“We’re gonna make it, son!” Marvin screamed above the death-rattle of the rocket that was currently on course to turn them both into mincemeat.
No, Marcus thought again as he looked into the black column homing in on their position. Not this time…
Marcus’s hand flared up of its own accord and he sent a spark of cackling green energy straight up at the projectile, shielding his eyes as it then exploded directly above them, and Marvin finally lunged towards the stone cave mouth.
When the back of his head hit the grey stone of the cave floor he grimaced in pain and turned back to see the devastation the explosion had unleashed on the landscape. Clearly, these barrages had been a common occurrence – beyond the mouth of this little sanctuary the density of the jungle was carved away like a thin layer of skin peeled from a rotten body. Only the charred, dead earth remained where nothing new grew, and pockets of still flaming vegetation were creeping up the trees that remained to snuff out their colors – sticking to the leaves on their boughs and dripping down to burn clean through their roots.
As his eyes adjusted to the smoky haze that hung over this dying place, Marcus finally recalled what this particular fiery discharge reminded him of.
Napalm…
His companion, meanwhile, seemed much more preoccupied with Marcus’s glowing hand.
“Well I’ll be a Tuthlatch’ka’s flopping teat,” Marvin wheezed. “They didn’t tell me you were a bleedin’ wizard, too!”
“Recently…anointed,” Marcus groaned, the pain radiating up his arm becoming more pronounced again, and he was forced to remember exactly how these new powers had come to him. “But…wait…how is it you know who I am?”
Marvin smiled, wiping the residue of soot and dirt from his face, creeping to the end of their small cave and beating his meaty hands on the back wall.
“Buddy,” he said as he stood back, apparently satisfied. “You don’t know how famous you are round these parts.”
At Marcus’s questioning glare his savior merely nodded as a small rectangular slab was removed from the wall he’d just knocked on.
Two amber eyes stared out from the gap.
“What is the song of the Pipers?”
“The song that lives in every slave’s mind,” Marvin said with a full-lipped smile. “The song that breaks the chains that bind.”
The eyes blinked once, the slab closed over, and Marcus heard a series of indiscriminate clicks and bumps of activity on the other side of the wall.
Then he saw that it was no wall at all, but a door. One that opened to afford the entrance into a dimly lit hallway that was certainly not part of this natural cave formation.
“Best to let me take the lead, son,” Marvin said as he stepped forward abruptly. “The Piper’s are a little overly-cautious. Can’t blame ‘em, really.”
Marcus cocked an eyebrow as he followed Marvin into the metal bowels of the hallways and heard the ‘door’ of the fake cave wall bolt shut behind them.
“Pipers?” he asked, suddenly remembering everything that had been locked behind the wall of color he’d traveled through – the flight from the Grindlefecht dungeons, the confrontation with Skeever, and the name of the place the Yokun assassin had told him to run to if he wanted to find Mari…
“You got it,” Marvin smiled, pointing to the number on his neck. “See this? Used to be my ‘number’ the bastardYokun slapped on me before the Pipers came and torched their slave market. Shoulda seen it, son. They killed the bastards good and shackled the overseers themselves. Jun-El – she’s our head-shaman - calls it ‘poetic justice’. A Yokun herself, though I don’t hate her for what her people do. After all, she’s out here fighting the good fight, right?’
Marcus shook his head as he tried to take in all the strange new details this ‘ex-farmer’ (who was really as it turned out a slave on the run) was imparting to him.
“The Pipers…” Marcus mouthed, almost not even noticing the metal door towards which Marvin was reaching. “You mean to tell me that this is…”
“You got it, son,” Marvin smiled, opening the door to reveal an entirely new kind of underground world to Marcus. “Welcome to Piper’s Hill.”
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An entire cavern dug deep into the earth filled his vision, filled with metal-sheath structures that resembled small slum-housing. Coal fires were currently burning within these huts without a care, and Marcus noticed how they stretched on seemingly for miles into the cave system – an entire shanty town built beneath the burning jungle above.
Not quite the ‘hill’ I had in mind, was Marcus’s first thought. I escape one underground society and am immediately harried into another. Though as far as I can tell, this place looks like a temporary place of accommodation at most.
