Degerlund undid his blood-soaked doublet and shirt. He had a tattoo on his skinny chest, two overlapping circles. The circles were dotted with points of various sizes. It looked a little like the diagram of the planets’ orbits that Geralt had once admired at the academy in Oxenfurt.

The sorcerer uttered a melodious spell. The circles shone blue, the points red. And began to rotate.

“Now. Stand close.”

“Close?”

“Still closer. Cling to me.”

“What?”

“Get in close and hug me.”

Degerlund’s voice had changed. His eyes, a moment before tearful, now lit up hideously and his lips contorted repugnantly.

“Yes, that’s right. Firmly and tenderly. As though I were your Yennefer.”

Geralt understood what was on the cards. But he didn’t manage to push Degerlund away, strike him with the pommel of his sword, or slash him across the neck with the blade. He was simply too slow.

An iridescent glow flashed in Geralt’s eyes. In a split second, he plunged into black nothingness. Into bitter cold, silence, amorphousness and timelessness.

* * *

They landed with a thud, the stone slabs of the floor seemingly leaping up to meet them. The impact threw them apart. Geralt was unable even to look around properly. An intense stench reached his nostrils, the odour of filth mixed with musk. Two sets of immense, mighty hands caught him under the arms and behind his head, fat fingers closed easily over his biceps, steely thumbs dug painfully into his nerves, into the brachial plexus. He went totally numb and his sword slipped from his inert hand.

He saw before him a hunchback with a hideous face covered in sores, his head dotted with sparse tufts of stiff hair. The hunchback, standing with his crooked legs wide apart, was pointing a large crossbow at him, or actually an arbalest with two steel bows one above the other. The two four-cornered bolts aimed at Geralt were a good two inches wide and razor-sharp.

Sorel Degerlund was standing in front of him.

“As you’ve probably realised,” he said, “you haven’t ended up at Rissberg. You’re in my asylum and lair. A place—about which the people at Rissberg know nothing—where I conduct experiments with my master. I am, as you probably know, Sorel Albert Amador Degerlund, magister magicus. I am, which you don’t know yet, he who will inflict pain and death on you.”

The feigned terror and simulated panic, all appearances, vanished as though blown away by the wind. Everything in the charcoal burners’ clearing had been feigned. A quite different Sorel Degerlund was standing before Geralt as he hung in the paralysing grip of those gnarled hands. A triumphant Sorel Degerlund, bursting with arrogance and hubris. Sorel Degerlund grinning a vicious smile. A smile calling to mind centipedes squeezing through gaps under doors. Disturbed graves. White maggots squirming in carrion. Fat horseflies wriggling their legs in a bowl of broth.