They were safe here, safe from the authorities and the Furnace. Though the prince disagreed that it was best to settle in, he stayed with them. There was really nothing else he could do. In short order, they had established themselves in the most comfortable apartments they could find.
Under Belina’s watchful eye, Sebastian transported the Furnace frown the truck to her apartment, though he could see no reason for that now. He placed the pieces together in the familiar pattern and was dismissed.
He was happy these days. There was a slow, eventless routine to life in the city that appealed to him.
He woke. He ate. He dressed and walked. Sometimes he saw the puppets and sometimes he did not. In the evening, he ate with either the third suitor, the chubby one he liked, or with all of the puppets in some neighborhood restaurant or other. He saw Bitty Belina quite a lot, and if she seemed often to be trailing him as he rambled shout the city, he did not notice.
There was only one smear on the even beauty of the first two weeks. It was the evening of the fourteenth day in the abandoned city. He had been walking, nosing through the closed shops as he had nosed through countless theaters in his years with Pertos. He was returning to his apartment, sleepy, and heard the argument in Belina’s room: small voices raised in anger.
The two loudest voices belonged to Belina and the little prince. Since the idiot didn’t care for the prince and mistrusted the man, he thought immediately that Bitty Belina might be in trouble again. He remembered the prince’s sword and how it had severed Wissa’s head from her shoulders in so many performances. In the back of his mind, he also remembered the steel sword of Alvon Rudi which had been a danger to Bitty Belina months earlier. The two sword images mixed, fused and became one in the muddled confusion of his mind.
“Goddamn you!” Bitty Belina squealed.
He hesitated no longer. Grasping the handle of the door, he swung it inward, prepared to save her again as he had saved her before. He was swelled with anticipation and eagerness to prove his value to her.
But it was not necessary.
He stood there, feet spread wide, trying to take in the scene and understand it. There had been an argument about something, but it seemed to have been more verbal than physical. No one was injured or seemed ready to fight. No one was naked. No swords of any kind were visible, except that sheathed on the prince’s side.
All the puppets had turned to look at Sebastian as if he were responsible for their feud.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Bitty Belina cried. She ran at him, as if she intended to pummel him with her
tiny fists. “Get out of here! Get out!”
The others scattered.
Ashamed of his intrusion, frightened, Sebastian slammed
the door and ran down the corridor toward his own room. He thought he heard a scrabbling sound behind, the door open again. He could not be sure.
He opened the door to his own room, closed it behind and locked it. When he flopped on the bed, crying over his
own stupidity, he thought he could hear Bitty Belina be yond the door. She was breathing heavily, a mixture of
exertion and fury.
Twice he called her name.
She did not answer, though she was there.
An hour later, after she had let him alone and after his hysteria had bled out of him, he realized that there had
been too many puppets in that room when he had burst in on them. He sat up in bed, wondering what that meant.
There had been at least a dozen puppets.
The next day, when he was in the lower levels, looking over the places where the maintenance robots were stored
between assignments, he saw two puppets he had never seen before. One was thin and very dark-skinned with horns
growing from its temples. The other was a woman, beauti fully copper-colored, with a thin, black tail like the tail of a