The wind dropped and it became muggy. The Prophet Lebioda, pushed by the current, freed itself from the boughs and drifted down the middle of the offshoot. Pudlorak wiped his eyes and forehead with his cap.

The leadsman cried. Cobbin cried. And then the others added their voices.

The thatched roofs of cottages could suddenly be seen beyond the thicket of reeds and wild rice. They saw nets drying on poles. A yellow strip of sandy beach. A jetty. And further away, beyond the trees on the headland, the wide river beneath a blue sky.

“The river! The river! At last!”

They all shouted. The deckhands, Petru Cobbin and van Vliet. Only Geralt and Addario Bach didn’t join in the yelling.

Pudlorak, pushing on the wheel, also said nothing.

“What are you doing?” yelled Cobbin. “Where are you going? Head for the river! Over there! For the river!”

“Not a chance,” said the captain, and there was despair and resignation in his voice. “We’re becalmed, the ship barely responds to the wheel and the current grows stronger. We’re drifting, it’s pushing us, carrying us into the offshoot again. Back into the swamp.”

“No!” Cobbin swore. And leaped overboard. And swam towards the beach.

All the sailors followed his example. Geralt was unable to stop any of them. Addario Bach roughly shoved down van Vliet, who was preparing to jump.

“Blue sky,” he said. “A golden, sandy beach. The river. It’s too beautiful to be true. Meaning it isn’t.”

And suddenly the image shimmered. Suddenly, where a moment earlier there had been fishing cottages, a golden beach and the river beyond the headland, the Witcher for a brief moment saw a spider’s web of tillandsia trailing right down to the water from the boughs of decaying trees. Swampy banks, cypresses bristling with pneumatophores. Bubbles rising up from the murky depths. A sea of water plants. An endless labyrinth of branches.

For a second, he saw what the aguara’s final illusion had been hiding.

The men in the water began to suddenly scream and thrash around. And disappear below the surface, one by one.

Petru Cobbin came up for air, choking and screaming, covered entirely in writhing, striped leeches, as fat as eels. Then he sank below the water and didn’t come up again.

“Geralt!”

Addario Bach used the boathook to pull the small boat, which had survived the encounter with the crocodile and had now drifted to the side of the ship. The dwarf jumped in and Geralt passed him the still stupefied van Vliet.

“Captain.”

Pudlorak waved his cap at them.

“No, Master Witcher! I shall not abandon my ship. I’ll guide her into port, whatever happens! And if not, I’ll go down to the bottom with her! Farewell!”

The Prophet Lebioda drifted calmly and majestically, gliding into an offshoot and vanishing from sight.