They were ready. Only one thing remained to be done.
‘Come, all of you.’
They came.
‘Cahir, son of Ceallach’ began Geralt, trying not to sound pathetic. ‘I have offended you with an unwarranted suspicion and acted maliciously towards you. First, I do hereby apologize, head bowed. I do apologize and ask you to forgive me. Also, I ask all of you for forgiveness, because it was cruel to make you watch and listen to it all.’
‘I have omitted to Cahir and to you the reason for my anger, my rage, and my grief. They stem from the fact that I know who betrayed us. I know who betrayed and kidnapped Ciri, who we want to save. My anger stems from the fact that we are talking about a person who was once very close to me.’
‘Where we are, what we are doing, which way we go, and what we want – it's all been determined by means of detection and acquisition magic. It is not too difficult for a master of magic to locate a person from a distance and observe them – as long as that person was once well known and close to them. And as long as they had formed a long-lasting mental contact with them, making it possible to create their matrix. But the sorcerer and the sorceress of whom I speak have made a mistake. They exposed themselves. They were wrong about the number of members in the company, and this mistake has betrayed them. Tell them, Regis.’
‘Geralt may be right,’ Regis said slowly. ‘Like any vampire, I am an invisible magical target for detection probing and acquisition spells. One can calculate a vampire with analytical magic up close, however it is not possible to discover a vampire from a distance with a locating spell. A tracking spell will not show the vampire. Where the vampire is, says the acquisition magic that no one had. Only a magician could therefore be mistaken in regard to us as follows: to count four, when in truth we are five, that is, four men and a vampire.’
‘We will take advantage of that error and get the magician,’ the witcher took the floor again. ‘Myself, Cahir, and Angouleme will ride to Belhaven and talk with the half-elf, our would-be killer. We will not ask the half-elf at whose command he is working, because we already know. We will ask him where the magician is. If we can get a location from him, we will ride there. And take revenge.’
All were silent.
‘We've stopped counting the days, so we have not even noticed that already is the twenty-fifth of September. Two days ago was the equinox. The equinox. Yes, that was the same night you think it was. I see your sadness in your eyes. You received a signal, then, in that vile night when we camped next to the merchants who brandy made courageous enough to sing and launch fireworks. Surely you haven’t had a premonition as clearly as Cahir and I, but you can imagine, yes. You have a suspicion. And I fear that the suspicion is justified.’
The crows flew over the treeless rocks and began to croak.
‘Everything indicates that Ciri is no longer alive. Two days ago, on the equinox, she was killed. Somewhere far from here – lonely, alone, and among hostile strangers.’
‘We are left with only revenge. A bloody and cruel revenge, about which stories will circulate for a hundred years. Such tales that people will be afraid to hear them after dark. And those who would like to repeat such a crime will tremble at the thought of our revenge. We will give them a shocking example of horror! With the method of Lord Fulko Artevelde, the clever Lord Fulko, who knows how to treat criminals with the gallows. We will make a deterrent example that will amaze even him!’
‘Let us begin our journey to hell! Cahir, Angouleme: to the horses. We ride along the Newi, then we ascend to Belhaven. Dandelion, Milva, Regis: follow the Sansretour to the borders of Toussaint. You cannot miss the way, the Gorgon will show you. See you soon.’
Ciri stroked the black tomcat, who had returned to the hut in the swamp. Like all cats, its dislike of cold, hunger, and discomfort had eventually overshadowed its love of freedom. Now he lay on girl’s lap, offering his neck to pet and purring with pleasure.
The tomcat did not give a damn about the girl’s tale.
‘That was the only time that I dreamed of Geralt,’ continued Ciri. ‘I had not once seen him in a dream since the time we parted on the island of Thanedd, since the Tower of Gulls. Therefore I thought he was dead. And then he suddenly appeared in this dream, one of the dreams Yennefer had long ago taught me were prophetic, precognitive, and showed either the past or the future. It was the day before the equinox. In a small town whose name I forget. In a basement where Bonhart had locked me up. After he tortured me and forced me to confess who I was.’
