When Flowers Go Bad – Part II
The lilies were the worst of the bunch. They always talked.
Stepping lightly in the alley, the woman crept silently past the windowsill where the flowers rested in the night. Her passing stirred not a leaf or petal of the plants.
Making it safely past, the silent form blew a tiny breath of relief. She was as yet undiscovered, and her mission tonight would go unreported, at least for now.
Above her black silk half-mask, yellow slit-pupiled eyes crinkled in amusement at the deadly game she played, while all around slept the unknowing residents of Benzor.
Soon, if she was successful, they would all know what the Nighthunter had done to stem the evil flowering in their city.
* * *
Long had the hills bloomed north of Benzor. The valleys were filled with flowers, their heady scent perfuming the air.
Yet their beauty usually went unappreciated by most of those living in nearby Benzor; the dry bones of many of the more curious folk rested among the flowered hills.
To anyone who dared to look closer, the cleaned bones bore marks of teeth.
Of course. These were the hills where the Zhenghi lived.
Little was known about the savage cannibals. Their villages lay deep in the convoluted hills and valleys that ranged north of the city of Benzor. Their numbers were unknown, but it was rumoured that uncounted thousands of Zhenghi were scattered in tribes across the deep wilderness and dark hills.
Few travelers would venture alone into Zhenghi territory, for to do so was to simply offer a quick meal to bands of roving cannibals. Not savages though; the Zhenghi were clever and organized, which allowed them greater success in their hunts for food.
Food on the hoof, so to speak. While some of the tribes grew crops to provide a balance to the preferred Zhenghi diet of flesh, most hunted in their hills, using skill and long knowledge of the wild to ensure that prey was always available to fill their bellies.
Other food that wandered into the Zhenghi hills rarely, if ever, left again.
* * *
The Zhenghi were at the heart of it. It was the simplest explanation.
Long had the cannibals lurked in their valley to the north, preying upon their neighbors and any travelers who wandered into their domain. Flesh was flesh, and the dreaded Zhenghi cry of “Eat or be eaten!” was enough to stop a brave heart cold when heard echoing from their dark hills.
Which was why Nichneven flitted from shadow to shadow in the Zhenghi domain, using all her skill to remain hidden from the cannibal’s hungry eyes. Their great hunting hounds may have caught a trace of her, but her otherworldly scent caused the beasts simply to become restless, not to bay out loud that food was sneaking past their master’s dull noses.
The dark was broken by the low fires of the Zhenghi camps. Dozens of small fires burned in the hills, surrounded by cannibal warriors eager to descend screaming on any intruders to their domain. The valley leading to Benzor was watched by hundreds of gleaming eyes in the night, ready to pounce on any foolish travelers and shred their flesh with filed teeth.
Those eyes did not see the Nighthunter though. Her magics cloaked her from the sentries as she passed them, and her skill kept dry twigs whole underfoot as she walked.
Somewhere in the dark hills, Nichneven knew the answer waited. There she would find out the how, and the why, of the new terror that stalked Benzor unawares.
It was the flowers, of course.
* * *
Some nights past, Nichneven had been patrolling the city was her want. From the rooflines, the city of Benzor slept peacefully under the watchful eyes of the tiefling.
That night though, her ears had caught the whisper of death in an alley nearby. Not the quickly silenced scream of a footpad’s victim, but the dull deadly rattle of life ending slow, almost silently among the soft sounds of the city at rest.
Moving quickly from cornice to shingled spire, along slate-tiled paths from roof to roof, Nichneven ran as fast as she could towards the sounds of life fading. Springing atop a final dormer, her eyes showed her much more than the darkness would to a normal human. Her tiefling heritage revealed a scene of death, come quick in an alley.
Yet the corpse that sprawled in a graceless heap had no killer rifling its pockets, no blood trail from a dagger silently stabbed. The man lay boneless on the bare dirt of the alley, his lips drawn back in a howl that his own hands had throttled at his throat. His eyes stared goggling at the night sky, from a face red and puffed like a blowfish. Whatever had killed him had done so quickly, and left no mark or trace of its passage.
Nichneven listened to the night around her, hearing no footsteps padding to fade in the alleys nearby. No door creaked on hinges, or breath panted from nearby lanes.
Curious, she leaned out from a chimney’s concealing shadow to peer more closely at the alley itself. Running between a baker’s shop and a merchant’s home, there were no doors for most of its length. It was cleaner than most, and the used crates and boxes of the bakery made a neat stack along part of one wall. Aside from that, the only other features to break the smooth walls were the windows of the merchant’s house.
Movement drew her eye towards those. Along the sill of one window was a flowerbox, and to the tiefling’s eyes its contents were plain. A row of lilies grew there, likely finding sun in the morning light to brighten the merchant’s kitchen view.
