Vanity's Brood - Lisa Smedman [4]
Hlondeth had been a human city in those days. In the centuries since, the yuan-ti had become dominant, and the yuan-ti worshiped the serpent god Sseth. Shrines like the one to Saint Aganna were all but forgotten, known only to the handful of humans who still worshiped the Crying God. Arvin, placed under the care of those priests in an orphanage, had been taken, years ago, to visit Saint Aganna's shrine as a "reward" for having knotted the most nets in a month. The sight of shriveled fingers on a platter, however, had terrified him, as had the faint rotten-egg smell that lingered within the shrine-an odor he had been certain was the lingering taint of plague. The priest, however, had explained to the near-panicked boy that the smell came from the shrine's cellar, which the yuan-ti had tunneled into and turned into a brood chamber. When Arvin had worried about the yuan-ti bursting out of the cellar to defend their eggs, the priest had chuckled. The cellar had been abandoned, he explained, many years ago. The yuan-ti no longer defiled it.
Arvin thanked Tymora, goddess of luck, for having woven that vital piece of information into his lifepath.
For the past six months, since returning from Sespech, Arvin had been gathering information about the ancient temple in which Sibyl had made her lair. He knew it had been built to honor the beast lord Varae, an aspect of Sseth, and that it lay somewhere beneath the city at the heart of an even older network of catacombs. Abandoned long before Hlondeth was even built, the temple had been rediscovered by the Extaminos family in the sixth century and used for several years as a place of worship by that House. It had been abandoned a second time after the Cathedral of Emerald Scales was completed. Over the intervening three and a half centuries, it had largely been forgotten. Nobody in Hlondeth-save for Sibyl's followers-knew exactly where it was or how to get to it.
There was a text, however-one of several obtained by Arvin at great expense through his guild connections-that described a way in. It had been written by a man named Villim. Extaminos in the late sixth century DR. In it, Villim had made a veiled reference to a trap door that led directly to the temple catacombs-a door that could only be opened by "the lady without fingers."
Saint Aganna. The entrance to the shrine's "cellar" was probably behind the icon.
The altar, Arvin saw, had sunk into the floor in the eighteen years since his visit with the priest; any offerings placed on it today would slide off its steeply canted surface. He climbed onto it and stood, studying the icon. It was even more faded than he remembered. He could barely make out the white, wormlike fingers on the platter Saint Aganna held.
Arvin grasped one edge of the icon and gently tugged. As he'd expected, the painting was mounted on the wall with hinges-hinges that tore free, leaving Arvin with the heavy wooden panel in his arms. He staggered back and nearly fell from the altar. Once he'd recovered his balance, he lowered the icon to the floor and studied the portion of the wall it had concealed. A close inspection revealed five faint circular marks-slight depressions in the stone. Pushing them in the wrong order might spring a trap. A poisoned needle, perhaps. or a sprung blade that would sever a finger.
Arvin wrenched a splinter of wood from the top of the icon and used it to push each of the depressions in turn. He tried several sequences-left to right, right to left, every other depression-but nothing worked. Frustrated, he stared at them, thinking. They were arranged, he saw, in a slight arc. As if…
He lifted a hand, fingers splayed, then smiled. One depression lay under the tip of each