‘You told him who you were?’ Vysogota raised his head. ‘You told him everything?’
‘I paid’ – she gulped -’for my cowardice with subjugation and self-loathing.’
‘Tell me about this dream.’
‘I saw it as if I were a mountain – tall and steep-edged like a stone knife. I saw Geralt. I heard what he said. Exactly. Every word, as I if were there in person. I remember I wanted to call out to him and tell him that things were quite different than he thought, that everything was not true, that he was terribly misled... that he was mistaken about everything! That it was not the equinox yet, and even if it was, that I would not die on the equinox like he previously declared, because I was still alive. And that he should not accuse Yennefer and say such things about her...’
She paused for a moment, stoked the cat, and then sniffed violently.
‘But I had no voice. I couldn’t even breathe... It was as if I drowning. And then I awoke. The last thing I saw, the last thing I remember from this dream were three riders. Geralt and two others, galloping through a canyon with cascades falling down its walls...’
Vysogota was silent.
If someone managed to sneak through the dark to the hut with the sagging thatch roof, and if they had peeked through a crack in the shutters, they would have seen, in the dimly lit interior, a gray-bearded old man focusing on listening to the story of an ash-blonde girl an ugly scar on her disfigured cheek.
They would have seen a black cat sitting on the girl's lap, purring lazy, and wanting to be petted further – to the delight of the mice passing through the hut.
But no one could see that. The hut with the bagged and mossy thatch roof was well hidden in the mist of the boundless swamps of Pereplut, where no one dared enter.
CHAPTER SIX
It is known that the witcher inflicts pain, suffering and death. He perversely pleasures and delights in such simple feelings like a normal, god-fearing person does with his wife on their wedding night. It visibly followeth, that in this sense the witcher is an unnatural creature, a contemptible and immoral degenerate, originating from the foulest, darkest depths of hell because indeed only the devil can delight in suffering and torment.
Anonymous
Monstrum, or a Portrayal of Witchers
They left the road that led along the Newi Valley, taking a shortcut through the mountains. They rode as fast as the path allowed. It was narrow, sinuous, and densely surrounded by fantastically shaped rocks, which were covered with different colored mosses and lichens. They rode between vertical rock walls from which striped ribbons of cascades and waterfalls hung. They rode through canyons and ravines, and over varying small bridges spanning chasms, where white foam whirled on the ground far below.
The angular blade of Mount Gorgon seemed to tower directly above their heads, though they could not see the summit of the Devil’s Mountain – it sank into the clouds and fog that covered the sky. The weather – as it does in the mountains – changed for the worse in only a few short hours. It started to drizzle, annoyingly and obnoxiously.
When evening came, all three began to keep an impatient and nervous lookout for a shepherd's hut, a ruined sheepfold, or at least a cave. For anything that would protect them against the night sky and dripping water.
‘It seems to have stopped raining,’ said Angouleme with hope in her voice. ‘It’s only dripping through the holes in the roof of the hut now. Tomorrow, if we are lucky, we will reach Belhave
n, where we can stay in a nearby shed or barn.’
‘We aren’t riding into town?’
‘Absolutely not. Strangers on horses catch the eye, and Nightingale has a lot of informers in the city.’
‘Considering that the plan is to consciously offer ourselves up as bait...’
‘No,’ she interrupted him. ‘It's a wretched plan. Together, we will arouse suspicion. Nightingale is a cunning dog, and the news that I was captured has certainly reached him by now. And if Nightingale suspects something, then the half-elf will learn of it.’
‘What do you suggest?’
‘We go around the city to the east, near the mouth of the Sansretour Valley, where there are iron mines. I have a friend in one of the mines. We will pay him a visit. Who knows, if we're lucky, perhaps this visit will be worth it?’
‘Can you speak more clearly?’
