‘Touché,’ Istredd said, smiling. ‘I refer, naturally, to your cutting wit, because as regards the jar’s contents, you were wide of the mark.’

‘But you do use blood occasionally, don’t you? You can’t even contemplate some spells, I’ve heard, without the blood of a virgin, ideally one killed by a lightning bolt from a clear sky during a full moon. In what way, one wonders, is that blood better than that of an old strumpet, who fell, drunk, from a palisade?’

‘In no way,’ the sorcerer agreed, a pleasant smile playing on his lips. ‘But if it became common knowledge that that role could actually be played just as easily by hog’s blood, which is much easier to obtain, then the rabble would begin experimenting with spells. But if it means the rabble having to gather and use virgin’s blood, dragon’s tears, white tarantula’s venom, decoction of severed babies’ hands or a corpse exhumed at midnight, many would think again.’

They were silent. Istredd, apparently deep in thought, tapped his fingernails on a cracked, browned skull, which lacked its lower jaw, and ran his index finger over the serrated edge of a hole gaping in the temporal bone. Geralt observed him unobtrusively. He wondered how old the sorcerer might be. He knew that the more talented among them were capable of curbing the ageing process permanently and at any age they chose. Men preferred a mature age, suggesting knowledge and experience, for reasons of reputation and prestige. Women, like Yennefer, were concerned less with prestige and more with attractiveness. Istredd looked no older than a well-earned, robust forty. He had straight, slightly grizzled, shoulder-length hair and numerous wrinkles on his forehead, around his mouth and at the corners of his eyelids. Geralt did not know whether the profundity and wisdom in his benign, grey eyes were natural or brought on by charms. A moment later he concluded that it made no difference.

‘Istredd,’ he interrupted the awkward silence, ‘I came here because I wanted to see Yennefer. Even though she isn’t here, you invited me inside. To talk. About what? About the rabble trying to break your monopoly on the use of magic? I know you include me among that rabble. That’s nothing new to me. For a while I had the impression you would turn out to be different to your confreres, who have often entered into serious conversations with me, in order just to inform me that they don’t like me.’

‘I have no intention of apologising to you for my–as you call them–confreres,’ the sorcerer answered calmly. ‘I understand them for, just like them, in order to gain any level of proficiency at sorcery, I had to apply myself seriously. While still a mere stripling, when my peers were running around fields with bows, fishing or playing odds and evens, I was poring over manuscripts. My bones and joints ached from the stone floor in the tower–in the summer, of course, because in the winter the enamel on my teeth cracked. I would cough from the dust on old scrolls and books until my eyes bulged from their sockets, and my master, old Roedskilde, never passed up an opportunity to flog me with a knout, clearly believing that without it I would not achieve satisfactory progress in my studies. I didn’t enjoy soldiering or wenching or drinking during the years when all those pleasures taste the best.’