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!"
He had dismounted. Fumbling under his cloak, he brought out something that glinted oddly in the starlight.
Then Nelson glimpsed what it was — the hoop of platinum with the two quartz disks mounted on it, that odd ornament or instrument which had sparked the treasure-lure of their quest.
"What the—!" Sloan exploded harshly. "If there's danger, we've no time to waste here!"
"Wait!" commanded Shan Kar. "Wait and be silent! All depends on whether I can contact my friends!" He had put the platinum hoop upon his head like a crown. He crouched, his strange headgear glistening vaguely.
Nelson felt incredulous wonder. What was Shan Kar doing with the odd thing? What was it?
Chapter IV
HIDDEN LAND
The moon was rising. As it gleamed above the mountains east of them, its lambent light poured down into the dark forest of the gorge like quicksilver trickling through a sieve.
Shan Kar remained crouched as a pool of the vague light widened around him. The little quartz disks on the headpiece of platinum he wore caught the light and shone brilliantly. The man's olive face was taut, his eyes stared, unseeing, into the darkness.
"What is it? What has happened now?" came Li Kin's anxious voice from the darkness.
Behind the little Chinese, Eric Nelson heard the rattle of the ponies' hoofs on stones and Lefty Wister cursing steadily.
"Cursed native mumbo-jumbo, that's all!" swore Nick Sloan. "Are we going to stand here all night?"
Nelson laid a hand on the other's sleeve. "Wait, Sloan. Shan Kar seems to know what he's doing."
Again a wolf howled, this time a lonely wailing single cry, echoing away, infinitely pregnant with menace.
Shan Kar finally broke his taut immobility, leaping to his feet and jerking the platinum circlet from his head.
"I have talked with my people in Anshan. They warn that a force of the Brotherhood is on its way to cut us off inside the pass, and that their own warriors can't reach us in time to help!"
Talked? Talked how, Nelson wondered swiftly? Had mind somehow spoken to distant mind through the agency of the platinum crown? But how could a people who were desperate to obtain the ordinary weapons of the outer world possess such a super-scientific instrument as that implied?
Shan Kar was continuing urgently. "We must get up through the pass and into L'Lan before they block us! All depends on that!"
Nelson shared the bafflement of the others. In this outlandish situation, they couldn't estimate the true magnitude of perils.
"How many men have the Brotherhood, your enemies, sent out to cut us off?" he demanded.
"Perhaps not many men" answered Shan Kar. "But they have many who are not men. Too many for us."
"More superstition," spat Nick Sloan, disgustedly. "He's trying to tell us there are intelligent beasts coming against us."
Nelson hesitated. "This Brotherhood may use trained beasts as fighters at that. Such a fight would be plenty messy. Especially in a narrow pass."
Again, he was forced to make a quick decision based on information whose sources seemed too fantastic to be credited.
"Get the ponies moving!" he ordered. "Whatever danger may be ahead, we'd be better off to meet it inside the valley than up in that pass."
They started climbing out of the great gorge, Shan Kar leading them up a trail that twisted amid giant boulders and gaunt firs. Soon they glimpsed above them the crack of a pass that split the titanic moonlit wall of the range.
A pulse-quickening sense of expectation spurred Eric Nelson as he helped drag the ponies upward. What lay within that mighty wall of mountains, what guarded answer to the mysteries that seemed to deepen around them hour by hour?
They came up clear of the last trees onto naked rock and shingle with the last lofty rampart of the range looming before them. The pass was a mere narrow crack through that rampart.
It was a place of shadows and shivering cold. The ponies' hoofs clattered on the loose rock as they rode through.
They came out onto an open ledge of moonlight, and Shan Kar leaned in his saddle to gesture ahead.
"L'Lan!"
It looked like a valley of dreams to Eric Nelson. It looked like a place he had visited in some former life and had never quite forgotten.
It was a pear-shaped land fifty miles long, completely walled in by towering ranges that stepped up toward stupendous, snow-crowned peaks at the northern, narrow end of the pear.
The pass at whose outlet they sat their ponies was some twelve miles from the northern end of the valley and nearly a mile above its floor. They looked down into a land silvered by the rising moon.
"Where is the city of your own people?" Nick Sloan demanded brusquely of Shan Kar.
The other pointed southward. "That way — out of sight. But Vruun, the city of the Brotherhood, is there!"
He was pointing north of due west. Eric Nelson followed the direction of his finger.
Nelson had already noticed the big river that flowed down the valley, whose every sprawling loop caught the moon. Now he saw a little cluster of lights beside it near the north end of the valley.
Vruun, city of the mysterious Brotherhood? Nelson strained his eyes. He glimpsed around the lights a mass of vague, glimmering structures that were oddly enlaced by the surrounding forest.
Nelson caught his breath. Unless the light tricked him, Vruun could be like no Asiatic city he had ever seen.
"But what—" he began, turning to Shan Kar.
He didn't finish. The cry that came echoing faintly up out of the great moonlit valley struck him silent.
Hai-ooo!
No human cry was that but one he had heard before in the uplands. The hunting call of wolves, of many wolves.
Hai-ooo! Hai-ooo!
The ponies jumped nervously. Shan Kar's voice rang urgent above the clatter of their hoofs.
"Tark's clan race ahead to cut us off! We must ride fast for Anshan!"