es upon the tower. He did not wish to look
down at what lay under his stealthy feet.

Inevitably, he looked.

_The temples and the palaces glittering in the ice...._

Level upon level, going down. Wells of soft light spanned with soaring
bridges, slender spires rising, an endless variation of streets and
crystal walls exquisitely patterned, above and below and overlapping, so
that it was like looking down through a thousand giant snowflakes. A
metropolis of gossamer and frost, fragile and lovely as a dream, locked
in the clear, pure vault of the ice.

Stark saw the people of the city passing along the bright streets, their
outlines blurred by the icy vault as things are half obscured by water.
The creatures of vision, vaguely shining, infinitely evil.

He shut his eyes and waited until the shock and the dizziness left him.
Then he set his gaze resolutely on the tower, and crept on, over the
glassy sky that covered those buried streets.

Silence. Even the wind was hushed.

He had gone perhaps half the distance when the cry rang out.

It burst upon the valley with a shocking violence. "_Stark! Stark!_" The
ice rang with it, curving ridges picked up his name and flung it back
and forth with eerie crystal voices, and the echoes fled out whispering
_Stark! Stark!_ until it seemed that the very mountains spoke.

Stark whirled about. In the pallid gloom between the ice and the stars
there was light enough to see the cairn behind him, and the dim figure
atop it with the shining sword.

Light enough to see Ciara, and the dark knot of riders who had followed
her through the Gates of Death.

She cried his name again. "Come back! Come back!"

The ice of the valley answered mockingly, "_Come back! Come back!_" and
Stark was gripped with a terror that held him motionless.

She should not have called him. She should not have made a sound in that
deathly place.

A man's hoarse scream rose above the flying echoes. The riders turned
and fled suddenly, the squealing, hissing beasts crowding each other,
floundering wildly on the rocks of the cairn, stampeding back into the
pass.

Ciara was left alone. Stark saw her fight the rearing beast she rode
and then flung herself out of the saddle and let it go. She came toward
him, running, clad all in her black armor, the great axe swinging high.

"Behind you, Stark! Oh, gods of Mars!"

He turned then and saw them, coming out from the tower of stone, the
pale, shining creature