"Nothing. Not from you, anyway. She sent me to kill you:'
The prince rolled quickly to his feet, for he had been made for the role of a fighter. The sword that never left his hip now left it-for the tight grip of his fingers.
"If a death's her wish," the prince said, "she'll have it. Though it won't be mine."
"Perhaps."
The prince held the sword to the side, tipped up and forward. "I would say there is little doubt about it. Your role is stealing souls of heroines and heroes and putting a fright into your audiences. My role is killing. I am equipped for a marvelous performance."
Scratch applauded, grinning. His teeth positively sparkled. "A wonderful soliloquy " he enthused. "You're a fine actor." This reaction, more than any other could, unsettled the prince.
"I am not acting," the prince replied. His temper was beginning to get the better of him. He could not afford to give in to it. He had to be cool and calculating. Scratch would be beaten, but he would offer a good battle first. The prince weaved on the balls of his feet, looking for an opening to make his first lunge.
"Neither am I acting," Scratch said. "Have you ever seen my play, 'The Nicksboro Curse'?"
"Of course not."
"Let me assure you, then, that I did more than steal souls and frighten the audiences. There is one scene, for instance, in which I tackle and defeat a hound my own size. He has fierce teeth and great claws. But I cripple him and dismember him in center stage."
The prince sneered. "Dismember him? With the help of how many visual deceptions?"
"Mirrors?" Scratch stepped closer. His bare arms appeared to swell. Or was it just that the thickly corded muscles had always been there, hidden beneath a deceptive layer of fat, visible only when they were needed? The prince wished he had paid closer attention to Scratch in the days past.
The devil made his muscles writhe and ripple as if they were alive and sentient beneath his ebony skin. "Give me your sword," he said, holding out a hand.
Before the prince could refuse, Scratch grasped the wicked blade in his hand, twisted it and tore it free of the hand that held it. He threw his dark head back and laughed. The laughter echoed up and down the pipe with the force of a dozen throats.
The prince grabbed for the handle of his weapon. Scratch swung the length of steel by the blade, snapped the shaft into the prince's jaw. There was a sickening crunch. The prince fell to his knees, spitting teeth and blood.
"Was that a visual deception?" Scratch asked. He chuckled heartily, though he no longer laughed out loud. There was a savage tone beneath the humor, a taste for blood and agony.
"Why?" the prince asked.
"Why what?"
"Why does* she want me* dead?"
"You really don't know?"
"No."
"It's obvious to everyone else," the devil said. "But I can see where it might not be to you."
"Tell me," the prince said.
When Scratch began to tell him, he dove for the devil's ankles, hoping to topple the dark puppet and go for its throat. Scratch kicked him square in the center of the forehead, propelled him backwards where he crashed the back of his skull against the floor.
"She wants you dead," Scratch said, "because you lack the necessary qualities to be allowed to survive. You have the cruelty and the love of death that she thinks we'll all need in the future to fulfill her plans. But there is a difference in the way you love pain. Your sadism is tempered by your egotism. When you kill or wound, it is to make yourself look better. You play the role of the hero offstage as well as on, always questing after the spotlight."
"I don't understand," the prince said. He did not have the energy, yet, to rise up.
"The rest of us enjoy death and pain for the intrinsic value in suffering. We have no ulterior motives. We kill to kill and not to gain status. It is a cleaner lust than yours. It will lead to fewer failures in the future than your own egotism would." He tossed the sword away, behind him, brushed his hands together. "Your egotism and need to accomplish taint everything you do. When you have sex, for instance, you sometimes spend as much energy giving your partner pleasure as the energy you spend to satisfy your own needs."
"Isn't that the proper thing?" the prince asked.
"Not for us. Not if we're going to survive. Everything we do we must do for ourselves, for our own pleasure. If the group gains from our actions, it is merely a side product of our own gain. Pleasure. We seek pleasure anywhere it is given. And Bitty Belina has shown us that our kind can find no greater joy than delivering pain. She says that we have been made less than men, but that we are consequently more deadly and more capable than men. Except you, that is."
"Me?"
"You"
"Please.
"Please?" the devil mocked. "Please?" He leaped upon the prince, his terrible fingers pressing the bones of the warrior's body from their sockets.
His eyes were pure crimson.
There is a point where the mind renounces its own emotions, blanks them out and utterly refuses to operate again until the causal stimulus ceases to exist. The husband grieving for his dying wife might grow hysterical on notice of her death. But the hysteria cannot build forever, forcing him closer and closer to madness. There is a moment when it will become either catatonia or acceptance. The same applies to terror. Terror is, perhaps, the most difficult emotion the mind must deal with, for it affects the body more directly than either hate or love. It summons up adren alin, sets the heart to beating faster, sensitizes the ears and the eyes. If the mind were not able to short circuit to avoid the more unbearable degrees of terror, madness might very well be the result.
