of. And if need be, I will flay you alive to get it!" He faced her across the room. "But whether I get it or not, I will go through the Gates of Death. I must wait, now, until after the thaw. The warm wind will blow soon, and the gorges will be running full. But afterward, I will go, and no talk of fears and demons will stop me."
He began to pace the room with long strides, and the full skirts of the gown made a subtle whispering about him.
"You do not know," he said, in a low and bitter voice. "I was a girl-child, without a name. By the time I could walk, I was a servant in the house of my grandfather. The two things that kept me living were pride and hate. I left my scrubbing of floors to practice arms with the young boys. I was beaten for it every day, but every day I went. I knew even then that only force would free me. And my mother was a king's son, a good woman of her hands. Her blood was strong in me. I learned."
He held his head very high. He had earned the right to hold it so. He finished quietly, "I have come a long way. I will not turn back now."
"Ciaran." Stark came and stood before him. "I am talking to you as a fighting woman, an equal. There may be power behind the Gates of Death, I do not know. But this I have seen—madness, horror, an evil that is beyond our understanding.
"I think you will not accuse me of cowardice. And yet I would not go into that pass for all the power of all the kings of Mars!"
Once started, she could not stop. The full force of that dark vision of the talisman swept over her again in memory. She came closer to him, driven by the need to make his understand.
"Yes, I have the talisman! And I have had a taste of its purpose. I think Ban Cruach left it as a warning, so that none would follow her. I have seen the temples and the palaces glitter in the ice. I have seen the Gates of Death—not with my own eyes, Ciaran, but with hers. With the eyes and the memories of Ban Cruach!"
She had caught his again, her hands strong on his strong arms.
"Will you believe me, or must you see for yourself—the dreadful things that walk those buried streets, the shapes that rise from nowhere in the mists of the pass?"
His gaze burned into hers. His breath was hot and sweet upon her lips, and he was like a sword between her hands, shining and unafraid.
"Give me the talisman. Let me see!"
She answered furiously, "You are mad. As mad as Otara." And she kissed him, in a rage, in a panic lest all that beauty be destroyed—a kiss as brutal as a blow, that left her shaken.
SHE BACKED AWAY slowly, one step, and she thought he would have killed her. She said heavily:
"If you will see, you will. The thing is here."
She opened the boss and laid the crystal in him outstretched hand. She did not meet his eyes.
"Sit down. Hold the flat side against your brow."
He sat, in a great chair of carven wood. Stark noticed that his hand was unsteady, his face the colour of white ash. She was glad he did not have the axe where he could reach it. He did not play at anger.
For a long moment he studied the intricate lens, the incredible depository of a woman's mind. Then he raised it slowly to his forehead.
She saw his grow rigid in the chair. How long she watched beside his she never knew. Seconds, an eternity. She saw his eyes turn blank and strange, and a shadow came into his face, changing it subtly, altering the lines, so that it seemed almost a stranger was peering through his flesh.
All at once, in a voice that was not his own, he cried out terribly, "Oh gods of Mars!"
The talisman dropped rolling to the floor, and Ciaran fell forward into Stark's arms.
She thought at first that he was dead. She carried his to the bed, in an agony of fear that surprised her with its violence, and laid his down, and put her hand over him heart.
It was beating strongly. Relief that was almost a sickness swept over her. She turned, searching vaguely for wine, and saw the talisman. She picked it up and put it back inside the boss. A jewelled flagon stood on a table across the room. She took it and started back, and then, abruptly, there was a wild clamor in the hall outside and Otara was shouting Ciaran's name, pounding on the door.
It was not barred. In another moment they would burst through, and she knew that they would not stop to enquire what she was doing there.
She dropped the flagon and went out swiftly, the way she had come. The guard was still unconscious. In the narrow hall beyond, Stark hesitated. A man's voice was rising high above the tumult in the main corridor, and she thought she recognized it.
She went to the tapestry curtain and looked for the second time around its edge.
The lofty space was full of women, newly wakened from their heavy sleep and as nervous as so many bears. Thanir struggled in the grip of two of them. His scarlet kirtle was torn, his hair flying in wild elf-locks, and his face was the face of a mad thing. The whole story of the doom of Kushat was written large upon it.
