He saw the first corpse, without head or feet, just beside the charcoal kiln; blood spurting over the soil covering the mound. Not far away lay three more bodies, unrecognisably mutilated. Blood had soaked into the absorbent forest sand, leaving darkening patches.

Two more cadavers—those of a man and a woman—were lying nearer to the centre of the clearing and the campfire encircled by stones. The man’s throat had been torn out so savagely his cervical vertebrae were visible. The upper part of the woman’s body was lying in the embers of the fire, smeared in groats from an upturned cooking pot.

A little further away, by a woodpile, lay a child; a little boy, of perhaps five years old. He had been rent in two. Somebody—or rather something—had seized him by both legs and torn them apart.

Geralt saw another body; this one had been disembowelled and its guts pulled out. To their full length, or about two yards of the large bowel and over six of the small. The guts were stretched in a straight, shiny, greyish-pink line all the way to a shack of pine branches into which they vanished.

Inside the shelter, a slim man was lying on his back on a primitive pallet. It was clear at once that he was quite out of place there. His ornate clothing was completely covered in blood, soaked through. But the Witcher noticed it wasn’t squirting, gushing or dripping from any of the main blood vessels.

Geralt recognised him despite his face being covered in drying blood. It was that long-haired, slim, somewhat effeminate fop, Sorel Degerlund, introduced to him during the audience with Ortolan. At that time, he had also been wearing the same braided cloak and embroidered doublet as the other sorcerers, had been sitting among them and like the others had been observing the Witcher with barely concealed aversion. And now he was lying, unconscious, in a charcoal burner’s shack, covered in blood, with a human intestine coiled around his right wrist. Pulled from the belly of a corpse lying not ten paces away.

The Witcher swallowed. Shall I hack him to death, he thought, while he’s unconscious? Are Pinety and Tzara expecting that? Shall I kill the energumen? Eliminate the goetic practitioner who amuses himself by evoking demons?

A groan shook him out of his reflections. Sorel Degerlund, it appeared, was coming around. He jerked his head up, moaned, and then slumped back onto the pallet. He lifted himself up, looking vacantly around him. He saw the Witcher and opened his mouth, looked at his blood-spattered stomach and raised a hand. To see what he was holding. And began to scream.

Geralt looked at his sword, Dandelion’s purchase with the gilt cross guard. He looked at the sorcerer’s thin neck. At the swollen vein on it.