‘I will tomorrow. In the mine. I don’t want to jinx it.’
Cahir threw birch twigs into the fire. It had rained all day and any other timber would not have been able to burn. But the birch wood, although it was wet, only crackled a little before immediately starting to burn with high blue flame.
‘Where are you from, Angouleme?’
‘From Cintra, witcher. It’s a country by the sea, at the mouth of the Yaruga.’
‘I know where Cintra is.’
‘Why are you asking if you know so much? Am I so interesting to you?’
‘Let's say a little bit.’
They were silent. The fire crackled.
‘My mother,’ Angouleme finally said, her gaze directed at the flames, ‘was a Cintran noble, by the right of high birth. Her House’s coat-of-arms was a Meerkat. I would show it to you – because my mother gave me a locket with this stupid cat – but I lost it playing dice... But this shitty House shunned me, because my mother supposedly had relations with someone from the general populace, probably a stable-boy, and I supposedly am a bastard, a shame, a disgrace, and a stain on the House’s honor. So they gave me to some distantly related in-laws, who certainly had neither a cat nor a dog nor any beast on their coat-of-arms, but they were not bad to me. Sent me to school, all in all hit me only a little... Although they reminded me quite often of who I was – a bastard, begotten in the bushes. My mother visited me maybe three or four times when I was little. Then she stopped. It turns out that she didn’t give a shit about me – even though...’
‘How did you come to be among criminals?’
‘You sound like an investigating judge,’ she hissed and screwed up her face ludicrously. ‘Among the criminals, pah! Strayed from the path of virtue, bah!’
She muttered something to herself, looked in her jacket for something, and then pulled out something that was not exactly familiar to the witcher.
‘That One-Eyed Fulko,’ she said vaguely, as she eagerly rubbed a bit into her gums and inhaled some through her nose, ‘is a decent fellow after all. He took what he took, but he left me the dust. Will you take a pinch, witcher?’
‘No. I would prefer if you also would take none.’
‘Why?’
‘Because.’
‘Cahir?’
‘I do not use Fisstech.’
‘It seems I am among paragons of virtue.’ She shook her head. ‘Will you preach moral certainty and lecture me that I will go blind, deaf, and hairless from the dust? That I will have a mentally defective child?’
‘Leave off, Angouleme. And finish your story.’
The girl sneezed violently. ‘Well, as you will. Where was I... Aha. The war broke out, you know the one with Nilfgaard, and the relatives lost all their possessions and had to leave their home. They had three children of their own and I was too much to bear, so they gave me a new home. It was run by the priests of some temple. A fun place, as it turned out. A common whorehouse, a brothel, for people who liked to dine on succulent young fruits with white skins, you get it? Little girls. And little boys too. I was already too old when I went there, there were no lovers...’
Quite unexpectedly, she blushed; it could even be seen in the firelight. ‘Almost none’ she forced out.
‘How old were you then?’
‘Fifteen. I got to know a girl and five boys, my age and slightly older. And we came to a unanimous agreement. We knew the legends and the stories. Of the madman De'I, of Black Bart, of the Cassini brothers... We wanted the freedom of the road, the merry life of bandits! Why, we said to ourselves, should we stay where we only get something to eat twice a day and had to sell our asses to repulsive creeps...’
‘Go easy on your choice of words, Angouleme. You know, too much cursing is unhealthy.’
The girl squawked and spat into the fire. ‘You really must be a paragon of virtue! Well, I’ll come to the point, because I do not feel like talking. We found knives in the kitchen of the home – they were sufficient after we grinded them well on the whetstone and belt. We turned the legs of a chair into great clubs. We just needed horses and money, so we waited until two scoundrels came, regular customers, old as the hills, ha, at least forty. They came, sat down, drank a little wine, and waited until their priests, as usual, tied their selected young thing into a specially refined piece of furniture... But that day they did not get to fuck her!’
‘Angouleme.’
