Pastor howled. The wolf opened its terrible jaws and seized him by the head. The howling turned into wheezing.

Geralt pushed away the finally dead ogrotroll from his legs.

Dussart, now in human form, stood up over Pastor’s corpse and wiped his lips and chin.

“After forty-two years of being a werewolf,” he said, meeting the Witcher’s gaze, “it was about time I finally bit someone to death.”

* * *

“I had to come,” Dussart said, explaining his actions. “I knew, Master Geralt, that I had to warn you.”

“About them?” Geralt wiped his blade and pointed to the lifeless bodies.

“Not only.”

The Witcher entered the room the werewolf was pointing at. And stepped back involuntarily.

The stone floor was black with congealed blood. A black-rimmed hole gaped in the centre of the room. A pile of bodies was heaped up beside it. Naked and mutilated, cut up, quartered, occasionally with the skin flayed off them. It was difficult to estimate how many there were.

The sound of bones being crunched and cracked rose up very audibly from deep in the hole.

“I wasn’t able to smell it before,” mumbled Dussart, in a voice full of disgust. “I only smelled it when you opened the door down there at the bottom. Let’s flee from here, master. Far from this charnel house.”

“I still have something to sort out here. But you go. I thank you very much for coming to help.”

“Don’t thank me. I owed you a debt. I’m glad I was able to pay it back.”

* * *

A spiral staircase led upwards, winding up a cylindrical shaft carved into the rock. It was difficult to estimate precisely, but Geralt roughly calculated that had it been a staircase in a typical tower, he would have climbed to the first—or possibly the second—storey. He had counted sixty-two steps when a door finally barred his way.

Like the one down in the cave, that door also had a passage carved in it for a cat. Unlike the heavy doors in the cave it wasn’t magical and yielded easily after the handle had been pushed down.

The room he entered had no windows and was dimly lit. Beneath the ceiling hung several magical globes, but only one was active. The room stank acridly of chemicals and every possible kind of monstrosity. A quick glance revealed what it contained. Specimen jars, demijohns and flagons on shelves, retorts, glass spheres and tubes, steel instruments and tools—unmistakably a laboratory, in other words.

Large specimen jars were standing in a row on a bookshelf by the entrance. The nearest one was full of human eyeballs, floating in a yellow liquid like mirabelle plums in compote. In another jar, there was a tiny homunculus, no larger than two fists held together. In a third…