Chapter I

ALIEN DREAM

It seemed to Eric Nelson that a strange voice spoke in his mind as he lay in drink-drugged sleep, here in the squalid inn of a Chinese frontier village.

"Shall I kill, little sister?"

The voice was mental, not physical. His brain recorded it, not through his ears but directly.

And it was not human. There was an alien quality in its vibration that set even his dreaming mind bristling.

"No, Turk! You were to watch, not to kill! Not — yet!"

To Nelson the answering mental voice seemed human enough. But though it lacked the uncannily alien quality of the first, it was chill, silvery, merciless.

He knew that he was dreaming. He knew that he lay here in the battle-wrecked frontier village of Yen Shi, that he had drunk too much to forget the doom that stared him and his companions in the face, that fatigue and too much liquor were doing this to him.

Yet it was creepily real, this swift, urgent dialogue of voices that only his mind could hear. And again his nerves crawled at the non-human strangeness of the first voice.

"They should all die now, little sister! For he even now seeks them out, to hire them as our foes! Ei has brought me word!"

"Turk, no! Watch only till I order—"

Nerve-tension snapped and Eric Nelson found himself scrambling up from his blankets, staring wildly around the dark room.

A black flying shadow leaped for the open window and was gone as his blurred eyes focused — a shadow that was not human!

With a strangled exclamation, Nelson lurched to the window, plucking the heavy pistol from his belt.

Great wings flapped suddenly out there in the night, rapidly receeding. He leveled the pistol but he could see nothing, and after a moment there were no more sounds.

Eric Nelson stood bewildered, his skin still creeping from the uncanny terror of the experience. His brain was fogged by sleep and by the sick aftertaste of the previous night's drinking.

Gradually his bristling nerves quieted. There was nothing out there in the dark-nothing but the few blinking lights of the wretched mud village, cowering underneath the silent stars, close beside the black wall of the great mountains that shouldered all the way to Tibet.

Dawn was coming. Nelson holstered his gun and ran his hands heavily over his unshaven face. Waves of pain surged up through his eyeballs as he turned from the window.

"Too much to drink," he muttered. "No wonder I'm hearing — and seeing — things."

He made a deliberate effort to thrust down the uncanny strangeness of his experience, to forget it. But he couldn't, quite.

It was not the mere fact of the voices that was so weird. The brain heard strange things in dreams. It was the alien, somehow husky quality of that first voice that still shook him.

Nelson lit a clay oil-lamp. Its flickering rays and the growing light of dawn showed nothing unusual hi the bare, squalid little room. He put on his uniform-jacket and went through a door into the common-room of the deserted inn. Three of his four fellow-officers were in the room.

Two of them, the big Dutchman, Piet Van Voss, and Lefty Wister, the spidery little Cockney, were snoring in their bunks.

Nick Sloan, the third, stood shaving in front of a tiny steel mirror, his big body easily balanced on firm-set feet, his flat, hard brown face looking coolly over his shoulder at Nelson.

"I heard you yell in there," Sloan said. "Bad dream?"

Eric Nelson hesitated. "I don't know. There was something in the room. A shadow—"

"I'm not surprised," Sloan drawled unsympathetically. "You were pretty stiff last night."

Nelson was suddenly resentfully aware of the contrast of his disheveled figure and tumbled blond hair with Sloan's competent neatness.

"Yes, I was drunk last night," he said harshly. "And I'll be drunk again tonight and tomorrow night also."

A patient voice sighed from the doorway. "Not tomorrow night, Captain Nelson. No."

Nelson turned. It was Li Kin who stood in the doorway. He made an absurd figure, his scrawny little body swathed in a major's uniform far too big for him. His gentle, fine-planed face was sagging with weariness and behind his thick-lensed spectacles his black eyes held sadness.

"A full column of the Chinese Red Army is on its way here from Nun-Yan," he said. "It will be here by tomorrow noon."

Nick Sloan's tawny eyes narrowed slightly. "That's pretty fast action. But it's only what we expected."

Yes, Eric Nelson thought heavily. It was only what they had expected.

