He planted his front foot and shifted his weight forward, his left hand raised in front of his face, his right hand open behind his head, ready to whip out and strike like a viper.

He looked down the stone steps to see the two men reach the top of the knoll and begin to approach him across the stone pavilion.

Then the world that he finally had come to accept shattered in a single moment.

The young monk spoke first. He gestured to the short, one-armed man who stood beside him, staring at Neal as he struggled to catch his breath.

“Ni renshr ta ma?” “Do you know him?” the monk asked Neal.

“Wode fuchin,” “My father,” Neal answered.

That’s where Neal Carey made his big mistake. He should have denied knowing the man, or just turned around, or run away into the dense bamboo. If he had done any one of these things, he never would have found himself way down on The High Lonely.

Part One

Cowboys

1

This is some weird kind of place,” Joe Graham said.

He and Neal were sitting in a small pavilion at the edge of the knoll. The tiled roofs of the monastery below glinted in the sunshine. Monkeys perched on the curved eaves, waiting to leap down onto the courtyard to pounce on any morsel of unguarded food. Brown-robed monks crossed the courtyard with one protective hand held over the tops of their bowls, steam from the hot rice gruel rising through their fingers.

“Tell me about it,” Neal answered. He’d been a prisoner in the weird kind of place for three years, long enough for the strange to have become the familiar. He filled Graham’s cup with green tea, made a small bow out of habit, then filled his own.