“No,” Shan said, “there was a reason.” He halted and studied the squares again, the colored stains on his hand, the discolorations on all their knees. “It is the colors.” To Hostene’s obvious chagrin he walked back onto the squares. Some-but not all of them-bore faintly colored soil or fine gravel, noticeable to the pilgrim with his face on the ground but so subtle as not to be obvious to the casual glance. “A sequence,” Shan observed, “red, white, and green.”
“Why?” Yangke asked.
“I don’t know,” Shan admitted. “The treasure flask will tell us,” he suggested, and led them back to the trail.
The climb to the flask rock was arduous. They were reaching an altitude where the thinness of the oxygen might affect them. Hostene had to pause often, leaning on his knees, and seemed about to collapse onto a rock at the side of the trail when he uttered a cry of glee. As Shan ran back to him Hostene pointed to a white chalk mark on the rock. Drawn hurriedly, in the shape of the Emperor Yu’s paces, it showed that Abigail had been there.
What they found under the wide overhanging rock behind the flask tower was not an homage to the gods but a memorial to the frailty of man. Men had labored there, for there was a blackened, shaped hole in the rock wall that appeared to have been a small furnace. There were bits of cast iron on the ground, a lichen-covered iron shape on a stone pillar that proved to be an anvil with an iron ring attached to its base, a few feet from a weathered juniper post in the ground holding fragments of what had been a large bellows. But Shan’s companions’ attention was focused elsewhere.
On a large slab beyond the furnace lay a dozen skeletons arranged like the spokes of a wheel, skulls at the hub. On a small, narrow shelf beyond, deeper in shadow, were twenty separate skulls. On a lower shelf, five feet off the ground, lay skeleton hands and arms, mixed with the weathered hands and paws of protector demons from ritual costumes.
Hostene, who shied away from owls and even from talk of death, stood as if petrified in front of the display. Yangke, however, seemed fascinated. “Pilgrims,” he declared in an awed whisper as he leaned his staff against the wall and pointed to the hands. “From centuries of following the path. Can you feel their-” His sentence ended in a terrified gasp as one of the demon hands reached out, grabbed his wrist, and jerked him toward the wall. His head struck the rock and he slumped against the wall, then slid lifelessly to the ground. Breaking out of his trance, Hostene darted to his side. Yangke’s staff rose and slammed against the Navajo’s back, knocking him off his feet.
Shan leaped forward, then froze. A pistol had materialized in the floating demon hand, aimed directly at him.
Shan said, fighting to keep his voice level, “Those who built this place, Captain, would have told you that bringing a weapon here would damage your spirit.”
“It wasn’t to enrich my soul that I followed you up here.” Bing stepped into view. The hands, Shan realized, were not arrayed on a shelf carved into the rock but atop a squared-off boulder whose back was totally obscured in shadow. One of Bing’s arms was covered by the costume of a demon, a long black glove-like device with bones of whitewashed wood affixed to it over the hand. Switching the pistol to his bare hand, the mayor of Little Moscow pulled off the glove with his teeth and tossed it into the shadows.
“Damn, you’re slow,” Bing said. “Performing all that mumbo jumbo below, when any fool could see you had to come this way.”
“Is that when you passed us?” Shan asked. From a position of prostration they would have seen nothing. “You made it from the chain without a staff?”
“I have the legs of a frog, my mother used to say.”
“I did not see you at Little Moscow this morning,” Shan observed.
“I was waiting at the painting.”
Shan understood. “You destroyed it, but you still did not understand what lay beneath.”
“When I saw you up on the rim above the town this morning, I knew you’d get to the painting sooner or later.”
“Like Abigail Natay.”
“Like the American woman,” Bing agreed.
Shan bent over his friends. Hostene was still conscious, although he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Yangke, who was beginning to stir, had a jagged cut on his forehead.
Shan rose and paced around the skeletons, ignoring Bing’s gun. “This is what happens,” he said.
“Happens to whom?”
“You should go back, Captain. You should go back now, or else promise to help us find the Navajo woman. The people who built this path intended the wrong minded to stay on it forever.”
“You make it sound like I’ll encounter three-hundred-year-old pilgrims still wandering about,” Bing sneered.
Shan gestured to the skeletons. “Something like that.”
Bing kicked the nearest of the pilgrim bags that lay on the ground before kneeling and upending it, without taking his eyes off his prisoners. “And what about you, Comrade Shan? Are you so saintly that you need not worry?” He picked up an apricot and took a bite, the juice running down his chin.
A small ache rose in Shan’s heart. “Me? I am beginning to realize I can only live between worlds. I’m not sure the deities take much notice of me.” The words had been uttered without conscious thought, as if something in the shrine had pushed them from his heart directly to his tongue.
Bing laughed derisively. “As much as I’d like to stay and hear the contrite confession of another prisoner,” he said in a mocking tone, “I haven’t got time. Where are the other packs?”
“There’s only one more. We lost one.” Shan pointed to his own bag by the old anvil. Bing kicked it toward the one he had already emptied and upended its contents. He drained one of their two remaining water bottles, then began filling his pockets with their meager rations.
“Abigail!” Hostene shouted, as if she might be near. Then he called again, and again, his last word like a cry of pain.
Bing grinned. “Is it really true, old man, that you came all the way from America for this?” he said.
“Is it really true,” Hostene shot back, “that you could kill so many in cold blood?”
“I am nothing compared to him,” Bing said, and pointed to Shan. “This is the man who has killed an entire mountain. If we had women and children on board we should have sent them away in boats the second we saw his face.” He stood, his task finished. “It was Shan who unleashed the real destruction. That son-of-a-bitch Ren never studied economics. He doesn’t know shit about the market economy. The miners have kept out of his sight for all these years. But now that Shan has him so fired up, he’ll make arrests, interrogate people, turn over every stone on the mountain. Ren will destroy a thriving enterprise that supports scores of people, then call himself a hero and return to his one-room apartment with a certificate from a grateful bureaucracy to hang on his wall.”
Shan’s chest tightened. Chodron must have repaired his sabotaged generator. “What is the major doing?”
“It’s what he’s not doing. Not leaving Tashtul when he was scheduled to. Not allowing the helicopter he summoned from Lhasa to depart. Not letting any of his men take leave. Not allowing anyone onto the trails into the mountains. Not letting anyone know the responses he is getting to your photographs that he e-mailed to every army and security office in Tibet. He is methodical and deadly.”
“Let him come,” Yangke said. He was rubbing his head now. “Let him arrest you as a killer.”
“When Ren comes, nothing on the mountain will continue as before. Not in Little Moscow. Not in your village. Just remember, it was Shan who brought him down upon you. It will start in earnest when Ren finds an illegal lama in shackles. Ever see a shark when it tastes fresh blood?” Bing bent over Hostene and Yangke, expertly patting them down. “Empty them,” he said to Hostene, pointing to his pants pockets. Then lightly pressing his pistol barrel against Shan’s chin, he patted down Shan as well. “And that one,” he said, pointing to one of Shan’s pockets. He quickly sorted through the little pile they’d made, tossing Hostene’s pocketknife over his shoulder, taking all their matches, pausing over Shan’s shard of plaster before dropping it onto the ground.