Shan, sipping his tea, was watching dawn wash over the western range when a long wail split the quiet of the café. He heard Marpa’s muffled voice trying to comfort a weeping child. Shan rose, then halted in the doorway to the kitchen. Lodi was clinging to his uncle, talking through long sobs as Marpa seemed to argue with him. Shan watched as the frustrated uncle took the boy by his shoulders and turned him toward the dining room.
Lodi cried out and frantically slipped behind his uncle.
Marpa looked at Shan with wide, frightened eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said as Shan approached. “I don’t know what he … The boy says Constable Shan is dead.” As he spoke, Lodi took a tentative step from behind his uncle. Shan stood motionless as the boy, his face drained of color, reached out and poked Shan with a finger. He backed away, his eyes still wide, then darted out the door. A moment later he reappeared, Raj the mastiff at his side.
Lodi halted a few feet away, still fearfully gazing at Shan. The dog approached, probing Shan with its nose as it circled, then wagged its tail and sat at Shan’s feet.
A joyful cry escaped the boy’s throat and he leapt forward to embrace Shan. “Some old ghost played a trick up on the mountain!” he exclaimed.
* * *
The trick played by the ghost had attracted a crowd of frightened onlookers by the time Lodi guided their two borrowed horses over the ridge toward the salt caravan shrine. Shan could see his own truck, which had been missing when he ran to the station, at the little flat where the caravan trail met the road, along with half a dozen other vehicles, including Jinhua’s sedan. At the sharp bend in the trail where Shan often coasted on his bike after visiting the shrine, a crowd stared mournfully over the cliff.
No one saw him descending the trail until he was a hundred feet away. Someone shouted and others began pointing at him. Half the assembly fled, running toward the road. Jinhua grinned at him. Jengtse stared in confusion. He stepped back and pointed below.
The uniformed body had tumbled off the curving cliff trail on a bicycle.
Jinhua stepped to Shan’s side. “It does look like a constable’s tunic,” the officer observed.
“Not mine. Not Jengtse’s,” Shan said. “No one has bothered to go down there?”
“The death of a policeman is a matter for Public Security, they said. I arrived only minutes ago.”
“Get some ropes,” Shan ordered Jengtse, then made an impatient gesture for Jinhua to follow him up the track to where the cliff faded into a less steep descent.
Ten minutes later the two men stood over the body, whose head was obscured under a thick growth of heather. A few feet away lay the twisted remains of a bicycle.
“Who else would be assigned to this area?” Jinhua asked as he bent to pull back the bush. “Do you know the constable from the nearest—” He turned away and vomited.
Mrs. Weng’s lips were curled up in an expression of surprised rage. She was still angry in her death.
“Where would she get a tunic?” Jinhua asked as he recovered, glancing nervously toward the expectant Tibetans above. Jengtse and Tserung were tying a rope to a boulder.
Shan looked more closely at what the dead woman was wearing. The tunic had none of the insignia common to a uniform and only plain black buttons. “Secondhand,” Shan observed. “The fool, always pretending to be an official.” A blue cap, devoid of markings but very similar to Shan’s uniform cap, lay beside the body.
“It worked,” Jinhua said as he straightened the body. Weng’s lifeless arm, which had been covering her neck, dropped onto the gravelly, blood-soaked soil. “Good enough to fool the killer.”
Shan, studying the cliff face as he worked out the plunge of the bicycle, turned. “What do you mean?”
“You go up there sometimes, on your bike.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t—”
“A lot of work to go up,” Jinhua interrupted, “and you probably have to walk your bike up that last steep section. But then you can coast down.”
“Yes, but—”
“On a bike she would sit much the way you do. Neck at the same height. Short hair covered by a blue cap. The killer was watching from a distance and went to work after she went up the ridge.”
Shan stepped closer to the corpse. “I don’t understand why you…” His words choked away as he followed Jinhua’s extended hand.
Weng’s head lay at an unnatural angle. Half the neck had been severed. A length of thin silver wire extended from one side of the sliced flesh.
“A sloppy job,” Jinhua said. “The wire was strung across the path at the right height, but it came undone at one end. Otherwise we’d be searching for her head.”
A cold fist seemed to grip Shan’s chest.
“They all said you were dead,” Jinhua continued. “You were supposed to be dead. This trap was laid for you. But the bitch couldn’t stop interfering. She came into the station when Jengtse and I were there. She asked for my card, wanted to see my badge. She asked what you were investigating, and I told her that was for official law enforcement only. Then she wanted to know what it was that you found so interesting at that old salt shrine. She said—her words—that you were a secret revisionist and the town had to be warned.”
