"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.