The flesh in the furnace

trusted. But when she spoke, it was softly, and she never taunted him like most of the others did. He didn't Me either the first or the second suitor, for they treated him nastily, though not quite so crudely as the prince. The third suitor, the chubby one, was just the opposite. He spoke to Sebastian more than any of the others, though the idiot had noticed that the third suitor was the quietest among his comrades. They talked about the stars if the clouds parted, about the snow, about the Furnace and the others.
        Belina, of course, he loved.
        He had created her in the Furnace, forged her with his own hands and without anyone's aid. It was as if this single act atoned for everything else that he had done wrong. In creating Bitty Belina, he had simultaneously erased his sin for killing Alvon Rudi and Pertos, for permitting Wolf to escape and murder Ben Samuels. And he had all but forgotten a girl named jenny and the recurring guilt that had chased him down the years of his life. Both because she was his creation and because she brought him this contentment without knowing it, he loved her. He was enchanted by her golden hair and her sparkling eyes, unaware that his creation might have other traits beyond the physical.
        He had even begun to think that there was a certain. scriptlike quality to their new lives. Every day they drove down the windswept, snow-hidden highway, keeping between the markers on either berm, bucking the air currents. Every night he sat and watched the puppets talk and laugh in the rear of the truck where they had made their home. Every day it snowed, either hard or gently. Every night it snowed in his dreams too. There was a quality of sameness, of routine, that made life more stable and endurable. As far as Sebastian could see, the rest of their lives would consist of the northern highway, the cold and the snow and the sky like ashes and the occasional birds streaking across the flat bottom of the clouds. 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