He gave his eyes a rest by walking up and down the corridor, marveling as always at the vastness of the collection and the labor of the dedicated monks who had written, then carved plates and printed, the books. Pausing at the end of the corridor, Shan bent over a pile of little brown pellets in a shadowed corner, then plucked a tuft of coarse white hairs from where they had rubbed off on the stonewall above them. He contemplated his finding for several long breaths then returned to his friends, freshening their tea before taking a seat at their work table.

“I couldn’t really understand why Lhakpa came to Yangkar,” he started. “A snow monk usually has friends somewhere who would gladly put him up when the weather is bitter. He lived in a village only a few day’s journey from here. But only Yangkar has an archive of the region, although its existence is supposed to be known by only a handful of us.”

Both Yara and Tserung suddenly seemed to take great interest in their mugs of tea.

“Lhakpa was at Gekho’s Roost, just days ago. I saw his goat there and she wouldn’t be there without him. He fled when that team from the Institute came here and went straight there from Yangkar. He left abruptly but wanted me to go there as well, because he left me a map.”

His friends remained silent.

“You’ve spent hard hours here, I know, but I was thinking it was nothing short of a miracle that you had already gone through hundreds of books. He had already been looking at them. He had already marked many.”

“He said to say nothing to you, Shan,” Tserung confessed in a worried voice. “But we would never lie to you.”

“So he swore you to secrecy,” Shan said, and held his weary head in his hands for a moment, then went to the shelf where Tserung kept supplies and retrieved a stick of incense, lit it, and set it in its wooden block holder in the middle of the table. It was a way of calling the gods to witness.

“Then I will tell you some of my secrets,” he declared, “and you can decide if I should know yours.” He explained the terrible morning when he had watched the execution of Metok, the false charges against the Tibetan engineer, and the deaths of the American woman and the professor in the ancient cavern shrine.