Decklan

"They broke through the line!"

Decklan groaned as he heard the call, taken up by a dozen other people as they echoed the first shout. The farmers and labourers had all taken to relaying messages this way, ever since the first breach in their brush wall hadn't been broadcast, and Decklan had wasted precious minutes in ignorance.

Three people had died. If it weren't for Ivan, one of them would have risen again.

"Right. Ivan, Beatrice, Cassidy, you ready to move?" Decklan asked. His hand patted the ammo pouch at his side, despite knowing he only had seven shots left. He wanted to believe it was to check, making sure none of them had fallen out. But every time, he kept hoping to find more.

"No. But since when have these things ever waited for a convenient time?" Ivan asked, cursing as he pushed himself up to his feet.

Ivan looked worn, wearier than the hours of labour and fighting should have. As if the man's relative youth were a theatre actor's makeup, washed away by stress and sweat. Sweat matted his hair to his scalp, with dirt and blood painted along the sides of his face. His knife was held in such slack fingers Decklan wondered how it was still in his hand.

Beatrice and Cassidy Tolun followed Ivan as he stood. The sisters were the first to the fore when Gloamtaken started breaking through their firewall. Angry, quiet, and keen to be in the fight, Beatrice' left arm bore a steady trickle of blood coming from a bite wound to the shoulder, and Cassidy had lost an eye to gouging fingers.

"Right. I'll take the lead, try to thin them out," Decklan said. "If we get them nice and sparse, we'll close and finish them off."

Ivan grimaced, but nodded a moment later. "Aye. We're with you."

At a slow run, they hurried down the line, passing people still gathering sticks and branches to keep the long trail of fire burning. So far, it had mostly kept the Gloamtaken from rushing them, though the creatures would try to pull the brush apart if they could get close enough to the flames. And as much as Decklan wished Emily were here with them, every time the cannon fired he felt it in his chest like a tiny triumph.

Decklan hoped it was only a few creatures. With the four of them moving, there were only two soldiers left to watch the end of the fire line, in case the Gloamtaken overtook them.

In fact, it was a small wonder they hadn't been overrun already.

But the screams began as they got closer, nearly a quarter mile down their improvised wall of fire. Panicking screams, the kind that didn't some from someone trying to run. The kind where the entire body is devoted to expressing the kind of mind-devouring, gut-wrenching terror that only comes from knowing you're about to die, and die painfully.

"Burn me," Decklan muttered, and started sprinting.

Closer now, he could see the gap in their wall of fire. Barely larger than an apartment doorway, only large enough to admit the creatures one at a time, but being made larger as Gloamtaken began reaching for pieces of the brush. A few bodies lay on the ground in the gap, fallen with their hands outstretched to the flame.

In front of that gap, a small crowd of the creatures. Perhaps twenty, but the group was large enough the farmers maintaining the firewall didn't dare to get close.

"We need to plug up that gap," Decklan said, his statement pitiable to even his own ears.

"That crowd's pretty big. We might be able to take them all, but not before more of them come through," Ivan said.

"Yeah," Decklan agreed, and a thought came to him. Inspiration, an idea that, even as his thoughts turned it over and examined it, he knew had a chance of working. And his thoughts, dark and shameful now as hope was ground down from hours of fighting, hated that idea.

He so desperately wanted to pick up a torch and try his chances, running for Barleybarrel.

Instead, he pointed at some of the brush that had been cut down. "We're going to close that gap first. Grab the biggest bundle you can carry. We'll approach in single file, and set the bundles on fire when we get close. I'll use it to drive the Gloamtaken back, they don't like approaching an open flame. You'll plug the gap, then turn back and save my stupid ass."

Decklan expected them to mirror the despair he felt, to cringe and groan even as they followed. They were hard people, made harder by the brutality of the last few hours, but even they must be reaching their breaking point. Instead Cassidy, one-eyed now, gave him the kind of smile a man hopes to see when he asks someone to the theatre. "Knew there was a reason we kept following you around," she said.

Beatrice grinned and gave a salute with the sword she had taken from the limited supplies back at the watchtower. Ivan looked like he was about to laugh, and rolled his shoulders. "We're with you."

They answered to him. They willingly stepped into the fight, on little more than his vague promise that this was the best answer he could think of. He didn't deserve them, and seeing them rise up, ready to fight, made his next words all the more painful. "Right, then. Let's go."

Decklan took a quick look around, and reached down to a nearby bush. Cut at the base, when he picked it up the branches were well above his head. It was bushy, and surprisingly light.

Because the water had been drawn from it, as it died beneath the Gloam.

"This will do," Decklan said.

Behind him, Ivan has gathered a bundle nearly too large to carry, made of loose sticks and dead grass. The Tolun sisters carried stacks of heavy wood on their shoulders.

Twigs and grass to burn quick, and dense wood to burn long. Decklan wouldn't have thought of that.

Decklan lead them up to the fire line, and then followed it to approach the Gloamtaken. "Low and quiet. The faster they notice us, the more likely we get reinforcements."

"Can they even see us?" Ivan asked. "Their eyes can't work after so long without blood."

"They seem to manage it just fine," Cassidy countered, and she tapped the brow above her missing right eye.

Nevertheless, Decklan thought it was a good question, one that deserved an answer. Their eyes were dead, glassy and grey. And even if they weren't, they couldn't see through the Gloam. Yet the Gloamtaken found them, unerringly and relentlessly.

"No," Decklan mused, voicing a counter-argument to his own thoughts. "Not relentlessly."

