Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

"If the soldiers try to take them," Shan replied quickly, "I, too, will choose to die." It was a simple thing, to die when the knobs finally came for you. If you ran away they would shoot. If you ran at them they would shoot. If you resisted they would shoot.

He saw Choje smiling at him and looked down. Shan's hands were still in the mudra, holding the treasure flask, as Choje began to talk.

Twenty minutes later he stood at the edge of the dead zone and took off his prison shirt. He took one step forward. The knobs shouted a warning. Three of them cocked their rifles and aimed directly at him. An officer pulled his pistol and was about to fire into the air when a hand closed around the gun and pushed it down. It was Tan.

"You have less than eighteen hours," Tan growled. "You should be finishing the official report." But as they moved away from the knobs his anger faded. "The Ministry delegation. They are already with Li. They changed the schedule. The trial will be at eight o'clock tomorrow morning."

Shan looked up in alarm. "You have to delay."

"On what grounds?"

"I have a witness."

They arrived before dawn, as Choje had instructed. Do not speak to the purbas, he had said. Do not let the knobs follow. Just be there as the sun rises, at the clearing before the new bridge.

"There was no sign of him?" Shan asked as Sergeant Feng switched off the engine. "Maybe he moved to another barracks. He has no place to go."

"Nope. He's gone. Down the road at nightfall," Feng said. "You won't see him again."

Yeshe's bag had been gone when Shan had returned to the barracks. "He didn't say anything, didn't leave anything?"

Sergeant Feng reached into his pocket. "Only this," he said, laying the ruined rosary on the dashboard, nothing but string and two marker beads. He yawned and lowered the back of his seat. "I know where he went. He asked how to get there. That chemical factory in Lhasa. They hire lots of Tibetans, with or without papers."

Shan put his head in his hands.

"We could ask patrols to pick him up, if you still need him."

"No," Shan replied grimly, and climbed out of the truck.

There was nothing, just the sliver of the moon over the black outline of the mountains. As the stars blinked out he found himself watching for Jao's ghost.

Another vehicle appeared along the road from town, and eased in behind the truck. It was Tan, driving his own car. He was wearing a pistol.

"I don't like it," Tan said. "A witness who hides is useless. How will he testify? He will have to come with us, to the trial. They will ask why he speaks up now, so late." He studied the dark landscape, then looked suspiciously at Shan. "If it is a cultist, they will say he is an accomplice."

Shan continued staring into the heather. "A group of monks were watching the bridge," he explained. "They were trying to cause it to collapse."

Tan muttered a low curse. "By watching it?" he asked bitterly. He looked back at his car, as though he might leave, then followed Shan slowly into the clearing.

"By shouting at it," Shan said. How could he explain the rite of the shards? How could he explain the broken pots above the bridge or at Yerpa, where Trinle and the others trained in the old ritual of thunder? How could he explain the ancient belief that a perfect sound was the most destructive force of nature? "Not a shout, really. Creating sound waves. It was what scared Sergeant Feng that night he fired his pistol. Like a clap of-"

He stopped. In the gathering light he saw a gray shape thirty feet away at the end of the clearing, a large rock that was gradually becoming the shape of a man sitting on the earth. It was Gendun.

They stopped six feet away. "This is a priest of a nearby gompa," Shan explained to Tan, then turned to the old monk. "Can you explain where you were the night of the prosecutor's murder?"

"Above the bridge," Gendun said in a firm, quiet voice, as though he were saying prayers. "In the rocks, chanting."

"Why?"

"In the sixteenth century there was a Mongolian invasion. Priests of my gompa stopped it from reaching Lhadrung by causing an avalanche to fall on the army."

Tan glared furiously at Shan, but before he could turn away Gendun continued. "This bridge. It does not belong here. It is destined to fall away."

He was interrupted by the sound of a heavy truck speeding on the gravel road behind them. As it skidded to a stop Li Aidang jumped out, clad in military fatigues. He took ten steps into the clearing, then snapped out an order. Half a dozen uniformed knobs began leaping from the truck. The major appeared in the headlights, a small automatic gun hanging from his shoulder. The troops formed in a single line along the road, in front of Li.

A strange serenity settled over Gendun, a distant look. He paid no attention to the knobs, but studied the mountains as if trying to remember them for future reference. He could not control his next incarnation. He might rekindle on the floor of a desert hut thousands of miles away.

"The sun had been down maybe an hour when the headlights of a car appeared," he suddenly continued. "It stopped near the bridge and turned out its lights. Then there were voices. Two men, I think, and a woman laughing. I think she was intoxicated."

"A woman?" Shan asked. "There was a woman with Prosecutor Jao?"

"No. This was the first car."

The silence before dawn was like no other. It seemed to hold the troops in a spell. Gendun's words were loud and clear. An owl's call eerily echoed from the gorge.

"Then she screamed. A death scream."

The words snapped Li out of his trance. He stepped into the clearing and moved toward Gendun. Shan stepped in front of him.

"Do not attempt to interfere with the Ministry of Justice," Li snarled. "This man is a conspirator. He admits he was there. He will join Sungpo in the dock."

"We are still conducting an investigation," Shan protested.

"No," Li said fiercely. "It is over. The Ministry will open its trial in three hours. I am scheduled to deliver the prosecution report."

"I don't think so," Tan said, so quietly Shan was not sure if he heard correctly.

Li ignored him and began to gesture for the knobs.

"There will be no trial without the prisoner," Tan continued.

"What are you saying?" Li snapped.

"I had him removed from the guardhouse. At midnight last night."

"Impossible. He had Public Security Guards."

"They were called away. Replaced with some of my aides. Seems there was some confusion about orders."

"You have no authority!" Li barked.

"Until Beijing decides otherwise, I am the senior official in this county." Tan paused and cocked his head toward the hillside.

It was a droning sound that distracted him, as though of frogs, a sound of nature that had not been there before. But then it seemed much closer. In the rising light another priest became visible at the edge of the clearing, ten feet from Gendun. It was Trinle. He was in the lotus position, chanting a mantra in a low nasal tone. Li smirked and approached Trinle, the new object of his furor. Then there was an echoing sound from the opposite side of the clearing. Shan stepped in that direction and discerned another red robe in the brush. Li took another angry step toward Trinle and paused. A third voice joined in, and a fourth, all in the same rhythm, the same tone. The sound seemed to be coming from nowhere, and everywhere.

"Seize them!" Li cried. But the knobs stood, transfixed, staring into the brush.

The day was breaking rapidly now, and Shan could see the robes along the edge of the clearing well enough to count them. Six. Ten. No, more. Fifteen. He recognized several of the faces. Some were purbas. Some were from the mountain, protectors of the gomchen.