Shan stared at the monolithic face of stone towering above them, recalling how the huge mountain had dominated the horizon even from the far side of the plain, how Dremu had cursed it from afar. The entire mountain, with its series of outrider ridges reaching toward the main Kunlun range, was nearly twenty miles long. On the north side it reached into Amdo and cradled the valley of the rongpa.
Winslow produced his binoculars and swept the ridges below. Anya stood close to the American, fingering her yak-hair bracelet.
"There is a goat path along the rock face," Chemi said, pointing to the massive rock wall, a seemingly impassable barrier. "It is a difficult path to find-" She was interrupted by a distant sound. The shot of a heavy rifle, Shan thought at first, but then as he heard a second identical sound he knew it was something bigger. Explosions, like an artillery barrage or grenades. Again the sound echoed and Winslow pointed toward three puffs of smoke on one of the ridges below, perhaps a mile away. Instantly Shan and the Tibetans dropped to the ground, fearful of being seen. Whether artillery or grenades, explosions meant the army. Anya reached out and tugged on Winslow's pant leg. The American was frantically working his binoculars, adjusting the focus knob, sweeping the lenses back and forth across the ridge where they had seen the smoke.
"Three people, maybe four," Winslow reported, as Shan sat up and pulled his own field glasses from his bag.
He quickly found the distant figures, jogging toward the deep shadow cast by an adjoining ridge. He saw no vehicle, no helicopter, no troop carrier. But even stranger, he saw no burning building, no old chorten, no shrine that might have attracted a demolition crew. He glanced back at Anya, who had edged up so she could see the ridge below.
"Sometimes the army still finds resisters," Chemi declared in a remote voice. "Sometimes they refuse to be taken alive. And there are bandits," she added, in a tone that almost sounded hopeful. Did she mean Dremu? Had she somehow recognized Dremu? Shan had not dared give voice to his first suspicion after his attack. Could it have been the Golok, riding somewhere below them, who had stirred up the troops, the Golok who had his own interest in the eye, and his own strange war with the mountain?
At Shan's side, Tenzin grimaced. He looked at Shan with pain in his eyes. Tenzin was being aided by the purbas, which probably meant that somewhere on the way to Yapchi purbas would be waiting for him, maybe traveling to meet him now. Tenzin looked past Shan in puzzlement and Shan turned to see Lokesh beside him, his finger raised in the air again. The old Tibetan appeared to be tracing an imaginary line through the landscape. Shan watched as he pointed toward the long grey line of mountains on the horizon that defined the provincial border, then downward toward Rapjung and a closer landscape, to the high broadtopped ridge that flanked Rapjung's northeast side, then to the series of ridges that ended in the deep gorge below them.
Shan's old friend reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, one of the Serenity Campaign pamphlets. As the others watched in silence he began working the paper in a series of folds. After nearly a minute he held the paper up, not toward his companions, but toward the mountain, toward the very top of the mountain. It was a horse, a paper horse, and Shan had helped Lokesh make many such horses during their travels. As Chemi and Anya nodded knowingly, the old Tibetan spoke to the horse in a whisper and released it into the wind.
As they watched the paper shoot out over the abyss below and slowly drift toward the ridges, Shan turned to Winslow, who was watching in confusion. "A spirit horse," he explained. "There is a tradition that such a horse, if released with a prayer, will reach a traveler in need, and when it touches the earth it will become a real horse."
Shan studied Lokesh again, and with a new surge of alarm he understood what his old friend was thinking. There may not be purbas in the mountains below them, but Shan and Lokesh knew of someone who was. The medicine lama was out there. Not a ghost, for Chemi had met a real healer, the old one she had expected. He looked at the small sturdy woman who was their guide. She had offered no explanation of what had happened to her on the trail that day, but pain was in her eyes now, and for a moment her face seemed to take on the frail appearance Shan had seen that day on the trail. Suddenly Tenzin pointed upward, and they looked up to see a bharal, one of the rare blue mountain sheep that roamed the mountains, seemingly suspended two-thirds up the face of the vast rock wall before them.
A calm strength filled Chemi's face. "It's showing us the way," she said in a reverent tone, and continued up the trail without looking back. Long after the others were out of sight, Shan lingered with his field glasses, scouring the ridges below. A raven flew over the gorge. A large dark animal, probably a wild yak, ran across the top of another ridge. But there was no sight of a medicine lama and no sign of soldiers.
They walked ever upward. Snowflakes swirled about them sometimes, even though the sky overhead was bright blue. Twice Anya's crooked gait caused her to slip, and pebbles spilled over the edge of the narrow trail, dropping downward for what seemed an impossibly long time.
The trail constantly changed in width and direction, sometimes dwindling to little more than a gap between walls where a wild sheep might just squeeze through. Now it disappeared altogether at a nearly vertical wall of rock. Chemi continued, pulling herself upward with meager hand-holds, jumping from one outcropping to the next, guided by nothing more than an occasional worn spot in the rocks that may have been caused by sheep leaping at the same point, over the course of centuries. Winslow stopped often, drinking, twice taking his pills. They passed fields of snow, and once a brilliant white bird burst out of a crevasse.
"Christ," Winslow repeated often, sometimes when he was pausing to press his palms against his temples, at other times when he stopped to consult his map. "Fifteen damned thousand feet," he reported in disbelief, but did not complain when Chemi took them still higher. Every five minutes he had to stop, panting heavily, to catch his breath. He answered Shan's anxious glances by grinning and shaking his head, then moving on with a spurt of energy as though to prove his vigor. They were on the long unprotected trail where they had seen the bharal, a path no more than thirty inches wide, above a thousand-foot drop, when the American stopped and leaned against the wall of rock. Anya, closest to him, turned back and put her hand in Winslow's as Shan inched closer.
"It's all right," he heard the girl say, softly, in the voice she used with the sheep, "hold my hand and the yak bracelet will protect us both." The American turned toward Shan, his head sagging, his eyes rolling as if he were dizzy. Anya squeezed his hand hard, as though to remind him she was with him, and the American straightened. With a sober expression he let the girl lead him onward.
They were two-thirds of the way along the treacherous, unprotected goat trail when Chemi moaned and threw up a hand. They all froze as she cupped her ears toward the north and slowly began backing up. Moments later they heard it, too, a harsh metallic thumping that was rapidly growing louder.
"Helicopter!" Winslow shouted, and suddenly Anya was pulling him toward a shadow in the rock face. Not a shadow, Shan saw, as first the girl and then the American turned sideways and stepped inside it. It was a narrow cleft in the rock, perhaps big enough to hide them all until the helicopter passed. It was why Chemi was backing up, he realized, because she, too, had seen the cleft. The thumping grew much louder, and Chemi turned and began running along the narrow trail. Tenzin paused at the cleft, helping Lokesh inside, then disappeared himself as Shan approached the shadow.