Vanity's Brood (House of Serpents) by Lisa Smedman

Author:Lisa Smedman [Smedman, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780786957033
Publisher: Wizards of the Coast Publishing
Published: 2010-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

It was early evening, and still the Dmetrio-seed hadn’t shown up. Arvin wondered if he’d guessed wrong. Maybe he wasn’t in Chult, but some other, even more distant place. He’d finished his meditations long ago and sat, hidden in the foliage a few paces distant from the stone head, but still there was no sign of the seed.

Finally, low in the sky to the west, Arvin spotted something. At first he took it to be a soaring bird, but the movement and proportions were all wrong. It was, instead, a person seated on a carpet.

He was reminded of the magical carpets of Calimshan. He’d once been hired to repair one—though it had turned out to have a more deadly purpose than flying. As the person on the carpet drew closer, Arvin rendered himself invisible and created an illusionary image of himself sitting cross-legged on the stone head. Ectoplasm shimmered on the stone then swiftly evaporated in the heat. He toyed with the ring on his finger—he was counting on it to hide his thoughts from any probe the seed might do of the general area around the stone head—and watched as the flying carpet approached. As soon as it was close enough for its passenger to manifest a power against him, Arvin threw up a psionic shield.

On the carpet sat a yuan-ti, not Dmetrio, but a female. She was dressed as the Se’sehen had been, in a cape—hers made of overlapping “scales” of turquoise feathers—and a clinging, gauzy tunic that ended just below her waist, where her snake tail began. Both her skin and her scales were a dark brown. A band of gold encircled her left wrist, and a round plug of jade as wide as Arvin’s thumb pierced the skin between her lower lip and chin. Instead of hair, a ruff of scales framed her face.

Wary that she might be yet another of Zelia’s seeds—or the Dmetrio-seed itself, cloaked in illusion—Arvin probed her mind as soon as she was within range. To his surprise, he encountered no resistance. If she saw the silver that sparkled out of thin air when he manifested the power, she gave no sign.

She studied the illusion, mentally comparing it to the description Hlondeth’s prince had given her. She was surprised by how human Arvin looked. Dmetrio had led her to believe the person she’d been sent to fetch was a halfblood.

She spoke. Arvin, inside her mind, understood the words, even though they were spoken in Draconic. She asked if he was the one she’d been sent to fetch. He made the illusion nod.

Meanwhile, he probed deeper. The yuan-ti’s name was Hrishniss, and she was a noble of House Jennestaa. She was one of those who had greeted Dmetrio when the prince had come to her tribe nearly six months before on a highly secret mission from Hlondeth. House Extaminos was poised to turn against its former allies, and assisted by the Jennestaa and Eselemaa, it would conquer the Se’sehen in a surprise attack.

She obviously had no idea what was going on in Hlondeth.

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