cellar had been abandoned, he explained, many years ago. The yuan-ti no longer defiled it.

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.