The idiot had existed with terror all his life, living in fear of forces he could neither define nor dismiss. It took him longer to blank out the horror that possessed him, for his tolerance was higher, but he managed it. Tranced, he continued to crawl hastily away from the region of the shafts where he had encountered the head, but he had little idea of what motivated him. Twice, aimlessness overtaking him, he stopped to investigate his circumstances. Both times, enough of the terror returned to spur him ahead faster than ever.
In time, the tunnel terminated in the wall of a darkened room. The grill had been removed to provide a swift exit. He knew there was a chamber beyond, for his fingers could identify wood paneling around the edges of the duct. Too, he could sense that there was a moderately large room with a low ceiling. The air was stuffy, the echo of his breathing flat and short.
He only wished there were more light to see what lay ahead.
He managed to turn around inside the thin walled tube until he could slide feet-first into the room. He cut his thumb on the flared rim of the air duct as he dropped to the floor, but it was a minor wound and only a physical one. He had long ago come to understand, despite ills slow wit, that the wounds of the body were those to be the least concerned about. The place was intensely dark, too warm by ten degrees, as quiet as a cemetery. He took comfort from this lack of stimuli, however. It seemed as if he would be safe here for as long as he chose to remain, no matter what forces pursued him. Yet he could not afford the luxury of a rest, for he had begun to remember that Bitty Belina might be in trouble. She was missing with the others and she had no hope of freedom except that he could bring her.
He crossed the room with both hands outspread before him, searching for a wall which he intended to follow until he found a light switch. The floor seemed alternately hard tile and patches of thick and loosely woven carpet that shifted beneath his boots.
The light came on before he reached a wall, activated by someone without the room. It stung his eyes after so much time spent in gloom. He used a hand to shield his eyes and squinted about. There was no furniture in the place, though there had once been, judging by the broken film of dust on the floors and walls. The chairs and couches and paintings had been replaced with at least three hundred spiders*
A naturalist could have told the idiot that an average acre of grassland in the northern hemisphere contains between ten thousand and a hundred thousand spiders, though man encounters only one or two during an entire day spent in such places. The average walls and cellars of a house harbor thousands of spiders too. A congregation of three hundred was hardly that unusual, therefore, except that they were not in their natural habitat: walls, foundations, insulation. Such a lecture would have done nothing whatsoever to save Sebastian. The terror bloomed more fully than ever, possessed him with scintillating red blossoms.
He found the door locked and barricaded from the other side. He could not force it open.
Spiders ran across his shoes.
Spiders covered the furniture.
Spiders crawled on his pantlegs.
He felt one scrambling out of his hair, and he mashed it against his forehead.
"Pertos!"
Spiders.
"Jenny!"
More spiders dropped out of the pipe in the wall through which he had entered the room.
He began to stomp on them, squashing them beneath his feet. They pulped easily, though many of them continued kicking even when they were plainly dead.
He tried to kill them as they dropped from the duct. A spider half as large as his hand fell out of the shaft, black and hairy with the markings of a tarantula. The puppets had found it in a sub-basement full of rotting food supplies where its ancestors had been transported from some southern region many years before, perhaps by a gypsy trucker. Its species had been kept alive here in the north by the constant warmth of the basements and the lack of natural predators, though the conditions were not ideal enough to support more than a few such giants at any one time.
Sebastian staggered backwards, choking at the grotesque sight. To him, the spider was more than an anachronism. It was a sign, a portent, and it boded only ill.
In his haste to get away from the tarantula, he had forgotten about the smaller spiders. They were on his trousers again, and a few of them had gained his shirt where they seemed fascinated with his cold, gleaming metal buttons.
The relatively harmless tarantula sauntered toward him, its thick legs trembling.
Mercifully, he passed out.
Unconscious, he could not see that the huge spider ran from him.
There were six puppets waiting in Belina's apartment when she came back. They were gathered around the Furnace with an assortment of tools taken from the dead gypsy's kit.
"What's happening?" the rat-tailed girl from Scratch's play asked. Her tail wrapped around her smooth, coppery thigh.
"We have him," Belina said. She was grinning widely, though her expression would not have pleased anyone but another puppet. "He fainted when the big spider came through, and he still isn't awake. He's tied down in the execution room, ready for us whenever he comes around. As soon as we get this out of the way, we'll go to him."
Her excitement passed to the others. They turned upon the Furnace and looked up at its towering, gray metal surfaces. For a moment, there was a mutually recognized silence, as if each of them was reconsidering his previous determination to carry on with this next to the last step of their liberation.
