Vanity's Brood

by Lisa Smedman

  Arvin thanked Tymora, goddess of luck, for having woven that vital piece of information into his lifepath.

  For the past six months, since returning from Sespech, Arvin had been gathering information about the ancient temple in which Sibyl had made her lair. He knew it had been built to honor the beast lord Varae, an aspect of Sseth, and that it lay somewhere beneath the city at the heart of an even older network of catacombs. Abandoned long before Hlondeth was even built, the temple had been rediscovered by the Extaminos family in the sixth century and used for several years as a place of worship by that House. It had been abandoned a second time after the Cathedral of Emerald Scales was completed. Over the intervening three and a half centuries, it had largely been forgotten. Nobody in Hlondeth—save for Sibyl’s followers—knew exactly where it was or how to get to it.

  There was a text, however—one of several obtained by Arvin at great expense through his guild connections—that described a way in. It had been written by a man named Villim Extaminos in the late sixth century DR. In it, Villim had made a veiled reference to a trap door that led directly to the temple catacombs—a door that could only be opened by “the lady without fingers.”

  Saint Aganna. The entrance to the shrine’s “cellar” was probably behind the icon.

  The altar, Arvin saw, had sunk into the floor in the eighteen years since his visit with the priest; any offerings placed on it today would slide off its steeply canted surface. He climbed onto it and stood, studying the icon. It was even more faded than he remembered. He could barely make out the white, wormlike fingers on the platter Saint Aganna held.

  Arvin grasped one edge of the icon and gently tugged. As he’d expected, the painting was mounted on the wall with hinges—hinges that tore free, leaving Arvin with the heavy wooden panel in his arms. He staggered back and nearly fell from the altar. Once he’d recovered his balance, he lowered the icon to the floor and studied the portion of the wall it had concealed. A close inspection revealed five faint circular marks—slight depressions in the stone. Pushing them in the wrong order might spring a trap. A poisoned needle, perhaps, or a sprung blade that would sever a finger.

  Arvin wrenched a splinter of wood from the top of the icon and used it to push each of the depressions in turn. He tried several sequences—left to right, right to left, every other depression—but nothing worked. Frustrated, he stared at them, thinking. They were arranged, he saw, in a slight arc. As if …

  He lifted a hand, fingers splayed, then smiled. One depression lay under the tip of each finger and thumb. The solution, he realized, was to push all of them at once.

  He did.

  He felt movement under his forefinger and little finger—each sank into the stone up to the first joint. Then they abruptly stopped. Flakes of red drifted out of the holes when he pulled his fingers out.

  The mechanism was rusted solid.

  Arvin braced a shoulder against the wall and shoved, but nothing happened. He shoved again—then gasped as the altar teetered with a grinding of stone on stone. Realizing his weight was about to send it crashing into the chamber below, he leaped off.

  “Nine lives,” he whispered, touching the crystal that hung from a leather thong around his neck. Then he smiled. The secret door behind the icon wasn’t the only way into the catacombs.

  Placing his hands on the lower end of the altar, he shoved. The slab of stone moved downward—then slipped and fell. As it tumbled into the chamber below, Arvin manifested a power, wrapping the block of stone in a muffle of psionic energy. Though the crash of the altar against the floor below sent a tremble through the shrine, the only sound was a soft rustle, no louder than a silk scarf landing gently on the floor.

  Dust rose through the opening as Arvin peered down into it. Sunlight slanting through the hole dimly illuminated the chamber below. The floor was littered with what looked like deflated leather balls: the remains of yuan-ti eggs. All had hatched long ago; what remained was brown and withered. The walls bore some sort of plaster work, done in relief—knobby sculptural elements that Arvin couldn’t make out from above.

  He pulled a rope from his pack and laid it out on the floor, doubling the rope back on itself to form a T-shape. He tied a knot, then stretched the short bar of the T from one edge of the hole to the other, letting the longer piece dangle down inside.

  “Saxum,” he whispered. The rope turned to stone. He slid down what had become a pole, then whispered a second command word: “Restis.” The rope returned to its original form and slithered down into his hands.