They five had been staff officers for Yu Chi, a onetime minor warlord in the old China who had fled the country when the Communists took over. For years, Yu Chi had made his base in the no-man's-land of wild mountains that thrust up like a fist between China, Burma and Tibet, a region where boundaries and sovereignties were shadowy things. Every so often the old warlord, posing as a liberator, had made a foray which pretended to be a guerrilla action against the Reds but which was really a looting raid.

Of the five of them, Li Kin was the only one with any patriotic motives. The others were frankly mercenaries, picking up whatever they could in the troubles of southeast Asia. Nelson had been such a mercenary for ten years, ever since the Korean War ended and he decided that he liked adventure too much to go home. Nick Sloan had been in Asia nearly as long. Van Voss and the little Cockney were fugitive criminals, but tough fighting-men.

But now the five were at the end of their rope. Yu Chi had gone on one "liberation" raid too many, and had walked into a tiger-trap of Red troops here. They had won the battle, and the town. But Yu Chi was dead, his motley army had broken up, and when Communist reinforcements reached the village, there would be short shrift for five mercenaries.

"We've got to get out of here by tomorrow morning or we're cooked," Nick Sloan said curtly.

Lefty Wister had awakened and stood, a cigarette drooping laxly from his thin lips. Van Voss was stretching hugely in his bunk, scratching his enormous paunch as he listened.

"Where can we go without running into the bloody Red troops?" whined the little Cockney.

Nelson shrugged. "North, east and south we'd walk right into their hands. West there's only the Kunlun Mountains, and without a guide we'd merely dodge around in there until the tribesmen got us."

Li Kin raised his tired head. "That reminds me. A tribesman from those mountains wanted to talk to me last night. Something about hiring us to fight for his people."

Van Voss grunted. "Some verdommte Trans-Tibetan tribe that wants a few machine-guns to crush their neighbors."

Sloan's hard face was thoughtful. "It might be an out, though. In those mountains, if we knew our way, we'd be safe. Where is the man?"

"Still waiting outside, I think," said the Chinese. "I'll get him." He went heavily toward the doorway.

Nelson looked after him without interest, simply because he was sick of looking at Sloan and Van Voss and Wister.

Through the open door he watched Li Kin cross the dusty compound to a crumbling mud wall, where another man sat — a bareheaded man in shapeless quilted garments, sitting motionless in the light of the rising sun. He did not sit with the patient immobility of peaceful things but with the tight-coiled watchfulness of a crouching tiger. He rose with a lithe quick movement when Li Kin spoke to him.

Li Kin and the stranger came back across the compound. As they entered the room Li Kin said, "This is Shan Kar."

Nelson glanced indifferently. Shan Kar was of his own age and stature but no more like himself than a wildcat is like a terrier. His bare black head was alertly erect as he studied the white men.

Here was no primitive tribesman The man's handsome olive face and dark eyes had the haughty strength and fire and pride of a prince of ancient blood.

Eric Nelson sat up.

"You're no Tibetan," he said sharply, in that language.

"No," answered Shan Kar quickly. His accent was slurred as though spoken in an obscure dialect of Tibetan.

He pointed through the open door at the gray, sunlit mountains in the distance.

"My people dwell there, in a valley called L'Lan. And we men and woman of L'Lan have — enemies."

There was a flicker of emotion in his eyes as he spoke, fierce as a sword-flash. His eyes were, for that moment, fiery and intense, the eyes of a fanatic warrior, of a man with a cause.

"Enemies too powerful for us to conquer with our own forces! We have heard of the white men's new, powerful weapons. So I came to hire such men and weapons to help us in our struggle."

Nelson felt suddenly certain that Shan Kar referred to no mere petty tribal struggle. This man was not playing his game of war for horses, women or conquest, but for something bigger.

Shan Kar shrugged. "I heard of the warlord Yu Chi and came here to make an offer to him. But, before I arrived he was dead in the battle here. But you who remain know the use of such weapons. It you come with me to L'Lan and use them, we can pay you well."

"Pay us?" Nick Sloan's face showed his sharp interest. "Pay us with what?"

