The Dark Symphony

women, suppressing his desire to leap into the bowl, mount them in flight, fornicate as together they plunged to the bottom of the bowl and swooped upward again, crescendoing to a climax with the pounding swirl of sound. He should not be thinking such things, he knew. He hated Musicians and their Ladies. Still, it is not uncommon to find a relationship between lust and hate, and he struggled with
a
. lust so bred. Stepping into the hallway, he closed the door to the Inundation Chamber, knowing what his dreams would always be from this day forward.
    Farther down the hall, he pushed open another door and found the nursery. Walking hurriedly to the cradles of the babies born that day, he began checking names. Not just any child would do. It had to be a newborn babe, fresh from mother's belly that very day, and it had to be the child of a relatively important Musician, at least a Class II. Finally he came to a tag that caught his attention: GUILLAUME DUFAY GRIEG. Could it possibly be the blood, in any way, of Johann Stamitz Grieg, Grand Meistro of Vivaldi, this city-state? He snatched it up. Even if it were only a nephew, its parents should be, with any luck, at least Class Us.
    The baby slept. It seemed so small and silly in his hands. He wondered what they would call it for a nickname. Guil? He fought down a moment of tenderness. Tenderness could not be permitted at this stage of the game. Carefully, he slipped into the corridor and found the; elevator. Walking into its surging strings, he fell down the well of noise, clutching the babe to his hair-matted chest.
    When he stepped into the hallway on the ground floor, however, there were three Musicians walking toward the elevator…

CHAPTER TWO
    The processional,
Pomp and Circumstance
, gorged the hall. Slowly and in perfect time with the music, the eight boys of Guil's class marched haughtily into the vast chamber of the Grand Hall, their full velvetlike shimmer-cloth capes glowing with contained purple Sashes as they fell behind their shoulders like wings. Purple was the color of a boy, of the uninitiated. When the Coming of Age Day rituals were completed, and if they were then lucky and resourceful enough to still be alive, they would never again wear that color, but would trade it for the reds and oranges, yellows and whites of adulthood.
    Guil swallowed hard as they walked, finding his throat more and more constricted the deeper they went into the arena. He had never imagined the Great Hall to be like this! The floor swept away from him in a slight upward curve that would have been unnoticeable in any lesser chamber. It was, he judged, a thousand yards long. Far, far away, the judges were only dots in the tiny crimson chairs that topped the hundred foot vaulting facade of the Bench, which was a blacker black than any he had ever seen. The floor between here and there was a brilliant copper, laced with free-form shots of cream and black that shimmered and intertwined, curling through the almost transparent background of the stone. He turned his eyes on the floor nearby, careful to keep his head properly erect so as not to break the symmetry of the formation, and saw that the stone
was
transparent Only lightly copper tinted, it dropped for at least a hundred feet, and only this great depth gave it that heavy coppery hue it seemed to possess at a casual glance—just as a cupful of water is clear but an oceanful is blue.
    He looked to the tiers of spectators next—fully five thousand on a side, stretching up and up to the nearly limitless reaches of the walls that thrust upward in a slight outward curve and blended with the ceiling and the shimmering green beams. Each spectator had a comfortable, padded lounge chair on a swivel base to make his job of watching that much easier. Before each chair was a small television screen so that the spectator might see the action close up when it strayed to distant parts of the arena during heated moments of battle.
    "My heart is literally in my throat," Rosie said next to him, his voice strained and based on a tremor.
    "I'll help you stuff it down once I've swallowed my own," Guil said, still marveling at the tiers, at the immense spaces, at the lovely transparent floor.
    A wave of cheering moved through the stands as the boys progressed, but they dared not look up any farther than they could manage by straining their eyes around in their sockets. Heads must remain front, for the ritual of entrance called for them to face only