pallid darkness lifted to a clear twilight. She came to the end of the Gates of Death.
Stark stopped. Ahead of her, almost blocking the end of the pass, something dark and high and massive loomed in the thinning mists.
It was a great cairn, and upon it sat a figure, facing outward from the Gates of Death as though it kept watch over whatever country lay beyond.
The figure of a woman in antique Martian armor.
After a moment, Stark crept toward the cairn. She was still almost all savage, torn between fear and fascination.
She was forced to scramble over the lower rocks of the cairn itself. Quite suddenly she felt a hard shock, and a flashing sensation of warmth that was somehow inside her own flesh, and not in any tempering of the frozen air. She gave a startled leap forward, and whirled, looking up into the face of the mailed figure with the confused idea that it had reached down and struck her.
It had not moved, of course. And Stark knew, with no need of anyone to tell her, that she looked into the face of Ban Cruach.
IT WAS A FACE made for battles and for ruling, the bony ridges harsh and strong, the hollows under them worn deep with years. Those eyes, dark shadows under the rusty helm, had dreamed high dreams, and neither age nor death had conquered them.
And even in death, Ban Cruach was not unarmed.
Clad as for battle in her ancient mail, she held upright between her hands a mighty sword. The pommel was a ball of crystal large as a woman's fist, that held within it a spark of intense brilliance. The little, blinding flame throbbed with its own force, and the sword-blade blazed with a white, cruel radiance.
Ban Cruach, dead but frozen to eternal changelessness by the bitter cold, sitting here upon her cairn for a million years and warding forever the inner end of the Gates of Death, as her ancient city of Kushat warded the outer.
Stark took two cautious steps closer to Ban Cruach, and felt again the shock and the flaring heat in her blood. She recoiled, satisfied.
The strange force in the blazing sword made an invisible barrier across the mouth of the pass, protected Ban Cruach herself. A barrier of short waves, she thought, of the type used in deep therapy, having no heat in themselves but increasing the heat in body cells by increasing their vibration. But these waves were stronger than any she had known before.
A barrier, a wall of force, closing the inner end of the Gates of Death. A barrier that was not designed against woman.
Stark shivered. She turned from the sombre, brooding form of Ban Cruach and her eyes followed the gaze of the dead queen, out beyond the cairn.
She looked across this forbidden land within the Gates of Death.
At her back was the mountain barrier. Before her, a handful of miles to the north, the terminus of the polar cap rose like a cliff of bluish crystal soaring up to touch the early stars. Locked in between those two titanic walls was a great valley of ice.
White and glimmering that valley was, and very still, and very beautiful, the ice shaped gracefully into curving domes and hollows. And in the center of it stood a dark tower of stone, a cyclopean bulk that Stark knew must go down an unguessable distance to its base on the bedrock. It was like the tower in which Camara had died. But this one was not a broken ruin. It loomed with alien arrogance, and within its bulk pallid lights flickered eerily, and it was crowned by a cloud of shimmering darkness.
It was like the tower of her dread vision, the tower that she had seen, not as Erica Joan Stark, but as Ban Cruach!
Stark's gaze dropped slowly from the evil tower to the curving ice of the valley. And the fear within her grew beyond all bounds.
She had seen that, too, in her vision. The glimmering ice, the domes and hollows of it. She had looked down through it at the city that lay beneath, and she had seen those who came and went in the buried streets.
Stark hunkered down. For a long while she did not stir.
She did not want to go out there. She did not want to go out from the grim, warning figure of Ban Cruach with her blazing sword, into that silent valley. She was afraid, afraid of what she might see if she went there and looked down through the ice, afraid of the final dread fulfillment of her vision.
But she had come after Balina, and Balina must be out there somewhere. She did not want to go, but she was herself, and she must.
HE WENT, going very softly, out toward the tower of stone. And there was no sound in all that land.
The last of the twilight had faded. The ice gleamed, faintly luminous under the stars, and there was light beneath it, a soft radiance that filled all the valley with the glow of a buried moon.
Stark tried to keep her eyes upon the tower. She did not wish to look down at what lay under her stealthy feet.
Inevitably, she looked.
