‘I saw a pogrom in Maribor,’ he stammered out, looking at the entrance to the cellar. ‘If they find them there…’

‘Go to the kitchen.’

Dandelion was also pale. Geralt wasn’t especially surprised. Individual accents were sounding in the hitherto indistinct and monotonous roar that reached their ears. Notes that made the hair stand up on their heads.

‘Geralt,’ groaned the poet. ‘I’m somewhat similar to an elf…’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

Clouds of smoke billowed above the rooftops. And fugitives dashed out of a narrow street. Dwarves. Of both sexes.

Two dwarves dived into the lake without thinking and began to swim, churning up the water, straight ahead towards the middle. The others dispersed. Some of them turned towards the tavern.

The mob rushed out of the narrow street. They were quicker than the dwarves. Lust for slaughter was winning out in this race.

The screaming of people being killed pierced the ears and made the coloured glass in the tavern’s windows jingle. Geralt felt his hands begin to shake.

One dwarf was literally torn apart, rent into pieces. Another, thrown onto the ground, was turned into a shapeless, bloody mass in a few moments. A woman was stabbed with pitchforks and pikes, and the child she had defended until the end was trampled, crushed under the blows of boot heels.

Three of them–a dwarf and two dwarf women–fled straight towards the tavern. The crowd raced after them, yelling.

Geralt took a deep breath. He stood up. Feeling on him the terrified eyes of Dandelion and Wirsing, he took the sihill, the sword wrought in Mahakam, in the very forge of Rhundurin, down from the shelf over the fireplace.

‘Geralt…’ the poet groaned pathetically.

‘Very well,’ said the Witcher, walking towards the exit. ‘But this is the last time! Dammit, it really is the last time!’

He went out onto the porch and jumped straight down from it, filleting with a rapid slash a roughneck in bricklayer’s overalls who was aiming a blow with a trowel at a woman. He cut off the hand of the next one, who was grasping the hair of another woman. He hacked down two men kicking a dwarf on the ground with two swift, diagonal slashes.

And he entered the crowd quickly, spinning around in half-turns. He cut with wide blows, apparently chaotically–knowing that such strokes are bloodier and more spectacular. He didn’t mean to kill them. He just wanted to wound them.

‘He’s an elf! He’s an elf!’ yelled someone in the mob savagely. ‘Kill the elf!’

That’s going too far, he thought. Dandelion perhaps, but I don’t resemble an elf in any way.

He spotted the one who had shouted, probably a soldier, because he was wearing a brigantine and high boots. The Witcher wormed his way into the crowd like an eel. The soldier shielded himself with a javelin held in both hands. Geralt cut along the shaft, chopping off the soldier’s fingers. The Witcher whirled, bringing forth shrieks of pain and fountains of blood with the next broad stroke.