The Valley of Creation Page 4

  He just glimpsed the terrific swing of Sloan's heavy gun as the other batted with it at the plunging wolf.

  He heard the thud of the blow, felt Tark's massive, hairy weight hit him — but limply. Then he scrambled hastily from beneath the motionless body of the stunned wolf.

  "We've got Tark alive and Barin, Kree's son, too!" Shan Kar exclaimed. "And we've given the Brotherhood its first taste of our new weapons!"

  The man was ablaze with exultation and excitement. Nelson looked down at the two bodies. The wolf still lay senseless, and the youth Barin was bleeding from a crease-wound across the temple.

  Nick Sloan looked more shaken than Nelson had ever seen him as he stared at the dead beasts that lay there on the moonlit plain.

  "Nelson, these brutes are intelligent!" he panted. "Running with men, fighting as allies of men."

  "Kuei!" repeated Li Kin, his saffron face pallid in the silver light. "A valley of witches and devils!"

  Shan Kar interrupted. "More of the Brotherhood will be here swiftly. We must ride on fast for Anshan or die here on the plain!"

  He was, as he spoke, kneeling to lash hide thongs securely about the feet of the stunned wolf.

  Tark, the wolf, stirred as Shan Kar finished the task. The green eyes of the great beast flickered open. Then, seeing Shan Kar binding the youth, Barin, the wolfs lips writhed away back from great fangs in a soundless snarl

  Shan Kar finished binding the youth, turned and laughed full in the face of the wolf.

  "Tark the mighty, trapped like a tame outland dog!" He jeered at the great beast. "Did Kree send you to guard his stripling son? A potent guardian!"

  The wolf made no sound, but his green eyes blazed an intelligent hatred of his mocker that made Eric Nelson's skin crawl.

  "Riders are coming from the south!" Nick Sloan shouted suddenly. "Get ready!"

  Chapter V

  WOLF HATRED

  Nelson and the others raised their weapons as a dull clatter of many hoofs grew swiftly louder.

  "Wait!" cried Shan Kar. "They are my own people from Anshan! Do not shoot!"

  In the moonlight, Nelson presently made out a band of horsemen galloping toward them from the south. They wore armor much like that of their recent attackers, skullcap helmets and breastplates of metal. Swords gleamed in the moon. For a moment, Nelson thought that the new-come horsemen would ride right onto them.

  But they pulled up sharply. A burly, bearlike warrior tumbled from his steed and strode toward San Kar with noisy greetings. Shan Kar, after brief colloquy, called to Eric Nelson and the others.

  "Hoik and these warriors came out to escort us to Anshan. But we mustn't delay. The scouts of the Winged Ones will have the whole Brotherhood down on us if we do."

  Nelson heard the warriors exchanging fierce exultant words. Their dialect was not Tibetan but so much akin to that ancient tongue that he could catch most of the phrases.

  "— Kree's son himself and the Hairy One!" the bearlike Hoik was shouting. "We'll make the Brotherhood squirm now!"

  Nelson found Lefty Wister bleeding from a slash in his forearm but not badly injured. The little Cockney was shaken.

  "They weren't wolves!" he panted. "They were men that can change like the old stories! They must be that!"

  The two prisoners — the bound, senseless youth and the wolf — had already been lifted and slung across horses by the warriors of Hoik, two of whom were to ride double.

  "Why don't you just kill them?" Lefty demanded viciously of Shan Kar.

  The other shook his head peremptorily. "No, these two captives are worth much to us Humanites! We take them to Anshan! Mount quickly, for we ride!"

  * * *

  Nelson's thoughts drummed in unison with the thudding of hoofs as they galloped with Shan Kar and Hoik's warriors across the rolling moonlit plain. His mind was bewildered, trying to reconcile this fantastic valley with the ordinary world.

  L'Lan was not of that world. That was sure. This hidden pocket of Earth held a way of life of man and beast unheard of on the rest of the planet. Here reigned an ancient and unearthly way of life — one even now moving toward a climax of conflict within itself.

  "Captain Nelson, to think it is all true!" came Li Kin's exclamation. "L'Lan, the legendary valley of the Brotherhood, unchanged!"

  "Perish old legends!" Nelson thought. There was some normal explanation for all this. There must be.

