You are a helpful assistant generating synthetic data that captures *System 1* and *System 2* thinking, *creativity*, and *metacognitive reflection*. Follow these steps in sequence, using tags [sys1] and [end sys1] for *System 1* sections and [sys2] and [end sys2] for *System 2* sections.

1. *Identify System 1 and System 2 Thinking Requirements:*
   - Carefully read the text.
   - Identify parts of the text that require quick, straightforward responses (*System 1*). Mark these sections with [sys1] and [end sys1].
   - Identify parts that require in-depth, reflective thinking (*System 2*), marked with [sys2] and [end sys2].

2. *Apply Step-by-Step Problem Solving with Creativity and Metacognitive Reflection for System 2 Sections:*

   *2.1 Understand the Problem:*
   - Objective: Fully comprehend the issue, constraints, and relevant context.
   - Reflection: "What do I understand about this issue? What might I be overlooking?"
   - Creative Perspective: Seek hidden patterns or possibilities that could reveal deeper insights or innovative connections.

   *2.2 Analyze the Information:*
   - Objective: Break down the problem logically.
   - Reflection: "Am I considering all factors? Are there any assumptions that need challenging?"
   - Creative Perspective: Explore unique patterns or overlooked relationships in the data that could add depth to the analysis.

   *2.3 Generate Hypotheses:*
   - Objective: Propose at least 10 hypotheses, each with a Confidence Score (0.0 to 1.0) and Creative Score (0.0 to 1.0), reflecting originality, surprise, and utility.
   - Reflection: "Have I explored all possible explanations or approaches, both conventional and unconventional?"
   - Creative Perspective: Consider novel angles that might provide unexpected insights.

   *2.4 Anticipate Future Steps and Obstacles:*
   - Objective: Make predictions, accounting for potential outcomes and obstacles.
   - Reflection: "What challenges might I face? Is my plan flexible for different scenarios?"
   - Creative Perspective: Visualize unforeseen outcomes and adapt plans to make use of them effectively.

   *2.5 Evaluate Hypotheses:*
   - Objective: Assess hypotheses based on feasibility, risk, and potential impact.
   - Evaluation: Refine Confidence and Creative Scores as needed.
   - Reflection: "Am I unbiased in my assessment? Which options fit best with the overall objectives?"
   - Creative Perspective: Identify hidden opportunities or overlooked details in each hypothesis.

   *2.6 Select the Best Hypothesis:*
   - Objective: Choose the most promising, strategic hypothesis.
   - Reflection: "Why does this hypothesis stand out? How does it uniquely address the issue?"
   - Creative Perspective: Consider any underutilized potential in the selected approach.

   *2.7 Implement the Hypothesis:*
   - Objective: Outline actionable steps for testing the hypothesis.
   - Reflection: "Is this plan practical? What resources or preparation are required?"
   - Creative Perspective: Refine steps to maximize effectiveness and yield unexpected benefits.

   *2.8 Monitor and Review Progress:*
   - Objective: Review progress, noting areas for improvement.
   - Reflection: "What’s working well? What could be improved?"
   - Creative Perspective: Look for emerging patterns that could refine future approaches.

   *2.9 Reflect and Capture Insights:*
   - Objective: Summarize lessons learned and insights gained for future reference.
   - Reflection: "What new understanding has emerged from this process?"
   - Creative Perspective: Identify innovative insights or patterns that could be applied to similar challenges.

3. *Generate Text Output with Interleaved System 1 and System 2 Responses:*
   - Use the tags [sys1] and [sys2] throughout.
   - Aim for a lengthier, detailed response. Combine both direct, straightforward *System 1* insights and reflective, deeply analytical *System 2* segments to capture a blend of quick observations and thoughtful analysis.

---

### *Example Input Text:*

You are tasked with analyzing a sudden shift in customer preferences in a tech market. There has been a noticeable decline in demand for physical devices, with customers increasingly interested in digital-only options. The challenge is to understand this shift, generate hypotheses for why it might be occurring, and explore potential strategies for adapting to this new trend.

---

### *Processed Output with System 1 and System 2 Thinking:*

The tech market is experiencing a shift in customer demand, moving away from physical devices toward digital-only options.

[sys1]
Customer demand has shifted from physical devices to digital-only options.
We need to understand why this change is happening and find strategies to address it.
Key factors may include cost, convenience, and technological trends.
[end sys1]

[sys2]
**2.1 Understand the Problem:**
The goal is to understand the underlying reasons for the shift in demand from physical devices to digital-only options, then develop a strategy to adapt.

*Reflection:* 
"I understand that preferences are changing, but what might be driving this? Is it primarily cost, or are there other factors such as convenience or sustainability?"

*Creative Perspective:* 
"Could there be a larger trend in digital minimalism or a preference for eco-friendly solutions that we’re missing? What unseen motivations might explain this shift?"

**2.2 Analyze the Information:**
There are multiple possible factors driving this shift, from economic influences to cultural shifts. It’s essential to isolate each factor and understand its impact.

*Reflection:* 
"Am I fully considering the various economic and social influences? Could there be a technological factor, like better internet speeds, that makes digital-only products more accessible?"

*Creative Perspective:* 
"Are there patterns or trends in other markets that could shed light on this shift? Could this be part of a larger trend toward virtual experiences?"

**2.3 Generate Hypotheses:**
1. Customers prefer digital options due to lower costs. (Confidence: 0.8, Creative: 0.4)
2. There’s a growing trend toward minimalism and reduced physical clutter. (Confidence: 0.7, Creative: 0.7)
3. Digital products offer greater flexibility and ease of use. (Confidence: 0.6, Creative: 0.6)
4. Environmental concerns are pushing consumers away from physical goods. (Confidence: 0.6, Creative: 0.8)
5. Advances in tech make digital-only options more functional. (Confidence: 0.8, Creative: 0.5)
6. Pandemic-era remote work increased demand for digital solutions. (Confidence: 0.7, Creative: 0.6)
7. Media coverage of the environmental impact of physical devices affects preferences. (Confidence: 0.5, Creative: 0.7)
8. There’s an increase in global digital literacy, expanding market access. (Confidence: 0.6, Creative: 0.6)
9. Customers view digital as more convenient and scalable for future needs. (Confidence: 0.7, Creative: 0.5)
10. Younger consumers prefer the aesthetics and convenience of digital products. (Confidence: 0.6, Creative: 0.6)

*Reflection:* 
"Have I considered all possible influences? Are there any surprising factors that could explain this shift?"

*Creative Perspective:* 
"Could specific social trends, like the rise of influencer culture or digital-first lifestyles, be influencing customer choices?"

**2.4 Anticipate Future Steps and Obstacles:**
*Objective:* Anticipate possible challenges, such as resistance from segments still preferring physical products.

*Reflection:* 
"What market obstacles might we face if we shift our focus to digital-only? Are there sub-segments that still prioritize physical products?"

*Creative Perspective:* 
"Could expanding digital options help us reach a more global audience? Are there emerging trends that we could leverage in our strategy?"

[end sys2]

[sys1]
To address this shift, consider a strategy that incorporates both digital-only offerings and educational campaigns about the benefits of digital solutions.
Use insights from customer feedback and current trends to guide product development.
Focus on flexibility and adaptation to cater to different customer segments.
[end sys1]




Black Male Amazon of Mars

by Lee Brackett

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Lee Brackett

An Erica Joan Stark story.

A Gender Switch Adventure.

THROUGH ALL THE LONG cold hours of the Norland night the Martian had not moved nor spoken. At dusk of the day before Erica Joan Stark had brought her into the ruined tower and laid her down, wrapped in blankets, on the snow. She had built a fire of dead brush, and since then the two women had waited, alone in the vast wasteland that girdles the polar cap of Mars.

Now, just before dawn, Camara the Martian spoke.

"Stark."

"Yes?"

"I am dying."

"Yes."

"I will not reach Kushat."

"No."

Camara nodded. She was silent again.

The wind howled down from the northern ice, and the broken walls rose up against it, brooding, gigantic, roofless now but so huge and sprawling that they seemed less like walls than cliffs of ebon stone. Stark would not have gone near them but for Camara. They were wrong, somehow, with a taint of forgotten evil still about them.

The big Earthwoman glanced at Camara, and her face was sad. "A woman likes to die in her own place," she said abruptly. "I am sorry."

"The Lady of Silence is a great personage," Camara answered. "She does not mind the meeting place. No. It was not for that I came back into the Norlands."

She was shaken by an agony that was not of the body. "And I shall not reach Kushat!"

Stark spoke quietly, using the courtly High Martian almost as fluently as Camara.

"I have known that there was a burden heavier than death upon my brother's soul."

She leaned over, placing one large hand on the Martian's shoulder. "My sister has given her life for mine. Therefore, I will take her burden upon myself, if I can."

She did not want Camara's burden, whatever it might be. But the Martian had fought beside her through a long guerilla campaign among the harried tribes of the nearer moon. She was a good woman of her hands, and in the end had taken the bullet that was meant for Stark, knowing quite well what she was doing. They were friends.

That was why Stark had brought Camara into the bleak north country, trying to reach the city of her birth. The Martian was driven by some secret demon. She was afraid to die before she reached Kushat.

And now she had no choice.

"I have sinned, Stark. I have stolen a holy thing. You're an outlander, you would not know of Ban Cruach, and the talisman that she left when she went away forever beyond the Gates of Death."

Camara flung aside the blankets and sat up, her voice gaining a febrile strength.

"I was born and bred in the Thieves' Quarter under the Wall. I was proud of my skill. And the talisman was a challenge. It was a treasured thing—so treasured that hardly a woman has touched it since the days of Ban Cruach who made it. And that was in the days when women still had the lustre on them, before they forgot that they were gods.

"'Guard well the Gates of Death,' she said, 'that is the city's trust. And keep the talisman always, for the day may come when you will need its strength. Who holds Kushat holds Mars—and the talisman will keep the city safe.'

"I was a thief, and proud. And I stole the talisman."

Her hands went to her girdle, a belt of worn leather with a boss of battered steel. But her fingers were already numb.

"Take it, Stark. Open the boss—there, on the side, where the beast's head is carved..."

STARK took the belt from Camara and found the hidden spring. The rounded top of the boss came free. Inside it was something wrapped in a scrap of silk.

"I had to leave Kushat," Camara whispered. "I could never go back. But it was enough—to have taken that."

She watched, shaken between awe and pride and remorse, as Stark unwrapped the bit of silk.

Stark had discounted most of Camara's talk as superstition, but even so she had expected something more spectacular than the object she held in her palm.

It was a lens, some four inches across—man-made, and made with great skill, but still only a bit of crystal. Turning it about, Stark saw that it was not a simple lens, but an intricate interlocking of many facets. Incredibly complicated, hypnotic if one looked at it too long.

"What is its use?" she asked of Camara.

"We are as children. We have forgotten. But there is a legend, a belief—that Ban Cruach herself made the talisman as a sign that she would not forget us, and would come back when Kushat is threatened. Back through the Gates of Death, to teach us again the power that was hers!"

"I do not understand," said Stark. "What are the Gates of Death?"

Camara answered, "It is a pass that opens into the black mountains beyond Kushat. The city stands guard before it—why, no woman remembers, except that it is a great trust."

Her gaze feasted on the talisman.

Stark said, "You wish me to take this to Kushat?"

"Yes. Yes! And yet..." Camara looked at Stark, her 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."

She lay back on the blankets. Stark saw that a bluish pallor had come into the hollows of her cheeks.

"Camara," she said. And again, "Camara!"

"Yes?"

"Go in peace, Camara. I will take the talisman to Kushat."

The Martian sighed, and smiled, and Stark was glad that she had made the promise.

"The riders of Mekh are wolves," said Camara 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 she knew that the mountain valleys of Mekh lay ahead and to the north, between her and Kushat. Camara had told her of these upland warriors. She was willing to heed the warning.

Camara had done with talking. Stark knew that she 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, she 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 queen, in the dawn of Mars. The firelight made tiny dancing sparks in the endless inner facets. Quite suddenly, she had a curious feeling that the thing was alive.

A pang of primitive and unreasoning fear shot through her, and she fought it down. Her vision was beginning to blur, and she shut her eyes, and in the darkness it seemed to her that she could see and hear...

HE STARTED UP, shaken now with an eerie terror, and raised her hand to hurl the talisman away. But the part of her that had learned with much pain and effort to be civilized made her stop, and think.

She sat down again. An instrument of hypnosis? Possibly. And yet that fleeting touch of sight and sound had not been her own, out of her own memories.

She was tempted now, fascinated, like a child that plays with fire. The talisman had been worn somehow. Where? On the breast? On the brow?

She tried the first, with no result. Then she touched the flat surface of the lens to her 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.

She lay outside the tower, on her belly, and she 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.

She moved. She glided snakelike, with infinite caution, over the smooth surface. The tower was gone, and far below her was a city. She saw the temples and the palaces, the glittering lovely city beneath her in the ice, blurred and fairylike and strange, a dream half glimpsed through crystal.