‘Okay, okay. In short: We botched things up with the two old scoundrels, three priests, and a stable boy – the only one who had fought for the horses instead of fleeing. The temple guard would not give us the gate key, so we burned the gatehouse until he came out, but we spared his life, because that was a better age – we were always benevolent and good. And we went on robber’s road. That’s how it went for us, sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes we dealt it, and sometimes we took it. Sometimes we were tired, sometimes hungry. Ha, hungry more often. I caught and ate more of what creeps and crawls than I ever had in my life. And of what flies – I once even ate a kid’s kite, because it was stuck together with glue made from flour.’
She paused and vigorously ran her hand through her straw-blond hair.
‘But what’s in the past is in the past. As far as I can tell you: Of those who escaped from the home with me, no one lives. The last two, Owen and Abel, were done in a few days ago by the soldiers of Lord Fulko. Abel even dropped his sword like me, but they cut him down anyway.’
‘They spared me. But don’t think it was out of loving kindness. They already had me stretched spread eagle on the ground when an officer came and forbade them the pleasure. Well, then you came and saved me from the gallows...’
She paused for a moment.
‘Witcher?’
‘I'm listening.’
‘I know how I can prove my gratitude. If you just want to...’
‘What?’
‘I should go check on the horses,’ Cahir said quickly, standing up and wrapping his coat around him. ‘I’ll see how their feet are doing...’
The girl sneezed, sniffled, and cleared her throat.
‘Not a word of it, Angouleme,’ he warned her, feeling really bad, really ashamed, and really confused. ‘Not a word!’
She cleared her throat again. ‘You really don’t desire me? Not a bit?’
‘Milva gave you a taste of the strap, you snot nosed brat. If you don’t shut up immediately, you'll get a second helping from me.’
‘I'm not saying another word.’
‘Good girl.’
The slope was covered with small, twisted pines that hung crookedly, gaping pits, and holes. There were also many boards secured with rubber stamps and connected by stairs, ladders and scaffolds. Walkways protruded from the holes, supported by crossed poles. On some walkways, people were busily moving carts and wheelbarrows. The contents of the carts and wheelbarrows – at first glance muddy soil, interspersed with rocks – were dumped from the walkways into a large square trough, which then flowed into a complex of increasingly smaller and separated troughs. Water flowed continuously and noisily through the wooden troughs, which were supported
on low-post cross gutters of a wooded hill. They apparently derived somewhere down the slope.
Angouleme dismounted and signaled for Geralt and Cahir to dismount as well. They tied the horses to a fence and walked towards a building, trudging through mud next to leaky gutters and pipes.
‘The iron ore is washed here,’ said Angouleme while pointing. ‘Over there it is brought out in the tunnels of the mine. They feed material there, pouring it into the troughs where it is washed with water from the stream. The ore is deposited in sieves, where it is separated out. There are many such mines and filtration camps around Belhaven. But the ore is then moved into the forested valleys, like the Mag Turga, because wood is needed for the furnaces and smelters...’
‘Thanks for the lecture,’ Geralt interrupted her with sour expression. ‘I've already seen several mines in my life and I know what it takes to smelt. When will you finally reveal to us our purpose for riding here?’
‘To chat with one of my acquaintances. He’s a pit foreman here. Come with me. Ha, I see him already! There, in the carpentry building. Come on.’
‘That dwarf there?’
‘Yes. His name is Golan Drozdeck. He is, as I said, a...’
‘Pit foreman. You said. But you have not said why you want to chat with him.’
‘Take a look at your boots.’
Geralt and Cahir obediently looked at their shoes, which were covered in a strange, reddish colored mud. ‘The half-elf you seek,’ Angouleme answered the question before they could ask it, ‘was at the meeting with Nightingale with the very same reddish dirt on his shoes. Get it now?’
‘Now, yes. And the dwarf?’
‘You shouldn't respond all the time. For variety, you should try keeping quiet every once in a while – it makes for a grim countenance.’