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out in the texts of Brother
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James Axler - Outlanders - Doom Dynasty
Mote, the basis of most of the congregation's lifestyle and belief system.
Generations ago, according to legend, the Ophidian Way had been founded when
Snakefish was a thriv-ing, populous ville. Every home in the township
dis-played the holy snake emblem. Brother Mote, the founder of the order, had
reputedly carved the sym-bols in the rock, the same symbols, ever after called
the Sepulcher of the Sacred Snakes. Like Mote, Jar-amillo was its guardian,
the caretaker of the serpents.
As a rite of passage, before they could father chil-dren, all male
congregation members were required to walk the sepulcher. If they were bitten
and recov-ered, then it was believed they had been cleansed of their sins. If
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they died, they were viewed as righteous sacrifices to the sacred snakes.
True, there weren't as many sacred snakes as there had been during Brother
Mote's day, certainly very few of the gigantic ones, but there were still
enough for the congregation to maintain its fundamentalist faith.
The diamondbacks living in the sepulcher ate bet-ter, frequently more often
than Jaramillo's clan. Field mice, rats and vermin of all sorts were trapped
and fed to the snakes, not just to keep them in the area but in the hopes they
would grow as large as their huge antecedents. That hope was pretty much a
vain one.
Only in the past ten years had a rattler been hatched that actually attained a
size comparable to the holy worms of yesteryear.
Jaramillo named it Gideon and conditioned his peo-ple to pay it homage, to
love it unquestioningly, even when it killed three of them in a four-year
period. It was a damnable choice for Jaramillo to make, since for the holy
serpents to be served properly, they re-quired people to attend to their
needs.
Sometimes if the hunting was poor, Gideon would slither into their village.
The clansmen and the wom-en dropped to their knees and passively awaited their
fate as the great snake selected a meal, as if his family of worshippers were
nothing but a pack of rats. But by strict interpretation of the Ophidian
Way canon, Gideon's venom slew only the ungodly, even though one of his
victims had been a two-year-
old child.
Jaramillo convinced himself and his followers the sacrifices were part of a
very old tradition. He knew the history of the Ophidian Way, as set down in
Brother Mote's texts, did not derive so much from the
Christian fundamentalist snake-handling sects of rural predark America as from
ancient times from.the days of Montezuma the sorcerer king and his sacred
serpent, a biboron
, a monster rattlesnake.
The great divine serpent was worshipped in the black shadows of Aztec pyramids
long before Amer-ica was discovered. The priests raised huge snakes, believing
them all to be messengers of the gods.
Ac-cording to the folklore of his people, the Indians of the Taos Pueblo in
New Mexico sheltered one of
Montezuma's divine serpents. The tale also main-tained that on special feast
days infants were fed to the gigantic rattlesnake. Whether or not such a story
was true, Brother Mote had promoted the same belief in sacred snakes when he
created the Ophidian Way more than a century before. It was only a
continuation of native American religion, and he borrowed heavily from the
mythography.
However, not only had the Ophidian Way lost many of its holy serpents since
Mote's time, but the faith had lost almost all of its popularity, as well.
Acolytes of the Ophidian Way were considered crim-inals, so the congregation
didn't dare venture too near Port Morninglight and certainly not even within
sight of the ville of Snakefish itself.
Jaramillo was deeply offended that the ville bore the name of the birthplace
of his religion, but its baron saw no hypocrisy in dispatching black-armored
her-etics to hunt down adherents to the very order that the original ville had
venerated. Some of the younger people occasionally wondered what it was like
in the big-walled ville, but Jaramillo insisted the world be-yond their
canyons and desert was filled with soul-
shredding dangers. Their land was the only true land, and now blasphemers
invaded it. Even the nearby
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James Axler - Outlanders - Doom Dynasty ru-ins of the old predark town were
forbidden to the clan. Seeing the houses, as overgrown and dilapidated as they
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were, could give them ideas of another way of life.
Jaramillo continued to exhort his congregation, but he knew that mere words,
no matter how passionately they were spoken, weren't sufficient to motivate
the people to attack armed men especially if they were the armored 'forcers in
service to Baron Snakefish.
Although it was not a holy day, Jaramillo took the medicine brazier from
beneath the makeshift altar and prepared it for the ceremony of commitment.
The bra-zier was a the huge, bleached-out skull of Azarel, one of the sacred
snakes deified by Brother Mote during his ministry and elevated to the status
of a holy relic.
Despite its age, the skull still retained the pair of long hollow fangs
curving down from the upper jaw.
From a wooden box beneath the altar, Jaramillo took fistfuls of a dried,
brownish green herb and crammed them into the empty sockets that once held
Azarel's venom sacs. He touched a torch to the herbs until they began to
smolder, then he blew gently to fan the sparks. A pungent, sickeningly sweet
odor arose.
Grayish white smoke boiled from the tips of the hollow fangs. As the vapors
thickened, the women shook diamondback rattles and chanted, "Blessed be the
fang and the hollow needle. Blessed is the crush-ing and the coil."
Jamarillo called the men of the congregation for-ward and directed them to
place their lips on the fangs and inhale the smoke. In pairs they did so,
bending and sucking deeply, more than one succumbing to a severe coughing fit.
The vapors produced by the burn-ing herbs were astringent and powerful.
The herbal concoction had many names, but it was best known as
Cannabis lupus
, the werewolf weed. It was a rare narcotic, hard to find even in the hindmost
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