‘She’s even got a cat,’ Keira Metz whispered. ‘I bet it’s black…’
‘Quiet,’ hissed Philippa. ‘My dear Francesca, honourable Mistress Assire. Our initiative is intended to be utterly apolitical; that is its fundamental premise. We shall not be guided by interests of race, kingdoms, kings or imperators, but by the interests of magic and its future.’
‘While putting magic first,’ Sabrina Glevissig said and smiled sneeringly, ‘I hope we will not forget, though, about the interests of sorceresses. We know, after all, how sorceresses are treated in Nilfgaard. We can sit here chatting away apolitically, but when Nilfgaard triumphs and we end up under imperial rule, we shall all look like…’
Triss shifted anxiously, Philippa sighed almost inaudibly. Keira lowered her head, Sheala pretended to be straightening her boa. Francesca bit her lip. Assire var Anahid’s face did not twitch, but a faint blush appeared on it.
‘It will be bad for all of us, is what I meant to say,’ Sabrina finished quickly. ‘Philippa, Triss and I, all three of us were on Sodden Hill. Emhyr will seek revenge for that defeat, for Thanedd, for the sum total of our activities. But that is only one of the reservations that the declared political neutrality of this convent arouses in me. Does participation in it mean immediate resignation from the active – and indeed political – service we presently offer to our kings? Or are we to remain in that service and serve two masters: magic and kingly rule?’
‘When someone tells me he is politically neutral,’ Francesca smiled, ‘I always ask which politics he specifically has in mind.’
‘And you know he definitely isn’t thinking about the one he engages in,’ Assire var Anahid said, looking at Philippa.
‘I am politically neutral,’ Margarita Laux-Antille said, lifting her head, ‘and my school is politically neutral. I have in mind every type, kind and class of politics which exists!’
‘Dear ladies,’ Sheala said, having remained silent for some time. ‘Remember you are the dominant sex. So don’t behave like little girls, fighting over a tray of sweetmeats. The principium proposed by Philippa is clear, at least to me, and I still have too little cause to consider you any less intelligent. Outside this chamber be who you want, serve who you wish, as faithfully as you want. But when the convent meets, we shall focus exclusively on magic and its future.’
‘That is precisely how I imagine it,’ Philippa Eilhart agreed. ‘I know there are many problems, and that there are doubts and uncertainties. We shall discuss them during the next meeting, in which we shall all participate; not in the form of projections or illusions, but in person. Your presence will be treated not as a formal act of accession to the convent, but as a gesture of good will. We shall decide together whether a convent of this kind will be founded at all. All of us. With equal rights.’
‘All of us?’ Sheala repeated. ‘I see empty seats and I presume they were not put here by accident.’
‘The convent ought to number twelve sorceresses. I would like the candidate for one of those empty seats to be proposed and presented to us at our next meeting by Mistress Assire. There must be at least one more worthy sorceress in the Nilfgaardian Empire. I leave the second place to you to fill, Francesca, so that you will not feel alone as the only pureblood elf. The third…’
Enid an Gleanna raised her head.
‘I would like two places. I have two candidates.’
‘Do any of you have any objections to this request? If not, then I concur. Today is the fifth day of August, the fifth day after the new moon. We shall meet again on the second day after the full moon, sisters dear, in fourteen days.’
‘Just a moment,’ Sheala de Tancarville interrupted. ‘One place still remains empty. Who is to be the twelfth sorceress?’
‘That is precisely the first problem the lodge will have to solve,’ Philippa said, smiling mysteriously. ‘In two weeks time I shall tell you who ought to take their place in the twelfth seat. And then we shall ponder over how to get that person to take it up. My candidature and that person will astonish you. Because it is not an ordinary person, honourable sisters. It is death or life, destruction or rebirth, chaos or order. Depending on how you look at it.’
* * *
The entire village had poured out of their houses to watch the gang pass through. Tuzik also joined them. He had work to do, but he couldn’t resist it. In recent days, people had been talking a great deal about the Rats. A rumour was even going around that they had all been caught and hanged. The rumour had been false, though, the evidence of which was ostentatiously and unhurriedly parading in front of the entire village at this very moment.
‘Impudent scoundrels,’ someone behind Tuzik whispered, and it was a whisper full of admiration. ‘Ambling down the main street…’
‘Decked out as if for a wedding…’
‘And what horses! You don’t even see Nilfgaardians with horses like that!’
‘Ha, they’re stolen. The Rats take everybody’s horses. You can sell a horse everywhere nowadays. But they keep the best for ‘emselves…’
‘That one up the front, look, that’s Giselher… Their leader.’
‘And next to him, on the chestnut, it’s that she-elf… they call her Iskra…’
A cur came scuttling out from behind a fence, barking furiously, scurrying around near the fore hooves of Iskra’s mare. The elf shook her luxurious mane of dark hair, turned her horse around, leaned down to the ground and lashed the dog with a knout. The cur howled and turned around on the spot three times, as Iskra spat on it. Tuzik muttered a curse between clenched teeth.
The people standing close by continued to whisper, discreetly pointing out the various Rats as they passed through the village. Tuzik listened, because he had to. He knew the gossip and tales as well as the others, and easily recognised the one with the long, tousled, straw-coloured hair, eating an apple, as Kayleigh, the broad-shouldered one as Asse, and the one in the embroidered sheepskin jerkin as Reef.
