Valen

"Mister Tellerman, sir," one of the bureaucrats addressed his father. Somoene else was standing next to the bureaucrat, a uniformed orderly sporting a rather nasty welt on the side of her head, and an arm in a sling.

Valen didn't notice the orderly at first. Hearing someone refer to his father as 'sir' — using a term of respect — was something Valen very nearly laughed over, if it weren't for what was said next. "There's someone in there that refuses to leave."

Crafter Howel was talking to the train engineers, loudly. Animatedly, judging by the amount of hand-waving. Whatever it was, Valen couldn't hear it, and at the time, wasn't that interested.

"Some old man. Said he refuses to leave his school. Apparently the orderlies can't force him out."

The orderlies. The City's police. The army for people afraid of work, was the way most people in the City referred to them. "That 'old man' wiped the floor with eight constables, using a broom. You're not getting him out unless you call in some soldiers and they lead him out at gunpoint."

His father didn't even hesitate before he gave his order. That part would be seared in his memory, along with the pain of it. "Then turn the pipes up, like you were sterilizing the building after a plague warning. He won't stay in there after that."

Plague evictions were uncommon, but not unheard of. Because of the risk of spreading infectious disease, every building in the City could be sterilized by stripping a room of furnishings and running fire into it. The process was normally tightly regulated, but using it to evict stubborn tenants had happened before.

And since, as Valen found out later, the building was scheduled for demolition, the usual permissions could legally be bypassed.

"Grandfather," Valen whispered, as the orderly turned away to attend to the task.

"Relax. That fossil will have about half an hour to realize he can't stay, before it gets too hot," his father said.

Valen hit him then. Years of training guided his hands and feet in a motion so swift he didn't realize he had moved until it happened. Right fist cross his father's jaw, right foot to the side of his knee, and left fist directly into his nose.

A heartbeat later, when Valen could think again, his father was sprawled on the ground. His mouth open, with his chin now in line with his left eye. The nose was beginning to swell, already looked deformed, and was streaming blood. And his knee rested at an angle so unnatural it made Valen shudder to look at.

Valen shook his head and backed up a step, then turned and ran. At the time, he wasn't sure why he was running. Part of him might have been hoping that his grandfather would help him, or that he could help his grandfather. Perhaps he ran because he was afraid he had made things worse by lashing out, his years of training making his mistake worse like trying to put out an oil fire with water.

So for a moment, he thought it was his fault when his grandfather's school erupted into flame.

******

"Your grandfather, was he a thin man, with scratch marks on the left side of his face?" Captain Dremora asked suddenly. "Tall, reed-like, long brown hair?"

"Grey, but yes," Valen said in surprise. "Did you meet him before?"

"No." The captain said as he reloaded. "But I've seen his likeness."

******

Valen screamed as he ran, throwing himself down the station stairs and across the street in a maddened frenzy. Rushing street cars didn't slow him down, and the pair of oderlies still at the entrance barely noticed him pass before he was halfway up the stairs.

But the heat stopped Valen, before he could get through the entranceway. A wall of bright orange singed his hair and began to burn his sleeves. He threw his arms over his face and stumbled backwards, screaming "grandfather" as loudly as he could.

"Follow me," a voice spoke from behind Valen, who turned his head to see a red coat sweep past him. The Crafter stepped up to the building, and the wall of flame parted for him like a treater curtain. Valen, in the midst of a tempestuous whirl of emotions, mutely followed.

Two figures were sprawled out on the stone floor of the school's largest sparring room, the open-aired one that Valen had lived so much of his life in. Most of the furnishings, and all of the plants, were either burning or ash in the wind. Little remained except warped metal, and the badly burnt pair in the middle of the room.

Despite the flowing fire, the Crafter marched across the sparring floor without any effort, the fires winking out all around him. Valen followed, watching with tears in his eyes as the fires vanished around the badly burnt pair, and could finally see that he knew them.

Valen's grandmother was lying on the ground, her hands folded on her lap, her eyes closed. She might have only been sleeping, but her chest didn't move, and the flesh around her face and neck was charred black. Kneeling beside her, naked apart from some flimsy rags, hair nearly burnt off, skin black and red, was his grandfather.

Valen had to blink to clear his eyes, and dabbed them quickly with his sleeve the way he was taught. Dabbed, he remembered. Not wiped. A wipe could drive dirt or worse on your face into your eyes, and blind you when you needed your sight the most.

"Grandpa, the hospice, we have to get you there," Valen had blubbered out, at he time. He hadn't understood what he was witnessing that day. But he wasn't the only one standing there, and the man in the red coat was quite a bit better versed.

"Was," his grandfather managed to say, body shuddering with the effort. "Was this you?"

Valen's grandfather wasn't speaking to him. Beside him, the man in the red coat shook his head. "No. To wield the flame is to become it. I would have to look you in the eye, to do this to you with my power. And I am not so far gone."

"Then," his grandfather rasped. "Valen. What he does next is a kindness. Remember."

"The Poor Knight of Riverwash," Crafter Howel said. And despite how trite the title sounded, there was nothing but respect in the Crafter's voice. "I've heard the stories of what you did, during the Fourth. They still sing your tale in the illegal watering holes. I didn't believe it was you, until you sent eight armed orderlies to the hospice with a broom."

"The poor what?" Valen asked.

The Crafter didn't look back, but Valen could feel his ire in the sudden rush of heat that surrounded him. "Every breath he takes is done in agony," the Crafter said quietly. "Don't waste these moments."

