Stark nodded. “And that is why you wanted the talisman so badly—because it might help you to take your father’s city.”
“To take Narrissan. My father is dead these three years, and I was his only issue. I hope the gods allow him to be amused…” She shook her head, looking at Stark. “If you had fought with me instead of against me… Well, that is past. But who knows what lies ahead?”
She gave him a keen glance. “You have a hint, I think. And it frightens you.”
“We’ll soon know,” Stark said, and rose, going back to the head of the straggling column. He did not bother to tell Ciaran that if ever they did face each other again it would still be as man to man and equal to equal, with no regard for her sex. He knew that she knew that. And he knew that it would be more than a little foolish to say so, since in any case the choice was not his.
The line of march formed up and moved on again.
The pass dropped lower and the uncanny twilight deepened to a kind of sickly night. There was nothing but rock and ice. Yet the sense of danger increased, so that Stark moved against it as a man might move against water. And not he alone was oppressed. Balin, Lugh, Rogain, Thanis, all of the people now moved grudgingly and in silence. Even Ciaran’s face began to show apprehension under the stoic mask.
Then suddenly the rock walls dropped away. The pallid darkness lifted to a clear daylight. They were through the Gates of Death.
Beyond them was a stony slope widening out and down into a great valley locked between the mountains. They filed out of the pass and stood there on the slope. The cessation of the wind that had hammered and howled at them in the narrow cleft made it seem that the valley was terribly quiet.
They stood a long time. Thanis came up between Stark and Balin, her cloak wrapped tight around her, her dark eyes wide and stricken.
“What does it mean?” she asked finally.
Stark answered, “I don’t know.”
XIII
There were three towers. Two were roofless, long abandoned. All around these two were ruins, sheathed in ice, and they were the strangest ruins that Stark had ever seen, on a world that was rich in ruins and in strangeness.
The eye could follow even yet the spiderweb pattern of streets, pick out what might have been the market places and the temple squares. All along these streets the hollow skeletons of buildings stood like the shells of fantastic sea-things with their soft flesh all eaten away. The ice made the color blurred and luminous, added a luster to soaring curves and empty arches where they caught the sun.
“Did they build the place all of swords and spear-points?” said Balin, staring.
“Something like it,” Stark said. In that land where stone was the obvious material for building, nothing was made of stone but the great towers. The light and graceful bones of the city were all of metal, colored in some fashion so that the black valley shone with an icy mockery of spring greens and yellows and soft blues, with here and there a spurt of crimson or coral pink. The taller structures had crumpled down. The smaller ones leaned. Nothing had lived there for a very long time.
The third tower was still whole and sound.
Stark looked at it, feeling the cringing, snarling, hateful fear rise in him, and knew that this was how Camar’s tower and all the others beyond the pass had looked in the days of their strength. It was alien. It was arrogant. It was massive and very high, the stonework tapering in close at the top, and on its highest point was a glimmer of something unfamiliar, like a captive star. Only the star did not shed light. It sent out instead a cloudy shimmering, visible more as a distortion in the air than as a definite emanation. The mountain peaks behind it seemed to float.
Underneath that cloudy shimmer, filling almost a third of the valley, was a portion of the city that was not in ruins, although the ruined areas joined it. Obviously all had once been part of the same complex, and obviously the dead parts of the city had once been covered by the same kind of force-field, from the abandoned towers. The line of demarcation was quite clear. The ice and the broken buildings ended at the edge of the field. Beyond there were streets as bare as summer. Arches soared up straight and free. The many-colored walls stood squarely. Nowhere was there any sign of frost, or decay.
Or of life. In all those long avenues, nothing moved. And in all that valley there was no living sound except what the people of Kushat had brought with them.
Stark heard Ciaran laugh, and turned to face her. She was looking past him at the bright-colored desolation.
“It seems,” she said, “that myths die as well as men.”
Stark moved his head as an animal does when it listens to something far off. “There is life there yet.”
He put his hands on the belt and felt the talisman as a point of fire under them.
“There must be life,” said Balin. “Look at the tower. I don’t know what its purpose is, but it still functions. There must be someone—something there to tend it.”
The others caught that up. They were eager, desperate to believe. Balin went on, gesturing at the tower.
“That is power, certainly. Perhaps the very kind of power Ban Cruach brought away with him, though not in that form. What do you think it is, Stark? A defense?”
Stark said slowly, “I think it’s a defense against the ice and cold. See how warm the city looks.”
“And how quiet,” Lugh muttered. “Why should we lie to ourselves? The place is dead. As dead as Ban Cruach.”
Only Stark heard him. The people had begun to crowd and clamor. They shouted for the talisman, and some of them moved on down the slope, too impatient to wait for their leaders. This was their last hope. On it rested everything they had left behind, city, home, the remnants of their families. With the power they might find here they could regain them all. Without it, even though they might buy their lives with Ciaran and go free, they would be only stateless wanderers on the face of Mars, utterly destitute.
“It would be wiser for them to wait here,” Stark said. Balin only shook his head, and Stark did not press the point. Perhaps they knew best what they wanted.
He opened the box and took out the talisman, wrapped in silk. He handed it to Balin.
“It belongs to Kushat,” he said. “Not to me.”
Balin looked at him with wry and bitter mirth. “True. And I thank you for the honor. But I am not Ban Cruach. If I drop the thing, you may have to pick it up.”
He held it stiffly and did not remove the wrappings.
They walked on together, and the people followed them closely. Stark was very conscious of external things, the soft breathing and trampling of the group and the way their voices fell silent, the slippery frost-buckled pavement that replaced the rock under his feet, the lengthening shadow of the western wall of mountains. He was extremely conscious of Ciaran walking behind him, and of Thanis at his side. But there was something else, something he could not put a name to, that he sensed more powerfully than any of these things. He still walked against fear as a man walks against water, just as he had in the pass, in spite of the fact that now he was in open sunlight and clear air.
The colors and fantastic shapes of the ice-sheathed ruins rose around him, marked off by transverse streets that glittered like ribbons of glass.
“These folk were never part of our past,” said Balin. His voice was small and low, so as not to wake any echoes. He held the talisman tight in his closed hands. “We never built like this, even when the world was young and rich.”
No, thought Stark. No race on Mars ever built like this. I have seen the old, old cities. Jekkara and Valkis of the Sea-Kings, Barrakesh, and sand-drowned ruins by the Wells of Tamboina. I have even seen Sinharat the Ever-Living. But the people who built them were human. Even the Ramas were human, and so the wickedness that clung around Sinharat was human too, and understandable. But no human ever conceived and shaped these curving walls and enormously elongated arches. No human hands ever opened these strange narrow doors. No human mind could endure for long surrounded by this geometry.