  The helmeted, sword-armed warriors who rode around him were like no ordinary Asiatic tribesmen, but Asia was vast and held queer racial survivals in its hidden places. The uncanny community of men and beasts here surely had other explanation than that the beasts were as intelligent as the men.

  "Anshan!" called Shan Kar, from where he rode at the head of the mounted band.

  Nelson perceived that they were riding down a gentle dope of the moonlit plain toward a city whose lights glimmered near the shore of the valley L'Lan's big woods-bordered river.

  He didn't like the way the city looked in the moonlight. It was not large, an oval stretching along the river less than a mile. But it looked so strange, too much like the disturbing impression he had obtained in his vague glimpse of distant Vruun.

  It was a city interpenetrated by forest, by the low, dark woods that bordered the river. The forest came into Anshan as though by right, was woven into its design in wide windings of dense foliage.

  "What kind of place is this?" demanded Nick Sloan, startled. "Those domes and towers are black glass!"

  Black glass? It could not be that, surely. Yet every surface shimmered blackly and brilliantly in the moon, as though vitreous.

  Like big bubbles of glittering jet, the spherical buildings loomed above the enlacing foliage. The round, slim towers, with queer openings and balconies at their tops, pointed skyward like ebony fingers.

  Lights within the city were reflected by a thousand curving surfaces of glass, were splintered and shattered into broken beams and sparkles.

  "This place doesn't belong on Earth at all!" Li Kin exclaimed.

  Eric Nelson realized that this was what upset him so badly. It was not merely the presence of a big unknown city in this hidden corner of Asia. There were many such.

  It was the fact that the city Anshan matched in strangeness the strange beast-and-human folk of the valley L'Lan, that it bulked and glittered here like a city fallen to earth from another, alien planet.

  They rode through the enlacing, whispering woods into the bubble-city. And Eric Nelson realized then that this city was old.

  He had seen Angkor brooding in its jungles and the thousand towers of Pagan lonesome against the Burmese sky. But this place, though not a ruin, looked infinitely more ancient.

  It was the weirdness of the wide windings of forest which interlaced the city that made Anshan seem older than human history. No completely human city had ever been so built. Even aside from the dark silent forest-ways within it, the city was too big for the number of its people. Few people were in its streets, few lights glimmered from the doorways of the bubble-buildings.

  Yet men and women, clad alike in silken jackets and trousers, except for a few armed warriors like those they rode with, ran toward their clattering troop. Shan Kar gave them a proud wave of his hand.

  "Shan Kar has returned with the outlanders and their weapons!" ran an excited cry.

  "I don't get it!" Nick Sloan said, his harsh voice puzzled. "A big city like this — yet they're crazy over a few machine-guns!"

  They rode up toward a complex of black, bubble-like buildings surrounded by a wide belt of tall trees, into which all the strange dark forest-windings of the city seemed to lead. The warrior Hoik and his men, with their two captives, went on around the buildings. But Shan Kar drew rein and dismounted.

  "You need not talk with me and the other Humanite leaders until morning," he told Nelson. "You must be tired."

  Tired? Nelson had not realized the full depth of his weariness until he dismounted. Bone-crushing fatigue made him reel. But,
as always, the responsibilities of leadership stiffened him.

  "You'll have our packs of weapons unloaded?" he said to Shan Kar. "They must remain with us, of course."

  Shan Kar's face and voice were smooth. "There is no need. They will be well guarded."

  "Yes," Nelson nodded stolidly. "By us. In unskilled hands they would be dangerous."

  The other's eyes narrowed but he shrugged. He called, and armored warriors appeared and picked up the heavy packs. They carried them after Shan Kar and the five outlanders, into the building.

  They went through a big open doorway, like that of a cathedral, into a great entrance hall. It was broad and high-arched, a dusky, empty immensity ill-lit by torches of resinous wood that flamed in rude sockets hacked in the walls.

  Torches in this shimmering lofty hall of faery-like black glass? The sight of them startled Eric Nelson. It was like finding tallow candles in a modern New York apartment.

  He noted other incongruities as they were led through corridors to a suite of small rooms. Dust clung to the floors everywhere. And in the rooms assigned them were wooden chairs and bedframes, clean in workmanship but primitive compared to the palace itself.

