Cameron
He had chipped one of his knives.
Gloamtaken, a big one, had throw itself through the doorway and nearly knocked him over. Its weight had dragged his right arm down, and bashed his knife into the stone.
The tip had broken off, along with a second piece as large as his fingernail, halfway down the blade. Cam's response had been to open the damn thing's left lung from its back to its sternum.
Cameron's knife was still stuck, hilt up, protruding from the creature's fallen form like he planned to use it and mark the dead thing's grave. He wasn't going to pick it up again.
"Damn shame. That was a good knife."
"Was it?" Hendricks asked.
Cameron reached into his coat, drawing out the knife Mack had given him from Crafter Saval's luggage chest. "The quality of the steel has gotten a lot better over the last few years. That was was one of the first Foundry issue knives, only got it two years ago. No way they'll replace it with something as good. Odds are, I'll be given a metal stick that's more rust than steel."
"Strange. I thought all of the steel in the City was pretty good," Hendricks said as he stepped into Cam's path. He shifted into one of those somewhat ridiculous duelling poses, but treating his sword like it didn't have edges wasn't a bad tactic in a narrow corridor.
And it worked. Well more than half of the bodies in the hall were Hendricks'.
"That's just how it looks from how high up your childhood was. Bet even your duelling foil was high-grade spring steel," Cameron said. "Army knife's not bad, but besides that I'm down to my coldstone knives. One's a piece of garbage, and I haven't tested the other."
"You mean that one you got from Saval?" Hendricks asked. Cameron frowned at how casual Hendricks was, referring to a Crafter. Most people in the City, even standing miles away from one, would attach the honorific. Even his coworkers. "She was one of the Foundry's lead researchers. That knife has to be pretty good."
Gloamtaken started coming again. Hendricks lunged forward, extended his sword, but let the advancing Gloamtaken push its way onto his blade. One it was in about a finger length, Hendricks twisted his wrist and took a step to the side, covering the other side of the hall with his sword while the newly felled Gloamtaken blocked the path he left open.
Hendricks was getting quite a bit better. And quickly. Cam was fairly confident there weren't many people in Oversight who could touch him. Mack perhaps, and a few of the other hard, brittle veterans of his Bureau.
"We're supposed to use the coldstone knives sparingly. They can cause frostbite at a touch, if you're not careful," Cam said, as he drank from a water bottle. "All of them are also extremely brittle."
"Doubt that's true about your new one," Hendricks said, dispatching another Gloamtaken with the same technique. "Saval might have been mad, but you don't become a lead researcher at the Foundry just because you have a red coat. You need to have some real skills, and if she made that knife, you know it's something special."
Cameron frowned, and looked down at the blade. "She made it?"
"Her initials are on the blade, near the hilt," Hendricks said, dispatching another creature with an ease bordering on indifference. Cameron might have found it unnerving, yesterday, to see someone kill so effortlessly. "CS."
Sure enough, Hendricks was right. Just above the hilt, a small, slightly embellished CS was set into the blade like a pair of runes. The letters, despite being so small Cameron could cover both with a fingernail, gleamed in the light. Out of some strange habit, he let his finger try to trace the letters, and had to pull his hand away as if the blade had burned him.
Meanwhile, the next Gloamtaken surged through the entrance, and held its position. It wasn't what Hendricks was expecting; until now, every creature that came through was intent on closing and trying to kill them. By the time Hendricks reached the monster, another three creatures had pushed their way through the doorway.
Hendricks was quick, though, which was enough to make the difference. A short thrust into the leader's chest, barely punching a hands-length, and the blade was out long before the creature could counter. A flick of his wrist, and a gash appeared on the one next to it, just between the ribs. It barely parted the rags the creature was wearing, but was deep enough that it collapsed at the young soldier's feet.
The third one scampered past on Hendricks' left. Cam waved his comrade off and closed with it, catching the creature's outstretched arm by the wrist and yanking it off balance. As it leaned forward, he plunged the knife into its side. He shifted his grip, prepared to push the thing away as he pulled the blade out.
Only the creature collapsed like he was holding a sack of grain, and the sudden collapse pulled his knife along with it. "Shit," Cameron grunted as he shoved the body to roll it off his knee, pulling the knife out before it was trapped between the body and the floor.
"You forget to pull the knife out?" Hendricks asked as he shifted his guard, and watched the doorway.
"If I just forgot, the damn thing would still be trying to kill me," Cameron replied, giving the knife a quick look over. Grime and bits of flesh still clung to his knife, now crystallized to the flat of the blade. He wiped the weapon on his coat a few times, until it looked mostly clean. "It just dropped, as soon as I stabbed it."
"Must've stuck the knife in at an angle," Hendricks said. "Valen's got a technique where you bend or twist the wrist just after you stab one, so it lets air into the wound."
"Maybe," Cam agreed, though the explanation didn't sit well in his thoughts, like eating spoiled food.
