It was early evening when he parked in front of the station. Choden met him at the door. “You have a new car?” he asked, visibly excited. “It can’t be more than three or four years old!”

Shan shrugged as he walked inside. “Heater works. But I don’t think it has a siren.”

“And it’s green,” Choden observed. “I don’t think law enforcement has green cars.”

“So much the better,” Shan replied, then noticed the map laid out over Choden’s desk. Someone had been writing on it.

Choden answered his question before he could ask. “Lhakpa,” the deputy explained. “This morning he went out and climbed the gate tower, like those scientists did yesterday, even seemed to study each mountain like they did. Then he came back in and asked if we had a map of the northern sector of the county. He studied it for nearly an hour, muttering ‘wrong, wrong, wrong,’ again and again. Then he took out a pencil and began making corrections.”

As Marpa had indicated the day before, existing maps, including those issued to mere constables, were grossly inaccurate. Lhakpa had been making corrections along the northern border. He had slightly shifted several peaks, even highlighted a remote valley and written a name on it, Gekho’s Roost, and then drawn little chortens in a ring surrounding the valley.

“I don’t understand,” Shan said. “Why did he do that?”

Choden shrugged. “He’s a snow monk,” he said, as if such men were never expected to act rationally.

“Gekho?” Shan asked. The word seemed vaguely familiar, and Shan suspected he had seen it in the archives hidden under the streets of Yangkar.

Choden looked nervously about, and his voice dropped to a near whisper. “An ancient one. A very fierce protector god. The first of the earth deities, the old ones say, from before the days of Buddha,” he added, meaning Gekho was a god of Bon, the animist religion that had dominated Tibet before Buddhist missionaries had arrived from India.

“But why?” Shan asked. “You should ask Lhakpa.”

“I can’t.”

Shan saw the awkward, worried expression on his deputy’s face and opened the door to the cell block. Lhakpa was gone. He had packed his belongings and departed.

“You criticized him yesterday,” Choden said, a hint of accusation in his tone. “You made it impossible for him to spend time here with his niece.”

Somehow Shan suspected his departure had more to do with the visit of the Institute team than the rules of his jail. “Check the stables for him,” he said.

“He won’t be in anyone’s stable. He and Tara left on the northeastern pilgrim’s trail, up into the high mountains. We won’t see him for months. It’s what snow monks do: bless us then disappear.”