Venom's Taste - Lisa Smedman [105]
“I-” Arvin let his words trail off, pretending to be mesmerized by the venom beading at the tips of the snake-hand’s fangs and the head’s slight swaying motion. All the while, he was thinking furiously. The yuan-ti must have heard Arvin and Naulg use each other’s names and realized Arvin had been making a rescue attempt. If Arvin could convince the yuan-ti he was on his own, it might protect Nicco-but he’d doom himself. He needed to convince the yuan-ti that it was more than a rescue mission, that there was vital information only he could provide.
Which, fortunately, there was.
“Rescuing my friend was only one of my goals in coming here,” Arvin answered. “I also wanted to learn more about the Pox. I was ordered to spy on them by a yuan-ti who goes by the name of Zelia.” As he dropped the name, he searched the yuan-ti’s eyes for a sign of recognition.
The yuan-ti’s expression remained unchanged. “Describe her,” it ordered.
“She looks human, but with green scales. There’s nothing else, really, to distinguish her.”
“Her scales had no pattern?”
Arvin shrugged. “Not that I noticed. They were just… green.”
The yuan-ti considered this. Fortunately, it didn’t ask about Zelia’s one distinguishing feature-her hair. Hair color and length was something the scaly folk generally took no notice of; all human hair looked alike, to them. Even so, Arvin wasn’t going to volunteer the information that Zelia was a redhead. Nor was he going to reveal that she was a psion. She’d be all too easy to track down if he did, and Arvin would become… superfluous. But he could whet the yuan-ti’s appetite a little.
“I think Zelia works for House Extaminos,” Arvin continued.
A sharp hiss from the yuan-ti told him he’d struck a nerve.
“Though that’s just a guess on my part,” Arvin continued quickly. “Zelia only engaged my services a few days ago. And she did it in a fashion that hardly endeared me to her. She placed a… geas upon me. If I don’t return with the information she wants in two days’ time, I’ll die.”
“She’s a cleric?”
Arvin nodded.
“Of Sseth?”
“I suppose,” Arvin demurred. As he answered, a part of his mind was focused deep within himself, drawing energy up his spine and coiling it at the base of his skull. When he felt the familiar prickle in his scalp, he narrowed his eyes in what he hoped was a suitably sly expression. “If you remove the geas, I’ll help you kill Zelia or capture her, whichever you prefer. Do we have a deal?”
The yuan-ti cocked his head as if listening to something then gave a thin-lipped smile. Arvin’s hopes rose. His charm must have worked. Then he realized the yuan-ti had heard footsteps in the hall. Arvin heard a rustling in the doorway and turned his head. Slowly-he didn’t want to give the snake-hand an excuse to bite him.
The female cultist who had fled earlier entered the room. She held a flask in one hand. It was metal, and shaped like the rattle of a snake. She started to remove the cork that sealed it then glanced at the yuan-ti, as if seeking his permission.
Arvin wet his lips nervously. “The Pox have already made me drink from one of those flasks,” he told the yuan-ti. “The potion didn’t work on me. As you can see, I wasn’t transformed into a-”
“Silence!” the yuan-ti hissed.
The cultist lowered the flask, a puzzled expression on her face. Seeing it, Arvin realized that the Pox still believed the flasks to contain poison or plague-and he had just come within a word of destroying that fiction. Had he just proved himself too dangerous to be allowed to live? He wet his lips nervously. His dagger was still inside his glove. There was a chance-a very slim chance-that he could kill the yuan-ti before the snake-hand sank its venomous teeth into Arvin’s throat.
The yuan-ti nodded at Arvin. “This man is dangerous,” he hissed. “Why don’t you let me feed him the plague, instead?” He held up his free hand, the jaws of its snake-head open, imploring.
The cultist hesitated. “It should be a cleric who…” Then her eyes softened, and she held out the flask.
Quicker than the blink of an eye, the yuan-ti’s free hand