Chương 161: Exhumation

It was probably too early to say whether the gophers were actually 'done,' but we'd defeated the brunt of their forces.

"That was not as many as I was expecting, Brother," Brawl said.

"How many were you expecting?"

"... I do not know, but gopher colonies were supposed to be larger."

"These were massive gophers," Anchor provided.

"They make up for their lack of numbers with size."

"Let's just get up to the surface, then we can debate the size of the colony," I said.

"And do a bit of a damage assessment." Once all the soldiers and armed workers were up on the lip of the massive well, we checked over everyone. While our squads didn't have a healer with them, there were only a few injuries, and Sage tended to them with ease. We'd lost four workers and two Dupes, but we'd taken out far more gophers than that, and given how strong they were, I was surprised it wasn't worse.

"You did well," Cuthward said, "but you didn't kill them all. There will be a few stragglers, they will breed, and the problem will repeat itself in a few years." I knelt at the edge of the pond, putting my hands on the lip, and said, "Two solutions. We're going to leave a squad here for a week, and they're going to kill any stragglers that show up. Second, I'm going to post a bounty for gophers."

"People will just start breeding the gophers on their own," Sage warned.

"Maybe," I replied.

"I don't doubt we'll have one or two unethical breeding operations. But here's the thing. We also make that a crime, and we double the bounty on any gophers if they come from a breeding operation that wasn't your own—along with the head of whoever was doing the breeding." Cuthward swallowed.

"That seems…like a harsh punishment. Potentially too harsh."

"It's a deterrent. You execute horse thieves here, don't you?"

"Y—yes. Well, we used to. Tunmod reduced the sentencing."

"Why'd you do it?" I prompted.

"It's not proportional, right? A horse thief doesn't kill anyone."

"I see where you are coming from, son," Cuthward said.

"But none of this will work if you don't cut the head off the top snake. Tunmod is still causing problems."

"Two days until the festival, now," I said.

"You can hold on just a little bit longer, can't you?"

"Yes, sir." So we left a squad here. Their task was to watch for more gophers and kill them when they turned up. I wanted to siphon all the Presences from the gophers, but that could wait until morning. It would be a massive boon to everyone here once we did, though. Maybe some of Romance's Irons would double their Presence value from this day alone. They returned to the city, and as they approached, Levi checked the progress on the wall with Lute, who was overseeing the construction.

"We've laid the groundwork," he said.

"It'll take a few more days, and we could use the help of some enhanced soldiers. The locals are pretty good at building, but they're not as strong as a Dupe."

"We'll help out tomorrow," I promised. As we walked back through the streets to the barracks, I asked Cuthward, "If bandits, or cultists, were a problem, why'd no one build a palisade before?"

"Do you have to ask?" Cuthward replied.

"Tunmod said something about it being unfair to travellers, some saccharine excuse like that.

'That's not the way the academy taught us to do it.' We all know why he didn't, though. Easier for cultists to snatch up a person here and there."

"Unfair to the travellers." I rolled my eyes.

"Equally unfair to the people of the city, I'd say." I shook my head.

"Get some sleep. Tomorrow, I'll need you at the top of your game. I've got hundreds more questions to ask you." ~ ~ ~ Over the next two days, I spent most of my time helping build a wall. I was lucky we'd chosen this time of the year, because it meant we actually had money to pay out the workers who were helping us. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings. The taxes Tunmod had collected for the festival?

Instead of letting them go to waste, instead of letting them go directly into his and his seer's pockets, we gave them back to those who helped us build. I didn't notice a difference immediately, but now that people had jobs and money? The city was a little more lively in the evening. A few patrons stopped by Cuthward's inn, and he had to crack open a new keg of ale for them. I checked up on the gopher pond every now and again. We cleared it out, dragging the bodies up to the surface, and siphoned their Presences.

They didn't all leave one behind, but enough did, and soon, we had a pile of about two hundred misty white orbs. Although our squad took some for ourselves, I divided the rest up between the squads and let the sergeants spread them around their squads how they saw fit. Of course, there were a few more gophers, but they were fewer and farther between, and we only needed a single squad of regulars to deal with them. Every hour or so, one tried to attack our new well, trying to collapse it.

