"They've been poisoning the water," Kali said, staring incredulously at one map as Alarion read to him from the corresponding logbook.

"For months, at least," Alarion confirmed. "That is why the tests are so erratic. They've been dumping fiend ichor into half the waterways in the district. They knew how we would search, so they made it impossible for us to succeed."

"Animals," Dimov spat.

Though Alarion typically had more respect for his fellow provincials than the Vitrian did, in this instance, he found it hard to disagree. The plan was barbaric. They'd weaponized a fiend infestation, concealed it, and enabled it. There were still dozens of journals to go through, but if he had to guess, they'd probably created it. If that was even possible.

After wiping out the hidden cell, Dimov and Alarion had reported on the situation and continued their search of the caverns, to no avail. The twisting passages spread out for miles beneath Shae-Yomag and the surrounding environment, with at least seven discreet exits that Alarion had located with ZEKE's help. Wherever the villagers had gone, Alarion could find no sign of them.

Bergman had woken by the time they finished searching. His eyes were sensitive, and his head was in agony, but he was mobile enough to reunite with his comrades in the enemy's command center.

Alarion had spent most of the intervening time poring over every scrap of information. Dimov had not bothered to learn Ashadi, so the task fell to Alarion and later to Kali as they tried to make sense of what the collaborators had been doing.

The picture the books painted was bleak. This was no haphazard plan, no isolated incident of a reckless few. It was years in the making, with dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of unaccounted-for accomplices. Alarion had found snippets of shipping logs detailing the procurement of bodies, both Awakened and mundane. They had been collecting corpses from all across Ashad and Imuria, embalming them, and storing them in the mortuary. What he'd mistaken for a treasury was the room where they kept anything of value they recovered from the bodies, items later intended for Centre's war chest, according to one document.

The purpose of the bodies was so blatant that Alarion felt stupid for not grasping it immediately, but the idea was so foul that his mind had refused to suggest it unprompted. They'd been storing bodies to feed them to the boil, giving it a steady supply of the dead to kick start its growth before the Vitrians were even aware of the threat. There was space for thousands of corpses in the mortuary, and from the smell, he wouldn't doubt that they'd had that many.

That was why the boil could afford to send two dozen revenants to intercept reinforcements. It explained the presence of Bergman's dead acquaintance and why the infestation had been more than willing to drown them in bodies to slow them down. It could afford it.

Yet somehow, that wasn't even the worst thing he'd read.

"They fed themselves to it," Alarion whispered in disgust, as if saying the words too loudly might invoke them.

"M-mother preserve," Bergman agreed, looking like he was going to throw up.

No one knew precisely how a boil determined which revenants would lead and which would follow, but it was known that strength played a crucial role in the process. A rank I would always defer to a rank II in that twisted hierarchy. The Bones of Ashad, as the bastards called themselves, had known this. They could have left things to chance, empowering the boil and letting it ruin the countryside as it chose. But that wasn't enough. A handful, including a rank III Awakened, had willingly given their lives to be resurrected as the boil's first revenants, hoping to control the horde.

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"Disgusting, but that does not help us," Dimov said. "Where is it?"

"I am looking," Alarion told him as he skimmed the last few pages and set the book aside. The collaborators had recorded so much of their plans, but one thing remained ever elusive. The actual location of the boil. In fact, the sheer volume of material was working against them. Bergman had used one of his skills, [Voluminous Search], to hunt for keywords within the piles of documents. Some, such as 'revenant' or 'ichor', had given them key insights into where to look, but no variation of 'boil', 'heart', or any other euphemism had found success.

The books were nowhere near as heavily coded as the ones they had found in the village, but the Bones had talked around critical topics, using individual codewords for names and locations. Shae-Yomag was 'The Village'; their leader or leaders were 'Centre', and their entire scheme was simply referred to as 'The Work'.

"My eyes are c-clearing. I should be able t-to help soon," said Bergman. "We have checked all the maps?"

"You can recheck them if you'd like," Kali grunted, pointing to each in turn. "Water table maps, land registries, geological surveys, city maps, rural roads. Mother help me. These are from the second Ashadi war. It looks like if they could get their hands on it, they put it on this wall."

"Those patrol schedules look very specific," Dimov said, his first contribution that wasn't a complaint or a curse in over an hour. "There are turncoats in the Auxilia."

"And in the empire,"

"I beg your pardon, Sergeant?"

Rather than try to argue the point, Kali let the ledger he'd been flipping through speak for him. "Twelve thousand to 'The Vitrian' for his services. Eight thousand. Another fifteen thousand here. It looks like he was selling them Awakened bodies."

"They could be lying. No Vitrian would-"

"Symbolic," Alarion said unprompted.

"Hmm?" Kali asked. "Did you find something?"

Alarion shook his head. "No, but... the way she talked. The propaganda, the self-sacrifice, even their name. They are all Ashadi zealots."

"N-nationalists," Bergman corrected him as he studied the maps, periodically rubbing at his sore eyes. He zeroed in on one in particular. "I recognize this o-one. It is C-Carling Hill. My uncle died here. It was the last major field battle of the war. B-before Ruin came for Ashad-Mundi."

"They could be grave-digging?" Dimov suggested. "We know they need bodies, and even a battlefield picked through-"

"No," Alarion shut down the idea. "They do not care about the overall state of the body, but it needs meat. That battle was a decade ago. There would be nothing left."

"Carling, that would be...." Kali trailed off as he searched one of the posted maps. His thick, pale finger tapped twice on the map, just to the east of the Giants. "Within the exclusion zone. And among a few of the major water sources that they poisoned. Bergman, can you-"

The weary soldier began chanting before Kali even finished the sentence.

"Look and find the hidden line, Bring forth the text by word and sign. Now speak aloud the words you seek, And do declare the term unique:"

"Carling Hill."

Alarion watched in amazement as Bergman's magic went to work. Visually, it was an impressive display, as it had been during the previous castings, with black ink leaping from book to book in search of the chosen words. But looking with fresh 'eyes' through the prism of his [Introverted Mana Sense] gave Alarion a whole new appreciation for the magic. It was as though the magic were a living thing, closer to a familiar than to a fireball. It was the sympathetic connection, the strong bond between the spell, its purpose, the caster, and the method of casting.

When it was over, five books were clearly marked with splotches of black ink along their spines and covers. The faux ink would fade over time, but it made it easy to pick out the correct books from the pile. Alarion claimed one at random, flipping through the dense pages as he followed a trail of that same ink to the underlined words.

"...those Vitrian mother-" Alarion winced at the blasphemy and invective, skipping past them rather than invoking Dimov's wrath. "- will face the ghosts of Carling Hill, I swear."

"We visited Carling Hill today," Kali read from another book. "It doesn't seem real. Knowing that all those patriots, that father, died on green grass hills. There isn't even a marker to commemorate them. The people have forgotten. But we will remind them."

Alarion followed a trail of ink to a letter buried beneath a stack of other documents. He pulled it loose, scanned it, and swore.

"What?" Dimov asked.

"Centre agrees," Alarion said, reading the seven-word missive aloud. "Periai, Shae-Istol, and Carling."

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