through.
There was a silence in the valley.
The Lady Ciara walked slowly across the trampled snow and took up her axe again.
"I will be obeyed," she said. "And I will not stand for fear, not of god, woman, nor devil." She gestured toward Stark. "Cut her down. And see that she does not die."
She strode away, and Otara began to laugh.
From a vast distance, Stark heard that shrill, wild laughter. Her mouth was full of blood, and she was mad with a cold fury.
A cunning that was purely animal guided her movements then. Her head fell forward, and her body hung inert against the thongs. She might almost have been dead.
A knot of women came toward her. She listened to them. They were hesitant and afraid. Then, as she did not move, they plucked up courage and came closer, and one prodded her gently with the point of her spear.
"Prick her well," said another, "Let us be sure!"
The sharp point bit a little deeper. A few drops of blood welled out and joined the small red streams that ran from the weals of the lash. Stark did not stir.
The spearwoman grunted. "She is safe enough now."
Stark felt the knife blades working at the thongs. She waited. The rawhide snapped, and she was free.
She did not fall. She would not have fallen then if she had taken a death wound. She gathered her legs under her and sprang.
She picked up the spearwoman in that first rush and flung her into the fire. Then she began to run toward the place where the scaly mounts were herded, leaving a trail of blood behind her on the snow.
A woman loomed up in front of her. She saw the shadow of a spear and swerved, and caught the haft in her two hands. She wrenched it free and struck down with the butt of it, and went on. Behind her she heard voices shouting and the beginning of turmoil.
The Lady Ciara turned and came back, striding fast.
There were women before Stark now, many women, the circle of watchers breaking up because there had been nothing more to watch. She gripped the long spear. It was a good weapon, better than the flint-tipped stick with which the girl N'Chaka had hunted the giant lizard of the rocks.
Her body curved into a half crouch. She voiced one cry, the challenging scream of a predatory killer, and went in among the women.
She did slaughter with that spear. They were not expecting attack. They were not expecting anything. Stark had sprung to life too quickly. And they were afraid of her. She could smell the fear on them. Fear not of a woman like themselves, but of a creature less and more than woman.
She killed, and was happy.
They fell away from her, the wild riders of Mekh. They were sure now that she was a demon. She raged among them with the bright spear, and they heard again that sound that should not have come from a human throat, and their superstitious terror rose and sent them scrambling out of her path, trampling on each other in childish panic.
She broke through, and now there was nothing between her and escape but two mounted women who guarded the herd.
Being mounted, they had more courage. They felt that even a witch could not stand against their charge. They came at her as she ran, the padded feet of their beasts making a muffled drumming in the snow.
Without breaking stride, Stark hurled her spear.
IT DROVE through one woman's body and tumbled her off, so that she fell under her comrade's mount and fouled its legs. It staggered and reared up, hissing, and Stark fled on.
Once she glanced over her shoulder. Through the milling, shouting crowd of women she glimpsed a dark, mailed figure with a winged mask, going through the ruck with a loping stride and bearing a sable axe raised high for the throwing.
Stark was close to the herd now. And they caught her scent.
The Norland brutes had never liked the smell of her, and now the reek of blood upon her was enough in itself to set them wild. They began to hiss and snarl uneasily, rubbing their reptilian flanks together as they wheeled around, staring at her with lambent eyes.
She rushed them, before they should quite decide to break. She was quick enough to catch one by the fleshy comb that served it for a forelock, held it with savage indifference to its squealing, and leaped to its back. Then she let it bolt, and as she rode it she yelled, a shrill brute cry that urged the creatures on to panic.
The herd broke, stampeding outward from its center like a bursting shell.
Stark was in the forefront. Clinging low to the scaly neck, she saw the women of Mekh scattered and churned and tramped into the snow by the flying pads. In and out of the shelters, kicking the brush walls down, lifting up their harsh reptilian voices, they went racketing through the camp, leaving behind them wreckage as of a storm. And Stark went with them.
