In the middle of her laughter, a shadow came and lay on the yellow flooring between them.
A sfarran officer stood tall and lean in the open doorway of the tower, a glittering Thorn blaster in his right hand.
The officer regarded them coldly. It came to Kael as he stood dumbly returning that hard glance, that he had never seen a sfarran smile.
"You will come with me at once."
He stood sideways to the green marble doors, giving them room to pass him. Flaith scrambled to her feet; eyeing the gesture with which the officer moved his blaster. The McCanahan bent and lifted his harp, and thrust it into the black sack that had once belonged to dead Lunol the peddler.
Then he was walking with Flaith out the pylon gateway of the tower, across the hot sands toward the black hull of a sleek sfarran cruiser.
He was midway through the hatch when he paused, staring.
There were sfarran men and officers inside the ship, but they were slumped over queerly, in distorted postures and attitudes. He had seen the sfarri like that in Clonn Fell, when he had plucked at the strings of his harp. But here he had not struck those strings!
Last night he had played for Flaith and Lunol. And when he had played, a tube in the great, glistening tower machine had cracked into a thousand different fragments.