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.”