The Dark Symphony

gone.
    The men behind the barrels, startled, were gone before they could manage to stand erect.
    The Musicians turned to the board-bearers and buzzed the thin shields out of the way. Some of the Populars, realizing the sudden desperation of their situation, threw their boards into the air and charged with a strange electric hopelessness that currented their bodies so that their muscles seemed to twitch as if repeatedly shocked. Shielded, they could not advance as fast as the dying wave before them, and, at any rate, the shields were useless to begin with. Even running, they did not make it The last was sound-killed a dozen feet from the Musicians, his arms thrown wildly into the air at the last moment, his dart weapon rattling across the pavement in a surrender the enemy would never accept. And which, Guil thought sarcastically, the Popular would not have accepted had the circumstances been reversed.
    Strong was worried. The power of the Musicians was frightening. Guil had underestimated the city's counterattack capabilities under the prevailing conditions. And if he had underestimated, Strong, in his fanatic self-confidence, had surely even guessed lower.
    "Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight: My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower and my deliverer; my shield."
    Certainly, they would need a deliverer and shield if more Musicians shook their grogginess and took up arms, laden with their superior fire power. Guil had noticed that the remaining Musicians in the corner, backed longed the wall, had destroyed the weapons that had belonged to their fallen comrades. They seemed determined to keep as many weapons as possible from falling into Popular hands if they themselves should somehow be brought to ruin.
    Which they would be, of course.
    Another wave hit them, fanning darts…
    The Musicians sustained heavy wounds this time, five of the eight mortally struck. They pitched forward, darts prickling their bodies in countless places, blood oozing here, gushing there, pooling about the feet of the remain-in g three.
    But those three, despite their unfamiliarity with the horrors of combat, had grouped and rallied with a defense system that seemed to be working. They stood in a triangle, facing one to the left, one to the right, and one directly front. They fanned their weapons, the humming beams crossing and magnifying one another so that where they hummed alone they burned Populars, and where they crossed they even destroyed the darts in midflight. With a single bark of command, the leader who faced front could shift the triangle slightly to meet any new angle of attack that seemed dangerous. It was a deadly, impenetrable wall of negating vibrations, and the Populars were forced into a retreat minus two-thirds of their original numbers.
    Strong was praying. Very loudly.
    Then salvation came…
    … for the Populars: the manbats.
    They swooped down from above, three bats for three men. The Musicians fell, their weapons skidding away from them, spinning across the street into the waiting hands of the ecstatic mutants. The manbats battled with fangs and claws, tore at the enemy flesh with maniacal glee. Even from the sled, Guil could see that the bats' eyes burned with a potent flame more savage and primitive than anything Nasty had possessed when he had attacked Guil. This was sheer bloodlust, the rending of flesh and blood and bone for the pleasure of it, and it reached its slimy hands toward Guil's stomach and petted him toward illness.
    Guil wanted to throw up, but he couldn't Rather, he felt that he should puke. It was an obligation, was it not, for the sensitive to physically rebel at such a sight? But rebellion at this crude man-against-man spectacle was something no longer in him. When had that sensitivity utterly died? With the first understanding that his parents had been willing to give him away, to use him, to sacrifice him for a cause—then to warp his life twice? No, it had not died then, but it had begun to. Had it died with the realization that the Musicians had warped other men into grotesque freaks in order to complete the chain of their society, in order to give their lowest class an object to which it could feel superior? No, but it had sickened severely with that knowledge. Had it died with the carnage below? Had that sapped his compassion for mankind? Perhaps, though it would seem to be a slow deterioration rather than a sudden death, with each of