Trent smiled, shaken a bit by the sincere simplicity of the girl's question, then shook his head.
"I am a man," he answered gently. "Now let us go and talk with the one you call 'the Elder.'"
Lura looked at the knife still gripped in her fingers, and a flush of color tided upward from her throat when her gaze went to the two guns carried by Trent. Wordlessly, she sheathed the blade.
She led the way now, going into the thickest part of the timber, gliding through the most tangled of the thickets with a careless familiar grace. Kimball Trent followed more clumsily, tripping despite his natural skill, scratching himself on sharp brambles. Minutes flicked away, grew into an hour, and he knew that he was approaching the city. They crossed roads now, cement blocks cracked by rain and winter ice, bright flowers and green grasses springing upward through the cracks.
Everywhere was bleak desolation. They passed holes in the ground that had once been basements. Walls still stood in other places, and further on, a great stone fence wound gracefully about what had been a private park.
Rubble came to the ground, the crushed remains of towering buildings blasted to bits by the Gharrians' concussors. Here and there, shards of indestructible plastic poked toward the sky to mark where vehicles had collapsed and dusted away in the course of centuries.
They came at last to a mighty stack of ruptured stone and plastics. Lura picked her way over the rubble, then dropped into a small hole, beckoning for Trent to follow. He came cautiously up the pile of stone, hand close to his gun, feeling his nerves crawl, now that he was close to his destination. This was not the situation he had planned five hundred—he grinned wryly—years ago.