Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"Thirty minutes," Larkin announced impatiently when the purbas returned. "Thirty minutes and I go out and take my equipment." But barely five minutes had passed when one of the purbas snapped his fingers and pointed to the north. Shan ventured a glance around the rocks. Three figures had appeared at the top of the trail, and were bent, running for cover.

"That idiot Zhu probably just wants to pilfer some of my supplies," Larkin fumed. "The little bastard probably sells things on the-" She was interrupted by the sickening crack of a long-range rifle. It shot twice more, and the purbas, their faces drained of color, began pushing Larkin away, down the other side of the ridge.

Shan slipped his head around the rock one more time. The dummies were sprawled over the boxes, one of the helmets in pieces. And from the other side of the clearing strode Special Director Zhu, a hunting rifle perched on his shoulder. His pace was jaunty, as if he were going to collect a trophy.

They dared not take the trail back to the gorge, for it exposed them on a long open slope where they would make easy targets for anyone with such a weapon. Shan led them downward, onto a path at the back of the mountain. In an hour they arrived at the mixing ledge.

Nyma, on a rock near the hidden entrance, called out excitedly, then ran to greet them. As she reached them, however, she paused and looked uncertainly at Shan's companions. She studied Melissa Larkin then turned toward Winslow with a knowing nod. "You never really thought she was dead," she observed solemnly. "I knew that, but to speak of such things could be bad luck."

Larkin smiled awkwardly. She had been deeply shaken by what Zhu had done. She had, Shan suspected, assumed she would go back to the venture when her work with the purbas was done. Now she knew the Special Projects Director would rather see her dead.

Shan quickly introduced Lhandro and his parents, the only occupants of the rooms. They had not seen the medicine lama. Lhandro and his mother served tea as Shan explained what had happened to Tenzin and Lokesh, and the news of Tenzin's true identity. Afterwards Shan found Anya and Lin beyond the gnarled old juniper on a blanket with a bowl of cold tsampa balls, talking and pointing toward clouds. It had the air of a picnic. He stopped fifty feet away. They did not see him. The colonel had his hands together, and the girl was tying a complex pattern of yarn around his fingers. There was an odd noise coming from Lin, as if he were in pain. Shan stepped closer. No, Lin was laughing.

As Shan approached the girl finished her tying. She looked into Lin's face expectantly then pulled one end of the yarn and the entire structure of yarn collapsed. Lin laughed again. Shan stepped forward. They both looked up, startled. Lin frowned and seemed to curse under his breath. Anya patted the blanket beside her and Shan sat.

They did not speak. Anya offered Shan the bowl of tsampa, then pointed at a large bird of prey, a lammergeier, soaring over one of the long ridges below. Shan looked toward the south. Somewhere in the haze near the horizon stood Norbu. Lin pointed to a flight of geese moving in the direction of Lamtso. Once, Shan recalled, Lin had ravaged a line of geese with an automatic rifle.

Suddenly a gust of wind grabbed the yarn on the blanket and carried it to the rocks thirty feet away. Anya sprang up to chase it.

"They took my friends," Shan said quietly.

"That old one, and the tall one who calls himself Tenzin," Lin said. It was not a question, as if he had known they would be taken.

"Tenzin was the abbot of Sangchi, the one who disappeared."

"Fled," Lin snapped. "That's what thieves do. I don't care what the others call him. He is a thief. My thief." He frowned at Shan. "They will never do a hostage exchange."

"No," Shan said in a slow voice, and studied the officer, gradually grasping Lin's meaning. "You are not a hostage, colonel. Not a prisoner."

When Lin turned his head it caused him obvious pain. "You say that because you know I can't leave anyway," he said with a grimace. "I get dizzy when I walk just a few paces. The girl helps me."

"She saved your life. No one would have dug you out of those rocks if she had not been there. The least you can do is use her name."

"They call her Anya," Lin acknowledged in a tight, resentful tone.

"My friends were captured because they went to look for medicine for you."

Lin made a sound like a snort, and his lips curled into a cold smile as though the news pleased him. Anya still chased the yarn up the slope, her uneven gait causing her to stumble frequently.

"If you had asked them to get that medicine, to go back to that valley where your soldiers waited," Shan said pointedly, "they still would have gone."

Lin looked at Shan through squinting eyes, his lips pursing as if he had bit something sour. He said nothing, and his gaze drifted toward Anya, who looked like a child at play now. They watched in silence a long time. The girl seemed to have forgotten them for a moment, as she knelt to look at some flowers.

"The girl shows me things," Lin said. "Anya," he added hesitantly, and turned slowly back to the landscape below. "When they come, I'll see that she is not harmed. She can go back to her home."

Shan stared at the officer. When they come. He meant his mountain combat troops. "She has no home," Shan said, ignoring the threat in Lin's words.

Lin frowned again and watched another skein of geese. "I'll get her some food to take, some shoes maybe. In the mountains you need good shoes."

"Where she lived is burned down. Yapchi."

"Damned fools," Lin shot back. "I didn't make them do that."

"Of course you did," Shan replied, just as quickly. He and Lin exchanged a taut stare, then Lin broke away as Anya called out. She was limping back with the yarn, and a rock she wanted to show them with yellow lichen in the form of a lotus flower.

As he retreated to the back of the plateau, Shan looked up and froze. There was something new in the rocks above, just a hundred yards away, just past where the field of talus started. He climbed a rock for a better view. There was a figure sitting among the boulders. Jokar. The old medicine lama was meditating above them. How long had he been there? No one had seen him for three days. Had he been meditating in the rocks all the time, watching over the mixing ledge and the distant Plain of Flowers? Where, Shan wondered, was his guardian? At the herb shelf there had been signs that two people had slept there.

Inside, Lhandro and his father were arguing. His father, having heard about Tenzin and Lokesh, wanted to return immediately to Yapchi. Lhandro kept telling his father that there was nothing to be done at Yapchi for the two prisoners. As Lepka saw Shan he broke off his dialogue and stepped to the doorway of one of the empty meditation cells, staring into the darkness. "It's the stickmen," the old man muttered toward the shadows. His voice was strangely feeble. "The stickmen never let up."

Nyma glanced at Shan with a sad expression as Lepka stepped inside the cell. "Sometimes he is like this. His mind wanders."

"What does he mean?" Shan asked.

"It's from his childhood," Nyma said. "A toy I think."

"Monsters from his dreams," Lhandro's mother said over Shan's shoulder in a voice tight with worry. "For years he has had nightmares every few weeks, crying out about stickmen," she added. "But this month, almost every night the bad dreams come."

Shan looked about the chamber. Winslow and Larkin were talking excitedly. The two purbas who had come with Larkin were speaking in low urgent tones with Somo about Lin. Shan studied the purbas. Perhaps he had spoken too hastily in telling Lin he was not a prisoner.

How many crimes, how many motives, he thought as he watched Lin, then the purbas. Everything was compartmentalized, as Somo had pointed out. Like Beijing's operations. The knobs had been looking for the medicine lama. The mountain troops had been looking for Tenzin. Tuan and his shadow Public Security squad were looking for the killer of Deputy Director Chao. Khodrak sought a man with a fish. Special Projects Director Zhu had falsely reported Larkin's death so he could stalk and kill her. Why? Because she had been taken under the wing of the purbas, she said. But Shan no longer believed it. Everyone had their own plans, their own mission, and none seemed to know what the others were doing, or why. Shan did not even understand what Jokar was doing. Had the medicine lama really come so far from India only to wander about the mountains above the Plain of Flowers?