Disciple of Vengeance by CC Rasmussen (phonics readers .txt) 📕

Guilt wasn’t an emotion Janis had indulged in very often. At least, from what he could remember of his past life. It certainly felt that he did now. “Then go in peace,” he said. Sciana snickered, coughing, before she fell back on the seat and let herself slide away.

“Help her,” Ruck yelled.

“Take the wheel.” Janis didn’t wait to hear him argue, he just let go and jumped into the back with her. Ruck leaped past to replace him, the chariot nearly rolling over. Janis ignored the boy’s swearing and the woman dying at his feet to face down the Hussar chariot as its arc thrower locked in and fired. He swung his arm up and used a telekinetic wave to hurl it away from them. The symbiote gripped him in some deep recess of his primal mind.

Give her to me…

Janis squashed it, forcing it to take from his own life energy instead as he supercharged the electrons in the space between his hands, letting their furious buzzing grow until arcs of lightning raced between his fingers faster than his eyes could see. The top of the chariot suddenly opened and two Hussars climbed from inside. Before Janis thought to hurl his counterattack, they leaped onto the chariot.

He hurled it as they landed. The lightning struck the outside of the chariot, electrocuting Hussars within. He consumed them as the chariot veered away, but he could feel a few of them were still alive inside. He’d injured the driver, but the Hussar had insulated himself from Janis’s attack somehow. The two Hussars landed on their chariot and held on to get leverage as Janis collapsed, his chest on fire from the energy it’d taken to strike the chariot.

“Janis,” Ruck yelled as one of them lifted his sword to cut him. In one quick move, Janis blocked it with his dagger. The Hussar kicked him, then thrust with his scimitar. Janis dodged to the right, the blade slicing him on his left side as he lunged forward with the dagger in his right hand, catching the Hussar in the chest. The man grunted through his mask and tried to shift. Janis didn’t give him the chance, leaping forward and onto the man, stabbing him repeatedly. The symbiote fed on his life energy as Janis saw a shadow spread across the chariot below him. The other Hussar. There wasn’t room to dodge, nor the time to find another way. Janis turned to catch his enemy with a telekinetic blast, but there wasn’t time. He was going to die. The chariot lurched them all forward as Ruck braked hard.

The Hussar hurled into the dash face first with a sickening crunch. Janis grabbed the back of his head and bashed it into the dash again and again until it sounded like a wet sponge, then grabbed him by the chest and chucked him over the side. Ruck pressed the button to start the chariot again, but it wheezed pathetically. The boy’s hand shook as he tried again. Janis looked behind them and saw the Hussar chariot barreling down on them.

“Ruck.”

“I know,” the boy said.

“We need it now.”

“It’s not magic, I can’t-”

The heart of the thing thrummed to life. Ruck slammed on the pedal and they lurched forward towards the widening ravine. It plunged into marshlands about half a league below. Tall cliffs loomed on either side of the remaining path.

“Are we going to get through that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. His young was face etched with concern as he stared down the incoming soggy earth before them. If they couldn’t get through it, the Hussars certainly could not. The road down was littered with rocks, trees hanging over the path from the ridges above. It was only a few chariot lengths across. Their own felt like it might disassemble at any moment. Janis reached behind him and felt the broken arrow in his back. He gripped what was left of the shaft and yanked it out, along with chunks of his flesh.

“If we don’t make it down there, we’re finished,” he said.

“I know,” Ruck replied. The Hussar chariot was gaining on them. At this rate, it’d take them before they could reach the marshland. He was planning a way to slow down or even destroy the thing when they hit the trap.

It was a crude arrangement, probably a pressure plate under the earth connected to an assortment of metal spikes and debris that, once set off, snapped into the sides of the chariot, sending the thing rolling down the hill and setting off more traps on its way until it crashed against the last remaining bit of ridgeline as little more than an accretion of junk metal. The whole thing was over in seconds. Janis came to his senses to find himself still in the front seat, Ruck struggling to get out of the driver’s seat, blood and dust on the boy’s face. He regarded his hands like an audience member regards the play at a theater.

He remembered something from the last night at his parent’s estate. His older brother, Gar’Sha, Master-at-Arms, patting him on the back during the feast. “We finally did it, and you even had a part to play. Imagine that.” Gar’sha’s laugh was a deep chuckle, like his lungs were drums his personality beat on with practiced ease. What part had he played? He couldn’t remember. Only that he was already coming down from one drug the Shadowstalkers take for concentration, soma, and that only drinking would save him now. Except that it wouldn’t, would it? He should have never made it out of that feast. He turned and saw Renea standing behind him with Orinax, the wizard’s hand on her back as he smiled at Janis.

