The Valley of Creation Page 2

  Eric Nelson stopped suddenly. Green eyes blazed at him from directly ahead in the gloom.

  A huge tawny dog crouched there, staring at him. Only it wasn't a dog.

  "A wolf," he told himself, as his hand went to the heavy pistol at his belt. "I'm not that drunk."

  He was a little drunk, yes, but even so he could see that the beast was too big for a dog, its massive head too wide, its crouching tenseness too feral.

  Its green eyes watched him with hypnotic intensity.

  Nelson was deliberately raising his gun when a soft voice spoke from the darkness beyond the animal.

  "He will not harm you," said a girl's voice in accented Tibetan dialect. "He is — mine."

  She came toward him out of the shadows, past the crouching beast.

  It was hard to see her clearly because Nelson's vision was obscured by the alcohol in his brain.

  But he felt that this girl was special enough to justify the effort.

  The way she moved, for one thing — she was light on her feet with a sort of gliding grace that belonged to an animal rather than to a town-bred human.

  Nelson had never seen a woman move that way before and he wanted to see more of it — much more of it.

  She wore the conventional dark jacket and trousers and at first he took it for granted that she was Chinese. Her hair was black enough, clustered around her shoulders as though she had brought part of the night with her into the lamplight. But it was soft wavy hair and the face it framed was the wrong color, a smooth, olive tan and the wrong shape.

  Vaguely Nelson had a feeling that only recently he had somewhere seen an olive face like that, finely wrought and strong and just a little arrogant — only it had been a man's face.

  Her great, grave dark eyes were looking up at him provocatively. Yet there was something oddly childlike about the innocence of her red mouth, the delicate tanned planes of her face.

  ''I am Nsharra, white lord," she said softly, her glance tilting to meet his eyes. "I have seen you in the village before the battle."

  Nelson laughed. "I haven't seen you before. Nor that wolf-dog, either. I'd remember you both."

  She came a step closer.

  Through the alcoholic haze that fogged his mind Nelson saw her dark eyes studying him.

  "You look tired and sad, lord," Nsharra murmured. "You are — lonely?"

  Nelson's first impulse was to toss her a coin and be on his way. In his ten years in China he hadn't sunk so low as to meddle with village street-girls.

  But this girl was different. It might be the Scotch that made her seem so, but her smooth face and slumbrous eyes had a beauty that held him.

  "My hut is very near," she was saying, looking up at him with an oddly shy little smile.

  "And why not?" Nelson said suddenly in English. "What difference does it make now?"

  Nsharra understood his tone if not his words.

  Her small hand on his arm guided him softly through the shadows.

  The mud hut was on the fringe of the village. In the starlight Nelson saw the looming bulk of a great black stallion standing outside it.

  The horse was fire-eyed, its ears alertly erect, yet it stood quietly and there was neither rope nor halter upon it.

  "Yours?" Nelson said to her, and then laughed. "Good thing Nick Sloan hasn't seen him. He likes fine horses."

  He was not completely drunk, not drunk at all, he told himself He knew quite well the incongruity of a village singsong girl owning a wolf-dog and a stallion but in his rosy, reckless mood he didn't pause to wonder or care.

  The interior of the hut was a squalid cubicle that wavered out of darkness when the girl lit a candle. As she straightened, Nelson took her into his arms.

  For just a moment, Nsharra struggled, then relaxed. But her lips remained cool and unmoved under his.

  "I have wine," she murmured, a little breathlessly. "Let me—"

  The rice wine was a pungent fire in his throat and Nelson knew he should drink no more of it. But it was too easy to sit here on the soft mat and watch Nsharra's delicate, grave face as her slim hands refilled his cup.

  "You will come again to see me, tomorrow or the next night, white lord?" she murmured, as she handed him the cup.

  "The name is Eric Nelson and I won't be back tomorrow night for I won't be in Yen Shi," he laughed. "So tonight is all there is."

  Her dark eyes fixed on his face, suddenly intent. "Then you and your comrades leave at once with Shan Kar?"

  "Shan Kar?" The name brought a flash of memory to Nelson. "Now I remember who you remind me of! You've got the same olive complexion, the same features and the same accent—"

  He broke off, staring at her. "What do you know of Shan Kar anyway?"

