"Why," he asked, feeling the numbness spread through his fingers, "did she stop serving on the council?" He pulled his hand away and studied his ice print. It was deeper than the others.
"When we did that," Jakli said, nodding at the handprints, "Akzu said that if the ice doesn't shift, the hands could be preserved for centuries. He said it would be the only evidence that we ever existed." She looked at the prints, then fitted her hand into one near the center as if confirming it was hers. "Just an emptiness in the ice in a dark cave on a forgotten mountain."
Shan looked at the woman, startled by her words. Jakli kept facing the wall. "I washed her at the stream," she said in a whisper. "I keep thinking of the terrible pain she died in." She pushed her hand more firmly into the ice, as if to create a greater emptiness. "Lau was disqualified somehow," she continued in her whisper, as if worried Lau might overhear. "Four months ago someone said she was no longer eligible to hold office."
"Someone?"
She shrugged. "The rules change all the time. The Brigade has taken over many of the functions of the old councils."
"But someone announced that Lau could no longer serve."
"I don't know, I guess. She just was gone. Someone else just started attending instead of her."
"Who?"
Jakli did not respond until she had stepped to the entrance to the larger chamber. "Ko Yonghong," she said in a brittle voice. "Comrade Managing Director."
"Was Lau told the reason?"
"If she was, she never told anyone else."
"You never thought it was odd, the timing?"
Jakli shook her head, confusion clouding her face.
"It was not long after that she asked for her body to be taken here." Shan reminded her. "As if it was only then that she became worried. Why, do you think?"
Jakli looked back on the dead woman, biting her lower lip. She looked as if she were about to ask Lau herself. Then she shrugged and turned back to Shan. "She associated with undesirables."
She was referring, Shan knew, to herself, and Akzu and the nomads. Perhaps even the Maos.
"But who was closest to her? Did she have a helper? Perhaps she was training someone. I need to know what her reaction was, when she heard she could no longer serve. Angry? Scared? Relieved?"
"No one."
"No one? Or no one you want me to see?"
Jakli seemed to consider his words as she bid farewell to Lau with a nod of her head, then stepped back into the larger chamber. "It's complicated," she said. "I want you to find the killer. But this is a land of secrecy. The Chinese make it that way. There are things that could be dangerous for you to know."
"Dangerous to whom?"
"Me. You. Others."
"You mean the resistance? The lung ma?"
"Resistance? There is no real resistance. Just intelligence gathering. How can we resist the People's Liberation Army or the Security Bureau? The Tibetans tried it, using flintlocks and swords against machine guns. A million of them died. Not resistance. A preservation movement, that's the best anyone can hope for. It's what Lau told the zheli a hundred times. Preserve what is good for the day when the bad goes away."
A minute later they were nearly at the mouth of the tunnel. Jowa and Lokesh could be seen outside by the old pine, straightening the stick-figure offerings. Shan paused at the entrance, holding his light close to the wall. There was something he hadn't seen before, a drawing made in chalk, a series of lines within a six-inch circle. At first it appeared to be an egg with a small plate on top, capped with something like a button with a flower growing out of it. Below the egg shape on either side were flowing, curving lines, like a banner blowing in the wind.
With a flash of recognition Shan pressed the light closer. It was in white chalk, recently laid on the rock.
"Do you know it?" Jakli asked over his shoulder.
"A
bumpa
, it's called, in Tibetan. A sacred treasure vase. One of the eight sacred Buddhist symbols."
"A vase?"
"An urn. A sacred receptacle," he said, his brows wrinkled in confusion. "It means hidden treasure."
Jakli stared at the chalk drawing a moment, then slowly stepped outside, leaving Shan alone. As he stood there, a particularly strong gust of cold air hit his back. Lau's breath.
Outside, he found Lokesh kneeling by the old pine, righting the stick animals that had fallen over, arranging them in a semicircle around the entrance to the cave, facing outward. The old Tibetan sang one of his old songs while he worked, sometimes pausing to admire the handiwork of one of the figures.