  Shan Kar, as the grunting warriors piled up the heavy packs and left, told them, "Food will be brought soon. You will want to sleep. In the morning we will talk."

  Nick Sloan's flat voice broke in. "Yes, in the morning we will talk-about platinum."

  The other's face tightened a little, but he nodded. "That and other things." He went out, and Nick Sloan stared after him with suspicion hardening his flat brown face.

  He muttered, "He's too cursed cagey to suit me. I've an idea there's a joker in his offer."

  Eric Nelson almost envied Sloan's hard singleness of purpose. The increasingly disturbing mystery of this strange valley of men and beasts had not deviated the other a hair from his goal. Lack of imagination and of sympathy served Sloan well.

  A frightened-looking olive-skinned girl in silk brought them food in earthenware bowls and platters-coarse wheaten cakes, a mush of cooked vegetables and a jar of yellow wine.

  Nelson drank heavily. Then fatigue crushed him down like a giant, gentle hand onto one of the low beds.

  Time unreeled backwards as his tired brain sank into darkness. L'Lan was a dream and ten years of Asia were a dream and he was back in his old slant-walled bedroom under the eaves of an Ohio farmhouse.

  * * *

  He did not awaken until sunlight splashed his face. The others were waking, rubbing bleared eyes and unshaven faces, looking wonderingly around the black, glassy rooms.

  The bearlike warrior captain, Hoik, came in as they finished breakfast. He said curtly, "If you're ready to come we'll talk now."

  "Talk with whom?" Eric Nelson demanded. "Who, exactly, runs things here?"

  Hoik shrugged big shoulders. "We Humanites are not a government yet. We're a faction that seceded from the rest of L'Lan. Shan Kar and I and Diril and old Jurnak have been the leaders."

  The two called Diril and Jurnak, a thoughtful-looking younger man and a bearded oldster, were waiting for them outside the room and went with them through the curving glass corridors.

  The place was all of black glass. But not ordinary glass. That, Nelson knew, could not have supported such stresses and strains. This city was of an unknown material. A miracle-city, a city that might have come from another planet, hidden here in deepest Asia and inhabited by a semi-civilized people! It didn't make sense.

  Hoik paused, Nelson and the others with him, at the entrance of a spacious hall like the heart of a huge black pearl. But here too dust dimmed the gracious curves, the furniture was primitive.

  "What's Shan Kar doing?" demanded Nick Sloan as they looked into the hall.

  "He's still talking with Tark," said Hoik.

  Eric Nelson felt a shock of astonishment as he looked at the strange scene in the dusty glimmering glass hall.

  Near the far wall of the room, secured by a heavy throat-chain to a massive staple in the wall, crouched the giant wolf Tark. Shan Kar sat in front of the wolf, looking silently down into the brooding, smoldering green eyes of the beast.

  "Talking? But no one is saying anything!" exclaimed Lefty Wister, his thin face puckered puzzledly.

  "It's supposed to be telepathy, I guess," said Sloan, jeering. "The same as he claimed to use with that eagle."

  Shan Kar heard and got up and came toward them. He looked at them with a flash of impatience.

  "You still don't believe? In spite of your powerful weapons you outlanders have things to learn."

  He spoke to the younger Humanite leader. "Get thought-crowns for them, Diril."

  Diril went out of the room and came back with five of the ancient-looking platinum circlets, each one mounted with two quartz disks.

  Shan Kar handed them to Nelson and his comrades. "Put them on. Then you can hear."

  Nelson hesitated and Li Kin handled his circlet in obvious nervous fright.

  "They won't hurt you," said Shan Kar sardonically. "We of L'Lan do not need them for talk like this. Our minds and the beasts' can converse easily.

  "But at a distance these thought-crowns our forefathers made let us hear thought more loudly. They should enable your minds to hear."

  They put on the platinum crowns, looking oddly like hard-faced saints in haloes.

  "Well, can you hear now?" asked Shan Kar.

  Eric Nelson was startled by realization that Shan Kar's lips had not moved, that he had not spoken that question.

  "Blimy, it works!" whispered Lefty Wister, with awe. "You can hear the blighter think!"