  He looked around as he untied the knot and stowed the rope away. The walls and ceiling of the chamber were decorated not with plaster reliefs but with human bones. On one wall, individual vertebrae and ribs had been arranged in floral patterns around a skull flanked by two shoulder blades that gave the appearance of wings. On another, leg and arm bones by the hundreds formed borders around still more skulls, arranged in circular rosettes. On the ceiling, thousands of finger bones were arranged in a starlike motif. A chandelier made from curved ribs and yet more vertebrae, wired together, creaked as it rocked slowly back and forth, disturbed by the fall of the altar.

  On yet another wall was a gruesome parody of a sundial, arm bones dividing a circle of tiny skulls into the four quarters of morning, fullday, evening and darkmorning. Arvin’s mouth twisted in disgust as he realized the skulls were from human infants. Stepping closer, he saw that the skulls were cracked, in some cases smashed in on one side; they must have been sacrificial victims. He touched one of the tiny skulls and it crumbled under the slight pressure of his fingertip, the fragments sifting down onto the floor like ash. The skulls were a poignant contrast with the hatched eggs that littered the floor—death and birth. The ones who had done the dying, of course, were human.

  So were the ones who had done the killing. The Temple of Varae—and the catacombs—had been built long before the yuan-ti came to the Vilhon Reach.

  There was one exit from the chamber, a doorway whose arch was framed in bones. It led to a flight of stairs that descended into darkness.

  Arvin pulled a glass vial out of his pocket, pulled out its cork stopper, and drank the potion it contained. The liquid slid down his throat, leaving a honey-sweet aftertaste of night-blooming flowers and loam. The inky blackness that filled the staircase lightened as walls, stairs, and ceiling resolved into shades of gray and black.

  He walked cautiously down the stairs, at several points having to duck to avoid decorative elements in the rounded ceiling where bones had been used to create mock arches. They gave the staircase an unnerving similarity to the gullet of a snake—something Villim had commented on in his text. Arvin shivered as a dangling finger bone brushed against the top of his head and clattered to the ground. He tensed, expecting one of Sibyl’s followers to appear at any moment.

  None did.

  The air was cool and clammy, like cold sweat. He found himself missing the stifling heat he’d left behind.

  The staircase should have ended in a hallway that led, according to Villim’s text, to the temple. Instead, it ended in a jumble of fallen stone. In the eight centuries since Villim had penned his text, the ceiling must have collapsed.

  Arvin swore softly and kicked at a loose stone. It rolled—farther than it should have. Bending down, he discovered a narrow gap, beyond which lay a wider passage. Clearing away the rubble that blocked it, Arvin realized it must be the tunnel the yuan-ti had used to reach the chamber in which they’d laid their eggs. It was too low to crawl through with a backpack on; he’d have to drag the pack behind him. He tied it by a short length of rope to one ankle then lay prone and wormed his way into the tunnel.

  The narrow passage wound its way through the collapsed masonry, up and over sharp bits of stone that scraped Arvin’s arms and legs and under jutting blocks that he would have banged his head against, had he not been able to see in the dark. Being in yuan-ti form helped. His increased flexibility enabled him to slither around corners a human wo
uld have been unable to negotiate.

  At one point the tunnel constricted, forcing him to wriggle forward on his belly with arms extended in front of him. Claustrophobia gripped him a moment later when his pack got caught in the narrow section, jerking him to a halt like an anchor. He was trapped! He would lie there, entombed with Varae’s victims, until he starved to death. He scraped at the rope around his ankle with his other foot, trying to free himself from it—then realized what he was doing. If he left the pack behind, he’d lose his chance to settle his score with Sibyl—the abomination who had killed both his best friend and the woman he loved.

  “Control,” he whispered.

  He blinked away the sweat that trickled down into his eyes and licked his lips with a long, forked tongue. The sweat tasted slightly acidic, reminding him that he was in yuan-ti form. The serpent folk had wriggled through that narrow spot to reach their brood chamber, and Arvin should be able to do the same. It was just a matter of freeing his pack.

  He worked it back and forth, prodding it with a foot, then jerked against the rope tied to it. Eventually the pack came free. Relieved, he crawled on.

  The tunnel ended a short distance ahead, opening into a chamber illuminated with flickering red light that washed out Arvin’s darkvision. A hissing noise filled the chamber: the soft, slow exhalations of serpents.

