Chapter 842: Nitocris’s Story [Bonus - ]

Chapter 842: Nitocris’s Story [Bonus Chapter]

The front door clicked shut behind them, sealing out the cool autumn breeze of the Silverleaf District.

Silas kept his right forearm clamped firmly around the squirming bundle of black fur tucked against his ribs.

"Unhand me, you insolent barbarian! I shall have your liver roasted over cedar coals and fed to the desert jackals! Do you hear me, you crude peasant? Release my royal person this instant, Nyaa~!"

Silas didn’t even flinch.

He kicked off his shoes by the door, padded into the living room in his socks, leaned down and set the black cat in the middle of the cream wool rug.

"There you go, Your Majesty," he said, stretching his shoulders with a quiet chuckle. "Feel free to inspect the place while I get the water running..."

The moment her paws touched the rug, Nitocris-Hathor shook out her dusty coat, flicked her tail with immaculate precision and lifted her chin so high she was practically looking at the ceiling.

She turned in a slow theatrical circle, taking in the apartment.

Her golden eyes swept over the hardwood floors, the tall windows looking out onto the quiet tree-lined avenue, the glass coffee table and the slim holo-display mounted on the wall.

"Hmph," Nitocris scoffed. "A glorified mud-brick hut... The rooms are cramped... The lighting is an insult to the sun... You don’t even own a single golden obelisk to greet the dawn... Where are the incense braziers? Where are the palm-frond fans? What sort of destitute magistrate lives in a box with no lapis lazuli on the walls, Nyaa~?"

She hopped up onto the coffee table with liquid grace and sniffed at a little porcelain bowl of dried potpourri Martha had set out a few days ago.

"And what is this dried rubbish?" She tapped a shriveled rose petal with one claw, deeply disgusted. "Stale leaves in a clay bowl... In Khemet, my bedchambers were strewn with fresh lotus blossoms every sunrise. You live like a herdsman who traded his last goat for three glass beads and a stool, Nyaa~"

Silas leaned against the hallway doorframe with his arms folded and a lazy grin tugging at his mouth.

"Martha would be heartbroken if she heard you calling her living room a goat pen," he said. "Though honestly, she’d probably just scrub you down twice as hard..."

Nitocris’s ears swiveled backward.

"Scrub me, Nyaa~?"

Silas pushed off the doorframe, crossed the room in two silent strides and scooped her up off the glass before she could leap away.

He tucked her into the crook of his arm, supporting her back legs with one hand.

"Time for your royal purification, Nito~"

"Release me, you wretched ape!" she screeched, her paws flailing against his forearm, though her claws only snagged his sleeve and never touched his skin. "I don’t require your primitive sanitation rituals! A Per-aa is cleansed by the sacred winds of the dunes... The sun itself purifies my coat with divine fire, Nyaa~!"

"The sun didn’t stop you from smelling like a dumpster behind a bait shop," Silas said, carrying her into the bathroom and nudging the door half-shut with his foot.

The bathroom was warm and roomy, lined with gray marble and trim with a deep porcelain tub and brass fixtures.

"Listen to my words, peasant!" she yowled, twisting in his grip as he leaned over the tub. "Cats are sacred creatures of grace! Water is an element of treachery! It’s an insult to the divine desert, Nyaa~!"

"It’s just warm water..." Silas said mildly.

He twisted the brass handle.

SHHHHHH!

Warm water roared out of the curved spout and splashed against the bottom of the tub as steam began to curl up into the air, carrying the scent of the lavender and eucalyptus oils lined up on the ledge.

Silas sat down on the wide rim of the tub with the squirming cat held firmly in his lap, one large hand cupped gently over her shoulders.

With his free hand, he grabbed a soft hand towel from the rack and wet one corner under the stream.

"Relax," he murmured, his voice dropping low and calm as he started dabbing the damp cloth against the dusty fur of her forehead, working carefully around her ears. "I’m not dunking you while you’re screaming... I’ll clean you up bit by bit while the tub fills."

Up close, she was even scrawnier than she’d looked on the sidewalk.

He could feel her ribs under his palm, and there was a small notch torn out of one ear that had healed badly... Wherever she’d been sleeping, it hadn’t been anywhere kind.

Nitocris opened her mouth to curse him again, but as the warm cloth wiped away the grit caked around her eyes and whiskers, a tiny strangled noise slipped out of her throat instead.

She stiffened, fighting it with every scrap of ancient dignity she had left.

"Don’t think these pathetic ministrations will sway my divine judgment, Nyaa~" she muttered, but she stopped thrashing and let him wipe down the bridge of her nose.

The water kept gushing into the tub.

"Hold your chin up..." Silas said.

"A Per-aa does not take orders from a bath servant, Nyaa~," she sniffed, and then lifted her chin anyway so he could reach the grime under her jaw.

He bit back a smile.

Her whiskers were twitching with the effort of staying dignified, and every time the warm cloth passed under her chin, her eyes drifted half-shut before she caught herself and snapped them open again.

...She was losing the battle, Nito knew it and she clearly hated knowing it.

’Hehe, she’s quite cute too...’

Silas worked slowly and carefully, wiping soot off her chin and the street grease matted into the fur along her neck then he glanced down into her golden eyes.

"So," he said, keeping his voice easy as the water rose. "Let’s talk properly... How did you end up in Harper’s head in the first place?"

The haughty flare of her whiskers softened.

For a long moment, Nitocris stared into the rising steam without answering. When she finally spoke, the royal theater was gone from her voice.

