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

Stark felt a shock of numbing cold that turned his nerves to ice. His
sword dropped from his hand, and he heard Ciara's axe go down. His body
was without strength, without feeling, dead.

He fell, and the shining ones glided in toward him.

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 his nerve centers than at his flesh.

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

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

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

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

He saw the tower loom high and higher still above him. The cloud of dark
force that crowned it blotted out the stars. It became too huge and high
to see at all, and then there was a low flat arch of stone close above
his face, and he was inside.

Straight overhead--a hundred feet, two hundred, he could not tell--was a
globe of crystal, fitted into the top of the tower as a jewel is held in
a setting.

The air around it was shadowed with the same eerie gloom that hovered
outside, but less dense, so that Stark could see the smouldering purple
spark that burned within the globe, sending out its dark vibrations.

A globe of crystal, with a heart of sullen flame. Stark remembered the
sword of Ban Cruach, and the white fire that burned in its hilt.

Two globes, the bright-cored and the dark. The sword of Ban Cruach
touched the blood with heat. The globe of the tower deadened the flesh
with cold. It was the same force, but at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Stark saw the cryptic controls of that glooming globe--a bank of them,
on a wide stone ledge just inside the tower, close beside him. There
were shining ones on that ledge tending those controls, and the