[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1951. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]...

Through all the long cold hours of the Norland night the Martian had not moved nor spoken. At dusk of the day before Eric John Stark had brought him into the ruined tower and laid him down, wrapped in blankets, on the snow. He had built a fire of dead brush, and since then the two men had waited, alone in the vast wasteland that girdles the polar cap of Mars. Now, just before dawn, Camar the Martian spoke. "Stark." "Yes?" "I am dying." "Yes." "I will not reach Kushat." "No." Camar nodded. He was

Stark waited, until they should tire of their own silence. Finally one demanded, "Of what country are you?" He answered, "I am called N'Chaka, the Man-Without-a-Tribe." It was the name they had given him, the half-human aboriginals who had raised him in the blaze and thunder and bitter frosts of Mercury. "A stranger," said the leader, and smiled. He pointed at the dead Camar and asked, "Did you slay him?" "He was my friend," said Stark, "I was bringing him home to die." Two riders dismounted to

The flames leaped high from the fire in the windless gorge. Men sat around it in a great circle, the wild riders out of the mountain valleys of Mekh. They sat with the curbed and shivering eagerness of wolves around a dying quarry. Now and again their white teeth showed in a kind of silent laughter, and their eyes watched. "He is strong," they whispered, one to the other. "He will live the night out, surely!" On an outcrop of rock sat the Lord Ciaran, wrapped in a black cloak, holding the great

He stood in a large square, lined about with huckster's stalls and the booths of wine-sellers. Beyond were buildings, streets, a city. Stark got a blurred impression of a grand and brooding darkness, bulking huge against the mountains, as bleak and proud as they, and quite as ancient, with many ruins and deserted quarters. He was not sure how he had come there, but he was standing on his own feet, and someone was pouring sour wine into his mouth. He drank it greedily. There were people around hi

They waited. Some distance away a guard leaned against the parapet, huddled in his cloak. He glanced at them incuriously. It was bitterly cold. The wind came whistling down through the Gates of Death, and below in the streets the watchfires shuddered and flared. They waited, and still there was nothing. Balin said impatiently, "How can you know they're coming?" Stark shivered, a shallow rippling of the flesh that had nothing to do with cold, and every muscle of his body came alive. Phobos plunge

A woman! And in that moment of amazement, she was quicker than he. There was nothing to warn him, no least flicker of expression. Her two fists came up together between his outstretched arms and caught him under the jaw with a force that nearly snapped his neck. He went over backward, clean out of the saddle, and lay sprawled on the bloody stones, half stunned, the wind knocked out of him. The woman wheeled her mount. Bending low, she took up the axe from where it had fallen, and faced her warri

It was past noon. He had climbed high toward the saddle of the pass. Kushat lay small below him, and he could see now the pattern of the gorges, cut ages deep in the living rock, that carried the spring torrents of the watershed around the mighty ledge on which the city was built. The pass itself was channeled, but only by its own snows and melting ice. It was too high for a watercourse. Nevertheless, Stark thought, a man might find it hard to stay alive if he were caught there by the thaw. He h

Twice before in his life Stark had come near to freezing. It had been like this, the numbness and the cold. And yet it seemed that the dark force had struck rather at his nerve centers than at his flesh. He could not see Ciara, who was behind him, but he heard the metallic clashing of her mail and one small, whispered cry, and he knew that she had fallen, too. The glowing creatures surrounded him. He saw their bodies bending over him, the frosty tendrils of their faces writhing as though in exci

The ice-folk had slowed their forward rush. They stopped and waited, well back from the cairn. Stark reached the edge of tumbled rock. He felt the first warm flare of the force-waves in his blood, and slowly the chill began to creep out from his bones. He climbed, scrambling upward over the rough stones of the cairn. Abruptly, then, at Ban Cruach's feet, he slipped and fell. For a second it seemed that he could not move. His back was turned toward the ice-folk. His body was bent forward, and shi