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

shimmering haze. He was about to chastise her when he saw it. A cloud of dust blooming into the air like smoke. Buzzing like a fleet of hornets grew in the desert air. He saw strange Settian chariots in his mind’s eye, ones that only the richest in J’Soon could afford. “The Ustis Hussars,” she replied. “The most ruthless and best outfitted of the Waste’s mercenaries.”

They shot into view. A column of Settian chariots and machines, metal huts on wheels that careened over the dry Waste with reckless abandon. They were a few leagues away, and yet the sound and sight of it was still intimidating. “How did you hear them before I did?”

She looked at him like he was an idiot again. He seethed. “If a lance is this close, they’ll have scouts nearby. We must be cautious.” She pulled back from the ledge. He watched the spectacle for a moment longer, then followed.

They loped along for the rest of the day. Janis would wait as Sciana demanded to stop and listen or scout ahead on her own. They ran out of water. His mind swam in a stew of negative possibilities. How much could he trust her? How long could they last without water? When B’lac rose ahead in the deep night like a beacon, he nearly collapsed off of his horse with relief. It was the dead of night when they rode under its simple gate. He took in little of the town as they approached what he hoped was an inn. She slid off of her horse; he followed suit. The inn was tight. Busy. Sciana spoke with the innkeeper as Janis stood in the corner eyeing the crowd. Gamblers playing bones. Two men keeping to themselves at a table at the far end of the room. They made a point of not looking at him. She returned and handed him a key. “I’m going to get water for the horses. You need sleep.” He grabbed the key and went upstairs.

That night, he dreamed of falling through an endless void. He was facing up like the towers of J’Soon rose on either side of him, growing longer and longer as he plummeted. His family watched, commenting on his fall as the long minaret above him cracked open, revealing a spinning clock. He felt something hunger in the void beneath him. Its tendrils reaching into his mind, digging deeper.

He woke up with his eyes still in the dream. It was obvious what the Shimmer was telling him. He was running out of time. He looked around. There was no Sciana, and the other simple bed looked undisturbed. He got up, threw on his robes, and departed.

The inn was in one of the town hubs. Out the front doors, merchants haggled with customers in small shops that neighbored it, encircling a small dry fountain in the center. The architecture was old Trajan, sandstone foundations with arches and rounded roofs. He wondered if some buildings could be traced back the thousand years or so to the old Suzerainty. He stepped out and checked on their horses. Cth’tata and Sciana’s horse were still tied up, so she hadn’t abandoned him. There was no way an Uma would leave their horses behind. He looked around the activity in the square again, unable to shake the feeling that it or something else was watching him. A gaze both distant and disconcerting. The symbiote was the reason he was still alive, but it was also a magnet for attention. The hunger returned. He clamped it down. He now had two mouths to feed. The prospect of what it enjoyed consuming made him sick.

He perched himself at a table in the inn's corner and ordered some breakfast, a plate of vegetables with cheese. He looked for Brethor among the other customers, but one resembled the stern man from his memory. It wasn’t much. A few images of the man’s face, hazy recollections of his training. The mercenary captain had claimed someone closer to him than Orinax had betrayed him. Could it be Brethor? How much did he know? He searched his memories for an answer. His breakfast came. He ate as he kept trying to remember. Nothing came. How long could he afford to wait?

“Have a few specs for a game of chance?” a voice said. Janis turned and looked down at a boy. He was maybe 15, with a face like an egg set on its side and a pair of dirty goggles over a bandana browned by dust and sweat. He was scrawny, wearing a ripped and filthy tunic and pants. Obviously a beggar. Janis opened his mouth to shoo the urchin away when a stream of memories him in a torrent. He had a friend like this once. A boy he met on the streets. Yes… Motie. Later, he’d taken him into their house as his compatriot to save him from the street. Same short brown hair and strong cheekbones. Same eyes. Like a younger brother. Motie had always been there for him. Where was he now?

“Hey. You drunk?” the boy asked.

Janis realized he’d been staring at the kid with his mouth hanging open. He closed it. “No,” Janis said.

“How about one game? Just a half-spec to start, so you can learn the rules.”

Janis looked away to hide his tears. Motie had been there that night. He suppressed a sob. This was too much. “I said no.”

“Maris won’t like it if you just sit here looking gloomy. Ruins business.”

“I don’t know who Maris is, and I don’t care.”

Someone dropped a glass at the bar, catching everyone’s attention. Janis’s reflexes were quick enough, however, to catch the boy’s arm as it pulled back from the small fold in his robes where he kept food and coins. He was about to smile at the brazen pick-pocketing attempt when the boy pulled away and revealed it wasn’t his arm, but a wiry metal appendage instead. The boy reached past Janis’s grip and plucked the meager treasure from the contraption’s hold.

“Thanks, mister!”

“What?” Janis said. The boy scrambled to the door. “Hey,” Janis yelled.

