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.

He tried to move, to crawl toward Ciara standing like a carven image in
her black mail. He could not.

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

The fear she felt was not for herself. It was for him.

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 men who have come before you through the
Gates of Death!"

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

* * * * *

Men, set like images in the galleries. Men 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.

He 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 woman and this man 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 Balin and Ciara. 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.