Sebastian’s hands were flat against the floor with the palms spread toward the ceiling. His arms were perpendicular to his shoulders, like the wings of a dead bird. They had tied his wrists to ringbolts in the floor. This must, at one time, have been a storeroom. The rings were for the security of precariously stacked goods. Now they served to hold a dying demi-god whose time to cease demi-godding had come. Where were the vultures that would eat out his liver?
On his right, one of the puppets drove a steak knife into the palm of his hand. Blood welled up and paddled there, dripped through his fingers, stained the floor.
To the left, another puppet followed this example.
The same was done to his feet.
Some of the servants of Bitty Belina had been in a play about a demi-god who was crucified in just such a manner by the governments he sought to destroy. They thought it made a nice touch.
Sebastian barely acknowledged the pain. He was not being stoic and playing the hero he had always wanted to be. No, it was a mere loss of sensitivity that enabled him to face the torture with such a subdued cry of agony.
Deep in his mind, there was a part of him which said he could escape. Surely he could. These were pitiful creatures against which he was pitted, not a third his size. He could rise up in fury and rip loose his bonds. He could bring judgment upon them.
I created them, he thought. Pertos had them made and I was the one who brought them their final life. And now they have me tied here, beneath them.
He strained and managed to sit part way up. They hurried away from him, terrified. But it was not in him to rebel at these indignities, to once more walk among them. He was infinitely weary of them, even of the blond Belina.
He fell back. His skull bounced on the floor and brought on a wave of darkness.
He called to the old puppet master for help in this time of need. And then he fainted.
When he woke, the tarantula was perched in the center of his chest, moving warily as it listened to the thumping of his heart. Its black maw opened and closed, baring tiny, dark fangs that looked enormous from the idiot’s queer vantage point.
He allowed it to scale his face without even shaking his head to dissuade it. Its feet were like the down on a duck’s belly.
He passed out again, though more from exhaustion than from fear.
Later, they took a fifth knife and ran it into his side. They offered him urine for his thirst, which he refused.
Again, he considered escaping. He could leap up, tear free and stomp them to death as he had stomped the spiders not so long ago. And then, rather quietly and without any choruses of heavenly hosts or displays of divine wrath in the heayens, he died.
You know the rest.
The puppets were immune to all human diseases. Their flesh did not infect, nurture parasites or require long to heal. It did not split open with boils or sores. But for those who perished in battle or by accident, they were immortal. They did not age, champions over wrinkled flesh and senility.
The pace of their lives was frantic. They had no souls with which to appreciate the qualities of rest and solitude, of inactivity and quiet. They slept little, worked long, sought the pain that nourished them.
The immortality and the industry combined to make formidable warriors.
They copulated, made the women with children, just as real women would have borne the young. The Vonopoens had always said that the puppets were as like men as they could be made. This was but another proof. The children were even more fierce and relentless than their parents when it came to the pursuit of pleasure through the principal of pain. Many of the parents did not survive their young. Bitty Belina did. Wissa did. And but four others from the original thirty-seven.
The new generations were not satisfied with the games of pain they played among themselves. Now that the Furnace was dead, they had all the city to roam through. They made use of the long-dormant computer and the other facilities available to them. In. time, they forged weapons, learned war and set forth against an unprotected Earth where the cities were named things like Springsun, and Fallingwater and Novembermoon, where men had grown rich and soft and somewhat bored. It was a one-sided battle.