They paused every quarter hour to scan the slopes with Yates’ binoculars. As they rushed up one steep switchback after another, Shan caught Yates looking back with worry toward the smoke of Tumkot’s chimneys, visible now over a ridge, the village that had been saved in the deal that had betrayed the rebels. The hermit had not actually denied that Ama Apte was the traitor. And the fortuneteller, while secretly trying to force Yates out of the country, had deliberately hidden the fact that she had known his father.
The hermit led them at a near-frantic pace after the first steep slope, through tight rock passages, under a narrow waterfall, around fields of jagged snow bound scree, through several frigid streams gorged with meltwater. He halted abruptly as they navigated along a glacier-shattered landscape, a fractured wall of granite on one side of the trail, a treacherous vertical drop on the other.
“If you watch carefully, there is an old trail,” he announced, “at least the shadow of an old trail. When there is a choice to be made, always go up.”
Yates and Shan exchanged confused glances then the hermit stepped aside to reveal a two-foot-wide hole in the ledge they walked on, no different from a dozen others they had passed. Except that this one had a barely perceptible legend painted on a rock above it, a mantra to the mother protector. Shan removed his pack and lowered himself, taking it on faith he would find purchase in the deep shadow below, and in fact discovering slots carved in the wall like a ladder, leading to a flat stone floor eight feet below. A moment later Yates had joined him.
“Lha gyal lo!” Dakpo called as he handed their packs down.
They had dropped into a twisting corridor of stone that soon opened onto a steep sheltered slope dotted with heather and wildflowers. The granite wall they had taken to be the side of the mountain revealed itself to be a massive outcropping that hid the slope and the path above it. They climbed without speaking, spotting fresh boot prints where rare patches of soil showed, at every junction in the path following the hermit’s advice to take the more difficult, steeper route, climbing up narrow shelves that had been chiseled into the stone like stairs. Yates moved with increasing urgency, hesitating not a moment when they reached a tall chimney, grabbing the narrow bars of old juniper wood that had been fixed between the stone walls. They climbed another steep slope that glistened with pockets of snow, passing a row of stone columns, then halted at a path through a high wall marked by a crumbling stone cairn.
At the end of the path they emerged onto a broad, nearly flat shelf almost two hundred feet wide and a quarter mile long. Directly to the south a glacier rose toward the horizon. To the southeast was a sweeping view of Everest and her sister peaks Lhotse and Makalu. To the north, in the shadow of the massive granite wall, were several crude structures of dry laid stone. Yates took a step and raised a strange jingling sound. He kicked and loosened several long brass cylinders, bearing the green patina of age. Bullet casings.
There was no sign of anyone, though in several patches of snow Shan saw more fresh imprints of boots. He willed himself not to follow them, to move instead toward the ragged lip of the deep crevasse that ran along the eastern edge of the little plateau.
“We came for evidence,” Shan reminded Yates, who insisted on searching each of the crude, crumbling structures before joining Shan at the lip of the crevasse. Lying at the lip, with the American anchoring his legs, Shan searched the fissure with the binoculars, studying the jumble of broken slabs and boulders that lined the bottom nearly two hundred feet below. Much of it was shrouded in shadow, though at its end it curved toward the southeast, where many of the slabs of rock were lit by the sun. The unlikely odds of discovering Megan Ross were compounded by the many gaps between boulders and slabs where a corpse dropped from above could easily have fallen. Seeing nothing, Shan rose and walked slowly along the top, studying the ground. At last, less than fifty feet from where the crevasse opened out onto the side of the mountain, he found older prints in a patch of snow, grown faint with freezing and thawing. There was more, a long indentation where something heavy had been dragged to the edge. He laid down again over the lip and instantly saw a patch of red below, the color of the windbreaker the woman had been wearing when she died.
“You’re some kind of wizard, Shan,” the American said in a hollow voice over his shoulder. “All these hundreds of miles of wilderness and you come right to her.”
Shan eased back from the lip and stood. “From the beginning the killer has tried to make it seem that one of the old rebels committed the crimes. If he ever needed more proof he would see to it that Public Security found this place, would make sure they knew this was where the rebels secretly disposed of bodies, that only one of them would know how to find it.”
Yates emptied his pack, dumping out the climbing gear at Shan’s feet.
“I can’t go down on the ropes,” Shan declared. “I’ve never done it before.”
“And I can’t do what has to be done at the bottom,” Yates countered in a grim tone.
Shan, filled with a new form of dread, lowered his head and listened to the American’s instructions as Yates produced two harnesses and began to fasten lines to a huge boulder near the edge.
She lay on her side as if sleeping, her face nearly as pale as the snow she rested on, one arm jutting at an unnatural angle from under her head. The cold, dry air had kept Megan Ross preserved as it did the dead climbers of Everest, though she had not been there so long as to become affixed to the stone. Shan gripped himself, telling himself not to look into her open eyes, then rolled the body over, straightening the arm along her side. But as he worked he seemed to feel her gaze, and when he finally looked into her face he saw the confusion and longing that had been there when she had died but also something else, an oddly plaintive expression. He glanced at Yates, who sat with his back to Shan, carefully avoiding looking at his dead friend, and was about to begin unwrapping the length of rope he had carried around his waist to fashion a harness for the body when he saw the bloodstains along the buttons of her shirt, faint but unmistakable fingerprints. With a shudder he unfastened the buttons, revealing a small silver gau, Ross’s prayer box, also bearing the marks of her bloody fingers at its latch. In his mind Shan replayed the awful moment when Megan Ross had died in his arms. He had almost forgotten that she had pushed her gau toward him, at the moment had simply assumed she had wanted to show him she was Buddhist. But now the fingerprints told him she had fingered the latch after being shot. She could have told him her killer’s name, could have explained everything with her last breath, but instead she had shown him the gau.
Glancing back at Yates, who had retreated further down the long slab that marked the opening of the crevasse, Shan opened the ornate box. There were prayers inside, rolled up in the traditional fashion, a turquoise stone, and a grainy photo torn from a book. He studied the photo with a chill then folded it again and buttoned it inside his shirt pocket.
As he reached Yates, Shan was rethreading the rope around his waist.
“You have to put it around her,” the American reminded him. “Make a harness.”
“No,” Shan said, “I’ve changed my mind. She doesn’t need to go down to the world anymore.”
The American searched Shan’s face, then shrugged. “If we took her down her body would become the star attraction in an international media circus,” Yates observed, obviously grateful he would not have to spend hours carrying the body of his dead friend. “What family she had she wasn’t close to,” he added, as if trying to persuade himself. “She was always going to die on a mountain.”
“In the Himalayas,” Shan said, “half those who do are never recovered.”