Major Xun was waiting at the front steps and escorted Shan around the building to the military entrance. Tan was pacing, very impatiently, outside a patient room on the first floor, next to the small emergency center. Jampa, the old Tibetan Shan had met at Tan’s office, lay in the solitary bed inside, his face and hands swollen and bandaged. His eyes were fixed so blankly on the ceiling that Shan thought he was dead. Tan motioned Shan inside and shut the door, leaving Xun in the corridor.

“I don’t care about Metok or Huan right now,” the colonel snapped. “I want the bastards who did this!”

“What happened?”

“He was set upon in an alley last night. In my town! Took what little money he had and fled, the cowards! I want you to find whoever did this and I will personally inflict blows to match what they did to him!”

Shan lifted the chart from the bedstand then looked again at the man’s arms, one of which was broken, held up in a sling, exposing its tattooed number. Jampa had been a prisoner, one of the many who found menial jobs in Lhadrung after release because travel papers were denied them. He gazed for a moment at the man, wondering what he had been before imprisonment.

Tan followed his gaze. “Yes, a convict. But he was a good man. He had been a scribe in the old days, you know, making those manuscripts the Tibetans use.” The colonel caught himself. “He was tainted by his reactionary ways but was cured of them. We never talked about all that. He paid his price and learned very passable Chinese during his time. Reformed his ways,” Tan added uneasily.

Years earlier it would have been unheard of for the tyrant of Lhadrung to engage in conversation with a former prisoner, let alone befriend and defend one. Was the colonel just finding compromise, or growing weak? Probably, Shan decided, Tan would consider them the same thing.

He read the rest of the chart, then studied the old Tibetan more closely. Broken arm, broken ankle, and a skull fracture. His assailants had used a metal bar on him, probably a reinforcing rod from one of the construction sites, judging by the ridges Shan saw along the fracture of his skull. But none of these would kill him. What was killing him was his ruptured kidney.

“Jampa!” Tan said, barking the name like an order. The old man stirred slowly, painfully turning his head toward Tan to smile. His chest rattled as he breathed. His body seemed to shake and he nodded. Then he looked at Shan with pleading eyes and the rattling stopped.

“Jampa!” Tan shook the man’s shoulder.

Shan lifted the Tibetan’s wrist, searching for a pulse. “He’s gone, Colonel.”

Tan seemed not to hear. “Jampa!” he repeated, then turned to Shan. “Get a doctor!”

“He’s dead.”