Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming

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The bastards were shirking again. And Azzie had just gotten comfortable. He had found a place just the right distance between the fiery hole in the mid­dle of the Pit and the hoarfrost-covered iron walls which encircled it.

The walls were kept close to absolute zero by the devil's own air-conditioning system. The central Pit was hot enough to strip atoms of their electrons, and there were occasional gusts that could melt a proton.

Not that that much heat or cold was needed. It was over­kill; overharass, actually. Humans, even when dead and cast into the Pit, have very narrow ranges (speaking on a cosmic scale) of tolerance. Once past the comfort zone in either di­rection, humans soon lost the ability to discriminate bad from worse. What good was it subjecting a poor wretch to a million degrees Celsius if it felt the same as a mere five hundred de­grees? The extremes only tormented the demons and other supernatural creatures who tended the damned. Supernatural creatures have a far wider range of sensation than humans; mostly to their discomfort, but sometimes to their exceeding pleasure. But it is not seemly to talk about pleasure in the Pit.

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