Venom's Taste

by Lisa Smedman

  The net he was working on suddenly vanished. Arvin waited patiently, keeping his fingers in exactly the positions they had been when the twine blinked into the Ethereal Plane. A few heartbeats later, the twine reappeared and he continued at his task.

  In its raw form, the blink dog hair was unstable, shifting unpredictably back and forth between the Ethereal and Prime Material Planes, but when the net was complete, a wizard would attune it to a command word. This done, the net would then blink only when its command word was uttered. Then Arvin would deliver it and collect his coin.

  Arvin had no idea who had commissioned the net. The order had been passed along by a middler who already had the coin in hand and who would take delivery of the net when it was done. Arvin would never know if the product would be used for good or ill—for restraining a dangerous monster or for ensnaring a kidnap victim—nor did he want to know.

  When Arvin had first begun working for the Guild, nearly twelve long years ago, he’d quickly realized that the magical twines and ropes and nets he had a hand in creating were used in crimes ranging from theft to kidnapping to outright murder. Not wanting blood on his hands—even at one remove—he’d begun to include deliberate flaws in his work.

  Those flaws had been discovered, and an ultimatum delivered. Arvin could continue to produce product for the Guild—quality product—or he could go under the knife again. It wouldn’t be a fingertip he’d be losing this time, but an eye. Perhaps both eyes, if the flaw caused a “serious difficulty” like the last one had.

  Arvin had nodded and gone back to his work. He kept smiling as he passed the finished goods to his customers—even when he knew they were destined to be used to kill. In the meantime, he’d begun padding his orders for material, setting some aside for himself. A slightly longer section of trollgut here, a larger pouch of sylph hair there. The extra material was used to create additional magical items that he’d cached in hiding places all over the city. One day, when he had enough of these collected, he’d gather them all up and leave Hlondeth for good. In the meantime, he continued to serve the Guild.

  At least this time, with the net he was weaving, he wouldn’t have to meet the customer face to face. It was better not to get to know people, to keep them at a distance, even old friends like Naulg. Trying to help Naulg had only gotten him into trouble. Arvin should have heeded the painful lessons he’d learned in the orphanage.

  He’d been only six when he’d been sent there as a “temporary measure”—a temporary measure that had lasted eight long years. Before leaving on the expedition that had turned out to be her last, Arvin’s mother had arranged for Arvin to stay with her brother, a man Arvin had met only twice before. This uncle, a wealthy lumber merchant, had cared for Arvin for two months after his sister’s death. Then he’d set out on a business trip across the Reach to Chondath. He’d placed Arvin with the orphanage “just for a tenday or two,” but when he returned from this trip, he hadn’t come back to collect Arvin.

  At first Arvin had assumed that he’d done something wrong, that he’d angered his uncle in some way. But after running away from the orphanage, he had learned the truth. His uncle wasn’t angry, just indifferent. Arvin had arrived at his uncle’s home with fingers blistered from net knotting and tears of relief in his eyes—only to have his uncle pinch his ear and sternly march him back to the place again, refusing to listen to Arvin’s pleas.

  That was the first time Arvin had been subjected to the ghoul-stench spell. It wasn’t the last. After Naulg’s escape, Arvin had attempted one escape after another. Some failed due to the orphanage’s reward system, which encouraged the children to spy on each other. Later, when Arvin learned to avoid making friends, even with the newly arrived children, his escapes had failed due to poor planning or bad luck. Prayers to Tymora had averted some of the latter, and an increasing maturity helped with the former. Over time, Arvin learned to wait and prepare, and his escape plans grew more cunning and complex. So, too, did his skill at knotting, weaving, and braiding, until he was almost never punished for being too slow, or for mistying a knot.

  Arvin continued working on the net, letting his painful memories drift away in the repetitive thread-loop-loop-tie of netmaking. After a time, his emotions quieted.

  Then he saw something out of the corner of his eye—a movement where there should have been none. He whirled around, left hand reflexively coming up to a throwing position until he realized his glove was lying on a nearby table. His eyes scanned the low-ceilinged workshop. Had the length of trollgut on the workbench across the room suddenly flexed? No, both ends of the gut were securely held in place by ensorcelled nails.

  Through a round, slatted vent that was the workshop’s only ventilation he heard a cooing and the flutter of wings. Striding over to the vent, he peered out and saw a pigeon on the ledge below. That must have been the motion his eye had caught—the bird flying past the slats. Three stories below was the street; none of the people walking along it were so much as looking up. Above—Arvin craned his neck to look up through the slats—was only the bare eave of the rooftop, curving out of sight to either side of the hidden room that housed his workshop. Satisfied there was no cause for alarm, he wiped sweat from his forehead with a sleeve and returned to his work. He picked up his netmaker’s needle and rethreaded it with a fresh piece of dog-hair twine then began to loop and tie, loop and tie.

  “So you escaped.”

  Arvin whirled a second time. “Zelia!” he exclaimed.

  The yuan-ti was standing against the far wall, her scale-freckled face partially hidden by a coil of rope that hung from one of the rafters. She stepped out from behind it and stared at Arvin with unblinking eyes, her blue tongue flickering in and out of her mouth.

  Arvin darted a glance at the spot on the floor where the hidden trapdoor was; it hadn’t been opened, nor should it have been. Arvin was the only one who knew about the three hinged boards in the net loft ceiling, adjacent to a “roof” support post, that opened into his workshop.

