Cameron
Sweat still trickled down the sides of his head, just in front of his ears, and his shirt stuck in spots to his arm pits, and his chest. His padded coat was draped over one shoulder, along with his sword belt — he wasn't wiling to put it on until he cooled down a little.
And so he waited, leaning against a wall and staring down the alleyway, watching a young woman sashay. Her gleaming black hair flicked to the side at the edge of every exaggerated step, only starting to straighten out again. She turned back at the edge of the alley, and smiled in a mysterious and beautifully complex way that left Cameron feeling — all at once— satisfied, wistful, lustful, and just a little afraid.
Like she was threatening to drown him in lustful bliss. Again.
She took a turn at the edge of the alley and vanished from Cameron's sight. He sighed, rolled his shoulders, and pulling at his shirt to air it out a little, began to buckle the straps that hid his knives under his coat.
Even sheathed, the coldstone blade at his left side nipped at his flesh. For just a moment or two, the sensation was a comfort. And the sudden spike of cold rippling though his body was enough to want to put on the thick, padded army coat he was neglecting. He buttoned up the coat as quickly as he could, hoping for the warmth the coat could provide. The knife they had taken from Saval's chest bit deeper than the last one he had been issued, the coldstone seemed hungrier, if such a thing was possible.
Cameron didn't know if it was the knife, or if he was finding it harder to be a shadow.
But the belt was comfortable; the weight and the simple presence of the sword hanging at his side was a pleasant thing to wear. He didn't have to tuck it into a coat pocket, didn't have to hunch himself forward in order to keep it concealed. He could wear it without seeing the wide, wary eyes of civilians, the visceral fear and hate of a reject he was tasked to watch, or the contempt of a Crafter. And the warmth of the white scarf as he tied it around his neck was almost as pleasant as that woman's caress.
He didn't know her name. She hadn't offered it. Cameron wondered if it would have hurt the moment, to have known her name as if he expected to have a future. Even if they won through this invasion, drove out the monsters, and reclaimed the farmland fast enough to avoid the famines that would follow, he was a shadow. A career of harrowing misery that would end in pain wasn't something he wanted to bring home to a warm bed and warmer smile.
Cameron sighed, and leaned against the wall. He let his thoughts wander, and surprisingly, they found their way to an hobby so long abandoned he thought it forgotten. "She found me broken and weak," he said to himself. "Crushed 'tween horror and grief. She held me and showed me joy, and laid me down to sleep."
The words surprised Cameron. It had been a long time since he had tried his hand at lyrics, not since he had run the gauntlet. His hands itched for a lute, a guitar, anything to put some rhythm into his thoughts.
He let his steps make a beat, and carried on as best he could.
"She is my joy and shame, and my mistress' great bane. She smiles like a spring morning, and her embrace warms to the bone," Cameron half sang, finding the steady metronome of his footsteps helping the words to come out.
Humming a few bars carried him back to the town square and the fountain, and suddenly worried he had missed something important. His squad was a flurry of motion, scrambling around the company's ammo crates like they had woken up to the Invasion knocking at their door.
Which meant the Gloamtaken were close. Cameron cursed and patted at his side, relieved to feel his ammo pouch was almost full. Something about how quickly he reached for the rounds, how quickly these new instincts of reaching for a soldier's weapon — rather than his knives — left him feeling strange.
As if he had been doing something wrong his entire life. And only now, in the middle of having his life and his relationship with danger upheaved, did it feel the way it should.
He tried to think of days to come, of going back to minding the City's failed Crafters. The idea of watching them burn themselves away until he had to put them down — as much for their own sakes as for everyone around them — left him sick to his stomach. He remembered the last reject he had struck down; a young woman, possibly younger than the woman who had just used and left him. Too young for the pale grey eyes and ash-coloured hair and the sharp acidic smell of torched metal that she carried into the streets.
"Cam," Hendricks called out from near the town's fountain, shaking him out of his musings. Cameron stepped over, and took the small bag his fellow soldier was offering him. He opened it, surprised to see it was a second pouch of Salamander rounds.
"Put it on. Our new lieutenant seems to think we need to start carrying more rounds into engagements," Hendricks explained. "Sounds like we'll be expected to hold."
