As far as I could tell he stayed out of my mind. I felt no mental probes. I remained awake and aware. My memories were not being stimulated. The Golden One was staying away from my brain.
Why?
“He is here!”
Anya’s voice! Concerned, angry almost.
“I can’t be disturbed now,” snapped the Golden One.
“He returned of his own volition and you tried to keep me from seeing him,” Anya said accusingly.
“Don’t you understand?” the Golden One retorted. “He is unable to return by himself. Someone has sent him here.”
“Let me see… oh! Look at him! He’s dying!”
Anya’s voice quivered with emotion. She cares about me! I exulted to myself. Immediately a voice answered, As she would care about a pet cat or a wounded deer.
“He’s weak,” the Golden One said. “But he won’t die.”
“What have you put him through?” she demanded.
At first he did not reply. Finally, though, he admitted, “I don’t know. I don’t know where he’s come from or how he got here.”
“You’ve questioned him?”
“Briefly. But he made no reply.”
“He’s been tortured. Look at what they’ve done to his poor body.”
“Never mind that! We have a serious problem here. When I tried to probe his mind, I got nothing but a blank.”
“His memories are completely erased?”
“I don’t think so. It was more like hitting a barrier. His mind has been shielded, somehow.”
“Shielded? By whom?”
Exasperated, the Golden One snapped, “I don’t know! And I can’t find out unless I can break through the shielding.”
“Do you think you can?”
I could sense him nodding. “With enough power I can do anything. The problem is that if I have to use too much power, it might destroy his mind totally.”
“You mustn’t do that!”
“I don’t want to. Whatever is stored inside his skull, I’ve got to recover it.”
“You don’t care about him,” Anya said. “He’s merely a tool that you use.”
“Exactly. But now he’s a tool that someone else might be using. I’ve got to find out who. And why.”
Deep within me, raging torrents of conflict were tearing at my guts. Anya wanted to protect me while the Golden One wanted only what was locked within my mind. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to love her and have her love me. Yet smothering those emotions, burying them in layers of molten iron, was Set’s unrelenting control over me. I saw a vision of my nightmare again. Horrified, I knew that I would kill them all.
CHAPTER 28
“Let me have him,” Anya said.
A long pause, then the Golden One answered, “You are emotionally attached to this creature. It wouldn’t be wise to let you—”
“How can you let jealousy cloud your judgment at a time like this?”
“Jealousy!” The Golden One sounded astonished. “Is the eagle jealous of the butterfly? Is the sun jealous of its planets?”
Anya laughed, like the cool tinkling of a silver bell. “Let me take care of him, bring him back to his strength. Then perhaps he can tell us what has happened to him.”
“No. I have the equipment here—”
“To destroy his mind with your brute-force methods. I will bring him back to health. Then we can question him.”
“There isn’t time.”
Her tone became taunting. “Not time? For the Golden One, who claims he can travel across the continuum as if it were an ocean? No time for the one who tells us he understands the currents of the universes better than a mariner understands the sea?”
I heard him puff out a heavy sigh, almost a snort. “I will compromise with you. I can restore his physical health much more quickly with my methods than you can by spoon-feeding him. Once he is strong enough to walk and talk, you can begin his interrogation.”
“Agreed.”
“But if you don’t get him to tell us how he got here within a few days,” the Golden One warned, “then I will revert to my methods.”
More reluctantly Anya repeated, “Agreed.”
I heard her leave, then felt myself being lifted on cushions of energy again and carried off the surgical table. I tried to open my eyes a little, just to peep out at where I was being taken, but found I had no control over my eyelids. I could not move my fingers, either, or even wiggle my toes. Either the Golden One or Set was controlling my voluntary muscular system. Perhaps both of them, working inadvertently together for the moment.