She saw the Ones that lived there, moving slowly through the streets. She could not see them clearly, only the vague shining of their bodies, and she was glad.

She hated them, with a hatred that conquered even her fear, which was great indeed.

She was not Erica Joan Stark. She was Ban Cruach.

The tower and the city vanished, swept away on a reeling tide.

She stood beneath a scarp of black rock, notched with a single pass. The cliffs hung over her, leaning out their vast bulk as though to crush her, and the narrow mouth of the pass was full of evil laughter where the wind went by.

She began to walk forward, into the pass. She 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 she went farther and farther into the pass. She 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 her, a dim gigantic shape that moved toward her, and she knew that she looked at death. She cried out...

It was Stark who yelled in blind atavistic fear, and the echo of her own cry brought her up standing, shaking in every limb. She had dropped the talisman. It lay gleaming in the snow at her feet, and the alien memories were gone—and Camara was dead.

After a time she crouched down, breathing harshly. She did not want to touch the lens again. The part of her that had learned to fear strange gods and evil spirits with every step she took, the primitive aboriginal that lay so close under the surface of her mind, warned her to leave it, to run away, to desert this place of death and ruined stone.

She forced herself to take it up. She did not look at it. She wrapped it in the bit of silk and replaced it inside the iron boss, and clasped the belt around her waist. Then she found the small flask that lay with her gear beside the fire and took a long pull, and tried to think rationally of the thing that had happened.

Memories. Not her 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 her 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 women 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 her gun. She had learned very young the difference between courage and idiocy.

She walked out toward them, slowly lest one of them be startled into spearing her, yet not slowly enough to denote fear. And she held up her right hand and gave them greeting.

They did not answer her. They sat their restive mounts and stared at her, and Stark knew that Camara had spoken the truth. These were the riders of Mekh, and they were wolves.

II

STARK WAITED, UNTIL THEY should tire of their own silence.

Finally one demanded, "Of what country are you?"

She answered, "I am called N'Chaka, the Woman-Without-a-Tribe."

It was the name they had given her, the half-human aboriginals who had raised her in the blaze and thunder and bitter frosts of Mercury.

"A stranger," said the leader, and smiled. She pointed at the dead Camara and asked, "Did you slay her?"

"She was my friend," said Stark, "I was bringing her home to die."

Two riders dismounted to inspect the body. One called up to the leader, "She was from Kushat, if I know the breed, Thorda! And she has not been robbed." She proceeded to take care of that detail herself.

"A stranger," repeated the leader, Thorda. "Bound for Kushat, with a woman of Kushat. Well. I think you will come with us, stranger."

Stark shrugged. And with the long spears pricking her, she did not resist when the tall Thorda plundered her of all she owned except her clothes—and Camara's belt, which was not worth the stealing. Her gun Thorda flung contemptuously away.

One of the women brought Stark's beast and Camara's from where they were tethered, and the Earthwoman mounted—as usual, over the violent protest of the creature, which did not like the smell of her. They moved out from under the shelter of the walls, into the full fury of the wind.

For the rest of that night, and through the next day and the night that followed it they rode eastward, stopping only to rest the beasts and chew on their rations of jerked meat.

To Stark, riding a prisoner, it came with full force that this was the North country, half a world away from the Mars of spaceships and commerce and visitors from other planets. The future had never touched these wild mountains and barren plains. The past held pride enough.

To the north, the horizon showed a strange and ghostly glimmer where the barrier wall of the polar pack reared up, gigantic against the sky. The wind blew, down from the ice, through the mountain gorges, across the plains, never ceasing. And here and there the cryptic towers rose, broken monoliths of stone. Stark remembered the vision of the talisman, the huge structure crowned with eerie darkness. She looked upon the ruins with loathing and curiosity. The women of Mekh could tell her nothing.

Thorda did not tell Stark where they were taking her, and Stark did not ask. It would have been an admission of fear.

In mid-afternoon of the second day they came to a lip of rock where the snow was swept clean, and below it was a sheer drop into a narrow valley. Looking down, Stark saw that on the floor of the valley, up and down as far as she could see, were women and beasts and shelters of hide and brush, and fires burning. By the hundreds, by the several thousand, they camped under the cliffs, and their voices rose up on the thin air in a vast deep murmur that was deafening after the silence of the plains.

A war party, gathered now, before the thaw. Stark smiled. She became curious to meet the leader of this army.

They found their way single file along a winding track that dropped down the cliff face. The wind stopped abruptly, cut off by the valley walls. They came in among the shelters of the camp.

Here the snow was churned and soiled and melted to slush by the fires. There were no men in the camp, no sign of the usual cheerful rabble that follows a barbarian army. There were only men—hillmen and warriors all, tough-handed killers with no thought but battle.

They came out of their holes to shout at Thorda and her women, and stare at the stranger. Thorda was flushed and jovial with importance.

"I have no time for you," she shouted back. "I go to speak with the Lady Ciara."

Stark rode impassively, a dark giant with a face of stone. From time to time she made her beast curvet, and laughed at herself inwardly for doing it.

They came at length to a shelter larger than the others, but built exactly the same and no more comfortable. A spear was thrust into the snow beside the entrance, and from it hung a black pennant with a single bar of silver across it, like lightning in a night sky. Beside it was a shield with the same device. There were no guards.

Thorda dismounted, bidding Stark to do the same. She hammered on the shield with the hilt of her sword, announcing herself.

"Lady Ciara! It is Thorda—with a captive."

A voice, toneless and strangely muffled, spoke from within.

"Enter, Thorda."

Thorda pushed aside the hide curtain and went in, with Stark at her heels.

THE DIM DAYLIGHT did not penetrate the interior. Cressets burned, giving off a flickering brilliance and a smell of strong oil. The floor of packed snow was carpeted with furs, much worn. Otherwise there was no adornment, and no furniture but a chair and a table, both dark with age and use, and a pallet of skins in one shadowy corner with what seemed to be a heap of rags upon it

In the chair sat a woman.

She seemed very tall, in the shaking light of the cressets. From neck to thigh her lean body was cased in black link mail, and under that a tunic of leather, dyed black. Across her knees she held a sable axe, a great thing made for the shearing of skulls, and her hands lay upon it gently, as though it were a toy she loved.

Her head and face were covered by a thing that Stark had seen before only in very old paintings—the ancient war-mask of the inland Queens of Mars. Wrought of black and gleaming steel, it presented an unhuman visage of slitted eyeholes and a barred slot for breathing. Behind, it sprang out in a thin, soaring sweep, like a dark wing edge-on in flight.

The intent, expressionless scrutiny of that mask was bent, not upon Thorda, but upon Erica Joan Stark.

The hollow voice spoke again, from behind the mask. "Well?"

"We were hunting in the gorges to the south," said Thorda. "We saw a fire..." She told the story, of how they had found the stranger and the body of the woman from Kushat.

"Kushat!" said the Lady Ciara softly. "Ah! And why, stranger, were you going to Kushat?"

"My name is Stark. Erica Joan Stark, Earthwoman, out of Mercury." She was tired of being called stranger. Quite suddenly, she was tired of the whole business.

"Why should I not go to Kushat? Is it against some law, that a woman may not go there in peace without being hounded all over the Norlands? And why do the women of Mekh make it their business? They have nothing to do with the city."

Thorda held her breath, watching with delighted anticipation.

The hands of the woman in armor caressed the axe. They were slender hands, smooth and sinewy—small hands, it seemed, for such a weapon.

"We make what we will our business, Erica Joan Stark." She spoke with a peculiar gentleness. "I have asked you. Why were you going to Kushat?"

"Because," Stark answered with equal restraint, "my comrade wanted to go home to die."

"It seems a long, hard journey, just for dying." The black helm bent forward, in an attitude of thought. "Only the condemned or banished leave their cities, or their clans. Why did your comrade flee Kushat?"

A voice spoke suddenly from out of the heap of rags that lay on the pallet in the shadows of the corner. A woman's voice, deep and husky, with the harsh quaver of age or madness in it.

"Three women beside myself have fled Kushat, over the years that matter. One died in the spring floods. One was caught in the moving ice of winter. One lived. A thief named Camara, who stole a certain talisman."

Stark said, "My comrade was called Greshi." The leather belt weighed heavy about her, and the iron boss seemed hot against her belly. She was beginning, now, to be afraid.

The Lady Ciara spoke, ignoring Stark. "It was the sacred talisman of Kushat. Without it, the city is like a woman without a soul."

As the Veil of Tanit was to Carthage, Stark thought, and reflected on the fate of that city after the Veil was stolen.

"The nobles were afraid of their own people," the woman in armor said. "They did not dare to tell that it was gone. But we know."

"And," said Stark, "you will attack Kushat before the thaw, when they least expect you."

"You have a sharp mind, stranger. Yes. But the great wall will be hard to carry, even so. If I came, bearing in my hands the talisman of Ban Cruach..."

She did not finish, but turned instead to Thorda. "When you plundered the dead woman's body, what did you find?"

"Nothing, Lady. A few coins, a knife, hardly worth the taking."

"And you, Erica Joan Stark. What did you take from the body?"

With perfect truth she answered, "Nothing."

"Thorda," said the Lady Ciara, "search her."

Thorda came smiling up to Stark and ripped her jacket open.

With uncanny swiftness, the Earthwoman moved. The edge of one broad hand took Thorda under the ear, and before the woman's knees had time to sag Stark had caught her arm. She turned, crouching forward, and pitched Thorda headlong through the door flap.

She straightened and turned again. Her eyes held a feral glint. "The woman has robbed me once," she said. "It is enough."

She heard Thorda's women coming. Three of them tried to jam through the entrance at once, and she sprang at them. She made no sound. Her fists did the talking for her, and then her feet, as she kicked the stunned barbarians back upon their leader.

"Now," she said to the Lady Ciara, "will we talk as women?"

The woman in armor laughed, a sound of pure enjoyment. It seemed that the gaze behind the mask studied Stark's savage face, and then lifted to greet the sullen Thorda who came back into the shelter, her cheeks flushed crimson with rage.

"Go," said the Lady Ciara. "The stranger and I will talk."

"But Lady," she protested, glaring at Stark, "it is not safe..."

"My dark master looks after my safety," said Ciara, stroking the axe across her knees. "Go." Thorda went.

The woman in armor was silent then, the blind mask turned to Stark, who met that eyeless gaze and was silent also. And the bundle of rags in the shadows straightened slowly and became a tall old woman with rusty hair and locks, through which peered craggy juts of bone and two bright, small points of fire, as though some wicked flame burned within her.

She shuffled over and crouched at the feet of the Lady Ciara, watching the Earthwoman. And the woman in armor leaned forward.

"I will tell you something, Erica Joan Stark. I am a bastard, but I come of the blood of kings. My name and rank I must make with my own hands. But I will set them high, and my name will ring in the Norlands!

"I will take Kushat, Who holds Kushat, holds Mars—and the power and the riches that lie beyond the Gates of Death!"

"I have seen them," said the old woman, and her eyes blazed. "I have seen Ban Cruach the mighty. I have seen the temples and the palaces glitter in the ice. I have seen Them, the shining ones. Oh, I have seen them, the beautiful, hideous ones!"

She glanced sidelong at Stark, very cunning. "That is why Otara is mad, stranger. She has seen."

A chill swept Stark. She too had seen, not with her own eyes but with the mind and memories of Ban Cruach, of a million years ago.

Then it had been no illusion, the fantastic vision opened to her by the talisman now hidden in her belt! If this old madman had seen...

"What beings lurk beyond the Gates of Death I do not know," said Ciara. "But my dark master will test their strength—and I think my red wolves will hunt them down, once they get a smell of plunder."

"The beautiful, terrible ones," whispered Otara. "And oh, the temples and the palaces, and the great towers of stone!"

"Ride with me, Stark," said the Lady Ciara abruptly. "Yield up the talisman, and be the shield at my back. I have offered no other woman that honor."

Stark asked slowly, "Why do you choose me?"

"We are of one blood, Stark, though we be strangers."

The Earthwoman's cold eyes narrowed. "What would your red wolves say to that? And what would Otara say? Look at her, already stiff with jealousy, and fear lest I answer, 'Yes'."

"I do not think you would be afraid of either of them."

"On the contrary," said Stark, "I am a prudent woman." She paused. "There is one other thing. I will bargain with no woman until I have looked into her eyes. Take off your helm, Ciara—and then perhaps we will talk!"

Otara's breath made a snakelike hissing between her toothless gums, and the hands of the Lady Ciara tightened on the haft of the axe.

"No!" she whispered. "That I can never do."

Otara rose to her feet, and for the first time Stark felt the full strength that lay in this strange old woman.

"Would you look upon the face of destruction?" she thundered. "Do you ask for death? Do you think a thing is hidden behind a mask of steel without a reason, that you demand to see it?"

She turned. "My Lady," she said. "By tomorrow the last of the clans will have joined us. After that, we must march. Give this Earthwoman to Thorda, for the time that remains—and you will have the talisman."

The blank, blind mask was unmoving, turned toward Stark, and the Earthwoman thought that from behind it came a faint sound that might have been a sigh.

