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 his nerve centers than at his flesh.
He could not see Ciara, who was behind him, but he heard the metallic
clashing of her mail and one small, whispered cry, and he knew that she
had fallen, too.
The glowing creatures surrounded him. He saw their bodies bending over
him, the frosty tendrils of their faces writhing as though in excitement
or delight.
Their hands touched him. Little hands with seven fingers, deft and
frail. Even his numbed flesh felt the terrible cold of their touch,
freezing as outer space. He yelled, or tried to, but they were not
abashed.
They lifted him and bore him toward the tower, a company of them,
bearing his heavy weight upon their gleaming shoulders.
He saw the tower loom high and higher still above him. 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
his face, and he was inside.
Straight overhead--a hundred feet, two hundred, he 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 him. 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 he could not see them clearly as he was carried on.
He was being carried downward. He passed slits in the wall, and knew
that the pallid lights he had seen through them were the moving bodies
of the creatures as they went up and down these high-flung, icy bridges.
He managed to turn his head to look down, and saw what was beneath him.
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 him 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 he could not move just then. One instinctive start
of horror would have thrown him and his bearers to the rock below, and
would have carried Ciara with them.
Down and down, gliding in utter silence along the descending spiral
ribbon. The great glooming crystal grew remote above him. Ice was solid
now in the slots of the walls. He wondered if they had brought Balin
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 him 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. He could see the
blurred tops of delicate minarets, the clustering roofs that shone like
chips of diamond.
Above him 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 his 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 Balin. He looked around once, and did not speak.
Stark was set on his feet, with Ciara beside him. He saw her face, and
it was terrible to see the fear in her eyes, that had never shown fear
before.
He himself was learning why men went mad beyond the Gates of Death.
Chill, dreadful fingers touched him expertly. A flash of pain drove down
his spine, and he 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 he could feel a cold, soft fingering of his brain. It came
to him 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.
He forced his mind to relax. The alien impulse was instantly stronger.
He sent out his own questing thought and felt it brush the edges of a
consciousness so utterly foreign to his own that he knew he could never
probe it, even had he had the skill.
He learned one thing--that the shining faceless ones looked upon him
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 his 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!_"
Balin spoke suddenly. He 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!"
He looked at Ciara then, a look of murderous hatred. "If you turn them
loose upon Kushat, I will kill you with my own hands before I die."