Perhaps that was what the Pox were trying to find out.
As Arvin stared down at the cultist, his expression hardened. If the Pox had their way, forty-five thousand people would die-perhaps more, if plague spread beyond Hlondeth into the rest of the Vilhon Reach. The gods had just placed what might be the key to preventing these people’s deaths in Arvin’s hands. All he had to do was find out where the Pox were and report that to Zelia. She would take care of the rest.
“Where are the other cultists?” he asked. “Where do you meet?”
The man gave a phlegmy laugh. “In the Ninth Hell.”
Arvin hefted his dagger, wondering if pain would prompt the truth. Probably not. Anyone who deliberately disfigured himself like this had little consideration for his own flesh.
The cultist’s disfigured mouth twisted into a lopsided grimace. “Go ahead,” he countered. “Cut me again with your fancy dagger. Perhaps a little of the blood will spray on you, this time, and you’ll know Talona’s embrace. Throw!”
As the cultist mocked him, Arvin’s mind exploded with rage. He whipped up his dagger and nearly threw it, only stopping himself at the last moment. His temper suddenly cooled, and he realized what the cultist had just attempted. He’d cast a spell on Arvin, compelling him to throw his dagger. Only by force of will had Arvin been able to avoid fulfilling the cultist’s wish to be silenced.
Slowly he lowered the dagger. That had been a narrow escape, but it reminded him of something. Perhaps there was another way, other than threats, to get the man to talk-by charming him.
Arvin had felt the first sputters of this power-which, until his conversation with Zelia a short time ago, he hadn’t admitted was psionic-back when he was a boy. Back when his mother was still alive. She’d discovered him cutting one of her maps into parchment animals and had raised her hand to strike him. Frightened, he’d summoned up a false smile and pleaded in the most winsome voice a five-year-old could summon-and had felt the strange sensation prickle across the base of his scalp for the first time. His mother’s expression had suddenly softened, and she’d lowered her hand. Then she’d blinked and shaken her head. She’d tousled Arvin’s hair and told him he’d very nearly charmed himself out of a punishment-that he showed “great promise.” Then she’d taken his favorite wooden soldier and tossed it into the fireplace, to teach him how bad it felt when another person damaged something that was yours.
He hadn’t been able to manifest that power again until he reached puberty. He’d charmed people in the years since then, but his talent was unreliable. Sometimes it worked… sometimes it didn’t. But that time with his mother, it had arisen spontaneously.
Why?
Suddenly, Arvin realized the answer. Strong emotion. Like a rising tide, it had forced his psionic talent to bubble to the surface.
Standing over his captive, Arvin tried to summon up an emotion equally as strong as the one he’d felt that day. Then, he’d been motivated by fear; this time, he let frustration carry him almost to the edge. He embraced the emotion and combined its rawness with the urge to get the man to talk to him. Why couldn’t he get the cultist to speak? The fellow was his
Arvin squatted on the floor next to the man. Deliberately he let his frown smooth and his voice soften. “Listen, friend,” he told the cultist. “You can trust me. I drank from the flask and survived. Like you, I am blessed by the goddess. But I don’t know how to find the others. I need to find them, to talk to them, to understand. I yearn to feel Talona’s…” He nearly lost his concentration as he spoke the goddess’s name then found his calm center again. “I need to feel Talona’s embrace again. Help me. Tell me where I can find the others. Please?”
When Arvin began his plea, the cultist’s eyes had been filled with scorn and derision. As his expression softened, a thrill of excitement rushed through Arvin. Untrained he might be, but he was doing it! He was using psionics to mold this man to his will!
The excitement was his undoing; it broke his concentration. The cultist jerked his head aside and broke away from Arvin’s gaze then began blinking rapidly. He heaved himself into a sitting position, fingers straining between the coils of rope as he reached for Arvin, who jumped back just in time. Then the cultist’s eyes rolled back in his head.
“Talona take me!” he cried. “Enfold me in your sweet embrace. Consume my flesh, my breath, my very soul!”
Though Arvin was certain the cultist was not crying, three amber tears suddenly trickled down the man’s pockmarked cheek. With each wheezing exhalation, the cultist’s lungs pumped out a terrible smell, worse than that of a charnel house stacked with decaying corpses. Arvin staggered back, afraid to breathe but unable to run. He stared in terrified fascination as the sores on the cultist’s body suddenly burst open and began to weep. Violent trembling shook the cultist and his robe was suddenly drenched in sweat. Even from two paces away, Arvin could feel the heat radiating off the man’s body. With horrid certainty, he realized what the cultist had just done-called down a magical contagion upon himself. Had Arvin been crouched just a little closer, and had the man succeeded in touching him, it would have been Arvin lying on the floor, dying.
The cultist’s body was swelling like a corpse left in the sun. In another moment his stomach would expand past the breaking point; already Arvin could hear the creak of flesh preparing to rupture…
And he was just standing there, staring.
Arvin flung open the warehouse door. As he slammed it behind him, he heard a sound like wet cloth tearing and the splatter of something against the inside of the door. He breathed a sigh of relief at yet another narrow escape, and touched the bead at his throat.
“Nine lives,” he whispered.
He stood for a moment with his back against the door, staring at the people in the street. If the cultist’s boasting was true, their days were numbered. Did Arvin really care if they died of plague? He had hundreds of acquaintances in this city but no friends, now that Naulg was gone. He had no family, either, aside from the uncle who had consigned him to the orphanage.
The sensible thing to do was report what he’d just found out to Zelia and see if she would remove the “seed” from his mind. Whether she did or didn’t, he’d clear out of the city as quickly as possible, since staying only meant dying.
If Zelia had been bluffing, Arvin would be safe-assuming that the plague the Pox were about to unleash stayed confined within Hlondeth’s walls. Even if it didn’t, clerics would stop the spread of the disease eventually- they always had, each time plague swept the Vilhon Reach. Maybe they’d lose Hlondeth before they were able to halt the plague entirely, but that wasn’t Arvin’s problem.
Then he spotted Kolim, sitting on the curb across the street. The boy had his string looped back and forth between his outstretched fingers in the complicated pattern Arvin had taught him. He was trying-without much success and with a frown of intense concentration on his face-to free the bead “fly” from its “web.”
Arvin sighed. He couldn’t just walk away and let Kolim die.
Nor could he walk away from something that might produce orphans for generations to come. He thought of his mother, of the trip that had taken her to the area around Mussum. That city had been abandoned nine hundred years ago, but the plague that had been its ruin lingered in the lands around it still.
If Mussum’s plague had been prevented, Arvin’s mother might never have died. Had there been one man, all those centuries ago, who had held the key to the city’s survival in his hand-only to throw it away?
Arvin realized he really didn’t have a choice. If he left without doing as much as he could, and plague claimed Hlondeth, the ghosts of its people-and everyone who ventured near it and died in the years that followed this-would haunt him until the end of his days.
Including the ghost of little Kolim.
Sighing, he trudged up the street to find Zelia.
CHAPTER 6
23 Kythorn, Fullday
Arvin strode across one of the stone viaducts that arched over Hlondeth’s streets, glad he didn’t have to
