VII
It was past noon. He had climbed high toward the saddle of the pass.Kushat lay small below him, and he could see now the pattern of thegorges, cut ages deep in the living rock, that carried the springtorrents of the watershed around the mighty ledge on which the city wasbuilt.
The pass itself was channeled, but only by its own snows and meltingice. It was too high for a watercourse. Nevertheless, Stark thought, aman might find it hard to stay alive if he were caught there by thethaw.
He had seen nothing of Balin. The gods knew how many hours' start hehad. Stark imagined him, scrambling wild-eyed over the rocks, driven bythe same madness that had sent Thanis up into the castle to call downdestruction on Ciara's head.
The sun was brilliant but without warmth. Stark shivered, and the icywind blew strong. The cliffs hung over him, vast and sheer and crushing,and the narrow mouth of the pass was before him. He would go no farther.He would turn back, now.
But he did not. He began to walk forward, into the Gates of Death.
_The light was dim and strange at the bottom of that cleft. Little veilsof mist crept and clung between the ice and the rock, thickened, becamemore dense as he went farther and farther into the pass. He could notsee, and the wind spoke with many tongues, piping in the crevices of thecliffs._
The steps of the Earthman slowed and faltered. He had known fear in hislife before. But now he was carrying the burden of two men'sterrors--Ban Cruach's, and his own.
He stopped, enveloped in the clinging mist. He tried to reason withhimself--that Ban Cruach's fears had died a million years ago, that Otarhad come this way and lived, and Balin had come also.
But the thin veneer of civilization sloughed away and left him with thenaked bones of truth. His nostrils twitched to the smell of evil, thesubtle unclean taint that only a beast, or one as close to it as he, cansense and know. Every nerve was a point of pain, raw with apprehension.An overpowering recognition of danger, hidden somewhere, mocking at him,made his very body change, draw in upon itself and flatten forward, sothat when at last he went on again he was more like a four-footed thingthan a man walking upright.
Infinitely wary, silent, moving surely over the ice and the tumbledrock, he followed Balin. He had ceased to think. He was going now onsheer instinct.
The pass led on and on. It grew darker, and in the dim uncanny twilightthere were looming shapes that menaced him, and ghostly wings thatbrushed him, and a terrible stillness that was not broken by the eerievoices of the wind.
Rock and mist and ice. Nothing that moved or lived. And yet the sense ofdanger deepened, and when he paused the beating of his heart was likethunder in his ears.
Once, far away, he thought he heard the echoes of a man's voice crying,but he had no sight of Balin.
The pass began to drop, and the twilight deepened into a kind of sicklynight.
On and down, more slowly now, crouching, slinking, heavily oppressed,tempted to snarl at boulders and tear at wraiths of fog. He had no ideaof the miles he had travelled. But the ice was thicker now, the coldintense.
The rock walls broke off sharply. The mist thinned. The pallid darknesslifted to a clear twilight. He came to the end of the Gates of Death.
Stark stopped. Ahead of him, 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 theGates of Death as though it kept watch over whatever country lay beyond.
The figure of a man in antique Martian armor.
After a moment, Stark crept toward the cairn. He was still almost allsavage, torn between fear and fascination.
He was forced to scramble over the lower rocks of the cairn itself.Quite suddenly he felt a hard shock, and a flashing sensation of warmththat was somehow inside his own flesh, and not in any tempering of thefrozen air. He gave a startled leap forward, and whirled, looking upinto the face of the mailed figure with the confused idea that it hadreached down and struck him.
It had not moved, of course. And Stark knew, with no need of anyone totell him, that he looked into the face of Ban Cruach.
* * * * *
It was a face made for battles and for ruling, the bony ridges harsh andstrong, the hollows under them worn deep with years. Those eyes, darkshadows under the rusty helm, had dreamed high dreams, and neither agenor death had conquered them.
And even in death, Ban Cruach was not unarmed.
Clad as for battle in his ancient mail, he held upright between hishands a mighty sword. The pommel was a ball of crystal large as a man'sfist, that held within it a spark of intense brilliance. The little,blinding flame throbbed with its own force, and the sword-blade blazedwith a white, cruel radiance.
Ban Cruach, dead but frozen to eternal changelessness by the bittercold, sitting here upon his cairn for a million years and wardingforever the inner end of the Gates of Death, as his ancient city ofKushat warded the outer.
Stark took two cautious steps closer to Ban Cruach, and felt again theshock and the flaring heat in his blood. He recoiled, satisfied.
The strange force in the blazing sword made an invisible barrier acrossthe mouth of the pass, protected Ban Cruach himself. A barrier of shortwaves, he thought, of the type used in deep therapy, having no heat inthemselves but increasing the heat in body cells by increasing theirvibration. But these waves were stronger than any he 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 man.
Stark shivered. He turned from the sombre, brooding form of Ban Cruachand his eyes followed the gaze of the dead king, out beyond the cairn.
He looked across this forbidden land within the Gates of Death.
At his back was the mountain barrier. Before him, a handful of miles tothe north, the terminus of the polar cap rose like a cliff of bluishcrystal soaring up to touch the early stars. Locked in between those twotitanic walls was a great valley of ice.
White and glimmering that valley was, and very still, and verybeautiful, the ice shaped gracefully into curving domes and hollows.And in the center of it stood a dark tower of stone, a cyclopean bulkthat Stark knew must go down an unguessable distance to its base on thebedrock. It was like the tower in which Camar had died. But this one wasnot a broken ruin. It loomed with alien arrogance, and within its bulkpallid lights flickered eerily, and it was crowned by a cloud ofshimmering darkness.
