Vanity's Brood

by Lisa Smedman

  Instinctively, Arvin tried to slash at one of the vines that quested toward him, but his arm, like the rest of his body, moved too slowly. The vine wrapped around his wrist, immobilizing his weapon hand. If only, he thought feverishly, his body would move as quickly as his mind….

  That gave him an idea. He summoned energy into his third eye and sent out a streak of silver that wrapped itself around the vine. Rotating it swiftly, he uncoiled the vine from his wrist. Another line of silver burst from Arvin’s forehead as he repeated the manifestation. He used it to grab his dagger and slash at the vines that held his legs. He manifested the power a third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, yanking back the vines that were still snaking toward him. He grabbed the end of each, then moved his energy-hands back and forth, over and under, tying the vines into a knot. Meanwhile, the dagger slashed through the last of the vines holding his legs. Slowly, sweat pouring from his body, Arvin crawled backward, moving at the pace of a slug.

  Vines kept snaking through the jungle toward him, but he caught each one with a psionic hand, knotting it around the branch of a nearby tree. Coughing, his throat and lungs raw, he at last found the edge of the cloud of fog. He crawled into clean, clear air—and moved at his normal pace again. His pent-up muscles were sent leaping forward, and his shoulder slammed into the trunk of a tree.

  In the branches above, a monkey screeched angrily—again, a very human-sounding cry—then swung away through the jungle. A piece of half-eaten fruit landed at Arvin’s feet.

  He rose, still coughing, and stared at the chewed-up fruit, its pulpy red seeds spilling out of its torn skin. “Nine lives,” he whispered, touching the crystal at his throat.

  Standing there, staring, he felt a tingle awaken in his forehead.

  The iron cobra. It must have passed through the portal as well. It was still looking for him.

  Arvin needed to get out of there. He drew energy into his navel and chest and manifested the power that would alter his body. It was disturbingly easy to morph into a flying snake; after his long flight to the temple, the wings that sprouted out of his arms felt familiar. Even feeling his legs meld together into a tail didn’t bother him. He had an anxious moment as his backpack flattened into a brown patch of scales on his back, but the Circled Serpent in its box, like everything else in his pack, as well as his clothing, melded with his body. Exhaling the scent of saffron and ginger, he rose into the air, his snake tail lashing with each stroke of his wings.

  He rose above the treetops and hovered, getting his bearings. Assuming no time had passed during their passage through the portal, the direction where the sun hung just above the horizon was east. The river snaked through the jungle in a roughly north-south direction. Its headwaters sprang from the slopes of a volcanic peak that resembled a broken serpent’s fang. The river emptied, far to the south, into an ocean that stretched to the horizon. Another large body of water, a lake, lay to the east. To the west, about an equal distance away across thick jungle, was a range of mountains. Another chain of mountains lay to the north beyond the volcano.

  Between these features, the jungle extended, unbroken, in every direction save one. About halfway between the river and the mountains to the west, enormous pyramids rose above the treetops. Arvin expected to see a city surrounding them but the jungle seemed to grow right up to their bases. Staring at the pyramids, he could see that their tops were jagged and broken—a ruined city.

  He decided to follow the river; that way, he wouldn’t get lost. Pakal was somewhere upriver, so the opposite direction was the way to go. He flew downriver along the canyon, looking for a place to hide the Circled Serpent.

  CHAPTER 7

  Arvin descended toward the limestone bluff he’d spotted from the air. It was one of the few landmarks in the vast sea of dark green, rising above the jungle canopy at a spot where the river made a U-shaped bend. There were a number of small caves in the bluff, any of which would make an ideal hiding place, assuming the caves weren’t inhabited.

  Dozens of flying snakes swooped in and out of the caves like swallows; they probably nested inside. Arvin joined them. He paused above the bluff, listening, but heard only the rush of the river in the canyon below and birds calling to one another in the jungle. Somewhere in the distance, a larger creature roared, and Arvin could see the treetops shake as something big moved between them. He was doubly glad just then that he’d chosen not to make his way through the jungle on foot.