They bit off more than they could chew when they attacked individually. On the third day, the day before the festival, I told Tunmod, "We can begin building wells, now." Mostly, I just wanted to see his reaction. As expected, he sputtered, then gave some garbled excuse about how we were going to cause an ecological disaster, and how we were moving too fast, and how we weren't aware of the complexities.

There was probably some truth in that, but as far as I was concerned, he'd been the one who had caused an ecological disaster. We were just cleaning it up, and he was mad that we were doing a good job. Well, he was probably mad about some other things, too. Like the fact that we would solving the sickness, and taking away the cultists' victims by letting them die of old age and live far longer. The effects of that, however, wouldn't manifest so soon.

Later that day, I asked him, "Do you know who the head of the cultists is? Or where we could find him?" Considering Tunmod had hair, and no obvious markings in his flesh, it couldn't have been him. But I had my suspicions, and I had tasked Elf with doing some research. The Dupe was currently sifting through the coffer records, trying to determine who had been paid what, and hunting for any clues there.

"I have no idea," Tunmod replied.

"They escape into the night, and there's nothing we can do about it." I nodded. Instinctively, I wanted to try to pretend I was still on his side, but he probably knew what was up. We only had one more night until the festival, anyway, and Tunmod's uses were running out. He didn't seem to know how close he was to the end, though. There hadn't been any more assassination attempts. For the rest of the day, I went about my business as normal.

I helped build the palisade wall, stripping logs and sharpening their tips, carrying them to the ditch, then placing them upright. We tied them together at the top and filled the gaps between them with mud and plaster. Finally, with the smaller logs that didn't work as well for an outer wall, we built ramparts for guards to perch on, behind the wall. When night came, though, I asked Cuthward where they kept the bodies of all the newly deceased.

"They are supposed to be burnt on a pyre," he said.

"We would cremate their bodies, gather their ashes in an urn, and bury them with gifts—which they would use when their souls arrive at Welkinmere."

"I don't suppose that's what happens anymore?"

"The old seer outlawed the practice of burning them. Now, we simply bury them in the burial fields south of the city, by the temple. You can't miss them." Since we'd lost a few locals in our skirmish with the gophers, I hoped they would have been processed and buried by now—which meant there were new corpses in the graveyard. It was perfect bait for the cultists. As the last arc of twilight faded from the western sky, I walked along the trail, following it in the opposite direction from the well and the gopher pit.

I was alone—the rest of my squad was resting for tomorrow, and it would be easier to investigate alone, anyway. Less chance of getting caught. With Brawl and Morph in tow, my squad wouldn't exactly be stealthy. The trail wound along the shore of the river, heading the opposite direction from our pit, until finally, it led us to an old temple. At least, the ruins of one. It looked almost identical to the temple in the Labyrinth, where we'd temporarily deactivated the level guardian and lit the sky.

This temple, however, didn't have an opening in the center for a massive golem to lay down in. Its roof had crumbled, leaving only the outlines of a sloped temple, and half the pillars were collapsing, too. A modern structure, a longhouse with a thatched roof, sat inside the center of the temple. Warm candlelight light poured from the windows, and smoke trickled out its chimney. Burial mounds turned the fields around the temple into moguls. They ran all the way to the shore, covered in grass and flowers.

I ducked down, hiding behind the mounds, then crawled on my stomach, navigating closer to the temple. The mounds were fresher closer to the river, so I drew closer, and— Voices. I stopped, ducking down behind an especially tall mound. As the voices faded into the distance, I peered over the mound. I lifted my head just enough to get my eyes over it. A pair of black-robed men with bald heads (and patterns etched into their scalps) walked toward the river, carrying shovels and a candle.

I stayed deathly still for an hour, watching and waiting. My instinct was to run away, but I wanted to see exactly what they did and where they went. They dug into the mound, exhumed a pair of corpses, then dragged them away. No, not away. Back to the temple. Of course. That was where the cult did some of their business. Seer Jaruwain was in on it too. The windows of the longhouse dimmed. Faint chanting seeped out the windows. I wouldn't have picked up on it without my enhanced senses.

Then came a faintly pink wisp of mist, leaking out the windows—again, I wouldn't have picked up on it without my senses being as good as they were. So it was settled, then. Tomorrow, the festival would begin, and all of this would end. Tunmod, the cults, everything.