A whistle from above broke Shan’s stunned silence. Jengtse was waving the end of a rope.
Shan stepped away from the body and cupped his hands to his mouth. “It’s Mrs. Weng! She had a biking accident. Send down a blanket!”
* * *
It was nearly an hour before the grisly recovery task was completed and the little convoy of vehicles departed for Yangkar, leaving Jinhua standing with Shan by the constable’s truck, with Mrs. Weng’s blanket-wrapped body lying in the cargo bed. The lieutenant seemed to understand Shan’s intentions and was the first back up the trail.
The thin wire had been strung in the perfect location, at the base of the steepest part of the trail and just before the sharp curve at the cliff. It had sprung back on itself and was tangled against a root that extended from a split in a ledge rock. Opposite the root, growing at the lip of the cliff, was a gnarled juniper with one limb that leaked sap where the wire had scraped away bark. Jinhua gauged the height by putting a flattened hand on his chest. “Unlucky for her that she was the same height as you. A bigger person might have just received a nasty cut in the shoulder.”
Shan pulled the wire free and coiled it around his hand before stuffing it in his pocket and ascending farther up the trail, a grousing Jinhua a few steps behind.
Mrs. Weng had indeed visited the salt shrine. The first three of the saints were toppled over, one of them broken in half. The fourth, the constable saint, still stood but had a stick embedded where one of its eyes should have been.
Jinhua sensed Shan’s despair and stood silently with him before the eroded sculpture. “They’re old,” he finally offered.
“Centuries,” Shan replied. He had not anticipated the deep sense of grief he felt at seeing the toppled statues. “The caravans came this way for centuries. Some would have two or three hundred sheep wearing special packs filled with salt, some with yaks carrying much bigger loads. It was a way of life, traveling hundreds of miles, sometimes all the way to Nepal or even India. Some sort of miracle probably occurred here that caused the shrine to be built, though it’s lost in time. They all had faces once, careful representations of old saints, and offerings would have been left here for a safe return to loved ones. Centuries,” he repeated. “But they didn’t have a chance against the Committee of Leading Citizens.” Shan extracted the stick out of the saint’s eye and patted the top of his head.
“Surely you’re not going to let her win,” Jinhua said from behind him. Shan turned to see that the lieutenant had his tunic off and was walking back to the toppled statues. “We can do this, comrade,” he called out and rolled up his sleeves.
Using tree limbs for levers they were able to right the two unbroken statues. They raised the base of the other, then Jinhua sank a limb in the ground along its back. As Shan held the broken top in place, Jinhua used the wire from Shan’s pocket to fasten it to the supporting limb.
Shan was so touched by the lieutenant’s satisfied smile that he waited until they were back at their vehicles before he told him his next task.
“Not possible!” Jinhua protested. “Never!” He backed away, staring wide-eyed at Weng’s shrouded body.
“You must,” Shan said as he pulled down the tailgate. “Her body cannot be examined.” He stepped to Jinhua’s car and opened the trunk. “The crematorium is outside of Lhasa, just past the first big bridge.”
“I can’t just show up in the middle of the night with an obviously murdered corpse and tell them to cremate it.”
“You can if you show them your Public Security badge. Buy one of those cartons for shipping. She had a sister in Nanjing.”
* * *
Dorchen steadfastly followed the old Tibetan custom of dismounting and walking beside his horse when ascending steep slopes, making their progress into the mountains slow and laborious. Time was short, Shan knew, and Pure Water College still had not given up its secrets. The amchi had reluctantly agreed to take Shan to the vantage point of the drawings, but only if they would go by way of the old dzong.
When they reached the ridge overlooking the ruined fortress, the amchi halted and studied the landscape in silence. “My father brought us this way when we brought my mother for healing that first time. We slept there”—he gestured to the little flat with cairns Shan had spied on his prior visit—“because my father wanted to reach the gate of the Pure Water College at dawn, the most propitious hour. A pilgrim was camped there too and warned us that powerful earth gods lived in the old dzong. There were prayer scarves tied to the bushes all around the mound, to pay homage to them. They had grown weary of men always crawling on their backs, so one day they rose up and threw all the stones down. The tale terrified me, but later, when we were staying in the college while my mother received treatment, I realized that the pilgrim hadn’t said evil gods, he just said powerful gods. There were days when my father spent hours in one of the chapels and I would escape and come back over here.”