  He chose a cave that was apart from the others, about halfway up the bluff, and sent his awareness drifting into it. Ectoplasm shimmered in the cave mouth as he probed for thoughts. The only ones he detected were those of the flying snakes, including some that appeared to be coiled up, sleeping, deep within the cave. Otherwise, the cave was empty.

  He fluttered inside. The off-white walls had a wrinkled appearance. Here and there, a mounded stalagmite rose from the floor like a sagging column of dough. They were, however—as Arvin discovered a moment later when he accidentally brushed a wingtip against one—as hard as any other stone.

  He glanced around, looking for a place to hide the Circled Serpent. There were no obvious choices, no convenient cracks into which the box could be wedged. Then a flying snake flew past him, toward the rear of the cave, and disappeared behind a natural column of stone that stood close to the rear wall. It didn’t return. Curious, Arvin flew in that direction. Behind the column, he discovered a passage that had been sealed with clay bricks. Two of the bricks had fallen, leaving a small hole. The passage beyond the wall led up at an angle from the cave, worming its way deeper into the bluff.

  It looked like the perfect hiding place. He flew into the gloomy passage, deciding that he would go only as far as the sunlight penetrated. After a short distance, the tunnel opened up into a second cavern. He gasped, barely remembering to flap his wings. For several terrible moments he thought he was staring down at Sibyl.

  The abomination nearly filled the cavern, its serpent body a tight coil on the smooth floor. Its wedge-shaped head rested, eyes closed, on arms that were folded beneath it like a pillow. Its scales were black and shiny as obsidian, like Sibyl’s, but it had no wings. It was dead, and the body had shrunk like a drumhead around the skeleton; every rib stood out in sharp relief.

  There was no odor of rot. The air was only slightly less hot and humid than the steaming jungle below. Surely a body would decompose quickly, yet—Arvin sniffed—the only smell was that of herbs or perhaps flowers, a sweet, pleasant scent.

  The cavern it lay in wasn’t natural. Its walls were perfectly circular and smooth, with an equally smooth ceiling and floor, a tomb.

  As Arvin’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, he made out more details. Several of the yuan-ti’s scales had nut-sized gems embedded in them. Though Arvin couldn’t make out their colors, he was certain, given their size, that they were extremely valuable. Any one of them would probably feed, clothe, and house him for a year.

  The flying snake he’d followed into the tomb flitted around the chamber. After several circuits of the tomb it fluttered past Arvin, back the way it had come.

  Arvin landed on the floor and morphed back into human form, braced and wary. He waited several moments. If the tomb had any magical protections, they so far hadn’t activated. He shrugged off his pack and unfastened its flaps, then pulled out the box that held the upper half of the Circled Serpent. After a moment’s thought, he realized that the best place to hide it would be inside the corpse. Wary of touching the dead abomination—especially after facing the skeletal serpent in Sibyl’s lair—he used a psionic hand to pry open its mouth. It was a struggle—the shriveled sinews of the jaw were tough as old leather—but slowly the mouth creaked open. A second sparkle of silver briefly illuminated the gloomy cavern as he used his psionics to lift the box into the air. He nudged it inside the mouth, cushioning it between the forks of the rotted tongue. Then he pushed the jaw shut. Fang clicked against fang like the closing of a lock.

  He put on his pack and st
arted to turn away. Then he turned back to the abomination again, unable to resist temptation. Drawing his dagger, he pried the largest gem from the body—one with a unique, star-shaped cut that would double its value—and caught it in his free hand when it fell. He stood, waiting. Nothing happened. Breathing a sigh of relief, he slipped the gem into his pocket and walked back to the tunnel that was the tomb’s only exit. Steadying himself on the wall with one hand, he prepared to morph into a flying snake.

  A soft hiss, just ahead of him, made him jerk his hand back.

  A snake poked its head out of the wall near the spot where his hand had just been, out of solid stone. Then it was gone.

  A second hiss, soft as the first, came from the ceiling just above his head. Arvin ducked as a swift-moving ripple of shadow flashed past his face. He caught a glimpse of curved fangs. Then that serpent, like the first, disappeared.

