"Yes. Yes! And yet...." Camar looked at Stark, his eyes filling suddenly
with tears. "No. The North is not used to strangers. With me, you might
have been safe. But alone.... No, Stark. You have risked too much
already. Go back, out of the Norlands, while you can."
He lay back on the blankets. Stark saw that a bluish pallor had come
into the hollows of his cheeks.
"Camar," he said. And again, "Camar!"
"Yes?"
"Go in peace, Camar. I will take the talisman to Kushat."
The Martian sighed, and smiled, and Stark was glad that he had made the
promise.
"The riders of Mekh are wolves," said Camar suddenly. "They hunt these
gorges. Look out for them."
"I will."
Stark's knowledge of the geography of this part of Mars was vague
indeed, but he knew that the mountain valleys of Mekh lay ahead and to
the north, between him and Kushat. Camar had told him of these upland
warriors. He was willing to heed the warning.
Camar had done with talking. Stark knew that he had not long to wait.
The wind spoke with the voice of a great organ. The moons had set and it
was very dark outside the tower, except for the white glimmering of the
snow. Stark looked up at the brooding walls, and shivered. There was a
smell of death already in the air.
To keep from thinking, he bent closer to the fire, studying the lens.
There were scratches on the bezel, as though it had been held sometime
in a clamp, or setting, like a jewel. An ornament, probably, worn as a
badge of rank. Strange ornament for a barbarian king, in the dawn of
Mars. The firelight made tiny dancing sparks in the endless inner
facets. Quite suddenly, he had a curious feeling that the thing was
alive.
A pang of primitive and unreasoning fear shot through him, and he fought
it down. His vision was beginning to blur, and he shut his eyes, and in
the darkness it seemed to him that he could see and hear....
* * * * *
He started up, shaken now with an eerie terror, and raised his hand to
hurl the talisman away. But the part of him that had learned with much
pain and effort to be civilized made him stop, and think.
He sat down again. An instrument of hypnosis? Possibly. And yet that
fleeting touch of sight and sound had not been his own, out of his own
memories.
He was tempted now, fascinated, like a child that plays with fire. The
talisman had been worn somehow. Where? On the breast? On the brow?
He tried the first, with no result. Then he touched the flat surface of
the lens to his forehead.
_The great tower of stone rose up monstrous to the sky. It was whole,
and there were pallid lights within that stirred and flickered, and it
was crowned with a shimmering darkness._
He lay outside the tower, on his belly, and he was filled with fear and
a great anger, and a loathing such as turns the bones to water. There
was no snow. There was ice everywhere, rising to half the tower's
height, sheathing the ground.
Ice. Cold and clear and beautiful--and deadly.
He moved. He glided snakelike, with infinite caution, over the smooth
surface. The tower was gone, and far below him was a city. He saw the
temples and the palaces, the glittering lovely city beneath him in the
ice, blurred and fairylike and strange, a dream half glimpsed through
crystal.
He saw the Ones that lived there, moving slowly through the streets. He
could not see them clearly, only the vague shining of their bodies, and
he was glad.
He hated them, with a hatred that conquered even his fear, which was
great indeed.
He was not Eric John Stark. He was Ban Cruach.
The tower and the city vanished, swept away on a reeling tide.
He stood beneath a scarp of black rock, notched with a single pass. The
cliffs hung over him, leaning out their vast bulk as though to crush
him, and the narrow mouth of the pass was full of evil laughter where
the wind went by.
He began to walk forward, into the pass. He was quite alone.
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 he went farther and farther into the pass. He could not
see, and the wind spoke with many tongues, piping in the crevices of the
cliffs.
All at once there was a shadow in the mist before him, a dim gigantic
shape that moved toward him, and he knew that he looked at death. He
cried out....
It was Stark who yelled in blind atavistic fear, and the echo of his own
cry brought him up standing, shaking in every limb. He had dropped the
talisman. It lay gleaming in the snow at his feet, and the alien
memories were gone--and Camar was dead.
After a time he crouched down, breathing harshly. He did not want to
touch the lens again. The part of him that had learned to fear strange
gods and evil spirits with every step he took, the primitive aboriginal
that lay so close under the surface of his mind, warned him to leave it,
to run away, to desert this place of death and ruined stone.
He forced himself to take it up. He did not look at it. He wrapped it in
the bit of silk and replaced it inside the iron boss, and clasped the
belt around his waist. Then he found the small flask that lay with his
gear beside the fire and took a long pull, and tried to think rationally
of the thing that had happened.
Memories. Not his own, but the memories of Ban Cruach, a million years
ago in the morning of a world. Memories of hate, a secret war against
unhuman beings that dwelt in crystal cities cut in the living ice, and
used these ruined towers for some dark purpose of their own.
Was that the meaning of the talisman, the power that lay within it? Had
Ban Cruach, by some elder and forgotten science, imprisoned the echoes
of his own mind in the crystal?
Why? Perhaps as a warning, as a reminder of ageless, alien danger beyond
the Gates of Death?
Suddenly one of the beasts tethered outside the ruined tower started up
from its sleep with a hissing snarl.
Instantly Stark became motionless.
They came silently on their padded feet, the rangy mountain brutes
moving daintily through the sprawling ruin. Their riders too were
silent--tall men with fierce eyes and russet hair, wearing leather coats
and carrying each a long, straight spear.
There were a score of them around the tower in the windy gloom. Stark
did not bother to draw his gun. He had learned very young the difference
between courage and idiocy.
He walked out toward them, slowly lest one of them be startled into
spearing him, yet not slowly enough to denote fear. And he held up his
right hand and gave them greeting.
They did not answer him. They sat their restive mounts and stared at
him, and Stark knew that Camar had spoken the truth. These were the
riders of Mekh, and they were wolves.