The Valley of Creation by Edmond Hamilton

Book Details

A group of mercenaries takes a job to help a rebel group secede from a tribe in the lost wilds of Tibet. What they find is a nightmare of men and intelligent animals fighting together against the rebel group.

The Valley of Creation (1948) – In the darkness, there came to Eric Nelson a summons and a warning—a summons to a land where beast and human walked alike, a warning of war and massacre strange and terrible!

Chapter I – Dream Shadows
Chapter II – Witch-Girl
Chapter III – Into Mystery
Chapter IV – Hidden Land
Chapter V – Wolf Hatred
Chapter VI – Daring Plan
Chapter VII – Secret Mission
Chapter VIII – Weird City
Chapter IX – Judgment of the Guardian
Chapter X – Dread Metamorphosis
Chapter XI – Forest Danger
Chapter XII – Death in Anshan
Chapter XIII – The Fight in the Palace
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

The Valley of Creation was first published in the July, 1948 issue of Startling Stories.

Edmond Moore Hamilton (1904–1977) was a child prodigy that entered college at the age of 14, though he left at 17.

Hamilton wrote prolifically for all of the pulp science fiction magazines during the late 20s and early 30s and is considered a co-creator of the “space opera” sub-genre of science fiction. His story “The Island of Unreason” won the first Jules Verne Prize (a precursor to the Hugo Awards) as the best Science Fiction story of the year in 1933.

In 1946, Hamilton married fellow science fiction writer, Leigh Brackett. Ray Bradbury served as Best Man.

The Valley of Creation has 4 illustrations.

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Excerpt: The Valley of Creation

Chapter I

Dream Shadows

IT SEEMED to Eric Nelson that a strange voice spoke in his mind as he lay in drink-drugged sleep in the squalid Chinese village inn.

“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, Tark! 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!”

“Tark, 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 receding. He leveled the pistol but he could see nothing, and after a moment there were no more sounds.

Eric Nelson stood bewildered, his skin still creeping from the uncanny terror of the experience. His brain was fogged by sleep and by the sick aftertaste of the previous night’s drinking.

Gradually his bristling nerves quieted. There was nothing more out there in the dark—nothing but the few blinking lights of the wretched mud village, cowering underneath the silent stars, close beside the black wall of the great mountains that shouldered all the way to Tibet.

Dawn was coming. Nelson holstered his gun and ran his hands heavily over his unshaven face. Waves of pain surged up through his eyeballs as he turned from the window.

“Too much to drink,” he muttered. “No wonder I’m hearing—and seeing—things.”

He made a deliberate effort to thrust down the uncanny strangeness of his experience, to forget it. But he couldn’t—quite.

It was not the mere fact of the voices that was so weird. The brain heard strange things in dreams. It was the alien, somehow husky quality of that first voice that still shook him.

Nelson lit a clay oil-lamp. Its flickering rays and the growing light of dawn showed nothing unusual in the bare, squalid little room. He put on his uniform-jacket and went through a door into the big common room of the deserted inn. Three of his four fellow-officers were in the room.

Two of them, the big Dutchman, Piet Van Voss and “Lefty” Wister, the spidery little Cockney, were snoring in their bunks.

Nick Sloan, the third, stood shaving in front of a tiny steel mirror, his big body, easily balanced on firm-set feet, his flat, hard brown face looking coolly over his shoulder, at Nelson.

“I heard you yell in there,” Sloan said. “Bad dream?”

Eric Nelson hesitated. “I don’t know. There was something in the room. A shadow—”

“I’m not surprised,” Sloan drawled unsympathetically. “You were pretty stiff last night.”

Nelson was suddenly resentfully aware of the contrast of his disheveled figure and tumbled blond hair with Sloan’s competent neatness.

“Yes, I was drunk last night,” he said harshly. “And I’ll be drunk again tonight and tomorrow night also.”

A patient voice sighed from the doorway. “Not tomorrow night, Captain Nelson. No.”

NELSON turned. It was Li Kin who stood in the doorway. He made an absurd figure, his scrawny little body swathed in a major’s uniform far too big for him.

His gentle, fine-planed face was sagging with weariness and behind his thick-lensed spectacles his black eyes held sadness.

“A Government column is on its way here from Nun-Yan,” he said. “It will be here by tomorrow noon.”

Nick Sloan’s tawny eyes narrowed slightly. “That’s pretty fast action. But it’s only what we expected.”

Yes, Eric Nelson thought heavily—it was only what they had expected.

They five had been staff-officers for Yu Chi Chan, the fat warlord who had held illegal sway over this remote southwestern province on the borders of Tibet.

They were, except for Li Kin, frank mercenaries who had taken many a warlord’s pay. Nelson had been ten years in China, Nick Sloan nearly as long. Van Voss and the little Cockney were fugitive criminals, flotsam of China’s civil wars.

But now they were at the end of their rope. Fat Yu Chi Chan had infringed a rival warlord’s territory. There had been an attack and battle here in Yen Shi, a battle which had ended with both warlords dead and their rag-tag armies shattered and dispersed.

And now Nanking, anxious to reassert its authority over this southwestern hinterland, had its troops on the way to Yen Shi. And they five could expect nothing better than a quick firing squad as rebels.

“We’ve got to get out of here by tomorrow morning or we’re cooked,” Nick Sloan said curtly.

Lefty Wister had awakened and stood, a cigarette drooping laxly from his thin lips. Van Voss was stretching hugely in his bunk, scratching his enormous paunch as he listened.

“Where can we go without running into the bloody Nanking troops?” whined the little Cockney.

“Nelson shrugged. “North, east and south we’d walk right into their hands. West there’s only the Tibetan mountains, where we’d merely dodge around until the tribesmen got us.”

Li Kin raised his tired head. “That reminds me. A tribesman from those mountains wanted to talk to me last night. Something about hiring us to fight for his people.”

Van Voss grunted. “Some verdommte Tibetan chief who wants a few machine-guns to crush his neighbors.”

Sloan’s hard face was thoughtful. “It might be an out though. In Tibet we’d be safe from Nanking. Where is the man?”

“Still waiting outside, I think,” said the Chinese. “I’ll get him.” He went heavily toward the doorway.

Nelson looked after him without interest, simply because he was sick of looking at the faces of Sloan and Van Voss and Wister.

Through the open door he watched Li Kin cross the dusty compound to a crumbling mud wall, where another man sat—a bareheaded man in shapeless quilted garments, sitting motionless in the sun.

He did not sit with the patient immobility of peaceful things but with the tight-coiled watchfulness of a crouching tiger. He rose with a lithe quick movement when Li Kin spoke to him.

Li Kin and the stranger came back across the compound. As they entered the room Li Kin said, “This is Shan Kar.”

Nelson glanced indifferently. Shan Kar was of his own age and stature but no more like himself than a wildcat is like a terrier. His bare black head was alertly erect as he studied the white men.

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 he spoke 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 women 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 Chan 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. If 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 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 vision.

Lefty Wister whined scornfully, “The blimey 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 sweated for stupid warlords 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 set-up 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’ll 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 Eric 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?

Excerpt From: Edmond Hamilton. “The Valley of Creation.”