The Skull Mantra (34 page)

“What is it?” Shan asked. He remembered the building from his last visit. There had been a line of Tibetans outside, waiting for something.

“It's very old. Very secret,” Yeshe whispered.

“No,” Fowler said. “Not old. Look at the paper. It has printing on the back.”

“I mean, the signs are old. I can't read them all. Even if I could I would not be permitted to recite them. Words of power.” Yeshe seemed genuinely frightened. “Dangerous words. I don't know who—most of the lamas with the power to write such words are dead. I don't know of any in Lhad-rung.”

“If he traveled far he must have been very fast,” she said, looking at Shan.

“The old ones,” Yeshe whispered, obviously still in awe of the charm. “Those with this kind of power. They would say they used the arrow ritual to fly. They could jump between dimensions.”

No, Shan was tempted to say, the charm had not come far. But perhaps it had come between dimensions.

Fowler grinned uneasily. “It's just words.”

Yeshe shook his head. “Not just words. You cannot write such words unless you have the power. Not power, exactly. Vision. Access to certain forces. In the old schools they would say that if I tried to write this, or someone else without the training—” Yeshe hesitated.

“Yes?” Fowler asked.

“I would shatter into a thousand pieces.”

Shan stepped up and examined the paper.

“But what does it do?” Fowler asked.

“It is about death and Tamdin.”

She shuddered.

“No,” Yeshe corrected himself. “Not exactly that. It is difficult to explain. It is like a signpost for Tamdin. It celebrates his deeds. His deeds are death. But good death.”

“Good death?”

“Protecting death. Transporting death. It offers the power of all souls here to help him open a path to enlightenment.”

“You said death.”

“Death and enlightenment. Sometimes the old priests use the same words. There're many kinds of death. Many kinds of enlightenment.” Yeshe turned back to Shan for a moment, as though he had just realized what he had said.

“All souls here?” Fowler asked. “Us?”

“Especially us,” Shan said quietly, stepping closer to the charm.

“Nobody asked me if I wanted to offer my soul,” Rebecca Fowler said, trying to make a joke. But she did not smile.

Shan ran his finger over the patchwork. It was made of thirty or forty small sheets, stitched together with human hair. He didn't need to lift the edge to know that the sheets were from the guard tallies at the 404th. He had seen the charm being made.

“And this is all he did, this priest?” Shan asked.

“No. There was something else. He had them build the shrine on the mountain.” She pointed to the shrine Shan had seen earlier. “I am supposed to go there tonight.”

“Why you? Why tonight?”

Fowler did not reply, but led them into the building, which was a dormitory for workers. The entrance chamber seemed to be a recreation area, but it was abandoned. Shelves were packed with jigsaw puzzles, books, and chess sets. Tables and chairs had been pushed to the sides, against the shelves. In an empty food tin, incense was burning. One small table stood in the center. On it was a bundle, surrounded by flickering butter lamps.

“Luntok found it near one of the ponds,” Fowler said. “Where a vulture dropped it. At first we thought it was human.”

“Luntok?”

“He came from one of the old villages where they do—you know, sky burial. He has no fear of such things.”

“Does he know Director Hu?” Shan asked. “Or the major? Does he ever speak with them?”

“I don't know,” the American woman said distractedly. “I don't think so. He's like most of the workers, I think. Government officials scare them.”

Shan wanted to press, to ask how Luntok came to work for her, but suddenly she seemed incapable of hearing anything. She was staring desolately at the bundle. “The workers say we have to give it back tonight.” Her voice cracked as she spoke. “They say it is the job of the village headman. And that I am the headman here.”

Shan took a step forward and opened the bundle. It was
a severed hand, a huge gnarled hand with long, grotesquely proportioned fingers that ended with claws covered in finely worked silver.

It was the hand of a demon.

