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

eyes towards him and then to the window. “How much do you remember about the night of the ambush?”

Janis remembered his mother’s prostrate corpse on one table, blood gushing from her throat. “I remember enough.”

Brethor nodded. “My search held me up from B’lac because I was extracting some answers from an Arawat commander. Orinax had approached them with a deal: he’d betray your father if they let him leave the estate with whatever he wanted. They’d always planned to kill him once they had their victory, but Orinax is a wizard. They’ve had little luck so far.”

“Why kidnap Renea?”

Brethor shook his head. “All I know is that he wanted this Channeler you mentioned.”

“What does it do?”

Brethor analyzed him. “Your father hired treasure hunters from time to time. Crews that brave the ancient Trajan ruins. Your brother Aron called it a waste of money, but your father enjoyed financing it, anyway. The gambler in him, I suppose. This time, he actually got his hands on something. A true artifact of power from the old Suzerainty. Or so the treasure hunter claimed. Your father asked me to verify its origin.”

“And did you?”

Brethor shrugged. “I showed replicas of it to someone who’d know. I’m no sorcerer, but according to this source, it allows someone who knows how to use it to channel power directly from the Shimmer. No intermediary or sacrifice required.”

Janis thought about that. Usually, magic required becoming host to, dealing with, or subordinating a Lethi from the Shimmer to help affect the world from outside itself. The Lethi were desperate to be manifested, and sapiens were desperate for power. They were the relay, but sapiens were the energy. Sorcerers and mages gave of themselves or others, and wizards used secret methods, but there was no way to avoid it. The wizard apothegm popped into his mind, “Magic is mind and body.” If there were a way to bridge the Veil directly, then…

“With it one of the god-beings could-”

“Yes,” Brethor said. “Someone could use it to manifest one of the Yabboleth here fully. Not as a mage, but as a living entity.”

Janis thought of the presence behind Orinax and the wizard’s power over Qinra. “He could have made a pact with one.”

“Or he could be trying to harness their power for himself. We don’t know enough to say what the wizard wants with it. All we know is that he was willing to kill your family to get it, and that his plan has something to do with this cult. The important thing is to find out what we can here, then split up and meet in Qestis.”

“Why Qestis?”

“Something big is happening there with this cult. I’ll know more when you meet me there.”

“You said you knew I’d come this way because you know what Orinax wants.” Brethor finished his drink, then placed the glass down carefully. Janis waited. “What is it?”

“We have tasks to take care of in this city. What you called a cult is actually the Society of Yrgamon. There is a coven here. If we hurry, we can take it. Orinax is dangerous and cunning, we must be ready before-”

“I’m ready now,” Janis interjected. Brethor clenched his jaw. “You know where he is. You have no right to hold it from me. Renea was your charge and mine. We have a duty to rescue her.”

“Don’t speak to me of duty. Yours lies with me. I am your master, and more of a father to you than your own ever was. I will not let you waste your life on a suicide mission.”

“Renea doesn’t have time for you to wait.” Janis leaned in. “I’m as good as I’m ever going to be. He won’t be expecting it. He’s arrogant, like most wizards, and mortal like them as well.”

Brethor eyed him for a long minute. Janis didn’t waver. The old man sighed. “He’s to be northeast of here, between Liliath and Iyre on the Channel.” Janis exhaled. “You have little time. He’s being picked up and ferried north.”

“How do you know?”

“The Arawat.”

“They’re going to ambush him?”

Brethor nodded once. He stood up out of his seat. “You’re going to need to use everything I’ve taught you, but he will weak.”

“Why are you telling me this instead of showing me?”

“Because it is foolish and petty, as your family often was.” The sting hit him deep. “But I can see you are committed. Not even the fires of the Aphora estate could burn out your loyalty to them, though it should have. Perhaps it’s made it worse. We have important business in Qestis, but if you must do this thing, I will not stop you. Should you die, it will leave our guild in disgrace, but I’ll not let you drag us from our mission.” He grabbed Janis’s shoulder and pulled him close. “You are a Shadowstalker. My greatest protege. And when you have finished with this petty need for revenge, you will join me in Qestis and help usher in a new age for our guild.”

“You wouldn’t think it foolish if you knew the power I have now.” Brethor looked confused. As he opened his mouth to answer, Janis felt Qinra’s sickly presence saturate his senses. He rose from the stool like a delirious drunk, knocking it to the floor. Brethor steeled himself. “Qinra is here,” Janis said.

They both turned and took in the busy tavern. A seated bald man to their left cackled at his table. Others played ziggurat, dhoka pipes in their mouths; groups of mercenaries haggled with merchants looking to get on the road as servers slipped between and around them. “You’re sure?” Brethor asked. Janis nodded. The mage was close, but in the chaos he couldn’t pinpoint where. He searched the faces of the men nearby. Hardened, bearded faces, some brown and others orange; some waxy with alcohol, others brittle by years of smoking. All sapien, though. “We’ll take the back stairs out,” Brethor said. Janis didn’t move. He could just see a man through the crowd, dressed in brown robes, his face shrouded under the ethereal Vrearean lamps.

