Kypo bent to his daughter and pointed to the door.

“No,” his mother said, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “She must hear this. She has no choice but to live with the new gods. There is no going back. The old gods and the old Tibetans, all we can do is to find ways to fade away with dignity.”

Kypo’s face drained of color. He knelt and tightly embraced his daughter, as if it was his turn to be frightened.

“So is that what this is about, Aunt Ama?” Shan asked in a flat voice as he rose. “It’s your way of giving up?”

A tear ran down Ama Apte’s strong, handsome face. She bent to the kettle and poured more tea.

“Last summer, at the end of the season,” the astrologer said, “Megan came to me, and said she wanted to stay here with me for the winter. It was illegal, I told her. It would endanger Kypo, because the authorities would assume as a local climbing manager he was behind it. She didn’t argue, she just asked me to go with her up one of her mountains. A hard climb, but not one needing ropes. We were gone five days. On the last night she watched the stars for hours, like a meditation. She said the universe was different in Tibet. She said she was going to die here again.”

“Again?” Yates asked.

Ama Apte offered a sad smile. “That’s what I asked. She said she had a sudden realization on her last ascent of Chomolungma, as she stood on the summit, that she had lived here in another life.”

“You’re trying to make it appear I was involved with her, in the ambush,” Yates said after another long silence.

“No. Only I was involved, with a little help from a tarchok ghost,” Ama Apte confessed with a glance at the notebook. She did not look at Yates, just stared into one of the flickering lamps by the kettle.

“You tried to get me arrested by Public Security,” Yates accused, “by putting a robe in my trash and those snaplinks with beads under my bed.”

“Not arrested,” Shan said, “only deported.”

Ama Apte was biting her lip like an anxious girl.

“I never did anything to hurt you,” Yates said to the woman.

“You don’t understand,” the fortuneteller said, her gaze not shifting from the flame. “You could never understand. Just know it is a killing season on the mountain. Go home. Even if you try the ascent, the mountain will push you back.”

“Without the climbers,” Kypo said in a near whisper, “I can’t put food on my family’s table.”

Ama Apte replied only with her eyes, which held a sad, soulful expression that Shan saw on old lamas, the look that said the only answers that meant anything were the ones you found for yourself.

As he studied her Shan began to sense that all the mysteries, all the questions about the killings, the strange behavior of so many Tibetans had begun with the mystery of who Ama Apte really was.

“We should eat,” she announced in a new, spirited voice, and clapped her hands to rouse everyone from their trance.

The mood quickly shifted as the astrologer returned to the role of mother and grandmother, instructing Kypo to bring a larger brazier, her granddaughter to retrieve water, Shan and Yates to carry trestles and planks outside into the rear courtyard of her house for a makeshift table. They ate thick thanthuk noodles and mutton, making quiet, casual conversation, Kypo and Yates at last laying a map of Chomolungma on the table to discuss the always complicated task of staging supplies at advance camps.

Kypo’s daughter leaned on the table beside the two men, listening attentively, her eyes wide with a sense of adventure. After a few minutes Yates searched his pockets, producing a metal ballpoint pen that he presented as a gift to the girl, who accepted with blushing thanks.

“Half the oxygen at Camp One for now, and half there,” he said, pointing to a mark indicating Camp Two. As he did so, Ama Apte gasped, dropping one of the dishes she was clearing. She stared with a stricken expression at Yates’s hand. He was absently holding the rolled-up peche page from his pocket, using it as a pointer. The Tibetan woman abruptly sprang forward, seized the rolled page, and slapped Yates on the cheek.

The stunned American reeled backward. Tears welled in Ama Apte’s eyes. She collapsed onto a stool, her head in her hands, sobbing. Kypo, Shan and Yates exchanged dumbfounded looks. Kypo knelt at his mother’s side, his hand on her shoulder. As Shan took a step forward, Kypo warned him off with a shake of his head and pointed to the street. Ama Apte began weeping. She seemed unconsolable.

Shan and Yates stood at the American’s truck minutes later, the two men gazing back uncertainly toward the fortuneteller’s house. “It’s like she’s having some sort of breakdown,” Yates said forlornly. “All the stress. She’s going to get herself arrested. She has to stay away from them.”

Shan realized the American was talking about the monks, that Yates had reached the same conclusion as Shan. Ama Apte had taken the monks from the base camp, and was hiding them somewhere on the forbidden mountain above the village.

“The fugitive monks are now considered assassins and traitors,” Shan said. “Those caught helping them will be treated the same way.”

“You’re saying it would be the firing squad?”

“And if they try to cross the border there are snipers positioned in the passes. Two years ago nuns trying to flee across to Nepal were killed with high-powered rifles.”

“Someone has to tell her.”

“She won’t listen. I think the astrologer sees her own fate and has decided it cannot be altered.”

Yates leaned on the hood of his truck, buried his head in his hands. “I’m finished.” He seemed strangely weary, as if he had just returned from an oxygen-deprived climb. “I’m sorry about her. I’m sorry about Megan. I am sorry about your son. But I am done. I won’t be involved with more killings. Stay away from me. You and I are on different paths. Stop dragging me onto yours. I’m taking my climbers up the mountain as fast as I can, then going home. It’s like she said. It’s a killing season.”

“Then it is I who apologize to you,” Shan replied. He stepped to the window on the driver’s door and with his finger began drawing in the caked-on dust.

“What the hell are you talking-” As Yates lifted his head his words died away. He stared without breathing at the sign Shan had drawn. “How could you possibly-” his words drifted away again as his finger traced Shan’s crude but accurate drawing of a crossed hammer and lightning bolt.

“I’ve been trying to make you understand, Yates. You and I are after the same thing. It is all about something that happened decades ago.”

Yates cast an uncertain glance at Shan, then his gaze went back to the symbol on the glass. “Kypo says you’re like a magnet to knobs. I can’t afford any more trouble.”

“Just take a walk with me.”

“Where?”

“Up to see your father.”

The two men did not speak as they climbed toward the top of the high ridge that curled around Tumkot. Yates, like Shan, no doubt recalled the last time they had been on the trail, assaulting each other in the moonlight as Yates carried his sack of little gods down the mountain.

The American slowed as they approached the ruined shrine, lingering behind. More than once Shan paused to look back and see Yates stopped, gazingly longingly toward the peak of Everest, visible in the distance. As he reached the shrine Shan halted, kneeling at a crumbling wall of lichen-covered mani stones, restacking and straightening the wall as the American approached with hesitant steps. Yates’s countenance held caution, perhaps even fear, but there was also a hint of shame as he glanced at the altar where he had removed the ancient figurines. “I will bring them back,” he said of the little gods he had taken. “I was always going to bring them back.”

He knelt beside Shan and silently assisted him with the stones, cleaning the faces inscribed with prayers, handing them to Shan for restacking.