The Dark Symphony

the same time. The feeling of sick-sweet desire flooded back.
    "Guil," she said, putting a finger on his left eye and prying the lid open. "I came to you because you were the only one that wanted me to win. You cared about what happened. And because I'm afraid that they may have me marked now that I have tried to upset things."
    "Afraid? You?"
    She looked at him, shook her head.
    And with the sound playing
prestissimo
falls upon their singing flesh on the shimmer-stone floor, they found an epiphany of soul, moving together in time, giving to each a moment for
cadenza.
.
    FIRST:
    Loper had disposed of the child's body just in time, for a moment later, the pursing Musicians entered the far end of the alley. He turned, started to run the other way. Suddenly, Musicians blocked that entrance too.
    He drew his knife, tossed it. It bounced off the yellow shield as he knew it would. He turned, searching the wall behind. A window ledge and a shattered window lay fifteen feet above. He leaped, caught hold of a hole where a brick had once rested, kicked his feet against the wall, brought a foot up to share the hole, raised a hand, grasped the window ledge, and pulled himself up.
    "He doesn't have the child!" someone shouted.
    Yellow light danced on the dull crimson walls.
    I le slashed his hand on the fragments of glass sticking out of the bottom of the sill. He hooked bleeding fingers over the rotting wood.
    " Don't let him—"
    "Stop him or—"
    "Someone shoot the goddamned—"
    His foot burst like an over-ripe fruit under the knife of the cold sound beam. Every bone reverberated like tuning forks set end-to-end. Desperately, he pulled over the sill and sprawled oh the floor of the abandoned building. The voices outside subsided to murmurs.
    A musty odor hung in the air. Reaching to examine his foot, he found only a stump. He wouldn't think about that. Gritting his broad teeth, he struggled out of his breechcloth, used it to make a tourniquet to stay the worst of the flow. Although he was resigned to dying for the cause, he didn't want to cash in his chips before he absolutely had to. He pushed up, moving on both hands and one leg, the wounded member held out so that he looked like a dog searching for a place to make its water. His head spun, toppled, climbed back to clarity, boiled, bubbled, ached.
    The building was a warehouse, long abandoned now, the floor rotting in places. Indeed, he felt sure if the Musicians crowded in after him they would all plummet to the cellar. Grimly, he made his way across the room to a set of stairs leading to a platform that ringed the main chamber and gave access to second floor doors.
    The wall adjoining the alley erupted in a shower of brick and dust, yellow light filtering in as Musicians shoved through, pulled others after them.
    He doubled his efforts, holding to the rickety railing that could collapse at any moment, hopping from step to step on his good leg. The Musicians came onto the main floor just as he swung onto the platform.
    "Up there!" And they were after him.
    But the floor gave way beneath them. Five of the twelve plunged through the rotting wood, screaming, even their shields unable to absorb the shock of a thirty foot fall onto old rusted beams, trash, and rail posts. But seven remained.
    The survivors strung themselves out and approached the stairs from several directions to distribute their weight. They saw Loper moving along the rail towards one of the doors, and they raised their rifles.
    "Just wound him!"
    Loper felt three fingers tear loose of his right hand. He faltered, wobbled, balancing on one leg, and crashed through the railing and the rotten floor below, breaking his bull neck in the spokes of a rusted bicycle lying on the basement floor.
    At least, he thought in that very last instant, the plan will be initiated. We will get our substitute child into the Musician towers in place of the real Guillaume Dufay Grieg. Then there was only blackness.
    The seven Musicians searched the alleyways for the child, but their search here was a fruitless one. The rats were very hungry that night…

CHAPTER FOUR
    When Tisha had gone from the cubicle, Guil dressed slowly, still stunned by the relationship that now existed between them, trying to sort out what it meant. She had said many things to him. She had said that they were two of a land, two rare ones in this society, misfits of a sort, and the rare ones that had a capacity for tenderness toward other human beings. Rare