turn toward us with the sword, the man and the woman will die. And you will die as well. For neither you nor any other can now use the sword as a weapon of offense."
Stark ran on. She was thinking then only of Ciaran, with the frost-crystals gleaming on his marble flesh and his eyes full of mute torment.
The cairn loomed up ahead, dark and high. It seemed to Stark that the brooding figure of Ban Cruach watched her coming with those shadowed eyes beneath the rusty helm. The great sword blazed between those dead, frozen hands.
The ice-folk had slowed their forward rush. They stopped and waited, well back from the cairn.
Stark reached the edge of tumbled rock. She felt the first warm flare of the force-waves in her blood, and slowly the chill began to creep out from her bones. She climbed, scrambling upward over the rough stones of the cairn.
Abruptly, then, at Ban Cruach's feet, she slipped and fell. For a second it seemed that she could not move.
Her back was turned toward the ice-folk. Her body was bent forward, and shielded so, her hands worked with feverish speed.
From her cloak she tore a strip of cloth. From the iron boss she took the glittering lens, the talisman of Ban Cruach. Stark laid the lens against her brow, and bound it on.
The remembered shock, the flood and sweep of memories that were not her own. The mind of Ban Cruach thundering its warning, its hard-won knowledge of an ancient, epic war …
She opened her own mind wide to receive those memories. Before she had fought against them. Now she knew that they were her one small chance in this swift gamble with death. Two things only of her own she kept firm in that staggering tide of another woman's memories. Two names—Ciaran and Balina.
She rose up again. And now her face had a strange look, a curious duality. The features had not changed, but somehow the lines of the flesh had altered subtly, so that it was almost as though the old unconquerable queen herself had risen again in battle.
She mounted the last step or two and stood before Ban Cruach. A shudder ran through her, a sort of gathering and settling of the flesh, as though Stark's being had accepted the stranger within it. Her eyes, cold and pale as the very ice that sheathed the valley, burned with a cruel light.
She reached and took the sword, out of the frozen hands of Ban Cruach.
As though it were her own, she knew the secret of the metal rings that bound its hilt, below the ball of crystal. The savage throb of the invisible radiation beat in her quickening flesh. She was warm again, her blood running swiftly, her muscles sure and strong. She touched the rings and turned them.
The fan-shaped aura of force that had closed the Gates of Death narrowed in, and as it narrowed it leaped up from the blade of the sword in a tongue of pale fire, faintly shimmering, made visible now by the full focus of its strength.
Stark felt the wave of horror bursting from the minds of the ice-folk as they perceived what she had done, And she laughed.
Her bitter laughter rang harsh across the valley as she turned to face them, and she heard in her brain the shuddering, silent shriek that went up from all that gathered company…
"Ban Cruach! Ban Cruach has returned!"
They had touched her mind. They knew.
HE LAUGHED AGAIN, and swept the sword in a flashing arc, and watched the long bright blade of force strike out more terrible than steel, against the rainbow bodies of the shining ones.
They fell. Like flowers under a scythe they fell, and all across the ice the ones who were yet untouched turned about in their hundreds and fled back toward the tower.
Stark came leaping down the cairn, the talisman of Ban Cruach bound upon her brow, the sword of Ban Cruach blazing in her hand.
She swung that awful blade as she ran. The force-beam that sprang from it cut through the press of creatures fleeing before her, hampered by their own numbers as they crowded back through the archway.
She had only a few short seconds to do what she had to do.
Rushing with great strides across the ice, spurning the withered bodies of the dead… And then, from the glooming darkness that hovered around the tower of stone, the black cold beam struck down.
Like a coiling whip it lashed her. The deadly numbness invaded the cells of her flesh, ached in the marrow of her bones. The bright force of the sword battled the chill invaders, and a corrosive agony tore at Stark's inner body where the antipathetic radiations waged war.
Her steps faltered. She gave one hoarse cry of pain, and then her limbs failed and she went heavily to her knees.
Instinct only made her cling to the sword. Waves of blinding anguish racked her. The coiling lash of darkness encircled her, and its touch was the abysmal cold of outer space, striking deep into her heart.