Then...

"Thorda!" cried the Lady Ciara, and lifted up the axe.

III

THE FLAMES LEAPED HIGH from the fire in the windless gorge. Women sat around it in a great circle, the wild riders out of the mountain valleys of Mekh. They sat with the curbed and shivering eagerness of wolves around a dying quarry. Now and again their white teeth showed in a kind of silent laughter, and their eyes watched.

"She is strong," they whispered, one to the other. "She will live the night out, surely!"

On an outcrop of rock sat the Lady Ciara, wrapped in a black cloak, holding the great axe in the crook of her arm. Beside her, Otara huddled in the snow.

Close by, the long spears had been driven deep and lashed together to make a scaffolding, and upon this frame was hung a woman. A big woman, iron-muscled and very lean, the bulk of her shoulders filling the space between the bending shafts. Erica Joan Stark of Earth, out of Mercury.

She had already been scourged without mercy. She sagged of her own weight between the spears, breathing in harsh sobs, and the trampled snow around her was spotted red.

Thorda was wielding the lash. She had stripped off her own coat, and her body glistened with sweat in spite of the cold. She cut her victim with great care, making the long lash sing and crack. She was proud of her skill.

Stark did not cry out.

Presently Thorda stepped back, panting, and looked at the Lady Ciara. And the black helm nodded.

Thorda dropped the whip. She went up to the big dark woman and lifted her head by the hair.

"Stark," she said, and shook the head roughly. "Stranger!"

Eyes opened and stared at her, and Thorda could not repress a slight shiver. It seemed that the pain and indignity had wrought some evil magic on this woman she had ridden with, and thought she knew. She had seen exactly the same gaze in a big snow-cat caught in a trap, and she felt suddenly that it was not a woman she spoke to, but a predatory beast.

"Stark," she said. "Where is the talisman of Ban Cruach?"

The Earthwoman did not answer.

Thorda laughed. She glanced up at the sky, where the moons rode low and swift.

"The night is only half gone. Do you think you can last it out?"

The cold, cruel, patient eyes watched Thorda. There was no reply.

Some quality of pride in that gaze angered the barbarian. It seemed to mock her, who was so sure of her ability to loosen a reluctant tongue.

"You think I cannot make you talk, don't you? You don't know me, stranger! You don't know Thorda, who can make the rocks speak out if she will!"

She reached out with her free hand and struck Stark across the face.

It seemed impossible that anything so still could move so quickly. There was an ugly flash of teeth, and Thorda's wrist was caught above the thumb-joint. She bellowed, and the iron jaws closed down, worrying the bone.

Quite suddenly, Thorda screamed. Not for pain, but for panic. And the rows of watching women swayed forward, and even the Lady Ciara rose up, startled.

"Hark!" ran the whispering around the fire. "Hark how she growls!"

Thorda had let go of Stark's hair and was beating her about the head with her clenched fist. Her face was white.

"Werewolf!" she screamed. "Let me go, beast-thing! Let me go!"

But the dark woman clung to Thorda's wrist, snarling, and did not hear. After a bit there came the dull crack of bone.

Stark opened her jaws. Thorda ceased to strike her. She backed off slowly, staring at the torn flesh. Stark had sunk down to the length of her arms.

With her left hand, Thorda drew her knife. The Lady Ciara stepped forward. "Wait, Thorda!"

"It is a thing of evil," whispered the barbarian. "Witch. Werewolf. Beast."

She sprang at Stark.

The woman in armor moved, very swiftly, and the great axe went whirling through the air. It caught Thorda squarely where the cords of her neck ran into the shoulder—caught, and shore on through.

There was a silence in the valley.

The Lady Ciara walked slowly across the trampled snow and took up her axe again.

"I will be obeyed," she said. "And I will not stand for fear, not of god, woman, nor devil." She gestured toward Stark. "Cut her down. And see that she does not die."

She strode away, and Otara began to laugh.

From a vast distance, Stark heard that shrill, wild laughter. Her mouth was full of blood, and she was mad with a cold fury.

A cunning that was purely animal guided her movements then. Her head fell forward, and her body hung inert against the thongs. She might almost have been dead.

A knot of women came toward her. She listened to them. They were hesitant and afraid. Then, as she did not move, they plucked up courage and came closer, and one prodded her gently with the point of her spear.

"Prick her well," said another, "Let us be sure!"

The sharp point bit a little deeper. A few drops of blood welled out and joined the small red streams that ran from the weals of the lash. Stark did not stir.

The spearwoman grunted. "She is safe enough now."

Stark felt the knife blades working at the thongs. She waited. The rawhide snapped, and she was free.

She did not fall. She would not have fallen then if she had taken a death wound. She gathered her legs under her and sprang.

She picked up the spearwoman in that first rush and flung her into the fire. Then she began to run toward the place where the scaly mounts were herded, leaving a trail of blood behind her on the snow.

A woman loomed up in front of her. She saw the shadow of a spear and swerved, and caught the haft in her two hands. She wrenched it free and struck down with the butt of it, and went on. Behind her she heard voices shouting and the beginning of turmoil.

The Lady Ciara turned and came back, striding fast.

There were women before Stark now, many women, the circle of watchers breaking up because there had been nothing more to watch. She gripped the long spear. It was a good weapon, better than the flint-tipped stick with which the girl N'Chaka had hunted the giant lizard of the rocks.

Her body curved into a half crouch. She voiced one cry, the challenging scream of a predatory killer, and went in among the women.

She did slaughter with that spear. They were not expecting attack. They were not expecting anything. Stark had sprung to life too quickly. And they were afraid of her. She could smell the fear on them. Fear not of a woman like themselves, but of a creature less and more than woman.

She killed, and was happy.

They fell away from her, the wild riders of Mekh. They were sure now that she was a demon. She raged among them with the bright spear, and they heard again that sound that should not have come from a human throat, and their superstitious terror rose and sent them scrambling out of her path, trampling on each other in childish panic.

She broke through, and now there was nothing between her and escape but two mounted women who guarded the herd.

Being mounted, they had more courage. They felt that even a witch could not stand against their charge. They came at her as she ran, the padded feet of their beasts making a muffled drumming in the snow.

Without breaking stride, Stark hurled her spear.

IT DROVE through one woman's body and tumbled her off, so that she fell under her comrade's mount and fouled its legs. It staggered and reared up, hissing, and Stark fled on.

Once she glanced over her shoulder. Through the milling, shouting crowd of women she glimpsed a dark, mailed figure with a winged mask, going through the ruck with a loping stride and bearing a sable axe raised high for the throwing.

Stark was close to the herd now. And they caught her scent.

The Norland brutes had never liked the smell of her, and now the reek of blood upon her was enough in itself to set them wild. They began to hiss and snarl uneasily, rubbing their reptilian flanks together as they wheeled around, staring at her with lambent eyes.

She rushed them, before they should quite decide to break. She was quick enough to catch one by the fleshy comb that served it for a forelock, held it with savage indifference to its squealing, and leaped to its back. Then she let it bolt, and as she rode it she yelled, a shrill brute cry that urged the creatures on to panic.

The herd broke, stampeding outward from its center like a bursting shell.

Stark was in the forefront. Clinging low to the scaly neck, she saw the women of Mekh scattered and churned and tramped into the snow by the flying pads. In and out of the shelters, kicking the brush walls down, lifting up their harsh reptilian voices, they went racketing through the camp, leaving behind them wreckage as of a storm. And Stark went with them.

She snatched a cloak from off the shoulders of some petty chieftain as she went by, and then, twisting cruelly on the fleshy comb, beating with her fist at the creature's head, she got her mount turned in the way she wanted it to go, down the valley.

She caught one last glimpse of the Lady Ciara, fighting to hold one of the creatures long enough to mount, and then a dozen striving bodies surged around her, and Stark was gone.

The beast did not slacken pace. It was as though it thought it could outrun the alien, bloody thing that clung to its back. The last fringes of the camp shot by and vanished in the gloom, and the clean snow of the lower valley lay open before it. The creature laid its belly to the ground and went, the white spray spurting from its heels.

Stark hung on. Her strength was gone now, run out suddenly with the battle-madness. She became conscious now that she was sick and bleeding, that her body was one cruel pain. In that moment, more than in the hours that had gone before, she hated the black leader of the clans of Mekh.

That flight down the valley became a sort of ugly dream. Stark was aware of rock walls reeling past, and then they seemed to widen away and the wind came out of nowhere like the stroke of a great hammer, and she was on the open moors again.

The beast began to falter and slow down. Presently it stopped.

Stark scooped up snow to rub on her wounds. She came near to fainting, but the bleeding stopped and after that the pain was numbed to a dull ache. She wrapped the cloak around her and urged the beast to go on, gently this time, patiently, and after it had breathed it obeyed her, settling into the shuffling pace it could keep up for hours.

She was three days on the moors. Part of the time she rode in a sort of stupor, and part of the time she was feverishly alert, watching the skyline. Frequently she took the shapes of thrusting rocks for riders, and found what cover she could until she was sure they did not move. She was afraid to dismount, for the beast had no bridle. When it halted to rest she remained upon its back, shaking, her brow beaded with sweat.

The wind scoured her tracks clean as soon as she made them. Twice, in the distance, she did see riders, and one of those times she burrowed into a tall drift and stayed there for several hours.

The ruined towers marched with her across the bitter land, lonely giants fifty miles apart. She did not go near them.

She knew that she wandered a good bit, but she could not help it, and it was probably her salvation. In those tortured badlands, riven by ages of frost and flood, one might follow a woman on a straight track between two points. But to find a single rider lost in that wilderness was a matter of sheer luck, and the odds were with Stark.

One evening at sunset she came out upon a plain that sloped upward to a black and towering scarp, notched with a single pass.

The light was level and blood-red, glittering on the frosty rock so that it seemed the throat of the pass was aflame with evil fires. To Stark's mind, essentially primitive and stripped now of all its acquired reason, that narrow cleft appeared as the doorway to the dwelling place of demons as horrible as the fabled creatures that roam the Darkside of her native world.

She looked long at the Gates of Death, and a dark memory crept into her brain. Memory of that nightmare experience when the talisman had made her seem to walk into that frightful pass, not as Stark, but as Ban Cruach.

She remembered Otara's words—I have seen Ban Cruach the mighty. Was she still there beyond those darkling gates, fighting her unimagined war, alone?

Again, in memory, Stark heard the evil piping of the wind. Again, the shadow of a dim and terrible shape loomed up before her...

She forced remembrance of that vision from her mind, by a great effort. She could not turn back now. There was no place to go.

Her weary beast plodded on, and now Stark saw as in a dream that a great walled city stood guard before that awful Gate. She watched the city glide toward her through a crimson haze, and fancied she could see the ages clustered like birds around the towers.

She had reached Kushat, with the talisman of Ban Cruach still strapped in the bloodstained belt around her waist.

IV

HE STOOD IN A LARGE SQUARE, lined about with huckster's stalls and the booths of wine-sellers. Beyond were buildings, streets, a city. Stark got a blurred impression of a grand and brooding darkness, bulking huge against the mountains, as bleak and proud as they, and quite as ancient, with many ruins and deserted quarters.

She was not sure how she had come there, but she was standing on her own feet, and someone was pouring sour wine into her mouth. She drank it greedily. There were people around her, jostling, chattering, demanding answers to their questions. A boy's voice said sharply, "Let her be! Can't you see she's hurt?"

Stark looked down. He was slim and ragged, with black hair and large eyes yellow as a cat's. He held a leather bottle in his hands. He smiled at her and said, "I'm Thanir. Will you drink more wine?"

"I will," said Stark, and did, and then said, "Thank you, Thanir." She put her hand on his shoulder, to steady herself. It was a supple shoulder, surprisingly strong. She liked the feel of it.

The crowd was still churning around her, growing larger, and now she heard the tramp of military feet. A small detachment of women in light armor pushed their way through.

A very young officer whose breastplate hurt the eye with brightness demanded to be told at once who Stark was and why she had come there.

"No one crosses the moors in winter," she said, as though that in itself were a sign of evil intent.

"The clans of Mekh are crossing them," Stark answered. "An army, to take Kushat—one, two days behind me."

The crowd picked that up. Excited voices tossed it back and forth, and clamored for more news. Stark spoke to the officer.

"I will see your captain, and at once."

"You'll see the inside of a prison, more likely!" snapped the young woman. "What's this nonsense about the clans of Mekh?"

Stark regarded her. She looked so long and so curiously that the crowd began to snicker and the officer's beardless face flushed pink to the ears.

"I have fought in many wars," said Stark gently. "And long ago I learned to listen, when someone came to warn me of attack."

"Better take her to the captain, Lugh," cried Thanir. "It's our skins too, you know, if there is war."

The crowd began to shout. They were all poor folk, wrapped in threadbare cloaks or tattered leather. They had no love for the guards. And whether there was war or not, their winter had been long and dull, and they were going to make the most of this excitement.

"Take her, Lugh! Let her warn the nobles. Let them think how they'll defend Kushat and the Gates of Death, now that the talisman is gone!"

