“Yes,” said Fareed quietly. “We all know this. We’re well aware of what the Voice is experiencing now. But Seth’s question was for you. How are you going to survive with the Voice inside you, night after—?”

“Yes, well, I will!” came the answer, emphatically and impatiently. Rhoshamandes flushed. “Do you think I have a choice?” he said. Then he drew back gesturing for silence. The Voice was talking to him, no doubt.

I was trying to conceal my thoughts completely, which meant leaving them in an inchoate state as best as I could, but clearly this creature was miserable, I could see it, miserable and conflicted, and his pale eyes, fixing on me again, couldn’t express anything but a deep frustration that bordered on pain.

“This must be followed to the finish,” he said now. “Fareed, I must ask you to come with me.”

“And what happens,” asked Sevraine suddenly, “when the Voice tires of being in your body, Rhoshamandes, and decides it wants to be transferred to another?”

“Well, very likely that is never going to happen!” Rhoshamandes flashed furiously, “because the Voice has things to learn in my body, a world to see as he’s never seen it before. This thing, this, this Voice …” He was stammering now in frustration. “This Voice has only just come to consciousness.”

“Yes, and it wants a better host body,” said Seth in a strong cold tone. “And it’s chosen you, a splendid male specimen, but once you take it into yourself you do realize it might just drive you stark raving mad.”

“We’re wasting time,” said Rhoshamandes. “Don’t you understand?”

“What? That you’re a pawn or a slave of this thing?” Seth was facing him and I couldn’t see his face except in semiprofile, but his tone was withering as before.

Rhoshamandes sat back in the chair and put up his hands. He stared at the phone again.

Suddenly Benji slid out of his place at my right and silently hurried down the length of the table until he stood at Rhoshamandes’s left and then he stared down at the phone.

“You touch it, and the boy dies!” said Rhoshamandes. He was now full of rage. His eyes were blazing as he glared at Benji, and his mouth was contorted, his lips pressed together and then released in a vicious sneer. “As I said, one errant signal from that phone and Benedict kills Viktor—.”

“And when that happens,” said Sevraine, “we destroy you, don’t we, in the most painful way because you no longer have any bargaining power whatsoever. What makes you think you can get what you want here?”

“I warn you!” He put up his right hand. Right, I was noticing. He’d taken out the phone with his right hand. Right-handed. “This will happen as the Voice has decreed.”