Hold the sword close, hold it closer, like a shield. The pain is great, but I will not die unless I drop the sword.
Ban Cruach the mighty had fought this fight before.
Stark raised the sword again, close against her body. The fierce pulse of its brightness drove back the cold. Not far, for the freezing touch was very strong. But far enough so that she could rise again and stagger on.
The dark force of the tower writhed and licked about her. She could not escape it. She slashed it in a blind fury with the blazing sword, and where the forces met a flicker of lightning leaped in the air, but it would not be beaten back.
She screamed at it, a raging cat-cry that was all Stark, all primitive fury at the necessity of pain. And she forced herself to run, to drag her tortured body faster across the ice. Because Ciaran is dying, because the dark cold wants me to stop…
The ice-folk jammed and surged against the archway, in a panic hurry to take refuge far below in their many-levelled city. She raged at them, too. They were part of the cold, part of the pain. Because of them Ciaran and Balina were dying. She sent the blade of force lancing among them, her hatred rising full tide to join the hatred of Ban Cruach that lodged in her mind.
Stab and cut and slash with the long terrible beam of brightness. They fell and fell, the hideous shining folk, and Stark sent the light of Ban Cruach's weapon sweeping through the tower itself, through the openings that were like windows in the stone.
Again and again, stabbing through those open slits as she ran. And suddenly the dark beam of force ceased to move. She tore out of it, and it did not follow her, remaining stationary as though fastened to the ice.
The battle of forces left her flesh. The pain was gone. She sped on to the tower.
She was close now. The withered bodies lay in heaps before the arch. The last of the ice-folk had forced their way inside.
Holding the sword level like a lance, Stark leaped in through the arch, into the tower.
THE SHINING ONES were dead where the destroying warmth had touched them. The flying spiral ribbons of ice were swept clean of them, the arching bridges and the galleries of that upper part of the tower.
They were dead along the ledge, under the control bank. They were dead across the mechanism that spun the frosty doom around Ciaran and Balina. The whirling disc still hummed.
Below, in that stupendous well, the crowding ice-folk made a seething pattern of color on the narrow ways. But Stark turned her back on them and ran along the ledge, and in her was the heavy knowledge that she had come too late.
The frost had thickened around Ciaran and Balina. It encrusted them like stiffened lace, and now their flesh was overlaid with a diamond shell of ice.
Surely they could not live!
She raised the sword to smite down at the whirring disc, to smash it, but there was no need. When the full force of that concentrated beam struck it, meeting the focus of shadow that it held, there was a violent flare of light and a shattering of crystal. The mechanism was silent.
The glooming veil was gone from around the ice-shelled woman and man. Stark forgot the creatures in the shaft below her. She turned the blazing sword full upon Ciaran and Balina.
It would not affect the thin covering of ice. If the man and the woman we
re dead, it would not affect their flesh, any more than it had Ban Cruach's. But if they lived, if there was still a spark, a flicker beneath that frozen mail, the radiation would touch their blood with warmth, start again the pulse of life in their bodies.
She waited, watching Ciaran's face. It was still as marble, and as white.
Something—instinct, or the warning mind of Ban Cruach that had learned a million years ago to beware the creatures of the ice—made her glance behind her.
Stealthy, swift and silent, up the winding ways they came. They had guessed that she had forgotten them in her anxiety. The sword was turned away from them now, and if they could take her from behind, stun her with the chill force of the sceptrelike rods they carried…
She slashed them with the sword. She saw the flickering beam go down and down the shaft, saw the bodies fall like drops of rain, rebounding here and there from the flying spans and carrying the living with them.
She thought of the many levels of the city. She thought of all the countless thousands that must inhabit them. She could hold them off in the shaft as long as she wished if she had no other need for the sword. But she knew that as soon as she turned her back they would be upon her again, and if she should once fall…
She could not spare a moment, or a chance.
She looked at Ciaran, not knowing what to do, and it seemed to her that the sheathing frost had melted, just a little, around his face.
Desperately, she struck down again at the creatures in the shaft, and then the