eat.

The wind scoured his tracks clean as soon as he made them. Twice, in the
distance, he did see riders, and one of those times he burrowed into a
tall drift and stayed there for several hours.

The ruined towers marched with him across the bitter land, lonely giants
fifty miles apart. He did not go near them.

He knew that he wandered a good bit, but he could not help it, and it
was probably his salvation. In those tortured badlands, riven by ages of
frost and flood, one might follow a man on a straight track between two
points. But to find a single rider lost in that wilderness was a matter
of sheer luck, and the odds were with Stark.

One evening at sunset he came out upon a plain that sloped upward to a
black and towering scarp, notched with a single pass.

The light was level and blood-red, glittering on the frosty rock so that
it seemed the throat of the pass was aflame with evil fires. To Stark's
mind, essentially primitive and stripped now of all its acquired reason,
that narrow cleft appeared as the doorway to the dwelling place of
demons as horrible as the fabled creatures that roam the Darkside of his
native world.

He looked long at the Gates of Death, and a dark memory crept into his
brain. Memory of that nightmare experience when the talisman had made
him seem to walk into that frightful pass, not as Stark, but as Ban
Cruach.

He remembered Otar's words--_I have seen Ban Cruach the mighty_. Was he
still there beyond those darkling gates, fighting his unimagined war,
alone?

Again, in memory, Stark heard the evil piping of the wind. Again, the
shadow of a dim and terrible shape loomed up before him....

He forced remembrance of that vision from his mind, by a great effort.
He could not turn back now. There was no place to go.

His weary beast plodded on, and now Stark saw as in a dream that a great
walled city stood guard before that awful Gate. He watched the city
glide toward him through a crimson haze, and fancied he could see the
ages clustered like birds around the towers.

He had reached Kushat, with the talisman of Ban Cruach still strapped in
the blood-stained belt around his waist.

IV

He stood in a large square, lined about with huckster's stalls and the
booths of wine-sellers. Beyond were buildings, streets, a city. Stark
got a blurred impression of a grand and brooding darkness, bulking huge
against the mountains, as bleak and proud as they, and quite as ancient,
wit