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“I offer you the name Uncertain,” Andre said, stepping away from Ragi and the others, keeping Phillipe’s attention on himself. The Maestro always said when you dominated the stage, no one paid attention to the scenery. It was how a stagehand did their work unseen and, hopefully, it would be enough for Ragi to whisk his family to safety as well.

“I don’t need anything from you, creature,” the captain snarled. “What use could I have for your names?”

It was a fair question, though Andre had no idea what the answer was. “Strange are the courtesies overhill,” he said, which was hopefully cryptic enough to suit a Fair Folk. He took a step forward and made a conscious effort to speak in the Maestro’s cadences. “What shall I know of you, then? Are you unstoppable, as the Guardian of Grapes says?”

Phillipe mirrored him, taking a single step back. “What if I am? What do such things matter to man, when he is doomed to spend his short and miserable life chasing after the petty wants of his stomach and his loins? And you would name me Without Certainty! Ha!” His laugh was flat and hard. “Men who chase after such things are as foolish as those who treasure the Gifts of their birth. I am more than these things, Blacklight. I am a Borgia.”

Some kind of breakdown in communications must have occurred because he could hear the others doing something behind him. Which meant they weren’t escaping. Still, the Maestro always insisted the actors had to trust the stage crew to do their jobs while they focused on their lines. Andre was new to that side of the equation but from his time on the other he knew it was true. He’d have to keep talking.

“What is a Borgia, then?” Andre asked, pacing back and forth as he studied Phillipe. Even now, as he matched Andre’s movements, fire building behind his eyes, the captain moved with a purposeful, deliberate pace that seemed out of place.

“We are a promise, Blacklight.” He drew a basket hilted rapier from his waist with one hand and fished something out of a pocket with another. Phillipe held it up between them, making it clear that it was a half eaten piece of bread. He must have been pulled away from dinner when the alarms started. “We are a family, not by birth but by choice, wedded to one another by the breaking of bread and the grace of our Father, Grigori the First.”

The captain spread his hands wide, holding bread and blade like twin blessings offered to all. “We nourish one another when we are hungry. When we are hurt we bear one another’s wounds. And when our family is threatened, we take up arms to destroy all our enemies, without fear or mercy.”

Andre tasted bile in the back of his throat. “You kill in the name of your father?”

“For the sake of our Father!”

“How many enemies can one man have?”

Phillipe lowered his arms, looking resigned. “I forget you are not human, Blacklight. If you were, you would know that every enemy who sets himself against a family is an enemy to its father, whether he wills it or not.” He snapped his sword into a guard position, its point directly aimed at Andre’s head. “Human or not.”

“And your family… how many are they?”

The captain hesitated, clearly unsure of what to make of the question. “Hundreds, I suppose. Perhaps thousands, now. A dozen newly made men were with me when I broke bread with the Father three years ago, when we were only two hundred strong.”

“So many.” A shiver ran up Andre’s back then around and down into his hands, curling them into a single knot of muscle that would not let go. “And in the name of your father you chase two girls through the Nernonan countryside, though one of them is pledged in marriage? How is that fair?”

“Fair!” Phillipe barked a laugh and flicked the point of his sword to their left. They had moved far enough that the goblin cat’s corpse lay in that direction now and Andre could just make it out while keeping an eye on the captain if he stood just so. What he saw astonished him.

The cat’s body had mostly transformed to a lumpy, pinkish mass. Charissa knelt by it, a knife in hand, shaving its fur with an eerie, effortless grace as her daughter stood by, the fur spinning into a thread that wove itself into a single sheet of silk black fabric. In the few minutes he’d been speaking they had somehow taken the fur from all but the tail and hindquarters. The work was done too fast to be anything but a Gift.

“You have killed the beast,” Phillipe said, “and now the Talisman maker seizes its magic for herself. A few such crimes and she will hold more power than even the greatest armies in Nerona. Do you think such things are fair? Tell me, creature from underhill, is it fair that humans are born so different from one another, that one person can so easily trample others underfoot?”

“There was no one under their feet when I found them in your tower. There was no one under the feet of the girls who you chased through the roads that wind overhill and I see no one beneath them now. Yet there are many feet that stamp down to trample them and each boot bears the name of Borgia.”

Phillipe’s brought his sword back to bear on Andre. “What of it? Those underhill have never cared about our affairs before. Why does the fate of a few girls matter to you, Blacklight?”

Staring at the point of the sword should have made it difficult to answer but Andre found his reply flowed as easily as if he’d rehearsed it his entire life. “Because look! You have so much light.” He pointed overhead at the blazing beacon in its reflective bowl, shedding light out towards the sea and sky but leaving none to reach the roof below. “Yet you won’t shine it on yourself.”

