Venom’s Taste

distract-”

“You could learn more. If I taught you-which I would, if you prove that you’re worth the time and effort.”

That startled him. Zelia was a psion? Arvin had always assumed his mother had been the only one in Hlondeth-maybe in all of the Vilhon Reach. But here, it seemed, was another.

That surprise aside, did he want to be trained? He had dim memories of his mother talking about the lamasery, far to the east in Kara Tur, that she had been sent to in the year her woman’s blood began. The discipline and physical regimen she’d been subjected to there had sounded every bit as strenuous as that imposed by the orphanage, but strangely, she’d spoken fondly of the place. At the lamasery, she learned the discipline of clairsentience-an art she’d used in later life during her work as a guide in the wild lands at the edges of the Vilhon Reach. She’d been in great demand in the years before Arvin was born.

Yet her talent had come with a price. Some of Arvin’s earliest memories were of being startled awake by a sharp scream and trying to comfort his mother as she sat bolt upright in the bed they shared, eyes wide and staring. She’d muttered frightening things about war and fire and children drowning. After a moment or two she’d always come back to herself. She would pat Arvin’s hair and hug him close, reassuring him that it was “just a bad dream.” But he’d known the truth. His mother could see into the future. And it scared her. So much so that she’d stopped using her psionics around the time that Arvin was born and had spoken only infrequently about them. Yet despite this, her nightmares had continued.

“I don’t know if I want to learn,” he told Zelia.

“You’re afraid.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to see my own death,” Arvin answered.

Zelia’s lips twitched. “What makes you think you will?”

“My mother did-though a lot of good it did her. She thought the vision would help her to avoid dying. She was-”

“Clairsentient?” Zelia interrupted.

Arvin paused. That wasn’t what he’d been about to say. He had been about to tell Zelia that his mother had been wrong in her belief that even the most dire consequences could be avoided, if one were forewarned. He’d been about to tell Zelia about that final night with his mother-about seeing her toss and turn in her bed and being able to make out only one of the words in her uneasy mutters: plague. The next morning, when he’d nervously asked her about it, she’d tousled his hair and told him the nightmare wasn’t something to be feared-that it would help keep her safe. She’d given him his cat’s-eye bead and left on the expedition she’d only reluctantly agreed to guide. Later Arvin had learned what this expedition had entailed-guiding a group of adventurers who wanted to find a cure for the plague that still lay dormant in the ruins of Mussum. They hadn’t entered the ancient city, but its contagion had found them nonetheless.

Just as her dream had foretold.

“The talents of mother and child do not always manifest in the same way,” Zelia said, breaking into his silent musings as she moved closer to him. “You may turn out to be a savant or a shaper or even a telepath. Their talents lie in glimpsing and shaping the present, not the future. Would that be so frightening?”

Arvin had never heard of savants, shapers, or telepaths before, but understood the gist of what she was saying. Not all psionic talents came with the terrible visions that had plagued his mother. “I suppose that wouldn’t be so bad,” he conceded.

“I can also see to it that you receive your chevrons. You’ll never have to run from the militia again.”

“Those chevrons are impossible to fake,” Arvin answered. “You must have powerful connections.”

Zelia smiled, but her eyes remained cold and unblinking.

“Why the sudden change?” Arvin asked. “Why promise me so much-when before you were content to threaten me?”

Zelia moved closer. “I find that it’s most effective to use both the stick”-she brushed his cheek with her fingertips-“and the carrot. At the same time.”

Arvin’s skin tingled where she’d just touched it. Zelia was an attractive woman, for a yuan-ti. A very attractive woman. Not only that, she was powerful-and well connected. But if his guess was right about her serving House Extaminos, he had little reason to trust her. The expression “deceitful as a snake” hadn’t come from nowhere. Humans in the service of the ruling family had to watch their backs constantly, never knowing when a fang might strike. And because they were working for the royal family-whose members could do no wrong-their poisonings were always “accidental.”

No, working for Zelia was going to be just as demanding-and nerve-wracking-as working for the Guild. Arvin wanted to escape Hlondeth, not mire himself even deeper in it.

“You’re not going to remove the mind seed, are you?” he asked.

Zelia shook her head. “Not until I get what I want.”

“Where can I find you if I learn anything?” Arvin asked.

“Ask for me at the Solarium,” she said. Then, bending gracefully, she inserted a finger into a knothole in the floor and pulled the hidden trapdoor open. She straightened, stepped through the hole, and fell out of sight. Arvin rushed to the trapdoor in alarm, and saw that she had assumed her serpent form. She was hissing loudly-and falling as slowly as a feather. Her sinuous green body lightly touched the floor, and she slithered away between the dusty coils of rope and spools of twine stacked in the warehouse below.

Arvin started to close the trapdoor then had second thoughts. Until he heard back from the Guild, he had nothing to go on, no way of locating the Pox. Sand was slipping through the hourglass. In less than seven days, Zelia’s spell would activate.

No, he corrected himself, not a spell, a power-a psionic power. But psionic powers were like spells, weren’t they? They could be negated.

But how? Arvin ground his teeth. Despite the fact that his mother had possessed the talent, psionics was something about which he knew very little. Maybe, by following Zelia and observing her, he could learn more.

Arvin scooped up his glove from the workbench and yanked it onto his hand. Then he clambered through the trapdoor and slid down a rope. He ran across the warehouse floor, toward the door that was slowly swinging shut.

CHAPTER 5

23 Kythorn, Fullday

Arvin pulled open the front door of the warehouse and stepped out into the humid summer heat. He glanced anxiously back and forth but saw no sign of Zelia, in either yuan-ti or serpent form. The street was filled with people, most of them human. One of the Learned, his ability to read and write proudly displayed by the two red dots on his forehead, swept past in a silken cloak, nose in the air. A stonemason, hammer and chisel hanging at the belt of his leather trousers, shouted at a brace of four slaves yoked to a rumbling cart bearing a snake-headed statue carved from cream-colored alabaster-one of the many statues that had been carved for the restoration of the oldest part of the city. Women returning from the public fountain in the plaza just down the street to Arvin’s right swayed across the cobblestones, pots of water balanced on their heads, while children lugged smaller vessels along beside them.

Across the street, young Kolim, the seven-year-old son of the woman who owned the bakery up the road, was pressing his palm against the stonework of the building opposite. When he removed it, the stone’s magical glow, triggered by the momentary darkness, was revealed. Spotting Arvin, Kolim hurried across the street, pulling from his pocket a loop of string with a bead on it.

“Hey, Arvin!” he called, threading it over his fingers as he ran. “I can do that string puzzle you showed me. Hey, Arvin, watch!”

“Later, Kolim,” Arvin told the boy, gently patting him on the head. “I’m a little busy just now.”

The section of city the yuan-ti preferred to live in lay to the left, uphill from the harbor. Arvin closed the door behind him and strode in that direction. He spotted a woman with green scales coming toward him and, for a