27 Kythorn, Darkmorning
Arvin heard a soft hissing and felt breath stir the hair near his left ear. Someone was bending over him, touching his cheek with something as soft as a feather. It tickled against beard stubble then was gone.
He opened his eyes and saw he was lying on the cold stone floor of the chamber in which he’d discovered Naulg. The transformed rogue was nowhere to be seen, but the yuan-ti was still there. The half blood was kneeling beside Arvin, one of his snake hands hovering just above Arvin’s face. Its flickering tongue was what had brushed against Arvin’s cheek a moment ago. Arvin wet his lips nervously. The eyes of the banded serpent were small, slit- and held just as much intelligence as the half blood’s human eyes. Those serpent hands-like the yuan-ti’s voice- seemed vaguely familiar to Arvin, yet he knew he’d never met this yuan-ti before. He decided that the sense of familiarity must have come from one of Zelia’s memories.
The yuan-ti’s face was illuminated by what was left of the lamp the patch-haired cultist had dropped. The wick was still burning, fueling itself from the patch of spilled oil. Arvin could feel the oil seeping into his hair. Instinctively he turned his head away from it and felt a sharp pain in his shoulder-the one Naulg had bitten. The venom in his spittle had come close to killing Arvin.
He stared up at the yuan-ti. “You neutralized the poison, didn’t you?” He didn’t bother to ask why; that much was obvious as soon as the yuan-ti spoke.
“Did you come here alone or with others?” it hissed.
“I-” Arvin let his words trail off, pretending to be mesmerized by the venom beading at the tips of the snake- hand’s fangs and the head’s slight swaying motion. All the while, he was thinking furiously. The yuan-ti must have heard Arvin and Naulg use each other’s names and realized Arvin had been making a rescue attempt. If Arvin could convince the yuan-ti he was on his own, it might protect Nicco-but he’d doom himself. He needed to convince the yuan-ti that it was more than a rescue mission, that there was vital information only he could provide.
Which, fortunately, there was.
“Rescuing my friend was only one of my goals in coming here,” Arvin answered. “I also wanted to learn more about the Pox. I was ordered to spy on them by a yuan-ti who goes by the name of Zelia.” As he dropped the name, he searched the yuan-ti’s eyes for a sign of recognition.
The yuan-ti’s expression remained unchanged. “Describe her,” it ordered.
“She looks human, but with green scales. There’s nothing else, really, to distinguish her.”
“Her scales had no pattern?”
Arvin shrugged. “Not that I noticed. They were just… green.”
The yuan-ti considered this. Fortunately, it didn’t ask about Zelia’s one distinguishing feature-her hair. Hair color and length was something the scaly folk generally took no notice of; all human hair looked alike, to them. Even so, Arvin wasn’t going to volunteer the information that Zelia was a redhead. Nor was he going to reveal that she was a psion. She’d be all too easy to track down if he did, and Arvin would become… superfluous. But he could whet the yuan-ti’s appetite a little.
“I think Zelia works for House Extaminos,” Arvin continued.
A sharp hiss from the yuan-ti told him he’d struck a nerve.
“Though that’s just a guess on my part,” Arvin continued quickly. “Zelia only engaged my services a few days ago. And she did it in a fashion that hardly endeared me to her. She placed a… geas upon me. If I don’t return with the information she wants in two days’ time, I’ll die.”
“She’s a cleric?”
Arvin nodded.
“Of Sseth?”
“I suppose,” Arvin demurred. As he answered, a part of his mind was focused deep within himself, drawing energy up his spine and coiling it at the base of his skull. When he felt the familiar prickle in his scalp, he narrowed his eyes in what he hoped was a suitably sly expression. “If you remove the geas, I’ll help you kill Zelia or capture her, whichever you prefer. Do we have a deal?”
