The sergeant gestured to the fallen tower. “A sorcerer,” he replied in a worried voice. Shan remembered how when they had first met years earlier, the driver had always spoken of Tibetans in dismissive, deprecating tones, as Tan himself had. Neither did anymore.

Shan caught up with the colonel at the summit of the hill, where he was sitting on a large flat boulder, smoking another cigarette. There was no sign of the Tibetan sorcerer other than a dust cloud in the direction of the northern mountains.

Tan inhaled deeply on his cigarette then emitted twin streams of smoke from his nostrils. “There’s going to be trouble,” he declared.

Shan sat beside him. “What kind of trouble?” he asked, gazing at the cloud of dust. To the north lay his own remote jurisdiction, the town of Yangkar and its surrounding township, and he saw with relief that the track of the horses was veering east, out of his domain, toward the tallest of the distant snowcapped peaks.

“Your kind of trouble.”

Shan watched the dust cloud for several breaths. “You forget, Colonel,” he said. “These days I specialize in finding stray yaks and settling disputes in the farmers’ market. Last week I had to decide whether a chicken was worth ten heads of cabbage or fifteen.”

Tan gave a grunt that may have been a laugh. Then he set his own eyes on the receding dust cloud and sobered. “A small convoy was coming through to Lhadrung from Sichuan Province, just two army trucks and two Public Security vehicles in escort.”

“You mean some very special prisoners were being transferred to one of your establishments.” In all of China, Tan was reputed to have the best prisons for making inmates disappear forever. It had been the reason Shan had been sentenced to the 404th People’s Construction Brigade years earlier.

Tan didn’t disagree. “Only six prisoners, three in each truck, with two guards in the back of each, Public Security cars in front and back. The Public Security officer in charge, who had just been assigned to Lhadrung, decided to take one of the old roads through the high mountains, though damned if I know why. If they had bothered to ask, I would have told them those roads are too unreliable, subject to landslides and worse.” He drew on his cigarette again. “An old man appeared on the road as they rounded a curve, waving and doing a strange dance. He stopped every few moments and shook his bundle of twigs toward the sky, which rapidly grew darker.