She snatched a cloak from off the shoulders of some petty chieftain as she went by, and then, twisting cruelly on the fleshy comb, beating with her fist at the creature's head, she got her mount turned in the way she wanted it to go, down the valley.
She caught one last glimpse of the Lady Ciara, fighting to hold one of the creatures long enough to mount, and then a dozen striving bodies surged around her, and Stark was gone.
The beast did not slacken pace. It was as though it thought it could outrun the alien, bloody thing that clung to its back. The last fringes of the camp shot by and vanished in the gloom, and the clean snow of the lower valley lay open before it. The creature laid its belly to the ground and went, the white spray spurting from its heels.
Stark hung on. Her strength was gone now, run out suddenly with the battle-madness. She became conscious now that she was sick and bleeding, that her body was one cruel pain. In that moment, more than in the hours that had gone before, she hated the black leader of the clans of Mekh.
That flight down the valley became a sort of ugly dream. Stark was aware of rock walls reeling past, and then they seemed to widen away and the wind came out of nowhere like the stroke of a great hammer, and she was on the open moors again.
The beast began to falter and slow down. Presently it stopped.
Stark scooped up snow to rub on her wounds. She came near to fainting, but the bleeding stopped and after that the pain was numbed to a dull ache. She wrapped the cloak around her and urged the beast to go on, gently this time, patiently, and after it had breathed it obeyed her, settling into the shuffling pace it could keep up for hours.
She was three days on the moors. Part of the time she rode in a sort of stupor, and part of the time she was feverishly alert, watching the skyline. Frequently she took the shapes of thrusting rocks for riders, and found what cover she could until she was sure they did not move. She was afraid to dismount, for the beast had no bridle. When it halted to rest she remained upon its back, shaking, her brow beaded with sweat.
The wind scoured her tracks clean as soon as she made them. Twice, in the distance, she did see riders, and one of those times she burrowed into a tall drift and stayed there for several hours.
The ruined towers marched with her across the bitter land, lonely giants fifty miles apart. She did not go near them.
She knew that she wandered a good bit, but she could not help it, and it was probably her salvation. In those tortured badlands, riven by ages of frost and flood, one might follow a woman on a straight track between two points. But to find a single rider lost in that wilderness was a matter of sheer luck, and the odds were with Stark.
One evening at sunset she came out upon a plain that sloped upward to a black and towering scarp, notched with a single pass.
The light was level and blood-red, glittering on the frosty rock so that it seemed the throat of the pass was aflame with evil fires. To Stark's mind, essentially primitive and stripped now of all its acquired reason, that narrow cleft appeared as the doorway to the dwelling place of demons as horrible as the fabled creatures that roam the Darkside of her native world.
She looked long at the Gates of Death, and a dark memory crept into her brain. Memory of that nightmare experience when the talisman had made her see
m to walk into that frightful pass, not as Stark, but as Ban Cruach.
She remembered Otara's words—I have seen Ban Cruach the mighty. Was she still there beyond those darkling gates, fighting her unimagined war, alone?
Again, in memory, Stark heard the evil piping of the wind. Again, the shadow of a dim and terrible shape loomed up before her…
She forced remembrance of that vision from her mind, by a great effort. She could not turn back now. There was no place to go.
Her weary beast plodded on, and now Stark saw as in a dream that a great walled city stood guard before that awful Gate. She watched the city glide toward her through a crimson haze, and fancied she could see the ages clustered like birds around the towers.
She had reached Kushat, with the talisman of Ban Cruach still strapped in the bloodstained belt around her waist.
IV
HE STOOD IN A LARGE SQUARE, lined about with huckster's stalls and the booths of wine-sellers. Beyond were buildings, streets, a city. Stark got a blurred impression of a grand and brooding darkness, bulking huge against the mountains, as bleak and proud as they, and quite as ancient, with many ruins and deserted quarters.
She was not sure how she had come there, but she was standing on her own feet, and someone was pouring sour wine into her mouth. She drank it greedily. There were people around her, jostling, chattering, demanding answers to their questions. A boy's voice said sharply, "Let her be! Can't you see she's hurt?"
Stark looked down. He was slim