He watched the rippllng wake it left in the jungle, thankful that he'd chosen somewhere elevated to land. His eyes ranged over the jungle. Dmetrio was out there somewhere-but where?
Something occurred to Arvin then, that perhaps he didn't need Pakal to tell him where Dmetrio was. Maybe a sending to Dmetrio would work, since Arvin was on the Chultan Peninsula himself. It was certainly worth a try.
He activated the lapis lazuli and pictured Dmetrio in his mind. The yuan-ti noble's features were easy enough to remember: high forehead, dark, swept- back hair, narrow nose, slit-pupil eyes, and flickering forked tongue. The connection wouldn't come, no matter how vehemently Arvin mentally whispered Dmetrio's name.
Dmetrio had either shielded himself-or he was dead.
Then Arvin realized there was a third possibility: that Dmetrio was dead in a manner of speaking, dead at Zelia's hands.
Zelia claimed to serve House Extaminos, but the mind seed she'd planted in Arvin had given him an intimate knowledge of where her loyalties truly lay. She thought of herself not as a subject of Lady Dediana but as working for herself, and she craved power. If the opportunity presented itself for her to become Sseth's avatar, she would have seized it.
The Naneth-seed had been Zelia's ticket into Sibyl's lair. With Naneth in place, there was a good possibility of both halves of the Circled Serpent falling into Zelia's hands if she could also control Dmetrio. Seeding the son of Hlondeth's ruler would have been a dangerous move for Zelia to make, but the fact that Dmetrio was headed south, where few knew him, made it slightly less risky. A seeded Dmetrio would explain why none of Arvin's sendings to the prince those past few months had been successful.
Still holding the image of Dmetrio's face in his mind, Arvin shifted his thoughts slightly. He imagined an identical body that housed a mind that went by a different name.
Zelia.
Immediately, his mental image of Dmetrio animated. The mind seed was lounging, his predominantly human body bent backward in an approximation of
a coiled serpent. He was holding a languid conversation with someone Arvin couldn't see, but he broke that off immediately as the sending manifested. Slit-pupil eyes stared at Arvin for a long, appraising moment. Then the Dmetrio-seed's tongue flickered out of an anticipatory smile. Its mouth hissed a silent word: "Arvin."
Arvin took a deep breath. Dmetrio, he began, 'Lelia sent me. I have the upper half of the serpent. Tell me where you are, and I'll bring it to you.
The Dmetrio-seed smiled. A heartbeat later, Arvin felt a familiar tingling in his forehead. Stay where you are, the seed answered. The jungle is dangerous. I'll come to you.
"I'll bet you will," Arvin muttered as the sending ended. It had been just the response he'd hoped for. He had no doubt that the Dmetrio-seed had just scryed him. The stone head would be a familiar landmark, and the seed would be there soon.
He glanced again at the water the strange creature had drunk from then decided not to chance it. Quenching his thirst would wait. He needed to get ready.
— 0–0 0 0 0
It was early evening, and still the Dmetrio-seed hadn't shown up. Arvin wondered if he'd guessed wrong. Maybe he wasn't in Chult, but some other, even more distant place. He'd finished his meditations long ago and sat, hidden in the foliage a few paces distant from the stone head, but still there was no sign of the seed.
Finally, low in the sky to the west, Arvin spotted something. At first he took it to be a soaring bird, but the movement and proportions were all wrong. It was, instead, a person seated on a carpet.
He was reminded of the magioal carpets of Calimshan. He'd once been hired to repair one-though it had turned out to have a more deadly purpose than flying. As the person on the carpet drew closer, Arvin rendered himself invisible and created an illusionary image of himself sitting cross-legged on the stone head. Ectoplasm shimmered on the stone then swiftly evaporated in the heat. He toyed with the ring on his finger-he was counting on it to hide his thoughts from any probe the seed might do of the general area around the stone head-and watched as the flying carpet approached. As soon as it was close enough for its passenger to manifest a power against him, Arvin threw up a psionic shield.
On the carpet sat a yuan-ti, not Dmetrio, but a female. She was dressed as the Se'sehen had been, in a cape-hers made of overlapping "scales" of turquoise feathers-and a clinging, gauzy tunic that ended just below her waist, where her snake tail began. Both her skin and her scales were a dark brown. A band of gold encircled her left wrist, and a round plug of jade as wide as Arvin's thumb pierced the skin between her lower lip and chin. Instead of hair, a ruff of scales framed her face.
Wary that she might be yet another of Zelia's seeds- or the Dmetrio-seed itself, cloaked in illusion-Arvin probed her mind as soon as she was within range. To his surprise, he encountered no resistance. If she saw the silver that sparkled out of thin air when he manifested the power, she gave no sign.
She studied the illusion, mentally comparing it to the description Hlondeth's prince had given her. She was surprised by how human Arvin looked. Dmetrio had led her to believe the person she'd been sent to fetch was a halfblood.
She spoke. Arvin, inside her mind, understood the words, even though they were spoken in Draconic.
She asked if he was the one she'd been sent to fetch. He made the illusion nod.
Meanwhile, he probed deeper. The yuan-ti's name was Hrishniss, and she was a noble of House Jennestaa. She was one of those who had greeted Dmetrio when the prince had come to her tribe nearly six months before on a highly secret mission from Hlondeth. House Extaminos was poised to turn against its former allies, and assisted by the Jennestaa and Eselemaa, it would conquer the Se'sehen in a surprise attack.
She obviously had no idea what was going on in Hlondeth.
Hrishniss had no psionic powers, no clerical spells, also no attack or defense forms, aside from those native to the yuan-ti race. She had come alone and knew nothing about Arvin save that she was to fetch him back to Ss'yin, the ruined city he'd spotted in the distance. Her thoughts gave Arvin the city's full name-Ss'yin'tia'saminass-a word Arvin knew he'd never have a hope of pronouncing without a serpent's forked tongue.
Arvin's attempt to lure the Dmetrio-seed to him had failed. It looked as though Arvin would have to go to the seed instead-to place his head inside the serpent's mouth, so to speak.
Still wary but seeing no reason why he should continue to hide, Arvin ended the illusion and allowed himself to become visible. Hrishniss blinked but otherwise didn't react. Yuan-ti didn't startle easily, and she was no exception. She hissed something at him-an invitation for him to climb onto the carpet with her.
Arvin took a closer look at it. The "carpet" was a section of shed snakeskin with dozens of wings from the tiny flying snakes sewn into its hem. The translucent skin looked fragile, as if it would tear
if too much weight were placed upon it. He climbed onto it-the skin gave slightly but seemed strong enough-and seated himself facing the yuan-ti. She turned her back to him and stared to the west, and the carpet moved in that direction.
As they flew toward the ruined city, Arvin wondered what was going on. It wasn't like Zelia to delegate a task, especially one as important as retrieving someone who claimed to have half of the Circled Serpent. She didn't trust anyone but her seeds-if indeed she trusted them. Arvin worried that Hrishniss might be part of some elaborate scheme but couldn't for the life of him figure out what it might be.
With a growing sense of unease, he rods? the carpet toward Ss'yin.
The ruined city was even larger than Arvin expected-three times the size of Hlondeth at least. It stretched through the jungle for a vast distance. Tree-covered mounds that had once been buildings gave the jungle canopy a bumpy appearance. Here and there Arvin could see the jagged remalns of a partially collapsed arch or viaduct rising above the treetops. Circular patches of lighter-colored vegetation marked the spots where plazas had once been. In the center of some of these were the lower coils of enormous serpent sculptures.