For answer, Shan Kar reached beneath his quilted cloak and brought forth a curious object which he handed to them.

"We have heard that this metal is valuable, to you of the outer world."

Eric Nelson puzzledly examined the thing. It was a thick hoop of dull gray metal, a ring several inches in diameter. Mounted on opposite sides of the metal hoop were two small disks of quartz. There was something odd about the little quartz disks. Each was only an inch across, but each had a carven pattern of interlocking spirals that baffled and blurred the vision.

Lefty Wister whined scornfully, "The bleody beggar wants to hire us with a hoop of old iron!"

"Iron? No," grunted Van Voss. "I see that metal down in the Sumatra mines. It is platinum."

"Platinum? Let me see that!" exclaimed Sloan. He closely examined the gray metal hoop. "By heaven, it is!"

His tawny eyes narrowed as he looked up at the silent, watching stranger? "Where did this come from?"

"From L'Lan," answered Shan Kar. "There is more there — much more. All you can take away will be yours as pay."

Nick Sloan swung around on Nelson. "Nelson, this could be big. All the years you and I have been out here, we haven't had an opportunity like this."

The Cockney's eyes were already shining covetously. Van Voss merely stared sleepily at the metal hoop.

Eric Nelson fingered it again and asked, "Where exactly did it come from? It looks almost like a queer instrument of some kind rather than an ornament."

Shan Kar answered evasively, "It came from a cavern in L'Lan. And there is much more metal like it there."

Li Kin said slowly, "A cavern in L'Lan? That name sounds familiar, somehow. I think there was a legend once—"

Shan Kar interrupted. "Your answer, white men — will you come?"

Nelson hesitated. There was too much about this business that was unexplained. Yet they dared not stay here in Yen Shi.

He finally told Shan Kar, "I'll commit myself to no bargains in the dark. But I'm willing to go to your valley. If the setup is as you say, we'll fight your battle — for platinum."

Sloan planned swiftly. "We can get a few light machine-guns and what tommy-guns and grenades we need from old Yu's arsenal. But it'll take work to round up enough pack-ponies by tomorrow morning."

His face crisped in resolve. "We can do it, though. We'll be ready to start at dawn, Shan Kar."

When Shan Kar had gone Lefty Wister uttered a crow of laughter.

"The bloody fool! Don't he realize that with machine-guns and grenades we can just take his platinum and walk off with it?"

Nelson turned angrily on the evilly eager little Cockney. "We'll do nothing of the sort! If we do agree to fight for this man, we'll—"

Suddenly Nelson stopped short, startled and shaken by abrupt remembrance. Remembrance of his weird dream of only an hour before, the dream in which human and unhuman voices had spoken in his mind!

"They should all die now, little sister! For he even now seeks them out to hire them as our foes!"

That alien, unhuman mental voice — had it been real after all? For Shan Kar had just provisionally hired them to fight enemies of whom they knew nothing! Into what mysterious struggle were they entering?

Chapter II

STRANGE BEASTS

The haunting memory of fantastic nightmare still oppressed Eric Nelson as he sat moodily late that night in the single drink-shop surviving in the battered village.

He was bone-weary from the long day's urgent work of rounding up pack-ponies. That and habit were why he had insisted to Li Kin that they stop at this mud-walled tavern whose fat Cantonese proprietor had somehow hoarded a few cases of imitation Scotch.

"Sloan and the others will need us to help pack," murmured Li Kin. He looked tired, his fine eyes blinking behind the thick spectacles. "We should go."

"In a little while," Nelson nodded. "They can get the stuff out of old Yu's arsenal and pack it without us anyway."

He tilted the square bottle, looking unseeingly at the wretched few tables whose grotesque shadows wavered on the crumbling mud walls as the oil-lamp flickered.

Why did that weird little experience stick in his mind like a burr? A dream of strange, coldly menacing voices in his mind, a shadow leaping across his room, a sound of great wings in the night-what was there in those to disturb him so?

"Yet it's cursed queer about Shan Kar," he muttered, half to himself.