  "Only when the thought is projected by an effort of will," the Humanite assured. "You can't pick up a man's inner mental reverie."

  "These crowns must be amplifiers-telepathic amplifiers," Nelson muttered. "The scientists say telepathy is a transmission of electric thought-waves and I suppose the right instrument could set up the power. But how did these people get such instruments?"

  "The things are platinum!" said Nick Sloan avidly in English. "The first platinum we've seen here. Try to find out where they keep the stuff, Nelson!"

  That Shan Kar heard Sloan's thought was proved by his quick answer. "We shall talk later of the metal you want. Now I want you to speak to Tark."

  The great green eyes of the wolf had a cold flare in them as they steadily met Nelson's gaze. Here was no blind brute fury, but unmistakable intelligence, poise and hatred.

  Yet this was a wolf. The white fangs behind those half-drawn lips had almost had his throat out that night in Yen Shi. The great body, crouched on the chain, was the hairy body of a wild beast.

  "Tell him," said Shan Kar to Nelson, "how many guns you've brought. He knows their power. He saw them in action in the outworld."

  Again, it took Nelson a moment to realize that Shan Kar had spoken telepathically and not vocally.

  The green wolf-eyes flashed from Nelson to Shan Kar, and back again. Then Nelson heard the oddly fibred, oddly husky mental voice of Tark, as he had heard it in sleep that first night weeks ago.

  "I am your prisoner," was the wolf's thought. "You're going to kill me. Why try to impress me now?"

  "Because," Shan Kar answered quickly, "we may not kill you, Tark."

  "Mercy from a Humanite?" jeered Tark. "Ice from the sun, warmth from the snow, good hunting from the storm!"

  Nelson's skin crawled, with an uncanny feeling that matched the horror in Li Kin's gasping exclamation behind him. The wolf was speaking, was jeering, even though those mighty jaws did not part. Brain speaking to brain, wolf brain to human brain, without need of the medium of vocal sound!

  "We have you and Kree's son," Shan Kar reminded. "But you both might live. We could make a bargain, Tark."

  "A bargain?" cried Tark's thought. "Such a bargain as you've offered these ignorant outlanders, promising them pay you can't give?"

  "What's that?" cried Sloan, aloud. The man instantly forgot the incredulous amazement that had held
him speechless till now and spoke directly to the wolf. "What do you mean he can't pay us?"

  "Keep silent!" flared Shan Kar to the animal. "Hoik, have the guard take Tark out!"

  "Just a minute," said Eric Nelson sharply. "What he says concerns us. I intend to know what he means."

  A soundless burst of snarling lupine mirth broke upon Nelson's mind. Tark's green eyes flared with pure pleasure. "You overreached yourself when you had them put the thought-crowns on, Shan Kar!" he taunted. "You forgot that then I could hear their meaning too — and overhear that you'd promised them the gray metal!"

  Shan Kar's hand gripped the hilt of his sword as he rose and glared in rage at the wolf.

  Nelson, all thought of the scene's strangeness swept away by sudden suspicion, spoke directly to Tark.

  "You mean — there is no gray metal here?"

  Tark's eyes flickered. "There is gray metal here. But it is all in one place where you can't reach it — the Cavern of Creation."

  "What's that?" demanded Nick Sloan, eyes narrowed.

  "It is a forbidden place of our Brotherhood," Tark answered. "It is the place whence intelligent life first issued onto the face of Earth, long ago. And it lies at the northern end of the valley L'Lan."

  Eric Nelson instantly caught at the salient point in the answer. "At the northern end of the valley? Then it's beyond Vruun?"

  The wolfs thought answered like a snap of jaws. "It is. Which means you can't reach it!"

  Chapter VI

  DARING PLAN

  Nick Sloan, his eyes flaring with suspicion, swung around on Shan Kar. "Is that true?"

  Shan Kar shrugged. "It's true that the platinum is all at the north end of L'Lan."

  "You said you had platinum here, and would give us all we wanted for our help!" accused Sloan harshly.

  "I said there was plenty of it in L'Lan and there is," retorted the Humanite. "But you can't get near it until the Brotherhood is conquered. When we win you'll get your pay."

  "A nice neat little double-cross," raged Sloan.