He walked cautiously down the stairs, at several points having to duck to avoid decorative elements in the rounded ceiling where bones had been used to create mock arches. They gave the staircase an unnerving similarity to the gullet of a snake-something Villim had commented on in his text. Arvin shivered as a dangling finger bone
brushed against the top of his head and clattered to the ground. He tensed, expecting one of Sibyl's followers to appear at any moment.
None did.
The air was cool and clammy, like cold sweat. He found himself missing the stifling heat he'd left behind.
The staircase should have ended in a hallway that led, according to Villim's text, to the temple. Instead, it ended in a jumble of fallen stone. In the eight centuries since Villim had penned his text, the ceiling must have collapsed.
Arvin swore softly and kicked at a loose stone. It rolled-farther than it should have. Bending down, he discovered a narrow gap, beyond which lay a wider passage. Clearing away the rubble that blocked it, Arvin realized it must be the tunnel the yuan-ti had used to reach the chamber in which they'd laid their eggs. It was too low to crawl through with a backpack on; he'd have to drag the pack behind him. He tied it by a short length of rope to one ankle then lay prone and wormed his way into the tunnel.
The narrow passage wound its way through the collapsed masonry, up and over sharp bits of stone that scraped Arvin's arms and legs and under jutting blocks that he would have banged his head against, had he not been able to see in the dark. Being in yuan-ti form helped. His increased flexibility enabled him to slither around corners a human would have been unable to negotiate.
At one point the tunnel constricted, forcing him to wriggle forward on his belly with arms extended in front of him. Claustrophobia gripped him a moment later when his pack got caught in the narrow section, jerking him to a halt like an anchor. He was trapped! He would lie there, entombed with Varae's victims, until he starved to death. He scraped at the
rope around his ankle with his other foot, trying to free himself from it-then realized what he was doing. If he left the pack behind, he'd lose his chance to settle his score with Sibyl-the abomination who had killed both his best friend and the woman he loved.
"Control," he whispered.
He blinked away the sweat that trickled down into his eyes and licked his lips with a long, forked tongue. The sweat tasted slightly acidic, reminding him that he was in yuan-ti form. The serpent folk had wriggled through that narrow spot to reach their brood chamber, and Arvin should be able to do the same. It was just a matter of freeing his pack.
He worked it back and forth, prodding it with a foot, then jerked against the rope tied to it. Eventually the pack came free. Relieved, he crawled on.
The tunnel ended a short distance ahead, opening into a chamber illuminated with flickering red light that washed out Arvin's darkvision. A hissing noise filled the chamber: the soft, slow exhalations of serpents.
Dozens of them.
Arvin sent his mind deep into his muladhara, the source of psionic energy that lay at the base of his spine, then summoned energy up through the base of his scalp and into his forehead. He sent his awareness down the tunnel ahead of him, into the chamber beyond. The thoughts of the yuan-ti inside it, however, were not what he'd expected. He'd been prepared for guards, alert and suspicious. The thoughts of these yuan-ti were languid, jumbled, confused. As if… yes, that was it; they were dreaming. The mind of one was filled with images of a jungle, of a tree whose snake-headed branches had become tangled in a hopeless knot. Another dreamed that the viaducts that arched over Hlondeth were growing together, forming a stone lattice overhead.
A third dreamed she was basking on a stone that had suddenly grown unbearably hot, but someone held her tail, preventing her from slithering away. Others dreamed of gardens that had become choked with weeds, of hatchlings that struggled to tear open the leathery eggs that enclosed them, and of ropes that turned into snakes and slithered into a mating ball that could not be untangled. All of the dreams were different, yet all had one thing in common: a restlessness-a need to do something-and a frustrating inability to grasp what that something might be.
Arvin withdrew his awareness from the dreamers, wondering what to do next. He'd planned to pass himself off as one of Sibyl's worshipers, bearing tribute for the avatar. He'd spent months studying the practices of Sseth's faithful, learning the gestures of propitiation and the hisses of praise. Sunset was one of the chief times of worship, the time when the yuan-ti ended the day's heat-induced lethargy with feasting and praise.
He hadn't expected to find Sibyl's worshipers deep in slumber.
He couldn't wait for them to awaken, however. His metamorphosis would wear off soon. He crawled forward, determined to either find someone who was awake or to find Sibyl on his own.
As Arvin drew nearer to the chamber, a wisp of amber-colored smoke curled down the tunnel toward him, bearing an odor he recognized: a combination of mint, burning moss, and sap. Osssra!The flickering light, he saw, came from flames dancing across a bowl of the burning oil-the same oil whose fumes had nearly poisoned him when he'd forced his way into an audience with Dmetrio Extaminos, royal prince of Hlondeth. In morphed form, Arvin would be immune to the worst of its toxic effects-but that didn't mean he wouldn't wind up drowsy and dreaming, like the yuan-ti in the chamber, if he inhaled it. Worried, he crawled out of the tunnel and untied his pack from his ankle. If he moved quickly, he might make his way through the chamber before he breathed in too much of the smoke.
The yuan-ti were sprawled together in loose- limbed heaps on the floor around the burning bowls of osssra, heads lolling in slumber. Breathing as shallowly as he could, Arvin stepped quickly across them, making for the chamber's only door. This chamber, like the previous one, was decorated with human bones. Here, however, complete skeletons had been used. They were wired together and attached to the walls inside arches made of vertebrae. One of the skeletons, just to the right of the door, was that of a woman, the tiny skeleton of an unborn child arranged within her pelvic bones.
A wave of nausea swept over Arvin. Karrell had been pregnant when she died, pregnant with his children. Eyes stinging, he reached for the handle of the door, but before he could open it, something twined around his ankle. Startled, he gasped-then realized he'd inhaled a deep lungful of smoke.
Looking down, he saw the snake-headed arm of one of the sleepers, coiled around his leg. "Stay," it hissed while the rest of the yuan-ti's body slept. "Dream with us."
Made drowsy by the smoke, Arvin yawned, inadvertently drawing in another lungful of it. He shook his head, but it couldn't dislodge the cobwebs of dream that clung to the edges of his thoughts. In that dream, he ran through a jungle, trying to escape from a slit-pupilled eye the size of the sun. It stared down at him from above, then suddenly became a mouth, which opened, drooling blood. Out of it fluttered a brown, withered egg shell. It landed on the ground next to him, staring up at him with Karrell's face. Long black hair splayed around her severed head like the rays of an extinguished sun. Her eyes were flat and dead in the wrinkled brown face. The jade earring in her left ear wriggled free, and the small green frog opened its mouth and gave a squeaking croak-a baby's shrill cry of need.
Arvin shook his head, purging the nightmare from his mind by sheer force of will. Shaking the snake-arm off his leg, he wrenched open the door and stumbled into a brightly lit hallway. He slammed the door behind him and took in several deep lungsful of cool, clean air. How long had he been standing there, lost in the dream? However long it had been, it had cost him precious time. His body was already starting to tingle. His metamorphosis would end soon.