new. He would have proven your story about the revenge of the ghost was wrong.”
“The little prick. One of those teacher’s pets who always has to show off how much he knows.
“They have artificial hands for amputees,” Bing said with sudden malice. “I’ll get ones with electric choppers. I’ll come looking for you, Shan.”
“You could have just sent Tashi away,” Shan continued. “None of this had to happen.”
“Tashi was the reason it all started. It would have been ungrateful to simply order him off the mountain. Worse, it would have been untidy.”
Shan paused, trying to understand. Bing’s breath began to rasp. He coughed. His breath came in short, shallow gasps. His lungs were beginning to fill with fluid.
“Tashi hadn’t a clue about keeping secrets.” Bing’s throat rattled. “The moment the fool appeared on the mountain, I knew there would be trouble. His services had already been bought and paid for. I gave him a chance, but he couldn’t stay away from vodka. We did him a favor, considering what might have happened.”
“Like the gratitude Rapaki showed you?”
“Too many years with those old Buddhist books, I guess. Nothing was real to him anymore. Everything was a symbol. He would hallucinate sometimes, talk to the paintings, stop suddenly and start speaking to a rock.” Bing’s breathing became labored. “He decided I became. . one. . in the end.”
“A demon,” Shan said, filling in for him. “Even though it was you who explained about demons to him last year.”
“He was like a damned cat, appearing out of nowhere, never making a sound unless he was telling his beads. I had no idea he was there, watching last year when I killed the miner. I had to think fast. The man was down but still breathing. I told Rapaki, Quick, help me get him to the painting of the old saint. I knew there was one close by. I said I had a prayer, given me by a saint, which had special powers near the old paintings, a way to identify a demon in human form. If I said the magic words, and the man was actually one of the demons who opposed the gods, then a red eye would appear on the man’s hand.”
“Your laser pointer,” Shan said with a sigh. “Ni shi sha gua.”
Bing gave a hoarse laugh, which triggered a fit of coughing. “I hid it in my hand and said the magic words in Chinese. You should have seen his face that first time, when that miner’s hand lit up with a demon’s eye. Rapaki was terrified. But then he began to smile. He ran away, and I thought that was the end of it. A few minutes later he showed up with that old ritual ax.”
“And now someone has borrowed your laser pointer.”
“Go any further and it will happen to you,” Bing vowed. “Soon everyone you know will have no hands.”
Shan ignored him. “It’s the new age indeed, Bing. High-tech demons. And thieves no longer know the meaning of honor. No loyalty. No gratitude,” Shan added, with a gesture to Yangke.
Bing weakly raised his brows in query.
“You never thanked Tashi’s friend. He didn’t tell Chodron about your lie. He didn’t tell him that you knew where two tons of gold, mined centuries ago, lay near the top of the mountain.”
Bing made an effort to push himself up. He rolled on top of Shan, who fought for a moment, then grew still as he realized Bing no longer resisted, realized the sour breath no longer came from Bing’s mouth, inches away from his head.
“He’s dead,” Hostene declared, and with Yangke’s help lifted the body from Shan.
They helped him to a nearby stream, where he thrust his face into the frigid water. Then, with gravel from the bed, he cleansed his hands and arms until the skin stung. When he was clean, to his surprise, Shan found he was hungry. As they ate, they debated what to do with Bing’s body. Yangke favored leaving Bing spread out by the gateway, to become a skeleton on the pilgrim’s trail. Hostene was inclined to shroud him in the blanket and heave him over the cliff. In the end they wrapped him in the blanket and covered him with rocks in the blood-soaked clearing, though not before Shan had studied the stumps of his arms. Each hand had been severed with two strikes. Each had left the same small nick in the bone.
They removed Bing’s shirt after Shan searched the pockets, ripping it into squares that Yangke inscribed, using a stick and Bing’s own blood, then left the prayer flags anchored with the burial stones. One more shrine to a demon.
“If he had followed the pilgrim’s path,” Yangke declared in a hushed voice, as he and Hostene pushed up the trail, “he would have seen who was lying in wait on this side of the passage.” It was Bing’s only epitaph.
“We can’t leave like this, Hostene,” Shan called to the Navajo’s back.
Hostene halted. Only Yangke turned, confused.
“We can’t go forward like killers,” Shan said.
Hostene leaned heavily on his staff. “You sound like Lokesh now.”
“We can’t go forward,” Shan repeated.
“You saw what happened to Bing,” Hostene said. “I don’t know what to expect now. One person alone could not have done that to him. Someone knocked him out from behind.”
He was afraid that Abigail was involved.
“I don’t know what to expect either,” admitted Shan. “But we know what to expect of ourselves.”
Hostene closed his eyes a moment then walked forward without bothering to see if the others followed him. Their silent procession reached the cliff and he lowered his bag and staff, reached inside his shirt, and pulled out Bing’s gun. “My uncle once told me some of the sacred mountains felt empty to him, as if the gods had left them, because so many men came with firearms to hunt the animals there.” With a long underhand throw he launched the pistol into the air. They watched it fall and get lost in the shadows at the base of the cliff.
They climbed now with grim, silent determination, up steep trails, bracing themselves against powerful downdrafts. They paused at every painting, twice following directions set out in the form of the little footprints and the outlines of sacred objects. Shan and Yangke had to pull Hostene away from a painting surrounded by chalk marks, whose deity, he insisted, resembled one of the Navajo holy people.
When they reached a ten-foot-wide chasm over which two thick yak-hair ropes had been tightly strung overhead, they hesitated.
“I’m not trusting my life to a four-hundred-year-old rope,” Hostene protested.
“It’s not that old. The lamas maintained the kora until they died. And it’s made of yak hair, which lasts despite the weather.” With a businesslike air, Yangke extracted the Y-shaped stick from the bag he carried, straddled the rope with it, grabbed each end in a hand, and slid across, dangling over several hundred feet of emptiness. He tossed the stick back to Shan as Hostene extracted the stick from his own bag. In another minute, both Shan and Hostene were across.
They halted at a narrow canyon intersected by half a dozen trails, each with a small painting of a demon at its entrance.
“Which one?” Yangke asked in a chagrined voice. “We could lose hours going down false trails.”
But Hostene pointed to the flat face of a boulder on which images had recently been drawn in chalk. He dropped to his knees in front of the drawings. “She has done the work for us,” he said. He began to explain how his niece had been trying to correlate Navajo symbols with the primitive symbols on the paintings at the trailheads.
“But what does it mean?” Yangke asked.
“Hunchback God,” Hostene said, and looked up. “The mountain goat god, that was the last one she drew, as if that was the explanation she sought.”
Shan walked in a semicircle along the trailheads. “Only one of these shows goat tracks,” he reported. Taking that trail, they soon reached another pilgrim station, with a small waterfall and beds of moss marked recently by boots.
Where the trail was obvious ahead Hostene pressed forward alone. On a sun-bleached rock with a view of the surrounding ranges for dozens of miles, they found him sitting cross-legged, stripped to the waist, his skin rubbed with dust, in his hand the little leather bag that contained his sacred soil. Yangke clutched his beads and lowered himself into the lotus position. Shan realized they had barely spoken above a whisper all day. It was as if, having left the gateway where Bing died, they had entered a temple where voices should not be raised.
But Shan, gnawed by his ever-present worry for Lokesh and Gendun, could not find a prayer within himself. He sat apart and arranged bits of gravel before him to randomly construct a number for the Tao te Ching. But for the first time in his life, he kept losing count, trying and failing, as if the book in his mind had closed. Instead, he