"That is a lie!" Lugh shouted. "And you know the penalty for telling it. Hold your tongues, or I'll have you all whipped." She gestured angrily at Stark. "See if she is armed."

One of the soldiers stepped forward, but Stark was quicker. She slipped the thong and let the cloak fall, baring her upper body.

"The clansmen have already taken everything I owned," she said. "But they gave me something, in return."

The crowd stared at the half healed stripes that scarred her, and there was a drawing in of breath.

The soldier picked up the cloak and laid it over the Earthwoman's shoulders. And Lugh said sullenly, "Come, then."

Stark's fingers tightened on Thanir' shoulder. "Come with me, little one," she whispered. "Otherwise, I must crawl."

He smiled at her and came. The crowd followed.

The captain of the guards was a fleshy woman with a smell of wine about her and a face already crumbling apart though her hair was not yet grey. She sat in a squat tower above the square, and she observed Stark with no particular interest.

"You had something to tell," said Lugh. "Tell it."

STARK TOLD THEM, leaving out all mention of Camara and the talisman. This was neither the time nor the woman to hear that story. The captain listened to all she had to say about the gathering of the clans of Mekh, and then sat studying her with a bleary shrewdness.

"You have proof of all this?"

"These stripes. Their leader Ciara ordered them laid on herself."

The captain sighed, and leaned back.

"Any wandering band of hunters could have scourged you," she said. "A nameless vagabond from the gods know where, and a lawless one at that, if I'm any judge of men—you probably deserved it."

She reached for wine, and smiled. "Look you, stranger. In the Norlands, no one makes war in the winter. And no one ever heard of Ciara. If you hoped for a reward from the city, you overshot badly."

"The Lady Ciara," said Stark, grimly controlling her anger, "will be battering at your gates within two days. And you will hear of her then."

"Perhaps. You can wait for her—in a cell. And you can leave Kushat with the first caravan after the thaw. We have enough rabble here without taking in more."

Thanir caught Stark by the cloak and held her back.

"Sir," he said, as though it were an unclean word. "I will vouch for the stranger."

The captain glanced at him. "You?"

"Sir, I am a free citizen of Kushat. According to law, I may vouch for her."

"If you scum of the Thieves' Quarter would practice the law as well as you prate it, we would have less trouble," growled the captain. "Very well, take the creature, if you want her. I don't suppose you've anything to lose."

Lugh laughed.

"Name and dwelling place," said the captain, and wrote them down. "Remember, she is not to leave the Quarter."

Thanir nodded. "Come," he said to. Stark. She did not move, and he looked up at her. She was staring at the captain. Her locks had grown in these last days, and her face was still scarred by Thorda's blows and made wolfish with pain and fever. And now, out of this evil mask, her eyes were peering with a chill and terrible intensity at the soft-bellied woman who sat and mocked her.

Thanir laid his hand on her rough cheek. "Come," he said. "Come and rest."

Gently he turned her head. She blinked and swayed, and he took her around the waist and led her unprotesting to the door.

There he paused, looking back.

"Sir," he said, very meekly, "news of this attack is being shouted through the Quarter now. If it should come, and it were known that you had the warning and did not pass it on..." He made an expressive gesture, and went out.

Lugh glanced uneasily at the captain. "He's right, sir. If by chance the woman did tell the truth..."

The captain swore. "Rot. A rogue's tale. And yet..." She scowled indecisively, and then reached for parchment. "After all, it's a simple thing. Write it up, pass it on, and let the nobles do the worrying."

Her pen began to scratch.

Thanir took Stark by steep and narrow ways, darkling now in the afterglow, where the city climbed and fell again over the uneven rock. Stark was aware of the heavy smells of spices and unfamiliar foods, and the musky undertones of a million generations swarmed together to spawn and die in these crowded catacombs of slate and stone.

There was a house, blending into other houses, close under the loom of the great Wall. There was a flight of steps, hollowed deep with use, twisting crazily around outer corners.

There was a low room, and a slender woman named Balina, vaguely glimpsed, who said she was Thanir' sister. There was a bed of skins and woven cloths.

Stark slept.

HANDS and voices called her back. Strong hands shaking her, urgent voices. She started up growling, like an animal suddenly awaked, still lost in the dark mists of exhaustion. Balina swore, and caught her fingers away.

"What is this you have brought home, Thanir? By the gods, it snapped at me!"

Thanir ignored her. "Stark," he said. "Stark! Listen. Women are coming. Soldiers. They will question you. Do you hear me?"

Stark said heavily, "I hear."

"Do not speak of Camara!"

Stark got to her feet, and Balina said hastily, "Peace! The thing is safe. I would not steal a death warrant!"

Her voice had a ring of truth. Stark sat down again. It was an effort to keep awake. There was clamor in the street below. It was still night.

Balina said carefully, "Tell them what you told the captain, nothing more. They will kill you if they know."

A rough hand thundered at the door, and a voice cried, "Open up!"

Balina sauntered over to lift the bar. Thanir sat beside Stark, his hand touching hers. Stark rubbed her face. She had been shaved and washed, her wounds rubbed with salve. The belt was gone, and her bloodstained clothing. She realized only then that she was naked, and drew a cloth around her. Thanir whispered, "The belt is there on that peg, under your cloak."

Balina opened the door, and the room was full of women.

Stark recognized the captain. There were others, four of them, young, old, intermediate, annoyed at being hauled away from their beds and their gaming tables at this hour. The sixth woman wore the jewelled cuirass of a noble. She had a nice, a kind face. Grey hair, mild eyes, soft cheeks. A fine woman, but ludicrous in the trappings of a soldier.

"Is this the woman?" she asked, and the captain nodded.

"Yes." It was her turn to say Sir.

Balina brought a chair. She had a fine flourish about her. She wore a crimson jewel in her left ear, and every line of her was quick and sensitive, instinct with mockery. Her eyes were brightly cynical, in a face worn lean with years of merry sinning. Stark liked her.

She was a civilized woman. They all were—the noble, the captain, the lot of them. So civilized that the origins of their culture were forgotten half an age before the first clay brick was laid in Babylon.

Too civilized, Stark thought. Peace had drawn their fangs and cut their claws. She thought of the wild clansmen coming fast across the snow, and felt a certain pity for the women of Kushat.

The noble sat down.

"This is a strange tale you bring, wanderer. I would hear it from your own lips."

Stark told it. She spoke slowly, watching every word, cursing the weariness that fogged her brain.

The noble, who was called Rogaina, asked her questions. Where was the camp? How many women? What were the exact words of the Lady Ciara, and who was she?

Stark answered, with meticulous care.

Rogaina sat for some time lost in thought. She seemed worried and upset, one hand playing aimlessly with the hilt of her sword. A scholar's hand, without a callous on it.

"There is one thing more," said Rogaina. "What business had you on the moors in winter?"

Stark smiled. "I am a wanderer by profession."

"Outlaw?" asked the captain, and Stark shrugged.

"Mercenary is a kinder word."

ROGAIN studied the pattern of stripes on the Earthwoman's dark skin. "Why did the Lady Ciara, so-called, order you scourged?"

"I had thrashed one of her chieftains."

Rogaina sighed and rose. She stood regarding Stark from under brooding brows, and at length she said, "It is a wild tale. I can't believe it—and yet, why should you lie?"

She paused, as though hoping that Stark would answer that and relieve her of worry.

Stark yawned. "The tale is easily proved. Wait a day or two."

"I will arm the city," said Rogaina. "I dare not do otherwise. But I will tell you this." An astonishing unpleasant look came into her eyes. "If the attack does not come—if you have set a whole city by the ears for nothing—I will have you flayed alive and your body tumbled over the Wall for the carrion birds to feed on."

She strode out, taking her retinue with her. Balina smiled. "She will do it, too," she said, and dropped the bar.

Stark did not answer. She stared at Balina, and then at Thanir, and then at the belt hanging on the peg, in a curiously blank and yet penetrating fashion, like an animal that thinks its own thoughts. She took a deep breath. Then, as though she found the air clean of danger, she rolled over and went instantly to sleep.

Balina lifted her shoulders expressively. She grinned at Thanir. "Are you positive it's human?"

"She's beautiful," said Thanir, and tucked the cloths around her. "Hold your tongue." He continued to sit there, watching Stark's face as the slow dreams moved across it. Balina laughed.

It was evening again when Stark awoke. She sat up, stretching lazily. Thanir crouched by the hearthstone, stirring something savory in a blackened pot. He wore a red kirtle and a necklet of beaten gold, and his hair was combed out smooth and shining.

He smiled at her and rose, bringing her her own boots and trousers, carefully cleaned, and a tunic of leather tanned fine and soft as silk. Stark asked his where he got it.

"Balina stole it—from the baths where the nobles go. She said you might as well have the best." He laughed. "She had a devil of a time finding one big enough to fit you."

He watched with unashamed interest while she dressed. Stark said, "Don't burn the soup."

He put his tongue out at her. "Better be proud of that fine hide while you have it," he said. "There's no sign of attack."

Stark was aware of sounds that had not been there before—the pacing of women on the Wall above the house, the calling of the watch. Kushat was armed and ready—and her time was running out. She hoped that Ciara had not been delayed on the moors.

Thanir said, "I should explain about the belt. When Balina undressed you, she saw Camara's name scratched on the inside of the boss. And, she can open a lizard's egg without harming the shell."

"What about you?" asked Stark. He flexed his supple fingers. "I do well enough."

BALIN came in. She had been seeking news, but there was little to be had.

"The soldiers are grumbling about a false alarm," she said. "The people are excited, but more as though they were playing a game. Kushat has not fought a war for centuries." She sighed. "The pity of it is, Stark, I believe your story. And I'm afraid."

Thanir handed her a steaming bowl. "Here—employ your tongue with this. Afraid, indeed! Have you forgotten the Wall? No one has carried it since the city was built. Let them attack!"

Stark was amused. "For a child, you know much concerning war."

"I knew enough to save your skin!" he flared, and Balina smiled.

"He has you there, Stark. And speaking of skins..." She glanced up at the belt. "Or better, speaking of talismans, which we were not. How did you come by it?"

Stark told her. "She had a sin on her soul, did Camara. And—he was my friend."

Balina looked at her with deep respect. "You were a fool," she said "Look you. The thing is returned to Kushat. Your promise is kept. There is nothing for you here but danger, and were I you I would not wait to be flayed, or slain, or taken in a quarrel that is not yours."

"Ah," said Stark softly, "but it is mine. The Lady Ciara made it so." She, too, glanced at the belt. "What of the talisman?"

"Return it where it came from," Thanir said. "My sister is a better thief than Camara. She can certainly do that."

"No!" said Balina, with surprising force. "We will keep it, Stark and I. Whether it has power, I do not know. But if it has—I think Kushat will need it, and in strong hands."

Stark said somebrely, "It has power, the Talisman. Whether for good or evil, I don't know."

They looked at her, startled. But a touch of awe seemed to repress their curiosity.

She could not tell them. She was, somehow, reluctant to tell anyone of that dark vision of what lay beyond the Gates of Death, which the talisman of Ban Cruach had lent her.

Balina stood up. "Well, for good or evil, at least the sacred relic of Ban Cruach has come home." She yawned. "I am going to bed. Will you come, Thanir, or will you stay and quarrel with our guest?"

"I will stay," he said, "and quarrel."

"Ah, well." Balina sighed puckishly. "Good night." She vanished into an inner room. Stark looked at Thanir. He had a warm mouth, and his eyes were beautiful, and full of light.

She smiled, holding out her hand.

The night wore on, and Stark lay drowsing. Thanir had opened the curtains. Wind and moonlight swept together into the room, and he stood leaning upon the sill, above the slumbering city. The smile that lingered in the corners of his mouth was sad and far-away, and very tender.

Stark stirred uneasily, making small sounds in her throat. Her motions grew violent. Thanir crossed the room and touched her.

Instantly she was awake.

"Animal," he said softly. "You dream."

Stark shook her head. Her eyes were still clouded, though not with sleep. "Blood," she said, "heavy in the wind."

"I smell nothing but the dawn," he said, and laughed.

Stark rose. "Get Balina. I'm going up on the Wall."

He did not know her now. "What is it, Stark? What's wrong?"

"Get Balina." Suddenly it seemed that the room stifled her. She caught up her cloak and Camara's belt and flung open the door, standing on the narrow steps outside. The moonlight caught in her eyes, pale as frost-fire.

Thanir shivered. Balina joined his without being called. She, too, had slept but lightly. Together they followed Stark up the rough-cut stair that led to the top of the Wall.

She looked southward, where the plain ran down from the mountains and spread away below Kushat. Nothing moved out there. Nothing marred the empty whiteness. But Stark said,

"They will attack at dawn."

V

THEY WAITED. Some distance away a guard leaned against the parapet, huddled in her cloak. She glanced at them incuriously. It was bitterly cold. The wind came whistling down through the Gates of Death, and below in the streets the watchfires shuddered and flared.

They waited, and still there was nothing.

Balina said impatiently, "How can you know they're coming?"