  Nsharra shrugged slim shoulders. "All the village knows that he is a stranger from the mountains and that he seeks to hire you and your comrades to go back to his land with him."

  Eric Nelson could believe that, for he had had past experience with the swiftness of gossip in an Oriental town. His fogged mind was still baffled, though, by the thing that didn't explain — the queer similarity between Shan Kar and Nsharra, as though they belonged to the same race.

  All that didn't matter. What mattered was that this was the last night for him, that the girl's tapering fingers were light against his cheek, her breath warm in his ear.

  Nelson gulped his wine and looked up from it to see the wolf-dog crouched in the open doorway of the hut, watching him with fixed, luminous green eyes.

  And the great head and fiery eyes of the big stallion were watching too from out in the darkness. There was something perched on the stallion's back, something winged and rustling.

  "Will you tell those two beasts to go away?" Nelson said thickly to the girl. "I don't like them. They look as though they were listening to every word."

  The girl looked at the wolf-dog and horse. She did not speak. But wolf and stallion melted back into the darkness.

  "Hatha and Tark mean no harm," Nsharra murmured soothingly. "They are my friends."

  Deep in Nelson's mind, something in her words plucked another hidden string of memory, something that set up vaguely unpleasant vibrations in his brain.

  But he couldn't think of that nor of the two queer beasts out there in the dark with his arm around Nsharra's pliant body and his lips on her soft mouth.

  "Tark, do not kill! You were to watch, not to kill yet!"

  The memory crashed suddenly through his mind, the memory of where he had heard that name before.

  The weird dream of alien, menacing thought-voices, the flying shadow in his room and the sound of wings in the night-memory of them ripped the alcoholic fog from Eric Nelson's mind.

  His hands suddenly gripped the girl's slim shoulders with bruising force. "You said 'Tark!'" he rasped. "You said it before when I thought I was dreaming. You were talking somehow to that wolf!"

  The caution and suspicion that had kept him alive for ten years in China's wars were all on the alert at this moment, dominating Nelson.

  He glared at the girl. "You got me here for a reason. You know Shan Kar, you're of his race. Why are you spying on him?"

  Nsharra looked back into his accusing eyes, with a little hurt look on her delicate face. She spoke softly.

  She said, "Kill now, Tark!"

  The wolf-dog was a dark thunderbolt that leaped in from the doorway and knocked Nelson sprawling as Nsharra jerked swiftly back.

  Nelson made one abortive gesture toward his gun and then knew that, before he could draw it, his throat would be cut. He wrapped his arms around his own neck as he rolled with the wolf-dog's hairy weight on top of him.

  He felt needle-sharp fangs rip his forearm. The most horrible part of the moment was that the wolf-dog sought his life in complete silence, without growl or snarl.

  Then the great stallion screamed outside the hut and a gun roared. Nelson heard Nsharra's flying feet and silvery cry.

  "Tark! Hatha — Ei! We go!"

  "Nelson!"
yelled Li Kin's startled voice.

  Nelson became aware that the wolf-dog was no longer atop him. He scrambled to his feet, dazed and shaken.

  The hut was empty. He stumbled to the door, and caromed into Li Kin. The little Chinese officer had his automatic in his hand and wore a stunned look in his spectacled eyes.

  "I followed you, Nelson!" he babbled. "I saw you come to this hut with the girl but when I came near the stallion attacked me! I shot at it and missed."

  "The girl? Where's the girl now?" Nelson cried. He was cold sober now and his daze was dissolving in red anger.

  "She and the wolf burst out, knocked me over and fled!" Li Kin cried. "See, there they go!"

  Nelson got a shadowy glimpse of a stallion and rider and a slinking wolf-shape racing westward down the dusty road in the uncertain starlight.

  Over stallion, rider and wolf, moving west with them against the stars, flew a winged black soaring thing.

  "There was something on the stallion's back when I came!" Li Kin exclaimed. "An eagle or other great bird — it's queer!"

  "It's more than queer," rasped Eric Nelson. He gripped the slashed forearm that was beginning to throb and burn. "Come on — I want to see this man Shan Kar!"

