The ice of the valley answered mockingly, "_Come back! Come back!_" and
Stark was gripped with a terror that held him motionless.
She should not have called him. She should not have made a sound in that
deathly place.
A man's hoarse scream rose above the flying echoes. The riders turned
and fled suddenly, the squealing, hissing beasts crowding each other,
floundering wildly on the rocks of the cairn, stampeding back into the
pass.
Ciara was left alone. Stark saw her fight the rearing beast she rode
and then flung herself out of the saddle and let it go. She came toward
him, 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, the
pale, shining creatures that move so swiftly across the ice, so fleet
and swift that no man living could outrun them.
* * * * *
He shouted to Ciara to turn back. He drew his sword and over his
shoulder he cursed her in a black fury because he could hear her mailed
feet coming on behind him.
_The gliding creatures, sleek and slender, reedlike, bending, delicate
as wraiths, their bodies shaped from northern rainbows of amethyst and
rose--if they should touch Ciara, if their loathsome hands should touch
her...._
Stark let out one raging catlike scream, and rushed them.
The opalescent bodies slipped away beyond his reach. The creatures
watched him.
They had no faces, but they watched. They were eyeless but not blind,
earless, but not without hearing. The inquisitive tendrils that formed
their sensory organs stirred and shifted like the petals of ungodly
flowers, and the color of them was the white frost-fire that dances on
the snow.
"Go back, Ciara!"
But she would not go, and he knew that they would not have let her. She
reached him, and they set their backs together. The shining ones ringed
them round, many feet away across the ice, and watched the long sword
and the great hungry axe, and there was something in the lissome swaying
of 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 we
could make it back to the cairn?"
"No. But we can try."
Guarding each others' backs, they began to walk toward Ban Cruach and
the 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 he
began to guess the riddle of the Gates of Death.
The shining ones glided with them, out of reach. They did not try to bar
the way. They formed a circle around the man and woman, moving with them
and around them at the same time, an endless weaving chain of many
bodies shining with soft jewel tones of color.
They drew closer and closer to the cairn, to the brooding figure of Ban
Cruach and his sword. It crossed Stark's mind that the creatures were
playing with him and Ciara. Yet they had no weapons. Almost, he began to
hope....
From the tower where the shimmering cloud of darkness clung came a black
crescent of force that swept across the ice-field like a sickle and
gathered the two humans in.
Stark felt a shock of numbing cold that turned his nerves to ice. His
sword dropped from his hand, and he heard Ciara's axe go down. His body
was without strength, without feeling, dead.
He fell, and the shining ones glided in toward him.