"When I was alive, I was betrayed by a woman named Nefertari Al-Mansur," she said quietly. "I had seen the rot in her eyes for years so before we marched into the trench where she pushed me into the rift, I cut a sliver from my own soul and sealed it inside my khopesh... That sliver is me... I slept in that blade for two thousand years, passing from one ungrateful hand to the next, Nyaa~"

Her tail curled loosely around Silas’s wrist.

"Then Harper bought the blade at auction. Her lightning touched the seal, and I woke up. I spoke to her in her office... I named her my successor, and I promised to make her stronger than she’d ever dreamed. I told her she didn’t carry Khemet’s blood..."

Her ears dipped. "That was a lie... She does, far down the line, but she does, Nyaa~."

Silas said nothing. He kept gently working the cloth along her neck, but his jaw had gone tight.

He remembered the black sand pouring out of Iunu’s citadel, the Sub-Suppression Engine screaming as it broke, and Harper’s face twisted into a stranger’s grin while a god spoke through her mouth.

’...Fucking Ititius.’ Silas thought as he remembered how hard it was to throw a punch to that face. ’I’m glad I killed him.’

He took a slow breath through his nose and let it go.

"For days I whispered to her from her bedside table," Nitocris went on. "I promised her the strength to stand beside you... One morning I told her the final step was to open her core to me completely. She trusted me. She dropped every ward she had and I took her body, Nyaa~."

She was quiet for a few heartbeats.

"I used her flesh to walk into Iunu and slaughter every last soul of Nefertari’s bloodline... All of them." Her voice wavered for the first time.

"I terrified that girl. I hurt her to keep her quiet and all that blood I spilled in Iunu... it was a beacon. It’s how Ititius found his way back to the world. He tore me out of her, crushed me, and wore her like a coat, Nyaa~"

Her small body was trembling now, and Silas realized it had nothing to do with the cold.

"The last thing I ever told her was that I thought of her as my friend," she said. "I didn’t even get to finish the word... He crushed me halfway through it, Nyaa~."

She lifted her golden eyes to his.

"I’m sorry," she whispered. "She was a brave, devoted child... She didn’t deserve to be used as a door for that abomination, Nyaa~."

Silas let the towel rest against her neck.

"You told me on the street that you and Ititius are one," he said.

There was no edge in his voice now, there was only the need to understand.

"How does that work?"

Nitocris tucked her paws against her chest.

"Because I was the First Per-aa, and so was he," she said. "After Nefertari pushed my body into the rift, it rotted in the dark for three hundred years... Somewhere down there, the woman who bled for her people decided humanity was weak. She cast away her own name and her own face, and forged herself into a god... A man, of all things as well. That god was Ititius. I was only the piece of her that stayed behind in the blade, Nyaa~."

She looked toward the swirling water.

"When he crushed me, what was left of me was pulled back into him... We were the same soul, after all then you killed him in Khemet. Your attack destroyed his soul but mine survived... In the collapse, what was left of me took over and swallowed the rest of him before the void could. Soul business is never clean, mortal... It’s tangled and messy and ancient, Nyaa~."

"And now?" Silas asked. "Is there any of him left in you?"

"A withered cinder," she said plainly. "A tiny splinter of him, locked under my own seals. It has no voice and no will... It’s far too weak to mean anything. You don’t need to fear the sand god crawling out of my throat, Nyaa~"

The water had nearly reached the brim now.

Silas reached over and shut the tap off, and the bathroom fell quiet except for the soft drip of the spout and the hum of the vent overhead.

Silas looked down at her for a long, quiet moment.

For weeks he’d thought of Ititius as a dead thing, a closed door and now a piece of that door was sitting in his lap, shivering, with soot on her whiskers, apologizing to him.

He saw the exhaustion in her small body, the dust still clinging to her paws, and the guilt she’d been carrying across an entire desert and a strange city just to find the girl she’d wronged.

He reached down and smoothed the soft fur behind her ear with his thumb.

"Alright," he said softly. "I forgive you..."

Nitocris blinked. Her golden eyes snapped wide open.

"What?" she squeaked, her whiskers twitching violently. "Just like that? I nearly destroyed your companion! I brought a calamity down on your heads! Don’t you want blood recompense? Shouldn’t I kneel on hot embers and swear forty oaths of servitude, Nyaa~?"

"You apologized and you told me the truth," Silas said with an easy shrug. "Harper’s alive, Ititius is dead, and you’ve spent weeks getting chased by alley rats and eating out of bins... from what I can see. I think the universe already punished you, no point holding a grudge against a cat."

Nitocris stared up at him, and her breath caught in her small throat. In her kingdom, mercy had been a transaction, bought with gold, land and hostage princes.

A ruler who forgave without demanding tribute was either a fool or a corpse waiting to be buried.

Silas Graves looked like neither... He looked like a man who was simply strong enough to afford to be kind.

A strange warm flutter rippled through her chest.

’Curse this boy...’ she thought, her tail twitching against his thigh. ’Why does he make it so difficult to despise him...?’

Harper had described him a thousand times, but Harper had only ever talked about his eyes, his shoulders and his smile... She’d never once mentioned this.

She’d crossed a desert on four paws expecting to be cursed, hunted or thrown out into the street the moment anyone learned what she’d done.

She’d spent nights under restaurant awnings rehearsing apologies in her head, and not one of those rehearsals had ended like this.

She lifted her nose in a desperate attempt to salvage her pride.

"Well," she huffed, looking away into the steam. "At least you have the wisdom to recognize my benevolent nature... You’re slightly less of a barbarian than I first presumed, Nyaa—"

Silas’s hands shifted.

He gripped her under her front legs, lifted her off his lap and dropped her straight into the warm water.

SPLASH!

"NYAAAAAA~!"