Prayer of the Dragon by Eliot Pattison Read Free Book Online Page A

in the open. He was going to skirt the camp but the dog went in and wouldn’t return.”
    “Where is their equipment and bedding?” Shan asked as they approached the grove of trees. There was no sign that anyone had been there except for compacted soil under the trees.
    “Gone. I came here two days later, as soon as I could without Chodron’s men seeing me. I found the cold ashes of a small campfire. Lots of dried blood. Boot marks all over. The miners watch each other. If one dies, any equipment that is not looted immediately is gathered up and auctioned to the others. They are like vultures.”
    Shan paused and looked back at Yangke. “Do you mean miners have been killed too?”
    “It’s a dangerous job,” Yangke said. “And the miners like to take care of their own problems. I hear things from the other shepherds. There was talk about a miner killed last year, another found dead last month. But the miners and I, we stay away from each other.” Exhausted from climbing while burdened by his canque, Yangke settled between two boulders, resting one end of the beam on each. He raised a weary arm to gesture toward a small mound of rocks not far from the trees. “Their campfire was there.”
    Someone had tried to obscure the fire pit by stacking rocks over it to make it look like the base of one more cairn. Shan kneeled and rolled away the rocks, then examined the ashes, trying to recognize the mélange of scents released when he stirred them. He closed his eyes to focus on the smells. Burned feathers. Burned plastic. Rice and wild onions, scorched in a pot. Singed butter. Sifting the ashes, he produced a lump of hard blue material, three inches long, then another similar piece. The remains of water bottles or plastic cups or even remnants of a small nylon pack? The ashes yielded nothing else but pebbles, dozens of small gray pebbles. He sifted several onto his palm. They were identical, each less than half an inch long, with a dimple on one side and a corresponding convex curvature on the opposite side. He retrieved more of the little shards, placed one on a flat stone and smashed it with a larger rock. It dented but did not break. The pebbles were made of plastic.
    At his side another hand reached into the pit and began retrieving more of them. Lokesh scooped them into a pile as Shan, still perplexed, tossed one in his palm and began pacing in ever-widening circles around the fire pit. The scavengers had been thorough. But on his first circuit he found the stub of a pencil, on his second a little red feather, and, pushed into the dirt by a heavy boot, a silver instrument, eight inches long, as thin as a pencil but ending in sharp curved points at the end. Another dental probe. On the third and fourth, a dozen slivers of wood, all tapered, all a uniform length. Toothpicks. He stepped under the trees, noting the pattern of the pressed earth and pine needles, the imprint of a sleeping bag. The soil beneath the trees was dry and loose. He raked his fingertips through the earth at the edge of the imprint. Pebbles turned up in the little furrows, then a white nugget, as hard as a pebble. Dried cheese, a traditional Tibetan food that, like buttered tea, appealed to few outsiders. But an outsider might have politely accepted the cheese and then discreetly buried it so as not to offend. He tried again, turning up a small stick, bits of quartz, a shard of old bone. It was a camp that had, no doubt, been used before. He rose then paused to pick up a little stick. Its bark had been peeled, a shallow groove cut in one end as if to indicate legs. He extracted the piece he had taken from the comatose stranger in the stable. The two pieces fit together, forming a crude figure that reminded him of the little clay images of saints traditional Tibetans used. This one, like those in the village, had had its body broken, perhaps by the killer.
    Shan gripped the little figure, studying the ground, seeing no more signs, then sniffed at it.