Two girls, riding side by side and holding hands, brought up the rear of the procession. The taller of the two, riding a bay, had her hair shorn as though recovering from the typhus, her jacket was unbuttoned, her lacy blouse gleamed white beneath it, and her necklace, bracelets and earrings flashed brightly.
‘That shaven-headed one is Mistle…’ someone near Tuzik said. ‘Dripping with trinkets, just like a Yule tree.’
‘They say she’s killed more people than she’s seen summers…’
‘And the other one? On the roan? With the sword across her back?’
‘Falka, they call her. She’s been riding with the Rats since the summer. She also s’pposed to be a nasty piece of work…’
That villain, Tuzik guessed, wasn’t much older than his daughter, Milena. The flaxen hair of the young bandit tumbled from beneath her velvet beret decorated with an impudently jiggling bunch of pheasant feathers. Around her neck glowed a poppy-red silk kerchief, tied up in a fanciful bow.
A sudden commotion had broken out among the villagers who had poured out in front of their cottages. For Giselher, the one riding at the head of the gang, had reined in his horse, and with a careless gesture thrown a clinking purse at the foot of Granny Mykitka, who was standing leaning on a cane.
‘May the gods protect you, gracious youth!’ wailed Granny Mykitka. ‘May you enjoy good health, O our benefactor, may you—’
A peal of laughter from Iskra drowned out the crone’s mumbling. The elf threw a jaunty leg over her pommel, reached into a pouch and vigorously scattered a handful of coins amongst the crowd. Reef and Asse followed her example, a veritable silver rain showering down on the sandy road. Kayleigh, giggling, threw his apple core into the figures scrambling to gather up the money.
‘Our benefactors!’
‘Our valiant young falcons!’
‘May fate be kind to you!’
Tuzik didn’t run after the others, didn’t drop to his knees to scrabble in the sand and chicken shit for coins. He stood by the fence, watch
ing the girls pass slowly by.
The younger of the two, the one with the flaxen hair, noticed his gaze and expression. She let go of the short-haired girl’s hand, spurred her horse and rode straight for him, pressing him against the fence and almost getting her stirrup caught. Her green eyes flashed and he shuddered, seeing so much evil and cold hatred in them.
‘Leave him, Falka,’ the close-cropped girl called. ‘Forget it.’
The green-eyed bandit settled for pushing Tuzik against the fence, and rode off after the Rats, without even looking back.
‘Our benefactors!’
‘Young falcons!’
Tuzik spat.
In the early evening, men in black uniforms arrived in the village. They were forbidding looking horsemen from the fort near Fen Aspra. Their horseshoes thudded, their horses neighed and their weapons clanked. When asked, the village headman and other peasants lied through their teeth, and sent the pursuers on a false trail. No one asked Tuzik. Fortunately.
When he returned from the pasture and went into his garden, he heard voices. He recognised the twittering of Zgarba the carter’s twin girls, the cracking falsettos of his neighbour’s adolescent boys. And Milena’s voice. They’re playing, he thought. He turned the corner beyond the woodshed. And froze in his tracks.
‘Milena!’
Milenka, his only surviving daughter, the apple of his eye, had hung a piece of wood across her back on a string, like a sword. She’d let her hair down, attached a cockerel’s feather to her woollen hat, and tied her mother’s kerchief around her neck. In a bizarre, fanciful bow.
Her eyes were green.
Tuzik had never beaten his daughter before, never used his belt for that purpose.
That was the first time.
* * *
Lightning flashed on the horizon and thunder rumbled. A gust of wind raked across the surface of the Ribbon.
There’s going to be a storm, thought Milva, and after the storm the rain will set in. The chaffinches weren’t mistaken.
She urged her horse on. She would have to hurry if she wanted to catch the Witcher before the storm broke.
Andrzej Sapkowski was born in 1948 in Poland. He studied economy and business, but the success of his fantasy cycle about the sorcerer Geralt de Rivia turned him into a bestselling writer and he is now one of Poland’s most famous and successful authors, selling more in his own country than Stephen King or Michael Crichton.
Also by Andrzej Sapkowski:
THE LAST WISH
BLOOD OF ELVES
TIME OF CONTEMPT
BAPTISM OF FIRE
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Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
WELCOME
THE MALADY
THE WITCHER
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
BLOOD OF ELVES
Chapter One
BAPTISM OF FIRE
Chapter One
ALSO BY ANDRZEJ SAPKOWSKI
ABOUT ORBIT SHORT FICTION
ORBIT NEWSLETTER
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Original text copyright © 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, 2013 by Andrzej Sapkowski
Translation of The Malady copyright © 2006 by Wiesiek Powaga
Translation of The Witcher, The Edge of the World and Blood of Elves copyright © 2007, 2008 by Danusia Stok
Translation of Baptism of Fire copyright © 2013 by David French
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover image © Shutterstock
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at
[email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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US eBook edition: December 2014
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in 2013 by Gollancz.
ISBN 978-0-316-30037-7
E3
Andrzej Sapkowski, The Malady and Other Stories: An Andrzej Sapkowski Sampler
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