Broken Lands

The stranger threw his arms in the air and shouted. “Monsters that kill people and take them over! I told you!”

Sophia exchanged a glance with Dav. She could definitely tell why this guy wasn’t being taken seriously. At the same time, she couldn’t quite afford to dismiss him. She just didn’t quite know how to handle him.

Dav nodded, then took a step forward and held a hand up ahead of him as if to tell the guy to calm down a little. His voice was a low, reassuring rumble. “We understand. Can you show us where they are or lead us to someone who knows more? We haven’t been in this part of Casterville before and a guide would help.”

Sophia wasn’t sure why that worked when everything she said seemed to set the man off. Maybe it was the fact that Dav looked imposing and Sophia simply wasn’t. Maybe she’d said something wrong. It was hard to tell sometimes.

The reason why he calmed down didn’t matter. The man seemed to think for a moment, then grunted and nodded. “I’ll take you to Lillah. She’s the only one who still sneaks inside the Conservatory.”

He turned and left without a glance behind himself to make sure they were following. Sophia was sure he knew, they made enough noise to be obvious. She suspected he didn’t really care.

Admittedly, she probably wouldn’t care too much about helping people who shot at her, either.

Sophia shot a glance at Amy. The shifter’s bow was still in her hands, but she didn’t look like she was ready to shoot immediately. Her attention was all on the stranger. That worried Sophia a little; wasn’t Amy supposed to be keeping an eye out for anything that might jump them? Wasn’t that why she’d shot at the man in the first place?

They turned left, then right, then left again. There was no sign that they were getting particularly close to Lillah, so Sophia took the chance to catch up with the archer. Amy was still paying far more attention to the man in the lead than she was to her surroundings, which was starting to really worry Sophia. She whispered, “Do you see something I’m not seeing?”

“He smells wrong,” Amy whispered back. “I don’t think it’s corpsevine, it’s more like…”

Sophia waited for a moment, but Amy didn’t say any more. Sophia couldn’t smell anything, but Amy clearly wasn’t a human; her ears showed that. She clearly had a more sensitive nose as well. “More like what?”

Amy shook her head with a frown. She didn’t seem to be certain. “It’s more like what isn’t there than what is. There’s no scent of plants, not even the vines he’s wearing. I’m not even sure I’m smelling him. It could be someone else who went by here not too long ago.”

Sophia frowned at that. She didn’t have any sort of special senses. All she had was her manasight … no, it was called MageSight now, wasn’t it? Either way, it was all she had.

A quick look at the alley ahead of the group made Sophia pale. With her MageSight active, the stranger disappeared; there was a bright blue magical aura where he should have been but it didn’t look like an aura. She blinked and he seemed to flicker back into being, only to flicker out of her view again, hidden by the magical glow.

“I’m not even sure if he’s really there,” Sophia half-muttered and half-whispered to Amy. “I think he might be an illusion. I see an enchantment, but I’m not sure anyone is carrying it. Something has to be, but what.”

Sophia started to refocus her attention to try to find the source of the illusion, but before she could locate anything, the man turned left and led the way down a short corridor, then turned right again. She was far enough behind that all she could do was try to keep up; she couldn’t keep him in her sight long enough to figure out what was going on.

Despite the deception, this didn’t feel like a trap. Sophia wasn’t sure what it was, but she knew that being prepared was important. She Infused an additional blade as she hurried, then glanced at Amy’s arrow. She hadn’t tried Infusing an arrowhead before; was it close enough to a blade that it might work?

The next chance Sophia had to concentrate on the illusion was as the illusory man led them down a small set of stairs. She stayed at the top of the stairs and watched. By the time he reached the last step, she was pretty sure she knew what she was watching. The man in front of them was insubstantial. Sophia couldn’t tell if that made him a ghost or if he was just a projection, but there didn’t seem to be anything physical there at all.

Well, at least she now knew why he wasn’t that worried about Amy’s bow. The arrow would probably have gone straight through him. In fact, Sophia couldn’t be sure that wasn’t exactly what happened in the first place.

He didn’t look quite like a ghost, though there was definitely some Death Affinity present. Something else was going on and Sophia couldn’t tell what. A ghost shouldn’t be visible to the naked eye, not without more power than he seemed to have. Even then, few ghosts were good enough to look that real.

“Why are you growing spiritweed?” Moti’s question pulled Sophia’s attention off the ghost and onto Moti Quinn and the other stranger present, a woman Sophia had ignored because she didn’t radiate magic the way the ghost did.

The woman was a little older than Sophia, with dark hair covered by a drab hood that matched the rest of her sturdy, practical outfit. It looked well-made but had clearly seen better days. A scar on her hand showed that her life hadn’t been without challenges, but it was long-since healed and there was no other obvious sign of injury. Her hands were caked with soil and there was a slight smudge on her face as well.

