On the left was a kitchen; on the right, a sitting room. A flight of stairs at the rear of the hall led to the second floor. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.
The kitchen was warm and steamy; water boiled in a large pot on the stove. Bundles of drying herbs hung from the kitchen’s ceiling beams, filling the air with their aromatic scents. Arvin moved the pot to the table, setting it beside a stack of neatly folded squares of white cloth, and the bubbling noise slowly calmed. He listened, but heard only the hiss of dried grain spilling from a sack that had slumped over inside a pantry cupboard. The doors of the pantry stood ajar, as if they’d been yanked open.
The sitting room also showed signs of the baron’s intrusion. A tapestry lay on the floor beneath a broken curtain rod; a chair was on its side; and a shelf had been yanked away from one wall, spilling books onto the floor. One of them was on the hearth, its pages starting to curl from the heat of the fire. Arvin picked it up. Flipping idly through it, he saw that the book contained a number of illustrations: male and female pairs of various humanoid creatures—orcs, two-headed ettins, cloven-hoofed satyrs, lizardfolk, and several other races. Next to each figure was an enlarged drawing of that creature’s genitals; the female illustrations were accompanied by a drawing showing a baby growing within the womb.
He had no idea what the text of the book said, but here and there he spotted a line that he recognized as Draconic. The spine of the book was deeply creased, as if it had been referred to many times, and one of the pages was marked with a ribbon. Flipping to it, Arvin saw an illustration of a male and female yuan-ti. Dmetrio Extaminos, it seemed, had been no aberration. It was common for a male yuan-ti to carry two swords in his scabbard… so to speak.
Closing the book, he set it back on the shelf.
A quick pacing of the first-floor rooms and a few knocks on walls determined that neither the kitchen nor the sitting room had any hiding places. There was a cupboard under the stairs at the back of the hall, but a glance inside revealed nothing but dust and cobwebs.
“Glisena?” Arvin called. “Are you here?”
There was, as he expected, no answer.
The stairs led to a landing with three doors. All were open. The one to Arvin’s right looked as though it had been kicked open, splintering the door frame; it must have been locked when the baron arrived. Arvin glanced into the other two rooms first—a small washing-up room and a bedroom, its bed dragged to one side and its wardrobe open and spilling clothes—then turned his attention to the third room. He eased open the broken door.
“Glisena?” he called. “Naneth?”
As the door swung open, the stench struck him. Small and shuttered tight against the cold outside, the room reeked of snake. The walls were lined with tables; on these stood square containers made from panes of leaded glass, each with a wooden lid that had been drilled with holes. A different type of snake slithered around inside each container. One was a brown-scaled boa, coiled tight around a feebly twitching rat. Its body flexed, and the rat stopped moving. In the container next to it was a clutch of small green snakes, tangled together in a mating ball. Next to these was a flying snake from the southern lands, its body banded in light and dark green, its wings a vivid shade of turquoise. It fluttered inside its glass-walled container, hissing.
Arvin shook his head. Naneth certainly had odd taste in pets.
As he stepped into the room, a reddish-brown viper with a thick band of black at its throat reared up and spat a spray of venom onto the glass. Arvin eyed it warily, glad that the lid prevented it from getting out. The container next to it, however, was open; its lid sat on the table beside it. A saucer lay upside down inside the glass-walled cage, next to the gold-and-black-striped snake that was coiled there; this was where Naneth had been standing when Arvin contacted her with his sending.
Arvin picked up the lid and set it cautiously back in place, closing the cage. The snake inside, he saw now, was coiled on top of a clutch of eggs. Its body covered most of the small, leathery ovals, but as the snake shifted, Arvin caught a glimpse of something strange—it looked like a symbol, painted in red, on the egg that was closest to the glass. Squatting down for a closer look, Arvin saw he was right. The symbol was in Draconic. What it signified, he had no idea. He touched a hand to the glass the egg rested against, and it happened. Just as it had on the ship. For the space of several heartbeats, he stared, with naked eyes, into the future.
