Finally convinced he had not been followed by the female imp, Shan hurried on to the concealed door and descended into the clandestine library. He paused as he reached the bottom of the stairs, resolving not to breathe a word about Jiao’s plan to take over Yangkar. Tserung and Yara were at the table in the first chamber, looking bleary-eyed as they studied old manuscripts. Tserung brewed a fresh pot of tea as Yara guided Shan through a stack of old peche marked with slips of paper.

“The journals kept in the old gompa go back over five hundred years,” Yara reminded Shan, “and even in the earliest there is mention of the Valley of the Gods. When the foundations of the Yangkar gompa were laid, an old hermit who had meditated in the valley for fifty years came to bless it. There are frequent references to Bonpo pilgrims en route to pay homage to the fierce old god who lived there, and to an annual ceremony in which representatives from the medical school up in the mountains asked the abbot’s permission to gather medicinal herbs there. The records mention that healers had been gathering sacred herbs there for centuries.” The young teacher looked up. “That means before Buddhist teachers arrived.”

“There was a stone field there,” Shan explained, “a cemetery or perhaps a shrine that was probably thousands of years old. Was,” he repeated.

A flicker of pain twisted Yara’s face. “There are similar references through all the decades we’ve sampled, though our page-by-page review is just reaching the eighteenth century tonight.”

“There are other records about Bonpo pilgrims that refer to it as both the Valley of the Gods and Gekho’s Roost,” Tserung added. The mechanic had taken to carrying an old silver pen case on his belt, in the traditional style of novice monks.

“Gekho was a mountain deity for the local people then?” Shan asked.

“No, not just any earth deity,” Tserung corrected. “For the Bonpo he was the primary earth deity, Wolchen Gekho, the Wrathful Demon Destroyer, maker of lightning, thunder, and hail. Gekho the Blue some called him, for his skin was the color of the sky. When he got angry he would shake the ground humans walked on. Twice I found very old references to the place as Gekho’s Cradle, as if the valley was where he was born, when the earth was still young.”

Shan sat and went through the laborious process of opening each of the long, loose-leafed peche on the table, reading the marked passages himself, getting lost for an hour in the aged, fading ink of the one-of-a-kind books, pausing over a delightful passage about a yak cow who would only yield milk when mantras were sung to her.