Vanity's Brood - Lisa Smedman [7]
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.
"Well?" a soft voice beside him asked.
A yuan-ti holding