way up. Could they mentally detect
him, know him for an alien intruder by the broadcast of his thoughts?
The Baldies had a certain respect for the Foanna and might desire to
take one alive. He drew the robe about him, used it to muffle his figure
completely as the true wearers did.

But the figure pulling painfully up from rung to rung was no Baldy. The
lean Hawaikan arms, the thin Hawaikan face, drawn of feature, painfully
blank of expression--Loketh--under the same dread spell as had held the
warriors in the citadel courtyard. Could the aliens be using this
Hawaikan captive as a defense shield, moving up behind him?

Loketh's head turned, those blank eyes regarded Ross. And their depths
were troubled, recognition of a sort returning. The Hawaikan threw up
one hand in a beseeching gesture and then went to his knees in the
corridor.

"Great One! Great One!" The words came from his lips in a breathy hiss
as he groveled. Then his body went flaccid, and he sprawled face down,
his twisted leg drawn up as if he would run but could not.

"Foanna!" The one word came out of the walls themselves, or so it
seemed.

"Foanna--the wise learn what lies before them when they walk alone in
the dark." The Hawaikan speech was stilted, accented, but
understandable.

Ross stood motionless. Had they somehow seen him through Loketh's eyes?
Or had they been alerted merely by the Hawaikan's call? They believed he
was one of the Foanna. Well, he would play that role.

"Foanna!" Sharper this time, demanding. "You lie in our hand. Let us
clasp the fingers tightly and you shall be naught."

Out of somewhere the words Karara had chanted in the Foanna temple came
to Ross--not in her Polynesian tongue but in the English she had
repeated. And softening his voice to his best approximation of the
Foanna singsong Ross sang:

"Ye forty thousand gods,
Ye gods of sea, of sky--of stars," he improvised.
"Ye elders of the gods that are,
Ye gods that once were,
Ye that whisper, yet that watch by night,
Ye that show your gleaming eyes."

"Foanna!" The summons was on the ragged edge of patience. "Your tricks
will not move our mountains!"

"Ye gods of mountains," Ross returned, "of valleys, of Shades and not
the Shadow," he wove in the beliefs of this world, too. "Walk now this
world, between the stars!" His confidence was growing. And there was no
use in remaining pent in this corridor. He would have to chance that
they we