She was pacing back and forth on the long, raised platform. Hiah-Leugh skirted the Iron Maiden, the Pallid Pulley, the Bronze Beater, the Copper Conker, and Giant Mas-Mixer, which was a fake. Nothing was ever mixed in it except the noxious weed Hiah-Leugh used in his pipe. At the sound of his approach Sally stopped her pacing and fixed him with a baleful glance out of eyes, four and five. Eyes, two and three were busy seeing if her coiffure was right and eyes one, six and seven were having their lids tweezed. After all, she had twelve pairs of legs which were also used for hands. A heck of a lot could be done with so many appendages.
She started in even before he quite reached her side:
"Where is everybody? Do I have to sit by myself every day? Must you have your eyeballs massaged everyday? Where are the torturers? Where is everybody...?"
"I think there's a picnic scheduled for today, dear," Hiah-Leugh said.
"Why wasn't I told about it?" Sally demanded.
She had very probably been told about it but knowing his ninth concubine and the limits of her memory, she had very surely forgotten.
"Hiah-Leugh!" she broke in on him before he could frame a reply. "I'm so terribly, terribly bored! There hasn't been a good torture since, since ... when was the last time there was a torture party?"
"The time Gin-Pad was caught stealing wokkerjabbies from his youngest child," Hiah-Leugh said. "We put him in the Pallid Pulley and stretched four of his legs until they were longer than the rest. And to this day Gin-Pad walks like he's looking for something between his forelegs...."
Six of Sally's seven pairs of eyes crossed suddenly, a sign she was in thought. Hiah-Leugh had the wishful hope that the seventh pair would cross. When that happened Sally would be ex-concubine. She would also be ex-living but that didn't bother him. We all have to die sometime, he thought. But why does she have to live so long? The thought processes of Sally Patica wound their weary way and came to their proper end. Life was boresome. And she had to think of something to make it less so. She did.