Yeshe picked up the next few photos. "The sequence continues. Tenth Cycle, Iron Ape Year, Wood Mouse Year, ten or twenty more skulls, then the Eleventh Cycle."

"Then you may be able to find what happened to the one that was moved to make way for Jao."

"Why wouldn't it just be discarded?"

"Probably was. I want to be certain."

Feng slowed for a herd of sheep with two young boys, who tended their charges not with dogs but with slingshots. As he watched, Shan kept seeing the hand in his mind's eye. The damage to it had been more than would have been incurred by severing it, or even in the fall when the vulture dropped it. The delicate hinges comprising the knuckles had been smashed. The fingertips had been crushed, ruining their fine filigree. Someone had smashed it deliberately, as if in a fight with Tamdin. Or as if in anger, to prevent further use of the costume. Had Balti fought with the thing, damaging the hand? Had Jao done it, when he struggled on the side of the mountain?

Feng stopped the solitary herdsmen who sometimes walked along the road, asking for the clan listed in Balti's official record, the Dronma clan. Each herdsman replied warily, watching the gun on the sergeant's belt. Most of them reacted by pulling out their identity papers as soon as the truck slowed and waving their hands in front of their faces to indicate they spoke no Mandarin.

"It's there," Yeshe gasped suddenly, as they pulled away from their fifth such stop.

Shan spun around. "The skull?"

Yeshe nodded excitedly, holding up one of the photos. "The skulls around the single empty shelf are from the late Fourteenth Cycle. Iron Ape Year on one side, then Wood Ox Year, the fifty-ninth year, on the other, say about one hundred forty years ago. The last skull on the shelves in the sequence is eighty years old, Earth Sheep Year of the Fifteenth Cycle. Except the very last one, on the bottom. It's Fourteenth Cycle, Water Hog Year."

Yeshe looked up with a satisfied gleam. "Water Hog is the fifty-seventh year, between Iron Ape and Wood Ox!" He showed the photos to Shan, pointing out the Tibetan characters for the year. The missing skull, and its tablet and lamps, had been reverently arranged on the last shelf.

Their excitement quickly faded. Shan and Yeshe exchanged an uneasy glance. The movement of the skull was not the act of a looter, or a rabid killer. It was what a monk, a true believer, would do.

Feng slowed down for an old man in the road. The man reacted to his inquiry by pulling out a tattered map of the region. It was contraband, for it depicted the traditional borders of Tibet, and Shan quickly moved to block it from Feng's view.

"Bo Zhai," the old man said, pointing to a region about fifty miles eastward. "Bo Zhai." Shan thanked him by giving him a box of raisins from the supplies Feng had hastily packed. The man seemed surprised. He stared mutely at the box, then with a proud, defiant gesture swept his hand over the vast eastern half of the map. "Kham," he pronounced, and marched off the road onto a goat trail.

Most of the territory he had indicated had been partitioned by Beijing and given to neighboring provinces. Thus it was that Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan provinces contained sizable Tibetan populations. Sichuan had Aba Tibetan Prefecture, Garze Tibetan Prefecture, and Muli Tibetan County. It had been a subtle measure to erode the nomadic lifestyle of the Kham herders; residency permits could not be granted in more than one district at a time, and travel papers were seldom issued to such people. It had also been punishment for the emphatic antisocialist sentiments of the region. Kham guerrillas had fought longer and harder against the People's Liberation Army than any minority in China. Even in the 404th Shan had heard tales of resistance fighters still roaming the eastern ranges, sabotaging roads and attacking small patrols, then disappearing into the impenetrable mountains.

It was midafternoon before they arrived at the office of the Bo Zhai agricultural collective, an assembly of shabby buildings constructed of cinder blocks and corrugated tin surrounded by fields of barley. The woman in charge, clearly unaccustomed to unannounced visitors, eyed the three men uneasily. "We have tours during harvest," she offered, "for the Ministry of Agriculture."

"This is a criminal investigation," Shan explained patiently, extending a paper with Balti's clan written on it.

"We are just ignorant herdsmen," she said, too meekly. "Once we had a hooligan from Lhasa hiding in the hills. The procedure was to use the local militia." There was a faded poster on the wall behind her, with young proletarians extending their fists proudly. Demolish the Four Olds, it said at the bottom. It had been a campaign during the Cultural Revolution. The Four Olds were ideology, culture, habits, and customs. The Red Guard had invaded the homes of minorities and destroyed their traditional clothing- often heirlooms passed down for generations- burnt furniture, even cut off the braids of the women.

"We have no time," Yeshe said.

The woman eyed him stonily.

"You are correct, of course," Shan confirmed. "In our case the procedure would be to contact the Public Security Bureau to tell them we are waiting here. Bureau headquarters would contact the Ministry of Agriculture, who would arrange for a company of soldiers from the Bureau to assist. Perhaps I could use your phone."

The challenge quickly left her face. "No need to waste the people's resources," she said with a sigh. She took the note from Shan's hand and produced a tattered ledger book. "Not in our production unit. No Dronma clan," she declared after a few minutes.

"How many units are there?"

"In this prefecture, seventeen. Then you can start checking Sichuan, Gansu, and Qinghai provinces. And there're still the bad elements in the high ranges. They never registered."

"No," Yeshe said. "He never would have been cleared for his job if his family weren't registered."

"And his work papers," Shan added, "were not likely to be transferred from another province."

"That's right." Yeshe brightened. "Doesn't someone have a master list, just for this prefecture?"

"Decentralization for maximum production." The woman spoke now in a familiar antiseptic voice, the one for strangers, the one tuned to the safety of reciting only banners and anything heard over a loudspeaker.

"I've also heard that we should stop worrying about black cats or white cats," Shan observed. "And concentrate on catching mice."

"We would have no authority to hold such a list," the woman said nervously. "The Ministry's office is in Markam. They would have the master list."

"How far?"

"Sixteen hours. If there's no mudslide. Or flood. Or military maneuvers." The woman knitted her brow and moved to a dusty shelf at the rear of the office. "All I have is the names of those in the combined work units receiving production awards. At least, in the past five years." She handed a stack of dusty spiral bound books to Yeshe.

"It's like searching for a single kernel of rice…" Yeshe began.

"No. Maybe not," she said, for the first time warming to the task. "Most of the old clans were concentrated in maybe six collectives. They were considered the greatest political risks, needed closer scrutiny. You're just looking for the one clan."

"And if we find the right collective?"

"Then you start the real search. It's spring. The herds are moving."