The Dark Symphony

Composer, maybe he could free himself.
    "You know," Rosie said.
    "No, I don't!"
    Rosie made a sound like a snarl.
    "Damn it, that hurts!" Guil was beginning to see small points of color in the darkness, though he knew they were seen behind his eyeballs and did not really exist.
    "Good," Rosie said again. But that wasn't like Rosie.
    "Rosie, listen to me. I—"
    Rosie pressed even harder with his knees. Guil's shoulders began to tingle with the first signs of muscle separation. Nasty's wounds, almost healed, would open under the pressure, burst the stitches. Carefully, desperately but slowly, he slid his right leg up, pointing the knee and measuring the possibility of swinging the foot in a tight enough arc to smash it into the head that was now visible as-his eyes adjusted to the gloom and blinked away the blurredness of sleep. "Rosie, what the hell is it?" he asked to distract the Composer's attention from the movement of the leg.
    "Seventeen years, Guil. I tried for seventeen years. I worked and sweated and polished. You haven't the faintest idea how much I worked over those years, not the slightest glimmer. You won't destroy it all now for some warped monsters that think they want the world."
    "I don't understand what you're saying. Let me up." Carefully, raising the leg…
    "Tish told me."
    Told you what?"
    "Don't fool with me!"
    "What have you done with her?"
    "Nothing."
    "If you've hurt her—"
    "I haven't hurt her. She was little-girl excited about it. She thought I would be too. You see, she knows that I think very little of our city-state, of the social order here. Rut she forgot that I must now conduct myself as an integral part of it, for that is the only advantageous thing for me to do. She said she wasn't supposed to tell but that she knew I would be excited too. I pretended to be. No need to harm her. Killing you is all I need to do."
    "Look, wait a moment—"
    "You won't topple the Musicians. Not now that I've made it."
    "Rosie, there are people out there beyond the city who—"
    "Freaks!"
    "People who—"
    "I don't want to hear it," the Composer shrieked.
    Guil swung his foot and connected with Rosie's back, sent the hunchback crashing over him. The pressure on his shoulders broke, allowed pain to sweep in and take its place. Guil twisted, kicked out from under the Composer and sprang to his feet, dizzying clangs of cymbals exploding in his head. "Rosie, stop it!"
    "I have to loll you."
    "You can't do it, Rosie." He backed off as the hunchback crouched and came at him, his hands twiddling, vibrating like plucked strings, blood lust in every cell, justified by his purpose.
    "Couldn't I?"
    "Damn it, I know you, Rosie! I love your sister. You once said I was your only friend. Remember that? In the arena on Coming of Age Day—"
    "None of that."
    "But—"
    "None of that because it doesn't matter. Friendship, love… they're high on the priority list, but they don't mean good goddamned if you aren't whole yourself, if you are only half a man." His words were thick with saliva.
    "Then what does matter anymore, Rosie? I just don't see what else could really matter."
    "What matters, Guil, is that I'm not a freak any longer. I've made it. They accepted me. They worship me—or will after I have been dead sufficient years. The whole of life, Guil, is getting up there, getting to a point where you aren't a tool or a tapestry. That's what most everyone is, you know. One or the other. The tapestries are for entertaining, to amuse. They shamble through life so other people will have something to talk about They are the dregs. And it may not be because they can't make it —it may be because other people keep them from making it Then others are tools for the real workmen of this world to wield and even break if necessary in order to screw, bolt, nail, and brace themselves to a higher ledge. Now, I am a toolmaster. I can command the tapestries to be unfolded or hung in a closet or burned and forgotten. I can screw myself to the highest ledge there is and never feel the workman's blade in the slot of my own back. That is what the hell matters, Guil. But you could never see that and adapt to it You aren't the type to see that, Guil."
    "Thank God, I'm not," he said.
    "Yes, you would look at it that way. Perhaps, if your stigmata had been more pronounced, if you had had to fight your way despite horns on your head and clawed hooks on the backs of your hands—perhaps then you would have understood
the
tool-toolmaster