Dorchen began leading his horse toward the dzong. “At first I just crept up that far ridge on my belly and stayed flattened at the top so the gods would not see me. But after a few days I ventured into the ruins. I was intensely curious but also intensely frightened, and when one of the rocks inside rose up I fell onto my knees and begged for forgiveness. The god laughed and I threw myself prostrate at his feet.” The dry chuckle from the amchi was the first time Shan had ever heard Dorchen laugh. “He was one of the monks, who preferred to wear a dark brown robe because he was a forager, who went into the wilds to gather medicines and didn’t like to frighten the animals. He was a jovial soul who became one of my favorite teachers. It was from him that I first learned the traditional name for this area. Before it was the Ghost Mountains, it was the Medicine Mountains. He was the one who raised the leopard who lived at the college, had discovered him as an injured cub and healed him. He insisted that any herb that had been touched by one of the great beasts of the wild always had more power, and he was constantly looking for places where they slept.”
Dorchen tethered his horse to a small spruce and sprang up the earthen ramp with surprising energy, disappearing behind the great blocks of the ruins. Shan found him by following the sound of muffled laughter from inside what was the largest pile of fallen slabs. He had to crawl on all fours down a short passage and found himself in a small, dim chamber. Dorchen was standing before a stuccoed wall with a faded painting of a white elephant carrying a jovial Buddha. “Always my favorite. Those who built this place did not shrink from the joys of life.” He paused, then with boyish energy reached into a wide crack in the wall that ran up into the elephant’s mouth. With a gleeful cry he pulled out a leather-wrapped bundle. “My first master always said when I did this, be careful or the elephant will bite you!” He shook the dust from the bundle, laid it on a fallen slab and unwrapped it, revealing the dried wing of a bird, its yellow feathers fading to brown, a little crystalline stone, and a scrap of paper with Tibetan script written in a crude, child’s hand. Gem medicine, stone medicine, soil medicine, fire medicine, it said.
Dorchen flushed. “I was just a boy, learning the classifications of medicines,” he murmured, then seemed to lose himself in memories. Shan silently retreated. It was another ten minutes before Dorchen climbed out of the low tunnel. He was much more somber now and seemed not to notice Shan as he paced around the ruins, pausing every few moments to place his fingers on the ruined walls, as if taking their pulse.
Shan worried that his tide of memories was pulling the old man too far away. “Amchi?”
Dorchen turned to him with a sad smile. “I have never been back here, Shan, never since … since then. I used to worry about what I would do if I had a patient up here. But no one ever comes here, no one lives up here. Only Nyima. And she is beloved of the gods.”
They spoke no more until they had mounted and ridden out of the little valley, and only then when Dorchen exclaimed over sightings of birds and the small mammals of the high altitudes. At a small verdant shelf the amchi dismounted, saying the horses would rest there, then he led Shan up a goat path, so steep they often had to grab onto the exposed roots of wind-beaten shrubs to pull themselves up.
By the time they reached the cave high up the mountain a dozen questions were on Shan’s lips, but as he stepped over the low wall at its entry he found himself strangely mute. If indeed, as the traditional Tibetans insisted, there were spiritual power places in Tibet, then surely this was one. The low wall across the eight-foot-wide entrance had been built so long ago that its surface was encased in lichen, giving it the appearance of a natural formation. The walls inside had been shaped by the hand of man, not to give them crisp angles, but to highlight their subtle features. What the Tibetans called a self-manifesting Buddha smiled down from a fold in the rock, a series of naturally occurring curves and hollows unmistakably forming his face and even his bald temples. The living rock below had been carved in the shape of a robe, including a necklace bearing a stone gau amulet that seemed styled after that of the Pure Water abbot. On the wall opposite, Buddhist symbols had been painted in some distant century. Most were so faded as to be impossible to identify, but Shan saw the hint of a bat, a conch, and a lotus. Above them, where wall and ceiling met, a long seam of reddish rock had been subtly worked to suggest a dragon. In the back of the cave, which was only twenty feet deep, was a pile of rotting cloth that may have been a pallet. On it were bits of bluish wool where wild goats had slept.
Somewhere over their heads the wind was caught in a fissure, creating a very low humming sound, the pitch of which rose and fell with the wind. It was as if the mountain were offering up the great harmonizing syllable om. It was a chamber of stone and spirit, where nature, men, and gods were as one.