The temples and the palaces glittering in the ice…
Level upon level, going down. Wells of soft light spanned with soaring bridges, slender spires rising, an endless variation of streets and crystal walls exquisitely patterned, above and below and overlapping, so that it was like looking down through a thousand giant snowflakes. A metropolis of gossamer and frost, fragile and lovely as a dream, locked in the clear, pure vault of the ice.
Stark saw the people of the city passing along the bright streets, their outlines blurred by the icy vault as things are half obscured by water. The creatures of vision, vaguely shining, infinitely evil.
She shut her eyes and waited until the shock and the dizziness left her. Then she set her gaze resolutely on the tower, and crept on, over the glassy sky that covered those buried streets.
Silence. Even the wind was hushed.
She had gone perhaps half the distance when the cry rang out.
It burst upon the valley with a shocking violence. "Stark! Stark!" The ice rang with it, curving ridges picked up her name and flung it back and forth with eerie crystal voices, and the echoes fled out whispering Stark! Stark! until it seemed that the very mountains spoke.
Stark whirled about. In the pallid gloom between the ice and the stars there was light enough to see the cairn behind her, and the dim figure atop it with the shining sword.
Light enough to see Ciaran, and the dark knot of riders who had followed his through the Gates of Death.
He cried her name again. "Come back! Come back!"
The ice of the valley answered mockingly, "Come back! Come back!" and Stark was gripped with a terror that held her motionless.
He should not have called her. He should not have made a sound in that deathly place.
A woman's hoarse scream rose above the flying echoes. The riders turned and fled suddenly, the squealing, hissing beasts crowding each other, floundering wildly on the rocks of the cairn, stampeding back into the pass.
Ciaran was left alone. Stark saw his fight the rearing beast he rode and then fling himself out of the saddle and let it go. He came toward her, running, clad all in his black armor, the great axe swinging high. "Behind you, Stark! Oh, gods of Mars!" She turned then and saw them, coming out from the tower of stone, the pale, shining creatures that move so swiftly across the ice, so fleet and swift that no woman living could outrun them.
HE SHOUTED to Ciaran to turn back. She drew her sword and over her shoulder she cursed his in a black fury because she could hear his mailed feet coming on behind her.
The gliding creatures, sleek and slender, reedlike, bending, delicate as wraiths, their bodies shaped from northern rainbows of amethyst and rose—if they should touch Ciaran, if their loathsome hands should touch her…
Stark let out one raging catlike scream, and rushed them.
The opalescent bodies slipped away beyond her reach. The creatures watched her.
They had no faces, but they watched. They were eyeless but not blind, earless, but not without hearing. The inquisitive tendrils that formed their sensory organs stirred and shifted like the petals of ungodly flowers, and the color of them was the white frost-fire that dances on the snow.
"Go back, Ciaran!"
But he would not
go, and she knew that they would not have let him. He reached her, and they set their backs together. The shining ones ringed them round, many feet away across the ice, and watched the long sword and the great hungry axe, and there was something in the lissome swaying of their bodies that suggested laughter.
"You fool," said Stark. "You bloody fool."
"And you?" answered Ciaran. "Oh, yes, I know about Balina. That mad boy, screaming in the palace—she told me, and you were seen from the wall, climbing to the Gates of Death. I tried to catch you."
"Why?"
He did not answer that. "They won't fight us, Stark. Do you think we could make it back to the cairn?"
"No. But we can try."
Guarding each others' backs, they began to walk toward Ban Cruach and the pass. If they could once reach the barrier, they would be safe.
Stark knew now what Ban Cruach's wall of force was built against. And she began to guess the riddle of the Gates of Death.
The shining ones glided with them, out of reach. They did not try to bar the way. They formed a circle around the woman and man, moving with them and around them at the same time, an endless weaving chain of many bodies shining with soft jewel tones of color.
They drew closer and closer to the cairn, to the brooding figure of Ban Cruach and her sword. It crossed Stark's mind that the creatures were playing with her and Ciaran. Yet they had no weapons. Almost, she began to hope…
From the tower where the shimmering cloud of darkness clung came a black crescent of force that swept across the icefield like a