The Dark Symphony

thought. Maybe "Treacherous" was better.
    Claws raked his chest, harsh, hot needles. He felt the fine lines of pain on one level, the blood breaking through in tiny rivulets on another. The claws sank deeper, twisted viciously back and forth. Nasty called wildly, cheered himself on with the most hideous array of dissonant notes Guil had ever heard.
    Guil struck upward with a fist, smashed it just below the green eyes. The blow felt solid, and something had given under it. Nasty's head snapped back and to the side. The claws tore loose, taking slivers of flesh with them and freeing more blood. For a moment, Guil thought he had broken its neck, and relief began to quiet his panic.
    Then Nasty shrieked, flapped onto Guil's back and sunk claws into the boy's shoulders from the bronc-buster position.
    For a while, Guil tried whirling about, hoping to get his hands on the tip of a wing or a foot, anything that would give him leverage against the beast so that he might cause it pain and pry it loose. But the manbat was more naturally the fighter, and he kept himself cunningly out of the boy's grasp, allowing himself to be brushed by Guil's fingertips but never conceding more than that.
    Eventually, Guil stopped, realizing he would tire and the manbat would finish him. The fangs and the claws would rip into him, open him up. His mind spinning swiftly through alternate courses of action, he did the only prudent thing. He fell backwards, crushing the bat's thin chest under him. Still, the manbat would not retreat. Nasty foamed and screeched his hatred, sank fangs into the boy's shoulder in a misdirected try for his neck.
    Guil's head spun madly merry-go-roundish, pumped up and down, slid, slipped, galloped in place. Pain shot through his chest like an electric current, and his shoulders seemed close to paralysis. He fought against the imprudent desire to get to his feet and try to run. There would be no place to go—just as there had been no hiding place in the arena in the Coming of Age Day—and that would free the manbat to claw and bite anew. Instead, he pressed back hard, rolled to the left and right, listening to the crunch of cartilage and light bones.
    Blood gurgled in Nasty's throat. He ripped his fangs loose and tried once more for the boy's throat. There, he knew, the pounding mainline of blood flowed. But he missed and merely scraped the flesh, his own pain and weakness now defeating him. His breath was foul with rotting meat fragments and the stench of his own gore.
    Guil rolled and rolled a long while before he realized the manbat was dead. The chest had crumpled inward, and the ribs had punctured its heart and other organs, setting a bubbling blood fountain to gurgling life. Wearily his clothes soaked with blood and caked with dirt, little sobs of exhaustion escaping from his throat despite his iron determination to hold them in, he stood and wheezed for air.
    "I would have killed him anyway," Redbat said. "He disobeyed me when I told him to stop. That would not have been tolerated."
    "But," Guil croaked, his sides and shoulders throbbing and hot where the bat had clawed him, "I fought him for… you. Now, Redbat… you owe me… a favor. The time will come when I will want… you to pay it back."
    "That is honorable," Redbat said. "Fine. Now you had both better leave. We must prepare to marshal our forces for the Day."
    He turned, Strong's arm about him, and struggled up the stony incline back toward the cave where they had first met Redbat, unable to refuse his father's aid this time, even though he wanted to, even though he detested looking weak before this man.
    "Your wounds," Strong protested.
    "I'll be fine."
    "We'll take you to the robo-doc in this area — before we continue with the preparations. We'll get you fixed. And those stinking clothes laundered."
    Well," Guil said reluctantly. "If you insist." He topped the rise. "Maybe a bandage or two is necessary." Then he pitched forward onto the rubble, into an even deeper dark…
    FIRST:
    The operating table slid out of the robo-doc, bearing Blue.
    Strong knew that the time was near at hand and his head was full of quotations from the Seven Books to bolster his Dream and give it flesh. His body literally shivered with pious joy. But his Dream was a vision of final judgment, retribution, and justice, and his mind was filled with this: "Then shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out,