There were many kinds of Gifts that fate bestowed to the people of Nerona. Some were beautiful, some were practical and some, like the Gifts of the Thunder Hand and Thunder Heart, were incredibly dangerous. One thing true of all of them was that the Gifts themselves made very little sense to people who didn’t have them. You could explain them with words, certainly, but those words meant nothing to people who lacked actual experience with the Gift in question.
Hannibal Fulminate, the most famous Thunder Hand in Neronan history, once explained the nature of his Gift by saying, “For everything that falls there is a climb, just as for lightning there is thunder.”
It sounded very pithy but didn’t mean a lot to a poor conjuror like Andre.
That said, it made a kind of intuitive sense that Ragi could somehow catch Erasmus, even when he was a lightning bolt, but that didn’t guarantee he could do it every time any more than Gianni could catch a club every time while juggling. That meant the older man was going to need help before he missed a catch. So Andre sucked in a deep breath and tried to follow what was going on, figure out some way to help.
His first thought, as Ragi collided with Erasmus’ lighting bolt form a second time, was to make a shield of some kind to keep Fabian’s soldiers from shooting them. He’d fixed or built plenty of prop shields over the years. Making one should have been easy enough but as soon as Andre began to build the picture of one in his mind he realized it wasn’t going to work. He’d never exhausted his Gift before but he could still tell it wasn’t up to making something that big now.
It was a strange sensation, a kind of bone deep exhaustion that turned the picture he was trying to hold in his mind into a blur. It was like getting so tired his eyes blurred, except with his mind’s eye rather than his normal ones.
Andre also knew enough about conjuring to know he couldn’t really do anything about the soldiers’ conjured weapons. He’d met a lot of others with his Gift working in other troupes. Comparing tricks of the trade was a common way to pass the time when walking from town to town or when camped at large festivals outside the major cities. Over the years he’d never heard of a way for one conjuror to effect another’s conjurations.
Aside from the normal ways, of course.
Bella and Charissa had vanished from view, which was a small consolation, but Erasmus seemed to think he could gain something by slipping past Ragi anyway. At least he spent a few seconds trying to wriggle free of Ragi’s grasp once they collided. Now that he was ready for the thin man’s attacks Ragi had managed hold on to him after the collided. The big man got one arm wrapped around Erasmus’ back and was trying to lock him in some kind of wrestling hold. Although he was taller, Erasmus seemed unable to turn that leverage into any kind of advantage. Unsurprising given Ragi’s manifestly superior strength.
It seemed winning the contest wasn’t necessary, however, as another crankbow bolt from the conjuring soldiers came skipping along the stone ground towards them. It struck Erasmus on the calf and he vanished again. Once again he became a bolt of lightning travelling along the thin chain that returned him to the base of the slope in a thunderclap. This time he paused to rub his ribs, obviously discomforted by Ragi’s grasp.
Andre grabbed Sophia by the arm and pulled her down into a crouch halfway behind one of the many stalagmites in the chamber. He dumped his pack out and gestured to the pile of old clothes that resulted. “Could you turn this into a net? Something to catch those arrows so they don’t reach?”
“It will take a second,” she replied, already starting to unravel the tunic on top. “But there’s nothing to say he can’t run along the net just as well as those chains.”
Andre grimaced but knew she was right. Still, it was the only thing he could think of at the moment. He grabbed a cloak and wrapped it around himself, pulling the collar up over his mouth and nose, then said, “It’s worth a shot. I’m going to try something else.”
After which he got to his feet and sprung up on top of the stalagmite.
A lifetime of running the posts on to and off of stages had made him confident in his footing and what was a stalagmite but a post made of stone? What was a slope full of such stones but a set of stairs made for a stagehand?
Well, nature had not built the cavern with Andre in mind, that was certain. Even as he dashed down the slope, skipping from one stone protrusion to the next, he was forced to move side to side far more than he would like. He’d hoped his mad run would bring him down to the docks before Fabian and his men could react. No such luck was with him.
He’d barely gone a quarter of the distance before one of Fabian’s soldiers pointed him out to the others. Andre immediately jumped back towards the path, leaping off the jagged stones and keeping as low to the ground as he could for the few seconds he needed. A shield may be too big to conjure but a cloud of smoke… well, it looked big but really wasn’t. After a lifetime of conjuring it for one scene or another he was pretty sure he could envision it in his sleep, no matter how smudgy his mind’s eye was becoming.
This time proved to be no exception. After conjuring into his clenched hands for a few seconds Andre spread them to release a huge plume of light gray smoke. Then he clapped one hand over his nose to hold the cloak in place and started forward again. The cloth kept the worst of the smoke out of his lungs but he couldn’t see through it any better than Fabian’s men could. Sadly, it seemed his magical hat didn’t do anything to help in that regard.