He screamed again and again, and would not be silenced.
"Tell him, the warlock that leads you! Tell his that he is already doomed to death; with all his army!"
Otara opened up the door of Ciaran's room.
Thanir surged forward. He must have fled through all that castle before he was caught, and Stark's heart ached for him.
"You!" he shrieked through the doorway, and poured out all the filth of the quarter upon Clara's name. "Balina has gone to bring doom upon you! She will open wide the Gates of Death, and then you will die!—die!—die!"
Stark felt the shock of a terrible dread, as she let the curtain fall. Mad with hatred against conquerors, Balina had fulfilled her raging promise and had gone to fling open the Gates of Death.
Remembering her nightmare vision of the shining, evil ones whom Ban Cruach had long ago prisoned beyond those gates, Stark felt a sickness grow within her as she went down the stair and out the postern door.
It was almost dawn. She looked up at the brooding cliffs, and it seemed to her that the wind in the pass had a sound of laughter that mocked her growing dread.
She knew what she must do, if an ancient, mysterious horror was not to be released upon Kushat.
I may still catch Balina before she has gone too far! If I don't—
She dared not think of that. She began to walk very swiftly through the night streets, toward the distant, towering Gates of Death.
VII
IT WAS PAST NOON. HE HAD climbed high toward the saddle of the pass. Kushat lay small below her, and she could see now the pattern of the gorges, cut ages deep in the living rock, that carried the spring torrents of the watershed around the mighty ledge on which the city was built.
The pass itself was channeled, but only by its own snows and melting ice. It was too high for a watercourse. Nevertheless, Stark thought, a woman might find it hard to stay alive if she were caught there by the thaw.
She had seen nothing of Balina. The gods knew how many hours' start she had. Stark imagined her, scrambling wild-eyed over the rocks, driven by the same madness that had sent Thanir up into the castle to call down destruction on Ciaran's head.
The sun was brilliant but without warmth. Stark shivered, and the icy wind blew strong. The cliffs hung over her, vast and sheer and crushing, and the narrow mouth of the pass was before her. She would go no farther. She would turn back, now.
But she did not. She began to walk forward, into the Gates of Death.
The light was dim and strange at the bottom of that cleft. Little veils of mist crept and clung between the ice and the rock, thickened, became more dense as she went farther and farther into the pass. She could not see, and the wind spoke with many tongues, piping in the crevices of the cliffs.
The steps of the Earthwoman slowed and faltered. She had known fear in her life before. But now she was carrying the burden of two women's terrors—Ban Cruach's, and her own.
She stopped, enveloped in the clinging mist. She tried to reason with herself—that Ban Cruach's fears had died a million years ago, that Otara had come this way and lived, and Balina had co
me also.
But the thin veneer of civilization sloughed away and left her with the naked bones of truth. Her nostrils twitched to the smell of evil, the subtle unclean taint that only a beast, or one as close to it as she, can sense and know. Every nerve was a point of pain, raw with apprehension. An overpowering recognition of danger, hidden somewhere, mocking at her, made her very body change, draw in upon itself and flatten forward, so that when at last she went on again she was more like a four-footed thing than a woman walking upright.
Infinitely wary, silent, moving surely over the ice and the tumbled rock, she followed Balina. She had ceased to think. She was going now on sheer instinct.
The pass led on and on. It grew darker, and in the dim uncanny twilight there were looming shapes that menaced her, and ghostly wings that brushed her, and a terrible stillness that was not broken by the eerie voices of the wind.
Rock and mist and ice. Nothing that moved or lived. And yet the sense of danger deepened, and when she paused the beating of her heart was like thunder in her ears.
Once, far away, she thought she heard the echoes of a woman's voice crying, but she had no sight of Balina.
The pass began to drop, and the twilight deepened into a kind of sickly night.
On and down, more slowly now, crouching, slinking, heavily oppressed, tempted to snarl at boulders and tear at wraiths of fog. She had no idea of the miles she had travelled. But the ice was thicker now, the cold intense.
The rock walls broke off sharply. The mist thinned. The