"Hold?" Cameron asked. He let himself think of how it felt, killing Gloamtaken. A single one was little danger to even someone like Roderick, whose life experience in combat was fighting his older brothers. Outnumbered several to one, even someone like Mack needed to be careful. And just from a casual glance earlier, Cam was fairly certain the oncoming mob outnumbered Barleybarrel.
"We channel them between the buildings, so we're only facing them head-on and every shot hits two of those ash-bitten things. The Rangers' demolition crews have already set explosives in all the outward facing buildings, so if we can't hold in one spot we block their advance with a hundred tons of rubble. Volenski and Varnell just briefed us, seriously Cam, what were you doing?"
Cam might have made a joke about 'who he was doing'. Part of him wanted to. But not knowing her name left him sick to his stomach, regretting it as if he had missed out on something important.
"Suspect he was making sure the people of Barleybarrel were all sequestered in the south end of town, behind the second layer of defences," Mackaroy said from behind him, surprising Cam by coming to his defence.
"Can't fault a soldier for following orders. Especially since Redgrave and Aranhall went after that kid who went wandering in the fields," Hendricks said. "Anyway, lieutenant's orders are to double-up on the amount of ammo you're carrying, and check your equipment."
"If anyone asks," Mackaroy replied, as Cameron attached to pouch to his belt. "Cam and I need to go check on Vincent. We'll be back soon."
Cameron flinched as if Mack had just wound up to hit him. If there was anyone in the City he didn't want to see, wasn't sure if he ever wanted to see again, it was Olivia Polden's apprentice.
But Mack put a firm hand on his shoulder, steered him around, and pushed him into motion. Sullenly, but without any real resistance, Cameron let himself be steered away. Hendricks was frowning as they left, but didn't offer any help to Cam's unspoken plea.
Mack lead them without a word until they were will out of earshot. "We need to talk, and I need you to see something."
"Mack," Cameron began. "If this is about leaving Vincent alone, I don't really want to hear it."
Mack looked back at him, just for a moment, before he turned away again. It was left to Cameron's imagination to paint the old shadow's expression. "This is important. If things go sour here, if the Rangers aren't enough to hold the Gloamtaken back, we have one last option. And you can throw yourself into the Gloam, right now, if you think I'm not going to use him."
"I'm not sure he'd be willing to, even if you asked," Cameron noted. "He doesn't seem all that inclined to step-up."
"If stepping-up meant killing yourself, you'd probably be as close to the Spire as you could get, hoping everyone else in the City would be enough to protect you," Mack said. The insult felt like a slap in the face, and Cameron's hand was clenched into a fist before he knew he had done it. "And quite frankly, if Vincent's afraid of his power, that would be the most sense I've ever seen in a Crafter. How many rejects would you have rather never touched their power again? How much safer would the City be, if the people you and I had to monitor were afraid of the Craft?"
Angry as he was, Cam very nearly missed the point Mack was making. He rolled his shoulders to try and relax, and managed to push the sheathed coldstone knife against his chest hard enough he flinched away from it. "So why are we going to see Vincent now?" he asked, hoping to cover up his discomfort.
"Last time I sent you by yourself, you probably didn't stick around long enough to see a Crafter at work," Mackaroy said.
A Crafter at work. The words took Cameron back to a different wall, where the air erupted in explosions so fierce a City district couldn't have endured it. Where Crafters went mad, turned on each other, and a Golem emerged triumphant. "I've seen Crafters at work before."
Mackaroy shook his head, and rubbed his temples with his hand. "You've seen Crafters at war. And you've been evaluating rejects for most of your career. A Crafter at work can be a hard adjustment from that. Things that could drive a reject into instant madness are casual efforts for someone as powerful as Vincent."
Cameron's cheeks felt hot, and he turned his head to look at the ground over his shoulder, hoping to keep the sight from his irritatingly prescient coworker.
It took another couple of steps to realize that Mackaroy was watching him. Meeting the man's gaze was deeply unnerving, and Cameron was grateful it didn't happen often. Mack wasn't inclined to look people in the eye much. "Yeah kid, I figured that was what happened. The Guild only graduates about a third of the potentials it receives, and the ones who receive the coat are the least likely to lose themselves to their power. Most evaluators never actually get to see what a Crafter is capable of, let alone what it takes to drive one past that point."