In hindsight, it was strange how Valen could have forgotten Crafter Howel. But what sight he did have, at the time, wasn't spent on the red coat. "I won't forget what I've learned, Grandpa. Any of it," Valen managed to say.

The words were trite. Simplistic. A child's gesture spoken into a storm of grief. But despite the blinding pain his grandfather was in, he smiled when he heard it.

It was the gesture that would define what kindness meant.

"This is a disgusting way for the City to pay you for what you've given," the Crafter said, as he crouched down in front of Valen's grandfather. He raised his hand, and pointed a finger at the old man's chest. "And I am sorry that I cannot do more for you."

"No," Valen began to say. Because in that moment — though he couldn't see what the Crafter was going to do — he knew his Grandfather was about to die.

"In a hospice," Crafter Howel said. "He will spend three days having his skin scraped off, as they try and salvage what they can and put him back together. He will spend those three days in the kind of agony. And he will not survive them."

"Remember, Valen," his grandfather added. "This is a kindness."

A flash of bright blue light, and the old man slumped forward, and fell to the side, lying next to Valen's Grandmother.

******

"He was known as the Poor Knight of Riverwash," Captain Dremora said, as they pulled back from another surge of Gloamtaken, and waited for them to cross over their dead. "The army hated him for what he did that day, since he defied lawful orders and kept an access gate open. But three hundred people survived when he held the access tunnels single-handed. I don't know if you've ever been to the Agora, in High Central. But his likeness is on the Fourth Tapestry."

******

The flames had already begun to die, leaving the school as dark as any night could get in the Everburning City. The glow of the Spire, and the fading embers of Valen's life left little to see by, and even less warmth. Despite the devastation, Valen shivered as he held his grandmother's hand.

A hand tapped him on the shoulder. "Time to go, kid," someone said. An orderly, Valen knew, but didn't realize at the time.

"The boy might have crippled a Planner for Civil Development," Breckan Howel said. "He'll need to be taken into custody, to await trial. He should also be given space to grieve. These are his grandparents."

"Crafters don't give orders," the orderly insisted. Even deep in grief, Valen thought that was rather foolish of him.

"Two good people were just killed by indifference and spite. Don't make it a third, Constable," Crafter Howel said.

The Crafter turned and left, then. Valen didn't know it at the time, but that was one of only two times their paths would ever cross.

The next time would the night the Golems came for the City.

******

"You asked me why my name is Redgrave," Valen said, as they pushed the Gloamtaken back again. "There were three reason in all. It was to honour one man. To spite another. And remember the surprising kindness of a third."

******

Two days passed in a holding cell. Small, dry, largely open, and close to the precinct's front desk. The door had been left open, but Valen hadn't gotten up for more than the bathroom, and hadn't said a word to the sympathetic orderlies. He grieved in silence, the tears long since stopped. And just beginning the long months of waiting for his heart to grow accustomed to the pain.

"Wounds don't always heal well. It's why we train, rather than risk a dangerous moment unprepared," his grandfather had said, so many years ago. "Because sometimes the things that injure us do leave us weaker."

"Master Valen," someone said from the other side of the bars.

Valen looked up, to see a soldier standing just a few feet away. A sergeant, by the insignia on his sleeves. And, Valen suspected, a recruitment officer.

"I'm here to offer you a way out of your predicament. You've been accused of assault, for which the punishment is two to ninteen years in a labour camp in the Undercity. And since you may have crippled the victim for life, you're likely to be handed the maximum."

Valen waited, silently, for the man to continue.

"However, given the circumstances, and the testimony of an eminent citizen of the City, I'm authorized to pardon you for this and any other less important crimes in your past, in exchange for a term of service no less than five years with the army." The man drew out a small piece of paper and set it on a nearby desk. "The pardon, obviously, is void if you fail to complete your five year term."

"He wanted his skills in the Army," Valen said. He didn't expect the recruiter to understand, nor did he need the man to do more than stand there, confused.

"Is that a yes?" the recruiter asked.

Valen nodded. "I have nowhere else to be."

"Not exactly the attitude we hope for in a soldier, but we'll get you there," the recruiter said. He held a pen, a strangely expensive device for someone this far from the rarified air of the inner City. "What's your name?"

"Valen."

"Last name?"

He didn't want to carry his father's last name. Not now, and not ever again. Not for the man who consigned his grandparents, and his entire life, to a crypt of smoke. Put out at the end by the harrowing kindness of a man in a red coat. "I don't want mine, any more."

"Well, I need to put something."

"Redgrave," Valen said. "So I don't forget them."

The recruiter didn't understand, but like before, Valen didn't need him to.

******

"Crafter Breckan Howel," Valen said. "I didn't know him, and didn't see him again, until last night. But he helped my Grandfather pass on, when I wouldn't have been able to. My grandfather asked me to remember it was a kindness."

Behind them, the familiar faces of his squad intermingled with the Rangers of the First. Which meant, to Valen's relief, they had broken through the Gloamtaken.

"I want to hear the story, after the invasion," Captain Dremora said. The Gloamtaken had seemly given up trying to rush them, the dead littered the end of the street, and those that followed were barely able to maneuver around their fallen. "Only question left to ask, is who's buying the drinks."

"Fifty-three," Valen said, as he stabbed another.

"Spit and burning ash, how am I only seven ahead?" The captain asked.

Valen grinned as he kept fighting. His grandfather would really, really have liked to meet the captain.