The Valley of Creation

'Still romantic,' he told himself satirically. 'Even ten years of Asia hasn't ground all that out of you.'

Shan Kar was telling Tark, 'Lead the way. But, Tark, remember that if you try to go too fast you will die very quickly.'

The wolf made no reply but trotted deliberately forward up the gently slanting tunnel. The three men, stooping, followed. Soon, the tunnel forked. Tark unhesitatingly took the left turn. They followed, their pistols and the light covering him.

The tense silent progress into these ramifying tube-ways beneath Vruun began to get on Eric Nelson's nerves. He began to think he could hear a whispering echo of sound from behind them.

He told himself as he glanced swiftly backward, that he was letting his nerve slip, that he-

He did glimpse something back there in the tunnel! Blazing eyes in the gloom, eyes that were following them!

'It's a trap! We're being followed-' Nelson started to yell.

But the wolf caught his thought and acted even as the sound left his lips. Tark whirled and charged back on them with inconceivable swiftness. His hairy body was a living battering-ram that knocked the little light from Nelson's hand. The wolf crashed on through them.

'Knew it!' shrilled Lefty Wister, and triggered his automatic half-blindly as the light smashed out against the floor.

The thunderous echoes of the forty-five were deafening in the confined tunnel and Nelson heard ricochets screaming. Then Tark, who had crashed back through them to join those other eyes following them, sent his thought through the dark to them.

'We block your way to liberty! You cannot escape — lay down your weapons!'

'A trick!' raged Shan Kar. 'Tark somehow managed to betray us without our knowing.'

'As you planned to betray me with your lie of coming for Jhanon!' rang the wolf's thought from the darkness. 'Fools, not to know that when Grih went toward Anshan at my order, he'd strike our trail and backtrail it — follow us to Vruun!'

Nelson, in a flash, realized the wolf's cunning in sending that Clawed One they had met in the forest on a direction that would cross their trail and thus tell the tiger something was wrong.

'Lay down your weapons and we shall not kill!' Tark's thought continued swiftly. 'You shall be our hostages for Barin!'

For answer, Lefty Wister mouthed a curse and emptied his gun into the darkness. But again the slugs ricocheted in whining shrieks off the curved walls of the tunnel.

'They're back around the fork where your weapons can't reach them!' Shan Kar cried. 'They'll arouse all Vruun! No chance now to seize the Guardian. We must escape this trap!'

Nelson, scrambling back to the fork in the tunnel, had hastily pulled a bulbous object from his pocket. He ripped out its pin.

'This will clear the way out for us!' he rasped and leaned and hurled the deadly thing around the fork of the tunnel.

'Down!' he yelled, and at the same instant heard the swift warning thought of Tark.

'An outland weapon, Grih! Out of the tunnel, quick!'

Nelson had a second to remember that Tark had seen grenades in action in Yen Shi before his own grenade exploded.

The explosion in the confined tunnel felt titanic. A giant scorching hand smashed them down flatter against the silted floor. Nelson leaped up, still dazed and shaky from the explosion, and shouted to the others. 'Now — back out of here!'

They scrambled down through the tunnel, over broken shards of glass masonry the grenade had ripped from its walls. Now a dim circle of starlight ahead showed their exit.

They burst out of it into the starlit gully of the little dry stream, and tripped over a huge, striped, prostrate body. The tiger, Grih, had not escaped the tunnel quite in time and the outblast of the grenade had stunned or killed him.

'I hope it got that cursed wolf too!' raged Lefty. 'I should have killed him when I wanted to first!'

Nelson, at that moment, heard a wolf-howl from nearby, and realized that Tark had escaped the blast in time.

'He rouses the city!' Shan Kar cried furiously. 'But Barin shall pay the penalty for his trick! If we can reach our horses—'

They scrambled furiously up the gully of the dry streambed to the forested ridge. Nelson, gasping, turned and looked back. Out of torchlit Vruun, four-footed shapes were racing swiftly on their track. A terrific wolf-cry echoed up from that band of racing creatures, a heart-stopping sound.

Nelson seemed to himself in the next minutes, to be watching from another dimension as the three of them fled through the forest along the ridge. He was two men, and one of them was watching like a disembodied ka of himself while the other self expended every ounce of energy in flight.

'We're near the horses!' Shan Kar encouraged. 'Diril will be waiting with them.'

Again, from much closer behind them, came Tark's terrific hunting-cry. Lefty Wister stopped and whirled around, his pinched face a white blur, his voice hoarse and wild.

'I won't be hunted by that brute! I'll kill him!' He had his gun raised, was crouched, looking back.

'Lefty, keep your head!' cried Nelson, checking in mid-stride to turn back.

'Leave the man or you die with him!' cried Shan Kar from the darkness ahead.

He ought to, Nelson knew. It was sheer folly to try to save the Cockney, whose brain had given way to unreasoning hatred and horror.

He owed no more to Lefty than to the others. Mere fortune of war had thrown him into company of the hardbitten, crime-stained little band and he had no loyalty due to any of them. But the ingrained tradition of supporting a comrade-in-arms was too much for Nelson.

He turned back, grabbed the Cockney's arm. 'Lefty, come—'

It was as far as he got. That brief delay had been enough for those who followed to overtake Lefty and himself. Dark, leaping shadows of wolf and tiger came plunging through the dry brush. Tark's thought-cry leaped ahead of him.

'We will not kill if you—'

Lefty Wister's automatic poured a stream of fire at the vague shadow of the wolf. Nelson saw Tark dodge with inhuman swiftness an instant before the other fired, then saw the wolf at the Cockney's throat.

He heard Lefty's bubbling, horrible scream as he triggered his own pistol at the dim shapes rushing upon him.

He saw the blazing, awful eyes of a striped beast leaping toward him from the right. An upraised giant paw eclipsed everything as he tried to swing his gun around in time.

Then Nelson saw nothing.

Chapter IX JUDGMENT OF THE GUARDIAN

'The man stirs, mistress! I told you that he was but stunned.'

Nelson heard that queer voice inside his mind, as he floated through infinities of aching darkness.

'Tark, it might be better for him if he had died out there in the forest!'

It seemed to Nelson that time had doubled back upon itself and that he lay again in the squalid inn in Yen Shi as he had lain that night he had first heard the thought-voices in his dreams.

But the throbbing pain in his head was no dream. He tried to raise his hand toward his temple and discovered by the attempt that his sitting body was bound in a chair.

Fear and memory pounced together upon Nelson's mind. He made a convulsive effort and opened his eyes. Brilliant sunlight from an open window caught his eye first and then the detail of the room focused slowly.

It was a high-ceilinged, long gallery with pale blue glassy walls. The sunlight danced and quivered and