Garach began to whimper. Whimpering, he recoiled from the blazing eyes of the man who towered above him. Half scrambling, half running, he darted away with a sound like laughter in his throat.
Straight out into the dark ring he ran and death received him and silently withered him.
Spreading, spreading, the silent force pulsed outward. Through metal and flesh and stone it went, withering, killing, hunting down the last child of the Serpent who fled through the dark corridors of Caer Dhu. No more weapons flamed against it. No more supple arms were raised to fend it off.
It struck the enclosing Veil at last. Carse felt the subtle shock of its checking and then Rhiannon stopped the wheel.
There was a time of utter silence as those three who were left alive in the city stood motionless, too stunned almost to breathe.
At last the voice of Rhiannon spoke. “ The Serpent is dead. Let his city—and my weapons that have wrought such evil in this world—pass with the Dhuvians.”
He turned from the crystal wheel and sought another instrument, one of the squat looped metal rods.
He raised the small black thing and pressed a secret spring and from the leaden tube that formed its muzzle came a little spark, too bright for the eye to look upon, only a tiny fleck of light that settled on the stones. But it began to glow. It seemed to feed on the atoms of the rock as flame feeds on wood. Like wildfire it leaped across the flags. It touched the crystal wheel and the weapon that had destroyed the Serpent was itself consumed.
A chain-reaction such as no nuclear scientist of Earth had conceived, one that could make the atoms of metal and crystal and stone as unstable as the high-number radioactive elements.
Rhiannon said, “ Come.”