Chapter 85 - The Shrine of Fortune’s Favor

“Were those the guys you were so worried about?” asked Annalisa, leaning over and prodding the padded areas of my robe with the tip of her tail.

“Just the first wave,” I said. “We were lucky they were so arrogant. How’d their leader fight?”

“Like a mage,” Annalisa flexed her biceps. “One that never hits the ash for a scrap. You guys need to do more press-ups.”

“I’ll add it to my growing to-do list,” I said, angling us toward the Lucitian Shrine. But wait, you might say. I thought you were going to a gaming house.

You’d be right. And my answer to that would be that religion is a funny thing. Some (few) religions make sense. Of these, I include the temple of Trawmir, saint of Anglers, Old Stoneface, the mountain god of the dwarves, and Choklar, the god of hangry snacking whose portly clerics push wheeled shrines and sell honeyed nuts and pigeon pies throughout the streets of Dragonmaw under the icon of a sugarcane stalk. Many a late night studying at the academy was made possible by those carts.

Slightly more eclectic are the disconnected-from-time adherents of Skein, and the savages who worship various wilds god beasts. Most strange of all is the Atheist Temple, whose sigil is a lightning rod. Even with real estate at a premium in the upper city, the nearest building to the local Atheist’s Temple is a full ten paces away.

Then, you have Lucita. Lucita is the goddess of odds and wagers. If you’ve ever watched the stone roll across a roulette wheel and offered a prayer, it was to Lucita. If you’ve ever prayed for that three of spades to finish out your straight and had it come up? Lucita stacked your deck. If you ever… look, she’s the goddess of gambling. You get the idea. Naturally, all of her shrines are gaming houses, filled with her followers offering praise and curse alike in her name. Her adherents keep the tables running and the coin flowing, and does it ever flow.

In my humble view, most of the religions in the city are little more than ways to part a fool from their silver. Lucita’s temple at least posts the odds of getting some of it back. That’s more than any wishing well will do for you. I’ve never seen a Temple of Fate collection plate with a 6/4 split, either. Shrines to Lucita are the only places where you can leave a church richer than when you entered—unless you run the church, of course.

And her adherents hate seekers. We’re the antithesis of chance and unforeseen outcomes. We suss the truth and the order of the universe while Lucitians revel in the murk of uncertainty. We throw off the odds and make even seasoned gamblers blanche.

We’re also not super fun at parties.

I knew we were getting close when the old guard barracks loomed above the top terrace of Barrowdown. Any further east and we’d end up in the unsheathing that buffered us from Hollowdown. There’s no guards in the guard barracks. That’s why it’s called the old guard barracks, and not just the guard barracks. Even before Margot Bethane wiped out what remained of the official city guard, it had become a pale shadow of its former self. But that shadow gathered here, and the fel witch caved half of it in with a wave of her hand. She was quick to turn the skeleton crew into a skeleton crew, if you take my meaning. She must have learned some of the northern necromancy along with her more blasphemous secrets.

Though many of their bones still lay beneath the rubble of the north wing. The south wing that still stood—well, leaned—had become home to vagrants, shrum addicts, foreign sailors too drunk to figure out the sea was downhill, and all other manner of degenerate. Graffiti marred every wall in more languages than I could count. Some had been scratched away to make room for new markings, or even just scrawled over top to create an incomprehensible mess of both tags that was somehow still more legible than Mithra’s handwriting.

You would think with the Shrine of Lucita so close by, it would also be home to debtors. But they tend to find religion right fast when the paladins stand behind them with a cudgel and a pile of IOTs (or I owe thee’s if you’ve had the good sense to steer clear of gaming dens). Most converts of the Odds Goddess become so to pay down that debt—which is a tight racket because they’d already been giving all their money to the church anyway.

Perhaps I should have become a cleric.

Finding the shrine wasn’t difficult. If anything, it would have been harder to ignore the place. Three stories of palatial stone looked quite out of place in the middle city, especially shaped and stacked to look like an old-fashioned peaked castle complex from the Mausoleum planes, with a carved visage of the goddess and her, ahem, ample blessings, that gave Felatitia’s icon of lust a run for its cleavage.

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Lucita’s colors were red and white, and one of her adherents stood out front in a patchwork ruffled outfit yelling praises, odds, and drink special prices to passers by. His expression fell when he saw my seekers robes.

“Look,” he said, “I think you might be lost. The guild is in the upper city, up that big hill, schoolboy. That’s why the call it the upper city.” He leered at Annalisa. “She can come in.”

Annalisa whooped and shot through the door, leaving me with the door cleric, who continued to eye me suspiciously.

“I’m not with the guild,” I told him.

“And I’m a farmer. Wanna taste my gourds?”

