And the Dhuvians ran, writhing in the shadows as they caught up the weapons they had not thought to need. The green light glinted on the shining tubes and prisms.
But the hand of Carse, guided now by the sure knowledge of Rhiannon, had darted toward the biggest of the ancient weapons—toward the rim of the great flat crystal wheel. He set the wheel spinning.
There must have been some intricate triggering of power within the metal globe, some hidden control that his fingers touched. Carse never knew. He only knew that a strange dark halo appeared in the dim air, enclosing himself and Ywain and the shuddering Boghaz and Garach, who had risen doglike to his hands and knees and was watching with eyes that held no shred of sanity. The ancient weapons were also enclosed in that ring of dark force, and a faint singing rose from the crystal rods.
The dark ring began to expand, like a circular wave sweeping outward.
The weapons of the Dhuvians strove against it. Lances of lightning, of cold flame and searing brilliance, leaped toward it, struck—and splintered and died. Powerful electric discharges that broke themselves on the invisible dielectric that shielded Rhiannon’s circle.
Rhiannon’s ring of dark force expanded relentlessly, out and out, and where it touched the Dhuvians the cold ophidian bodies withered and shriveled and lay like cast-off skins upon the stones.
Rhiannon spoke no more. Carse felt the deadly throb of power in his hand as the shining wheel spun faster and faster on its mount and his mind shuddered away from what he could sense in Rhiannon’s mind.
For he could sense dimly the nature of the Cursed-One’s terrible weapon. It was akin to that deadly ultra-violet radiation of the Sun which would destroy all life were it not for the shielding ozone in the atmosphere.
But where the ultra-violet radiation known to Carse’s Earth science was easily absorbed, that of Rhiannon’s ancient alien science lay in uncharged octaves below the four-hundred angstrom limit and could be produced as an expanding halo that no matter could absorb. And where it touched living tissue, it killed.
Carse hated the Dhuvians but never in the world had there been such hatred in a human heart as he felt now in Rhiannon.