‘Very well, it was like this. Me and my ostlers were driving my horses to be sold at the market in Devil’s Ford. We had our last stop a day’s ride from the city. We overnighted, having first dealt with a small cask of burnt caramel vodka. I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like my bladder was about to burst, got off the wagon, and I thought to myself I’ll take a look at what the nags are doing in the meadow. I walk out, fog thick as buggery, I look and suddenly someone’s coming. Who goes there? I ask. He says nothing. I walk up closer and see… myself. Like in a looking glass. I think I oughtn’t to have drunk that bloody moonshine, accursed spirit. And this one here–for that’s what it was–ups and conks me on the noggin! I saw stars and went arse over tit. The next day I woke up in a bloody thicket, with a lump like a cucumber on my head, and not a soul in sight, not a sign of our camp, either. I wandered the whole day before I finally found the trail. Two days I trudged, eating roots and raw mushrooms. And in the meantime that… that lousy Dudulico, or whatever it was, has ridden to Novigrad as me and flogged my horses! I’ll get the bloody… And I’ll thrash my ostlers! I’ll give each one a hundred lashes on his bare arse, the cretins! Not to recognise their own guvnor, to let themselves be outwitted like that! Numbskulls, imbeciles, sots…’

‘Don’t be too hard on them, Dainty,’ Geralt said. ‘They didn’t have a chance. A mimic copies so exactly there’s no way of distinguishing it from the original–I mean, from its chosen victim. Have you never heard of mimics?’

‘Some. But I thought it was all fiction.’

‘Well it isn’t. All a doppler has to do is observe its victim closely in order to quickly and unerringly adapt to the necessary material structure. I would point out that it’s not an illusion, but a complete, precise transformation. To the minutest detail. How a mimic does it, no one knows. Sorcerers suspect the same component of the blood is at work here as with lycanthropy, but I think it’s either something totally different or a thousandfold more powerful. After all, a werewolf has only two–at most three–different forms, while a doppler can transform into anything it wants to, as long as the body mass more or less tallies.’

‘Body mass?’

‘Well, he won’t turn into a mastodon. Or a mouse.’

‘I understand. And the chain you’ve bound him up in, what’s that about?’

‘It’s silver. It’s lethal to a lycanthrope, but as you see, for a mimic it merely stops the transmutations. That’s why it’s sitting here in its own form.’

The doppler pursed its glutinous lips and glowered at the Witcher with an evil expression in its dull eyes, which had already lost the hazel colour of the halfling’s irises and were now yellow.