“We were taught that once this had been the place of lifelong hermits,” Dorchen explained. “The front wall had been all the way to the top then, with little holes for small buckets of grain and water to be passed through once a week to the hermit inside. When I was at the college, coming here involved a somber duty. The abbot had to approve each person who came, and no one was allowed who did not vow to stay seven days, in absolute silence except for his recitations of scriptures and mantras. Failure to do so would disrespect the countless generations of devout souls who had used the cave. Only once did I know of a monk who violated that rule. The abbot called for an assembly, then ripped the robe off the man’s back and sent him away with an alms bowl.”
Dorchen approached the self-manifesting Buddha and dipped his head, then rubbed the stone gau, shiny from centuries of such gestures. “It was always deemed good luck to rub his gau,” he said with a melancholy smile, then stepped to the entrance. His face was so twisted by emotion that Shan was beginning to regret bringing the old man to the place.
As Dorchen stared down at the empty plain of the old medical college, less than a mile away, Shan laid the drawings out on the half wall, anchoring them with stones. The cave was, unquestionably, the viewpoint from the drawings.
“Who would come here,” Shan asked, “amid the chaos of the Red Guard being at the college?”
“I don’t know. I was gone. The abbot would have tried to keep everything as normal as possible. He might have sent a monk up here to calm him, to keep him focused in adversity. A test of his spirit.”
“If someone was up here, wouldn’t they have run down when they saw the distress at the college?”
“I told you. One week. It was a sacred rule. There were no exceptions.”
“Seven days,” Shan said. “He drew the feathers over the stable. That means he knew the ravens were there and had been at the college to hide the treasure.”
“Only the most senior of lamas would have known such secrets.”
“I think our witness was a senior lama. Maybe he wasn’t sent here to meditate, he was sent here for his protection, to save one life at least, to save his life. Now at the end of his life he’s trying to pass on those secrets with these drawings.”
Dorchen, clearly in torment, said nothing.
“The Red Guard came. Then the army. You were away the entire time?”
“There used to be trees,” Dorchen said in a hollow voice, pointing to the north side of the plain, around the well. “Tall junipers, even an oak or two.”
“Why weren’t there trees in the drawing?” Shan asked, then answered his own question. “Because they were taken down while the Chinese were there. He drew what he saw. Instead of trees he drew a small circle, a circle of smaller circles really.”
Dorchen bent over the first drawing. “The circle of stones around the old well, disused since the big earthquake in the prior century.” He indicated a little structure outside the oval of chortens at the opposite end of the plain. “The new well. That’s what we called it, though it had been used for many decades by then.”
Shan pointed to the last drawing. “I still don’t understand this one. Monks and birds and horses dancing in the air. “
“Monks and ravens,” Dorchen corrected. “And we never had horses. Mules.”
The amchi went very still. He stared at a large black bird circling high over the plain of the old college.
“The sign of the raven was over the last building,” Shan stated.
Dorchen glanced uneasily at Shan, then back at the solitary raven that seemed to be keeping watch over the plain. Or was it watching them? The amchi sighed and put a hand on the wall as if he suddenly needed support. “Forgive me, Shan, for the truths I have not told you.”
The amchi went back to the Buddha and bowed his head to gather strength before continuing. “I have told you no lies,” he declared in a pained voice, his head still bowed. “But I have not given you the full truth.” He seemed much older and careworn when he turned back to Shan.
“I did first come to Pure Water with my ailing mother. What I did not say was that my father then was a minor official in Lhasa, one of those who communicated with gompas all over central Tibet to coordinate food and other supplies. If one gompa had a poor harvest, he would see that those who had not suffered shared their bounty. In the time we spent here at the college he grew very attached to the abbots of Yangkar gompa and the college. Over the years while I studied, he rose in rank and entered the inner circles of government. He was entrusted with other duties, taking care of more than supplies. Protecting holy assets, he would sometimes say.”
“You mean secret assets,” Shan suggested.
“Not only those, but yes. The office of the Dalai Lama had set aside reserves and other treasures for hard times. There was much gold, though most of the gold was held for use in making statues of deities or gilding temple roofs to honor the gods. My father felt honor bound to protect such things, and he stayed behind when the Dalai Lama left.” Dorchen stared out at the empty plain of the college. “They urged him to go, to leave the treasures, because there would be many new gompas to be built and managed in India and Nepal, but he would not hear of it. He said the treasures were a link between Tibetans and their gods.”
“So he stayed behind and worked with the ravens.”