As she gazed at the flowers, they moved. Their petals slowly rotated in eerie sync, to point as one at the tiefling as though seeing her without eyes. All of them, all at once.
Shaking, Nichneven hurriedly pulled back past the roof’s edge, her eyes wide.
* * *
Nichneven had first seen the flowers in the Zhenghi wilds.
Seeking a missing merchant and his small caravan, she had traveled to the north of the city with only a small hope of bringing back anyone alive from the foolish venture.
After only a day’s travel, most of the time spent in shadows and cover the tiefling had discovered the remains of the caravan some distance from the main road, late in the day. The trade goods were gone and the wagons stripped of all their useful parts, even to the metal straps.
Gnawed bones accounted for some, but not all of the doomed travelers. From the prints in the area, two fools had escaped the waiting Zhenghi and struck out to the east as fast as their boots could take them. Her limited woodslore told Nichneven that the pair had managed to evade the Zhenghi pursuit until the cannibals gave up to return to an easier meal back at the ambush site.
The survivors had rested in a small grove, surrounded by the beauty of the wild that also consumed their companions. Flowers and other plants grew in green abundance around the small clearing, providing cover for the exhausted duo as they rested for the night.
Yet when Nichneven finally came upon them, they were quite, quite dead.
Dull eye sockets stared accusingly at their late rescuer from shrunken faces. Some force had drawn all the fluids from the bodies, leaving naught but a pair of mummies in the quiet glade.
With the utmost caution, Nichneven searched the area for predators or other creatures that she thought might have found the pair first. Yet no tracks were evident, no spoor present anywhere around the small clearing.
Her senses straining, Nichneven examined the bodies briefly without touching them. Her eyes saw rows of marks along their limbs, as though tiny teeth had dug into the flesh to draw out the fluids. Yet the marks were not made by any mouth the tiefling could imagine, not unless dozens of small creatures had attacked the poor duo at once.
Straightening from her cursory exam, Nichneven eyed the sun as it dipped lower in the sky. She would have to leave now if she was to make Benzor by nightfall. Though the dark was her preferred element, the method of the deaths in the clearing left her unwilling to spend this particular night outside the safety of Benzor’s safe stone walls.
As she left the bodies to their slumber in the glade, the tiefling failed to notice the sound of the many flowers that dotted the glade. Though the wind appeared to move them and make them whisper, the leaves of the trees around moved not a hair.
* * *
The corpse in the alley jerked, drawn to the window of the merchant’s home by slim tendrils that snaked from the lillie’s flowerbox. As it was pulled, slight sucking sounds reached Nichneven’s ears, perched high above and watching with horrified eyes as the flowers fed. His body soon withered as its fluids vanished, the bones crumbling into dust from the dark magics that flowed through the plant’s tendrils. Soon, little would remain of the body but a small pile of wind-blown dust.
Pressing her forehead against the night-cool stone of the chimney, the tiefling willed herself to calm. As she thought, pieces clicked into place to form a chilling picture.
The Zhenghi had long coveted the rich meal that Benzor represented, yet had never been able to take the city despite years of repeated assaults. So now they had resorted to an attack of a different kind.
A short time ago, one of those many assaults had breached the gates of Benzor. As in times past, the guards had been beaten back by the cannibals by sheer numbers. The adventurers of the city had rallied and stemmed the savage tide, putting aside their differences for a time to send the cannibals fleeing and broken back into their dark hills to lick their wounds. One notable good thing to come out of that battle was that her friend, Cyanid, had discovered some new information about her mother. Nichneven had barely known her own mother before she was no longer a part of her life, and she envied her friend being able to discover a link to her past, however tenuous.
After that battle, there had been something different. Nichneven had smelled it in the city, the trace of Zhenghi, yet none of the savages lurked inside the walls. Suspecting that the attack had been a diversion, she had hunted inside Benzor’s walls without success, seeking the source of the new scent yet finding nothing she could put a finger on. It seemed to come from many places in Benzor, starting near the docks and spreading throughout the city.
Suspecting that the Zhenghi had managed to slip past Benzor’s defenses by using the waters of the docks, the tiefling kept a watch for a week, trying to ferret out any of the cannibals who might have hidden themselves in the city. None showed their faces though, and though the disappearances started, no signs of the Zhenghi’s feasting were found within the city’s well-patrolled walls.
It was a deadly puzzle indeed.
* * *
Now she knew what had killed the man in the alley; the plant’s puzzle was almost complete. Once she could stop her hands from shaking, she would try to find out the how of the newest threat to the city, perhaps even the why of it.
Why the flowers had gone bad.