subplotkudzu | Emirikol Seession 15, part 3

After another day’s travel, with Hiram doing his best to catch short naps along the way, the actor is jostled by the change from the paving stone roads to the cobblestones of a community. He peers out through the crack and sees what certainly looks like buildings passing by in the darkness. Time to put his plan into motion. He rubs the thin oil from the dried meat that was meant to comprise the meals from his trip onto his hands and wrists, then began working them methodically back and forth. It took several minutes – so much so that he was afraid they would pass through the town with the job incomplete, but eventually his bloodied hands are freed. A quick pass with his handkerchief drew the wound away, followed by a grace enhancing charm meant to make one more acrobatic on the stage.

Loosening his sword and dagger in their scabbards he pulls one of the patches from his magical cloak – the one that becomes a moderate sized steel mirror. Wedging that into the correct position he produced a crude mechanical illusion of the cart being empty when viewed through the trap. It would last no more than a glance or two, but that should be all he needed, and would give some protection from a pistol shot if need be. In his crouch he pulled out the palm-sized conch shell that was a memento of his single-handed defeat of the chaosian assassin and dramaturge Remi Colbras and gave it a short breath, producing an unearthly moan and filling the carriage with a magical fog that seeped out into the night.

At this occurrence he hears the slider open and, he suspected, the oiled trap open as well, followed by a curse from above that their prisoner had vanished. A quick stage cantrip produces the sound Hiriam’s feet escaping into the night behind them, and the carriage jerked as the horses were halted and the men on the roof leapt down to join the rider in pursuit of the their illusionary quarry. Hiram jerked the mirror aside, slashed open the weaving and stabbed upward with his rapier, opening a long gash on the face of his final captor before catching him in the chin with his pommel, sending the man timbling off the cart. Hiram shoved his swordarm and head through the trap and then squirmed his shoulder and torso through as he had been taught lo those many moons ago for a backstreet production of Pedro and Pierre at the Jaws of Doom, when the ‘walking dead’ had to arise through the cheap stage.

Just as he freed himself he saw the recovering constable take aim with his pistol and has just time enough to slap the firearm aside with the tip of his rapier, its discharge going wild and sending the thing skittering off into the night. Sure that his other captors would return any second Hiram leapt from the carriage top to the roof of the closest building with the grace of a cat and followed his nose. The pungent aroma of livestock told him that this was one of the caravan towns along the roads that connect one side of the Green Mountains with the other. In such towns there was always at least one business that would not question the arrival of a newcomer at any hour of the night. Fortunately for Hiram he had been returning from the Legerdemain when he was taken, and was still wearing the cap whose cantrips aided his disguise abilities. Appearing as nothing more than a drunken, overweight merchant Hiram asked for Daisy – a lady of the night whose appearance in many a Pedro and Pierre tale guaranteed that there would be at least one girl going by that name in every house of the red lantern – and engaged her services for the evening. “Best place as any to hide until morning without raising undue suspicion,” he thought as he followed her callipygian form upstairs.