  Li Kin kept recurring to the beasts as they slogged hastily through dark dusty streets toward the inn.

  "She spoke to them, as though they were people! She was like a witch, a mistress of kuei, with her familiars!"

  "Will you forget those animals?" Nelson snapped.

  He was angry and he was angry because he was a little afraid. He had been afraid before, many times, but not of something as uncanny as this, not of a girl and three beasts and a dream.

  * * *

  The dark courtyard of the inn echoed with the stamping and trampling of scores of hoofs. Shaggy little ponies were squealing and biting in protest as Nick Sloan and Lefty and Van Voss loaded the heavy packs from the arsenal onto them.

  Nelson found Shan Kar in the corner of the courtyard, a dark, tense figure impatiently watching the hurried preparations.

  "Just who is Nsharra?" Nelson asked him flatly.

  Shan Kar turned like a goaded leopard. The light from the inn's window showed the narrowed gleam of the man's eyes.

  "What do you know of Nsharra?" asked Shan Kar.

  "She's one of your own people, isn't she?" Nelson pressed. "She comes from L'Lan too?"

  Shan Kar's handsome face was taut and dark. "What do you know of Nsharra?" he repeated dangerously.

  Eric Nelson knew then that he had failed in his attempt to surprise full explanation from the other.

  Li Kin broke in excitedly. "A girl with a stallion and a wolf and an eagle! They would have killed Nelson if I had not interrupted! But they got away!"

  Shan Kar, staring beyond them, spoke softly between his teeth. "Nsharra here — and Tark and Hatha and Ei too! Then they have followed me and watched me."

  "Who is she? What does it mean?" Nelson demanded.

  Shan Kar answered with brooding slowness. "She is daughter of Kree, Guardian of the Brotherhood — the enemies of my people!"

  He added tightly, "And it means that the Brotherhood is striking at us even before we reach L'Lan. We must go swiftly if we are ever to reach the valley!"

  Chapter III

  INTO MYSTERY

  They had gone swiftly. Two weeks and half a thousand miles of the wildest mountains on Earth lay behind them. They were still climbing as the fifteenth day gathered toward the explosive climax of sunset.

  Eric Nelson looked back down the shoulder of the great gray mountain and saw the little line of heavily laden pack-ponies crawling up the trail after him like a disjointed hairy snake.

  Ahead of them the treeless slope they climbed went up to a ridge against the sky like a springboard into infinity. Against the glory of fusing colors that fired the western heavens, Shan Kar and his mount loomed bigger than life.

  Shan Kar stopped suddenly, pointed skyward and uttered a yell.

  "Now what?" exclaimed Nick Sloan, riding beside Nelson. "Do you suppose he's sighted his valley? He said we would tonight."

  "No, something's wrong!" Eric Nelson said quickly. He spurred forward, his tired shaggy pony manfully responding.

  They reached Shan Kar at the very crest of the ridge. From here they looked westward toward another and parallel gigantic mountain range. Its highest, northern peaks were snow-capped and beyond it was a dim stupendous vista of still other ranges.

  Between this next great rampart and the one on whose crest they stood yawned a deep gorge, wooded thickly with fir and poplar and larch. Shadows were already deepening in the forests down there.

  This was the mountain wilderness that stretched between the southeastern Kunlun Ranges and Koko Nor. And it was still one of the least-known parts of Earth.

  Warplanes had flown over this mountainous no-man's-land in the last few years. A few explorers like Hedin had, at great peril, toiled across sectors of it. But most of it was as little-known as when the French missionaries, Hue and Gabet, had trudged through it a hundred years before. There was little here to tempt exploration, and there were hostile Tibetan and Mongol tribes to discourage it.

  "Your guns!" Shan Kar was shouting as Nelson and Sloan rode up. "Shoot them, quickly!"

  He was pointing skyward. Bewildered, Eric Nelson looked up. There was nothing in the fire-shot heavens but two eagles planing down a thousand feet above the ridge.

  "There's nothing up there—" Nelson began puzzledly, when Shan Kar interrupted.

  "The eagles! Kill them or our danger is great!"

  It hit Nelson in the face. It brought back all the uncanny memory of Nsharra and her weird animal companions — a memory he had deliberately sought to rationalize and forget during the two weeks' trek.