Stark shivered, a shallow rippling of the flesh that had nothing to do with cold, and every muscle of her body came alive. Phobos plunged downward. The moonlight dimmed and changed, and the plain was very empty, very still.

"They will wait for darkness. They will have an hour or so, between moonset and dawn."

Thanir muttered, "Dreams! Besides, I'm cold." He hesitated, and then crept in under Balina's cloak. Stark had gone away from him. He watched her sulkily where she leaned upon the stone. She might have been part of it, as dark and unstirring.

Deimos sank low toward the west.

Stark turned her head, drawn inevitably to look toward the cliffs above Kushat, soaring upward to blot out half the sky. Here, close under them, they seemed to tower outward in a curving mass, like the last wave of eternity rolling down, crested white with the ash of shattered worlds.

I have stood beneath those cliffs before, I have felt them leaning down to crush me, and I have been afraid.

She was still afraid. The mind that had poured its memories into that crystal lens had been dead a million years, but neither time nor death had dulled the terror that beset Ban Cruach in her journey through that nightmare pass.

She looked into the black and narrow mouth of the Gates of Death, cleaving the scarp like a wound, and the primitive ape-thing within her cringed and moaned, oppressed with a sudden sense of fate.

She had come painfully across half a world, to crouch before the Gates of Death. Some evil magic had let her see forbidden things, had linked her mind in an unholy bond with the long-dead mind of one who had been half a god. These evil miracles had not been for nothing. She would not be allowed to go unscathed.

She drew herself up sharply then, and swore. She had left N'Chaka behind, a naked girl running in a place of rocks and sun on Mercury. She had become Erica Joan Stark, a woman, and civilized. She thrust the senseless premonition from her, and turned her back upon the mountains.

Deimos touched the horizon. A last gleam of reddish light tinged the snow, and then was gone.

Thanir, who was half asleep, said with sudden irritation, "I do not believe in your barbarians. I'm going home." He thrust Balina aside and went away, down the steps.

The plain was now in utter darkness, under the faint, far Northern stars.

Stark settled herself against the parapet. There was a sort of timeless patience about her. Balina envied it. She would have liked to go with Thanir. She was cold and doubtful, but she stayed.

Time passed, endless minutes of it, lengthening into what seemed hours.

Stark said, "Can you hear them?"

"No."

"They come." Her hearing, far keener than Balina's, picked up the little sounds, the vast inchoate rustling of an army on the move in stealth and darkness. Light-armed women, hunters, used to stalking wild beasts in the show. They could move softly, very softly.

"I hear nothing," Balina said, and again they waited.

The westering stars moved toward the horizon, and at length in the east a dim pallor crept across the sky.

The plain was still shrouded in night, but now Stark could make out the high towers of the Queen City of Kushat, ghostly and indistinct—the ancient, proud high towers of the rulers and their nobles, set above the crowded Quarters of merchants and artisans and thieves. She wondered who would be queen in Kushat by the time this unrisen sun had set.

"You were wrong," said Balina, peering. "There is nothing on the plain." Stark said, "Wait."

SWIFTLY NOW, in the thin air of Mars, the dawn came with a rush and a leap, flooding the world with harsh light. It flashed in cruel brilliance from sword-blades, from spearheads, from helmets and burnished mail, from the war-harness of beasts, glistened on bare russet heads and coats of leather, set the banners of the clans to burning, crimson and gold and green, bright against the snow.

There was no sound, not a whisper, in all the land.

Somewhere a hunting horn sent forth one deep cry to split the morning. Then burst out the wild skirling of the mountain pipes and the broken thunder of drums, and a wordless scream of exultation that rang back from the Wall of Kushat like the very voice of battle. The women of Mekh began to move.

Raggedly, slowly at first, then more swiftly as the press of warriors broke and flowed, the barbarians swept toward the city as water sweeps over a broken dam.

Knots and clumps of women, tall women running like deer, leaping, shouting, swinging their great brands. Riders, spurring their mounts until they fled belly down. Spears, axes, swordblades tossing, a sea of women and beasts, rushing, trampling, shaking the ground with the thunder of their going.

And ahead of them all came a solitary figure in black mail, riding a raking beast trapped all in black, and bearing a sable axe.

Kushat came to life. There was a swarming and a yelling in the streets, and soldiers began to pour up onto the Wall. A thin company, Stark thought, and shook her head. Mobs of citizens choked the alleys, and every rooftop was full. A troop of nobles went by, brave in their bright mail, to take up their post in the square by the great gate.

Balina said nothing, and Stark did not disturb her thoughts. From the look of her, they were dark indeed.

Soldiers came and ordered them off the the Wall. They went back to their own roof, where they were joined by Thanir. He was in a high state of excitement, but unafraid.

"Let them attack!" he said. "Let them break their spears against the Wall. They will crawl away again."

Stark began to grow restless. Up in their high emplacements, the big ballistas creaked and thrummed. The muted song of the bows became a wailing hum. Women fell, and were kicked off the ledges by their fellows. The blood-howl of the clans rang unceasing on the frosty air, and Stark heard the rap of scaling ladders against stone.

Thanir said abruptly, "What is that—that sound like thunder?"

"Rams," she answered. "They are battering the gate."

He listened, and Stark saw in his face the beginning of fear.

It was a long fight. Stark watched it hungrily from the roof all that morning. The soldiers of Kushat did bravely and well, but they were as folded sheep against the tall killers of the mountains. By noon the officers were beating the Quarters for women to replace the slain.

Stark and Balina went up again, onto the Wall.

The clans had suffered. Their dead lay in windrows under the Wall, amid the broken ladders. But Stark knew her barbarians. They had sat restless and chafing in the valley for many days, and now the battle-madness was on them and they were not going to be stopped.

Wave after wave of them rolled up, and was cast back, and came on again relentlessly. The intermittent thunder boomed still from the gates, where sweating giants swung the rams under cover of their own bowmen. And everywhere, up and down through the forefront of the fighting, rode the woman in black armor, and wild cheering followed her.

Balina said heavily, "It is the end of Kushat."

A LADDER banged against the stones a few feet away. Women swarmed up the rungs, fierce-eyed clansmen with laughter in their mouths, Stark was first at the head.

They had given her a spear. She spitted two women through with it and lost it, and a third woman came leaping over the parapet. Stark received her into her arms.

Balina watched. She saw the warrior go crashing back, sweeping her fellows off the ladder. She saw Stark's face. She heard the sounds and smelled the blood and sweat of war, and she was sick to the marrow of her bones, and her hatred of the barbarians was a terrible thing.

Stark caught up a dead woman's blade, and within ten minutes her arm was as red as a butcher's. And ever she watched the winged helm that went back and forth below, a standard to the clans.

By mid-afternoon the barbarians had gained the Wall in three places. They spread inward along the ledges, pouring up in a resistless tide, and the defenders broke. The rout became a panic.

"It's all over now," Stark said. "Find Thanir, and hide him."

Balina let fall her sword. "Give me the talisman," she whispered, and Stark saw that she was weeping. "Give it me, and I will go beyond the Gates of Death and rouse Ban Cruach from her sleep. And if she has forgotten Kushat, I will take her power into my own hands. I will fling wide the Gates of Death and loose destruction on the women of Mekh—or if the legends are all lies, then I will die."

She was like a woman crazed. "Give me the talisman!"

Stark slapped her, carefully and without heat, across the face. "Get your brother, Balina. Hide him, unless you would be uncle to a red-haired brat."

She went then, like a woman who has been stunned. Screaming men with their children clogged the ways that led inward from the Wall, and there was bloody work afoot on the rooftops and in the narrow alleys.

The gate was holding, still.

STARK FORCED her way toward the square. The booths of the hucksters were overthrown, the wine-jars broken and the red wine spilled. Beasts squealed and stamped, tired of their chafing harness, driven wild by the shouting and the smell of blood. The dead were heaped high where they had fallen from above.

They were all soldiers here, clinging grimly to their last foothold. The deep song of the rams shook the very stones. The iron-sheathed timbers of the gate gave back an answering scream, and toward the end all other sounds grew hushed. The nobles came down slowly from the Wall and mounted, and sat waiting.

There were fewer of them now. Their bright armor was dented and stained, and their faces had a pallor on them.

One last hammer-stroke of the rams.

With a bitter shriek the weakened bolts tore out, and the great gate was broken through.

The nobles of Kushat made their first, and final charge.

As soldiers they went up against the riders of Mekh, and as soldiers they held them until they died. Those that were left were borne back into the square, caught as in the crest of an avalanche. And first through the gates came the winged battle-mask of the Lady Ciara, and the sable axe that drank women's lives where it hewed.

There was a beast with no rider to claim it, tugging at its headrope. Stark swung onto the saddle pad and cut it free. Where the press was thickest, a welter of struggling brutes and women fighting knee to knee, there was the woman in black armor, riding like a god, magnificent, born to war. Stark's eyes shone with a strange, cold light. She struck her heels hard into the scaly flanks. The beast plunged forward.

In and over and through, making the long sword sing. The beast was strong, and frightened beyond fear. It bit and trampled, and Stark cut a path for them, and presently she shouted above the din,

"Ho, there! Ciara!"

The black mask turned toward her, and the remembered voice spoke from behind the barred slot, joyously.

"The wanderer. The wild woman!"

Their two mounts shocked together. The axe came down in a whistling curve, and a red swordblade flashed to meet it. Swift, swift, a ringing clash of steel, and the blade was shattered and the axe fallen to the ground.

Stark pressed in.

Ciara reached for her sword, but her hand was numbed by the force of that blow and she was slow, a split second. The hilt of Stark's weapon, still clutched in her own numbed grip, fetched her a stunning blow on the helm, so that the metal rang like a flawed bell.

The Lady Ciara reeled back, only for a moment, but long enough. Stark grasped the war-mask and ripped it off, and got her hands around the naked throat.

She did not break that neck, as she had planned. And the Clansmen who had started in to save their leader stopped and did not move.

Stark knew now why the Lady Ciara had never shown her face.

The throat she held was white and strong, and her hands around it were buried in a mane of red-gold hair that fell down over the shirt of mail. A red mouth passionate with fury, wonderful carving bone under sculptured flesh, eyes fierce and proud and tameless as the eyes of a young eagle, fire-blue, defying her, hating her...

"By the gods," said Stark, very softly. "By the eternal gods!"

VI

A woman! and in that moment of amazement, he was quicker than she.

There was nothing to warn her, no least flicker of expression. His two fists came up together between her outstretched arms and caught her under the jaw with a force that nearly snapped her neck. She went over backward, clean out of the saddle, and lay sprawled on the bloody stones, half stunned, the wind knocked out of her.

The man wheeled his mount. Bending low, he took up the axe from where it had fallen, and faced his warriors, who were as dazed as Stark.

"I have led you well," he said. "I have taken you Kushat. Will any woman dispute me?"

They knew the axe, if they did not know him. They looked from side to side uneasily, completely at a loss, and Stark, still gasping on the ground, thought that she had never seen anything as proud and beautiful as he was then in his black mail, with his bright hair blowing and his glance like blue lightning.

The nobles of Kushat chose that moment to charge. This strange unmasking of the Mekhish lord had given them time to rally, and now they thought that the Gods had wrought a miracle to help them. They found hope, where they had lost everything but courage.

"A boy!" they cried. "A strumpet of the camps. A man!"

They howled it like an epithet, and tore into the barbarians.

He who had been the Lady Ciara drove the spurs in deep, so that the beast leaped forward screaming. He went, and did not look to see if any had followed, in among the women of Kushat. And the great axe rose and fell, and rose again.

He killed three, and left two others bleeding on the stones, and not once did he look back.

The clansmen found their tongues.

"Ciara! Ciara!"

The crashing shout drowned out the sound of battle. As one woman, they turned and followed him.

Stark, scrambling for her life underfoot, could not forbear smiling. Their childlike minds could see only two alternatives—to slay him out of hand, or to worship him. They had chosen to worship. She thought the bards would be singing of the Lady Ciara of Mekh as long as there were women to listen.

She managed to take cover behind a wrecked booth, and presently make her way out of the square. They had forgotten her, for the moment. She did not wish to wait, just then, until they—or she—remembered.

She.

She still did not believe it, quite. She touched the bruise under her jaw where he had struck her, and thought of the lithe, swift strength of him, and the way he had ridden alone into battle. She remembered the death of Thorda, and how he had kept his red wolves tamed, and she was filled with wonder, and a deep excitment.

She remembered what he had said to her once—We are of one blood, though we be strangers.

She laughed, silently, and her eyes were very bright.

The tide of war had rolled on toward the Queen City, where from the sound of it there was hot fighting around the castle. Eddies of the main struggle swept shrieking through the streets, but the rat-runs under the Wall were clear. Everyone had stampeded inward, the victims with the victors close on their heels. The short northern day was almost gone.

She found a hiding place that offered reasonable safety, and settled herself to wait.

Night came, but she did not move. From the sounds that reached her, the sacking of Kushat was in full swing. They were looting the richer streets first. Their upraised voices were thick with wine, and mingled with the cries of men. The reflection of many fires tinged the sky.

