had melted, just a little, around her face.

Desperately, he struck down again at the creatures in the shaft, and
then the answer came to him.

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

It was heavy. It would have been heavy for two men to lift, but Stark
was a driven man. Grunting, swaying with the effort, he 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.

He smiled, and turned again to Ciara, 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 his side. He had taken
the talisman and replaced it in the boss, and he was himself again.

Ciara and Balin walked beside him. 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.

He looked for a long moment into the face of Ban Cruach. Then he 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, he replaced the sword in Ban Cruach's hands. Then he
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 his
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 he guards the Gates of Death.
Men have forgotten. And they should not forget."

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

Some of Ciara's chieftains met them at the mouth of the pass above
Kushat. They had waited there, ashamed to return to the city without
her, but not daring to go back into the