Tales of Midbar: Secret Priest

It was a steep climb to the level of the ruin and it didn’t help that Aleph set, leaving us to struggle in black night with just the stars and Bet for light. Obviously we used mage lights, those strange, luminous balls that hover near magi or people with the right artifacts, but kept them dim so as not to be conspicuous.

There were a few lights on at the camp around the strange ruin. There were three towers in a circle with several small buildings around their bases. Several tents were pitched around this along with a number of vehicles. We could sense a katchey alone in one of the buildings and teleported there.

“Hey Narblo!” I said, giving him a shake.

“Clindar?” he said waking up. “What the fornication are you doing here? My voice!”

“I put a hoarse spell on you so you couldn’t call for help. I thought you’d like to tell me why you’ve been stopping me from having sex.”

“You managed to put a spell on me!” he gasped sitting up. “Tomorrow I’m going to be tried for something I can’t remember doing and possibly given a harsh punishment and you’re just worried about your sex life?”

“You’re ruining my life! I want to know why and if there’s anything I can do about it.”

“I don’t know. I was just following orders.”

“From whom?”

“How stupid do you think I am? I can probably get off or get a lenient sentence as I can’t remember what happened. I’m not going to get into more trouble by blabbing to you!”

“Did you know girls were being raped to disqualify them as sexual partners for me?”

“Why have you got to have a psychic virgin when I had to marry a hipsickah who’d fornicated a bunch of guys before I met her?”

I knew he was evading the question and probably did know about the girls being raped.

“Not my rules! Anyway it’s more complicated than that or you wouldn’t have had to disqualify girls by raping them. Do you want me to tell all the Benai Nibeyim about that because I doubt they’d all approve?”

“I was just following orders! How many fornicating times do I have to say?”

“Pathetic excuse!”

“Dost thou hath his genealogy somewhere?” asked Dwendra, who was supposed to be keeping watch.

Narblo seemed momentarily off balance. I don’t think he’d registered the presence of an anavah before that. “Sure it’s on the internet.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“It’s encoded in the genealogies of characters in Under Bet.”

“What that stupid soap opera that’s been going since the Cataclysm?” I asked.

“We wanted a semi public place in case all Benai Nibeyim leaders got killed. What are you going to do about it? Kill all the psychics we’ve been breeding?”

“No. You do realize most your Benai Nibeyim group ..?”

“So I heard. Sixteen apparently. Stay away from her, assuming it is a her! Weren’t they supposed to be keeping you in protective custody until they dealt with her?”

“What doth thou knoweth about Sixteen?” asked Dwendra.

“Not much. I was just told to keep her the fornication away from Clindar. Difficult as I don’t know what she looks like or even if she’s just one person. I’ve no idea why she’d kill my chapter. How did you get in here? They have guards!”

“Sorry about this,” I said and used a date rape spell on him.

We spent two hours in the Vineyard doghouse looking at the Under Bet website. Fortunately it had a family tree of all the characters so we didn’t have to look through three centuries of terrible scripts and acting.

“Why can’t they have put it in an adventure show,” I said at one point. “You know have characters with names that refer to Yohoism or Benai Nibeyim or something to clue people in who are looking for things? Perhaps something involving teleporters or time travel.”

“Hiding it in a public library wouldst also hath worked,” said Dwendra.

Then it was a matter of deciding who represented me. Had to be in the most recent generation, an unmarried male who was still alive and probably about my age. There was only one family with two sons and a daughter who’d been kidnapped. The father of that family was a second son and his older brother had been murdered in infancy. Everything else fitted the relatives I knew of. Tracing back, the father and sons of this family were male line descendants of Rildmin Grinda, one of the founders the fictional town of Amber Valley. The town’s founders were all Trulists who’d survived a battle with Winemakers during the Cataclysm. There were thirty seven founders, the same number as Yohoist priests who’d been burnt to death in front of Rendamar Temple.

“This good enough?” I asked Dwendra.

“I wilt hath to pray about it but I suggest we get back to the safe house. I know, I could go back in time, get biological samples from the last priests and compare their Y chromosomes to yours.”

We were very tired by the time we took the train back to Grishnarl (we’d had to go back in time to catch one).

“What dost we still have to doeth?” asked Dwendra at one point, with her lips tight and the top of her nose scrunched.

“We need to get those DNA samples and do the genetic test and convince the police we don’t have to stay in that safe house,” I said. “We need to figure out the religious stuff and I supposed get Benai Nibeyim to stop messing with me.”

“Perhaps we should have stayed and talked to the Benai Nibeyim leaders.”

“Maybe but I think we need some sort of plan first and we won’t do a good job of it if we’re exhausted.”

We arrived back at the safe house just after we’d left.

“I’m too tired to give in to temptation,” said Dwendra, when we materialized.

We just went into the boys’ room, where Attan was already asleep and preyed very briefly. Then I stripped down to my underwear and Dwendra removed her harness, did her removing the bra while keeping her dress on trick and we collapsed into the empty bed.