Dorchen nodded. “I did go to Chokpori, the medical college in Lhasa to study, but not just to study, and I did not always stay there during the time I was assigned there. I carried messages back and forth, because I knew so many of the officials and the ravens. The treasure had been well concealed in Lhasa, but as the Red Guard advanced we knew it would not be safe. Pure Water College seemed the perfect place. So remote. So difficult to get to. My father saw to it that the records were altered, so that the college did not even appear on any official lists of gompas, then he hid the lists, but not too well, for he wanted the Chinese to find them and think them authentic.
“First the ravens moved everything to Chokpori, on the outskirts of Lhasa, hiding everything in normal deliveries. When all was ready, I helped my father and the ravens load the mules. Fifty mules.”
“The Chinese who took over Yangkar studied the caravan records,” Shan explained. “There was one they couldn’t account for. Fifty mules, with ten teamsters and ten others. The others were ravens.”
“Yes. By then most of them carried weapons, mostly pistols that had been dropped from the sky in the packages sent by the Americans. Squads of the resistance were assigned to meet the caravan at intervals and escort it. Someone from the college who knew of the old secret trails was sent to meet it when it approached Yangkar.”
“The gold was in the last of the buildings standing, the final one destroyed,” Shan ventured.
“We were always so innocent. No one ever thought about thieves or nonbelievers like those Chinese. The ravens probably thought it clever to conceal gold in the stables, probably under fodder or at the bottom of the big jars of grain fed to the animals.”
“It took three days to destroy it,” Shan stated. “The other buildings were demolished by then. The raven sign over the building must mean they defended it. A last stand.”
“The Chinese were probably frightened of damaging the gold,” Dorchen continued, “so they used no fire, no explosives. The defenders probably only had the bullets in their guns. I doubt they even aimed to kill their attackers, just wound them. They were monks, not soldiers.” Dorchen wiped at an eye. “I’ve never told anyone this, not all these years.”
“There was more, amchi, thirty mules unaccounted for. I think it was more valuable than the gold. By putting the gold in the stable and defending it there, they let the Chinese believe they had found the Dalai Lama’s fortune. They were monks, but warrior monks. They could have found a way to flee. They knew they had to die there, to complete the ruse.”
Dorchen gave a ragged sigh and stared again at the raven.
“Did you ever encounter the Red Guard?” Shan asked.
“By the time they reached Lhasa, we had heard horrible stories. We fled into the mountains, stayed in camps the resistance set up for a while, until the food ran out. I met a young boy in one of those camps, only ten years old, who months earlier had been sent by his family to work at Yangkar gompa, where his parents thought he would be safe. He sometimes ran messages between the gompa in town and the college. The Red Guard had been at Yangkar for weeks already, had built their base and had begun to hold their trials. He had still been able to go back and forth, in the night, between Yangkar and the college. The boy had delivered a message for the abbot of the college saying that all those there should hide in the mountains, but then a big company of Red Guard arrived. He was trapped there because no one was permitted to leave.
“The first day they put those dunce hats on the abbot and the senior lamas, then tore off their robes and made them parade around the circuit of chortens in their underwear. The Chinese hit them with switches if they went too slow and made them chant slogans about Mao. After a few hours they arranged them in two lines and made them throw stones at each other, and no one was allowed to stop until they had drawn blood from another. The boy kept asking me, where were the parents of those young Chinese, that their parents should have been told what they were doing. They were just teenagers, but they carried army guns. Those teenagers had their own parade, he said, shooting guns in the air and shouting ‘Zaofan! Zaofan!’ It meant ‘rebellion,’ of course, but no one in the college would have known. The next day they hung their red flags from the eaves of the buildings and began their trials. They made the monks open the base of a chorten and they took out the mummified lama inside to the courtyard where they tried him for oppression of the peasants and cut off his head.” Dorchen’s voice trailed off as he watched the raven swoop low over the plain.
“On the second day after their arrival, they forced everyone inside the main assembly hall and stood guard while others searched the grounds, destroying many old things as they did so. The next day the army arrived. The abbot was relieved at first because the officer in charge seemed more responsible, even offended by what the Red Guard had done. The leader of the Red Guard shouted at the officer, saying they were in charge, and the officer slapped him like a spoiled child. I think everyone expected the army to be more respectful.”
Dorchen’s voice became a hoarse whisper. “The soldiers sent the Red Guard back to their base and then ordered all the young Tibetans to leave. The boy fled into the mountains. After that I don’t know exactly what happened. I should have gone back,” he added after a moment.
“There was nothing you could have done.”
