Venom's Taste - Lisa Smedman [107]
“Leave us,” the priest said. The two servants exited the room, bowing.
The priest slithered up to the corpse and raised himself above it. Arvin slid around to the other side of the slab. He didn’t recognize the dead man, but he knew who he was-a younger cousin of Lady Dediana. Arvin let his eyes range over the body. The corpse reminded him of prey that had been constricted then rejected as unfit to swallow.
“Keep your questions simple,” the priest said. “The dead are easily confused. And remember, you may ask only a limited number of questions. No more than five.”
Arvin nodded. The information he wanted was very specific. Five questions should do nicely.
The priest swayed above the body in a complicated pattern, tongue flickering in and out of his mouth as he hissed a prayer in Draconic. As the prayer concluded, the mouth of the corpse parted slightly, like that of a man about to speak. “Ask your questions,” the priest told Arvin.
Arvin addressed the body. “Urshas Extaminos, how did you die?”
“I fell from a great height.” Urshas’s voice was a creaking echo, his words sounding as if they were rising out of a dark, distant tomb. Broken bones grated as his smashed jaw opened and closed.
Interesting. Urshas’s body had been found late last night, lying on a road near the House Gestin compound. The tallest of the viaducts that spanned that road was only two stories above street level-and was three buildings distant from the spot where the body lay. “How did you reach that height?” Arvin asked.
“Sseth’s avatar carried me. We flew.”
The priest gave a surprised hiss. “How do you know it was Sseth’s avatar?” he asked.
Arvin’s head snapped around angrily. “I am asking the questions.”
Urshas, however, was compelled to answer: “She told me so.”
“She?” Arvin said aloud-then realized his error. His inflection had turned the word into a question.
“Sibyl,” Urshas answered.
“Sibyl who?” Arvin asked.
“She has no house name,” Urshas croaked. “She is just… Sibyl.”
“Sibyl,” a different voice-one that wasn’t part of his dream-hissed from somewhere close at hand.
Roused to partial wakefulness, Arvin contemplated the dream. At the time of the memory he was reliving, the name Sibyl had meant nothing to Zelia. But it would, in the months to come. Arvin tried to cast his mind into Zelia’s more recent memories, to conjure up an image of Sibyl, but he could not. Instead he made a momentary connection with one of his own memories-of the way Sibyl’s name had popped into his head while Gonthril was questioning him. With it came a realization. It was desperately important that Zelia find out if Sibyl was involved in all of this. If she was, it would give Lady Dediana the excuse she needed to-
“Sibyl,” the voice hissed again.
Fully awake at last, Arvin opened his eyes the merest of slits. He was lying, bound hand and foot, in a different room than the one in which he’d fallen asleep. Its walls were round, not square, and were made of green stone. By the hot, humid feel of the air, the room was above ground, and it was day. The floor was covered in a plush green carpet, on which stood a low table. A yuan-ti half blood-the one from the crematorium-was seated at the table, his back to Arvin. He stared at a wrought-iron statuette of a serpent that held in its upturned mouth a large crystal sphere. Sitting next to it on the table was the lamp that illuminated the room.
“Sibyl,” the yuan-ti hissed again. “It is your servant, Karshis.”
Silently, Arvin took stock. His glove was still on his left hand, but the restraints that held him made it impossible to tell if his magical bracelet was still on his wrist. His wrists were bound together behind his back by something cold and hard; his ankles were similarly restrained. A length of what felt like a thin rod of metal connected these restraints. Glancing down, he saw that his ankles were bound by a coil of what looked like rope but felt like stone. He was hard-pressed to suppress a grin. He’d braided the cord himself from the thin, fine