“The earth’s liquid core,” I muttered.
“A sea of energy,” Set continued, “heated by radioactivity and gravity, seething with electrical currents and magnetic fields, so hot that iron and all other metals are molten and flow like water.”
He was describing hell. He drew his energy from hell.
Down and still further down we walked. I began to wonder why Set had not constructed an elevator. We walked on in silence, in the eerie dull red light, for what seemed like hours. It was like walking through an oven.
He’s holding Anya down here, I told myself. What can he have down at this depth? Why so deep underground? Is he afraid of being seen? Does he have other enemies, in addition to the Creators? Perhaps some of his own kind are at odds with him?
My thoughts circled endlessly, but always came back to the same fearful question: What is he doing to Anya?
Gradually I became aware of a presence in my mind, another intelligence, probing so gently I could hardly feel it. At first I thought it might have been Anya. But this presence was alien, hostile. Then I realized why we were spending so much time walking toward Anya’s prison. Set was probing my mind, interrogating me so subtly that I had not even realized it, searching my memories for—for what?
He sensed my awareness of his probe.
“You are just as stubborn as the woman. I shall have to use more forceful methods on you, just as I have had to do with her.”
Hot fury driven by fear raged through me. I wanted to leap on his back and snap his neck. But I knew that he could overpower me. I could feel his evil amusement at my thoughts.
“She is in great pain, Orion. Her agony will become even greater before I allow her to die.”
Chapter 13
The steep spiraling tunnel ended finally at another I blank door. Set did nothing that I could see, but the door slid open to reveal what seemed, at first glance, to be an elaborate laboratory.
Anya was nowhere in sight. The chamber we stepped into hummed with electrical power. Row upon row of buzzing throbbing consoles stood along two of the four walls of the cramped little room. Behind us was a long table cluttered with strange objects and a backless chair, almost like an ornate bench, for a tailed two-legged creature to sit upon. The fourth wall was absolutely blank.
Set clicked the talons of his right hand and that featureless wall slid up, revealing a much larger room, also packed with arcane equipment.
And Anya.
She was imprisoned in a glass cylinder standing atop a raised platform. Totally naked, she stood motionless, eyes closed, hands fiat at her sides. Blue flickers of electricity played up and down every inch of her body.
“She appears quite serene,” said Set’s hissing voice in my mind.
She seemed to be in frozen stasis. Or dead. On the four corners of the raised platform, outside the glass cylinder holding Anya, stood four rudely carved statues of Set. The largest was as high as my chest and made of wood.
“Look here,” he commanded.
I turned and followed his outstretched claw to see a row of display screens against the wall.
“They show her brain-wave patterns.”
Jagged spikes, red with agony, jittering up and down in rhythm to the sparks of electricity crawling over her body.
With a wave of Set’s hand the blue flickers intensified, became brighter, raced across Anya’s skin. Her naked body seemed to cringe, shudder. Her eyelids squeezed shut tighter. Tears crawled out from behind them. From the corner of my eye I saw the spikes of the display screens turn sharper, steeper, racing across the screens like tongues of flame burning themselves into my brain.
This monster was torturing Anya. Torturing her as heartlessly and efficiently as a swarm of army ants stripping the flesh from any living thing that stood in its path.
“Stop it!” I screamed. “Stop it!”
“Open your mind to me, Orion. Let me see what I want to see.”
“And then?”
“And then I will allow you both to die.”
I stared into his glittering reptilian eyes. There was no triumph there, no joy, not even sadistic pleasure. Nothing but pure hate. Hatred for the human race, hatred for the Creators, for Anya, for me. Set was remorselessly doing what he had to do to reach his goal.
I, too, burned with hatred. But, powerless, I let my shoulders slump and my head droop.
“Stop her pain and you can do what you want with me,” I said.
“I will ease her pain,” Set replied. “It will not stop until I have learned what I must know from you. Then you can both die.”
The blue flickers crawling across Anya’s skin turned paler, moved more slowly. The display screens showed her pain lessened.
And Set’s powerful, merciless mind drove into mine like a spike of red-hot iron, ruthlessly seeking the knowledge he wanted. I felt frozen, totally immobile, unable to twitch a finger as he ransacked my brain for its memory storage.
I saw, I heard, I felt things from my pasts. The insane Golden One sneering at me, telling me that he will destroy all the other Creators and be worshiped by the human race as its one true god. The barbaric splendor of Karakorum and Ogotai, the Mongols’ high khan, my friend, the man I assassinated. The piercing wet cold of Cornwall on that darkest day of the Dark Age, when Arthur’s knights slaughtered each other by the score.
Set was rampaging through my mind, touching on memories, thoughts, lifetimes that had been erased from my consciousness, seeking, seeking, greedily ripping across the eons I have lived to find what he sought.
Yet while he tore through my defenseless mind he exposed his own to me. The link between us, agonizing as it was, went in both directions. I could not see much of his thoughts, nor could I create an active probe to seek out his memory bank as he was doing to me. But Set could not ravage my mind without exposing at least some of his thoughts to me.
I was in the laboratory where the Golden One created me. I was on a becalmed sea beneath a brazen sky of hammered copper, dying of thirst. I was on a world that circled the star Sirius. I died with Anya in my arms as a great starship exploded.
At last I was standing in this alien fiendish torture chamber with Anya suffering within her glass prison and Set’s hateful red eyes glowering at me.
“Pah! This is pointless. You know less about it than I do.” For the first time his words, burning in my mind, seemed edged with frustration and anger.
My body came alive again. I felt it tingle as Set’s control over me relaxed.
He turned his reptilian gaze toward Anya once more. “She knows. I will have to tear it out of her.”
“No!” I bellowed as he raised his hand toward the instruments on the wall.
He turned to the wall of instruments once again, ignoring me for just a fraction of a second. Enough.
I grabbed the nearest of the four carved wooden statues and smashed him across his ridged back with it. Down he went, smashing into the dials and display screens lining the wall. Raising the carving over my head, I swung it with all my might at the tube of glass enclosing Anya. It shattered into a spray of fragments and the electrical flames that slithered over her naked flesh winked out.
I reached for her wrist and pulled her down off that pedestal of pain.
“Wh—what…?” Her eyes opened, bloodshot from pain.
“This way!” I snapped, pulling her along with me.
Set was on one knee, pulling himself to his feet. “Stop!” his voice roared in my head. And something within me wanted to obey him.