Kham was a vast and wild landscape, located not only on the top of the world but at what seemed the very end of it. It was a land that seemed to defy being tamed, or claimed, a land unlike any Shan had ever experienced. The wind blew constantly over the high lonely plateau, churning the sky into a mosaic of heavy clouds and brilliant patches of blue. When Sergeant Feng stopped, as he frequently did to consult his map, Shan heard fleeting, unidentifiable sounds, as if the wind carried fragments of voices and calls, strange broken noises like the distant cries of suffering. There were places, some of the old monks believed, that acted as filters for the world's woes, catching and holding the torments that drifted across the earth. Maybe here was such a place, Shan thought, where the screams and cries of the millions below collected to be beaten by the wind into snippets of sound, like pebbles in a river.

He waited until they had driven nearly six hours to call back to Tan from a battered, tin-roofed garage near the county border.

“Where are you?” Tan demanded.

“What do you know about Lieutenant Chang of the 404th?”

“Dammit, Shan, where did you go? They said you left before dawn again. Feng never called.”

“I asked him not to.”

“You asked him?”

In his mind's eye Shan could see Tan's lips curl in anger.

“Let me speak to him,” Tan demanded icily.

“Chang was an officer of the guard. I'd like to know his prior postings.”

“Don't mix my officers into—”

“He tried to kill us.”

He could hear Tan breathing. “Tell me,” came his sharp reply.

Shan explained how they had followed Chang's shortcut, and how he had ambushed them.

“You're mistaken. He's an officer of the PLA. He has duties at the 404th, nothing to do with Prosecutor Jao. It wouldn't make any sense.”

“Fine. Try to locate him at the 404th. Then you might want to drive up his shortcut on the North Claw. It's an old trail to the north, two miles above the valley turnoff. From the top of the cliff you can see the wreckage. We told no one else. By now there will be vultures you can follow.”

“And you waited this long to tell me?”

“At first I wasn't sure. Like you said, he was in the army.”

“Weren't sure?”

“Whether you had arranged it.” Another silence from Tan. “It might be tempting,” Shan suggested, “if you had decided not to pursue a separate case.”

“What changed your mind?” Tan asked matter-of-factly, as if conceding the point.

“I thought about it all night. I don't believe you would kill Sergeant Feng.”

Shan heard a muffled conversation on the other end. Tan began barking instructions to Madame Ko. When he came back on he had an answer. “Chang was off-duty yesterday. Acting on his own time.”

“He decided on his own to kill us? Just some idle amusement for his day off?”

Tan sighed. “Where are you?”

“Every other lead is cold. I am going to find Jao's driver. I think he's alive.”

“Leave the county and you're an escapee.”

Shan explained the file found at the garage, and why it meant he had to look for Balti. “If I had asked for permission, there would have been preparations. Word could have gone to the east, to the herders. Any chance of finding Balti would have been lost.”

“You never told the Ministry of Justice either.”

“Not a word. It is my responsibility.”

“So Li doesn't know.”

“It occurred to me that we might benefit from speaking to Jao's driver without the assistant prosecutor's assistance.”

In the silence that indicated Tan's indecision, he decided to tell about the hand. It was a public phone, unlikely to be tapped. The demon's hand that had so frightened Rebecca Fowler's workers had been of exquisite manufacture. A casual observer could easily have been convinced it was nothing less than the shriveled remains from a creature of flesh and blood. But Shan had shown Fowler how the ligaments had been meticulously crafted of leather sewn over copper strips. The pink palm had been made of faded red silk. When he had raised it the fingers had dangled limply, at odd angles.

“You're saying you found part of the Tamdin costume,” Tan observed tautly.

“The one Director Wen said was not missing.” Shan had already made a note in his pad. Check the audits done by Religious Affairs.

“There could have been one hidden away.”

“I don't think so. These were so rare, such treasures, that they all have been accounted for.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning someone is lying.”

There was a moment's silence. “All right. Bring the driver back alive. Forty-eight hours. If you're not back in forty-eight hours, I'll turn Public Security loose on you,” he growled, and hung up.

Patrols. If things went bad, Tan could still give up. Li would prosecute Sungpo, the case would be closed, and the 404th would receive its punishment. Tan could turn off his investigation by simply declaring Shan a fugitive. All a Public Security patrol would need to bring back was the tattoo on Shan's arm.