As Jakli bent to help Lokesh, Shan touched her shoulder and gestured toward Jowa, who stood nearby, facing the thicket on the opposite side of the clearing. One hand was behind his back, a finger raised toward Shan, signaling him to wait. The other hand hovered over his blade.
The wind died, and Shan realized what had alarmed Jowa. There was a sound coming from the thicket, an animal sound, like a low-pitched growl. Shan stepped to Jowa's side, No, it wasn't a growl, he realized as he moved closer to the sound, it was more like a moan.
Something moved in the thicket. Jowa ran.
The thing flashed into view between two rocks, a low, dark shape trying to escape beyond the wall of rock. Jowa disappeared into the thick rhododendron and Shan followed. Jakli streaked past him with the speed and stealth of a seasoned hunter.
The creature ran hard. Shan saw it again as it scrambled across rocks in a pool of light fifty yards ahead. It was black, but its two rear feet were bright red. It was making another sound now, a wrenching howl, a sound of new fear. Shan ran faster, ignoring the branches slapping his face, stumbling twice on the loose rocks, leaping over beds of moss, pausing once to listen, then sighting Jakli again and darting toward her as she disappeared back into the dense undergrowth.
Then another sound split the silence of the forest. Jowa had caught the thing and was shouting for them.
Gasping for breath, Shan arrived in a small clearing to find Jowa and Jakli looking down at a dark figure that cowered at their feet. Shan wondered where they had found the large black chuba which covered the thing, then realized that their quarry was wearing the chuba.
Jakli lifted an edge of the sheepskin robe and exposed two human feet, clad in bright red, ankle-high athletic shoes. She gasped, as if recognizing the shoes. Her eyes flared with sudden anger and she pulled on the chuba, struggling to lift it for a moment, then wrenching it free to reveal a small man, quivering with fright. She paused a moment, her eyes full of fire, and pounced on the man, pounding his back with clenched fists.
Jowa and Shan exchanged a look of surprise, then bent to pull her away. She would not relent. "Traitor!" she screamed, still hitting the man. "Murderer!"
They had to forcibly lift her, one under each shoulder. When she was off the man's back she lashed out with her feet, kicking him on his arms and legs.
The man did not fight back. He seemed not to have noticed the blows. He lay curled up, making the same low moaning noise they had first heard from the thicket by the cave.
"Don't you understand?" Jakli cried in frustration. "It's Bajys! The child-killer!"
Shan rolled the man over. The face that looked up was contorted with fear. Bajys kept his hands locked about each other, as if he had to stabilize himself even though lying on the ground. His eyes blinked open and shut. Tears streamed down his face.
Jakli shouted at him in the Kazakh tongue. The words were unintelligible to Shan, but the sharp, accusing tone was unmistakable. The man looked at her in confusion, then looked to Jowa and began speaking.
"Help me. Help me, brother," he said, his chest heaving with sobs. "The monster has been loosed. There is only death. The world is ended. I cannot find my way out."
Something was wrong. Shan, Jakli, and Jowa exchanged a confused look. Bajys was speaking Tibetan.
Jakli spoke to him again, in the language of their clan, not shouting this time but still in anger. Bajys just looked at Jowa with pleading in his eyes. Jakli's rage evaporated into bewilderment. "It can't be," she said to Shan in Mandarin. "He's a Kazakh. He's never spoken Tibetan." She spoke to Bajys again in her Turkic tongue, but the man stared at her dumbly, then looked at Jowa.
"Tell this woman," he said in a trembling voice, "I do not understand her. She confuses me with someone else. Tell her not to waste her time in anger. There is only time for prayer now. All we can do is pray."
Jakli's face seemed to go limp. She looked to Shan as if he could explain, but he shook his head and helped the little man to his feet. They made a slow procession back to the clearing, Jowa and Shan supporting Bajys, Jakli behind, a numb, confused expression on her face.
Lokesh showed no surprise when they led the little man into the clearing. He took his hand and led him to a log in the bright, warm sun in the center of the clearing, then sat with him.
"Are you a priest then?" Bajys whimpered to the old Tibetan.
