Venom's Taste - Lisa Smedman [27]
Just as her dream had foretold.
“The talents of mother and child do not always manifest in the same way,” Zelia said, breaking into his silent musings as she moved closer to him. “You may turn out to be a savant or a shaper or even a telepath. Their talents lie in glimpsing and shaping the present, not the future. Would that be so frightening?”
Arvin had never heard of savants, shapers, or telepaths before, but understood the gist of what she was saying. Not all psionic talents came with the terrible visions that had plagued his mother. “I suppose that wouldn’t be so bad,” he conceded.
“I can also see to it that you receive your chevrons. You’ll never have to run from the militia again.”
“Those chevrons are impossible to fake,” Arvin answered. “You must have powerful connections.”
Zelia smiled, but her eyes remained cold and unblinking.
“Why the sudden change?” Arvin asked. “Why promise me so much-when before you were content to threaten me?”
Zelia moved closer. “I find that it’s most effective to use both the stick”-she brushed his cheek with her fingertips-“and the carrot. At the same time.”
Arvin’s skin tingled where she’d just touched it. Zelia was an attractive woman, for a yuan-ti. A very attractive woman. Not only that, she was powerful-and well connected. But if his guess was right about her serving House Extaminos, he had little reason to trust her. The expression “deceitful as a snake” hadn’t come from nowhere. Humans in the service of the ruling family had to watch their backs constantly, never knowing when a fang might strike. And because they were working for the royal family-whose members could do no wrong-their poisonings were always “accidental.”
No, working for Zelia was going to be just as demanding-and nerve-wracking-as working for the Guild. Arvin wanted to escape Hlondeth, not mire himself even deeper in it.
“You’re not going to remove the mind seed, are you?” he asked.
Zelia shook her head. “Not until I get what I want.”
“Where can I find you if I learn anything?” Arvin asked.
“Ask for me at the Solarium,” she said. Then, bending gracefully, she inserted a finger into a knothole in the floor and pulled the hidden trapdoor open. She straightened, stepped through the hole, and fell out of sight. Arvin rushed to the trapdoor in alarm, and saw that she had assumed her serpent form. She was hissing loudly-and falling as slowly as a feather. Her sinuous green body lightly touched the floor, and she slithered away between the dusty coils of rope and spools of twine stacked in the warehouse below.
Arvin started to close the trapdoor then had second thoughts. Until he heard back from the Guild, he had nothing to go on, no way of locating the Pox. Sand was slipping through the hourglass. In less than seven days, Zelia’s spell would activate.
No, he corrected himself, not a spell, a power-a psionic power. But psionic powers were like spells, weren’t they? They could be negated.
But how? Arvin ground his teeth. Despite the fact that his mother had possessed the talent, psionics was something about which he knew very little. Maybe, by following Zelia and observing her, he could learn more.
Arvin scooped up his glove from the workbench and yanked it onto his hand. Then he clambered through the trapdoor and slid down a rope. He ran across the warehouse floor, toward the door that was slowly swinging shut.
CHAPTER 5
23 Kythorn, Fullday
Arvin pulled open the front door of the warehouse and stepped out into the humid summer heat. He glanced anxiously back and forth but saw no sign of Zelia, in either yuan-ti or serpent form. The street was filled with people, most of them human. One of the Learned, his ability to read and write proudly displayed by the two red dots on his forehead, swept past in a silken cloak, nose in the air. A stonemason,