It did not have the ring of truth, Shan sensed, but it was a step in the direction of the truth. “And now you are continuing his work?”

“Right. I want to conclude his research. Maybe get something published, in both our names. I never really knew him. Doing this brings me closer to him than ever before.”

Shan touched the tool on the bed beside him. “So you do use this instrument, this borescope?”

“Sure. Sometimes its helps show the thickness of the metal, and internal structure of the casting, which also can be like a fingerprint.”

“You could have asked to borrow the statues, even asked a Chinese university to help.”

“How long have you lived in Tibet, Shan? An American working with Tibetans on a project that shows how Tibetan culture came from over the mountains and not from China? They would deport me in a second, and do much worse to any Tibetan who helped me.”

That much, Shan knew, was the absolute truth. But Yates had done nothing to close the biggest hole in his story: Why, if he was studying the metal of religious statues, was he only taking those of the Lord of Death?

Shan stood. It was late in the day. He still had a long drive back to Shogo. Yates followed him into the pool of sunlight by the entry, the worry on his face proof enough that he had finally grasped Shan’s point. He and Megan Ross had unleashed a chain of events that were endangering every Tibetan in the shadow of the mountains.

“When she comes back,” Yates said, “Megan will know how to patch things up. She’ll know where to take the monks.”

“She’s not coming back,” Shan said.

“Nonsense. I told you. I saw the bodies. No Megan.”

“She died in my arms,” Shan tried again.

Yates shook his head in disagreement, then turned his back on Shan.

“ ‘The raven,’ she said at first, then ‘is it me?’” Shan told him.

The American froze for a moment, but did not look back before disappearing into the shadows.

Chapter Ten

He stopped the truck at the crossroads where Xie had waited that morning, looking in the dusk for signs of the director’s watchers. The local people would descend on the ruins after Xie and his men departed. There would be prayer stones to retrieve. Even smashed prayer wheels would still be considered sacred. The Tibetans would know that the government tended to return to such sites, with excavators, to remove every stone, to scour the site to bare earth and salt it so nothing would grow. But that would be in the daytime, and in Tibet, everywhere but the cities, the night belonged to the Tibetans. He waited for five minutes, seeking signs of watchers, then turned onto the valley road.

The weathered, compact structures of the gompa were gone. Three thick stone walls alone remained standing, their soot-stained murals exposed to the elements. Everything else was leveled, reduced to a rubble of stone, plaster, and wood. Chairs and tables lay in splinters, smashed not only by the bulldozer but by what looked like sledgehammers. Shreds of old tangka paintings trapped in the rocks fluttered in the wind. There was no sign of any Tibetans. Then he paused, seeing why no one was salvaging anything. In the shadow of the trees at the far side he could see the low, dark shape of the director’s sedan.

He wandered into the rubble without conscious thought, numbed again by the devastation, vaguely aware of a rhythmic, metallic rumble, the sound of an engine straining, revving then ebbing. He walked past a patch of whitewashed stones that marked where the old chorten shrine had stood, passing a futile moment searching for the bronze or wooden box with relics that would have been secreted inside. Then he stepped toward the sound of the engine, past the three standing walls that had been too thick to topple, to the rock face that defined the back of the compound.

The small bulldozer had been aimed at the Buddha painted on the rock face. Driverless, its engine was on, but something in its drive gears had broken so that it was pushing forward several inches, hitting the rock face, revving and falling back, repeating the process over and over. With new foreboding, Shan looked about the compound for any sign of the driver, then approached the machine, intending to switch off the ignition. Two steps away he froze. The levers that controlled the steering had been fastened in place, tied with old khatas, white prayer scarves. As he reached for the ignition a splash of color by the blade caught his eye. He looked at the scrap of red fur with a vague sense of recognition, not seeing the blood and fragments of expensive overcoat until he was inches away. He staggered, bracing himself against the rock wall, fighting a spasm of nausea. Caught between the rock and the heavy metal blade was a different, bloody rubble, the remains of Director Xie of the Bureau of Religious Affairs.

He did not know how long he stood against the wall, gripped by horror, but eventually he turned and switched off the ignition, using his knuckles on the key so as not to leave prints. He covered what was left of Xie’s head with a scrap of tangka. The Radiant Light of Pure Reality, said a prayer on the scrap, from the beginning of the Bardo death ritual. The words stopped him. Xie might have been a wheelsmasher, might have come to the county to enhance his reputation at the expense of the Tibetans, but no one deserved such a fate. “Recognize the radiant light that is your death,” he murmured, continuing the rite, “recognize that your consciousness is without birth or death.”

He searched the grounds in the dusk, trying to understand how Xie could possibly have let himself be alone with his killer, half expecting to find the bodies of one or more of his deputies. But there were no other bodies. As darkness fell he found a hand lantern in his truck and searched Xie’s car, finding nothing but a box of ritual tools that he removed to the hidden trail at the rear of the gompa. Then he methodically paced along the packed earth.

It was crisscrossed with tire and boot tracks, probably of more than two dozen different people and half a dozen vehicles. He wandered a few paces up the pilgrim trail, where he knew many Tibetans had traveled that day. If they had seen anything they would be burrowing deep into the hills by now.

Shan did not hear the approaching vehicle until it was too late to hide. It came rolling into the compound with its lights out, coasting the last hundred feet with its engine off. He switched off his own light and took refuge in the deeper shadow of one of the standing walls.

“Lao Shan?” came a nervous voice from the dark, a respectful call in Chinese, as lanterns were lit from the road. Shan stepped toward them to find a small pickup truck overflowing with Tibetans, most of them porters from the base camp. In the back of the truck were shovels and a wheelbarrow.

They would not be dissuaded from their salvage efforts, not by Shan’s warnings, not by being shown the grisly remains in front of the bulldozer. These were men who had been hardened by the mountains, who were no strangers to death, and their reverence for the objects that might be buried in the rubble overcame all fear. This was how they preserved their faith.

“Quickly,” Shan urged at last, “let us move the trucks so the headlights light the rubble. If you have canvas, cover the murals. Those walls may yet survive.” Giving up all hope of finding evidence of Xie’s killer, he worked with them for an hour, uncovering many more ritual implements, intact robes, even some costumes used in religious festivals. Some were tied into larger bundles and set on pack frames that several men carried up the moonlit trail. Others were piled on the trucks.

They were sorting through the rubble, retrieving every stone inscribed with prayer, when the man left to watch the road whistled. The lights were extinguished and they watched with rising fear as a single headlight wound its way up the road. The Tibetan on the battered motorcycle had barely dismounted when he was told the news of Xie’s murder.