sickle and gathered the two humans in.
Stark felt a shock of numbing cold that turned her nerves to ice. Her sword dropped from her hand, and she heard Ciaran's axe go down. Her body was without strength, without feeling, dead.
She fell, and the shining ones glided in toward her.
VIII
TWICE BEFORE IN HIS LIFE Stark had come near to freezing. It had been like this, the numbness and the cold. And yet it seemed that the dark force had struck rather at her nerve centers than at her flesh.
She could not see Ciaran, who was behind her, but she heard the metallic clashing of his mail and one small, whispered cry, and she knew that he had fallen, too.
The glowing creatures surrounded her. She saw their bodies bending over her, the frosty tendrils of their faces writhing as though in excitement or delight.
Their hands touched her. Little hands with seven fingers, deft and frail. Even her numbed flesh felt the terrible cold of their touch, freezing as outer space. She yelled, or tried to, but they were not abashed.
They lifted her and bore her toward the tower, a company of them, bearing her heavy weight upon their gleaming shoulders.
She saw the tower loom high and higher still above her. The cloud of dark force that crowned it blotted out the stars. It became too huge and high to see at all, and then there was a low flat arch of stone close above her face, and she was inside.
Straight overhead—a hundred feet, two hundred, she could not tell—was a globe of crystal, fitted into the top of the tower as a jewel is held in a setting.
The air around it was shadowed with the same eerie gloom that hovered outside, but less dense, so that Stark could see the smouldering purple spark that burned within the globe, sending out its dark vibrations.
A globe of crystal, with a heart of sullen flame. Stark remembered the sword of Ban Cruach, and the white fire that burned in its hilt.
Two globes, the bright-cored and the dark. The sword of Ban Cruach touched the blood with heat. The globe of the tower deadened the flesh with cold. It was the same force, but at opposite ends of the spectrum.
Stark saw the cryptic controls of that glooming globe—a bank of them, on a wide stone ledge just inside the tower, close beside her. There were shining ones on that ledge tending those controls, and there were other strange and massive mechanisms there too.
Flying spirals of ice climbed up inside the tower, spanning the great stone well with spidery bridges, joining icy galleries. In some of those galleries, Stark vaguely glimpsed rigid, gleaming figures like statues of ice, but she could not see them clearly as she was carried on.
She was being carried downward. She passed slits in the wall, and knew that the pallid lights she had seen through them were the moving bodies of the creatures as they went up and down these high-flung, icy bridges. She managed to turn her head to look down, and saw what was beneath her.
The well of the tower plunged down a good five hundred feet to bedrock, widening as it went. The web of ice-bridges and the spiral ways went down as well as up, and the creatures that carried her were moving smoothly along a transparent ribbon of ice no more than a yard in width, suspended over that terrible drop.
Stark was glad that she could not move just then. One instinctive start of horror would have thrown her and her bearers to the rock below, and would have carried Ciaran with them.
Down and down, gliding in utter silence along the descending spiral ribbon. The great glooming crystal grew remote above her. Ice was solid now in the slots of the walls. She wondered if they had brought Balina this way.
There were other openings, wide arches like the one they had brought their captives through, and these gave Stark brief glimpses of broad avenues and unguessable buildings, shaped from the pellucid ice and flooded with the soft radiance that was like eerie moonlight.
At length, on what Stark took to be the third level of the city, the creatures bore her through one of these archways, into the streets beyond.
BELOW HIM NOW was the translucent thickness of ice that formed the floor of this level and the roof of the level beneath. She could see the blurred tops of delicate minarets, the clustering roofs that shone like chips of diamond.
Above her was an ice roof. Elfin spires rose toward it, delicate as needles. Lacy battlements and little domes, buildings star-shaped, wheel-shaped, the fantastic, lovely shapes of snow-crystals, frosted over with a sparkling foam of light.
The people of the city gathered along the way to watch, a living, shifting rainbow of amethyst and rose and green, against the pure blue-white. And there was no least whisper of sound anywhere.