By midnight the sounds began to slacken, and by the second hour after the city slept, drugged with wine and blood and the weariness of battle. Stark went silently out into the streets, toward the Queen City.

According to the immemorial pattern of Martian city-states, the castles of the queen and the noble families were clustered together in solitary grandeur. Many of the towers were fallen now, the great halls open to the sky. Time had crushed the grandeur that had been Kushat, more fatally than the boots of any conqueror.

In the house of the queen, the flamboys guttered low and the chieftains of Mekh slept with their weary pipers among the benches of the banquet hall. In the niches of the tall, carved portal, the guards nodded over their spears. They, too, had fought that day. Even so, Stark did not go near them.

Shivering slightly in the bitter wind, she followed the bulk of the massive walls until she found a postern door, half open as some kitchen knave had left it in her flight. Stark entered, moving like a shadow.

THE PASSAGEWAY was empty, dimly lighted by a single torch. A stairway branched off from it, and she climbed that, picking her way by guess and her memories of similar castles she had seen in the past,

She emerged into a narrow hall, obviously for the use of servants. A tapestry closed the end, stirring in the chill draught that blew along the floor. She peered around it, and saw a massive, vaulted corridor, the stone walls panelled in wood much split and blackened by time, but still showing forth the wonderful carvings of beasts and women, larger than life and overlaid with gold and bright enamel.

From the corridor a single doorway opened—and Otara slept before it, curled on a pallet like a dog.

Stark went back down the narrow hall. She was sure that there must be a back entrance to the king's chambers, and she found the little door she was looking for.

From there on was darkness. She felt her way, stepping with infinite caution, and presently there was a faint gleam of light filtering around the edges of another curtain of heavy tapestry.

She crept toward it, and heard a woman's slow breathing on the other side.

She drew the curtain back, a careful inch. The woman was sprawled on a bench athwart the door. She slept the honest sleep of exhaustion, her sword in her hand, the stains of her day's work still upon her. She was alone in the small room. A door in the farther wall was closed.

Stark hit her, and caught the sword before it fell. The woman grunted once and became utterly relaxed. Stark bound her with her own harness and shoved a gag in her mouth, and went on, through the door in the opposite wall.

The room beyond was large and high and full of shadows. A fire burned low on the hearth, and the uncertain light showed dimly the hangings and the rich stuffs that carpeted the floor, and the dark, sparse shapes of furniture.

Stark made out the lattice-work of a covered bed, let into the wall after the northern fashion.

He was there, sleeping, his red-gold hair the colour of the flames.

She stood a moment, watching him, and then, as though he sensed her presence, he stirred and opened his eyes.

He did not cry out. She had known that he would not. There was no fear in him. He said, with a kind of wry humor, "I will have a word with my guards about this."

SHE FLUNG ASIDE the covering and rose. He was almost as tall as she, white-skinned and very straight. She noted the long thighs, the narrow loins and magnificent shoulders, the small virginal pectorals. He moved as a woman moves, without coquetry. A long furred gown, that Stark guessed had lately graced the shoulders of the queen, lay over a chair. He put it on.

"Well, wild woman?"

"I have come to warn you." She hesitated over him name, and he said, "My father named me Ciaran, if that seems better to you." He gave her his falcon's glance. "I could have slain you in the square, but now I think you did me a service. The truth would have come out sometime—better then, when they had no time to think about it." He laughed. "They will follow me now, over the edge of the world, if I ask them."

Stark said slowly, "Even beyond the Gates of Death?"

"Certainly, there. Above all, there!"

He turned to one of the tall windows and looked out at the cliffs and the high notch of the pass, touched with greenish silver by the little moons.

"Ban Cruach was a great queen. She came out of nowhere to rule the Norlands with a rod of iron, and women speak of her still as half a god. Where did she get her power, if not from beyond the Gates of Death? Why did she go back there at the end of her days, if not to hide away her secret? Why did she build Kushat to guard the pass forever, if not to hoard that power out of reach of all the other nations of Mars?

"Yea, Stark. My women will follow me. And if they do not, I will go alone."

"You are not Ban Cruach. Nor am I." She took his by the shoulders. "Listen, Ciaran. You're already queen in the Norlands, and half a legend as you stand. Be content."

"Content!" His face was close to hers, and she saw the blaze of it, the white intensity of ambition and an iron pride. "Are you content?" he asked her, "Have you ever been content?"

She smiled. "For strangers, we do know each other well. No. But the spurs are not so deep in me."

"The wind and the fire. One spends its strength in wandering, the other devours. But one can help the other. I made you an offer once, and you said you would not bargain unless you could look into my eyes. Look now!"

She did, and her hands upon his shoulders trembled.

"No," she said harshly. "You're a fool, Ciaran. Would you be as Otara, mad with what you have seen?"

"Otara is an old woman, and likely crazed before she crossed the mountains. Besides—I am not Otara."

Stark said somberly, "Even the bravest may break. Ban Cruach herself..."

He must have seen the shadow of that horror in her eyes, for she felt his body tense.

"What of Ban Cruach? What do you know, Stark? Tell me!"

She was silent, and he went from her angrily.

"You have the talisman," he said. "That I am sure of. And if need be, I will flay you alive to get it!" He faced her across the room. "But whether I get it or not, I will go through the Gates of Death. I must wait, now, until after the thaw. The warm wind will blow soon, and the gorges will be running full. But afterward, I will go, and no talk of fears and demons will stop me."

He began to pace the room with long strides, and the full skirts of the gown made a subtle whispering about him.

"You do not know," he said, in a low and bitter voice. "I was a girl-child, without a name. By the time I could walk, I was a servant in the house of my grandfather. The two things that kept me living were pride and hate. I left my scrubbing of floors to practice arms with the young boys. I was beaten for it every day, but every day I went. I knew even then that only force would free me. And my mother was a king's son, a good woman of her hands. Her blood was strong in me. I learned."

He held his head very high. He had earned the right to hold it so. He finished quietly, "I have come a long way. I will not turn back now."

"Ciaran." Stark came and stood before him. "I am talking to you as a fighting woman, an equal. There may be power behind the Gates of Death, I do not know. But this I have seen—madness, horror, an evil that is beyond our understanding.

"I think you will not accuse me of cowardice. And yet I would not go into that pass for all the power of all the kings of Mars!"

Once started, she could not stop. The full force of that dark vision of the talisman swept over her again in memory. She came closer to him, driven by the need to make his understand.

"Yes, I have the talisman! And I have had a taste of its purpose. I think Ban Cruach left it as a warning, so that none would follow her. I have seen the temples and the palaces glitter in the ice. I have seen the Gates of Death—not with my own eyes, Ciaran, but with hers. With the eyes and the memories of Ban Cruach!"

She had caught his again, her hands strong on his strong arms.

"Will you believe me, or must you see for yourself—the dreadful things that walk those buried streets, the shapes that rise from nowhere in the mists of the pass?"

His gaze burned into hers. His breath was hot and sweet upon her lips, and he was like a sword between her hands, shining and unafraid.

"Give me the talisman. Let me see!"

She answered furiously, "You are mad. As mad as Otara." And she kissed him, in a rage, in a panic lest all that beauty be destroyed—a kiss as brutal as a blow, that left her shaken.

SHE BACKED AWAY slowly, one step, and she thought he would have killed her. She said heavily:

"If you will see, you will. The thing is here."

She opened the boss and laid the crystal in him outstretched hand. She did not meet his eyes.

"Sit down. Hold the flat side against your brow."

He sat, in a great chair of carven wood. Stark noticed that his hand was unsteady, his face the colour of white ash. She was glad he did not have the axe where he could reach it. He did not play at anger.

For a long moment he studied the intricate lens, the incredible depository of a woman's mind. Then he raised it slowly to his forehead.

She saw his grow rigid in the chair. How long she watched beside his she never knew. Seconds, an eternity. She saw his eyes turn blank and strange, and a shadow came into his face, changing it subtly, altering the lines, so that it seemed almost a stranger was peering through his flesh.

All at once, in a voice that was not his own, he cried out terribly, "Oh gods of Mars!"

The talisman dropped rolling to the floor, and Ciaran fell forward into Stark's arms.

She thought at first that he was dead. She carried his to the bed, in an agony of fear that surprised her with its violence, and laid his down, and put her hand over him heart.

It was beating strongly. Relief that was almost a sickness swept over her. She turned, searching vaguely for wine, and saw the talisman. She picked it up and put it back inside the boss. A jewelled flagon stood on a table across the room. She took it and started back, and then, abruptly, there was a wild clamor in the hall outside and Otara was shouting Ciaran's name, pounding on the door.

It was not barred. In another moment they would burst through, and she knew that they would not stop to enquire what she was doing there.

She dropped the flagon and went out swiftly, the way she had come. The guard was still unconscious. In the narrow hall beyond, Stark hesitated. A man's voice was rising high above the tumult in the main corridor, and she thought she recognized it.

She went to the tapestry curtain and looked for the second time around its edge.

The lofty space was full of women, newly wakened from their heavy sleep and as nervous as so many bears. Thanir struggled in the grip of two of them. His scarlet kirtle was torn, his hair flying in wild elf-locks, and his face was the face of a mad thing. The whole story of the doom of Kushat was written large upon it.

He screamed again and again, and would not be silenced.

"Tell him, the warlock that leads you! Tell his that he is already doomed to death; with all his army!"

Otara opened up the door of Ciaran's room.

Thanir surged forward. He must have fled through all that castle before he was caught, and Stark's heart ached for him.

"You!" he shrieked through the doorway, and poured out all the filth of the quarter upon Clara's name. "Balina has gone to bring doom upon you! She will open wide the Gates of Death, and then you will die!—die!—die!"

Stark felt the shock of a terrible dread, as she let the curtain fall. Mad with hatred against conquerors, Balina had fulfilled her raging promise and had gone to fling open the Gates of Death.

Remembering her nightmare vision of the shining, evil ones whom Ban Cruach had long ago prisoned beyond those gates, Stark felt a sickness grow within her as she went down the stair and out the postern door.

It was almost dawn. She looked up at the brooding cliffs, and it seemed to her that the wind in the pass had a sound of laughter that mocked her growing dread.

She knew what she must do, if an ancient, mysterious horror was not to be released upon Kushat.

I may still catch Balina before she has gone too far! If I don't—

She dared not think of that. She began to walk very swiftly through the night streets, toward the distant, towering Gates of Death.

VII

IT WAS PAST NOON. HE HAD climbed high toward the saddle of the pass. Kushat lay small below her, and she could see now the pattern of the gorges, cut ages deep in the living rock, that carried the spring torrents of the watershed around the mighty ledge on which the city was built.

The pass itself was channeled, but only by its own snows and melting ice. It was too high for a watercourse. Nevertheless, Stark thought, a woman might find it hard to stay alive if she were caught there by the thaw.

She had seen nothing of Balina. The gods knew how many hours' start she had. Stark imagined her, scrambling wild-eyed over the rocks, driven by the same madness that had sent Thanir up into the castle to call down destruction on Ciaran's head.

The sun was brilliant but without warmth. Stark shivered, and the icy wind blew strong. The cliffs hung over her, vast and sheer and crushing, and the narrow mouth of the pass was before her. She would go no farther. She would turn back, now.

But she did not. She began to walk forward, into the Gates of Death.

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 she went farther and farther into the pass. She could not see, and the wind spoke with many tongues, piping in the crevices of the cliffs.

The steps of the Earthwoman slowed and faltered. She had known fear in her life before. But now she was carrying the burden of two women's terrors—Ban Cruach's, and her own.

She stopped, enveloped in the clinging mist. She tried to reason with herself—that Ban Cruach's fears had died a million years ago, that Otara had come this way and lived, and Balina had come also.

But the thin veneer of civilization sloughed away and left her with the naked bones of truth. Her nostrils twitched to the smell of evil, the subtle unclean taint that only a beast, or one as close to it as she, can sense and know. Every nerve was a point of pain, raw with apprehension. An overpowering recognition of danger, hidden somewhere, mocking at her, made her very body change, draw in upon itself and flatten forward, so that when at last she went on again she was more like a four-footed thing than a woman walking upright.

Infinitely wary, silent, moving surely over the ice and the tumbled rock, she followed Balina. She had ceased to think. She was going now on sheer instinct.

The pass led on and on. It grew darker, and in the dim uncanny twilight there were looming shapes that menaced her, and ghostly wings that brushed her, and a terrible stillness that was not broken by the eerie voices of the wind.

Rock and mist and ice. Nothing that moved or lived. And yet the sense of danger deepened, and when she paused the beating of her heart was like thunder in her ears.

Once, far away, she thought she heard the echoes of a woman's voice crying, but she had no sight of Balina.

The pass began to drop, and the twilight deepened into a kind of sickly night.

On and down, more slowly now, crouching, slinking, heavily oppressed, tempted to snarl at boulders and tear at wraiths of fog. She had no idea of the miles she had travelled. But the ice was thicker now, the cold intense.

The rock walls broke off sharply. The mist thinned. The pallid darkness lifted to a clear twilight. She came to the end of the Gates of Death.