If he used two full days, moreover, Shan would have only four more until Sungpo was brought before his tribunal. Two days. Balti of the Dronma clan had had a week to lose himself in Kham. But Shan's task wasn't the impossible one of finding a solitary man in 150,000 square miles of the most arduous terrain north of Antarctica. It was simply the vastly unlikely one of finding Balti's clan. For a
khampa,
the safest
place would always be the hearth of his family.

As they pushed on, Shan turned toward Yeshe. “You have my gratitude. For the
ragyapa.”

“It wasn't hard to understand, once I saw all those army socks.”

“No. I mean, thank you for not telling the warden. It would have made you look good, a victory in your record. It might have meant getting your travel papers.”

Yeshe gazed out over the seemingly endless plateau as it rolled by. “They would have raided the place. All those children.” He shrugged. “And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they got the supplies legally. Maybe,” he said, turning to Shan, “they got them in payment for the charms.”

Shan nodded slowly. “Someone in the military who's scared of offending Tamdin?” he wondered out loud, then handed Yeshe the envelope of photos from the skull cave he had been given by Rebecca Fowler. “Take a look.”

Yeshe opened the envelope. “What am I looking for?”

“First, a pattern. I can't read the old Tibetan text. Are they just names?”

Yeshe frowned. “That's simple. They're arranged by date, in the traditional Tibetan calendar,” he said, referring to the system of sixty-year cycles that had started a thousand years earlier. “The tablet in front of each skull shows the year and the name. The first—” Yeshe moved the photo into the direct sunlight by the window, “—the first is Earth Horse Year of the Tenth Cycle.”

“How long ago?”

“The Tenth started in the middle of the sixteenth century. Earth Horse Year is the fifty-second year of the cycle.” Yeshe paused and cast a meaningful glance at Shan. Shan remembered the empty shelves. The shrine must have been started far earlier than the sixteenth century.

Yeshe picked up the next few photos. “The sequence continues. Tenth Cycle, Iron Ape Year, Wood Mouse Year, ten or twenty more skulls, then the Eleventh Cycle.”

“Then you may be able to find what happened to the one that was moved to make way for Jao.”

“Why wouldn't it just be discarded?”

“Probably was. I want to be certain.”

Feng slowed for a herd of sheep with two young boys, who tended their charges not with dogs but with slingshots. As he watched, Shan kept seeing the hand in his mind's eye. The damage to it had been more than would have been incurred by severing it, or even in the fall when the vulture dropped it. The delicate hinges comprising the knuckles had been smashed. The fingertips had been crushed, ruining their fine filigree. Someone had smashed it deliberately, as if in a fight with Tamdin. Or as if in anger, to prevent further use of the costume. Had Balti fought with the thing, damaging the hand? Had Jao done it, when he struggled on the side of the mountain?

Feng stopped the solitary herdsmen who sometimes walked along the road, asking for the clan listed in Balti's official record, the Dronma clan. Each herdsman replied warily, watching the gun on the sergeant's belt. Most of them reacted by pulling out their identity papers as soon as the truck slowed and waving their hands in front of their faces to indicate they spoke no Mandarin.

“It's there,” Yeshe gasped suddenly, as they pulled away from their fifth such stop.

Shan spun around. “The skull?”

Yeshe nodded excitedly, holding up one of the photos. “The skulls around the single empty shelf are from the late Fourteenth Cycle. Iron Ape Year on one side, then Wood Ox Year, the fifty-ninth year, on the other, say about one hundred forty years ago. The last skull on the shelves in the sequence is eighty years old, Earth Sheep Year of the Fifteenth Cycle. Except the very last one, on the bottom. It's Fourteenth Cycle, Water Hog Year.”

Yeshe looked up with a satisfied gleam. “Water Hog is the fifty-seventh year, between Iron Ape and Wood Ox!” He showed the photos to Shan, pointing out the Tibetan characters for the year. The missing skull, and its tablet and lamps, had been reverently arranged on the last shelf.

Their excitement quickly faded. Shan and Yeshe exchanged an uneasy glance. The movement of the skull was not the act of a looter, or a rabid killer. It was what a monk, a true believer, would do.