  Shan Kar was in deadly earnest. His black eyes glared hatred and fear at the two bkck winged shapes swooping in smooth circles through the sunset.

  "Cursed native superstitions!" Nick Sloan grunted. "But I suppose we have to humor him."

  Sloan had unslung his rifle from his saddle. He aimed at the lowest of the two black-winged shapes and fired.

  There was a horrid, shrill scream across the heavens. It did not come from the eagle that was suddenly plummeting earthward with crumpled wings. It came from the other great bird and, as it screamed, it was swiftly hurtling upward and westward in flight.

  "The other!" cried Shan Kar. "He must not get away!"

  Sloan fired again, and again. But the second eagle was already a receding dot against the sunset.

  Shan Kar clenched his fists, staring after it. "He'll take word to L'Lan. But maybe—"

  He started in a run toward the spot farther down the ridge where the first eagle had fallen.

  "What the—?" Sloan exclaimed, lowering his rifle. "Is he crazy?"

  "Native superstition of some kind," Eric Nelson said but was coldly conscious that he did not believe it himself.

  The two eagles, in their purposeful reconnoitering of the pack-train, had been too uncannily reminiscent of Nsharra's strangely purposeful horse and wolf and eagle.

  * * *

  Li Kin and the Cockney had come up. Lefty Wister's pinched red face was glistening with alarm.

  "What happened? And what's the bloody native doing down there?"

  They could see that Shan Kar, farther down the ridge, had reached the fallen eagle. Nelson and the others followed hastily.

  The eagle was not dead. Its wing had been broken by Sloan's bullet and it had been flopping away across the rocky ridge in evident effort to escape when Shan Kar stopped it.

  Shan Kar looped a hide thong about the great bird's legs, hobbling it. The eagle, a magnificent creature of glistening black plumage and white-crested head, glared at Shan Kar with wonderful golden eyes, trying to strike with its beak.

  Shan Kar grasped the crippled wing of the eagle by the tip and deliberately twisted it, tormenting the great bird.

  "What the devil!" flamed Nelson.
"Put the thing out of its misery!"

  The eagle glanced at him swiftly with a flash of golden eyes. It was as though the bird understood. It brought Nelson creepy memory of the intent, intelligent look in the eyes of Nsharra's beasts — of Tark, the wolf, and Hatha, the stallion!

  "Let me alone," Shan Kar said tightly, without turning his gaze from the eagle's eyes. "This is necessary."

  "Necessary — to torture a dumb animal?" Nelson snapped.

  "He can tell me what I must know," Shan Kar retorted. "And he is no dumb animal. He is one of the Brotherhood, of our enemies."

  "Blimey, the man's cracked!" exclaimed Lefty Wister.

  Shan Kar disregarded them all. He was staring fixedly into the splendid eyes of the wounded bird.

  Nelson almost thought he could hear question and answer, inside his mind. Telepathic questions put by Shan Kar — and stubborn, defiant answer by the crippled eagle!

  Could man and beast talk telepathically? His weird dream flashed back into his memory. Shan Kar, eyes narrowing, suddenly twisted the crippled wing again. A spasm of agony shook the eagle.

  It turned its head convulsively, looked up at Eric Nelson. In that look, Nelson read tortured pain — and appeal!

  His pistol came into his hand and cracked. The head of the eagle became a bloody mess and its wings relaxed in death.

  Shan Kar leaped to his feet, his eyes flaming as he faced Nelson. "You should not have done that! I would have made him tell me!"

  "Tell you what? What could an eagle tell you?" Sloan demanded incredulously.

  Shan Kar made a visible effort to repress his anger. He spoke rapidly, his fierce eyes sweeping them.

  "We can't camp here now. We must move on tonight, and move fast. The Brotherhood will be out after us now that the other winged one has taken back word of our coming."

  His hands clenched. "I feared it would be so! Nsharra has reached L'Lan before us with warning and they have watchers out — like those two."

  "What is this Brotherhood?" Eric Nelson demanded.

  "I will explain that later, when we reach L'Lan," answered the other.

  Nelson took a step forward. "You will explain now. It's time we got the truth about what faces us in L'Lan."