“The cavern was not just a shrine,” Tserung said in a whisper. “For all of time the great earth deity, the grandfather of mountains, lived there.” He paused and pulled a book from the pile at the end of the table, then opened it to a page marked with a tattered silk ribbon. The image on the page was of a fierce, sixteen-armed demon protector whose skin was cobalt blue and whose hands were filled with weapons and tools. Tserung pointed to each object and identified it. “A sword, a sledgehammer maul, a bow and arrow,” he began then looked up when he had finished. “All used for battle or for shaping the earth. Lhakpa thought that was important. He was trying to learn all he could about this Gekho, to see if he could find a new way to reach the earth god, he said. If he had gone earlier, he would have been killed too with that Chinese professor and the American. But he was here,” the monk mechanic said, and gestured to the stacked peche. “The old books saved him.”

“A new way?” Shan asked. “Meaning what?”

“I don’t know. It troubled me. I think now that maybe he had been without the gods earlier in his life and now he wanted to change that.”

“What exactly was he looking for?”

Yara looked to Tserung, who nodded. “The words,” she said. “The prayers forgotten in time, the prayers that might let Gekho know not all have forgotten him. He didn’t find any, said they are probably all lost now.”

“Lost to the black years, he meant,” Tserung added, his voice bitter now. The black years were one of the many terms Tibetans had for the apocalyptic period of the initial Chinese invasion and the bloody Cultural Revolution that followed. He hesitated, with a nervous glance at Shan, as if just realizing what he had spoken in front of the Chinese constable, but Shan only nodded to him.

“What does it mean, Shan,” Tserung asked in a mournful voice, “when all the prayers have been taken from us? Prayer is the lifeblood of a god. When no one prays to a god, my grandmother told me, the god will eventually shrivel up and die. I would pray for a Bonpo god, if only I knew what to say.”

Yara broke the heavy silence. “There aren’t too many Bonpo left,” she said, “and almost no Bonpo monks. Many of the few who truly understood the old ways are unregistered, always moving about and hiding because they know Religious Affairs has informers everywhere.”

“Are you saying Lhakpa was a Bonpo monk?”

Tserung sipped his tea. “More like an educated man who needed to urgently study the ways of a Bonpo monk.”

“A very educated man with a goat niece,” Shan observed.

Yara shrugged and cast a sympathetic glance at Tserung. “In this age the path to becoming a monk is not well charted.”