The sitting room also showed signs of the baron’s intrusion. A tapestry lay on the floor beneath a broken curtain rod; a chair was on its side; and a shelf had been yanked away from one wall, spilling books onto the floor. One of them was on the hearth, its pages starting to curl from the heat of the fire. Arvin picked it up. Flipping idly through it, he saw that the book contained a number of illustrations: male and female pairs of various humanoid creatures—orcs, two-headed ettins, cloven-hoofed satyrs, lizardfolk, and several other races. Next to each figure was an enlarged drawing of that creature’s genitals; the female illustrations were accompanied by a drawing showing a baby growing within the womb.
He had no idea what the text of the book said, but here and there he spotted a line that he recognized as Draconic. The spine of the book was deeply creased, as if it had been referred to many times, and one of the pages was marked with a ribbon. Flipping to it, Arvin saw an illustration of a male and female yuan-ti. Dmetrio Extaminos, it seemed, had been no aberration. It was common for a male yuan-ti to carry two swords in his scabbard… so to speak.
Closing the book, he set it back on the shelf.
A quick pacing of the first-floor rooms and a few knocks on walls determined that neither the kitchen nor the sitting room had any hiding places. There was a cupboard under the stairs at the back of the hall, but a glance inside revealed nothing but dust and cobwebs.
“Glisena?” Arvin called. “Are you here?”
There was, as he expected, no answer.
The stairs led to a landing with three doors. All were open. The one to Arvin’s right looked as though it had been kicked open, splintering the door frame; it must have been locked when the baron arrived. Arvin glanced into the other two rooms first—a small washing-up room and a bedroom, its bed dragged to one side and its wardrobe open and spilling clothes—then turned his attention to the third room. He eased open the broken door.
“Glisena?” he called. “Naneth?”
As the door swung open, the stench struck him. Small and shuttered tight against the cold outside, the room reeked of snake. The walls were lined with tables; on these stood square containers made from panes of leaded glass, each with a wooden lid that had been drilled with holes. A different type of snake slithered around inside each container. One was a brown-scaled boa, coiled tight around a feebly twitching rat. Its body flexed, and the rat stopped moving. In the container next to it was a clutch of small green snakes, tangled together in a mating ball. Next to these was a flying snake from the southern lands, its body banded in light and dark green, its wings a vivid shade of turquoise. It fluttered inside its glass-walled container, hissing.
Arvin shook his head. Naneth certainly had odd taste in pets.
As he stepped into the room, a reddish-brown viper with a thick band of black at its throat reared up and spat a spray of venom onto the glass. Arvin eyed it warily, glad that the lid prevented it from getting out. The container next to it, however, was open; its lid sat on the table beside it. A saucer lay upside down inside the glass-walled cage, next to the gold-and-black-striped snake that was coiled there; this was where Naneth had been standing when Arvin contacted her with his sending.
Arvin picked up the lid and set it cautiously back in place, closing the cage. The snake inside, he saw now, was coiled on top of a clutch of eggs. Its body covered most of the small, leathery ovals, but as the snake shifted, Arvin caught a glimpse of something strange—it looked like a symbol, painted in red, on the egg that was closest to the glass. Squatting down for a closer look, Arvin saw he was right. The symbol was in Draconic. What it signified, he had no idea. He touched a hand to the glass the egg rested against, and it happened. Just as it had on the ship. For the space of several heartbeats, he stared, with naked eyes, into the future.
A pool of blood spread around someone’s feet. And a finger-thin stream of red flowed away from the pool, toward a dark shape Arvin couldn’t quite make out. Yet somehow he knew that it was something evil, something monstrous. The creature looked down then lifted the stream of blood from the ground with one hand—the hand of a woman—and began drawing the blood toward itself like a fisher hauling in a line.
Arvin’s ears rang with an anguished scream—a woman’s scream. Startled by it, he jerked his hand away. Only after his heart had pounded for several moments did he realize the sound had been part of his vision.
The snake shifted, covering its eggs once more. It looked at Arvin through the glass, tongue flickering in and out of its mouth, and gave a soft, menacing hiss.
Shaken by the premonition, Arvin stood.
Someone was going to die. Naneth?
He forced his mind back to the job at hand. Had Naneth still been in this room when the baron kicked the door in? If so, the room might hold a clue as to where she’d gone.
For the fourth time that evening, Arvin manifested the power that made him sensitive to psychic impressions. The snakes hissed as a low droning noise filled the air. Allowing the energy that lay just behind his navel to uncoil, Arvin held out a hand and turned in a slow circle, scanning the room. Ectoplasm blossomed in his wake on the containers that held the snakes, covering their glass with a translucent sheen.
Arvin focused on the saucer Naneth had dropped. A vision flashed before his eyes—of Naneth, startled, releasing it. The image was faint and ghostly, at first, but grew in detail and solidity as Naneth listened and responded to the warning Arvin had sent. By the end of the sending, the midwife was visibly agitated. She ran from the room, into the bedroom across the landing, and returned an instant later with something tucked in the crook of one arm. Slamming the door behind herself, she quickly locked it. She shoved aside one of the glass containers, ignoring the agitated hissing of her snakes, and placed the item on the tabletop. It turned out to be a wrought-iron statuette of a rearing serpent holding a fist-sized sphere of crystal in its mouth.
Arvin felt the blood drain from his cheeks. He’d seen a crystal ball identical to it once before. It had belonged to a yuan-ti named Karshis—a yuan-ti who had served Sibyl.
Sibyl, the abomination who had killed Naulg, Arvin’s oldest friend.
Painful memories swam into Arvin’s mind—of Naulg, barely recognizable as human, his body hideously transformed by the potion Sibyl’s minions had forced him to consume. Driven insane by his transformation, Naulg had glared at Arvin after his rescue, frothing and snapping his teeth, not recognizing his friend. And Arvin, staring down at one of the few people to have shown him kindness without wanting something in return, had realized that there was only one thing he could do for his old friend, one final kindness.
He could still hear Naulg’s final choked gasp as the cleric’s prayer took effect . and the silence that followed.
Together with Nicco and the others in the Secession, Arvin had thwarted Sibyl’s plan to turn the humans of Hlondeth into mindless semblances of yuan-ti. But the abomination herself was still at large. Though the Secession had been searching for her, these past six months, they’d turned up no trace of her. Arvin had bided his time, hiding from Zelia and slowly learning new psionic powers from Tanju. He’d told himself that, when Sibyl did rear up out of her hole again, he’d be ready to avenge himself on her. That was something he’d sworn to do—sworn in the presence of a cleric of Hoar, god of retribution.
The god must have been listening. Why else would he have placed another of Sibyl’s followers in Arvin’s path?
As if in answer, thunder grumbled somewhere outside, rattling the shutters of the windows.
Arvin swallowed and nervously touched the crystal that hung at his throat.
The vision his manifestation had conjured up was still unfolding. In it, Naneth raised a hand to her mouth and pointed her forefinger at the crystal ball. “Mistress,” she said in a tight, urgent voice, one hand stroking the crystal. “Mistress, heed me.”