‘I tripped on that shit,’ Dandelion said, gasping for air, recovering himself and lifting a large, flat mollusc dripping water from its cobalt blue shell, overgrown with threads of algae. ‘There’s loads of these on the steps. It’s a pretty colour, don’t you think? Grab it and shove it into your bag, mine’s already full.’

‘Get out of there,’ the Witcher snapped, annoyed. ‘Get back on the shelf this minute, Dandelion. This isn’t a game.’

‘Quiet. Did you hear that? What was it?’

Geralt heard it. The sound was coming from below, from under the water. Dull and deep, although simultaneously faint, soft, brief, broken off. The sound of a bell.

‘It’s a bloody bell,’ Dandelion whispered, clambering out onto the shelf. ‘I was right, Geralt. It’s the bell of the sunken Ys, the bell of the city of monsters muffled by the weight of the depths. It’s the damned reminding us…’

‘Will you shut up?’

The sound repeated. Considerably closer. ‘… reminding us,’ the bard continued, squeezing out the soaking tail of his jerkin, ‘of its dreadful fate. That bell is a warning…’

The Witcher stopped paying attention to Dandelion’s voice and concentrated on his other senses. He sensed. He sensed something.

‘It’s a warning,’ Dandelion said, sticking the tip of his tongue out, as was his custom when he was concentrating. ‘A warning, because… hmm… So we would not forget… hmm… hmmm… I’ve got it!

‘The heart of the bell sounds softly, it sings a song of death

Of death, which can be born more easily than oblivion…’

The water right next to the Witcher exploded. Dandelion screamed. The goggle-eyed monster emerging from the foam aimed a broad, serrated, scythe-like blade at Geralt. Geralt’s sword was already in his hand, from the moment the water had begun to swell, so now he merely twisted confidently at the hips and slashed the monster across its drooping, scaly dewlap. He immediately turned the other way, where another creature was churning up the water. It was wearing a bizarre helmet and something resembling a suit of armour made of tarnished copper. The Witcher parried the blade of the short spear being thrust towards him with a broad sweep of his sword and with the momentum the parry gave him struck across the ichthyoid-reptilian toothy muzzle. He leapt aside towards the edge of the shelf, splashing water.

‘Fly, Dandelion!’

‘Give me your hand!’

‘Fly, dammit!’

Another creature emerged from the water, the curved sword whistling in its rough green hands. The Witcher thrust his back against the edge of the shellfish-covered rock, assumed a fighting position, but the fish-eyed creature did not approach. It was the same height as Geralt. The water also reached to its waist, but the impressively puffed-up comb on its head and its dilated gills gave the impression of greater size. The grimace distorting the broad maw armed with teeth was deceptively similar to a cruel smile.

The creature, paying no attention to the two twitching bodies floating in the red water, raised its sword, gripping the long hilt without a cross guard in both hands. Puffing up its comb and gills even more, it deftly spun the blade in the air. Geralt heard the light blade hiss and whirr.