I had been furious with his sneering taunts. I had worked against him, challenged him, and finally driven him into a paroxysm of egomaniacal madness. The other Creators had to protect him against my anger and his own hysterical ravings.
I can think, I told myself. If I can’t use my physical strength, then all that’s left to me is my mental power.
“Set uses despair like a weapon.” I recalled Anya’s words.
He had tried to manipulate me, control me, through my emotions. Tried and failed. What was he trying to do to me now, penning me in this soul-punishing cell?
He comes from another world, the planet that circles the sun’s companion star, Sheol. Why has he come here? From what era did he originate? What is his grievance against the human race?
He claims that he created the dinosaurs some two hundred millions years earlier than this era. He claims that he will extinguish the dinosaurs to make room on Earth for his own kind.
A thrill of understanding raced through my blood as I recalled Set’s own words, heard again in my mind his sneering, hate-filled voice: You breed so furiously that you infest the world with your kind, ruining not merely the land but the seas and the very air you breathe as well. You are vermin, and the world is well rid of you.
And again: We do not overbreed.
Then why is he here on Earth? Why is he not content with his own world, Shaydan, where his kind live in harmony with their environment? I had seen the idyllic pictures of that world in the wall mosaics of this castle. Why leave that happy existence to seed the earth with reptilian life?
I could think of three possibilities:
First, Set had lied to me. The mosaics were idealizations. Shaydan was overcrowded and Set’s people needed more living room.
Alternatively, Set had been driven off Shaydan, exiled from his native world, for reasons that I had no way of knowing.
Or, even more harrowing, the planet Shaydan was threatened by some disaster so vast that it was imperative to transfer the population to a safer world.
Which could it be? Possibly a combination of such reasons, or others that I had not an inkling of.
How to find out? Probing Set’s mind was impossible, I knew. Even in the same room with him I could no more penetrate his formidable mental defenses than I could muscle my way out of this miserable dungeon.
Could Anya probe his mind?
I closed my eyes there in the dimness of my cell and reached mentally for Anya’s mind. I had no way of knowing where in the castle she was, or even if she was still in the castle at all. Or even if she still lived, I realized with a cold shudder.
But I called to her, mentally.
“Anya, my love. Can you hear me?”
No response.
I concentrated harder. I brought up a mental picture of Anya, her beautiful face, her expressive lips, her strong cheekbones and narrow straight nose, her midnight black hair, her large gray eyes shining and luminous, regarding me gravely with depths of love in them that no mortal had a right to hope for.
“Anya, my beloved,” I projected mentally. “Hear me. Answer my plea.”
I heard nothing, no reply whatever.
Maybe she’s already dead, I thought bleakly. Maybe Set has raked her flesh with his vicious talons, torn her apart with his hideous teeth.
Then I sensed the tiniest of flickers, a distant spark, a silver glint against the all-encompassing darkness of my soul. I focused every neuron of my mind on it, every synapse of my being.
It was Anya, I knew. That infinitesimal spark of silver led me like a guiding star.
I felt almost the way I had when I had entered Juno’s simple mind. But now I was projecting my consciousness into a mind infinitely more complex. It was like falling down an endlessly spiraling chute, like stepping from subterranean darkness into blinding sunlight, like entering an overpoweringly vast universe. I knew how Theseus felt in the palace of Knossus, trying to thread his way through a bewildering maze.