Shan took a step forward and opened the bundle. It was a severed hand, a huge gnarled hand with long, grotesquely proportioned fingers that ended with claws covered in finely worked silver.

It was the hand of a demon.

Chapter Twelve

Kham was a vast and wild landscape, located not only on the top of the world but at what seemed the very end of it. It was a land that seemed to defy being tamed, or claimed, a land unlike any Shan had ever experienced. The wind blew constantly over the high lonely plateau, churning the sky into a mosaic of heavy clouds and brilliant patches of blue. When Sergeant Feng stopped, as he frequently did to consult his map, Shan heard fleeting, unidentifiable sounds, as if the wind carried fragments of voices and calls, strange broken noises like the distant cries of suffering. There were places, some of the old monks believed, that acted as filters for the world's woes, catching and holding the torments that drifted across the earth. Maybe here was such a place, Shan thought, where the screams and cries of the millions below collected to be beaten by the wind into snippets of sound, like pebbles in a river.

He waited until they had driven nearly six hours to call back to Tan from a battered, tin-roofed garage near the county border.

"Where are you?" Tan demanded.

"What do you know about Lieutenant Chang of the 404th?"

"Dammit, Shan, where did you go? They said you left before dawn again. Feng never called."

"I asked him not to."

"You asked him?"

In his mind's eye Shan could see Tan's lips curl in anger.

"Let me speak to him," Tan demanded icily.

"Chang was an officer of the guard. I'd like to know his prior postings."

"Don't mix my officers into-"

"He tried to kill us."

He could hear Tan breathing. "Tell me," came his sharp reply.

Shan explained how they had followed Chang's shortcut, and how he had ambushed them.

"You're mistaken. He's an officer of the PLA. He has duties at the 404th, nothing to do with Prosecutor Jao. It wouldn't make any sense."

"Fine. Try to locate him at the 404th. Then you might want to drive up his shortcut on the North Claw. It's an old trail to the north, two miles above the valley turnoff. From the top of the cliff you can see the wreckage. We told no one else. By now there will be vultures you can follow."

"And you waited this long to tell me?"

"At first I wasn't sure. Like you said, he was in the army."

"Weren't sure?"

"Whether you had arranged it." Another silence from Tan. "It might be tempting," Shan suggested, "if you had decided not to pursue a separate case."

"What changed your mind?" Tan asked matter-of-factly, as if conceding the point.

"I thought about it all night. I don't believe you would kill Sergeant Feng."

Shan heard a muffled conversation on the other end. Tan began barking instructions to Madame Ko. When he came back on he had an answer. "Chang was off-duty yesterday. Acting on his own time."

"He decided on his own to kill us? Just some idle amusement for his day off?"

Tan sighed. "Where are you?"

"Every other lead is cold. I am going to find Jao's driver. I think he's alive."

"Leave the county and you're an escapee."

Shan explained the file found at the garage, and why it meant he had to look for Balti. "If I had asked for permission, there would have been preparations. Word could have gone to the east, to the herders. Any chance of finding Balti would have been lost."

"You never told the Ministry of Justice either."

"Not a word. It is my responsibility."

"So Li doesn't know."

"It occurred to me that we might benefit from speaking to Jao's driver without the assistant prosecutor's assistance."

In the silence that indicated Tan's indecision, he decided to tell about the hand. It was a public phone, unlikely to be tapped. The demon's hand that had so frightened Rebecca Fowler's workers had been of exquisite manufacture. A casual observer could easily have been convinced it was nothing less than the shriveled remains from a creature of flesh and blood. But Shan had shown Fowler how the ligaments had been meticulously crafted of leather sewn over copper strips. The pink palm had been made of faded red silk. When he had raised it the fingers had dangled limply, at odd angles.

"You're saying you found part of the Tamdin costume," Tan observed tautly.

"The one Director Wen said was not missing." Shan had already made a note in his pad. Check the audits done by Religious Affairs.

"There could have been one hidden away."

"I don't think so. These were so rare, such treasures, that they all have been accounted for."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning someone is lying."

There was a moment's silence. "All right. Bring the driver back alive. Forty-eight hours. If you're not back in forty-eight hours, I'll turn Public Security loose on you," he growled, and hung up.

Patrols. If things went bad, Tan could still give up. Li would prosecute Sungpo, the case would be closed, and the 404th would receive its punishment. Tan could turn off his investigation by simply declaring Shan a fugitive. All a Public Security patrol would need to bring back was the tattoo on Shan's arm.

If he used two full days, moreover, Shan would have only four more until Sungpo was brought before his tribunal. Two days. Balti of the Dronma clan had had a week to lose himself in Kham. But Shan's task wasn't the impossible one of finding a solitary man in 150,000 square miles of the most arduous terrain north of Antarctica. It was simply the vastly unlikely one of finding Balti's clan. For a khampa, the safest place would always be the hearth of his family.

As they pushed on Shan turned toward Yeshe. "You have my gratitude. For the ragyapa."

"It wasn't hard to understand, once I saw all those army socks."

"No. I mean, thank you for not telling the warden. It would have made you look good, a victory in your record. It might have meant getting your travel papers."

Yeshe gazed out over the seemingly endless plateau as it rolled by. "They would have raided the place. All those children." He shrugged. "And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they got the supplies legally. Maybe," he said, turning to Shan, "they got them in payment for the charms."

Shan nodded slowly. "Someone in the military who's scared of offending Tamdin?" he wondered out loud, then handed Yeshe the envelope of photos from the skull cave he had been given by Rebecca Fowler. "Take a look."

Yeshe opened the envelope. "What am I looking for?"

"First, a pattern. I can't read the old Tibetan text. Are they just names?"

Yeshe frowned. "That's simple. They're arranged by date, in the traditional Tibetan calendar," he said, referring to the system of sixty-year cycles that had started a thousand years earlier. "The tablet in front of each skull shows the year and the name. The first-" Yeshe moved the photo into the direct sunlight by the window, "- the first is Earth Horse Year of the Tenth Cycle."

"How long ago?"

"The Tenth started in the middle of the sixteenth century. Earth Horse Year is the fifty-second year of the cycle." Yeshe paused and cast a meaningful glance at Shan. Shan remembered the empty shelves. The shrine must have been started far earlier than the sixteenth century.