Venom's Taste - Lisa Smedman [25]
Zelia moved closer, her body swaying sinuously as she made her way around the hanging clutter. “You’re a psion.”
Arvin felt the blood drain from his face. “No.” He shook his head. “No, I’m not.”
Zelia’s eyes bored into his. For once, the unblinking stare of a yuan-ti was getting to him.
“Yes you are. In the tavern, when we first met, you tried to charm me. And later, you used psionics to distract the militia.”
A cold feeling settled in the pit of Arvin’s stomach. He opened his mouth but found himself unable to deny Zelia’s blunt observation. For years, he’d told himself that his ability to simply crack a smile and have people suddenly warm up to him was due solely to his good looks and natural charisma, but deep down, he’d known the truth. What had happened this morning-when Tanju had been distracted in the tavern-had confirmed it.
Arvin’s mother had been right about him all along. He had the talent.
“The Mortal Coil,” he began in a faltering voice. “That droning noise…”
“Yes.”
Arvin closed his eyes, thinking back to the day he’d finally succeeded in running away from the orphanage. He’d been in his teens by then-hair had begun to grow under his arms and at his groin, and the first wisps of a beard had begun on his chin. His mother had always warned him that “something strange” might start to happen when he reached puberty. Arvin, surrounded by the rough company of children “rescued” from the gutters by the clerics of Ilmater, had developed his own crude ideas of what she’d been referring to-until that fateful day, just after his fourteenth birthday, when he’d found out what she’d really meant.
It had happened at the end of the month, on the day the clerics renewed the children’s marks. The children had been summoned from their beds, and Arvin contrived to place himself last in line-an easy thing to do, since those at the end of the line had to wait longest to return to their beds. As the cleric who was applying red ink to the children’s wrists worked his way down the line, staining the symbol of Ilmater onto the wrists of each child with quick strokes of his brush, Arvin stood with fingers crossed, wishing and wishing and wishing that somehow, this time, he might be overlooked.
One by one, the children were painted and dismissed, until only Arvin remained. Then, just as the cleric turned toward Arvin, brush dripping, something strange happened. It started with a tickling sensation at the back of Arvin’s throat. Then a low droning filled the air-the same droning that had filled the tavern this morning.
Suddenly, the cleric had glanced away. He stared at the far wall, frowning, as if trying to remember something.
Arvin seized his chance. He stuffed his hands into his pockets, deep enough to hide his wrists, and turned away. Then he began to walk out of the room, as if dismissed. From behind him came not the shout he’d expected, but the sound of a brush being tapped against a jar. The cleric was cleaning his brush and preparing to leave.
Later that night, when he was certain the other children in his room were asleep, Arvin had climbed down from a third-floor window using the finger-thin rope he’d secretly braided over the previous months. After four days of hiding in a basement, what remained of the previous month’s mark had faded enough for him to venture out onto the streets. He was free, and he remained that way for several tendays… until the Guild caught him thieving on their turf.
Thank the gods he’d still been carrying his escape rope at the time. The rope appeared ordinary, but woven into it were threads that Arvin had plucked from a magical robe owned by one of the orphanage’s clerics. The resulting rope had chameleonlike properties and magically blended with its surroundings-allowing it to dangle against a wall, undetected, until the moment it was needed. One of the rogues who had captured Arvin had tripped over it-and cursed the “bloody