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

“Then this will be a quick conversation.”

“What about me?” Ruck asked.

“Guard the horses.”

“But I know this place. I can help you.”

“Not this time.”

“You better not be ripping me off.” Janis chuckled. “I’ll sneak inside. You won’t even know I’m there. I can be like your very own snatch-it.”

“What?”

Ruck grinned. “The arm I used to steal your stuff.”

He looked at Sciana. She shrugged. “Fine,” Janis said. “Just be careful.” Ruck cheered as he walked the rest of the way up the ridge. Sciana grabbed his arm as he made to follow.

“I recognize what you did back there was to save us. Among my people, such an act is…”

He nodded. “I know.”

She nodded back. “That boy is our responsibility now.”

“I won’t let anything happen to him.”

She didn’t pull her eyes away, though he could tell it took genuine effort. “I’ll secure them and come in after you.” She gripped his hand. “This is a terrible power you have now. It must be you that wields it, and not the other way around.” He remembered their conversation the night before. How she’d condemned the ancient priests and thaumaturge for their selfishness. “If you don’t…”

She wore the struggle within her without shame. To be allied with a sorcerer was bad enough, but one as close to a mage as him? “I understand,” he replied. He let her go. He missed the warmth of it.

The shrine, if that’s indeed what it had ever been, was another ancient Trajan ruin wallowing in the Waste. The only difference was this one was rebuilt. The customary dome of the Trajan style was cracked open like an egg, the building itself overgrown with dead vines and crusted with mold, but it looked sturdy. Perhaps it had been a palace or a fortress of the local satrap. It was possible it had even been a temple. Janis didn’t really care.

He didn’t see Ruck as he walked up the path towards the structure, but he could feel the boy’s presence nearby thanks to his burgeoning experience with the Shimmer. There were also minds beyond a large double door that towered up towards the roof of the structure. How many exactly he didn’t know, but enough that the symbiote squirmed with anticipation. Ornamental towers flanked the door on either side, one of which was leaning so far to Janis’s left he wondered what force was keeping it up.

“Who goes there?” A voice called. From its pitch, Janis figured it to be from atop the not-leaning tower. He kept walking. “Stop now or we’ll fire on you,” the voice yelled again. Janis stopped about thirty paces from the door. He looked up at the tower above him, his robe whipping in the wind. It was five stories up, only a little higher than the roof of the complex.

“I’m a traveler,” Janis yelled. “On pilgrimage.”

“What makes you think we accept them?”

“Nothing,” Janis shouted. The shouter waited. “I’ve lost my faith in the Yabboleth. I seek new truths. A new power to believe in.” It was a risk, but a calculated one. Qinra was of the Yabboleth, and that alone would make his bitterness sound authentic. They were the accepted pantheon of beings these religious types followed, and whose Lethi the wizards, sorcerers, and mages had dealings with. Usually, anyway. If the townspeople viewed them as a cult, then it stood to reason they weren’t followers of the pantheon.

“Which of the false gods have you denounced?” the man yelled.

“Qinra. May his dark cloud disperse to nothing.”

Something shifted past the door. Janis watched as it creaked open. A sapien exited wearing blue robes that appeared almost black in the fading light. One figure became three as they spread out in front of him. “What is your name?” asked the one in the center.

“Ibin,” Janis responded. The man approached. Janis breathed in just before he slapped him across the face. Janis grit his teeth.

“You wish to enter? To serve on your journey to hidden knowledge?”

“Yes.”

The man slapped him again, this time hard enough to draw blood. Janis let it run down from his mouth. The man lifted his cowl enough for Janis to make out his face. He had a bulbous nose smothered with warts and scars, a sign he had recently survived the pox. “If you’re found unworthy, we will slough you off into the Shimmer. Do you accept this risk?”

“I do.”

The ambassador grabbed him by the neck and analyzed his face the way a jeweler might inspect a precious stone. The two figures flanking him approached as the pox survivor let him go and turned to the door. “Follow.”

The inside featured the strange artificial lights of the Suzerainty, rehabbed enough to project a ghostly white hue from lamps strung along the walls haphazardly. It showed some level of ingenuity by the cultists to have figured out how to keep them powered. More than he’d care to admit. Janis followed the ambassador to a large central hallway, taking a right turn into a tubular one that curved back to the left. They passed one large metal door with a single porthole. Janis glimpsed what was on the other side: men in robes standing over sapien bodies in various forms of transition, their faces twisted in pain.

“You practice biomancy?”

The ambassador turned his head to the side briefly. “One of the great truths you shall learn to appreciate is change defines that everything. It is controlling that change that brings power, and serves the One True God.”

Janis nodded once, and the man turned back around. Biomancy was only practiced by one sorcerer school he knew of. Altering living creatures was even more difficult than creating new ones, and knowledge of both were closely held secrets. That these cultists were engaging in it meant they were competent, industrious, and insane.

