"Edmond Hamilton - The Valley of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

• Chapter XIV. RETURN TO DOOM
• Chapter XV. THE WRATH OF THE CLANS
• Chapter XVI. THE CAVERN OF CREATION
• Chapter XVII. THE DAY OF THE BROTHERHOOD




Chapter I. ALIEN DREAM

It seemed to Eric Nelson that a strange voice spoke in his mind as he lay in drink−drugged sleep, here in the


The Valley Of Creation 1
 The Valley Of Creation

squalid inn of a Chinese frontier village.

“Shall I kill, little sister?”

The voice was mental, not physical. His brain recorded it, not through his ears but directly.

And it was not human. There was an alien quality in its vibration that set even his dreaming mind bristling.

“No, Turk! You were to watch, not to kill! Not—yet!”

To Nelson the answering mental voice seemed human enough. But though it lacked the uncannily alien
quality of the first, it was chill, silvery, merciless.

He knew that he was dreaming. He knew that he lay here in the battle−wrecked frontier village of Yen Shi,
that he had drunk too much to forget the doom that stared him and his companions in the face, that fatigue and
too much liquor were doing this to him.

Yet it was creepily real, this swift, urgent dialogue of voices that only his mind could hear. And again his
nerves crawled at the non−human strangeness of the first voice.

“They should all die now, little sister! For he even now seeks them out, to hire them as our foes! Ei has
brought me word!”

“Turk, no! Watch only till I order—“

Nerve−tension snapped and Eric Nelson found himself scrambling up from his blankets, staring wildly around
the dark room.

A black flying shadow leaped for the open window and was gone as his blurred eyes focused—a shadow that
was not human!

With a strangled exclamation, Nelson lurched to the window, plucking the heavy pistol from his belt.

Great wings flapped suddenly out there in the night, rapidly receeding. He leveled the pistol but he could see