Palanti-Aarbo: Worship
It was all well and good enough to start a new religion, but Palanti-Aarbo hadn’t considered the vast paraphernalia and equipment involved in worshiping a god. Whether Palanti was fake or not didn’t matter; she needed to look real to all those on Xydak needful of divine permission to bring laxative-filled sweets to work or to drop medium-sized balloons filled with custard out their apartment windows.
Holy robes had been easy. All the Vijari did was wander into a high-end spa in Kuanis at the top of a mountain peak, studiously ignore the nude Draeg strolling around in the steam, and walk back out with a stack of red silk robes, and a pocketful of yils. Hopping the stone wall surmounted with an energy grid, while getting chased by small guard dragons, had proven to be more of a trial than he expected, but the repulsor-augmented pogo stick had nearly worked as he intended.
After acquiring a house of worship, Palanti-Arbo would later take a class on electric wiring. The sonic gauntlet exploding made sense, as it was overworked. Seeing a pogo stick wipe out more than 20 feet of fence and leave a crater behind indicated he didn’t have the power source wired properly.
It took more than a month of searching, and lots of explaining as to why a Vijari wearing oversized red robes and a stuffed chicken on his head was wandering about northern Xydak, before he found the perfect place in a small city near Valtir. The structure met all of his requirements: it was large, it was a place people enjoyed congregating, it had regular traffic flow along the street, and it kept people around for quite some time.
It was the Drunken Dragon Alehouse and Inn. Rooms were 25 yils a night, 75 if you wanted sheets, 100 if you wanted company, 125 if you wanted company who pretended you were attractive, and Palanti-Aarbo knew it would make a perfect church. The walls were thick stone, and the windows were already mostly shattered. He could imagine the savings on replacing them all with stained glass. The drunken howls put him in the mind to write a hymnal or two. Striding forward, hiking up his long robe, the Vijari was prepared to make an excellent offer to the owner.
The twin doors, resplendent with entwined dragons set in relief—with a minimum of rude graffiti, he noted—swung shut behind the short priest.
A moment later the short priest crashed through the one unbroken window on the bar’s right side.
“We don’t accept offworlders, you short, scrawny pouch of dragon spawn,” came the shout through the ruined window. “Now get, before we throw you off the mountain.”
Palanti-Aarbo kept quiet as he picked up his chicken, brushed the dust and glass shards from his long robe, and walked away.
The next day Palanti-Aarbo returned to the Drunken Dragon at midday. He hadn’t even made it to the top of the stairs when the doors flew open. A Draeg so tall he had to duck to get through the doorway, and who was nearly as wide as the opening, stepped outside. A fat, heavy piece of iron dangled from one hand. “Mervin’s Moderator” was etched along the club’s side; quite possibly with a nail, given the lettering quality.
“I told you, offworlders aren’t allowed. Get,” the Draeg, presumably Mervin, said, pointing his Moderator in the street’s direction.
“I have business here. I wish to buy your establishment,” Palanti-Aarbo said, adopting the solemn tone he assumed all priests used. While it would have worked for any priest taller than 5 foot 7, coming from the Vijari’s compact frame it sounded like a child imitating his father and saying, “Business, business, business. I run a business for business reasons.”
“Why?”
“I wish to bring religion to this remote mountaintop.”
The Draeg’s brows collapsed toward each other, pulling the rest of his face in with them. “We have our religion. Got plenty of temples and such.”
“But do you have the Goddess Palanti? Holy Divinity of Divine Mischief? The latest in theological discoveries?”
With a light backhand, Presumably Mervin and his Moderator knocked Palanti-Aarbo off the stairs, lofted him through the air, and sent him rolling back into the street.
The bartender didn’t even bother to laugh as he walked back into his establishment. His patrons, however, shrieked with laughter.
For the second time, Palanti-Aarbo picked himself off the ground, dusted off his robe, and adjusted his chicken. He forcefully stared at the ground as he walked away. He could feel the eyes of a gathering crowd focusing on him—not to mention hear the murmured comments and muffled laughter.
Those amused faces stayed fixed in his mind long after he had trudged out of town and into the dense forest.