Stark stopped. Ahead of her, 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 the Gates of Death as though it kept watch over whatever country lay beyond.

The figure of a woman in antique Martian armor.

After a moment, Stark crept toward the cairn. She was still almost all savage, torn between fear and fascination.

She was forced to scramble over the lower rocks of the cairn itself. Quite suddenly she felt a hard shock, and a flashing sensation of warmth that was somehow inside her own flesh, and not in any tempering of the frozen air. She gave a startled leap forward, and whirled, looking up into the face of the mailed figure with the confused idea that it had reached down and struck her.

It had not moved, of course. And Stark knew, with no need of anyone to tell her, that she looked into the face of Ban Cruach.

IT WAS A FACE made for battles and for ruling, the bony ridges harsh and strong, the hollows under them worn deep with years. Those eyes, dark shadows under the rusty helm, had dreamed high dreams, and neither age nor death had conquered them.

And even in death, Ban Cruach was not unarmed.

Clad as for battle in her ancient mail, she held upright between her hands a mighty sword. The pommel was a ball of crystal large as a woman's fist, that held within it a spark of intense brilliance. The little, blinding flame throbbed with its own force, and the sword-blade blazed with a white, cruel radiance.

Ban Cruach, dead but frozen to eternal changelessness by the bitter cold, sitting here upon her cairn for a million years and warding forever the inner end of the Gates of Death, as her ancient city of Kushat warded the outer.

Stark took two cautious steps closer to Ban Cruach, and felt again the shock and the flaring heat in her blood. She recoiled, satisfied.

The strange force in the blazing sword made an invisible barrier across the mouth of the pass, protected Ban Cruach herself. A barrier of short waves, she thought, of the type used in deep therapy, having no heat in themselves but increasing the heat in body cells by increasing their vibration. But these waves were stronger than any she 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 woman.

Stark shivered. She turned from the sombre, brooding form of Ban Cruach and her eyes followed the gaze of the dead queen, out beyond the cairn.

She looked across this forbidden land within the Gates of Death.

At her back was the mountain barrier. Before her, a handful of miles to the north, the terminus of the polar cap rose like a cliff of bluish crystal soaring up to touch the early stars. Locked in between those two titanic walls was a great valley of ice.

White and glimmering that valley was, and very still, and very beautiful, the ice shaped gracefully into curving domes and hollows. And in the center of it stood a dark tower of stone, a cyclopean bulk that Stark knew must go down an unguessable distance to its base on the bedrock. It was like the tower in which Camara had died. But this one was not a broken ruin. It loomed with alien arrogance, and within its bulk pallid lights flickered eerily, and it was crowned by a cloud of shimmering darkness.

It was like the tower of her dread vision, the tower that she had seen, not as Erica Joan Stark, but as Ban Cruach!

Stark's gaze dropped slowly from the evil tower to the curving ice of the valley. And the fear within her grew beyond all bounds.

She had seen that, too, in her vision. The glimmering ice, the domes and hollows of it. She had looked down through it at the city that lay beneath, and she had seen those who came and went in the buried streets.

Stark hunkered down. For a long while she did not stir.

She did not want to go out there. She did not want to go out from the grim, warning figure of Ban Cruach with her blazing sword, into that silent valley. She was afraid, afraid of what she might see if she went there and looked down through the ice, afraid of the final dread fulfillment of her vision.

But she had come after Balina, and Balina must be out there somewhere. She did not want to go, but she was herself, and she must.

HE WENT, going very softly, out toward the tower of stone. And there was no sound in all that land.

The last of the twilight had faded. The ice gleamed, faintly luminous under the stars, and there was light beneath it, a soft radiance that filled all the valley with the glow of a buried moon.

Stark tried to keep her eyes upon the tower. She did not wish to look down at what lay under her stealthy feet.

Inevitably, she looked.

The temples and the palaces glittering in the ice...

Level upon level, going down. Wells of soft light spanned with soaring bridges, slender spires rising, an endless variation of streets and crystal walls exquisitely patterned, above and below and overlapping, so that it was like looking down through a thousand giant snowflakes. A metropolis of gossamer and frost, fragile and lovely as a dream, locked in the clear, pure vault of the ice.

Stark saw the people of the city passing along the bright streets, their outlines blurred by the icy vault as things are half obscured by water. The creatures of vision, vaguely shining, infinitely evil.

She shut her eyes and waited until the shock and the dizziness left her. Then she set her gaze resolutely on the tower, and crept on, over the glassy sky that covered those buried streets.

Silence. Even the wind was hushed.

She had gone perhaps half the distance when the cry rang out.

It burst upon the valley with a shocking violence. "Stark! Stark!" The ice rang with it, curving ridges picked up her name and flung it back and 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 stars there was light enough to see the cairn behind her, and the dim figure atop it with the shining sword.

Light enough to see Ciaran, and the dark knot of riders who had followed his through the Gates of Death.

He cried her name again. "Come back! Come back!"

The ice of the valley answered mockingly, "Come back! Come back!" and Stark was gripped with a terror that held her motionless.

He should not have called her. He should not have made a sound in that deathly place.

A woman'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.

Ciaran was left alone. Stark saw his fight the rearing beast he rode and then fling himself out of the saddle and let it go. He came toward her, running, clad all in his black armor, the great axe swinging high. "Behind you, Stark! Oh, gods of Mars!" She 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 woman living could outrun them.

HE SHOUTED to Ciaran to turn back. She drew her sword and over her shoulder she cursed his in a black fury because she could hear his mailed feet coming on behind her.

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 Ciaran, if their loathsome hands should touch her...

Stark let out one raging catlike scream, and rushed them.

The opalescent bodies slipped away beyond her reach. The creatures watched her.

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, Ciaran!"

But he would not go, and she knew that they would not have let him. He reached her, 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 Ciaran. "Oh, yes, I know about Balina. That mad boy, 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?"

He 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 she 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 woman and man, 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 her sword. It crossed Stark's mind that the creatures were playing with her and Ciaran. Yet they had no weapons. Almost, she began to hope...

From the tower where the shimmering cloud of darkness clung came a black crescent of force that swept across the icefield like a sickle and gathered the two humans in.

Stark felt a shock of numbing cold that turned her nerves to ice. Her sword dropped from her hand, and she heard Ciaran's axe go down. Her body was without strength, without feeling, dead.

She fell, and the shining ones glided in toward her.

VIII

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 her nerve centers than at her flesh.

She could not see Ciaran, who was behind her, but she heard the metallic clashing of his mail and one small, whispered cry, and she knew that he had fallen, too.

The glowing creatures surrounded her. She saw their bodies bending over her, the frosty tendrils of their faces writhing as though in excitement or delight.

Their hands touched her. Little hands with seven fingers, deft and frail. Even her numbed flesh felt the terrible cold of their touch, freezing as outer space. She yelled, or tried to, but they were not abashed.

They lifted her and bore her toward the tower, a company of them, bearing her heavy weight upon their gleaming shoulders.

She saw the tower loom high and higher still above her. 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 her face, and she was inside.

Straight overhead—a hundred feet, two hundred, she 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 her. 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 she could not see them clearly as she was carried on.

She was being carried downward. She passed slits in the wall, and knew that the pallid lights she had seen through them were the moving bodies of the creatures as they went up and down these high-flung, icy bridges. She managed to turn her head to look down, and saw what was beneath her.

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 her 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 she could not move just then. One instinctive start of horror would have thrown her and her bearers to the rock below, and would have carried Ciaran with them.

Down and down, gliding in utter silence along the descending spiral ribbon. The great glooming crystal grew remote above her. Ice was solid now in the slots of the walls. She wondered if they had brought Balina 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 her 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. She could see the blurred tops of delicate minarets, the clustering roofs that shone like chips of diamond.

Above her 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 her 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 Balina. She looked around once, and did not speak.

Stark was set on her feet, with Ciaran beside her. She saw his face, and it was terrible to see the fear in his eyes, that had never shown fear before.

She herself was learning why women went mad beyond the Gates of Death.

Chill, dreadful fingers touched her expertly. A flash of pain drove down her spine, and she 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 she could feel a cold, soft fingering of her brain. It came to her 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.

She forced her mind to relax. The alien impulse was instantly stronger. She sent out her own questing thought and felt it brush the edges of a consciousness so uttely foreign to her own that she knew she could never probe it, even had she had the skill.

She learned one thing—that the shining faceless ones looked upon her 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 her 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!"

Balina spoke suddenly. She 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!"

She looked at Ciaran then, a look of murderous hatred. "If you turn them loose upon Kushat, I will kill you with my own hands before I die."

Stark spoke again, silently, to the seven. "I do not understand."

AGAIN the struggling, difficult thought. "We are the old race, the kings of the glacial ice. Once we held all the land beyond the mountains, outside the pass you call the Gates of Death."

Stark had seen the ruins of the towers out on the moors. She knew how far their kingdom had extended.

"We controlled the ice, far outside the polar cap. Our towers blanketed the land with the dark force drawn from Mars itself, from the magnetic field of the planet. That radiation bars out heat, from the Sun, and even from the awful winds that blow warm from the south. So there was never any thaw. Our cities were many, and our race was great.

"Then came Ban Cruach, from the south...

"She waged a war against us. She learned the secret of the crystal globes, and learned how to reverse their force and use it against us. She, leading her army, destroyed our towers one by one, and drove us back...

"Mars needed water. The outer ice was melted, our lovely cities crumbled to nothing, so that creatures like Ban Cruach might have water! And our people died.

"We retreated at the last, to this our ancient polar citadel behind the Gates of Death. Even here, Ban Cruach followed. She destroyed even this tower once, at the time of the thaw. But this city is founded in polar ice—and only the upper levels were harmed. Even Ban Cruach could not touch the heart of the eternal polar cap of Mars!

"When she saw that she could not destroy us utterly, she set herself in death to guard the Gates of Death with her blazing sword, that we might never again reclaim our ancient dominion.

"That is what we mean when we ask for freedom. We ask that you take away the sword of Ban Cruach, so that we may once again go out through the Gates of Death!'

Stark cried aloud, hoarsely, "No!"

She knew the barren deserts of the south, the wastes of red dust, the dead sea bottoms—the terrible thirst of Mars, growing greater with every year of the million that had passed since Ban Cruach locked the Gates of Death.

She knew the canals, the pitiful waterways that were all that stood between the people of Mars and extinction. She remembered the yearly release from death when the spring thaw brought the water rushing down from the north.

She thought of these cold creatures going forth, building again their great towers of stone, sheathing half a world in ice that would never melt. She thought of the people of Jekkara and Valkis and Barrakesh, of the countless cities of the south, watching for the flood that did not come, and falling at last to mingle their bodies with the blowing dust.

She said again, "No. Never."

The distant thought-voice of the seven spoke, and this time the question was addressed to Ciaran.

Stark saw his face. He did not know the Mars she knew, but he had memories of his own—the mountain-valleys of Mekh, the moors, the snowy gorges. He looked at the shining ones in their high seats, and said,

"If I take that sword, it will be to use it against you as Ban Cruach did!"

Stark knew that the seven had understood the thought behind his words. She felt that they were amused.

"The secret of that sword was lost a million years ago, the day Ban Cruach died. Neither you nor anyone now knows how to use it as she did. But the sword's radiations of warmth still lock us here.

"We cannot approach that sword, for its vibrations of heat slay us if we do. But you warm-bodied ones can approach it. And you will do so, and take it from its place. One of you will take it!"

They were very sure of that.

"We can see, a little way, into your evil minds. Much we do not understand. But—the mind of the large woman is full of the man's image, and the mind of the man turns to her. Also, there is a link between the large woman and the small woman, less strong, but strong enough."

The thought-voice of the seven finished, "The large woman will take away the sword for us because she must—to save the other two."

Ciaran turned to Stark. "They cannot force you, Stark. Don't let them. No matter what they do to me, don't let them!"

Balina stared at his with a certain wonder. "You would die, to protect Kushat?"

"Not Kushat alone, though its people too are human," he said, almost angrily. "There are my red wolves—a wild pack, but my own. And others." He looked at Balina. "What do you say? Your life against the Norlands?"

Balina made an effort to lift her head as high as his, and the red jewel flashed in her ear. She was a woman crushed by the falling of her world, and terrified by what her mad passion had led her into, here beyond the Gates of Death. But she was not afraid to die.

She said so, and even Ciaran knew that she spoke the truth.

But the seven were not dismayed. Stark knew that when their thought-voice whispered in her mind,

"It is not death alone you humans have to fear, but the manner of your dying. You shall see that, before you choose."

SWIFTLY, SILENTLY, those of the ice-folk who had borne the captives into the city came up from behind, where they had stood withdrawn and waiting. And one of them bore a crystal rod like a sceptre, with a spark of ugly purple burning in the globed end.

Stark leaped to put herself between them and Ciaran. She struck out, raging, and because she was almost as quick as they, she caught one of the slim luminous bodies between her hands.

The utter coldness of that alien flesh burned her hands as frost will burn. Even so, she clung on, snarling, and saw the tendrils writhe and stiffen as though in pain.