Lokesh gestured for Jowa to join them, then placed his own rosary in the man's hands. "We both trained at gompas," Lokesh said, nodding toward Jowa. But Jowa remained standing, as if unable, or unwilling, to console the man. "I have seen them," Lokesh offered with a sigh. "I have seen demons in my lifetime too." His voice was serene, as if in prayer.
"He couldn't—" Jakli said to Shan as they watched. "Sometimes I practice my Tibetan, sing Tibetan songs. Bajys never understood. He's a Kazakh, a Muslim. He can't speak Tibetan." Her voice drifted off as she looked at the diminutive man. He was holding the rosary tightly wrapped around the fingers of his left hand, his right hand clasped over them, rocking back and forth, murmuring a mantra in Tibetan.
But Jakli would not give up. "Where did you go?" she demanded again, now in Tibetan. "Why did you run away? They are certain you killed the boy—" Confusion seemed to grip her tongue.
"She used to go to the old place in the sand," the little man said suddenly, in Tibetan. "When I saw that Khitai was dead I had to find her." His voice was barely above a whisper. "When she wasn't at the cabin, I went out on the sand. All day and part of a night I walked. I went to the
Ihakang
place, the sanctuary place." He raised his hands in front of him as though to defend against something invisible to the others, then pushed the beads against his forehead so hard they pressed into his flesh.
"Khitai isn't dead," Jakli said. "It was the other boy."
But Bajys seemed unable to hear her. "I looked in the huts away from the Ihakang," he continued. "But there was only dead people. Everyone dead. Like in the old thangkas," he said in his trembling voice, referring to the religious paintings that often hung in Tibetan temples, "where the demons are eating human limbs." He stared at the ground, his eyes wild. "People were in pieces. A leg. A hand. Dead hands."
They stared at Bajys in horror.
The little Tibetan seemed not to notice them, as if he were lost in his vision of death. Surely, Shan told himself, it was only a vision. Not a memory.
"We'll go below," Shan said quietly to Jowa and Lokesh. "We'll make a fire. Come when he is ready."
But Bajys spoke again.
"Then I remembered the special place inside the mountain," he said in his tiny hollow voice. "So I came back here. I sensed her here. I shouted for her with great hope. But she wasn't in that place. She was just in the back place, the ice room, and when I found her she had no voice left for me."
Shan sprang up, grabbing the battery light, and ran back into the cave. Moments later he stood at the front of the wide chamber, Lau's burial room opposite him. Lau had a place in the mountain, not the burial chamber where Bajys found her. A special place. He played his light along the walls at floor level. To his right the wall was solid, dropping straight to the stone and clay floor without interruption. He began walking along the left wall, the base of which was obscured at several places by slabs of rock that had shifted from the ceiling. He explored each slab, shining his light into the shadows where they had fallen against the wall. After fifty feet he stopped. There was something in the air, the vaguest hint of incense and singed butter, a temple scent. In the next pocket between the rocks there was no sign of an opening, but the scent grew stronger. Then around the next slab he found a small gap at the floor, big enough for a person to crawl through. The clay floor below had been worn smooth. He dropped down and crawled inside. After ten feet the passage opened into a chamber slightly larger than Lau's burial room.
Shan had been in shrine caves before, where Buddhist artifacts and relics were secreted, sometimes centuries old, and when his light played upon a small golden Buddha he had thought he had found another. But it wasn't a room of Buddhist treasures he had found. The Buddha, at the far wall, was on a small altar of hand-hewn timber, joined with pegs. Around it were seven containers, representing the seven offering bowls of Buddhist worship. But the bowls did not match. Some were not even bowls. There was a chipped tea cup in the row, and a tin mug of the type Shan had used in prison. Yet they held the traditional Buddhist offerings. The first, second, and sixth were filled with water, the third with flowers, the fourth with incense, the fifth with butter, the last with aromatic chips of wood. On the Buddha's shoulder a prayer scarf had been draped. Beside the foot-high statue was a small ceramic stand to hold stick incense, partly covered with ashes. Six feet in front of the altar was a large tattered cushion, then a single, smaller cushion five feet beyond it. For a teacher to sit with his student. Beside the smaller cushion was a brazier with two charred stubs of wood, the remnants of a fire.
