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

It had been cut only days earlier. He walked around each of the half dozen trees, and found four stubs oozing sap, then held the stick close to one of the stubs. It was a match, or close enough. Had there been four stick figures? But there had been only three people in the camp. Pocketing the sticks, he took a step, then looked back at the trees. There were many branches that might have served the purpose, but all of the sticks had been cut from the east side of the trees.
    When he looked back he saw that Lokesh had laid the plastic pebbles in a row and was counting them in a low voice. As Shan approached he reached one hundred eight.
    “Not for a rosary,” Shan said to his old friend. “Not for praying.” He picked up a handful and with a tentative expression began a second line parallel to the first. He laid out the double line for eighteen inches then held up two of the pebbles and showed Lokesh how each curvature fit into the dimple of the next. “A zipper,” he explained.
    Lokesh gestured to the pile of gray shards. “But it would be four or five feet long.”
    “Do you smell the ashes? A sleeping bag was burned. Nylon and feathers would be easily consumed by the flames. Though why someone would burn something so useful in the mountains I cannot say.”
    Shan left the old Tibetan wearing a puzzled expression, continuing to assemble the charred teeth in tandem lines. He paced about the campsite again, noting now the broken twigs of several nearby bushes. He kneeled to study the way the slanting rays of the sun played on the ground. A vague line of shadow, the barest smudge of gray, ran from near the fire, around the outcropping, and up the slope. It was the vestige of a very old path, unused for many decades.
    Two other paths were betrayed only by crushed plants and a few boot prints, recently made, going toward separate clusters of large boulders spaced a few hundred feet apart. Shan followed each, confirming that they led to makeshift latrines: two of them.
    Finally he found a third path, or rather a track, where, judging from the bent stems, something heavy had been dragged. It led to a cluster of high boulders a hundred feet away.
    Yangke rose and walked unsteadily toward Lokesh as Shan reached the entrance to the cluster of outcroppings, a narrow passage between two eight-foot-high flat-faced boulders. With a glance toward his companions Shan stepped between the rocks, then froze. Rope was strung waist-high around most of the small clearing, with squares of white paper taped to it at intervals. The papers held Chinese ideograms, inscribed with a ballpoint pen.
    “What sort of prayer flags are these?” a raspy voice asked over his shoulder.
    “Not prayer flags, Lokesh,” Shan said in a worried tone as he approached the rope. “Warnings.” As he read the words on the flags he shuddered. Keep out , the first said. Danger , said the second. Special Police and Murder Crime , read two more. Then, Night Lab Squad .
    Feet shuffled in the dirt behind them and Yangke appeared, squeezing sideways through the boulders. “Is this where . . . ,” he began.
    There was no need to announce that this was where the two bodies had been discovered. On the ground before them, inside the rope, were white silhouettes. Two of them were ovals, three feet long. Another, wider, was nearly four feet long. A circle was less than two feet wide, beside a long irregular outline with two appendages that must have been legs, the shape of a human body sprawled on its side. Shan stepped over the rope and knelt at the first outline, the largest oval, rubbing a finger on the white powdery line. He touched it to his tongue. Flour. The discovery caused him to again gaze uneasily at the warning flags. Whoever had strung up the flags was from a place far away from the mountain. Someone who used bleached flour to draw on the earth came from a different world.
    Still kneeling, he surveyed the bizarre scene, beginning to grasp that it was not one