They entered an expansive circular room. There were more lamps along the wall, but the center was lit by the stars through the cracked dome high above them. Janis took it all in. The white lamps hung from wires strung along the walls like vines. A few were set up on large pedestals aimed at the high walls, creating a dramatic shadow for the center of the chamber where a man was resting cross-legged, his eyes closed under the soft silvery starlight. There was no hair anywhere on his almost naked body, and the only thing covering his genitalia was a simple white loincloth.

“Malarlo,” the ambassador said. The mostly naked man opened his eyes but didn’t acknowledge the ambassador otherwise. “I apologize for disturbing your contemplation. Another pilgrim has approached us. He hopes to become a disciple.”

“Is that so?” Malarlo said. He stood up in one smooth motion and strode to the edge of the shadow to Janis’s left. His body was lanky, his skin albino white, showing he’d been inside for months and potentially years. Malarlo pulled up robes from the floor. They were as pearly white as his loincloth. He scrutinized Janis as he adjusted them on his body. “Let us hope he can survive the process better than the others.” He stepped closer. “It is not a simple path to arrive here. Few know of it.”

“I wandered for many days and nights,” Janis replied with as much gravity as he could muster. “I heard stories. Rumors. I had to see for myself.”

“There is something strange about you,” Malarlo said. Janis could feel the man’s mind probing his own, reaching out through the Shimmer to sense his feelings. He felt him reel back.

“You are a sorcerer,” Malarlo said.

“I was a follower of Qinra, but have abandoned him.”

“What is the name of the Lethi you’ve bonded with?”

To know the name of a sorcerer’s Lethi was to have power over them. “I don’t know,” Janis said and meant it. Malarlo appraised him with his cold eyes. They bulged with surprise. “I sense you tell the truth. How can you not know?”

“They left me for dead when Qinra abandoned me. It approached me in the Shimmer. I did what I had to do to survive.”

Malarlo stepped closer, trying to peer under his still lowered hood. Janis didn’t move a muscle.

“A true symbiote. How interesting. May I?” He held out a hand towards Janis’s robes. Janis bit back his revulsion and opened his robe. Malarlo’s eyes widened with sickening wonder as he beheld the symbiote. “Beautiful,” he said. He reached out towards it but held himself from touching it. “You may close it,” Malarlo said. Janis did so. “What have you heard about us?”

“That you are a mysterious power that helped destroy the House Aphora of J’Soon, once powerful followers of Qinra.” It was a risk, but he had to take it. “That you gained an artifact of substantial power.”

“Is that so?” Janis felt the cultist’s eyes on him as he stared at the floor. “Where did you hear this?”

“I was in J’Soon when the massacre happened.” He waited. “Is it true?”

“True enough,” Malarlo said. The cultist crossed his arms. “You wish power.”

“I wish to serve a new master.”

Malarlo scoffed. “And what use would we have for such a sniveling cretin that would join anyone?”

“Not just anyone. I traveled far to come here.” Malarlo pursed his lips. Janis could feel him probing, hoping to discern the nature of Janis’s symbiote and the extent of his power. He could feel the thing squirming inside him with the urge to feed. He suppressed it. “Please, great Malarlo. I witnessed the overthrow of the only power I’d ever known. I wish only to know what you serve.”

“You dare make a demand of me?”

“No. I only hope to understand.”

“Then despair, for it’s not for you to understand. Only to serve.”

“And how may I know how to serve?”

“By swearing your loyalty, binding yourself to us, and renouncing all other gods.” Janis didn’t respond. The man had knowledge of the Shimmer, enough that such a promise could be binding. He couldn’t possibly allow that. “Do that, or merge with the Shimmer. The choice is yours.”

Janis nodded as if he was considering it. “There is another choice,” he said. Before anyone could react, he reached out to the symbiote and felt it surge with power, its hunger and arousal at the violence to come, almost causing him to collapse in a mixture of pleasure and ravenous desire. He killed the one behind him first, stretching his arm in one quick motion and directing his thoughts to super-heat the surrounding air. The cultist burst into flames, the light and heat causing the others to lift their arms up to shield their eyes. Janis let him burn, paying attention to it in the back of his mind to feed on the man’s life before it escaped to the Shimmer, but turning to the other cultist on his right. He motioned quickly with his right arm, the symbiote allowing him to channel the possibilities of the Shimmer into whatever reality he wanted. His simple finger movements projected telekinetic blades that sliced through the cultist’s body. He was pink mist in seconds.

The ambassador was faster to react. He repelled Janis’s first attempt at the same maneuver, shielding himself from the kinetic blades with quick maneuvers of his arms that reflected them into the walls of the temple, puncturing holes and casting dust across the now bloody-slicked floor. Janis fed on the escaping life forces of the two dying cultists, their bodies disintegrating as he super-heated the air in his hands and hurled the ball of fire at the ambassador. The man tried to block it, but the explosion hurled him back against the wall like spewed phlegm. Before he could gather himself, Janis jabbed with his