Andre couldn’t really say he was surprised at that and he’d anticipated having to move about with his vision impaired. Moving to the left, downslope along the path, made the most sense. It made so much sense the archers probably realized it as well so Andre decided not to go that way. Instead he moved to the right, staying on the path until he emerged from the smoke and leapt up onto the stalagmites again.
He scampered over another few stone protrusions before his skin prickled and Erasmus blazed past once more. The resulting thunderclap threw off Andre’s timing and his boot slipped off the next stalagmite. He jackknifed, twisting to get his hands under him and break his fall. The stone ground was much harder than the grass he was used to landing on and a dozen small protrusions and loose rocks prodded him uncomfortably as he rolled but on the whole Andre thought it was a good landing. Then he slammed into one of the taller stalagmites and changed his mind.
Winded, he scrambled to his feet again and threw a look towards Fabian and his men, wondering if he needed another smoke screen to keep from getting shot. Their attention was still focused on Ragi and Erasmus. The clash of lighting wielders had followed Andre down the slope, albeit at a slower pace due to keeping to the path, and Ragi was now backing the thin man through the remains of Andre’s smoke cloud.
The soldiers were conjuring and releasing bolts as as quickly as they could but so far Erasmus hadn’t reached one yet. That was because Sophia trailed a few steps behind the two. Rather than completely reweaving the clothes he gave her she had simply stitched them together at the corners, creating a checkerboard of cloth that waved over the three of them in a loose dome. From the slow, lethargic moves of the cloth it was proving more than she could easily manipulate with her Gift. It was still enough to throw off the archers’ aim.
Satisfied things hadn’t turned into a disaster yet, Andre started down slope once more, looking for another pattern of stalagmites he could use. He had just worked out a path that would let him move faster than walking when Fabian raised his voice and called, “Ipecac.”
Andre’s head whipped around to watch the blind man drink whatever it was in the bottle he was holding. A moment later a violent wave of nausea washed over him. Andre abandoned all thoughts of jumping, much less jumping on top of anything, and did his best not to vomit.
He’d met a carnival Sensate once, who tickled himself with feathers and shared the sensation with others, calling it, “Sharing the mirth.” When Fabian introduced himself Andre had wondered why a man with such a Gift would lead soldiers. The Sensate Gift supposedly went both ways, meaning Fabian would feel everything his men felt as well. But, as Andre watched the blind man stand there, one hand resting on his stomach, otherwise unperturbed by the nausea he was sharing with the room, it did make a kind of sense. If Fabian could endure that level of discomfort so easily and his enemies couldn’t…
Well, the results were obvious. Andre could barely walk, Sophia’s net had collapsed as she heaved her stomach’s contents onto the ground and Ragi was swaying lightly on his feet. The only consolation was that Fabian’s side wasn’t much better. Erasmus looked almost unaffected, though whether that was because of his own fortitude, some quirk of his Gift or just because he was familiar with this particular trick was impossible to tell. Whatever it was, it didn’t give him the confidence to try to overpower Ragi, weakened though he was. The archers fared much worse.
One had dropped to his knees and was vomiting on the floor. The other clutched his midsection, face contorted in discomfort, but hadn’t entirely lost his composure yet.
Fabian twisted his head about, one way, then the other, looking suddenly annoyed. His cane reached out, sweeping back and forth until it tapped the standing archer in one leg, then the blind man rapped the soldier’s shins with it smartly, snapping, “Open your eyes, fool. I can’t see.”
Andre had never once heard of a Sensate seeing through the eyes of another person. Then again, he’d also never heard of a blind Sensate before. Either way, he finally had an idea of what he could do to help Ragi and the others escape.
Isobela told all the new actors to crouch down and put their head between their knees, then take three deep breaths to get rid of nausea from stage fright. Andre tried it and found it worked almost as well with the phantom nausea he was feeling. Steadied, he leaped up and across the stalagmites once more, adjusting his path a few steps towards the archer Fabian was scolding. The blind man had drawn another bottle from his waist pouch but not yet removed the stopper. Whatever that bottle did, Fabian seemed unwilling to drink it before he knew the situation and his vicarious vision still didn’t have a point of view it could work with yet.
With time dwindling, Andre threw all caution to the wind. He sprinted down the slope, leaping and tumbling across every obstacle, ignoring every bump and prod as he advanced. Looking back, the run took him five seconds, maybe six. As he ran it he thought it would never end, each protrusion or divot in the floor seeming to add hours to the time it took to reach the bottom.
Then, in the blink of an eye, Andre went from vaulting off a low rock to skidding along the grotto’s shoreline. The archer had recovered just enough that he had opened his eyes and seen him coming before they collided. Then Andre wrapped his arms around the other man and carried them both to the ground with a sickening thud.