He considered following that suspicion, but as he thought his eyes lingered on the doorway. His gaze didn't want to turn, even as his mind looked and saw nothing strange. It wasn't until Hendricks kicked an arm out of the way, kicking at one of the bodies he had left in the hall, that Cameron understood his own suspicion. "Hey, weren't there four bodies near the door?" he asked.
Hendricks' sword point fell, and he took a slow step back. "There were," he admitted. "Another four, right near the door."
"Where did they go? They couldn't just get back up," Cam said.
"Wait, can they?" Hendricks asked. The thought sent a shiver through Cameron, and he gripped his knife tighter. "I mean, they haven't before, but we don't know why they die when they're struck in the lungs. Who's to say they couldn't just get back up again?"
Surprisingly, Cam's thoughts were already examining the possibility, and had an answer. "Because there are better times for them to get back up," Cameron insisted. "Like when we dropped a bunch of them on our way to rescue Varnell and those workers she was protecting. If they just got up after we passed, they'd have us surrounded."
"Okay," Hendricks said. "So where did they go?"
"The other Gloamtaken must have moved them," Cam said, announcing the conclusion of a thought that now frightened him. "Shit."
"They spent three Gloamtaken after us, just to clear out some others? Why?" Hendricks asked.
The answer came in a rush, as a dozen creatures threw themselves into the hall from outside, so quickly Hendricks only gaped until they closed. They rushed and grabbed his sword arm, threw themselves on his legs, and tried to pull him off his feet.
Cameron rushed in to help, drawing another knife from his coat for his other hand, and started stabbing as soon as he closed. He plunged the knives in, yanked them out, and moved on without knowing if the blows had any effect. One, two, another, and another, until he was in the middle of a mob as thick as a crowd of people waiting for a train, pushing as if trying to get through them, knives in and out.
But as hard as he pushed, as many as he stabbed, he was getting no closer to seeing Hendricks, who had fallen somewhere up ahead. Or perhaps right by where Cameron now pushed against the mob.
This was't the first time a mob had pressed into him, shoved him back when he needed to get through. More than once, a crowd throwing themselves through a doorway, their choking mass of bodies like a flood of water or a falling wall, blocking him from someone who needed help as flames rose and someone's lost rage began to consume his friends.
Screams. Screams and the acidic smell of burning flesh. Just past a wall of people keeping him from helping.
"Ash-stained shits," Cameron cursed as he stabbed and stabbed again, forced backwards by the press of the creatures. No matter how fast he struck, no matter how many he felled, they kept coming. Kept grasping, grabbing, and eventually forced him down.
He managed to stab the one that grabbed him by the collar and knocked him off his feet, and it fell on top of him. Pain in the back of his head, blinding him for a moment, but when he should have been able to see again there was nothing but darkness. Suffocating, dank darkness. Not the darkness of a night sky, but the only place in the city where you couldn't see — when the world was pressing in and blotting out light and space.
Cameron pushed, hard as he could, over and over, trying to get it up. He tried to scream, but he was breathing and panting too quickly to force out anything more than a frantic gasp. Kicking, flailing, failing to do anything that got him loose.
Something grabbed his hand, pushed the creature off, and pulled him away. "Easy now," Hendricks was saying above him, as Cameron gasped in air. "Come on, Cam, put your bloody head back on. Fight's not done."
And saying that, Hendricks drove himself back into the fray, his sword little more than a blur in his hands as he struck the creatures down and threw them back.
Cam staggered to his feet, drew his sword, and took a position behind Hendricks. He held his weapon less like a sword and more like a pole, only stabbing at whatever managed to get around his fellow soldier as Hendricks cleaved through the mob.
And then, as suddenly as they came, they stopped. Hendricks dropped the last one, and as quickly as it had begun they were alone in the hall, surrounded by nothing but the dead.
"Hendricks," Cam panted, nearly dropping his sword. "Thanks."
"Should be thanking you," Hendricks said, wiping his blade clean by setting the blade against the inside of his elbow and pulling the blade through. "I wouldnt' have gotten up if you hadn't driven into them like that. And that Gloamtaken that landed on you did as much as I managed to keep you safe. Good thinking, using a dead one as a shield."
Cameron hadn't noticed, not at first. But the creature that brought him down, fell on top of him, hadn't bitten or clawed at him after. Nothing but that dank, suffocating darkness. He shuddered, and tried to hide the motion by stretching.
"I don't remember stabbing it."
"I barley remember half of what I did in the last minute," Hendricks agreed. "First chance I get, I'm going to sleep. And won't wake up for days."
"You might miss the rest of the invasion," Cameron said. He patted his coat, and realized he was missing a knife. "Shit. I left one of mine somewhere."
"In that one," Hendricks said. "The one that fell on top of you."
Cameron crouched down next to it. In its side, just below the armpit, a handle with an obsidian pommel stone jutted out. "There's no other wound."
"There must be," Hendricks insisted.
Cameron remembered stabbing the other one with it earlier, how it went limp and dragged the blade downwards as soon as he punched the knife in. And now, a corpse where a Gloamtaken would have been, with no other wound except the knife still embedded in its side.
Cameron shook his head, and pulled the blade out. "Yeah," he said to himself. "There must be."