The Dark Symphony

purpose to gain a station and prove manhood— or to thrill the Musicians and their Ladies with horror by the bucketful?
    The six remaining devils separated and gingerly tried to surround him. They closed in from three sides, teeth foam-flecked, eyes hideous and wild. But it would not be those teeth, no matter how horrid they looked, that would kill him. The devils would simply grasp him in a death embrace where their null waves would negate his positive waves and wipe him off the face of the earth. He arced the point of his knife and smoothly halved all of them in ten seconds. There was a tremendous amount of blood on the floor, leaking away in all directions like a thousand-fingered hand with an irregular palm.
    Guil searched the arena for signs of the next test. For a time, as the seconds ticked by, he thought that it might be over and that he might have won. But the silence of the crowd and the gaze of the judges told him this was not so. Then what? Was it now a war of nerves, stretching seconds into minutes, stretching minutes into scores of minutes until he was ready to crack from the stress-then throwing another horror at him? But he did not have time to follow that course of thought any further. The next test was upon him.
    Suddenly he saw that the gore from the past battles was shivering, not just as all sound configurations shimmered, but with a purpose. The blood from the ten devils began to draw together, defying gravitational laws, surging up the curved floor like crimson tides, forming a deep, high-sided puddle. Coagulation occurred rapidly as black clots formed, meshed, tangled to clot more and more of the sticky fluid. He could almost feel as well as hear the shudders of disgust in the tiers. Still, they loved it with a savage lust. It was an awful and delicious thrill they would never allow themselves to miss.
    Abruptly, the blood coagulation was fed by gallons of red fluid that erupted from the slashes on the partially deflated hulk of tie dragon—blood stored, saved, waiting for this moment. It gushed down the floor to the pulsating mass, splashed around it and held to it magically. The jelly-mass quivered, now a dozen feet high and nine feet thick, a pillar of congealed blood with a strange We of its own. All at once, it shrank down to six feet, split into two pillars, each stretching back to its original height of twelve feet with a new thickness of four and a half.
    The crowd roared, thumped the bleachers. Guil could see their faces without even bothering to look: red, bloated slightly out of normal perspective, perspiring, saliva wet in their open mouths and glistening on their lips, their noses quivering like the noses of wild animals sensing a terminal battle. Eyes wide and pupils dilated. And why? What was it they had that he lacked? What ugly longing boiled in them that did not boil in him, that clrt w them to this spectacle?
    The two pillars trembled as if about to move.
    More noise from the crowd…
    Guil waved the sonic knife, slashed them in two, waved it back at a lower level and made eight pieces. Then he saw the terrible consequences of acting without thinking. Each part still lived, burbling, slopping, stretching to almost six feet, shrinking width-wise to two feet They were not dead, but merely multiplied. They Lashed out with pseudopods, all eight of them, closing the gap between test and testee…
    He threw the sonic knife from him in fury, bringing the rifle into play now. Falling to one knee, he aimed through the glass bubble on the sleek, gray barrel, centered on the jelly-mass, and fired. The thing vibrated, seemed to flame into a million flecks of seething ash, and was gone, its sound patterns disrupted and dispersed by the bolt from the rifle. This was good. This was better. No blood, no gore, no ruined bodies. Simple and clean. He turned toward the remaining seven pillars of blood jelly, grinning.
    While he had concentrated on the first of the creatures, the others had moved frighteningly close. He danced backwards, firing as he went He blasted two more of them out of existence before he suddenly slipped and fell backwards in a tangle of legs and arms. The gun tumbled out of his hands and rattled across the floor, spinning to a stop a dozen feet away…
    His head spun as the gun had spun, aching with brushburns where flesh had skidded over stone. Every nerve in his body tensed and began screaming, for this was, just possibly, the end of Guillaume Dufay Grieg. He launched