Li Kin's head bobbed in earnest agreement. "Very queer. For today I have remembered about L'Lan."

Nelson stared at him blankly. "L'Lan? Oh, that's the name of the fellow's valley back in the mountains. I wasn't thinking of that."

"I have been thinking of it very much," the little Chinese officer affirmed. He leaned across the rough table. "You've been in China a long time, Captain Nelson. Have you never heard the name?"

"No, I never—" Nelson began, then stopped.

He did remember something.

"Magic valley of L'Lan! Long and long ago in L’Lan were born the Yang and Yin — life and death, good and evil, joy and sorrow!"

It came dimly back into Nelson's mind across seven war-crowded years, the rapt talk of that blind old seer whom he'd saved from the murderous guerrillas.

"Still, still lives L'Lan the golden, deep in the guarding mountains! Still lives in L’Lan the ancient Brotherhood, for that hidden heartland of the world was the valley of creation!"

"I remember the story now," Nelson admitted. "A sort of Central Asian Garden-of-Eden myth."

"Yes, a myth, a legend," Li Kin said earnestly. "Yet this man Shan Kar says that he comes from L'Lan!"

Eric Nelson shrugged. " 'Nature imitates Art,' said Wilde. The tribe out there in the mountains probably named their valley after the legend."

"Perhaps so," Li Kin said doubtfully. He got to his feet. "Should we not go now?"

"Go along and tell Sloan I'll be there soon," Nelson said carelessly.

Li Kin's eyes nickered to the emptied Scotch bottle, and he hesitated a moment "Remember, we have to get away by morning."

"I'll be there," snapped Nelson and the little Chinese went silently out.

Eric Nelson looked after the little man with a sympathy he felt neither for himself not his three other fellow-officers. Li Kin was a patriot, an absurdly impractical patriot whose fervent dreams had set his feet stumbling through the quagmire of China's civil wars to this blind-alley end.

The other three and he himself, Nelson thought with savage self-contempt, were not patriots, nor dreamers nor anything but soldiers of fortune.

Soldiers of fortune? The phrase lent an ironical twist to his lips. He and his fellow mercenaries were so far removed from the gay, gallant connotations of that name. Nick Sloan was a cool ruthless self-seeker, Van Voss a moronic sadist, Lefty Wister a spidery criminal.

And he, Eric Nelson? He, least of all, fitted that glamorous name. He was thirty years old, and the best years of his life had no other memorial than forgotten battles. Now he was a fugitive whose only out was to hire himself to Shan Kar's mountain people.

* * *

Nelson swept the empty Scotch bottle off the table to crash in splinters against the mud wall.

"Am I a dog to sit here untended?" he demanded of the fat Cantonese. "Bring another."

The liquor had lighted his somber mood by the time he went out into the night an hour later.

The few blinking lights along Yen Shi's wrecked and wretched streets danced in a cheerful rosy glow as he stalked along.

"I'm tired of Yen Shi anyway!" he thought as he, elbowed between shadowy, shuffling peasants. "San Kar's mountains will be new, at least."

"L’Lan, L'Lan the golden, inhere the ancient Brotherhood still lives— "

Now what was this Brotherhood that the old seer had talked of so raptly? And if it was so important, why hadn't Shan Kar mentioned it?

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."

Nick Sloan, his flat brown face hard and suspicious, harshly seconded Nelson. "That's right, Shan Kar. It seems we're up against more than just a tribal war. Spill it or we'll backtrack out of here."

Shan Kar smiled thinly. "You want the platinum we can pay you. You won't go back to China to be shot."

"Not to China — but we can cross southward over the Kunlun," Sloan spat. "Don't think you have us in your hand. You need us worse than we need you. Talk or we walk out."

Shan Kar eyed them, his mind obviously busy behind the handsome olive mask of his face. Then he shrugged.

"There is not time to tell you everything. We must move fast or we are lost. Also-you would not believe all if I told you."

He hesitated. "This much I will tell you. There are two factions in L'Lan. One is the party of the Humanites, of which I am one of the leaders. The other party is the Brotherhood.

