his forehead. And Ciaran took his harp. He was looking at Mouse when he set the strings to singing. That was why it wasn't hard to play as he did. It was something from him to Mouse. A prayer. A promise. His heart held out on a song. The music rippled out across the packed mass of humanity. At first they didn't hear it. Then there was a stirring and a sigh, a dumb, blind reaching. Somewhere the message was getting through the darkness clouding their minds. A message of hope. A memory of red sunlight on green hills, of laughter and home and love. Ciaran let the music die to a whisper under his fingers, and the people moved forward, toward him, wanting to hear. He began to walk away, slowly, trailing the harp-song over his shoulder—and they followed. Haltingly, in twos and threes, until the whole mass broke and flowed like water in his wake. Bas was gone, his slim young body slipping fast through the broken ranks of the crowd. Ciaran caught one more glimpse of Mouse before he lost her among the others. She was crying, without knowing or remembering why. If Bas died, if Bas was defeated, she would never know nor remember. Ciaran led them as far as he could, clear to the wall of the pit. He stopped playing. They stopped, too, standing like cattle, looking at nothing, with eyes turned inward to their clouded dreams. Ciaran left them there, running out alone across the empty floor. He followed the direction Bas had taken. He ran, fast, but it was like a nightmare where you run and run and never get anywhere. The lights glared down and the metal monster sighed and churned high up over his head, and there was no other sound, no other movement but his own. Then, abruptly, the lights went out. He stumbled on, hitting brutally against unseen pillars, falling and scrambling in scrap heaps. And after an eternity he saw light again, up ahead. The Light he had seen before, here in the pit. The glorious opalescent light that drew a man's mind and held it fast to be chained. Ciaran crept in closer.
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