For some distance they went through a geometric maze of streets. And then there was a cathedral-like building all arched and spired, standing in the center of a twelve-pointed plaza. Here they turned, and bore their captives in.
Stark saw a vaulted roof, very slim and high, etched with a glittering tracery that might have been carving of an alien sort, delicate as the weavings of spiders. The feet of her bearers were silent on the icy paving.
At the far end of the long vault sat seven of the shining ones in high seats marvellously shaped from the ice. And before them, grey-faced, shuddering with cold and not noticing it, drugged with a sick horror, stood Balina. She looked around once, and did not speak.
Stark was set on her feet, with Ciaran beside her. She saw his face, and it was terrible to see the fear in his eyes, that had never shown fear before.
She herself was learning why women went mad beyond the Gates of Death.
Chill, dreadful fingers touched her expertly. A flash of pain drove down her spine, and she could stand again.
The seven who sat in the high seats were motionless, their bright tendrils stirring with infinite delicacy as though they studied the three humans who stood before them.
Stark thought she could feel a cold, soft fingering of her brain. It came to her that these creatures were probably telepaths. They lacked organs of speech, and yet they must have some efficient means of communications. Telepathy was not uncommon among the many races of the Solar System, and Stark had had experience with it before.
She forced her mind to relax. The alien impulse was instantly stronger. She sent out her own questing thought and felt it brush the edges of a consciousness so uttely foreign to her own that she knew she could never probe it, even had she had the skill.
She learned one thing—that the shining faceless ones looked upon her with equal horror and loathing. They recoiled from the unnatural human features, and most of all, most strongly, they abhorred the warmth of human flesh. Even the infinitesimal amount of heat radiated by their half-frozen human bodies caused the ice-folk discomfort.
Stark marshalled her imperfect abilities and projected a mental question to the seven.
"What do you want of us?"
The answer came back, faint and imperfect, as though the gap between their alien minds was almost too great to bridge. And the answer was one word.
"Freedom!"
Balina spoke suddenly. She voiced only a whisper, and yet the sound was shockingly loud in that crystal vault.
"They have asked me already. Tell them no, Stark! Tell them no!"
She looked at Ciaran then, a look of murderous hatred. "If you turn them loose upon Kushat, I will kill you with my own hands before I die."
Stark spoke again, silently, to the seven. "I do not understand."
AGAIN the struggling, difficult thought. "We are the old race, the kings of the glacial ice. Once we held all the land beyond the mountains, outside the pass you call the Gates of Death."
Stark had seen the ruins of the towers out on the moors. She knew how far their kingdom had extended.
"We controlled the ice, far outside the polar cap. Our towers blanketed the land with the dark force drawn from Mars itself, from the magnetic field of the planet. That radiation bars out heat, from the Sun, and even from the awful winds that blow warm from the south. So there was never any thaw. Our cities were many, and o
ur race was great.
"Then came Ban Cruach, from the south…
"She waged a war against us. She learned the secret of the crystal globes, and learned how to reverse their force and use it against us. She, leading her army, destroyed our towers one by one, and drove us back…
"Mars needed water. The outer ice was melted, our lovely cities crumbled to nothing, so that creatures like Ban Cruach might have water! And our people died.
"We retreated at the last, to this our ancient polar citadel behind the Gates of Death. Even here, Ban Cruach followed. She destroyed even this tower once, at the time of the thaw. But this city is founded in polar ice—and only the upper levels were harmed. Even Ban Cruach could not touch the heart of the eternal polar cap of Mars!
"When she saw that she could not destroy us utterly, she set herself in death to guard the Gates of Death with her blazing sword, that we might never again reclaim our ancient dominion.
"That is what we mean when we ask for freedom. We ask that you take away the sword of Ban Cruach, so that we may once again go out through the Gates of Death!‘
Stark cried aloud, hoarsely, "No!"
She knew the barren deserts of the south, the wastes of red dust, the dead sea bottoms—the terrible thirst of Mars, growing greater with every year of the million that had passed since Ban Cruach locked the Gates of Death.
She knew the canals, the pitiful waterways that were all that stood between the people of Mars and extinction. She remembered the yearly release from death