It would have been enough for him.
Though he had not forgotten what Bitty Belina had done with the spiders, how she had threatened him with them
and laughed at his terror, how she had forced him to create the other puppets, he no longer held any of that against her. She was too beautiful to hate. Besides, his fear of the spiders had quieted a bit and would remain in the back of his mind so long as the many-legged creatures were kept in the empty saltshaker. It was almost as if Belina had done him a great favor by putting the spiders where they were. As long as he knew they were in the bottle and that the metal cap was on it tight, he could rest easier, knowing they were not hiding nearby, ready to pounce on him. The enemy is always less impressive when he can be seen and placed. So, as the days passed, he looked even more kindly upon Bitty Belina and did as she asked.
Had he been able to read, and had he ever come across a copy of the sayings of the Rogue Saint, he might have been interested in Eclesian’s letter to the Tolemedons which states, in part: “Man’s greatest advantage in the coming war against the deity is, perhaps, his sense of history and his taste for revenge. We forget nothing. We crawl away to lick our wounds, delivered us by the Fates, but the mental wound remains open and bleeding after the flesh has healed, only to be soothed by revenge. God, on the other hand, has so much to consider, so many tasks to handle, that he does not retain the minor events of our sub-cosmic world as fully as we do. When we kill him, he may very well die confused, wondering just what it is we have rebelled against.”
The fourth day of their renewed leg of the journey, it snowed again. That night, in his dreams, the world was white and old. .
The sixth day, they found the city.
It was snowing, and the shifting masses of clouds, fleeing across the low sky, threatened blizzards. The wind had grown in fury through the long hours of the day until now it whipped about the truck like a huge bellows, sent the vehicle from side to side of the highway. It was a test of the driving skill that Sebastian had acquired, but he kept the truck moving. One of the puppets had said that, sitting still, they would surely be rolled over. Moving, knifing diagonally into the wind and using a little of its force to propel them, they were not quite so vulnerable. He didn’t like it, but he continued to drive, even when the threatened blizzard became a reality and the world was a dizzying display of flakes.
Twice, he struck the berm markers, tore them loose, swerved back onto safe territory as the clattering sound died away. He did not have to be warned by the puppets to know that if anything got tangled in the blades below them, they would stay here forever, freezing to death when the battery died and could no longer warm them.
Belina and the angel both rode in the front with him, while the others curled in bundled blankets in the rear, trying to keep from being bruised as they were jounced back and forth between the walls.
Then they passed through some invisible barrier which toned the wind down, held back three quarters of the snow and provided a haven. As the thumping windshield wipers brushed away the last flakes, they saw the city ahead of them and stopped the truck with a mixture of relief and dread.
Many times in the past two months, running with Belina, Sebastian had driven by exit ramps that were marked with the names of small towns, hamlets, minor cities. But this was something altogether different. It rose out of the ice plain as if it were made of ice itself. Its fantastic spires tipped the bottoms of the clouds. Its walls were a brilliant, translucent blue that shone with an inner light, a beacon of welcome. The land immediately around the city was untouched by the gale and the worst of the snow. Though the ground was not bare, but hard ice, there was a less wintry feeling to the place. On the walls and towers there was no snow or ice. The severe weather seemed not to have pitted the city’s grandeur.