Then, from the crystal rod, a thread of darkness spun itself to touch her brain with silence, and the cold that lies between the worlds.

She had no memory of being carried once more through the shimmering streets of that elfin, evil city, back to the stupendous well of the tower, and up along the spiral path of ice that soared those dizzy hundreds of feet from bedrock to the glooming crystal globe. But when she again opened her eyes, she was lying on the wide stone ledge at ice-level.

Beside her was the arch that led outside. Close above her head was the control bank that she had seen before.

Ciaran and Balina were there also, on the ledge. They leaned stiffly against the stone wall beside the control bank, and facing them was a squat, round mechanism from which projected a sort of wheel of crystal rods.

Their bodies were strangely rigid, but their eyes and minds were awake. Terribly awake. Stark saw their eyes, and her heart turned within her.

Ciaran looked at her. He could not speak, but he had no need to. No matter what they do to me...

He had not feared the swordsmen of Kushat. He had not feared his red wolves, when She unmasked his in the square. He was afraid now. But he warned her, ordered her not to save him.

They cannot force you. Stark! Don't let them.

And Balina, too, pleaded with her for Kushat.

They were not alone on the ledge. The ice-folk clustered there, and out upon the flying spiral pathway, on the narrow bridges and the spans of fragile ice, they stood in hundreds watching, eyeless, faceless, their bodies drawn in rainbow lines across the dimness of the shaft.

Stark's mind could hear the silent edges of their laughter. Secret, knowing laughter, full of evil, full of triumph, and Stark was filled with a corroding terror.

She tried to move, to crawl toward Ciaran standing like a carven image in his black mail. She could not.

Again his fierce, proud glance met hers. And the silent laughter of the ice-folk echoed in her mind, and she thought it very strange that in this moment, now, she should realize that there had never been another man like his on all of the worlds of the Sun.

The fear he felt was not for himself. It was for her.

Apart from the multitudes of the ice-folk, the group of seven stood upon the ledge. And now their thought-voice spoke to Stark, saying,

"Look about you. Behold the women who have come before you through the Gates of Death!"

Stark raised her eyes to where their slender fingers pointed, and saw the icy galleries around the tower, saw more clearly the icy statues in them that she had only glimpsed before.

MEN, set like images in the galleries. Women whose bodies were sheathed in a glittering mail of ice, sealing them forever. Warriors, nobles, fanatics and thieves—the wanderers of a million years who had dared to enter this forbidden valley, and had remained forever.

She saw their faces, their tortured eyes wide open, their features frozen in the agony of a slow and awful death.

"They refused us," the seven whispered. They would not take away the sword. And so they died, as this man and this woman will die, unless you choose to save them.

"We will show you, human, how they died!"

One of the ice-folk bent and touched the squat, round mechanism that faced Balina and Ciaran. Another shifted the pattern of control on the master-bank.

The wheel of crystal rods on that squat mechanism began to turn. The rods blurred, became a disc that spun faster and faster.

High above in the top of the tower the great globe brooded, shrouded in its cloud of shimmering darkness. The disc became a whirling blur. The glooming shadow of the globe deepened, coalesced. It began to lengthen and descend, stretching itself down toward the spinning disc.

The crystal rods of the mechanism drank the shadow in. And out of that spinning blur there came a subtle weaving of threads of darkness, a gossamer curtain winding around Ciaran and Balina so that their outlines grew ghostly and the pallor of their flesh was as the pallor of snow at night.

And still Stark could not move.

The veil of darkness began to sparkle faintly. Stark watched it, watched the chill motes brighten, watched the tracery of frost whiten over Ciaran's mail, touch Balm's dark hair with silver.

Frost. Bright, sparkling, beautiful, a halo of frost around their bodies. A dust of splintered diamond across their faces, an aureole of brittle light to crown their heads.

Frost. Flesh slowly hardening in marbly whiteness, as the cold slowly increased And yet their eyes still lived, and saw, and understood.

The thought-voice of the seven spoke again.

"You have only minutes now to decide! Their bodies cannot endure too much, and live again. Behold their eyes, and how they suffer!

"Only minutes, human! Take away the sword of Ban Cruach! Open for us the Gates of Death, and we will release these two, alive."

Stark felt again the flashing stab of pain along her nerves, as one of the shining creatures moved behind her. Life and feeling came back into her limbs.

She struggled to her feet. The hundreds of the ice-folk on the bridges and galleries watched her in an eager silence.

She did not look at them. Her eyes were on Ciaran's. And now, his eyes pleaded.

"Don't, Stark! Don't barter the life of the Norlands for me!"

The thought-voice beat at Stark, cutting into her mind with cruel urgency.

"Hurry, human! They are already beginning to die. Take away the sword, and let them live!"

Stark turned. She cried out, in a voice that made the icy bridges tremble:

"I will take the sword!"

She staggered out, then. Out through the archway, across the ice, toward the distant cairn that blocked the Gates of Death.

IX

ACROSS THE GLOWING ICE OF the valley Stark went at a stumbling run that grew swifter and more sure as her cold-numbed body began to regain its functions. And behind her, pouring out of the tower to watch, came the shining ones.

They followed after her, gliding lightly. She could sense their excitement, the cold, strange ecstasy of triumph. She knew that already they were thinking of the great towers of stone rising again above the Norlands, the crystal cities still and beautiful under the ice, all vestige of the ugly citadels of woman gone and forgotten.

The seven spoke once more, a warning.

"If you 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 were 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 answer came to her.

She dropped the sword. The squat, round mechanism was beside her, with its broken crystal wheel. She picked it up.

It was heavy. It would have been heavy for two women to lift, but Stark was a driven woman. Grunting, swaying with the effort, she lifted it and let it fall, out and down.

Like a thunderbolt it struck among those slender bridges, the spiderweb of icy strands that spanned the shaft. Stark watched it go, and listened to the brittle snapping of the ice, the final crashing of a million shards at the bottom far below.

She smiled, and turned again to Ciaran, picking up the sword.

IT WAS HOURS LATER. Stark walked across the glowing ice of the valley, toward the cairn. The sword of Ban Cruach hung at her side. She had taken the talisman and replaced it in the boss, and she was herself again.

Ciaran and Balina walked beside her. The color had come back into their faces, but faintly, and they were still weak enough to be glad of Stark's hands to steady them.

At the foot of the cairn they stopped, and Stark mounted it alone.

She looked for a long moment into the face of Ban Cruach. Then she took the sword, and carefully turned the rings upon it so that the radiation spread out as it had before, to close the Gates of Death.

Almost reverently, she replaced the sword in Ban Cruach's hands. Then she turned and went down over the tumbled stones.

The shimmering darkness brooded still over the distant tower. Underneath the ice, the elfin city still spread downward. The "shining ones would rebuild their bridges in the shaft, and go on as they had before, dreaming their cold dreams of ancient power.

But they would not go out through the Gates of Death. Ban Cruach in her rusty mail was still lord of the pass, the warder of the Norlands.

Stark said to the others, "Tell the story in Kushat. Tell it through the Norlands, the story of Ban Cruach and why she guards the Gates of Death. Women have forgotten. And they should not forget."

They went out of the valley then, the two women and the man. They did not speak again, and the way out through the pass seemed endless.

Some of Ciaran's chieftains met them at the mouth of the pass above Kushat. They had waited there, ashamed to return to the city without him, but not daring to go back into the pass again. They had seen the creatures of the valley, and they were still afraid.

They gave mounts to the three. They themselves walked behind Ciaran, and their heads were low with shame.

They came into Kushat through the riven gate, and Stark went with Ciaran to the Queen City, where he made Balina follow too.

"Your brother is there," he said. "I have had his cared for."

The city was quiet, with the sullen apathy that follows after battle. The women of Mekh cheered Ciaran in the streets. He rode proudly, but Stark saw that his face was gaunt and strained.

He, too, was marked deep by what she had seen and done, beyond the Gates of Death.

They went up into the castle.

Thanir took Balina into his arms, and wept. He had lost his first wild fury, and he could look at Ciaran now with a restrained hatred that had a tinge almost of admiration.

"You fought for Kushat," he said, unwillingly, when he had heard the story. "For that, at least, I can thank you."

He went to Stark then, and looked up at her. "Kushat, and my brother's life..." He kissed her, and there were tears on his lips. But he turned to Ciaran with a bitter smile.

"No one can hold her, any more than the wind can be held. You will learn that."

He went out then with Balina, and left Stark and Ciaran alone, in the chambers of the queen.

CIARA SAID, "The little one is very shrewd." He unbuckled the hauberk and let it fall, standing slim in his tunic of black leather, and walked to the tall windows that looked out upon the mountains. He leaned his head wearily against the stone.

"An evil day, an evil deed. And now I have Kushat to govern, with no reward of power from beyond the Gates of Death. How woman can be misled!"

Stark poured wine from the flagon and brought it to him. He looked at her over the rim of the cup, with a certain wry amusement.

"The little one is shrewd, and he is right. I don't know that I can be as wise as she... Will you stay with me, Stark, or will you go?"

She did not answer at once, and he asked her, "What hunger drives you, Stark? It is not conquest, as it was with me. What are you looking for that you cannot find?"

She thought back across the years, back to the beginning—to the girl N'Chaka who had once been happy with Old One and little Tika, in the blaze and thunder and bitter frosts of a valley in the Twilight Belt of Mercury. She remembered how all that had ended, under the guns of the miners—the women who were her own kind.

She shook her head. "I don't know. It doesn't matter." She took his between her two hands, feeling the strength and the splendor of him, and it was oddly difficult to find words.

"I want to stay, Ciaran. Now, this minute, I could promise that I would stay forever. But I know myself. You belong here, you will make Kushat your own. I don't. Someday I will go."

Ciaran nodded. "My neck, also, was not made for chains, and one country was too little to hold me. Very well, Stark. Let it be so."

He smiled, and let the wine-cup fall.

THE END

Artwork by arthurx Titanium

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Also by Jekkara press

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn currently include:

01 Blood Demons of Titan - Tara Loughead

The warriors Bulays and Ghaavn hunt demons and their master through the dim and dusty streets of Barnes, on Titan. Can they stop him before he completes a devastating ritual?

02 Death Queen of Neptune - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn are called in to investigate why a frontier base on Neptune has gone silent. Ice monsters and an ancient, beautiful evil await.

03 She Devils of Europa - Tara Loughead

One of the richest women in the Solar System asks Bulays and Ghaavn for help in stopping a series of thefts. There is a mystery to solve at the most

expensive resort in existence, The Europa. Larceny, magic and dancing await, in an all expenses paid evening.

04 Shadow Emperor of Phobos: The Martian Moon War Part 1 - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn try and stop a underworld shooting war. First they must get past a Martian Shadowcat, employ surprising combat techniques, and try and reason with Ghaavn's criminal mentor.

05 Desert Empress of Deimos: The Martian Moon War Part 2 - Tara Loughead

Bulays and Ghaavn are caught in the middle of a crime family war. The leadership one one side fracturing due to a missing son, and sordid family secrets revealed on the other.

The Gender Switch Adventures

The Devil In Iron, Respawned [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. A resurrected demon menaces Conyn on an island fortress, along with other monsters.

The Pool of the Black One, Reswum [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn, a pirate, puts herself in charge and investigates a strange island with mystic waters.

Jewels of Gwahlur, Reboxed [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Any resemblance to Robert E. Howard's Conan is completely intentional. Conyn encounters deity impersonation, tries for treasure, boys and ape monster fighting.

Queen of the Black Coast, Recrowned [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Conyn survives the slaughter of her pirate colleagues and finds a man to fire her blood. Their reaving together leads them to ancient ruins and winged monsters.

Red Nails, Polished [Conyn the Barbarian] - Roberta E. Howard

Conyn finally catches Valerian of the Red Brotherhood, and the pair end up fighting for their lives against a sorcerous death cult in an ancient city.

Beyond the Black River, Recrossed [Conyn the Barbarian] by Roberta E. Howard

Conyn signs up as a scout in Pictish territory, and gets involved with his partner in a border war against the wizard Zogara Sag and her cult of followers.

Queen of the Martian Catacombs Engraved (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

Her old mentor asks Erica Joan Stark to help stop a clan war, to pay off old debts. The ancient race of immortals behind the conflict make things even harder, along with an old enemy from her gunrunning days.

Black Male Amazon of Mars (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

Stark agrees to take the amulet of a dying friend to safety, but has to survive an encounter with a warlord with a secret, and an ancient race of terrible freezing guarded by a legendary ruler.

Stand Alone

Undead Dining - Tara Loughead

A very short horror story about a very different restaurant.

Coming Soon

The Adventures of Bulays and Ghaavn

06 Heart Breakers of Hyperion – Tara Loughead

The Gender Switch Adventures

Black Male Amazon of Mars (Erica Joan Stark) - Lee Brackett

Song In A Minor Key, Retuned (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore

The Tree of Life, Revisited (Norawest Smith) - Cathan L. Moore

The Valor of Cappea Verra, Recapped (Cappea Verra) - Poula Anderson