_It was like the tower of his dread vision, the tower that he had seen,not as Eric John Stark, but as Ban Cruach!_
Stark's gaze dropped slowly from the evil tower to the curving ice ofthe valley. And the fear within him grew beyond all bounds.
He had seen that, too, in his vision. The glimmering ice, the domes andhollows of it. He had looked down through it at the city that laybeneath, and he had seen those who came and went in the buried streets.
Stark hunkered down. For a long while he did not stir.
He did not want to go out there. He did not want to go out from thegrim, warning figure of Ban Cruach with his blazing sword, into thatsilent valley. He was afraid, afraid of what he might see if he wentthere and looked down through the ice, afraid of the final dreadfulfillment of his vision.
But he had come after Balin, and Balin must be out there somewhere. Hedid not want to go, but he was himself, and he must.
* * * * *
He went, going very softly, out toward the tower of stone. And there wasno sound in all that land.
The last of the twilight had faded. The ice gleamed, faintly luminousunder the stars, and there was light beneath it, a soft radiance thatfilled all the valley with the glow of a buried moon.
Stark tried to keep his eyes upon the tower. He did not wish to lookdown at what lay under his stealthy feet.
Inevitably, he looked.
_The temples and the palaces glittering in the ice...._
Level
upon level, going down. Wells of soft light spanned with soaringbridges, slender spires rising, an endless variation of streets andcrystal walls exquisitely patterned, above and below and overlapping, sothat it was like looking down through a thousand giant snowflakes. Ametropolis of gossamer and frost, fragile and lovely as a dream, lockedin the clear, pure vault of the ice.
Stark saw the people of the city passing along the bright streets, theiroutlines blurred by the icy vault as things are half obscured by water.The creatures of vision, vaguely shining, infinitely evil.
He shut his eyes and waited until the shock and the dizziness left him.Then he set his gaze resolutely on the tower, and crept on, over theglassy sky that covered those buried streets.
Silence. Even the wind was hushed.
He had gone perhaps half the distance when the cry rang out.
It burst upon the valley with a shocking violence. "_Stark! Stark!_" Theice rang with it, curving ridges picked up his name and flung it backand 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 starsthere was light enough to see the cairn behind him, and the dim figureatop it with the shining sword.
Light enough to see Ciara, and the dark knot of riders who had followedher through the Gates of Death.
She cried his name again. "Come back! Come back!"
The ice of the valley answered mockingly, "_Come back! Come back!_" andStark was gripped with a terror that held him motionless.
She should not have called him. She should not have made a sound in thatdeathly place.
A man's hoarse scream rose above the flying echoes. The riders turnedand fled suddenly, the squealing, hissing beasts crowding each other,floundering wildly on the rocks of the cairn, stampeding back into thepass.
Ciara was left alone. Stark saw her fight the rearing beast she rodeand then flung herself out of the saddle and let it go. She came towardhim, running, clad all in her black armor, the great axe swinging high.
"Behind you, Stark! Oh, gods of Mars!"
He turned then and saw them, coming out from the tower of stone, thepale, shining creatures that move so swiftly across the ice, so fleetand swift that no man living could outrun them.
* * * * *
He shouted to Ciara to turn back. He drew his sword and over hisshoulder he cursed her in a black fury because he could hear her mailedfeet coming on behind him.
_The gliding creatures, sleek and slender, reedlike, bending, delicateas wraiths, their bodies shaped from northern rainbows of amethyst androse--if they should touch Ciara, if their loathsome hands should touchher...._
Stark let out one raging catlike scream, and rushed them.
The opalescent bodies slipped away beyond his reach. The creatureswatched him.
They had no faces, but they watched. They were eyeless but not blind,earless, but not without hearing. The inquisitive tendrils that formedtheir sensory organs stirred and shifted like the petals of ungodlyflowers, and the color of them was the white frost-fire that dances onthe snow.
"Go back, Ciara!"
But she would not go, and he knew that they would not have let her. Shereached him, and they set their backs together. The shining ones ringedthem round, many feet away across the ice, and watched the long swordand the great hungry axe, and there was something in the lissome swayingof their bodies that suggested laughter.
"You fool," said Stark. "You bloody fool."
"And you?" answered Ciara. "Oh, yes, I know about Balin. That mad girl,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?"
She did not answer that. "They won't fight us, Stark. Do you think wecould make it back to the cairn?"
"No. But we can try."
Guarding each others' backs, they began to walk toward Ban Cruach andthe 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 hebegan to guess the riddle of the Gates of Death.
The shining ones glided with them, out of reach. They did not try to barthe way. They formed a circle around the man and woman, moving with themand around them at the same time, an endless weaving chain of manybodies shining with soft jewel tones of color.
They drew closer and closer to the cairn, to the brooding figure of BanCruach and his sword. It crossed Stark's mind that the creatures wereplaying with him and Ciara. Yet they had no weapons. Almost, he began tohope....
From the tower where the shimmering cloud of darkness clung came a blackcrescent of force that swept across the ice-field like a sickle andgathered the two humans in.
Stark felt a shock of numbing cold that turned his nerves to ice. Hissword dropped from his hand, and he heard Ciara's axe go down. His bodywas without strength, without feeling, dead.
He fell, and the shining ones glided in toward him.