  He glanced around, his heart beating rapidly, trying to see where the serpents had gone. There was a faint smudge on the wall where the first serpent had appeared—a wavy line that might have been a ripple in the limestone or a shadow cast by one of the columns at the far end of the tunnel. From somewhere deep inside the stone came an eerie hissing.

  The tomb was protected, after all—by shadow asps.

  Arvin had once had a close brush with one such creature of the Plane of Shadow many years past. A wizard the guild had paired him up with had the bright idea of making a “robe of shadows” from the shed skin of one of the magical serpents. The experiment, however, had fatal results. When Arvin had arrived at the wizard’s workshop, he’d been met not with a living wizard, but the shadow creature the man had become. The shadow asp had escaped its bindings and bitten the poor wretch.

  Arvin decided that one gem, no matter how valuable, wasn’t worth dying for.

  As a shadowy head emerged once more from the wall, Arvin yanked the gem from his pocket and rolled it across the chamber, back to the abomination. It worked; the shadow asp slithered after it. As it did, Arvin morphed into a flying snake. Wings flapping as rapidly as his heart beat, he streaked down the tunnel. A shadow asp emerged from a wall to watch as he dived through the hole into the first cavern, but it did not attack.

  Back in sunlight again, safe from the shadow asps, Arvin morphed once more into human form. He touched his abbreviated little finger, thankful for his time in the guild. If he hadn’t seen what had happened to the wizard, he never would have recognized the shadow asps.

  The upper half of the Circled Serpent was safely concealed, but one more thing was required to ensure that it stayed hidden. Arvin took off his backpack and pulled out a few items he thought might come in handy in the next little while, including his trollgut rope, then placed the pack behind a stalagmite near the cave mouth—an easy hiding place to find. Pulling out a few items more, he arranged them around the pack to make it look as though someone had rifled through its contents.

  His shirt was torn. He stripped it off and changed into the spare shirt he’d been carrying in his pack. He used his dagger to cut a length of fabric from the old shirt and wound it around his head like a loosely wrapped turban; it would keep the worst of the sun off. He cut the remainder of the fabric into long, thin strips.

  Those he braided into a thin cord. At several points along its length, he worked intricate knots into the braid. When he was done, he dropped the cord next to the pack.

  Then he manifested a psionic power—one he’d never used on himself before to the best of his knowledge. It was odd, hearing his own secondary display. The tinkling noise sounded just like the tiny silver bells, shaped like hollow snake teeth, that had decorated the hem of one of his mother’s dresses. It was odder still, feeling the power take hold of his own mind and reshape it. Sharp as a dagger, it sliced away neat chunks of memory, excising everything from his finding of the tunnel to his narrow escape from the shadow asps. He left in the memory of himself hiding the pack behind the stalagmite but removed the part where he’d knotted the cord. He felt the remaining memories braid themselves together again and—

  Arvin stood near the mouth of the cave, staring at the spot where he’d just hidden his pack. It wasn’t possible to see the pack from the entrance, but still he wondered if he’d chosen the best hiding place. He glanced at the back of the cave, wondering if there might be a better spot there, but no, that cave was one of dozens in the bluff and was one of the less accessible. The chances of someone stumbling across Arvin’s pack were slim.

  He morphed back into a flying snake; the transformation was even easier than it had been before. He launched himself into the air and flew upriver again, toward the spot where he’d agreed to meet Pakal.

  When he reached it, the dwarf wasn’t there.

  Perhaps Pakal was trying to find him. Arvin flew back downriver to the spot where he’d climbed the cliff. Worried that Pakal might have fallen victim to the carnivorous plant, Arvin circled above that spot. The plant had torn apart the knots he’d tied in its vines, but its bud-mouths were open. It didn’t look as though it had swallowed anything lately, at least nothing dwarf-sized. Pakal, being native to the jungle, would surely know how to avoid the danger it posed.

  He flew back along the other side of the river, back to the spot where he’d last seen Pakal, and continued on upriver, searching its banks, but saw no sign of the dwarf or of anyone who might be Ts’ikil.