"What?" Ivan asked.

"They don't find us unerringly. They come in scattered waves, rather than solid groups. They come a few at a time, then more, and eventually in droves. Like they're summoned when something sees us." Decklan shrugged, much as he could with the small tree he carried. "I should ask Emily to think about this. She's better at this sort of thing."

"It's a thought you need to share, when we make it back," Beatrice insisted.

"When, not if?"

"You'd better burning believe it," Cassidy said. She clapped Decklan on the back, hard enough to make him stumble and pull the brush he was carrying close to his chest. "I I didn't lose an eye just to let my sister be the pretty one for the first time in her life."

"Since burning when were you the pretty one?"

"Since I was born, obviously. True as fire being hot."

Decklan looked from one sister another. Covered in dirt and dried blood, dressed in clothes that were worn and abused even before they had been taken into battle, hair soaked in grime and burnt in places from being too close to a torch. Seeing such a disconnect from their conversation, Decklan did the only thing he could do.

He laughed.

Both women turned, and three eyes promised pain.

Decklan struggled to speak, still laughing. "Comparing the two of you is like trying to tell the colour of the Spire."

"It's yellow," Cassidy insisted, though the anger in her gaze had faded somewhat.

"More a reddish-orange," her sister countered.

"It's hot, which was Decklan's point," Ivan groaned. "Mind if we hurry the burning hell up? This stupid bundle's about to come apart on me."

Decklan wasn't sure he'd have lasted the first hour in the field without them.

Drawing closer, it wasn't until they were barely a few dozen feet from the gap, that one of the Gloamtaken finally turned in their direction. Most of them were standing in a close-knit circle around a few bodies. One of the creatures was dragging someone along with them, towards the gap in their wall.

Towards the Gloam.

Something in the sight washed away Decklan's thoughts, and he plunged the wood he carried into the fire. Rage set his hands to quivering as he waited for the wood to catch the flames, and by the time it was burning, he was ready to try and tear the thing's lungs open with his bare hands.

Decklan ran, the burning tree held straight up in the air, and screamed. He didn't know what he was shouting, or if he was doing anything more than making noise. But the anger consuming him wasn't satisfied with waving a torch, and he threw it aside as he got close, his hands tugging at his sword.

He forgot his form as he swung, but the anger overcompensated. Decklan's sword cut clean through an arm and stuck hard into the creature's chest. So hard that it only stopped close to the spine, deep enough the creature toppled backwards. Decklan yanked his sword free, and turned to the mob that only just seemed to notice him.

Decklan screamed again, and with one hand pickled up the burning brush he had dropped. He charged the mob, right into the centre, waving the fire at them even as they scattered to the sides.

He threw the brush to the creatures on his left, and turning to the closest creature, shoved his sword through its chest. It's emaciated ribs offered surprisingly little resistance, and the hilt was pressing against ribs before it stopped his thrust. He pushed hard, and pushed the blade sideways, widening the wound. The creature fell like a cup pushed off the edge of a table, collapsing at his feet.

He pulled his sword out and swung again, hurling himself at the next creature, without caring how close together they were. He chopped at an outstretched hand like it was just an offending tree branch. A jaw cracked beneath the guard of his sword. He gripped one by what was left of it's hair and pulled it off its feet. He stabbed and slashed at everything that came close.

Even as hands gripped him, and pulled his sword from his hands, he didn't slow. Fear had no place in the blind rage he felt. He drew his knife and kept stabbing, until the weight of them dragged him to his knees, and eventually knocked him onto his back.

His right arm pinned, he had the one crouching on top of him by the side of its head, and even as it clawed at his face — jabbing with cracked nails and bony fingers for his eyes — he swung its head into the one next to it. He tried it again and again, until his arm was free and he could stab at the creature's chest.

It collapsed on top of him. He didn't have a lot of leverage to pull it off, but it came off easily as soon as he pushed. But another creature replaced it, this one thicker, taller, stronger looking, reaching with a hand.

Decklan rose up to strike, but the hand snaked out and grabbed his wrist. The other hand balled into a fist, and struck him in the nose.

His head snapped back, and he fell into the dirt. He blinked, ready to try again, but the hand on his wrist held fast.

"Decklan, you with us?"

The question sounded like it came from miles away, barely tickling the back of Decklan's thoughts. But he latched on to the voice, and realized it came from the creature holding him down. He blinked again, and realized the sweat-soaked, dirt-smeared figure holding him in place was Ivan.

"Oh, cauldron of simmering shit. Ivan, I," Decklan began to say.

"I won't hold it against you. Not the first time someone's tried to knife me. Usually they're drunk," Ivan explained. He released Decklan's wrist, and sat up. "Or I've slept with their wife. It's only really dicey if it's both."

Declan grimaced in confusion, and flinched over a sharp pain at his forehead, and his cheeks. Ivan saw his pain, and pointed just above his eye. Beside him, Candice crouched down and grinned. "Looks like that last one had claws. You're going to have some neat looking scars when those heal up."

"How bad is it?" Decklan asked.

"Rub some dirt in it, and the bleeding should stop. Facial wounds are like the career courtiers in High-Central. They scream and make a big mess, but they don't mean all that much," Ivan explained.

"Besides, you were too pretty for this crew," Candice added.

He took Ivan's hand, and pulled himself to his feet. And he knew, as he stood and tried to stem the rivulets of blood dripping down his face, that he wouldn't have survived the hour without these three mad farmers.

He hated himself for that. He was the soldier here. And he wasn't meant to be sheltered.