The yuan-ti cocked his head as if listening to something then gave a thin-lipped smile. Arvin’s hopes rose. His charm must have worked. Then he realized the yuan-ti had heard footsteps in the hall. Arvin heard a rustling in the doorway and turned his head. Slowly-he didn’t want to give the snake-hand an excuse to bite him.
The female cultist who had fled earlier entered the room. She held a flask in one hand. It was metal, and shaped like the rattle of a snake. She started to remove the cork that sealed it then glanced at the yuan-ti, as if seeking his permission.
Arvin wet his lips nervously. “The Pox have already made me drink from one of those flasks,” he told the yuan-ti. “The potion didn’t work on me. As you can see, I wasn’t transformed into a-”
“Silence!” the yuan-ti hissed.
The cultist lowered the flask, a puzzled expression on her face. Seeing it, Arvin realized that the Pox still believed the flasks to contain poison or plague-and he had just come within a word of destroying that fiction. Had he just proved himself too dangerous to be allowed to live? He wet his lips nervously. His dagger was still inside his glove. There was a chance-a very slim chance-that he could kill the yuan-ti before the snake-hand sank its venomous teeth into Arvin’s throat.
The yuan-ti nodded at Arvin. “This man is dangerous,” he hissed. “Why don’t you let me feed him the plague, instead?” He held up his free hand, the jaws of its snake-head open, imploring.
The cultist hesitated. “It should be a cleric who…” Then her eyes softened, and she held out the flask.
Quicker than the blink of an eye, the yuan-ti’s free hand shot out. The cultist gasped as fangs sank into her hand then she immediately stiffened. Unable to breathe, she purpled. Then she toppled sideways, crashing onto the floor like a felled free.
The yuan-ti picked up the flask with one of its snake hands then turned its unblinking stare on Arvin. “You must be tired-why don’t you sleep?” it hissed. “I have no reason to harm you. I
Arvin felt his eyelids begin to close. He mounted the only defense he could think of-the Empty Mind Tanju had taught him-pouring his awareness out in a flood. But it was no use. The suggestion felt as though it came from deep within; it wasn’t something that grasped the mind from without. What the yuan-ti was saying just seemed so
His heavy eyelids closed as the last shred of his resistance fluttered away like a snake’s discarded skin.
27 Kythorn, Fullday
In his dream, Arvin slithered across the floor of the cathedral between its forest of columns, each of which was carved into the form of two vipers twining around each other, one with its head up, the other with its head down. The columns supported an enormous domed ceiling of translucent green stone through which sunlight slanted, bathing everything in a cool light reminiscent of a shaded jungle. Water from the fountain that topped the cathedral dripped through holes in the roof, pattering onto the floor like rain.
Just ahead was one of the Stations of the Serpent-an enormous bronze statue of the god in winged serpent form, his body banded with glittering emeralds and his mouth open wide to reveal curved fangs of solid gold. The base of the statue was wreathed in writhing jets of orange-red fire, symbolic of Sseth’s descent into the Peaks of Flame.
One day, Sseth would rise from them again.
A dozen other yuan-ti were weaving in prayer before the station, mesmerized from by the slit eyes of Sseth. Arvin slithered closer, welcoming the warmth of the oil-fueled fire on his scales. Twisting himself into a coil, he raised his upper body and swayed before the statue then opened his mouth wide in a silent hiss. Feeling a drop of venom bead at the tip of each of his fangs, he lashed forward in a mock strike, spitting the venom forward onto the tray that stood just in front of the statue. The venom landed on the fire-warmed bronze and immediately sizzled as it boiled away.
Hearing the hiss of scales against stone behind him, Arvin turned and saw the priest he had come here to meet. The priest’s serpent form was long and slender and narrow-nosed, with black and white and red stripes running the length of his body. The part of Arvin’s mind that was his own-the part that was observing the dream from a distance, like a spectator watching a dance and unable to resist swaying in time with the music-recognized the priest as the one he-no Zelia-would eventually reduce to a broken-minded heap. But that memory was months
