Chapter 86

“I…I don’t know what to say…”

For the first time since he’d been summoned to the world of Thea, Marcus Graham was looking at something he actually wanted.

“That makes a change,” Mari said, her voice hoarse as she held back tears.

To look at her was to look upon a lucid dream. He could barely even feel the intensity of the creatures’ stares all around him as they watched these two humans gaze into the eyes of the other like they were looking at a ghost. The reality of her pale skin, threads of auburn hair, emerald irises, and thin neckline just wouldn’t resolve themselves as true for him. There she was, standing there wearing a set of patchy leather armor, and there he was standing before her like a dumbstruck schoolboy looking upon his crush.

“Mari…” he breathed. “After all this time…”

He bent forward, lolling slightly, and collapsed into her open arms. Feeling her skin against his gave him more relief than he’d felt in ages. Only now did he realize just how weary his body and mind were…

“Karliah,” Mari said. “Did you really have to be so harsh with him?”

She was addressing the dark cat-woman who shrugged nonchalantly behind them. Garbed in leather wrappings as black as the Underkingdom itself, she then gave an utterly unimpressed yawn.

“I would have thought the mighty ‘Shar-Azrok’ would have put up more of a fight,” she said.

*Shar-Azrok*…Marcus’s mind echoed. *Yeah…that’s what they called me. That’s what I…was…*

Just as the thought entered his mind, he looked down at the pulsing green energy still flowing down the veins of his right hand.

*No…that’s what I’m still supposed to be…*

“Believe me, Karla!” Marvin, the ex-farmer, then shouted so that all the gathering children and their parents could hear. “He coulda wiped the floor with ya if he wanted to! He’s a wizard now, don’tcha know!”

Karliah rolled her eyes. “I noticed, Marvin. You’d have to be a blind kitten not to see the gangly mess of green that he calls a hand. And, for the final time, my name is KARLIAH.”

Another reverberation then rang out from above, sending small smatterings of dust down into the metal streets of the Piper’s compound. Though he finally had a small semblance of respite, Marcus was still aware of just how much danger this world always seemed to offer to him.

But another look in his love’s eyes almost dispelled even those woes.

“Mari,” he said. “Mari, what’s happening? Who are these people and – well – what are you do-“

A skinny finger graced his lips. Even though he could’ve kept talking, he decided to obey.

“First things first,” Mari whispered into his unbelieving eyes. “You need a bath. Karliah?”

The cat straightened up at being called by her superior. Marcus noted it even in his state of blissful abandon. Mari was clearly the superior around here.

And that’s when he remembered what the Yokun – Yeeva – had told him about her – she was no ordinary human in these parts. She was something else, just like he was: the Pale Matriarch.

And it was as this leader that she issued her command:

“Take the Shar-Azrok to the bath chambers, and see that he gets a proper bathing. Scrub him well, for he has work to do.”

“Very well, my La-wait, what?”

“You heard me, kitten,” Mari said with a giggle that Marcus had almost forgotten he’d missed the sound of. She could be a real tease when she wanted to be.

“I can think of no one more suited to the job of handling my consort. Now, if you would..?”

Marcus had to admit that he liked the sound of bathing. After all this time, he’d practically become accustomed to smelling like shit.

“Might I…remind you that we are on a tight time schedule, my Lady?” Karliah choked through bared teeth as she grabbed Marcus by his arm and pulled him towards one of the metal shanty-hovels. “Is it really wise to –“

“Marvin,” Mari interrupted. “How’s it looking out there?”

The ex-farmer stood to attention. “They're cleaning up, my Lady,” he said. “But none of the Prince’s forces have advanced. Probably because they’re scared shitless of what’s coming for ‘em!”

“If I know Nagoya,” Mari murmured. “Fear is the last thing he’ll be feeling. But his overcautiousness is exactly what I’m counting on.”

Marcus could barely even comprehend that this woman – with a voice that commanded such respect – was the Mari from his memory. He had to admit, there was something…sensual to seeing her barking orders and having them obeyed.

She turned to see Marcus’s bemused face then and winked.

“Be gentle with him, Karliah,” she told her catwoman servant before Marcus was whisked off into a sparse bathing room. “And when you’re done, escort him to my chambers.”

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…

Being bathed by a cat had never been on Marcus Graham’s list of priorities.

Indeed, the experience was made more awkward by the fact that this particular catwoman clearly looked on him as something of a plaything for her Mistress, and as her claws scratched his back and fur rubbed against him, he did all he could to think about other, less…awkward things.

“Don’t think this means anything, human,” Karliah told him. “This is a job I do for my Lady, nothing more, nothing less.”

“The feeling is more than mutual,” he assured his feline scrubber. “I’m not much for pet-play.”

As she dried him off, Marcus noted that she did not bear the mark of slavery upon her own neck – no number glistened there against her fur. Curious, but just one of the many questions he had to have answered. Indeed, he was so filled with his desire to understand what this whole place – this whole organization – was, that he barely took in the details of the tiny wash-tub or the fact that they somehow had heated water in this place that clearly had no indoor plumbing. The purity of the air was also more curious still, and yet secondary to the burning question that was flaring in his mind: just what was Mari doing here?

Karliah finished drying him and handed him a simple thatched robe, explaining that she’d wring out his trench coat and return it to him when his business with the Lady was concluded.