“I spent months trying to find my father, praying all the time that he had had the sense to finally flee across the border. I took my robe off and posed as a beggar in Lhasa, then later in Shigatse, looking for him or anyone who might have seen him. Finally I found one of the palace cooks, in a line of workers hauling night soil out of an army base. He said my father had never fled Lhasa and had been one of the first the Red Guards put on trial, in the courtyard of the Norbulingka, the old summer palace in Lhasa. He threw off the dunce cap they put on him and kicked down the stool where he was supposed to sit. He had memorized enough Chinese to say one thing, to be sure his accusers understood. ‘May the Dalai Lama live ten thousand years!’ he shouted, again and again. They shot him in the head and threw his body in the river.” His voice faded as he watched the raven again, tracing its path with a finger in the air.
“I made my way back to Lhasa on old pilgrim trails, out of sight of any Chinese. When I finally arrived I sat by the river and recited the Bardo rites for the soul of my father. I prayed for five days and nights. It should have been longer, but I was tired and hungry and soldiers began taking shots at me from across the river. I think they had decided I was a spy. I didn’t move. I laughed. I wanted them to kill me. But the fools were bad shots.
“The next morning I put on my robe. I knew more Chinese than my father. I was filled with rage. I was going to the army barracks and make a speech. I had rehearsed all night. You can’t kill Tibet, I was going to say, for Tibet lived in the Dalai Lama, who was an eternal spirit. Their Mao, I was going to say, was a lowly beetle who would burst into flame when he felt the heat of the Dalai Lama.”
“Your body would soon have been in the river with your father’s.”
Dorchen gave a bitter grin. “There was an old woman sweeping the street outside the army base. She saw the defiance in my eyes. I blessed her as I passed, and she promptly knocked me unconscious. I woke up in beggar’s clothes, packed into a truck with other Tibetans, on the way to a labor camp.”
“She saved your life.”
“And many were the days when I cursed her for it.” The amchi sighed. “But the gods look after tormented souls. I was imprisoned with a dozen medical professors from Chokpori. We worked on Chinese roads all day but for half the night they secretly taught us. A lot of good doctors came out of that prison. Especially adept at treating malnutrition, frostbite, and broken bones.”
They silently watched a wild goat wander across the slope below, grazing on cinquefoil blossoms.
The amchi’s gaze drifted back to the circling raven. “They say ravens live for long decades. Maybe that one was there.”
“A bird didn’t make those drawings. Who could have been sent here by the abbot?”
“Monks and nuns were sent here for many reasons. Sometimes as punishment, sometimes as a reward. Sometimes as penance, to reflect on sinful acts or sinful thought.”
“But why then, when the Red Guard was there? Why would they allow him to leave the college?”
Dorchen shrugged and looked down at the drawings. “We will never know.”
“You said a guide was sent from Pure Water to lead the ravens here. A perilous job—a job involving great secrets, which must mean it was a senior lama.”
“Whomever it was,” Dorchen said, “he had the courage to give the drawings to the old constable but not the courage to stay.”
“The one who brought the drawings was only a messenger.”
Dorchen’s brow furrowed. “Those drawings could have been made years ago. Decades even. The one who drew them is probably long dead.”
“No. The paper is new. It was salvaged, you could say, the original words scraped off. It had been recently taken from a prison bulletin board.”
Dorchen stared at Shan in disbelief. He took several long breaths before he could find his tongue. “Impossible. A monk from Pure Water? No. We would have known. He would have reached out. There would have been messages years ago. And why would they keep one monk alive after killing all the others?”
“I don’t think they knew about him. I think he was sent up here just before the violence started, maybe because the abbot wanted to protect him, maybe as a reward for helping the ravens. I think he kept the rules about his stay here, then left after his seven days here and was arrested elsewhere, so he was never connected to Pure Water College. And I believe he had good reason to keep his existence a secret. To protect lives, and perhaps something greater.”
“Something greater?”
“There is still treasure there, unaccounted for. Those missing thirty mules were carrying it. It’s why the general is here, why he kept his agents here for years. The man who drew these has the secret those agents have been killing for. I think somewhere in these drawings there is a clue to it.”
Dorchen’s countenance clenched with pain. “I don’t want to believe it. Do you grasp the agony he must have lived with?”
“Fifty years and more in prison. He glimpses the end of his life. He decided to finally reach out, in his own way, a way that would be understood by only a few, so the secret could be passed on.”
Dorchen gazed at Shan, his face desolate. Then he looked up at the circling raven, down at the empty plain, and wept.