Then Bitty Belina climbed a chair, swung onto the top of the Furnace, drew herself to her feet and motioned for the others to follow. They fell over each other in their eagerness.
Strung across the highest surface of the Furnace, they wielded their screwdrivers and hammers, their wrenches and oiling tubes. They smashed the glass viewplate above the capsule-womb, pried the two control knobs off and kicked them to the floor below. After that, it was necessary to go inside the machine as Bitty Belina had gone to lever Wissa out that night she had tried to create a puppet on her own. In the bowels, they smashed tubes, ripped circuit boards free of their contacts. They shredded the insulation, bent plastic wire guides, crushed transistors.
At first, they had been reluctant to dispose of the machine, for it served the purpose of re-creating them if they were accidentally killed. In the final analysis, however, they knew it must go. As long as it functioned, they could never leave its vicinity except under the punishment of unbearable pain. If they were to build the planned empire, mobility was essential. Simple immortality would have to be sacrificed.
The alarm circuits were triggered inside the Vonopoen device. The power plant flared. Heat washed throughout the Furnace, melting the parts of it to incomprehensible slag.
One puppet died in the furious eruption, though the others escaped unharmed.
"Now there are no chains," Belina said.
The roar inside the Furnace stopped. It was dead at last. The flesh in the furnace had died with it, save that which now existed free beyond its realm. That flesh had entered a new Furnace, of course: the world. They would set that afire in short order.
"Sebastian," she said.
They followed her out of the room. They had already forgotten their comrade who had perished within the machine's guts, although his screams and his intense agony had given them a few moments of pleasure.
At the end of a ventilation shaft, by the open well of a vertical pipe, pieces of a body lay in darkness. The thin blood had already begun to dry as the water in it evaporated, leaving only stains. Though it was warm here, the prince would not decay for a very long time, for his flesh was not genuinely organic. His sword was clamped between his teeth in a parody of the lover's red rose. Scratch had placed it there.
The first and second suitors had been dispatched to collect the gypsy's head and the flashlight that had illuminated it to such a good effect. They placed the light inside the thing's mouth so that the beam shone out between the separated lips and partially illuminated their way. They stood on either side of it, each by an ear, and they hefted it by the ragged and bloody base. Hunched over like cripples, they were able to carry it to a loosened grill where others waited to accept it and bear it to the execution chamber.
Now and then it was necessary to put the head down and rest, for the weight prohibited one long dash to the grill. It was during one of these breathers that the first suitor, elbows propped on the head, told the second suitor about the prince. "The prince is dead," he said.
"Who said?"
"Scratch."
"That malcontent? And you're going to believe what he says? How could he know if we don't."
"He killed him."
"So? On whose orders?"
"Hers. Who else's orders are there?" The second suitor smiled, scratched at the back of his neck. "I never did like the way he always got the girl after we failed. Even if it was in the script." He laughed at some thought. "Though I suppose I couldn't have handled her very well if I had won, eh?"
"Nor me I" the first suitor agreed, shivering. "Not even as well as he managed her. Still, I would have liked to hear him when old Scratch came on the scene. They say the devil tears a monstrous hound limb-from-limb in his own play, without the aid of mirrors. I would have given a great deal to listen to the prince under similar punishment."
"Yes," the second suitor agreed. "Oh, my, yesl just to listen would have been enough I"
Nothing was real any longer. None of it had ever seemed real, actually, though now it was even more like the stuff of dreams, bits and pieces of illusions that swam at him through the soft blue haze that sheathed the world. Time had no meaning for him. The spirits of the dead were as solid and interesting as the capering puppets who ringed his bound form. Now and again he caught sight of Bitty Belina in her golden aura, laughing with her bright teeth and her seawater eyes. Just as often, the blond was not Belina at all, but his sister jenny who teased him and comforted him, angered and pleased him. Sometimes jenny was alive and well, speaking in her soft voice, watching him with heavily lidded eyes. Other times she was dead, falling away from the edge of a cliff with a knife in her belly, coming up hard on smooth boulders, washing away in a strong current, the knife ripped free of the hole in her flesh* He tried to hold onto her when she was alive. But his fingers slipped through her and in a moment she would return, dead again.
The puppets taunted him with the bloodless head of Pertos. They pushed the grizzly thing directly before his face and demanded that he confront it. This, they seemed to say, is the head of your father whom you dethroned to gain your godhood. This is your handiwork. Are you proud of it?
The dead eyes stared, yellow and sightless.
"Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, Pertos, PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS. The puppets sang until the name ceased to be a name and became just another word. The world was full of words, and none of them could hurt as much as a name.
"PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS, PERTOS*".
The word was no longer a word, but merely two syllables of two harmonic notes, each separated from the other by one tone, rising and falling, over and over.
"PERTOSPERTOSPERTOS*: '.