Vanity's Brood - Lisa Smedman [26]
She stepped in front of him again, holding the dagger. She jabbed its point into first one ear, then the other, cutting the flaps of skin that had grown over them. Then she sliced open his lips. Arvin gasped at the pain and began to choke on the blood he'd inhaled. When he was able to speak again, he told Zelia what she wanted to hear.
"You've beaten me," he said, blood dribbling from his lips onto the floor. He stared up at her with his one good eye. "What now?"
Instead of answering, she stepped over to the first Zelia-the one that lay either unconscious or dead. She laid a hand gently on that Zelia's neck, as though checking for a life pulse. Instead of continuing to rest gently on the neck, however, her fingers sank deep into it, as if into soft dough. Then the first Zelia began to shrink. Head and legs and arms shriveled into the torso, and the torso itself collapsed around the second Zelia's hand.
Zelia closed her hand around the last vestiges of the body it as it flowed into her palm and closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. She shivered and her head lolled back-arid groaned in pleasure. Her fist fell open, empty. She opened her eyes and bent down to pick up Naneth's ring.
"How did you come to have this?" she asked.
Arvin stared defiantly up at her. Maybe she wasn't going to seed him after all. His lips were raw with pain, and he spat out the blood that had puddled in his mouth.
"Abyss take you," he swore.
Zelia swayed closer, tossing her long red hair. "You will tell me," she said, "one way or the other. When you've finished telling me, I'll end your suffering." She smirked. "Perhaps by compelling you to kill yourself."
Her eyes flashed and a soft tinkling filled the air as she manifested another power. Arvin felt it brush against his mind as softly as a cobweb-then tear apart, as if it were equally fragile.
Zelia frowned, then grabbed his hair and used it to roll his body back and forth like a ball as she examined him. Her eyes flashed a second time and a soft hissing filled the air as she concentrated on her manifestation. Her hand paused briefly over the braided leather bracelet on his right wrist, and hesitated a second time over the lump that had been Arvin's left hand. She probed with her fingers.
Arvin realized she had found Karrell's ring.
With quick, deft slices that sent fresh spasms of pain lancing through his hand and up his arm, Zelia cut Arvin's little finger apart from the rest, then yanked the ring from it. She held the ring in the fountain until the blood was gone from it, then gave it an appraising look.
A tear welled in Arvin's open eye. He said nothing, however. Zelia would have enjoyed listening to him plead for Karrell's ring. He stared at the backpack, lying no more than a pace away. He'd never be able to kill Sibyl. Zelia would no doubt claim the net inside it, as well…
His breath caught as he realized there might be a way out. If he could trick Zelia into speaking the net's command word while still holding it, the magical net would kill her. Arvin would be free once the manifestation she'd used to fuse his flesh together ended.
Assuming it ever did end.
Zelia's eyes flashed silver a third time as she manifested the power that would allow her to listen in on Arvin's thoughts. Without Karrell's ring or his own psionics to counter it, he had only his own raw will to defend himself with-and Zelia tore through that like a knife through cloth. Arvin pretended to panic, filling his mind with thoughts of his backpack. He prayed-falsely-to Tymora that his luck would hold, that Zelia wouldn't take the net inside it, that she wouldn't speak its command word-pullulios-and toss it on him. That would inflict a terrible agony, one that would cause him to crumple and succumb to whatever she wanted.
Arvin felt Zelia push deeper into his mind. She chuckled. "Try that trick on someone who's going to fall for it." Then she continued to sift through his thoughts.
Arvin's mind reeled as his thoughts were peeled back, layer by layer. Memories flashed