Her own great-granduncle had given the northern herds the apple, breeding the plants carefully through a hundred generations, then planting them where human tribes would discover the apparently wild orchards. This had been done as a solution to a nutritional problem. Humans needed fruit or they became constipated. It was most unpleasant to feed on a constipated human.

The samlor came to a stop before the shambling Chiang Mai airport, which proved to be empty in the predawn. Flights, it seemed, did not begin early here. She certainly couldn’t sit alone in the lobby, not and invite the curiosity of security guards by being the only passenger present.

Nearby there was an area of warehouses, lit only by a few overhead lights. As the driver walked down a ramp to an area where others of his kind slept beneath plastic sheets, she slipped into the shadows at the edge of the main terminal building. A few yards away there was a chain-link fence with a locked gate. She twisted the lock off and moved toward the nearest warehouse, slipping in through a side door.

The black interior smelled of cotton and turned out to be full of T-shirts intended for the western market. “Grateful Dead,” “Adolf Hitler, European Tour 1939–1945,” “I Am a Teenage Werewolf.”

She knew a great deal about fear, as something that her prey experienced. It was interesting to watch, in an abstract sort of way. She never felt it herself unless she got careless or unlucky. After all, humans couldn’t do anything to a Keeper. Being killed by man was regarded as a freak accident, about as likely as being caught in an avalanche. Or, that used to be the case. Since about the time of her mother’s death, things had been changing. The Keepers had responded by becoming more and more wary and reclusive.

Keepers were ten times as strong; they could climb sheer walls and leap long distances. They were far more intelligent. But were they faster than a bullet or a warning cell-phone call? Had they the skill to outwit investigators armed with the tools of forensic science?

She had been surprised to see the shadow of man in that ruined holy place. But she realized, now, that she should not have been.

Given the destruction of the Asian Book of Names, she had to assume that there were human beings who knew of their Keepers and were efficient enough to have destroyed a whole conclave.

The question was, how much had they actually understood of that book? If man had learned to read Prime, the ancient Keeper language, then a terrible doom might be upon all the Keepers. That book not only contained records of the locations and property of all the Keepers in Asia, but also all of their familial and fiscal relationships to every other Keeper in the world. It told the locations and times of the other centennial conclaves that would be held this month.