A man laughed at the bar. Janis leaped up from his chair and after the boy. When he pushed through the door, the sun struck his face so hard he nearly fell back through it. He hissed, then listened. Pit pat pit pat. The kid was racing away to his left. He ran after the sound before his eyes adjusted to the light, weaving through the crowd as best he could. The boy was only a few paces ahead, but he was fast, and the bazaar was crowded. As his eyes adjusted, he tried to pick out the brown bandana among the shawls, turbans, and dark reddish hair. He bumped past a woman with a large bag of goods that called out in angry shock. He kept going, the latent Shadowstalker skills coming back as he tried to keep up, feet flying across the rough earth as he found gaps and tiny openings to earn just a few seconds and stay on the kid.

More than once Janis was sure he’d lost him, only to pick out the percussive patter of his running or the bobbing bandanna. Before long, they were past the bazaar, racing down half-empty streets between clay houses connected above by wooden ramps and bridges. He lost him again. Leaped up the walls of some connected units and looked among the maze of alleys.

“Stop,” he yelled as the kid dove into a tiny alley just underneath him. Janis hopped onto the next roof and listened, senses attuned to the trembling of wind chimes and someone washing food in the house underneath him. He felt the boy make a break for the open, but when he went to find him, he saw only a massive junkyard. Janis hopped across the rooftops and dropped to the ground.

It was a graveyard of ancient metals and Trajan artifacts, some of them as far back as the Suzerainty’s time, stacked in mounds that towered higher than the houses whose rooftops he’d just been traversing. Janis walked between the heaps of ancient trash, sensitive to every sound and tremor in the place. It was the perfect hiding place for a thief. He had to be ready for anything.

Janis found him in the center of a three-story rusted chassis. Janis approached behind him as he counted his treasure. The kid was overconfident, his attention entirely consumed by the meager gains, but he nearly got away again just as Janis jumped and grabbed him by the tunic.

He flung his arms and legs out, scrambling to land a blow. Janis held him out at arm's length and slapped the haphazard attacks away.

“Let me go, you sad madman,” the boy screamed.

“Give me back what’s mine.”

“Who chases a kid through an entire market just for a couple specs?”

“I do. Now give it here.”

The kid flung them onto the floor. “Fine, take your money and go. You might be even poorer than me.”

Janis dropped him and, despite the shame of it, picked up the few coins from the floor, secreting them away in his robes again as he stood back up. The boy was perched on some junk in the chassis's corner, his small body encased in shadow with the harsh beams of Urias’s suns cutting across the gap between them from the wide-open side of the old artifact. From the way he was standing, Janis could make out a small crossbow in his right hand.

“What’s that?”

“A crossbow, what does it look like?”

“You built that yourself?”

The boy squinted at him, suspicious. “Yeah. Don’t even think about testing me. I can put a bolt through your eye, easy.”

Janis stood up. Memories of Motie returned. He tried to push them away, but they weren’t having it. They were about the same age, even, from when he met Motie. 15 or 16. “I wouldn’t dream of it. What’s your name?”

The kid shifted his head back. “Ruck.”

“That a family name?”

“Go rut yourself.” Janis laughed. “What’s your name you think you’re so special?”

“Janis,” Janis replied.

“Yeah, well, that’s a stupid name to me. What kind of family name is that?”

“A cursed one, most likely,” Janis replied. “It was of House Aphora.”

Ruck’s eyes softened in the dim light, but he didn’t lower his crossbow. “You’re lying,” he said. “They’re rich.”

“Were rich,” Janis said. “Now, all dead.” He winced. He hadn’t actually said it out loud like that.

Ruck swallowed. Janis felt Sciana slip inside before he saw her. “It’s okay, Sciana. The boy’s harmless.”

“Who are you talking to?” Ruck asked.

“Me,” Sciana answered, stepping into the light from under a shadow just inside the chassis to their right, an arrow notched in her bow. “Drop it,” she said.

Ruck looked at her, scared but also disappointed, as though the game was now up, but he still wanted to play.

“I said he’s harmless,” Janis said.

“I heard you.”

Ruck lowered his crossbow. Sciana followed suit with her bow. “Any sign of Brethor in town?” Janis asked.

“No. But there’s a man here who might know something, a priest. There’s some gossip he recently met with a couple that sound like your sister and her kidnapper.”

“Priest?” Ruck asked. “The only one calling himself a priest around here is Yaffar, and he’s a priest the same way my brother’s a pawnbroker.”

“What do you mean?” Janis asked.

Ruck jumped down onto the metal of the chassis, causing the shell to shake. “I mean, he’s a liar. But unlike Ifir, he’s also crazy, even crazier than you.”

“How’s that?”

“He’s a member of some religion, but it’s just a bunch of people in the desert trying to dig up old Trajan stuff.”

“A religion? Like a cult?”

“That’s