The Everburning City

Act 1, Part 3, Chapter 12

Valen

The brakes made their muffled squeal, as the train turned off the Causeway and down the ramp along the side of the wall. At the bottom of the ramp, lingering just dozens of feet from the wall's pilot lights, the pallid Gloam waited. The siege had already reached three walls into the City.

The train plunged into the Gloam, and rode the tracks through it like a creature swimming through the water.

Strangely, it wasn't the siege that made Valen's palms sweat. "What do I say to them?" he asked, as much to himself as anyone else.

There were only two people close enough that they might have heard him. To his left, Gwendolyn Aranhall stood so still stone might have envied her poise. Her hat was tilted forward on her head, her medical bag strapped tightly over her shoulder, and rested under her left arm. At the sound of his voice she tilted her hat up slightly, and patted him on the shoulder.

It wasn't reassurance. But it was reassuring.

To his right, Mackaroy O'Fallow was adjusting the collar of his padded coat, trying to accomodate the closely tied sheathes of a couple of his knives. "Haven't the foggiest idea. Only perk of being a shadow is you don't have to go apologize to the families afterwards."

The train whistled into the gloom, and was answered by a similar wail, barley more than an echo. The train rumbled as the brakes clamped on, passed a line of torches, and arrived in Barleybarrel.

The Gloam encircled the entire town, lingering at the edge of the pilot lights and towering above the mist. The mist rose like a wall at the edge of the light, rising as high as four storeys. Only the single warehouse, the grain tower, and Barleybarrel's apartment towers rose above it.

Barelybarrel was, thankfully, large enough that the Gloam couldn't form a canopy above it. The sky wasn't quite black anymore; kissed by just a hint of sunlight in the earliest morning, it bore just a hint of blue. "That's one night done," Valen said to himself.

Beside him, Gwnedolyn laughed. "Burn me, you're right. This madness is just a single night old. I feel like I've lived a year."

The train passed behind the warehouse at the back of the town, and drew close to a platform set near the grain tower. Up ahead, a large crowd of people had already gathered, with hundreds or perhaps a thousand people squeezed together in a space meant for dozens.

"Simmering ash stain," Mackaroy cursed. "That mob is going to want on this train, and is going to hate us when we tell them 'no'."

Boots clicked hard against the car floor, to clear to be an accident. Valen turned in time to see Lieutenant Volenski pass behind Mackaroy and set a hand on his shoulder. "You've seen a lot of people at their worst," she said, slow and calm.

"Not sure I'd call it 'at their worst'." Mackaroy gestured towards the crowd, a knife somehow appearing in his hand. "Always thought of it as at someone's most honest."

"Then you might be pleasantly surprised," the lieutenant replied. "Sergeant Redgrave, I understand you need to have a fallen soldier to honour here?"

"I do, ma'am," Sergeant Redgrave said.

"You should attend to it as soon as any issues on the train platform are settled. It shouldn't take long," Niveah Volenski said, and there was a happy smile on her stern and weathered face.

"I have two lottery tokens from Oversight that says this will turn ugly," Mackaroy said, holding two small coins between fingers in his right hand, where the knife had been a heartbeat before.