The air was far cooler than that of the Underkingdom, and as Marcus and Marvin stepped onto the creaky metal platform that opened out into what looked like a kind of makeshift town square, Marcus realized there must have been an internal ventilation system that was running down here. Either that, or some wizardly magic was at play – perhaps both, judging by what he knew about Thean physics. Orjust how much he still didn’t know.
In the middle of the town square there was a ramshackle statue constructed out of pieces of metal shards and discarded weapons. The statue resembled that of a female Yokun in rags with both her hands crushing a pair of broken chains.Children of various races were engaged in hanging from its outstretched arms and playing around its booted feet – children that all shared the same defining trait: the branded number cut into the skinfolds of their necks…
They stopped playing when the saw the new arrival. And they were not alone – all around him Marcus could hear murmurs and whisperings coming from every slum-house that now surrounded him, seeing the eyes of at least two dozen creatures appraise him as though they were looking at a walking God. Some things never change.
THUMP.
His thought was cut off, along with his windpipe, as something fell from the sky and pinned him to the ground.
The crowd breathed a collective gasp and hung back, mothers and fathers appearing from their houses to guide their children away from the sight.
Above him, Marcus heard a distinct sound – something so familiar that it struck him even more than the pain as this creature’s thigh dug into his neck.
The sounds of a hissing cat.
“Well, well, well,” it said – in a voice that was distinctly feminine. “Whatever do we have here? New prey for this hungry little kitten, Marv?”
Marcus thought discretion the better part of valor. He resisted the urge to let fly his bolts of lightning. This time, if he had to redo his summoning process, he’d have to leave a better first impression…
Marvin, however, barely seemed troubled at all by this assault.
“Kara…” he wheezed. “Why you gotta always spook the new guys like that?”
“You aren’t spooked, are you, little one?” the creature on top of Marcus asked as it brought its mouth closer and closer to its prey’s pinned face. “Mmmm. You do have a rather pleasant scent. The type I’m quite fond of…”
“I can vouch for him,” Marvin said. “He ain’t no plant. In fact, he’s exactly who we’ve been looking for!”
Marcus’s assailant give him a hearty sniff.
“He smells human,” she said. “He feels…human. But…yes…something is off. He’s no Thean, that’s for sure. But is he our man, really?”
“I’ll be the judge of that, Kana,” another female voice then called out from above.
Marcus barely even felt his attacker’s foot leave his neck. He barely even marveled at her thin, furry tail that poked out of her backside or the twirling of her whiskers as she slipped stealthily away from him. Not because the sight of a catwoman didn’t excite the imagination, but because the voice he had just heard compelled him to stand and stare at its owner as though it were a siren’s song.
His eyes strained to look at the woman who stepped out of one of the shacks to stand before him. He could see her, alright – he could see the thin leather armor that clung to her body and could trace the pale limbs that poked out from beneath her tunic. He could follow the heavy rise and fall of her chest and could trace every curve of her pink-hued lips as she opened them to stare just as dumfounded at the sight of him as he was at her. He dared not even allow his mind to speak her name, for fear that the apparition he saw before him, parting the crowd of runaway slaves like a living, breathing Boudicca, was nothing but a cruel trick of his mind. A holdover from the hallucinogenic properties of Silas’ teleportation method.
Only when she spoke again could his mind truly commit to the insane notion that she was standing here, in front of him.
“Marvin,” she breathed. “I asked you to find me scraps out there. Instead, you’ve brought me gold.”
There are times in a man’s life when he must remind himself to stand even though he knows that every fibre of his being wants nothing more than to break down and weep. This feeling of responsibility surged through Marcus in this moment with more caustic intensity than it ever had before. He walked – at least, he thought he was walking – towards the lucid vision that swam before his eyes. A dream bearing the form of a woman.
And when he finally stood mere inches from her face, and looked into the lilly-pads of her eyes, the thoughts of oblivion that had so haunted him mere hours ago suddenly faded away into the nape of her neck, the light twitching of her nose as she sniffled, and the short gasp of breath that escaped from her mouth when he finally had enough belief to say her name.
“Maria.”
She took his head in her hands and giggled like a schoolgirl as she blinked through the tears forming at the edges of her eyes. The expression was something so innocent, so pure, and so utterly incongruous in this new world that it made Marcus think what she said next was nothing more than the final lines of a nightmare he thought he’d never wake up from:
“Yeah,” she said. “Welcome home, Marcus.”
***
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