To make matters worse there was a flash of lightning. And a clap of thunder. It began to rain. Geralt had a good mind to spit, swear coarsely and declare the enterprise over. But he overcame the feeling.

“Let’s go on, Dussart. Next hole.”

“As you wish, Master Geralt.”

And suddenly, quite like in a cheap novel, a turning point in the action occurred by the next opening gaping in the rock.

“Bats,” announced the werewolf, sniffing. “Bats and a… cat.”

“A lynx? A wild cat?”

“A cat,” said Dussart, standing up. “An ordinary domestic cat.”

* * *

Otto Dussart looked at the small bottles of elixirs with curiosity and watched the Witcher drinking them. He observed the changes taking place in Geralt’s appearance, and his eyes widened in wonder and fear.

“Don’t make me enter that cave with you,” he said. “No offence, but I’m not going. The fear of what might be there makes my hair stand on end.”

“It never occurred to me to ask you to. Go home, Dussart, to your wife and children. You’ve done me a favour, you’ve done what I asked of you, so I can’t demand any more.”

“I’ll wait,” protested the werewolf. “I’ll wait until you emerge.”

“I don’t know when I’ll be coming out,” said Geralt, adjusting the sword on his back. “Or if I’ll come out at all.”

“Don’t say that. I’ll wait… I’ll wait until dusk.”

* * *

The cave bottom was carpeted in a dense coat of bat guano. The bats themselves—pot-bellied flittermice—were hanging in whole clusters on the cave ceiling, wriggling and squeaking drowsily. At first, the ceiling was high above Geralt’s head and he could walk along the level bottom tolerably quickly and comfortably. The comfort soon ended, however—first he had to stoop, then stoop lower and lower, and finally nothing remained but to move along on his hands and knees. And ultimately crawl.

There was a moment when he stopped, determined to turn back, when the cramped conditions represented a grave risk of getting stuck. But he could hear the whoosh of water and feel on his face a current of cold air. Aware of the risk, he forced his way through a crack and sighed in relief as it began to open out. All of a sudden, the corridor turned into a chute down which he slid straight into the channel of an underground stream, gushing out from under a rock and disappearing under another. Somewhere above was a weak light, emanating from the same place as cold gusts of air.