The street dead-ended after a dozen paces at a simple, one-room shrine whose roof had long since fallen in. The walls on either side of the building pressed against it, squeezing it like the coils of a serpent. The door was gone, as if burst from its hinges under the strain.

The shrine had been built nearly thirteen centuries ago, shortly after the first great plague swept the city. It commemorated Saint Aganna, a cleric and healer who had lost her fingers to the rot caused by what came to be known as the clinging death. An icon of the saint was attached to the rear wall of the shrine, above the altar stone, its oils almost faded to the color of the wood it had been painted on. It showed the saint offering up her fingers on a platter to Ilmater. Despite the loss of her fingers, Saint Aganna had remained in the city, using her prayers to heal the sick. The clinging death had eventually taken her, but until it did she labored without pause, tending the sick until she was too weak to heal herself. Those whose lives she had saved kept her memory alive by building the shrine.

Hlondeth had been a human city in those days. In the centuries since, the yuan-ti had become dominant, and the yuan-ti worshiped the serpent god Sseth. Shrines like the one to Saint Aganna were all but forgotten, known only to the handful of humans who still worshiped the Crying God. Arvin, placed under the care of those priests in an orphanage, had been taken, years ago, to visit Saint Aganna's shrine as a "reward" for having knotted the most nets in a month. The sight of shriveled fingers on a platter, however, had terrified him, as had the faint rotten-egg smell that lingered within the shrine-an odor he had been certain was the lingering taint of plague. The priest, however, had explained to the near-panicked boy that the smell came from the shrine's cellar, which the yuan-ti had tunneled into and turned into a brood chamber. When Arvin had worried about the yuan-ti bursting out of the cellar to defend their eggs, the priest had chuckled. The