And having seen it, Cameron would rather he had never witnessed a Crafter's madness. The sight of Saval raising her hand, and turning a man into smoke in the space between heartbeats was a memory he wished he didn't possess. If he could take his knife to his own skull, and carve it out, he would.
The part of that memory that ached the most, was when Mack had to point out how close Crafter Polden had come to turning him into hot ash.
"That isn't your problem, though," Mackaroy continued, his gaze as ever focused on the ground a hundred miles away. "Your problem, is you've only ever seen the Craft when someone's losing themselves. I'm not even sure you remember Crafter Howel's last stand as anything other than directed madness."
The accusation stung, but Cameron realized a heartbeat after that it was true. Mackaroy continued without looking over. "Let me try a different tack. Up until now, you've only ever seen the Craft as a weapon in the hands of a madman. Right now, you have a chance to see why they call it 'The Craft'. The way Vincent is wielding it right now, it's more like a hammer in the hands of a smith."
Mackaroy pointed ahead as they walked, though Cam was surprised to see he wasn't pointing straight ahead. The older shadow's finger was also pointed up, above the horizon, tracking the plume of black smoke that seemed to be coming from the wall. Still walking, he watched the midnight-black tower blot out the bottom of the Spire, and realized what it was.
It was burning stone. "Burn me," Cameron whispered.
"You've been in the Rangers too long. Shadows don't make that curse," Mackaroy reflected.
"Mack, that's stone being turned into gas. Every reject I've ever dealt with, all at the same time, couldn't do that."
"Lucky for us we aren't asking one of your rejects to save Barleybarrel. Come on, I want to be back before Redgrave starts asking where we are."
Their next few steps had them crossing a small trench just ahead of the town's train station. Barely wider than his foot, it was deep enough to reach Cameron's thigh if he were to step into it. And at the bottom was a ceramic pipe, one of the millions of miles of pipe the City used to spread the Spire's flame around the City, and hold back the Gloam. Cam knew the plan, and knew as soon as he crossed that he was behind their second line of defence.
The last line of defence, if they didn't count Vincent.
Past the pipe, and on the other side of the station, were nearly nineteen thousand people.
In the front, were the younger men and women. All of them were sitting, or standing in small groups, and all of them were armed. Not with weapons, the comm station that served as the town's only army outpost only had a few swords, and asides from one of the men Varnell had rescued — who still had a Salamander slung over his shoulder, the ammunition had all gone into the Rangers' stockpile.
There was a very familiar face in the front ranks. Cameron's halted mid-breath, and very nearly stumbled. Those same brown eyes, wild and expressive, and that black hair that seemed to glimmer in the light.
She seemed to feel his surprise, because that was exactly when she looked up and their eyes met. Cameron stopped in place, freezing as badly as he had the first time he had seen a reject craft. He might have stopped there for a long time, if Mack didn't tap him on the shoulder and steer him along.
Mack lead them around the crowd, past what Cameron realized was the town's militia force, and wove through the thousands of people behind them. And much like the impromptu militia at the front, most of them looked as able-bodied as any group of people Cameron had ever seen. Farmers and labourers, tanned skin and thickly calloused hands, it was strange to see a people so remarkably tough held back like this.
"Mack, we've seen Gloamtaken," Cameron said. "Even if they outnumbered Barleybarrel, I think this town could take them. These aren't High-Central socialites, these are hard people. Nearly everyone here could take one of those dead things."
"If it were just the Gloamtaken, I'd agree with you," Mackaroy replied. "But the Gloamtaken come with the Gloam. We lose the Rangers, and the enemy only numbers an extra hundred or so. We lose Barleybarrel..."
"And the enemy numbers tens of thousands more," Cameron finished.
"And on a selfish note, we'd lose the people we're going to depend on most in the coming years. Crops don't grow themselves," Mackaroy added, as he climbed the steps up the train platform, and led them over.
The wall wasn't far from the other side of the station. Past the conveyer belts and grain chutes, and Cameron was standing barely a stone's throw from where Vincent worked.
