It must have been Ama Apte, Shan realized, who had arranged for the mule to be used for carrying the dead. It had always been waiting with Kypo at the side of the road, without an explanation. She had been sending her sturdy uncle, the mule. Shan remembered the attentive way the mule had always listened to his poetry.

“I need to examine his body,” Shan declared.

When the Tibetan woman did not reply, Shan reached into his pocket for his notepad. Ripping off a blank page, he wrote, in Tibetan. Thou were dust and now a spirit, thou were ignorant and now wise. It was a traditional expression of mourning. Ama Apte studied Shan as he set the prayer under a stone by the body, then she gestured him toward the animal. He removed the harness, stretched out the bent legs of the animal, then systematically ran his hands over its body, pausing over a lump here, a patch of dried blood there. Nearly a quarter hour later he wiped his hands on a tuft of grass and stood.

“This wasn’t one of his favorite places,” he ventured. “No water, not much grazing.”

“No,” Ama Apte agreed. “But here is where he must be burned. He is too big to move.”

“But above,” Shan suggested, “there is a place he favored.” He pointed to the top of the cliff high above them, then paused a moment, surveying the nearby outcroppings. He had a vague sense of being watched.

The Tibetan woman cocked her head. “He had favorite places, with grass and sun. There was an old shrine we would visit, now lost to the world. He liked the flagpole. There’s a trail from below that winds up toward a little grove of juniper and grass above. He would go with me there sometimes, in both his faces.”

Shan nodded. “He was shot at the top of the wall, here-” he pulled at the animal’s right front shoulder to reveal a wound that been pressed against the rock-“and he fell to the bottom of the cliff. Then someone came to put a bullet in his head with a pistol held between his eyes.”

A tear rolled down Ama Apte’s cheek. “How can you know that?”

“There are no hoofprints anywhere near here, except for a few from sheep. He has several broken bones, from the fall. If you look closely at his head you will see burned hairs around the wound, from the discharge of a large pistol pressed to his skull. There are prints from a heavy boot, a military boot, from someone walking close along the cliff face.”

“He hated soldiers. He would have avoided soldiers,” Ama Apte said in a distant voice. “But why? Why go to the trouble? What did they have to fear from him?”

“I don’t know. I left him near the road the day of the assassination, carrying Tenzin, a few hours before he was shot.” Shan turned and surveyed the little bowl-shaped valley defined by the ridge that curled into the massive Tumkot mountain. The trail that went upward led to a glacier that was said to be impassable. But on the other side of the mountain would be the road to the base camp. “He died because he was a witness to something.” Shan looked back at the seated woman, realizing only afterwards that he had given voice to the unlikely thought that had entered his head.

But the old diviner only nodded, as if the explanation made perfect sense to her. “Are you strong enough to find the rest of it for him, so he can move on?” she asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“The truth. The truth about my uncle will be a heavy, dangerous thing. It will not want to be found.”

Shan nodded. The truth about the dead mule would also be the truth that would protect Tan, and therefore could be the truth that kept Shan’s son alive. Someone, on the same day, had assassinated the minister, a Western woman, and a mule.

“But I was casting the bones last night,” she declared in an apologetic tone. “And again just here. They said the same thing each time. A very strong portent. On the path of death lies more death.”

Shan closed his eyes a moment then gazed at the snowcapped peaks beyond the little valley. He extended his hand to the woman to help her up as he spoke again. “We’re going to need more wood.”

Chapter Five

Onward and onward! It was the shining light of the Party and Chairman Mao Tse-tung who gave us boundless strength and wisdom! read the dusty banner on the wall behind Tsipon’s desk. The quote was famous in the region, the fervent declaration from the journal of the first Chinese team to have ascended Chomolungma, emblazoned on tourist brochures and regional histories. On the adjoining wall was a new banner, almost as big, announcing the opening of the Snow Leopard Guesthouse, the most luxurious accommodation in the Himalayan region.

It was an hour after dawn, far too early for Tsipon to have stirred from his comfortable house on the slope above town, but with enough light cast through the windows for Shan to see without switching on a telltale bulb. He headed straight for the table under the window, where Tsipon’s secretary maintained an informal archive dedicated to local mountaineering: photos of early climbers, year-by-year statistics on expeditions, annals of the Chinese Mountain Institute, and copies of the regional newspaper.

With the battering of his mind and body, his memories of the murder scene had become so blurred he could almost believe everyone’s denial that any Westerner had been there. But he believed his dreams. Her face had haunted his sleep ever since that terrible day. In a nightmare the previous night, Shan had been lying broken and bleeding on a cell floor when the blood-soaked blond woman had appeared and carried Shan away from his cell, telling him in a comforting tone that the mountain was calling him for his final climb, that he shouldn’t think of it as death, just a cold, windy passage to a loftier existence.

He had decided that her face, though not familiar to him, was not altogether new. He had a sense he had seen Yates with a woman at the base camp, though he could not be certain since Public Security worked hard to discourage the support staff from mingling with the Westerners. But Kypo had confirmed that the American had a partner who was a famous climber, a woman named Ross.

He had planned to find her photo, tear it out and rush out of the office. But it took much longer than he had expected, as he futilely leafed through every newspaper from the past three months then started over, reminding himself to look for different hairstyles, different apparel, as he studied each of the many group photos. When he finally found her, her hair was much longer, shadowing part of her face, under an American style visored cap.

She stood in the center of the front row of a group of two dozen, described in the caption simply as the American guest speaker at a luncheon of the local climbing industry, celebrating the launch of the season, announcing American funding of a new environmental campaign to clean litter off the upper slopes of Everest.

He ripped the page out of the paper, folded it, and stuffed it into a pocket, then resumed his search. Westerners were conspicuous and popular subjects during the season. Within five minutes he had found her again, a clearer image showing an athletic woman with a gentle, self-conscious smile shaking hands with a representative of the Ministry of Education in front of a new one-room schoolhouse donated by an American climbing club. He was scanning the second article, about to extract it, when the overhead light switched on.

Tsipon stood in the doorway, his face smoldering.

“Who is she?” Shan demanded before the Tibetan could speak. Shan held the photo in front of him, advancing toward the door.

The image of the woman seemed to jar Tsipon. He stared at it, his anger fading, as Shan repeated his question, then he pulled it from Shan’s grip.

“Megan Ross, it says,” Tsipon read. “Citizen of the United States.”

“You knew her. You must have known her.”