e bent closer to the fire, studying the lens.
There were scratches on the bezel, as though it had been held sometime
in a clamp, or setting, like a jewel. An ornament, probably, worn as a
badge of rank. Strange ornament for a barbarian king, in the dawn of
Mars. The firelight made tiny dancing sparks in the endless inner
facets. Quite suddenly, he had a curious feeling that the thing was
alive.

A pang of primitive and unreasoning fear shot through him, and he fought
it down. His vision was beginning to blur, and he shut his eyes, and in
the darkness it seemed to him that he could see and hear....

* * * * *

He started up, shaken now with an eerie terror, and raised his hand to
hurl the talisman away. But the part of him that had learned with much
pain and effort to be civilized made him stop, and think.

He sat down again. An instrument of hypnosis? Possibly. And yet that
fleeting touch of sight and sound had not been his own, out of his own
memories.

He was tempted now, fascinated, like a child that plays with fire. The
talisman had been worn somehow. Where? On the breast? On the brow?

He tried the first, with no result. Then he touched the flat surface of
the lens to his forehead.

_The great tower of stone rose up monstrous to the sky. It was whole,
and there were pallid lights within that stirred and flickered, and it
was crowned with a shimmering darkness._

He lay outside the tower, on his belly, and he was filled with fear and
a great anger, and a loathing such as turns the bones to water. There
was no snow. There was ice everywhere, rising to half the tower's
height, sheathing the ground.

Ice. Cold and clear and beautiful--and deadly.

He moved. He glided snakelike, with infinite caution, over the smooth
surface. The tower was gone, and far below him was a city. He saw the
temples and the palaces, the glittering lovely city beneath him in the
ice, blurred and fairylike and strange, a dream half glimpsed through
crystal.

He saw the Ones that lived there, moving slowly through the streets. He
could not see them clearly, only the vague shining of their bodies, and
he was glad.

He hated them, with a hatred that conquered even his fear, which was
great indeed.

He was not Eric John Stark. He was Ban Cruach.

The tower and the city vanished, swept away on a reeling tide.

He stood beneath a scarp of black rock, notched with a single pass. The
cliffs hung over h