  Worried, Arvin hovered above the canyon. He wouldn’t be able to sustain his metamorphosis much longer. He needed to find a safe place to land and somewhere he could spend the night, since he wouldn’t be able to use a sending to contact Pakal again until the next day. The lapis lazuli only allowed him to contact a particular person once each day.

  A short distance from the river was a place that looked suitable: a roughly circular clearing in the jungle. He flew toward it and saw that it was the plaza of what must have been a small city. A dozen low hills encircled the plaza: ruined buildings the jungle had long since grown over. Each structure was topped with an enormous serpent head carved from stone. It looked as if some ancient foe had decapitated a nest of serpents then set each of their heads upon a leafy green cushion. Their sightless stone eyes stared at the plaza like brooding serpents plotting their revenge.

  Arvin landed on top of one of the heads, whose upper surface was as wide as a feast table. It afforded an excellent view of the plaza. The open area was paved with enormous red flagstones; bushes had thrust their way between them at several points, giving the stones the appearance of flotsam on a heaving sea. He morphed back into human form and stood. The sun beat down from above, and the weathered stone was uncomfortably hot, even through his boots. His feet were sweltering, but he didn’t dare take the boots off. The jungle was full of strange insects, bristling with spines and pincers.

  He wished, belatedly, that he’d filled his water skin from the river. It felt as though the heat had wrung every drop of moisture from his pores. Sunlight glinted off water that had collected in a murky green puddle in a hollow in one of the flagstones, and he decided to climb down and see if it was drinkable.

  As he looked for the best way down, a movement at the edge of the jungle caught his eye. Something—or someone—was moving toward the plaza. At first, Arvin took it to be a human child or perhaps, given its short-limbed, heavy build and childlike face, a halfling. Its naked body, however, was covered in patches of what looked like green scales and it had a tail, not long and serpentine, like that of a yuan-ti, but thick and stubby, like a lizard’s, and entirely covered in green scales. It moved with a bow-legged gait. When the half-man, half-lizard turned, Arvin could see that he held a crude spear.

  Slowly, wary of any sudden movement that might catch the half-lizard’s eye, Arvin settled into a crouch on the stone head then slid down beside it, out of sight. He watched, trying to decide whether to venture closer. The half-lizard was probably native to the jungle. He might know where Pakal was—might even know where Dmetrio was. If Arvin could get close enough, he cou
ld read the strange creature’s thoughts.

  The half-lizard walked more or less upright, but as he approached the water, he dropped to all fours and scuttled. He scooped up water with a cupped hand then drank, his eyes ranging warily across the plaza. Then, as if sensing Arvin’s eyes upon him, the half-lizard looked up, startled. A bright orange flap of skin shot out just under his chin, expanding into a half circle like a fan, as his head bobbed up and down several times in rapid succession.

  Something moved through the jungle toward the plaza, something big—something that sent birds screeching out of the trees in flocks as it shouldered the trees aside like a man moving through a field of corn. It had to be as large as a dragon.

  The monster smashed its way into the plaza a heartbeat later, knocking over a tree that slammed down onto the flagstones. It was an enormous reptile, its head level with the treetops. It stood on its hind legs, tiny forelegs scrabbling at the air, as if still tearing jungle vines out of the way. Slowly, it tilted its head from side to side. One eye fixed on the half-lizard. The giant reptile threw back its head and roared. Its mouth was filled with rows of teeth that looked easily as long as Arvin’s dagger.

  The half-lizard grabbed his spear and fled into the jungle. The gigantic reptile charged after him, its clawed feet gouging flagstones out of the plaza with each step. It smashed into the jungle and disappeared from sight. Only after it was gone did Arvin realize that there had been what looked like a saddle on its back.

  He watched the rippling wake it left in the jungle, thankful that he’d chosen somewhere elevated to land. His eyes ranged over the jungle. Dmetrio was out there somewhere—but where?

  Something occurred to Arvin then, that perhaps he didn’t need Pakal to tell him where Dmetrio was. Maybe a sending to Dmetrio would work, since Arvin was on the Chultan Peninsula himself. It was certainly worth a try.