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die, of Tenzin asking why Shan had abandoned him in the hour he needed him the most. When Shan woke, in the blackness, a single thought sustained him. Tsipon did not understand. Shan had another way to reach his son. He simply had to reach the new hotel at the base of the mountain, and he could leave Tsipon and Cao and the murders behind. Before he passed out again he heard himself call out for Ko, pleading with him to survive, to endure the tortures of the clinic.
    At last there was only the goddess. Floating in the darkness, she gazed at him with strained tolerance, reproach in her eyes, reminding him there were fugitive monks in the mountains, frightened monks who needed his help.
    Each time he woke he became more aware of his surroundings. Tea and noodles appeared beside his pallet, and when he consumed them they were magically replenished, waiting for him beside a flickering candle each time he regained consciousness. Then, finally, suddenly, he was awake, able to sit up.
    He discovered that his dark chamber had been made by hanging heavy black felt blankets around his pallet, supported by climbing ropes. At each side of his makeshift closet sat an upturned wooden crate. On another upturned crate to his left was a stack of gauze topped by a roll of medical tape and an envelope of antibiotic powder. To his right was a small figurine of the Tibetan protec-tress deity Tara. Flanking the Tara were two brown smoldering sticks stuck in a plank, a familiar mantra scrawled on a scrap of paper between them. He recognized the odor of aloe. Someone had been tending him with bandages and pills. Someone else had been treating him with healing incense and an invocation of the Medicine Buddha.
    Shan slowly rose, stretching, rubbing the stiffness out of his limbs. Then he probed the blankets until he found an opening, and staggered out into a familiar maze of stone and old beams. The stable that he had adopted two months before as his living quarters, abandoned decades earlier, was at the mouth of the wide gully that served as the dump for Shogo town. Though it was shunned by the townspeople, though Tsipon had offered him quarters in the rear of his warehouse, Shan had been drawn to the place. It was old and decaying, but as he aged he found himself more and more comfortable with the old and decaying, particularly the old and decaying of Tibet. He had seen the heavy hand-hewn posts and beams rising out of the rubble, as solid as they had been when erected centuries earlier. He had also seen under the rear piles of rubble something else that had been the real reason he had set up his meager household there. He hobbled to the makeshift workbench, threw off the dusty canvas that covered it, and confirmed that nothing had been touched. Spread over the planks were a score of ancient carved printing blocks, used for printing peche , the traditional Tibetan books of prayer. His spare hours at the stable were spent restoring the long rectangular blocks retrieved from the rubble, fitting and gluing together pieces that had been split apart, scraping away the dirt and dried manure that filled the carved characters and ritual images. He lifted the block he had last worked on and without conscious effort began scraping away its grime.
    It had become a nightly ritual, the thing that brought him so close to his old friends Gendun and Lokesh that he sometimes sensed them at his side, a better restorative than any salve or pill.
    Shan finished the rosewood peche plate, a page of the heart sutra with images of birds carved along the borders, and put it in a sack he kept in the shadows; he would take the best of the peche boards back to Lhadrung, so they would be safe with his friends in their secret hermitage. He had begun another block, clearing it with a brush he had made with hairs from the old mule’s mane, when a thought began to nag him, growing until he set the brush down and stared into the shadows. Not once had anyone mentioned the dead