The Valley of Creation

beside the big platinum mind-transference machine of the ancients.

'You brought me back into my own body while I slept?' Nelson said hoarsely.

'Yes,' said Kree. 'The force of the ancients stunned you in sleep so that you did not wake.'

Nelson sat up. He felt strong, rested, fresh-and realized it was because his human body had lain here in coma for so long. Yet his human body now felt strange. He felt blinded and deafened by his loss of scent, felt slow, clumsy, awkward.

He sat up and saw that Nsharra stood at the foot of his cot. And that the four leaders of the great Clans were here — Tark and Hatha, the tiger and Ei. They were watching him.

'Death and danger walk toward Vruun on swift feet of flame,' Kree was saying somberly. 'Little time was left to give Asha back his body and return you to your body for judgment.'

For judgment? That was why they had returned him to his humanity as doom drew close to Vrunn? Then the time had come.

Nelson stood up and faced them all. 'I am ready,' he said heavily.

'Tark and Ei have told us how you fought to save Barin — how you fought your friends,' said Kree.

'They were not my friends, save one who is dead now,' Nelson answered heavily. 'I did not know, though, they were butchers.'

'It seems you have learned much you did not know, outlander,' said Kree. 'You know now what it will be like for the Clans if the Humanites break the Brotherhood.'

'Yes, I know that now,' answered Eric Nelson sickly. Free children of the forest, hunted and slain and enslaved as in the outer world! Swift sentient folk of the Clans, crushed beneath a stupid human tyranny! He deserved what was coming—

'You are free to leave L'Lan,' said Kree. Nelson stared, incredulous. 'You're not going to kill me for what I've helped to do?'

Kree shook his head. 'By your work last night, you redeemed the crime that you committed in ignorance. You can go.'

Nelson looked at the Guardian, then around the watching leaders of the Clans.

'But I want to stay!' he cried. 'I want to help you save the Brotherhood, to undo what I helped do here!'

Nsharra cried eagerly to her father, 'Give him the chance! He will be loyal to us, I know!'

'He will be loyal,' Tark's thought agreed. 'And he knows the ways and weapons of the outlanders.'

Kree's eyes searched Nelson's face, seemed to be searching his soul. Finally the Guardian spoke.

'So be it, outlander. Your help can be valuable in this hour of peril.' He swung toward the others. 'Clan- leaders, let the word run through all your Clans that this outlander fights on our side!'

'We shall see how he fights,' growled the thought of Quorr the tiger.

Nelson felt the uplift of a queer buoyancy, as though an oppressive weight had been lifted from him. He knew, now. He knew that this Brotherhood that had at first seemed to his outer-world eyes so unnatural and alien was worth all sacrifices to preserve. He had learned that in the body of Asha the wolf.

And he felt strangely happy. For ten years he had fought the purposeless battles of warlords, first for adventure and then because he had no other profession. But this last battle was to be for a cause that he thought worth all he had to give.

Kree, as the Clan-leaders hurried out, led Nelson to a window that looked southward over Vruun.

'The hour comes fast upon us, outlander!'

Nelson was appalled by the spectacle. He realized now that hours had passed, for the sun was westering in a bloody, smoky murk. The whole southern sky was a wall of black smoke laced with livid flame — a wall that marched toward Vruun and was but a few miles distant. Only the forests west of the river were burning, but they were burning from the river to the western hills.

'That fire will be here in a few hours and Sloan and Van Voss and the Humanites will come after it!' Nelson exclaimed.

Kree nodded. 'But we hope to stop it. The men of Vruun have labored all day to cut a fire-break from the river to the western hills.'

'No mere fire-break will stop that!' Nelson told him emphatically. 'It will jump it. You've got to start a backfire.'

'Use fire as a defense against fire?' Kree looked worried. 'The Clans would not like it. They hate all fire.'

'Either that or the blaze will come into Vruun tonight!' Nelson warned.

Kree said reluctantly, 'I will go with you and give the order.'

As they turned, Nelson found Nsharra handing two heavy service pistols to him. He recognized them as his own and Lefty's.

'Less than twenty shots,' he muttered, as he belted on the guns. 'And Sloan and Van Voss will have submachine-guns and will have trained some of the Humanites to use grenades.'

'But your experience of war will be valuable to us,' Kree told him. 'We know little of war in L'Lan. Our swords have only been used at long intervals to repel out-land tribes who sought to enter.'

'I go with you, father!' cried Nsharra, her eyes dark and stormy with excitement.

Kree shook his head. 'Nsharra, if aught befalls me, you alone remain to rally the Brotherhood. You must remain in Vruun.'

Eric Nelson went out of the Hall of Clans with the Guardian into a thickening, ominous dusk. Smoke was rolling ever more densely from the south, blotting out the sunset. The air was bitter with it.

Tark ran up to them, the Hairy One's eyes blazing. 'The fighters of the Clans are already on their way in the forest! Two of the Hoofed Ones wait for you!' _

Nelson leaped on the back of one of the excited horses as Kree too mounted. They rode southward out of Vruun.

The sun had gone down behind smoke-veils as though afraid, and darkness was thickening westward. But southward it was like a dreadful new dawn over the forest, the whole sky there blood-red, immense.

Nelson, as he rode with Kree along a red-lit forest aisle beside the wide, dark-flowing river, heard the Clans moving through the forest with them, and heard their thought-cry.

Gather, O ye of the Brotherhood! Gather to the south, my brothers, for soon we fight — and die!

The woods were full of running shadows. Shaking red light fell on gray backs and striped backs and struck fire from eyes that were already like blown coals in the darkness and shone white on gleaming, snicking teeth.

The ground shook to the trampling thunder of hoofs as Hatha's Clan went by, great stallions, their loose manes whipped like banners on the wind of their going. Some of them bore men of Vruun, armed for battle. And above the treetops in the bloody glare, the wide-winged eagles looped and swung.

There rose the terrific call of Tark beside them and it was answered. A tiger roared and another, sending their deep rolling coughs to echo from the hillsides. And the sons of Hatha lifted their wild neighing on the night.

Roll call! Roll call of the Clans!

Nelson's throat contracted and the warrior in him was shaken by a strange emotion. He heard the thought- cry of a lithe gray wolf-shape that ran in close to Tark and Kree and himself.

'Outlander, we go together this time! Good hunting!'

With a weird feeling, Nelson recognized that running wolf-shape as the one which for a time had been his own.

'Good hunting, Asha!'

They came to the fire-break that the men of Vruun had labored all day to hew across the forest, and Nelson groaned inwardly.

This ragged hundred-foot lane, cut at such labor from the woods, would never stop the cyclone of flame raging up from the south.

'We must start our backfire going from the south side of this lane, and keep it from jumping back across!' he told Kree. 'And there's little time!'

The whole night a few miles ahead was now a sky-high chaos of smoke and flame. The red glare lit the hosts