The Dark Symphony

half-man said, bunking slow, furry lids over his magnificent eyes. He smacked his thin lips together and made a sighing sound. "For some reason, I'm red-skinned and red-furred. Doesn't really matter to some bats, cause some of us mutated to a point where we see in black and white or in radar blips. But I have radar
and
my human sight, and I saw that I was red and different. And I knew."
    "Knew what?" Guil asked.
    The manbat showed fangs as large as thumbs. In the light wash from his eyes, they too were green, though a softer shade. "I was meant to lead, of course! I knew that right away."
    "Lead what?"
    "Manbats!" Redbat exclaimed, fluttering all over with consternation, his eyes even a little wider than they had been.
    Strong pinched his son's arm between his thick fingers to warn the boy. Cue such admonition was enough, Guil decided. He had a single, snapshot-clear vision of thumb-sized fangs sinking to the gums in a vein, tearing flesh, foam-flecked and crimson…
    "Redbat," Strong said, turning the manbat's attention away from Guil, who was relieved to see the mutant's green gaze shift from his face, "we came to meet with your council. The Day is only a week ahead."
    "So soon?"
    "The boy has already told me that what I want can be done quite easily."
    True
, Guil thought,
but I did not say I would do it
.
    "They won't suspect him of sabotage," Strong continued. "He can go freely almost anywhere he wants. And where he cannot go is of no consequence to our plans. So we might as well begin coordinating things."
    The manbat was silent for a time, thinking. Guil tried to imagine what the workings of such a mind would be like, what patterns the thoughts would follow, what prejudices would exist, what memories. It was a little too much for him. He could accept the Populars on a physical level, but could never extrapolate from that to a thought process pattern that might be typical of them. "Come on," Redbat said at last.
    Redbat disengaged his claws and flopped to the floor, managing to come to a standing position before he hit He turned, scrambled over the ruins, farther back into the darkness, half flying and half walking through the narrow passage whose sides were formed of broken chunks of concrete, broken glass, twisted wires, and oddly intact ceramic tiles.
    "Father," Guil said, the word thick and bad-tasting on his tongue, much as if a fat insect had flown in his mouth, "why didn't you use Redbat instead of Loper to steal the real Guillaume from the Primal Chord?"
    Strong clambered over stone and plastic and metal, reached back and helped Guil over the hillock. "It's 2,500 feet to the top of the Primal Chord. True, manbats can fly. but they are still men. Their bone structure is not completely adapted to flight. A real bat's bones are nearly hollow, but manbats have to walk on the ground and support their weight, so hollow bones are out. Therefore, they can only get up about two hundred feet. And even if they would have flown up the Primal Chord that far, they would not have had well-developed muscles to scale the rest of the distance in a conventional manner."
    Darker it got.
    And colder.
    They came to another slope that was negotiable only by sliding down it. Redbat was fortunate in that the ceiling here was high enough to allow him to fly to the bottom. Strong went first. Guil looked at what he could see of the slope, listened to his father's descent. This one was not made of sand. He could hear heavy material rolling here. But, again, it was too steep to permit walking. He tensed, pushed off…
    Rocks and skin on a toboggan ride. The rocks came out the better for it Guil grimaced as the tip of his little finger rasped over another rock. Then he was sliding down a long stretch of loose stones, kicking and squealing as the dust rose to choke and blind him. When he came to the bottom, he lay still a moment, then pushed up before Strong (always motherly in fear his divine tool would be damaged) could come running to assay his wounds.
    "You're certain he can do it?" Redbat asked, fluffing his wings in the gloom, his face screwed into an almost comic scowl. But Guil remembered what that same face looked like with fangs splitting the lips and could suddenly see nothing remotely comic about it.
    "He can do it," Strong said. "But we have to remember that he was raised by Musicians. He isn't prepared for the kind of life we lead."
    Guil wondered how these two would have fared in the arena. Probably would have dropped