the ice was thicker now, the cold
intense.

The rock walls broke off sharply. The mist thinned. The pallid darkness
lifted to a clear twilight. He came to the end of the Gates of Death.

Stark stopped. Ahead of him, almost blocking the end of the pass,
something dark and high and massive loomed in the thinning mists.

It was a great cairn, and upon it sat a figure, facing outward from the
Gates of Death as though it kept watch over whatever country lay beyond.

The figure of a man in antique Martian armor.

After a moment, Stark crept toward the cairn. He was still almost all
savage, torn between fear and fascination.

He was forced to scramble over the lower rocks of the cairn itself.
Quite suddenly he felt a hard shock, and a flashing sensation of warmth
that was somehow inside his own flesh, and not in any tempering of the
frozen air. He gave a startled leap forward, and whirled, looking up
into the face of the mailed figure with the confused idea that it had
reached down and struck him.

It had not moved, of course. And Stark knew, with no need of anyone to
tell him, that he looked into the face of Ban Cruach.

* * * * *

It was a face made for battles and for ruling, the bony ridges harsh and
strong, the hollows under them worn deep with years. Those eyes, dark
shadows under the rusty helm, had dreamed high dreams, and neither age
nor death had conquered them.

And even in death, Ban Cruach was not unarmed.

Clad as for battle in his ancient mail, he held upright between his
hands a mighty sword. The pommel was a ball of crystal large as a man's
fist, that held within it a spark of intense brilliance. The little,
blinding flame throbbed with its own force, and the sword-blade blazed
with a white, cruel radiance.

Ban Cruach, dead but frozen to eternal changelessness by the bitter
cold, sitting here upon his cairn for a million years and warding
forever the inner end of the Gates of Death, as his ancient city of
Kushat warded the outer.

Stark took two cautious steps closer to Ban Cruach, and felt again the
shock and the flaring heat in his blood. He recoiled, satisfied.

The strange force in the blazing sword made an invisible barrier across
the mouth of the pass, protected Ban Cruach himself. A barrier of short
waves, he thought, of the type used in deep therapy, having no heat in
themselves but increasing the heat in body cells by increasing their
vibration. But th