The flesh in the furnace

surprise."
        "Why?"
        Pertos pushed away from the table, his face suddenly clouding. He looked at the door joining his room to the room the puppets occupied. The sound of merriment came through the thin portal. Wissa was laughing, and two of the three suitors were shouting in some game or other. Belina's own whispery giggle came through now and then. Pertos approached the door, examined it, then spun the lock dial and threw the door wide.
        The puppets stopped squealing, looked up at him. None of them were smiling. There was a litter of tiny glasses and bits of food on the floor. Wissa was naked, stunningly dark and beautiful.
        Sebastian averted his eyes, though he was not sure why.
        "You let them in," Pertos said to the puppets.
        They watched him.
        "You let them in your room and through the adjoining door"
        It was Bitty Belina who spoke. "Who?" she asked. But there was something about her tone that said she already knew who.
        "The Heritage Leaguers. Trimkin and those four men he brought with him." Pertos wasn't Pertos, because he wasn't smiling.
        "I don't know what you're talking about," Bitty Belina said.
        "When I crawled into the hall to get help it was because no one in your room seemed to hear me. And when I had to go for Sebastian, I found my own door still locked, from the inside. So they came and went somehow else."
        None of the puppets spoke.
        Wissa was slipping into clothes.
        The prince fingered his sword.
        And when Sebastian looked again, Bitty Belina was watching him. Her face held an expression of utter contempt and loathing. It was not pretty at all, and it seemed to accuse him.
        "I didn't do any… anything," Sebastian said.
        "Exactly," Bitty Belina said.
        "What will you do to us?" Wissa asked, fully clothed now, addressing herself to the puppet master.
        Pertos looked at Bitty Belina. "There will be two shows tonight and a matinee this afternoon. But you will work an extra show. And if you don't work it, I'll never call any of you out of the Furnace again."
        "What extra show?" Bitty Belina asked, her fisted hands on her hips, looking fierce-and just a bit frightened.
        "You'll see," Pertos said. The smile returned, but it was a grim one. "It's sort of a command performance, you might say. For an audience of one. I'll see you later:"
        He closed the door.
        Sebastian thought how much older Pertos looked, how much he seemed to have aged in only the last few moments.
        
        When Pertos Godelhausser climbed the stairs to the lightman's perch for the second performance of the evening, Trimkin was waiting for him. The League President was dressed in the softest of brown, imitation buckskin, with long fringe on the arms and around the hem of the jacket. He smiled and spread his hands as the puppeteer displayed the handgun he had not had time to use the previous night.
        "I come unarmed," Trimkin said.
        "And I should take advantage of that."
        "You'd never leave the theater alive, then"
        "Perhaps."
        "Most certainly."
        Then they stood there, facing each other, being men and playing the games of courage and self-possession which are supposed to be those rituals which separate men from boys, though they seemed more in the Neanderthal spirit than in the tradition of civilization.
        "So why are you here?" Pertos asked at last.
        "You even had an afternoon performance today." He pulled out one of the handbills that had been circulated about the city. "And you have another scheduled every afternoon this week:"
        "Standard:"
        "Maybe you didn't understand, Mister Godelhausser."
        "I understood."
        "Then it's stubbornness."
        "No. It's just that I have a strong sense of self-preservation," Pertos said. "That's the sum of it." He smiled, too warmly to mean it
        Trimkin looked nonplussed. "Self-preservation?"
        "Tonight, I'll sell my soul to a merchant, just as he predicted I would. The only thing I'll have left, then, is pride and the future. Without money, I'll never see the stars, I'll die on Earth; there must be, then, many performances in Springsun. For if I die on Earth, there is no future to look forward to. And without any future, there can be no pride; a fly trapped in amber isn't proud. You