“Thank you, Karliah,” he told her. He did so with grace – he wasn’t trying to make more enemies, though the cat was more preoccupied with scowling at the rat-symbol stitched into his jacket.

“So, it’s true,” she said. “You really did help out those furballs down there…”

He was about to launch into a detailed explanation when the catwoman’s tail shot out and ushered him away.

“Guess we’ll find out exactly what you did soon enough,” she said, a sly smile appearing on her face just below her twitching whiskers. “’Shar-Azrok.’”

She said the word with such teasing, dripping sarcasm, that Marcus almost felt the need to defend himself. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and followed her to Mira’s room at the far end of the shantytown.

As he went, he inspected the windows and doorways of the metal hovels and saw the faces that stared back at him. Children – eyes full and brimming with curiosity that matched his own – stared at him like he was some figure from legend. Their parents seemed just as fascinated by him, and as he weaved around the small corridors that formed Piper’s Hill, he felt like a hero coming home.

*Is that really what I am to these people?* he thought. *A hero?*

“Don’t get too big for your boots,” his guide told him as they approached Mari’s own shanty-home. “Yeah, we know who you are, but that doesn’t mean shit if you can’t serve Maria well. In your state,” she added with a nod at his twitching hand. “I very much doubt it.”

“What do you know about me?” Marcus asked, desperate to glean any information he could. “What does the name Shar-Azrok mean to your people? Until I met one of your own, I had never even heard of this place. I don’t even know what you’re here for.”

The catwoman smiled then, her fangs glinting against the faint lantern lights that framed Mari’s doors.

“Oh, we know about you, alright,” she told him. “Whether you knew it or not, you’ve been helping us out this whole time.”

When his feline guide then opened the door to Mari’s chambers, Marcus was surprised at just how cozy the place looked. The four-walled room was dimly lit by lanterns similar to those that afforded light outside, and the room, similar to the bathing chamber, was sparsely populated by a set of carved wooden chairs and bamboo drawers that looked as though they might have been created out of the trees in the jungle above them – back when it was still a living, breathing part of this world’s ecosystem. What caught Marcus’s attention most was the cabinet chock-full of maps – a cartographer and military historian’s dream, especially considering the detail that was inscribed on them, which was visible even to Marcus’s hazy eyes.

“Karliah,” a voice called out from the end of the room. “Good work.”

Marcus looked towards the door that had just opened, seeing the girl he’d killed for wander out in a very different dress now. This one was silken, lime-green, and threaded with twine, complemented by a necklace sporting a set of what looked like raw rubies glowing around her pale neck. Her low-cut decolletage afforded Marcus a vision of her thin neck bones that sent shivers down Marcus’s spine.

“Ahem,” Karliah coughed, nudging him with her foot. “The Mistress’s eyes are up there.”

Looking back up at her, Marcus then noticed just how much she was blushing.

“Well?” she asked. “How do I look?”

Marcus wasted no time in answering. He didn’t even hear the cat-girl sigh audibly beside him.

“As beautiful as the day you first took pity on this dumb boy,” he said.

She fixed a stray hair that had fallen over her ear. “You’re such a fucking cheeseball.”

“If that’s all, my Lady?”

It seemed Mari barely noticed the cat-girl’s presence in this moment, either.

“Y-yeah,” she said, surprising Marcus with just how girly she was acting right now. “You…may return to your duties, Karliah.”

“Such as they are,” the cat girl sighed, bowing low and whispering to Marcus as she left, “If you so much as harm a hair on the Mistress, my claws will find your throat tonight, little man.”

With that, she left just as quietly as she had entered.

“Quite the charming lieutenant you have there,” he said, not knowing quite what else he could say.

“Well…” Mari replied quietly, slowly stepping towards him. “She is a cat, after all. They’re fiercely individual…don’t you know.”

When she’d closed the gap between them, Marcus found that he had entirely forgotten all the questions he’d been wanting to ask her. Her eyes, her neck, and the curvature of her lips – that was his whole world now.

She brought a shaking hand to his cheek and brushed it gently, and before she could take it away, he held it there, firm.

“It…it really is you,” she said.

He leaned into her. “I thought I’d lost you,” he said. “There was a moment, even though I couldn’t accept it, that I thought I’d never set eyes on you again. Even when I heard you were still ali-“

Her lips quieted him. The scent of her and the feeling of her hair falling in little threads over his cheek as they kissed consumed him.

“I never let it win,” he said as they pulled away and held onto each other for dear life. “I never let the notion that you weren’t there anymore win. That was the hardest battle I fought, Mari, despite everything.”

She rubbed his cheek again with her index finger, letting her nail play across his shaven skin.

“Such a cheeseball,” she said again. “You never let this place take that from you, did you? You’re still you…”

Before he could say another word, she took his hand and guided him towards her bedroom, where a single linen bed waited, surrounded by six burning ruby candles.

She drew him towards the edge of the bed and lay down beside him, taking his face in her hands and examining every facet of his features as she spoke.

“There’ll be time for talking after,” she said. “There’ll be time for explanations, for apologies, for…for a lot of things. But right now, all I want is to feel you again. You…I waited for you, Marc. And,” she added with a giggle as she began to undo his robe. “This girl’s thirsty.”

Marcus Graham, once General of the Underkingdom, held up his hands in his first act of surrender.

***

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