Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

In their frantic flight up the mountain Shan had not considered why she had taken off her robe. To blend in better with the others who were being chased, he had assumed at first, but now he remembered the woman running out of the house at the last minute, pausing to hang a brown cloth on a peg. "Your robe," he said. "You left it to burn."

"It's not mine," Nyma said in a hollow voice. "I am finished with that lie. I am not a nun. If my people had a real nun maybe none of this would have happened."

A small, sad moan escaped Lokesh's lips.

"You can't-" Shan began. "They need you…" But the words choked away as a wave of helplessness washed over him. He saw her turn her head toward the chain of peaks that ran to the west.

A loud hollow croaking noise came from above, the sound of a night-hawk.

"We could follow those peaks into the main range of the Kunlun Mountains. We could follow them for a thousand miles, follow them for months, maybe not see any other person the entire time," Nyma said, with longing in her voice.

Nyma's distant gaze caused Shan to piece together the mental map of the region he had been constructing in his mind. Suddenly he realized where they were, and he knew Winslow would soon reach the same conclusion. They were only two or three miles from where Melissa Larkin had fallen to her death.

Lokesh was asleep beside Lin when Shan and Winslow left the next morning. The American had been studying his map when Shan had finally gone inside to eat the night before, and the two men had not spoken, but Shan was only a few steps behind when Winslow left at dawn and began climbing the long western arm of the mountain.

"You should have stayed and rested with the others," Winslow suggested when Shan caught up with him.

"I need to see for myself," Shan replied.

"But Larkin is my business," the American observed.

"But this mountain," Shan said, "this mountain has many secrets still to tell us. Not just about Larkin."

"I thought everything was finished yesterday."

Shan nodded with a grim expression. "Some things were finished. But I think something else started."

The American's only response was to point to a massive blue sheep, a bharal, standing majestically on a ledge above them, leaning so far over the edge it almost seemed to be floating in the air. Winslow stared intensely at the animal and Shan remembered his story of being called by something to climb up a mountain and retrieve a small stone. The American began jogging up the trail, as if worried he was going to miss something.

Shan caught up with Winslow several minutes later at a strange nook in the rock, a slight recess in a high cliff face, where water seeped out of the mountain fifty feet above and flowed down the nearly vertical wall, not in a waterfall but in a broad, thin glistening sheet of moisture, nearly thirty feet wide, covered with moss and small ferns, falling onto a shelf of stone that appeared to have sloughed off the cliff eons earlier to form a sheltered alcove. Not falling onto the rock itself, Shan saw as he approached. The water fell behind the slab and flowed under it. The effect was of a perfectly level dry shelf bounded by a lush, living wall of plants, protected from the wind but open to the sun. More plants grew in pockets of soil on the shelf itself, plants he had not seen elsewhere on the mountain.

"Look at this," Winslow said in a tone of wonder, and Shan joined him on the other side of a large squarish boulder near the edge of the fallen slab. There were half a dozen flat rocks, each about eighteen inches high and a foot wide, arrayed in a semicircle before three evenly spaced indentations in the stone floor, each of them half-spheres about a foot wide and eight inches deep.

"Who… what was… how did this get made?" Winslow asked, with wonder in his voice.

Shan knelt at one of the indentations, touching its surface. The stones and holes were not perfectly shaped. They did not appear to be manmade, but they must have been- for mixing medicine. He turned to see the American rubbing his fingers along the flat back of the boulder that shielded the semicircle of stones. The surface, though partially encrusted with lichen, was covered with Tibetan script carved into the rock.

"The herb shelf," Shan whispered, and explained to Winslow what Lokesh had told him, how medicine lamas had once used the mountain.

Winslow seemed deeply moved by the place. He kept rubbing his fingers over the ancient script. "They knew so much," he said, "so much that we don't know. That we'll never know."

Shan sat, tentatively, on one of the stool stones, as lamas had once done. A gentle breeze stirred over the shelf, filled with unfamiliar smells. He smelled something like mint, and something like fennel, mixed with more acrid odors. The power of the place hung over it like a mist, though not in any frightening way. He felt strangely relaxed, and intensely aware. It was a place where healing began.

Winslow called Shan to a patch of moss below the shelf. It had been pressed down recently, by feet, and by reclining bodies.

"Two people," the American said as he squatted by the moss to study it. "Not last night, but recently." He turned and scanned the landscape urgently. Above Rapjung, in a small meadow less than five miles from where they now stood, they had seen two people who sought herbs, the ghost lama and his attendant. The American sprang up and began walking quickly, almost jogging, up the trail.

Twenty minutes later Winslow stopped and looked at a patch of snow high on the slope above them. "Why would Zhu hide?" he asked abruptly. "Why would he sneak around in the mountains without telling Jenkins?" He moved on, without waiting for a reply, walking rapidly until they reached the crest of the long ridge they climbed, where he flattened his map on a boulder. A high cliff jutted out to the west of them, forming a huge vertical wall that ran several hundred yards before cascading downward to the gorges below.

"We never asked where Zhu's team was," Shan said, "where they were when Zhu saw her body. We asked Jenkins about Larkin's team, but not about Zhu's." He studied the landscape. The cliff was the place Zhu had indicated on the map, the place where Larkin had fallen. Someone could have watched Larkin from the slope they had walked up, or from the flat ridge that ran parallel to the cliff, the one on which they stood. But not anyone on official venture business, for the ridge was outside the boundaries of the concession Jenkins had drawn on Winslow's map. Neither Larkin nor Zhu would have been inside their company's concession.

Half an hour later they were on top of the cliff, walking in grim silence, every few minutes pausing to gaze down into the shadows far below. Shan watched apprehensively as the American leaned out over the edge. In spots the footing was hard granite, but in many places debris of shattered rock and gravel lay underfoot. It would not be difficult for someone to slip and fall and certainly possible, even likely, for someone dizzy from altitude sickness to tumble into the shadows far below. Suddenly Winslow pressed his hand to his brow and Shan leapt forward.

"It's okay," Winslow said in a tight voice, pushing him away. "I took a pill."

"Did she have pills?" Shan asked.

"I don't know," the American replied, in a helpless tone. He stared down at a narrow ribbon of water that led away from the bottom of the cliff disappearing into the shadows of one of the gorges that twisted their way south.

Suddenly a patch of color caught Shan's eye; on a small ledge that jutted from the cliff face, a hundred feet away, twenty feet below the rim, a patch of light grey and blue in a pool of sunlight emerged from a tumble of boulders that filled a narrow fissure in the cliff face. He pointed, and Winslow darted away. By the time Shan reached him Winslow had already disappeared into the fissure that led to the ledge. "It's too dangerous," Shan called out. He saw now that the ledge had been formed when a slab of rock had cleaved away from the cliff and wedged itself in the fissure. It could be balanced there, for all he knew, ready to slide away under the pressure of a few more pounds of weight.