n gone and forgotten.

The seven spoke once more, a warning.

"If you turn toward us with the sword, the woman and the man 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. He was thinking then only of Ciara, with the
frost-crystals gleaming on her marble flesh and her 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 him coming with those shadowed
eyes beneath the rusty helm. The great sword blazed between those dead,
frozen hands.

[Illustration: _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. He felt the first warm flare of
the force-waves in his blood, and slowly the chill began to creep out
from his bones. He climbed, scrambling upward over the rough stones of
the cairn.

Abruptly, then, at Ban Cruach's feet, he slipped and fell. For a second
it seemed that he could not move.

His back was turned toward the ice-folk. His body was bent forward, and
shielded so, his hands worked with feverish speed.

From his cloak he tore a strip of cloth. From the iron boss he took the
glittering lens, the talisman of Ban Cruach. Stark laid the lens against
his brow, and bound it on.

_The remembered shock, the flood and sweep of memories that were not his
own. The mind of Ban Cruach thundering its warning, its hard-won
knowledge of an ancient, epic war...._

He opened his own mind wide to receive those memories. Before he had
fought against them. Now he knew that they were his one small chance in
this swift gamble with death. Two things only of his own he kept firm in
that staggering tide of another man's memories. Two names--Ciara and
Balin.

He rose up again. And now his 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 king himself had risen again in battle.

He mounted the last step or two and stood before Ban Cruach. A shudder
ran through him, a sort of gathering and settling of the flesh, as
though Stark's being had accepted the stranger within it. His eyes, cold
and pale as the very ice that sheathed the valley, burned with a cruel
light.

He reached and took th