The Dark Symphony

down Guil's face and gouge out his eyes. "And I will start living!"
    But Redbat had spoken prematurely. The claws never connected with Guil's face. Suddenly, the manbat pitched forward, eyes glazing, crashed full length over his intended victim. Dead… Guil rolled from beneath the furry corpse, and waited till his vision settled. He saw Tisha standing over him, the butt of her sound rifle glistening with Redbat's blood.
    "I had to," she said.
    He could feel his own blood seeping from his sides. He nodded, took her hand, and led her toward the pillar that shimmered powerfully before them. As they grew nearer to the brown column, a fragile sort of peace descended on them…
    FIRST:
    Strong looked out from the alleyway to where Babe lay with the dog, to where the others laughed, where the sun beat unmercifully upon a scene .that he wanted to strike completely from his mind, burn out with a hot poker and leave only cool scar behind. But there was no way to deny the memory now. He had seen how they had degraded Babe for their own fun, and the picture would haunt him forever.
    Without thinking what he was doing, without bothering to plan, to gauge distances, to outline a course of action, he charged from the alleyway into the plaza, toward the Musician boys that had done this thing. He reached the edge of their circle before they saw him, ripped into them with his massive hands, punching, pounding, slamming them down and kicking them hard, over and over in the neck and in the ribs.
    For a long time, he moved like an automaton, a mindless construction programmed only to destroy. He tore at them, made them bleed and cry and slobber on the pavement. He was aware that some of them had escaped, would be bringing back help, but he did not let that deter him. When he had finished with the half dozen he had beaten, when none of them breathed or moved or had hearts that fluttered, he went to Babe and took the mesh cap off him, tossed it aside.
    He took Babe in his arms as if the mutant truly was yet an infant, ran with him back through the covered alleyway, back across the adjoining square into the second alleyway, on farther until they were moving through the neon stones, beyond the dilapidated truck and into the ruins they called home.
    Later, when it became clear that whatever the sound cap had done to Babe's brain was permanent and not temporary, Strong tried to go back into the city. Shell, his father, restrained him, and eventually his fervor cooled enough so that he could be trusted to remain in the ruins. But he remembered how the Musicians had bled. How their bones had broken. How they had died… And he began to feel that there was something special about him. Perhaps he had been chosen to strike back at the oppressors.
    As the days went by and he saw more and more of the mindless Babe (drooling, mumbling, staring vacantly) the feeling was fortified. The Dream began to flesh out. He knew he had only to wait until the proper time, and he would be given a chance to wash the streets of Vivaldi with Musician blood.

CHAPTER TWELVE
    Guil was thinking of the song that had been played at dinner that night before Coming of Age Day…
    See Father, the Erlkings near…
    The Erlking with crown and wand
. . .
    They reached the pillar just as several of Redbat's chiefs found his battered corpse and garnered the story of the fight and of Tisha's treachery from the few nonbat Populars who had seen it. They looked after Guil and Tisha, chattered excitedly among themselves as the two tried to gain a few more precious feet.
    They'll follow us," Tisha said. They'll stop us."
    "Give me your rifle."
    She watched as he braced the gun in a statue of Chopin standing in the plaza. He tilted it so that the barrel aimed at the pillar. "What are you doing?"
    "It will engage the configuration of the pillar," he said, turning it on. "A few minutes after we're through, it'll negate the whole thing." He took her hand and started forward with her.
    Behind, there was a flapping of wings…
    A manbat ahead of the rest of the pack crashed against Guil's shoulders. The boy whirled, threw it from him into the pillar. Shrieking, it disappeared, its screams so quickly choked off that one would have thought a knife had been drawn across its throat.
    Carefully avoiding the thin, humming beam from the sound rifle that was working on the patterns of the pillar, they stepped into the pulsating column and were swallowed by the smooth convolutions of its buzzing,