She carried a plant, which Sophia had to assume was the “spiritweed.” It had a profusion of dark green leaves above a wrapped bundle of dirt and roots. It reminded Sophia somewhat of some ornamental plants with flowers she’d seen in the past on Earth, but there were no flowers now.

“I use a lot of spiritweed,” she answered. She seemed unperturbed as she turned and set the plant into a clay pot, then used a trowel to scoop dirt from a plantless pot into the one she’d just placed the spiritweed into. “It has to be split regularly or it won’t spread. Why are you here?”

“They’re from the Registry,” the ghost informed the woman. “They want to see the West Conservatory.”

The woman shoved the trowel deep into the soil of the empty pot and turned around to face the group. Her expression was somewhere between hope and worry. A slight, tentative smile seemed to be winning. “Are you, now. Are you here to clear it out?”

Sophia shook her head. “No, we’re here to find out what’s going on. Your … assistant…?” She paused to give the other woman a chance to fill in the blank.

“Oh, him?” The woman with dirt on her hands chuckled. “I guess you could call him that. He’s one of the reasons I grow spiritweed; I give him spiritweed leaves and he tells me about the city. Anyway, I’m being rude; come on in.” She rubbed her hands on her pants, then headed towards the back of the room. “Oh, I’m Lillah. As you can probably guess from this place, I’m a Gardener. If the West Conservatory wasn’t infested, I’d probably do my gardening there instead of here.”

The room behind Lillah was covered in plants. The area near the entrance held a collection of pots filled only with soil, but everywhere else the pots were nearly hidden by the greenery they held. There were a number of places that Sophia would have sworn the plants grew out of the stone walls. The furniture in the corner Lillah was leading them to was wooden, but it wasn’t wooden furniture made by cutting up a tree; instead, it looked more like bamboo that grew in the shape of a table and several chairs.

There was a fireplace that had a contraption that clearly allowed a pot to be swung over the coals or pulled out to use. A collection of dried herbs in small bags hung next to the fireplace; that was clearly the cooking area, even though Sophia saw no obvious source of water. In fact, as she looked around, water was the one big thing she didn’t see. Didn’t plants require regular watering? “Where do you get your water? Do you have to carry it all down here?”

Lillah chuckled and pointed at the window at the other end of the room. “There’s an old fountain just outside that still has fresh running water; all I have to do is open the window and I can get as much as I need. That’s why that window opens. Come, sit down.”

Moti Quinn didn’t follow them to the chairs; he stopped at the freshly potted spiritweed plant and stared at it. Everyone else slowly made their way across the room. Perhaps it was more like a well-lit cellar? Despite the window, it definitely felt more underground than anything to Sophia.

“What does he do with the spiritweed?” Rae waved at the stairs and their guide, who hadn’t moved far from the entrance. “It’s dangerous if it’s used wrong.”

Lillah grinned at Rae. “How would I know? I’m just a gardener.”

Sophia decided it was time to make her guess. “He’s using it to be visible and maybe solid, isn’t he?”

It was completely worth it to see Rae’s mouth drop open and her head whip around to look at the guide. The muttered “so that’s what it was” only confirmed Sophia’s guess. He was a spirit of some sort, but the Quinns were fooled because he was visible to normal sight. She hoped they’d catch it if it ever happened again. They were supposed to be the experts, weren’t they?

Sophia was willing to guess he was a ghost. A fairly weak one, probably, since the traces of Death Affinity she’d seen were weak. Maybe that was another part of the reason the Quinns hadn’t recognized what they were seeing?

Lillah shrugged again. “Maybe. I don’t know and I don’t care. He doesn’t talk about his past. You five are here to find out what’s happening here. You could have asked around the market, but I doubt they’d tell you much of use. They don’t know plants. It’s really obvious to a gardener; the Domain of the Vine is growing. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“Domain of the Vine?” Sophia didn’t like what that sounded like. Her eyes moved up along the wall to the vines that ran along cracks in the ceiling. “Is that why there’s so much greenery everywhere? Are you telling me that corpsevines could be anywhere?”

Lillah shook her head. “There are none in this area. The central vines do not come this far. Only the cuttings can travel easily.”

Sophia felt a little queasy at the terminology. “When you say cuttings, you mean people the corpsevines control.”

Lillah nodded gracefully. “Yes, cuttings can control both people and monsters. I believe I have even seen them control animals, though it is unusual. I suspect they are far less useful for anything but fertilizer.”

“We need proof,” Amy interrupted. “Some way to show that there are actually corpsevines here, that it’s not just rumors.”

“Rensyn said to run if we saw corpsevines, not to bring back proof,” Dav objected.

“We haven’t seen any corpsevines yet,” Amy countered. “Lots of vines, and Domain of the Vines certainly sounds bad, but I don’t have anything from the Guide yet. Do you?”

Sophia found herself shaking her head along with Dav even though she wasn’t the target of the question. She hated it, but Amy had a point. They had believable rumors, but they were still only rumors.