Something struck him across the face and he was back in the crashed chariot, Ruck’s brown eyes tight with fear as they stared into his own. “Wake up. We need to get out, now!”

Janis could hear the chariot bearing down on them outside, but it was slower than it had been. Twisted metal encased them in their own chariot, sunlight poking through as it does between gaps in a slaver’s stall.

“I can’t bend it back.”

“Stand back,” Janis said. He used the symbiote’s stolen power, gripping the edges of the metal with his mind and forcing it back. Ruck exhaled with awe as the metal bent back and opened up like a flower. Janis felt nauseous as he followed the boy out. The Hussars were maneuvering towards them carefully, following the path their wrecked chariot had made.

“What do we do?” Ruck asked. He looked out on the marsh. “We’ll never get through there without the chariot.”

Janis looked back inside and saw Sciana’s crumpled body in the tortured remains of the chariot. He remembered her lying next to him under the stars of the Waste, the cocky way she held herself, the glare in her eyes when she’d told him that this plan was doomed to fail. He heard her voice as if from the Shimmer. “We will not make it through there alive,” it rang. And she’d been right.

The rage built up in him. Rage at his ineptitude and weakness, at the Arawat and what they’d done to him and his family, at his own damaged memory and the Yabboleth who always, no matter what was claimed about them, played sapiens as puppets for their incomprehensible desires.

Ruck shouted something and Janis looked back up from his perch on the twisted metal to see the bandits had surrounded them once again on the ridge just above them. Ruck found cover under a small rock as arrows rained down around him, a few of the bandits racing to find footing just above Janis. He looked back up and saw they were attacking the Hussars as well. A bolt of energy struck the thing’s side, nearly blowing it open. The Hussars inside fired back, their arc caster turret lobbing a blue energy bolt back at the landing above.

He heard Ruck crying as he brought his legs to his chest. Could feel the life force of all the enemies arrayed against them like flickering flames in the inert darkness of the world. Flames that if he could bring into himself and the symbiote’s maw would burn inside and through him instead.

He wanted nothing more.

Janis pulled out the small dagger he kept in his boot and, with a tiny telekinetic push with his other hand, launched himself towards the ridge above. He grabbed a small bush there and climbed up onto the ledge before his weight could pull him back down to the earth below. There were half a dozen bandits before him, most with ranged weapons of various kinds, all wearing dirty tunics or leather armor, their faces sheathed with cloth or dusty clay masks. The one closest lifted the clumsy wood frame of a foreign arquebus at Janis and yelled in surprise.

Janis reacted with his old skills before he consciously thought to use them. He crouched as the man fired, the bullet streaking above him as he dashed across the five paces and sliced the shooter’s throat open. His left hand unsheathed the bandit’s scimitar as he twisted out of the way of the arrows and haphazard arquebus shots. The memories inhabited his body again, bringing them to life like a shadow stuttering between frames. He stalked them, their screams resonant as he flitted between their lives. His conscious mind caught up and jolted him back to the present. He was standing above the litany of their corpses, their blood splattered on his black and dusty robes. He controlled his breath.

“Please,” one of them said through his cheap synthetic mask. “Don’t kill me. I didn’t have a choice.”

He heard himself speak as though through a transponder. “Who directed you?”

He focused on the bandit. The sapien was on its back, arms trembling, head bobbing between prostration and pleading. “She came to us in our dreams. Some of us tried to deny but…” the cretin whimpered. “The pain was too much.”

“She?” He nodded. The pathetic bandit nodded before he could continue. Janis heard the battle going on in the ravine below.

“She commanded you to fight the Hussars as well?”

The sapien grabbed his leg. “Please,” he said. There was nothing more to learn from this one. Janis plunged his dagger into the sapien’s neck to make it quick, then let the symbiote devour him. It was like he’d just consumed a series of stimulants. He imagined himself as how the chariot would feel if it was fully charged, were the chariot a thing that could feel at all. The symbiote gripped him with ecstasy and, to his shame, he let it.

“Janis?” Ruck yelled from below. He sounded like he was trying to decide whether he should be scared, curious, or overjoyed. Janis approached the edge of the cliff and saw him standing behind the rock jumble below. “You’re alive,” Ruck shouted, excited. A massive explosion rocked the cliff, and they both looked up towards the battle. A cloud of dust smothered the Hussar armored chariot from a massive hole they’d blown out of the cliff. “We need to get out of here,” Ruck yelled.

“We won’t make it through the marsh fast enough without a way through,” Janis said. As if to gauge how right that could be, Ruck looked the other way and out over the great bog that stood between them and Vrear. Janis wished suddenly that he’d heeded Sciana about her cherished horses as well.

Horses…

Janis reached out through the symbiote to feel the life forces of the surrounding creatures. He tried to concentrate. It was a mess of feeling. He focused harder.