* *

A ladder banged against the stones a few feet away. Men swarmed up the
rungs, fierce-eyed clansmen with laughter in their mouths. Stark was
first at the head.

They had given him a spear. He spitted two men through with it and lost
it, and a third man came leaping over the parapet. Stark received him
into his arms.

Balin watched. He saw the warrior go crashing back, sweeping his fellows
off the ladder. He saw Stark's face. He heard the sounds and smelled the
blood and sweat of war, and he was sick to the marrow of his bones, and
his hatred of the barbarians was a terrible thing.

Stark caught up a dead man's blade, and within ten minutes his arm was
as red as a butcher's. And ever he watched the winged helm that went
back and forth below, a standard to the clans.

By mid-afternoon the barbarians had gained the Wall in three places.
They spread inward along the ledges, pouring up in a resistless tide,
and the defenders broke. The rout became a panic.

"It's all over now," Stark said. "Find Thanis, and hide her."

Balin let fall his sword. "Give me the talisman," he whispered, and
Stark saw that he was weeping. "Give it me, and I will go beyond the
Gates of Death and rouse Ban Cruach from his sleep. And if he has
forgotten Kushat, I will take his power into my own hands. I will fling
wide the Gates of Death and loose destruction on the men of Mekh--or if
the legends are all lies, then I will die."

He was like a man crazed. "Give me the talisman!"

Stark slapped him, carefully and without heat, across the face. "Get
your sister, Balin. Hide her, unless you would be uncle to a red-haired
brat."

He went then, like a man who has been stunned. Screaming women with
their children clogged the ways that led inward from the Wall, and there
was bloody work afoot on the rooftops and in the narrow alleys.

The gate was holding, still.

* * * * *

Stark forced his way toward the square. The booths of the hucksters were
overthrown, the wine-jars broken and the red wine spilled. Beasts
squealed and stamped, tired of their chafing harness, driven wild by the
shouting and the smell of blood. The dead were heaped high where they
had fallen from above.

They were all soldiers here, clinging grimly to their last foothold. The
deep song of the rams shook the very stones. The iron-sheathed timbers
of the gate gave back an answering scream, and toward the end all other
sounds grew