ism that spun the frosty doom around Ciara and Balin.
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 his back on them
and ran along the ledge, and in him was the heavy knowledge that he had
come too late.

The frost had thickened around Ciara and Balin. It encrusted them like
stiffened lace, and now their flesh was overlaid with a diamond shell of
ice.

Surely they could not live!

He 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 man and woman.
Stark forgot the creatures in the shaft below him. He turned the blazing
sword full upon Ciara and Balin.

It would not affect the thin covering of ice. If the woman and the man
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.

He waited, watching Ciara'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 him glance
behind him.

Stealthy, swift and silent, up the winding ways they came. They had
guessed that he had forgotten them in his anxiety. The sword was turned
away from them now, and if they could take him from behind, stun him
with the chill force of the sceptre-like rods they carried....

He slashed them with the sword. He 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.

He thought of the many levels of the city. He thought of all the
countless thousands that must inhabit them. He could hold them off in
the shaft as long as he wished if he had no other need for the sword.
But he knew that as soon as he turned his back they would be upon him
again, and if he should once fall....

He could not spare a moment, or a chance.

He looked at Ciara, not knowing what to do, and it seemed to him that
the sheathing frost