Though calling it work made a joke of the word.
Smoke rose from the wall in black columns so thick, so seemingly solid, Cameron might have believed a roof could have been built atop it. There was a gap in the wall ahead, a portal little larger than a building's entranceway, that glowed so brightly it looked like a piece of the Spire had been placed inside.
And in that portal, that stone cave holding a piece of the sun inside, was Vincent.
Cameron remembered every reject he had to kill. As clear and vivid as if he had done it just yesterday to someone he loved. The most dangerous reject had been in the streets outside the shipyards of Ashwood, waving fire about like a child with a toy, laughing and crying all at the same time. His fire had taken eleven people and slagged long trenches into stone walls. Cameron had been commended for the kill, and the reject was described as one of the most dangerous they had dealt with in years.
Comparing that reject to Vincent was putting a candle next to a blast furnace.
The heat and light winked out, faded as if the fuel had been choked off. The light turned from white to red in just a few breaths, and with a last puff of air the smoke pouring up from the top of the wall stopped.
Vincent stepped out of the cavern then, and stepped a few dozen feet away from the entrance, where the Rangers' demolition expert Nasim Lorec was using the dozens of feet of wall as shelter from the heat of Vincent's Craft.
Something tapped Cameron on the shoulder, and he turned to see Mack pointing. "Come on. I want you to hear what he says next."
Cameron had no idea what the old shadow meant by that, but he followed until the two of them were in earshot.
"I think I've hit a different kind of rock," Vincent was saying to Sergeant Lorec, turning over his sleeve as he talked and inspecting the far side. "Melting temperature just after I passed the mark we set was quite a lot lower, and had almost no thermal arrest time. I nearly blew a couple tons worth of sublimated rock into my face."
Cameron didn't understand most of what Vincent just said, and suspected me ought to be grateful for it.
"It's a wonder you didn't blast the wall apart, doing that," Sergeant Lorec replied.
"I could have done that hours ago," Vincent said, and there was something in the young man's tone — in that apprentice's tone — that frightened Cameron. "Getting this rather precise amount of control can be challenging. Too weak and I melt the rock instead of turning it into gas. Too strong and I crack the wall, and then we might as well have just blasted it open. Do you have any water?"
"We don't have the demolition charges for that," Sergeant Lorec said, as he handed Vincent a bottle. "Though I guess you weren't talking about the rest of us."
"My mouth is going to taste like burnt rock for weeks," Vincent grumbled. With his first sip, he swirled the water around in his mouth, and then spat it out in the ground. On his second sip, he looked up and finally met Cameron's eyes.
There was no fear in Vincent. That was the thing that unnerved Cameron most about interacting with this apprentice Crafter. Most rejects were wary around an evaluator, and would either show it or hide it with their own aggression and posturing. And the fear wasn't of an empty threat; the worst threat to most evaluators for ending a reject's life was a short after-action debriefing and some paperwork. But unlike everyone who could Craft that Cameron had ever dealt with before, Vincent had no fear for him.
But with titles and authority set aside, as they were now, why should Vincent fear him? Cameron was just a man with a few knives and a sword. Vincent had to restrain himself, to keep from blasting a wall into pieces.
"You making progress, kid?" Mackaroy asked, not sharing Cameron's troubles.
"We are, yeah. Only fifteen feet to go, and only five of those feet matter. I can just slag the last ten feet without doing any real damage," Vincent said.
"So we can start the evacuation soon?" Cameron found himself asking. "Captain Dremora's fighting a delaying action in the field, so the Gloamtaken haven't reached the town yet, but they can't be more than a half-hour away."
"Half an hour," Vincent said. "It should only take that..."
Cameron frowned in irritation as Vincent trailed off, irritated that he was being brushed off so quickly. But as the apprentice's eyes turned to the north, and his eyes widened, Cameron felt that small imitation of anger was washed away by a cold wave of fear.
"Vincent?" Cameron asked.
Beside him, Mackaroy looked as frightened as he had when they had first seen the Golems. "What is it, kid?"
"There's something out there."
"Besides the Gloam, and the creatures?" Mackaroy asked.
"Yes."