"We Humanites are all men and women as our name implies. We believe in the superiority of humanity to all other forms of life and are ready to fight for it. But the Brotherhood, our enemies, are not all men!"

Sloan stared. "What do you mean? What are those of the Brotherhood who are not men?"

"Beasts!" hissed Shan Kar. "Beasts who assert their equality with men! Yes, in L'Lan the wolf and tiger and eagle claim themselves the equals of humans!"

His black eyes flashed. "And they'll not stop there! The winged ones and the hairy ones and the clawed ones — all the forest clans — will eventually aspire to dominance over man! Is it strange that we Humanites are preparing to crush them before that can happen?"

There was stunned silence for a moment, then Lefty Wister's shrill laughter crowed. "Didn't I tell you the man was cracked? We've come half into Tibet on a wild-goose chase with a crazy native for guide!"

Nick Sloan's face darkened and he started toward Shan Kar. Eric Nelson intervened hastily.,

"Sloan, wait! That platinum was real enough!"

Sloan stopped. "So it was. And we're going to find its source. But we won't find it by listening to crazy talk of wild beasts plotting against men!"

"The beasts of the Brotherhood are not the brute beasts of your outer world!" flared Shan Kar. "They are intelligent, as intelligent as men."

He made a fierce gesture. "I knew you would not believe! It was why I dared not tell you! But you at least should know I speak truth!" He pointed to Nelson.

Nelson felt a queer chill. He did have an uncanny conviction that Shan Kar was speaking the truth. But the impossible couldn't be true. A witch-girl and her pets, a crippled eagle, a queer native's fantastic talk-was he for these to throw away his firm footing on the everyday earth?

“L’Lan the golden where the ancient Brotherhood still lives'" whispered Li Kin, quoting. "So that is what it means?"

Nick Sloan snapped the spell. "This is all moonshine, but we can talk it out later! Right now I want to know what the danger is that you claim threatens us! How far are we now from L'Lan?"

Shan Kar pointed at the great wall of mountains that rose on the other side of the deep wooded gorge.

"The valley L'Lan lies on the other side of those mountains. We are that close! But getting into it will be perilous now."

He hurried on. "There is only one pass into the valley. It leads into it near the city Vruun which is the heart of the Brotherhood. Yet we must pass Vruun to reach Anshan, the city in the south which we Humanites hold.

"I hoped to creep through the pass and past Vruun without detection. But if the Brotherhood's scout gets word back of our coming they'll move to block us at the pass. That is why we must hurry!"

Nelson and Sloan and the other three grasped at least the urgency of the situation. They had, all of them, fought too many battles and made too many forced marches not to understand strategy.

Eric Nelson told Sloan, "We'd better move as he says. We can get him to explain his queer statements later."

Sloan nodded, frowning. "He's either a liar or a superstitious fool. We'll find out later. Right now I smell trouble."

The sun was setting. Darkness came with a swift rush as Shan Kar led their little caravan down into the wooded gorge.

The forest was a dark tangle of fir, scruboak and poplar. Beneath it, the brush was tindery and crackling from the long dry season. A mountain-stream brawled noisily along in the night somewhere nearby.

Shan Kar knew the trails. He turned southward and they moved after him, their ponies stumbling in the dark, Lefty Wister swearing in a monotonous whine each time his little steed staggered.

A cold wind whined down from the black mountains on their right. The trees stirred mournfully. Eric Nelson had a sudden strongly claustrophobic awareness of the huge ranges that shut them into this wild and forgotten pocket of the globe.

A wolf howled, a long swelling cry that came from somewhere up in the wooded slopes on the west side of the gorge.

Shan Kar turned in his saddle. "Faster!" he rasped.

Nelson was drawn by some instinct to look up and, through the tracery of branches overhead, saw a dark, winged shape plane swiftly above the gorge. It was high, moving in searching loops and curves.

It screamed, an eagle cry echoing thinly down from the night. Almost at once the distant wolf-cry came again.

Shan Kar abruptly reined in his pony. "They know we're coming! I must try to learn what faces us inside L'Lan!"