text: Last night we told Ythac about the innocent Elrique being tossed into a quarantine camp and getting infected. He had to investigate for himself. When an information sorcerer investigates a matter that he is passionate about (or that his husband is), great spells are cast and much truth is revealed.
  
  So: of the three hundred hovens in Elrique's camp, sixty-one had been infected when they were quarantined. Two hundred thirty-nine uninfected hovens were thrown in with them.
  
  As of today, none remain uninfected.
  
  We have fed the worms two hundred and thirty-nine hovens in the one camp alone, when we intended to deny them all opportunity to colonize anyone ever again.
  
  And that camp is a fairly old one, among cyozi-camps. More recent ones have been filled by the No False Negatives decrees, which make the standards for avoiding the camp harder. We intended that fewer worms, no worms, escape the camps. But that meant that more uninfected people were thrown in there with them.
  
  When we looked at the records and interrogated some laboratory workers, we estimated that about two-thirds of the mistakes were purely scientific in nature — people with under-udder birthmarks and naturally high Kia ratios and such. The rest seemed to have some political or personal element to them as well. The mayor encouraged the 'very careful examination' of certain of her political rivals, such as Elrique. She did not exactly say it, but it was clear to the laboratory workers that they should try particularly hard to find them infested. The gendarmes also made their recommendations: this hoven had fought fiercely against his arrest and afternoon of torture, so surely he must be wormridden. And that one had tried to bribe her way out of it, but the bribe was insufficient; ditto. And after a while, it was clear that the camps should be filled as quickly as possible, or the dragons would be upset and become destructive, so standards were relaxed somewhat despite Wulpmegarn's publishing of somewhat stricter standards.
  
  Such is our revenge against the worms.
  
  "Llredh, may I summon Csirnis? I wish to behave with honor and justice, but I somehow seem to have utterly lost track of where they are. Csirnis knows about them more than most of us." asked Ythac. "Actually, Csirnis is in the mating flight still, so I should and do ask Nrararn and Jyothky as well for permission to summon him."
  
  "The mating flight, such as it is," said Nrararn. "It would be polite to call Osoth, though I doubt he'll come."
  
  "I would be happy to see the rest of my fiancés," I said.
  
  Osoth did, though it took him until this morning to get here. I had to fly out and give him the Melismatic Tempest.