15- - Sweetmook Lord Dung Dung

The line of Sweetmook Lords has since been unbroken for over twelve centuries. Each inherits not land or gold, but a cracked leather apron and a set of eleven finger-sized brass probes, each tuned to a different resonant frequency of dung. The succession is not hereditary by blood, but by merit. When a Sweetmook Lord feels his time is near, he retreats to the highest cave. The remaining elders bring forth three candidates. The final test is simple: they are given three different dung samples, identical in appearance, from three different altitudes. They must identify each by taste .

To the lowland cartographers who first heard the name whispered in the 1920s, it was a nonsense phrase, surely a prank by guides or a garbled translation. They dutifully recorded “Sweetmook” as a possible corruption of the local Swe-Tamuk (“One who turns waste to warmth”), and “Dung Dung” as an onomatopoeic reference to the hollow thump-thump of a dried patty being tapped for quality. But they missed the forest for the trees. Or rather, they missed the dung for the pasture. Sweetmook Lord Dung Dung 15-

Pem became obsessed. He developed a rigorous system: the Dro-kha , or “Dung Path.” Dung was collected not by age, but by the precise lunar phase and the yak’s diet of a specific silver-leafed rhododendron. He discovered that dung from a yak that had drunk from the Ice-Cave Stream burned with a blue, odorless flame. Dung from a yak stressed by wolves produced a thick, black smoke—ideal for signaling. He was not a lord; he was an artist. The line of Sweetmook Lords has since been