Three days later, the little priest returned to Valtir at orbdown. With the fading light to his back, Palanti-Aarbo sat hunched over the controls of his stolen, half-dead hovercart as it crawled into town. A patchwork of aluminum, plastic, and wooden boards nailed, glued, and riveted together, the sputtering hovercart nearly drew as much attention as the load it was hauling: a dark black mesh sack so large it slumped over the cart’s sides. At random times it would bulge and thrash about, juddering the cart from side to side and forcing its driver to saw at the controls to keep it in a straight line.
Sparks from the lev engine scattered against the street as it juddered to a halt near the Drunken Dragon Alehouse. Before hopping down to the ground, Palanti-Aarbo reached behind his ear and pulled out a slightly bent, hand-rolled cigarette. Fortunately, his god did not require him to treat his body as a temple.
Harsh blue smoke hovered around his head and the stuffed, mightily ruffled chicken he wore. The Vijari ignored a fresh round of catcalls coming from the bar’s shattered windows as he walked around the hovercart.
Cigarette smoke churned in Palanti-Aarbo’s wake as he untied the various knots and ropes holding the mesh sack down. Its contents thrashed so violently it fell to the ground, kicking up dust and half rolling away from the cart. Accustomed to this, the Vijari carefully lashed out with a single foot, striking at the various bulges and ripples in the bag. Grating, metallic screeches answered each blow.
Donning heavy dragonskin gloves, the priest grabbed a fistful of bag and dragged it behind him. The contents beat against the mesh, bouncing from one side to the other, screeching and tittering, but Palanti-Aarbo kept walking forward, around to the bar’s entrance, and purposely bumping the sack up the stairs. He made it through the swinging doors before Presumably Mervin could make it halfway across the bar. Stopping just inside the door, the Vijari looked each drunken patron in the eye before staring at Presumably Mervin and his Moderator. A thick tendril of smoke curled around Palanti-Aarbo’s mustache as he spoke.
“Final offer. Will you provide a humble priest with his parish?”
Presumably Mervin’s response was a snarl mixed with the sharp hocking of phlegm from his throat. Palanti-Aarbo took that as a no.
“You should have sold me the bar before it was infested.”
Before anyone could question the statement, the priest opened the bag. Dozens of yvichu stormed into the air, fleeing the bag they’d been trapped in for more than two days. Their wings pulled hard, becoming a blur as they circled around the ceiling, the bag rapidly deflating as an entire flock sought freedom. Wingtips, beaks, and sharp talons glinted in the lamplight as their flocking instincts took hold.
Then they realized how hungry they were, and an entirely different instinct took over.
For the bar patrons it was never a question of running; it was a question of which window to jump through. A few yvichu could effectively pick an animal clean in hours. An entire flock was completely lethal.
Presumably Mervin made a valiant fight of it for all of 10 seconds—Palanti-Aarbo counted—before he had three birds digging into his back. He went out the window he’d tossed the priest through.
Any time one of the yvichu got too close to the Vijari, he would blow smoke in its eyes. After three days of captivity and having cigarette smoke forced into the bag whenever they misbehaved, the yvichu were effectively trained to stay away from Palanti-Aarbo and his cigarettes made more with peat than tobacco.
Training yvichu to do anything had been attempted only once before, more than 100 years prior, when an Outcast named Nyevetus walked into the Xydasian forest wearing a homemade bird costume—complete with structurally sound wings—in an attempt to join a yvichu flock and understand what made such adorable creatures so fearsome. Only his bones, the entire costume, and his athletic supporter were found three months later.
Palanti-Aarbo crouched down next to the front door and watched the yvichu start to take up roost on the lamps, ale taps, dirty barware, and dilapidated furniture. Notoriously territorial, they were already starting to use their knife-sharp talons to carve their unique symbols into the old wood. Entire farms and even small military outposts had been abandoned when yvichu flocks decided the territory belonged to them. Buying a bar infested with the things would be insane.
Puffing at his cigarette both out of habit and to keep the murderous flying razors at bay, the priest smiled to himself.
“It’ll be a hell of an exorcism.”