  “How did you find me?” he asked.

  Zelia smiled, revealing perfect human teeth. “Your blood was on the ramp. Fortunately for you, I collected it before anyone else did.”

  “And you used it in a spell to find me,” Arvin guessed. But how had she gotten into his workshop? More to the point, had she brought the militia with her? Were they waiting in the streets below?

  Zelia’s eyes flashed silver as they reflected the light from the lantern that hung from a nearby rafter. She gave a breathy hiss of laughter that somehow overlapped her words. “I’ve decided against having the militia arrest you,” she said.

  Arvin startled. Had she read his thoughts? No, it was an easy thing to have guessed.

  “I’m going to take you up on your offer,” she continued. “Find out what I want to know—without alerting the Pox—and I’ll remove the mind seed.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What the Pox are up to—over and above the obvious, which is poisoning people. What is their goal? Who is behind them? Who is really pulling the strings?”

  “You don’t think they’re acting on their own?”

  Zelia shook her head. “They never could have established themselves in Hlondeth without help.”

  “Where do I begin?” Arvin asked. “How do I find them?”

  “When I locate the chamber you described, I’ll contact you,” Zelia said. “In the meantime, there are resources you have that others don’t. Put them to work.”

  “Use my … connections you mean?” Arvin asked.

  “No,” Zelia said, her eyes blazing. “Say nothing to the Guild.”

  “Then what—”

  “You have a talent that others don’t.”

  Arvin shrugged then gestured at the nets and ropes and delicately braided twines that hung from the rafters and from pegs, leaving not one blank spot on the wall. “If it’s an enchanted rope you want, I can—”

  Zelia moved closer, her body swaying sinuously a
s 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 near invisible” rope. The other rogue had paused, dagger poised to chop off another of Arvin’s fingertips, then slowly lowered his dagger.

  “Where did you get that rope, boy?” he’d asked.

  Arvin’s answer—“I made it”—had saved him.

  In the years since his escape from the orphanage, Arvin had deliberately avoided thinking about what had happened to the cleric that night. He’d hadn’t been willing to face the truth. He hadn’t wanted to wind up like his mother, frightened by her own dreams—and dead, despite her talent for catching glimpses of the future.

  Arvin opened his eyes and acknowledged Zelia. He could no longer deny the obvious—even to himself. “I do have the talent,” he admitted.

  Zelia smiled. “I could tell that by your secondary displays—by the ringing in my ears when you tried to charm me, and later, by the droning noise. Beginners often give themselves away.”

  “That’s the thing,” Arvin hastily added. “I’m not even a beginner. I haven’t had any training at all.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Zelia said. “Psions are extremely rare, especially in this corner of the world. Their talent often goes unrecognized. Even when a high-level power is manifested, it is usually attributed to some other magical effect.”

  “High-level power?” Arvin echoed. He shook his head. “All I can do is make people like me. I have no control over it. Sometimes it works … and sometimes it doesn’t. And once, no, twice ever in my life, I was able to distract—”

  “You could learn more. If I taught you—which I would, if you prove that you’re worth the time and effort.”

  That startled him. Zelia was a psion? Arvin had always assumed his mother had been the only one in Hlondeth—maybe in all of the Vilhon Reach. But here, it seemed, was another.

  That surprise aside, did he want to be trained? He had dim memories of his mother talking about the lamasery, far to the east in Kara Tur, that she had been sent to in the year her woman’s blood began. The discipline and physical regimen she’d been subjected to there had sounded every bit as strenuous as that imposed by the orphanage, but strangely, she’d spoken fondly of the place. At the lamasery, she learned the discipline of clairsentience—an art she’d used in later life during her work as a guide in the wild lands at the edges of the Vilhon Reach. She’d been in great demand in the years before Arvin was born.

  Yet her talent had come with a price. Some of Arvin’s earliest memories were of being startled awake by a sharp scream and trying to comfort his mother as she sat bolt upright in the bed they shared, eyes wide and staring. She’d muttered frightening things about war and fire and children drowning. After a moment or two she’d always come back to herself. She would pat Arvin’s hair and hug him close, reassuring him that it was “just a bad dream.” But he’d known the truth. His mother could see into the future. And it scared her. So much so that she’d stopped using her psionics around the time that Arvin was born and had spoken only infrequently about them. Yet despite this, her nightmares had continued.

  “I don’t know if I want to learn,” he told Zelia.

  “You’re afraid.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to see my own death,” Arvin answered.

  Zelia’s lips twitched. “What makes you think you will?”

  “My mother did—though a lot of good it did her. She thought the vision would help her to avoid dying. She was—”

  “Clairsentient?” Zelia interrupted.

  Arvin paused. That wasn’t what he’d been about to say. He had been about to tell Zelia that his mother had been wrong in her belief that even the most dire consequences could be avoided, if one were forewarned. He’d been about to tell Zelia about that final night with his mother—about seeing her toss and turn in her bed and being able to make out only one of the words in her uneasy mutters: plague. The next morning, when he’d nervously asked her about it, she’d tousled his hair and told him the nightmare wasn’t something to be feared—that it would help keep her safe. She’d given him his cat’s-eye bead and left on the expedition she’d only reluctantly agreed to guide. Later Arvin had learned what this expedition had entailed—guiding a group of adventurers who wanted to find
a cure for the plague that still lay dormant in the ruins of Mussum. They hadn’t entered the ancient city, but its contagion had found them nonetheless.

  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.