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

his inert body sliding off the edge. Ruck grabbed his arm as his legs slid off the side. “Stop,” he yelled. The creature didn’t listen. He grit his teeth and held on. Janis’s body dangled precariously, but the man didn’t wake. Ruck yanked harder… harder…

He edged Janis back onto the bouncing saddle and held. The Zata showed no signs of slowing. He hoped it was at least going in the right direction.

Meanwhile, Janis dreamed. He imagined calling out in a pitch black cave. “Renea,” he yelled. His voice reverberated through a space too massive to comprehend, then drifted away. Leaving him only with silence.

“Did you betray me?”

*****

THE SUN WAS rising when they arrived at the Channel. The largest river in Saurius, it had many names, but only one function everyone accepted. Its water sparkled in the morning light, a far cry from the muddy marshes they’d crossed further south. After a few hours, the Zata finally stopped on a hill leagues away from Vrear, under a canopy of dry thorn root. It was one of the few breeds of foliage still thriving in Saurius. Ruck slid Janis off the creature’s back and then fell to the ground, landing in a puff of dust. He brushed himself off, wary of the thing’s horns and regal head, and slid the Shadowstalker to the slight shade offered by the root’s trunk. The Zata wandered off.

“Hey,” Ruck yelled.

“Leave him,” Janis said. “He did as he promised. I’ll do the same.”

Janis coughed as the Zata trotted away. “How do you feel?” Ruck asked.

“Fine,” Janis replied. He stood up with a thick grunt.

“I’m tired. We should rest.”

Janis stood to his full height and brushed the dust from his robes. His mind was still hazy. The same as it might be after a long night out. That was something he used to do, he remembered. Drinking. Whoring. “We don’t have time,” he said.

“We’re lucky we got out of there alive.”

“It wasn’t luck.”

“I told you not to trust that guy,” the boy said. Janis had forgotten about Brethor in the mayhem. He hadn’t seen where the wily old murderer had gotten to, but Brethor had killed mage’s before. The man was old because he was a survivor.

“Duly noted.” Janis looked over the grassy hills and wondered how a place so austere and cold like the Domain could support such abundant life. In J’Soon a single hill like this one would cost a significant part of his family’s fortune. He knew because they were among the only families in the city to possess one. Yet here these were empty.

Someone screamed in the distance. “Did you hear that?” Janis asked.

“No. What?”

Metal clanged. He imagined pairs of feet sliding through the grass. Bright blades streaking through morning light. He remembered what Brethor had said and strode north towards the sound. “Janis? Hey.” Ruck ran to keep up. “You’re not healthy enough.” Janis didn’t slow down to accommodate him. Ruck hopped along to face him. “I heard you talking in your sleep. You were saying some weird things. I know you want to get your sister, but you have to think about yourself. You sounded scared. Tired. You did a lot to get us out of there. It must have taken something from you to do it. Just wait a few minutes.” Janis continued, drawn to the haunting sounds he’d heard just a moment ago. He could swear he’d heard fighting just over the next hill.

He didn’t realize Ruck was still talking until they crested the hill. The boy’s silence became clear then, enforced by a scene of bloody carnage that stretched in the field below them. Arawat banners fluttered in the wind off the Channel above retainers floating face down in the crystal waters of its bank. Black splotches scorched the earth where men had once stood, and the ash of grass burned off in the fighting smothered the entire scene. Janis should have been happy seeing what had become of his enemies. All he felt was the hollowness of impending doom.

“Who are they?” Ruck asked. Janis marched down the hill. Ruck waited, scared, but then rushed him to catch up. As he got closer, Janis could make out the contorted faces of dead mercenaries at his feet. Some were impaled on their own spears, others half incinerated or split asunder. There thick puddles of sludge where entire squads must have been liquidated. Janis could read carnage the way a sorcerer read books. Whoever had done this had both relished it and considered it an afterthought.

He stopped when he saw Jah’san Arawat’s banner. Twin black scimitars forming a white rising sun with a red background. Janis slowed on his approach. He remembered Jah’san’s thin smile as he’d watched his men bludgeon Janis’s father with bats. Remembered the sound it made when they’d cracked his skull. Janis walked over the twisted bodies until he picked out the most garish armor. He kicked the body over and saw Jah’san’s face. His mouth was frozen in unimaginable pain, eyes blown open to stare at eternity. Janis recalled what those eyes had seen as Ruck stepped closer behind him. “Do you think Renea is here?” Janis’s anger simmered. It had nowhere to go, and so his mind stewed on it. He’d been so focused on Orinax, he’d forgotten that this was his true enemy. And now he was dead. “Janis? Should we… look?”

“No,” Janis said. He swallowed and looked up to a gently sloping hillside to the north. Grass still swayed there in the easy wind. He strode over the bodies towards it.

