Alvon Rudi was trying to get off the bed, but his throat was heavily bruised, and he was dizzy from the lack of blood to his brain. Slowly, he was gaining equilibrium, but too slowly. Much too slowly.
Sebastian reached for him, grabbed him again.
Rudi’s hands locked on the idiot’s fingers, trying -to pry them off his neck. He dug nails into Sebastian’s flesh.
Belina gained the idiot’s neck, reached round him, clawed at his left eye with her tiny fingers.
Sebastian howled, shook her like a horse trying to throw a bronco buster. She fell, striking the floor hard, and lay there whimpering, her hip crushed.
Despite the fact that one eye was blurry with blood and tears, Sebastian continued to choke the merchant, shaking the man with each furious pulsing squeeze of the fingers.
He shook and squeezed for a long while after Alvon Rudi was dead, then turned and left that place, walking in pure blackness, unknowing and uncertain, merely terrified and filled with a need to escape the blood from the puppets . . . .
Pertos Godelhausser had been awakened from his Pearlvisions by Wissa. She had been hysterical, and she had had to repeat her hurried story several times before he had even an inkling of what had transpired while he had been tranced. When he did discover that Alvon Rudi was dead, he was not angry or frightened. Merely sad. It seemed like a logical tragedy to unroll in his life, the final act with no denouement for the lead character, the hero.
He picked up the dead prince and the wounded puppets, fed them to the furnace to be broken down into synthetic flesh liquid. He collected the healthy puppets next and did the same with them. There were no protests this time. They even seemed anxious to go.
Back in his room he found a large blanket in a closet and wrapped Alvon Rudi’s corpse and clothes in that, tied the bundle around with four lengths of cord, as if it were nothing more than a rug. He had found two thousand postals in the man’s wallet, and he added that to the twenty-five thousand he had gotten for renting Bitty Belina for the night. It never occurred to him to call the authorities, for that would have caused had business in future cities, at least. It could very well lead to the suspension of his entertainer’s license, leaving him more stranded than ever, preyed on him in darkness and woke him ten times between first sleep and dawn. But they were gone this time, not even evident in the distance of his unconsciousness, not even lurking in the shadows. When he woke, it was more refreshed and excited than he had been in years, with a sense of the future that he had never before felt so strongly.
He got up and sonic showered and dressed in clean clothes.
He ate quite well, though he punched for random foods through the delivery system and ate a somewhat hodgepodge breakfast. Even if he had been able to identify the words on the menu he would have preferred this mixed-up meal of sweets and meats and cereals and liquors.
By the time he left his room he was feeling very well indeed. He hurried down the corridor to find out what Pertos might want of him this morning. It was a day when he felt sure he could accomplish a great deal. He wanted to prove himself.
The door to Pertos’ room was open.
He went inside.
Pertos was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling, one side of his head slewed crooked. His light yellow shirt was sodden with blood, and there was a fragment of bone lying next to his right ear.
And then it all came back to Sebastian, and be left that room and vomited in the hallway at the disgust he felt at what he had done.
He had been all over the theater, looking into all of the rooms, touching everything he saw, though he did not know what it was that he was after. In time, it became dear to him that he felt better in those rooms where the old puppet master had been. He spent a long time in the lightman’s perch, tracing his blunt fingers over the grips of the spotlight, around and around the buttons and the knob-headed toggles of the console that controlled the stage effects. He stood a full hour on the stairs leading from the perch that Pertos had trod before and after each performance. It was almost as if he could feel the places the old man’s shoes had worn in the concrete. Once, he fancied he felt the vibrations of other feet on those stairs, though there was no one else about, and that thought suddenly terrified him so much that he ran from that dark, back area to the stage where he sat by the footlights he had turned on, trying to imagine there was an audience this morning. But when he forced a shimmering vision of people, they were all Pertos Godelhausser, and he had to run again, crying and frightened.