Shan paused to catch his breath on the steep climb up to the outcropping field. He could see the work site far below, where some equipment was still being operated with headlights on. In the distance a huge pile of toppled trees burned. Something still nagged at the back of his mind, a lurking question about his visit that he couldn’t quite articulate. Something else still tore at his heart, the destruction and burial of the ancient standing stones. He had begun to grasp the excitement the professor and the American woman had felt about the valley. They hadn’t been doing archaeology of long-ago tribes, they had been engaged in archaeology of the human spirit, at the place that anchored all the bones of the earth.

He had to climb the final heights in short stages, pausing when his lungs strained in the thin air. At the next stop, as he looked down at the shadowed place where the standing stones had once stood, the engima of his afternoon found his tongue.

“October 1!” he said out loud. October 1 was the day the stones had been destroyed. October 1 was National Day. National Day was when Tsomo, the old lama at Ko’s prison, had suddenly gasped, thrust his arms toward the north, and died.

Two hours later Shan sat at the campfire in the little sheltered flat below the stone talons and told Lhakpa and Jaya of his afternoon at the work site, ending with his realization that the standing stones and the old prisoner from the Larung Gar monastery had essentially died the same day.

“The same hour,” Jaya said. “2:00 p.m. on October 1.” She knew. She knew more than Shan. “The mysteries of spiritual transmigration in Tibet,” she added, then saw the confusion on Shan’s face. “Yankay calls in hail and two soldiers die. They destroy the ancient stones and an aged lama dies. Maybe it’s true what the old Bonpo say. We are all puppets. The gods decree it all.”

Lhakpa murmured something in a voice that had grown desolate, and Jaya kicked him. He gave his niece a stern shake of his head, as if chastising her. Shan did not react, acting as though he had not heard. But he had heard. Lhakpa had said I should have been the one.

“On the road you stopped that white car, Constable,” Jaya said.

Shan hesitated. The Tibetan woman seemed to spend much of her time watching the valley. “I discovered that I knew the visitor, someone from Lhasa,” he replied.

Lhakpa stirred the embers of their dung-fed fire. “Tell me, Constable, are you investigating the death of Metok or the death of the gods?”

Shan leaned closer to the fire. “I only have jurisdiction over the former.”

“That is just the jurisdiction that other men give you,” Lhakpa replied, seeming to disagree.

Shan, suddenly feeling very small and very cold, pulled his borrowed blanket around his shoulders.