“Do you think she escaped? Got on a boat, maybe?” Ruck followed, but kept his distance. Janis climbed the hill, passing a few more bodies along the way. Some of them were dressed in the white robes of the Society. So, they’d planned to meet here, and the Arawat had planned their destruction. The boy was likely right, and the survivors had fled by boat. But…

He was on the other side of the hill, facing north up the Channel and away from the carnage. The grass fluttered in great sheets around him, giving him the look of a forgotten epitaph or ruin of the Waste left to feed time’s erosion. Janis took in the scene as Ruck approached, admiring a rising sun as its rays spread across the twinkling water beyond them. Ruck’s breath caught in his throat as he stopped by Janis’s side. The two of them stood silent, waiting for the wizard to do something fantastic. Open a portal to another branch, perhaps, or shapeshift into an unspeakable horror. After a minute of tranquility, Janis unsheathed his dagger and approached. Ruck put an arm across his chest. “It’s got to be a trap,” he said. Janis looked at the boy but didn’t see him. “Why would he ever just be sitting there like that? After all this time, how would he not fight you to the death?”

Janis grasped Ruck’s wrist and peeled the boy’s hand away. He walked up behind the wizard, crossing him by his right shoulder, and faced him. Orinax didn’t look up at him, his face bent low as if in deep contemplation, his black eyes quivering with tears as he peered north with hopeless attachment.

“Look at me,” Janis said. When he didn’t, Janis grabbed his face. “I said look at me.”

Orinax blinked repeatedly. He smiled like a madman does when a person stumbles in the street. “You’ve come too late, Shadowstalker,” Orinax said, his voice ragged.

“How long?”

“A few hours at least.” Orinax wheezed a high-pitched laugh. “She is gone. Gone away.” The truth of his words dragged on his face as if he’d attached weights to his mouth. He wailed, flung his head to the ground, and beat his neck.

“When did she take you?” Janis asked, his throat tight. Orinax wouldn’t stop. Janis grabbed his arm before the next blow and yanked him up. “Speak.”

Orinax ran his tongue over parched lips. “It was… so long ago. So sweet… so sweet.” Janis grabbed him by the neck. He squeezed the dagger’s hilt hard into his palm, feeling its edges like a ledge. Orinax looked at him. “Please,” the wizard said. “Kill me.” He sobbed again. “She’s abandoned me.”

Janis pushed him away and hissed with frustration. Ruck approached. “What’s… happened to him?”

“Renea,” Janis whispered. His spine tingled just saying her name.

“Your sister? But I thought…” Ruck trailed off.

“Orinax didn’t take her - she took him. Possessed his mind, perhaps ages ago, and turned him into her puppet. With him as her cat’s paw, she could make deals with cultists and god-beings, even my family’s worst enemies.” The thoughts connected into a web whose full structure he still didn’t comprehend, but whose strands he could feel.

“But why?” Ruck asked.

“For a loftier goal than you could ever understand,” the wizard spat.

Janis pulled him close. Orinax struggled against his grip. “Help me anyway.” The wizard shut his eyes and then opened them. “Someone has polluted her mind. Who?” He squeezed. “Tell me.”

“No one,” Orinax managed. Janis squeezed harder despite himself.

“Janis, you’ll kill him,” Ruck said.

“You lie,” Janis said, inching his face closer. “I felt the presence moving you. Tell me the truth.” He watched the wizard’s eyes bulge, felt his artery grow weak, but the man just grinned at him, spittle leaking out onto his cheek. Janis flung him to the ground. Orinax coughed and rubbed his neck.

“No lie,” Orinax said.

“Then why?”

Orinax smiled as though taken by bliss. “An idea.”

Janis wanted nothing more than to stab him right then. “What idea?”

“Trees that grow on their own,” Orinax replied. “Harvests so plentiful you can pick fruit from the street.”

“That makes little sense.”

Orinax laughed. “Novice sorcerer, what can you say about what makes sense or not?”

The wizard’s robes were in tatters. Renea had left him here for Janis to find. It was a message: he knew nothing, and she wasn’t afraid of whatever Janis might do with him. In fact, she’d left him to die.

“She betrayed us… for a dream?”

“Yes,” Orinax said. “But what is the power of one family in one city next to the power to create a new world?” Orinax’s grin melted into a desperate sob. “Take me with you again, Renea. Please…”

Orinax fell to the earth and took great heaps of it in his hands, as though grabbing her robes. Ruck walked towards him. “Look, I know this guy helped do some terrible things. But look at him. Maybe we just leave it. The people you really want are back in J’Soon, right? Maybe we go back there and fight them. Or just go somewhere else. Anywhere. You can be whoever you want now.” He paused, breathing in to gather courage. “It’s like my brother back in B’lac. I could’ve tried to mess him up after he sold me to the Society, but why bother? It was just going to ruin my life. I realized the only person I owed something to was myself. I was free.”

There was something appealing about it. Total freedom. The opportunity to cast off his family name and responsibilities, the terrible weight of their deaths and mantle. But just thinking about it, he remembered his mother’s corpse again, his brother Gar’Sha calling for help, the carnage in what had once been his family’s sanctuary.

“I owe myself the truth, and I