"Guess I'm ready to go. I feel good again. But I'd like to stay that way. Do you have another of those pencil-things?"
He pointed at her girdle. She drew out the weapon and smiled, "You mean the displacer. It forces the electrons of an object out of their orbit. Turns them into other orbits, and makes them dust."
She went to a drawer, drew out three of the pencil-guns, and handed them to him. "You will be safe with these."
Nuala went to the pink barrier and beckoned to him. "Hurry. The sooner we surprise Rudra, the better."
The arklings left them strictly alone. They went up through the tunnels, past the carven walls to the ruins of the Nekkalad temples. Sprawled across acres of the barren, pitted surface of the planet, the white towers and jagged walls of the once-massive buildings were like huge play-things scattered by a child-giant in petulant anger.
Nuala breathed, "Before Rudra came and smashed them, they were the loveliest things in all the universe."
The silvered hull of Travis's spacer lay a hundred yards from the crumbled wall, on a bed of powdered black rock. Nuala walked around it, frowning. She shook her head, her long yellow hair fluttering about her shoulders.
"It will never make the trip. There are things to be done to it."
She looked at him, troubled. She asked, "Do you know what a Calakin curvature-annihilator is? Or a Wilwal warping-beam?"
Travis shook his head.