Vanity's Brood - Lisa Smedman [39]
"How much for a jug?" a woman's voice asked.
Arvin heard the clink of a coin pouch. He turned his head, trying to figure out where she was, and heard a male voice whisper: "He's blind."
Then a second man added, in a smirking whisper, "Pay him in coppers; he won't know the difference."
Arvin nudged his pack with one foot, making sure it was still there.
"Silence," the woman's voice hissed. "I will buy the wine, and you will drink only as much of it as I serve you. We must reach the temple tonight."
"Yes, Stormmistress," the second man said, contrite.
A hand touched his cheek, turning his face-a woman's hand, by the soft feel of the skin and the sweet- smelling, almost overpowering perfume she wore.
"I'm over here," the Stormmistress said in a silky, sensuous voice, "and I'd like to buy some wine for my fellow pilgrims. How much?"
"Five pythons a jug," Arvin answered, naming the price of the most expensive bottle of wine he'd ever seen ordered at the Mortal Coil. Judging by the fine ceramic jugs, Dar ris had stolen the stuff from a noble household, and it was probably worth that much or even more.
"Done," the woman said, not even bothering to haggle. "I'll take three." She caught Arvin's hand and pressed coins into it. He rubbed one of them. There was a snake embossed on one side of it, and what felt like the House Extaminos crest on the other. Judging by its weight, it was gold, not copper.
The woman leaned past him to lift a jug of wine from the cart. As she did, Arvin caught a whiff of what the perfume was hiding: the musky odor of snake.
That startled him. The clergy of Talos were all human as far as he knew. Yuan-ti scorned the Raging God as one of the lesser Powers, inferior to their serpent deity. To the yuan-ti, Sseth was the only god worth worshiping.
That brought up an unpleasant possibility-that the woman who'd just purchased wine for her "followers" had some ulterior motive for being there.
A moment later, when he listened in on her thoughts-hiding his secondary display by kneeling on the ground and pretending to search for his shirt-he discovered that it was even worse than he'd thought.
She was indeed a worshiper of Sseth.
One of the clerics who served Sibyl.
CHAPTER 5
Arvin patted the ground, pretending to search for his shirt, as he probed the mind of the "Stormmistress." She was delighted to have stumbled across the wine; that would make her job all the easier. She planned to mix something into it before serving it to the Talos worshipers. A word drifted through her mind: hassaael. Arvin wasn't sure if it was the name of a potion, a poison, or the yuan-ti word for blood. All three concepts seemed to be braided into the word. She'd been given it by a yuan-ti in Skullport named Ssarm-the same man who had provided the Pox with their deadly trans- formative potion.
He probed deeper, worming his way into her memories of Sibyl. He was relieved, somewhat, to find that her most recent meeting with the abomination was more than a tenday in the past, and that she had no knowledge of the events unfolding in Hlondeth or Arvin's role in them. The cleric-Thessania, her name was-had been on the road with the latest batch of worshipers, who had come all the way from Ormath on the Shining Plains. Her instructions had been to herd them to the temple, where they would be killed. If they didn't die that night, Sibyl would be displeased.
An image of what Thessania intended flickered through her mind, swift as a snake's darting tongue: Men and women, piled in a heap, their faces bright red and eyeballs bulging.
Arvin shuddered. The followers of the Raging God might be crazy-they had to be, to view volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and lightning-strike wildfires as something to celebrate-but that didn't mean they deserved to die.
Once again, Sibyl was taking advantage of human gullibility. The first time, it had been the Pox then it was the pilgrims. If Arvin could stop whatever was happening, he would.
He heard another