. They stood in lines, unmoving, without speech among
themselves, men who might have been frozen into immobility and arranged
so for some game in which they were the voiceless, will-less pieces.

And their immobility was a thing to arouse fear. Were they dead and
still standing?

"Come!" Karara's voice had sunk to a whisper and her hand pulled at the
men.

"What--?" began Ross.

Ashe shook his head. Those rows below drawn up as if in order to march,
unliving rows. They could not be alive as the Terrans knew life!

Ross left his vantage point, ready to follow Karara. But he could not
blot from his mind the picture of those lines, nor forget the terrible
blankness which made their faces more unhuman, more frightenly alien
than those of the Foanna.

17

Shades Against Shadow

The corridor ended in a narrow slit of room, and the wall before them
was not the worked stone of the citadel but a single slab of what
appeared to be glass curdled into creamy ridges and depressions.

Here were the Foanna, their robes once more cloaking them. Each held,
point out, one of the rods. They moved slowly but with the precise
gestures of those about a demanding and very important task as they
traced each depression in the wall before them with the wand points.
Down, up, around ... as their feet had moved in the dance pattern, so
now their wands moved to cover each line.

"Now!"

The wands dropped points to the floor. The Foanna moved equidistant from
one another. Then, as one, the rods were lifted vertically, brought down
together with a single loud tap.

On the wall the blue lines they had traced with such care darkened,
melted. The glassy slab shivered, shattered, fell outward in a lace of
fragments. So the narrow room became a balcony above a large chamber.

Below a platform ran the full length of that hall, and on it were
mounted a line of oval disks. These had been turned to different angles
and each reflected light, a ray beam directed at them from a machine
whose metallic casing, projecting antennae, was oddly out of place here.

Once more the three staffs of the Foanna raised as one in the air. This
time, from the knobs held out over the hall blazed, not the usual whirl
of small sparks, but strong beams of light--blue light darkening as it
pierced downward until it became thrusting lines of almost tangible
substance.

When those blue beams struck the nearest ovals they webbed with lines
which cracked wide