The street had been barred by three powerful-looking bruisers with ugly, unshaven and unwashed mugs. One of them, so broad-shouldered he was almost square, held a metal-tipped club, as thick as a capstan bar. The second, in a sheepskin coat with the fur on the outside, was holding a cleaver and had a boarding axe in his belt. The third, as swarthy as a mariner, was armed with a long, hideous-looking knife.

“Hey, you there, Rivian bastard!” began the square-shaped man. “How do you feel without any swords on your back? Bare-arsed in the wind, eh?”

Geralt didn’t join in the discourse. He waited. He heard Dandelion arguing with a cooper about a stave.

“You’re toothless now, you freak, you venomous witcher toad,” continued the square-shaped man, clearly the most expert of the three in the oratory arts. “No one’s afraid of a reptile without fangs! For it’s nothing but a worm or a slimy lamprey. We put filth like that under our boots and crush it to a pulp so it won’t dare to come into our towns among decent people no more. You won’t foul our streets with your slime, you reptile. Have at him, boys!”

“Geralt! Catch!”

He caught the stave Dandelion threw to him, dodged a blow from the club, smashed the square-shaped man in the side of the head, spun around and slammed it into the elbow of the thug in the sheepskin, who yelled and dropped the cleaver. The Witcher hit him behind the knees, knocking him down, and then, in passing, struck him on the temple with the stave. Without waiting until the thug fell down, or interrupting his own movement, he ducked under the square-shaped man’s club and slammed him over the fingers clenched around it. The square-shaped man howled in pain and dropped the club, and Geralt struck him in turn on the right ear, the ribs and the left ear. And then kicked him hard in the crotch. The square-shaped man fell over and rolled into a ball, cringing and curling up, his forehead touching the ground.

The swarthy one, the most agile and quickest of the three, danced around the Witcher. Deftly tossing his knife from hand to hand, he attacked on bent legs, slashing diagonally. Geralt easily avoided the blows, stepped back and waited for him to lengthen his strides. And when that happened he knocked the knife away with a sweeping blow of the stave, circled the assailant with a pirouette and slammed him in the back of the head. The knifeman fell to his knees and the Witcher whacked him in the right kidney. The man howled and tensed up and the Witcher bashed him with the stave below the ear, striking a nerve. One known to physicians as the parotid plexus.

“Oh, dear,” said Geralt, standing over the man, who was curled up, retching and choking on his screams. “That must have hurt.”