“It’s too late for that,” Janis said.

Brethor unsheathed a sword at his side. The mage surrendered all pretense. His body glowed from the inside like smoldering charcoal as he shed the robes. In his mind’s eye, Janis could see his face, the pain clear on what had once been sapien but was now contorted into a misshapen mass of skin and bone. It screamed and lashed out at him with its arm, flaming tendrils stretching from within the cracks in its skin, slicing through the unfortunates close to it as they swung blindly toward Janis.

The screams subsided as the flames disintegrated their throats. He kicked Brethor to the bar as the stream ignited the air between him, singeing his robes. The tavern descended into chaos. The mage howled at him again, its open mouth exuding light and heat like a dragon. The next attack wouldn’t be so easy to dodge.

Janis raced away from the bar toward the banister overlooking the whole of the inn, people now peeking out from behind closed doors to see what all the ruckus was about. Vrearan soldiers would be here any minute, and if Vrear’s reputation held true, they wouldn’t hold Janis in much higher regard than the creature now trying to kill him. “Janis,” Brethor yelled. The old man flung a knife at the mage, striking him in his chest and unleashing more of the eldritch glow. “Get behind him.” The mage turned his attention to Brethor and flung a wave of fire at him. Brethor jumped behind the bar as the rolling wave crashed against it, burning away the wooden facade and inspiring the metal beneath to glow. The air smelled of melted skin and burned hair.

Janis looked for the closest victim. It was a middle-aged man, drunk by the look of it, probably a traveling laborer. Janis didn’t have time to think about it. He reached out through the symbiote as the mage stalked towards Brethor. The man scrambled to his feet, half stunned, and then Janis was on him, his knife in the man’s chest. Again and again. He let the symbiote consume the man’s essence into himself and felt power surge through him. Heat and pain spread across his back. He turned and conjured a kinetic shield just as a ribbon of flame nearly struck him.

Fire sprayed onto the walls, the bar itself already an inferno, as other denizens burned alive or hurled themselves from the balcony. Janis stood up, one outstretched hand holding the oppressive flames at bay as he walked back out to face the creature.

He felt sick at the thought of it, but as the power drained from him just holding the thing back, he also knew that if he wanted to survive, he had no other choice. With his other arm, he sent telekinetic blasts that punctured the chests of a group of visitors trying to make the stairway nearby, sucking their life force into himself as he strode towards Qinra’s slave. He projected the shield away from him and toward it with the boost in his energy, driving the flames back on the thing until it finally gave way and stopped. In the thin gap of time before the next attack, he could see that the mage profane body. Flesh slid off its frame as the demon inside screeched with rage.

“Scream all you want, Qinra,” Janis said. “I’m going to break you into pieces.”

The mage laughed. It was no sapien laugh, but seemed to echo through unseen dimensions around him. “You think you are powerful, fallen son? I have seen the future paths of your branch’s growth. Every one ends in your annihilation.”

The mage hunched over as if under the weight of so much power, or perhaps in pain. Janis let the energy he’d stolen blossom within him. “We mortals all know that,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I can’t kill a god-being on my way out.”

Without warning, it leaped at Janis, its arms holding two glowing orbs in each hand. He tried to catch it with a telekinetic slice in mid air but only achieved cutting one orb. Flames leaked from it like blood from a wound, spreading across the floor and obscuring the creature’s path. Janis barely dodged as the second orb hit the ground behind him.

The world erupted into a haze of splinters, metal, and blood. Janis felt himself falling. He twisted in midair as best he could, his body wielding the old Shadowstalker training even as his mind struggled to understand what was happening.

Stop our fall.

Janis reached out his hand and compressed the air between him and the ground, creating a kind of packet that he fell into smoothly. He shot his hand up just as a massive chunk of the ceiling nearly toppled on him, shielding his physical body from direct impact as it shattered itself on his barrier, spikes of pain shooting through his mind. He peered through the settling dust. Shadowy forms scurried this way and that, seeking cover or a way out. Everything was muffled as though in a sandstorm. Janis walked through the ruins towards what he thought was the 1st floor bar, his senses keen, the symbiote’s power still thrumming.

The mage’s glow gave him away. He was trying to hide among a group of dazed survivors as they scrambled for any exit they could find, all of them cast into a slight red haze that even in the dust riddled air he could make out from halfway across the now ruined bar.

“Get down,” he yelled. A few realized in time. He couldn’t worry about the rest.

He jabbed with his fingers, unleashing a wave of telekinetic blasts, each