Stark let out one raging catlike scream, and rushed them.
The opalescent bodies slipped away beyond his reach. The creatures watched him.
They had no faces, but they watched. They were eyeless but not blind, earless, but not without hearing. The inquisitive tendrils that formed their sensory organs stirred and shifted like the petals of ungodly flowers, and the color of them was the white frost-fire that dances on the snow.
"Go back, Ciara!"
But she would not go, and he knew that they would not have let her. She reached him, and they set their backs together. The shining ones ringed them round, many feet away across the ice, and watched the long sword and the great hungry axe, and there was something in the lissome swaying of their bodies that suggested laughter.
"You fool," said Stark. "You bloody fool."
"And you?" answered Ciara. "Oh, yes, I know about Balin. That mad girl, screaming in the palace—she told me, and you were seen from the wall, climbing to the Gates of Death. I tried to catch you."
"Why?"
She did not answer that. "They won't fight us, Stark. Do you think we could make it back to the cairn?"
"No. But we can try."