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.