  Dozens of them.

  Arvin sent his mind deep into his muladhara, the source of psionic energy that lay at the base of his spine, then summoned energy up through the base of his scalp and into his forehead. He sent his awareness down the tunnel ahead of him, into the chamber beyond. The thoughts of the yuan-ti inside it, however, were not what he’d expected. He’d been prepared for guards, alert and suspicious. The thoughts of these yuan-ti were languid, jumbled, confused. As if … yes, that was it; they were dreaming. The mind of one was filled with images of a jungle, of a tree whose snake-headed branches had become tangled in a hopeless knot. Another dreamed that the viaducts that arched over Hlondeth were growing together, forming a stone lattice overhead. A third dreamed she was basking on a stone that had suddenly grown unbearably hot, but someone held her tail, preventing her from slithering away. Others dreamed of gardens that had become choked with weeds, of hatchlings that struggled to tear open the leathery eggs that enclosed them, and of ropes that turned into snakes and slithered into a mating ball that could not be untangled. All of the dreams were different, yet all had one thing in common: a restlessness—a need to do something—and a frustrating inability to grasp what that something might be.

  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 a parchment and quill sat a short distance away, her limbless lower body coiled on a bench against one wall. Long red hair framed an angular face, and for a moment Arvin was reminded of Zelia, the woman who had become his nemesis, but this yuan-ti had red scales, instead of green. She raised her quill, an expectant look on her face.

  “Your dreams?” she hissed—softly, as if not wanting to break the tenuous thread that connected dreaming and wakefulness.

  Arvin wet his lips—a gesture that sent his long forked tongue flicking out toward her, sending a drop of spittle onto the parchment she held. Her upper lip twitched, baring the tips of her fangs—a gesture that often preceded a bite.

  Arvin started to flinch, then remembered that he was supposed to be a yuan-ti. No, he was yuan-ti, at least for the duration of his metamorphosis. Drawing himself up imperiously—yuan-ti never apologized, even to another yuan-ti—he bared the tips of his own fangs. He and the scribe locked eyes for a moment—and the scribe was the first to look away. As she did, Arvin manifested the power that would allow him to listen in on her thoughts. She swayed slightly, tipping her head as if listening to a distant sound, and her thoughts tumbled into Arvin’s mind.

  She was annoyed at him—how dare he threaten her! The mistress had given her a sacred task to fulfill, and she would not let a petty annoyance get in the way. Later, perhaps, she might exact her revenge, but for now, the important thing was to record whatever dreams the osssra had induced.

  Arvin decided to get that part over with, then ask where Sibyl was.

  “In my dream, I was in a jungle,” he told the scribe.

  She dipped her quill in the pot of ink that sat on the bench beside her and started scribbling. The script was narrow and flowing, a series of lines that looked like elaborately looped scratch marks, punctuated by bl
ots of ink. Draconic.

  Wary that his own nightmare might reveal some hidden human quality, Arvin repeated a dream Karrell had related to him just before she was killed: of being a mouse, struggling within the grip of a serpent. His voice cracked a little on the final words. He remembered how vulnerable Karrell had looked as she lay on the bench in Helm’s chapel, her expression pinched and her fingers twitching as she fought, in her dream, to free herself. Seeing that, he’d been worried that Zelia had seeded her—that Zelia had used her psionics to plant, deep within Karrell’s mind, a tiny seed of psionic energy that would eventually grow, choking out Karrell’s own consciousness like a weed and replacing it with a copy of Zelia.

  That hadn’t been the case. The dream Karrell had been having was just a simple nightmare, rather than a dream-taste of Zelia’s thoughts.

  The real nightmare had come later, when Karrell was yanked into the Abyss by a marilith.

  Arvin’s awareness was still hooked deep inside the scribe’s mind. She was disappointed by what he’d told her; it offered nothing new.

  “That wasn’t very helpful, was it?” Arvin asked.

  “No,” she agreed, blowing on the parchment to dry the ink. “It wasn’t.” Certainly not worth bothering Mistress Sibyl with, her thoughts silently added, especially in the middle of the welcoming ceremony.

  Arvin’s heart quickened. The scribe knew where Sibyl was. He needed to convince her that he must be conveyed to her mistress at once, but how?