I scowled. I didn’t just trade spells with two seekers just to be roadblocked by an entry-level altar boy. I snapped my fist out, low and direct. The door cleric’s eyes bulged, and he doubled over, gasping.

“Don’t think they’re ripe yet,” I commented, stepping over him. Several of the patrons stared at the curled up, moaning moron. “When you can get your boots beneath you, tell your boss that Barrowdown is at the bar to talk business.”

“Hulgh-fack my arse.”

I pulled my hood up and stepped into the shrine. I was immediately assaulted by a cascade of lights, music, and a see of flickering card crowns that made me dizzy.

This wasn’t like some seedy, dockside dice table shoved in the corner of a whore-house. This was gambling taken to a religious expression. Clerics presided over grand gaming displays, running odds and moving wagers with crops according to sacred forms. Not every patron was a worshiper, of course. Annalisa, professional blasphemer that she was, had already managed to find a bottle of something, and she was currently splashing it over everyone nearby as she shouted at the dealer of a Stakes table—which has rules and a board more complicated than any of the wards in Alondalis’ book.

Beneath vaulted ceilings, smokeless lanterns kept the interior daylight-bright. Hells, this gallery of games might be better lit than the finest libraries in the upper city. It had to be, in order to catch would-be cheaters. You had to be pretty brazen to risk cheating when you were playing against a capital-G God, though. A quick touch of my four of dragons showed me several floating constructs with enchantments of scrying. It also showed me several of the church paladins with concealed weapons patrolling the shrine floor. They’d already marked me, and two moved to flank my movement.

I didn’t give them any reason to draw their weapons. The holy weapon of the Lucitian church is the paired brass knuckles—which, while I didn’t want to run afoul of them, probably didn’t measure up well against Mayazian knives and swords. Still, it was surprising they’d attacked at all. Shrines aren’t exactly soft targets. But the bigger question was, why was mother Mayaz sniffing around here at all?

I made my way to the upstairs bar on the second level, two shrine enforcers close behind. The upstairs bar was at the back of a lounge, kept darker for ambiance, with a small raised stage at the front. Paper lantern versions of the twin dragons flitted about on invisible air currents near the ceiling, spinning and circling each other much as the real ones did over Dragonmaw each night. Though these filled the lounge with the soft, warm light of flickering candles.

The bartender, of course, was also a cleric—a dwarven one, who offered an assortment of ‘sacraments’ to the others at the bar but just offered me an unimpressed look as he put his palms flat on the table. “Seeker, I think ye may be lost.”

“Your man at the door said something similar,” I said. “I took a chance anyway.” I pulled a pair of cunnings out and put them on the bar top. The dwarf still gave me the stink-eye as he swept the coins across. “Kalash lager, if you’ve got any.”

Orcs may be assholes, but they still brew the best beer on the Bastard, thanks to the sniffers on the little ones. The primary exports from Kalash are beer, followed closely by widows. At a smattering of applause and whistles, I spun around in my chair. The fanfare marked the arrival of the next performer. I craned my neck, hoping to see one of the vaunted magic shows that were a stable in Lucitian shrines—which ironically contained zero magic. Skilled artists made effects as though through arcane means, but in ways that left wizards worrying their beards in confusion.

Instead, I watched Mithra step onto the stage in a corset that left even less to the imagination than her usual getup at the Mop that she wore when entertaining clients. Even more surprising, she began to sing. That was a talent I didn’t even know she had. She caught my eye, winked, and before I knew it I found myself captivated by both her voice and her sinuous movements across the stage. After so much time spent working with her, I sometimes forgot that Mithra’s primary living was made through making others desire her. And she was good at it. Even half the courtesans in the lounge had their eyes glued to her with either envy or desire. Hells watching her pace across the stage, even I was reconsidering my no-paid-company policy.

A drakkyn woman slid into the chair next to me, watching me admiring Mithra. I noticed the paladins shadowing me tense up a bit.

“She’s quite the showgirl,” said the Drakkyn. “Fire in her heart. Fuels her performance.”

I nodded my assent.

The dwarven barkeep pushed over a glass of bubbling liquid without the woman even ordering, and she accepted it before twisting her neck to regard me. “She has the eyes of every man and half the women in this room. Yet hers are reserved only for you, as is her praise. Tell me, Seeker. Why is that?”

“Maybe I’m just a lucky, lucky man,” I said.

“I’m thinking not.” she tilted her head as though listening to something. “In fact, I’d wager most of your life has been marked by misfortune.”

I managed to tear my eyes off Mithra long enough to regard the unadorned red and white blouse, vest, and skirts the woman wore. She might have been dressed as a simple pit priest, but I got the distinct impression she knew as well as I the value of being underestimated.

“Finish your drink, enjoy the show, and then let’s retire to a less distracting venue.”