“We can still see the light to guide us.”

“Perhaps. If that is the way you wish to go. But for those who grope through the darkness, seeking another way, what is there for them?” Andre slowly lowered his hand and closed his eyes. He pictured the beacon in his mind but shrunk it down and took away the dancing flames, then he let his Gift do the rest. When he opened his eyes again a small light hovered over his outstretched palm. “For them, I will be their blacklight.”

For a second Andre thought the captain was about to back down. He wavered, at least, his gaze uncertain as he stared at the small yellow pinprick Andre had conjured. Then Phillipe shook himself off and said, “Hubris. The world is too vast for such a small light to make a difference.”

Andre closed his hand and stopped conjuring. “We shall see.”

There was a breath of air by his neck then Ragi whispered, “We’re done, Blacklight, it’s time to go. Don’t worry about him. He can’t run and use his Gift at the same time.”

“This isn’t over, Corragio!” Phillipe called.

“If you were still the Phillipe I knew it might not be,” Ragi replied, stepping up beside Andre. “He would risk his life and limb to get what he wanted when he was a bravo with no master but himself. But a Borgia must put the family first! What will they do without an unyielding avalanche to crush their enemies into the dirt? They cannot risk losing such a thing.”

Ragi started to pull Andre back towards the roof’s edge, clearly expecting that to be the end of it. His judgement was good enough for Andre and had already started to turn towards the others when he saw Ragi’s expression turn to shock. He spun back to find Phillipe charging towards them in an insane burst of speed. He looked like a gymnast, about to leap into a triple summersault, except for the sword in his hand and his murderous glare.

For all his surprise, Ragi reacted quickly, planting his feet and lunging forward with his own sword point directed squarely at the captain’s stomach. For a moment, Andre thought the exchange was over with that. It looked like Ragi would run him through and be done with it. Then Phillipe somehow managed to plant both his feet under him and he came to a sudden stop. He didn’t slide or crouch. He simply stamped his feet down and snapped upright, perfectly straight, like a spear that had just been thrown into the dirt. Ragi’s thrust hit him squarely in the middle and slid off, doing nothing. It didn’t even slice through the captain’s jacket. For all the world it looked like the captain had planted his feet and transformed from a running man made of flesh to a motionless statue made of stone.

He only stayed that way long enough to avoid getting stabbed. After the point of Ragi’s blade was turned he stabbed over the shorter man’s sword arm, aiming for Ragi’s considerable neck. Ragi managed to grab Phillipe’s arm with his off hand, levering himself partly up and away from the point, but it still opened a nasty cut on his back. Worse, for all Ragi’s considerable strength, he couldn’t stop the captain.

Phillipe slowly dragged his arm back towards himself, preparing for another strike, while he locked eyes with his opponent. Andre tried to read what was going on. He remembered Sophia trying to wrap the captain in an awning when he’d discovered her and Charissa under the Maestro’s caravan. He’d had his feet planted, holding perfectly still that time, too. Then Phillipe had patiently pulled the fabric off of himself using one hand.

Just like that, Andre could see the picture in his mind. A man who was invincible when he held still, who became more impossible to stop the slower he moved – a man who was inexorable so long as he was patient in how he moved. Yet if he picked up his feet and ran he must become a normal person, or he wouldn’t have reacted like he did to Ragi’s attack. He wondered how far Phillipe’s invulnerability went.

As the captain finished setting up his next strike Andre pushed into the melee, holding one hand up in front of Phillipe’s face, and he conjured the brightest light he could. The captain cried out and jerked away from it. Amazingly enough, he kept his feet planted but from the way he began to blink frantically Andre could tell he was dazzled at least. For a follow up, Andre switched from light to smoke, filling the air around the captain with a dense cloud of oily smog while he grabbed Ragi and ran.

Blinded and coughing, Phillipe still managed to force himself after them at his purposeful, inexorable pace. But with no idea where they were, his sword swung aimlessly and the other two were able to get out of its reach easily. Sophia waited for them at the edge of the roof, a rope twisted out of old costumes in her hands. She worked the rope around to lift all three of them off the roof and down to the walls, where Bella and Charissa waited for them. From there she lowered them again, to the ground this time, before spooling the rope around her waist.

“Excellent work, all,” Ragi said. “Now we just need to find this wine cellar of Andre’s. Do you know where it is?”

Andre cast about, looking for landmarks, but realized with a sinking feeling he didn’t recognize anything. “I think it’s on the other side of the fort, sir. I don’t think we can make it there without getting spotted.”

Charissa grinned, holding her hands up as if displaying a cloth. “Well, think again.”