No. It wasn’t an illusion, it wasn’t the murmur of shifting slate or the echo of dripping water. It was a human voice. Geralt shut his eyes and looked hard. Searching for the source.

The voice, the Witcher could have sworn, was coming from another niche, from behind another small figure, also eroded, but not enough to remove its shapely female curves. This time the medallion did its job. It flashed, and Geralt suddenly saw a reflection of metal in the wall. He grasped the eroded woman in a powerful embrace and twisted hard. There was a grating, and the entire niche revolved on steel hinges, revealing a spiral staircase leading upwards.

The voice again sounded from the top of the stairs. Geralt didn’t think twice.

At the top he found a door that opened smoothly and without any grating. Beyond the door was a tiny vaulted room. Four enormous brass pipes with their ends flared like trumpets protruded from the wall. A chair stood in the middle between the trumpet-like openings, and on the chair sat a skeleton. On its pate it had the remains of a biretta slumped down beyond its teeth. It was wearing the rags of fine garments, around its neck was a golden chain, and on its feet curled-toed cordovan slippers, much gnawed by rats.

The sound of a sneeze erupted from one of the horns, so loud and unexpected that the Witcher started. Then someone blew their nose and the sound–intensified by the brass tube–was simply unbearable.

‘Bless you,’ the pipe sounded. ‘Why, how your nose is running, Skellen.’

Geralt shoved the skeleton off the chair, not forgetting to remove and pocket the golden chain. Then he sat down at the surveillance post. At the end of the horn.

One of the men being eavesdropped on had a deep, rumbling bass voice. When he spoke, the brass tube vibrated.

‘Why, how your nose is running, Skellen. Where did you catch such a chill? And when?’

‘Not worth mentioning,’ answered the man with the runny nose. ‘I caught the damned illness and now it won’t subside. As soon as it lets up, it returns. Even magic doesn’t help.’

‘Perhaps you ought to change your sorcerer?’ came another voice, grating like a rusty old hinge. ‘For at the moment that Vilgefortz can’t boast of much success, can he? I’d say—’

‘Leave it,’ interjected someone speaking with characteristic long-drawn-out syllables. ‘That wasn’t why we organised this meeting, here, in Toussaint. At the world’s end.’

‘At the end of the bloody world!’

‘This world’s end,’ said the man with the cold, ‘is the only country I know that doesn’t possess its own security service. The only corner of the empire that isn’t crawling with Vattier de Rideaux’s agents. They regard this endlessly merry and fuddled duchy as ridiculous, and no one takes it seriously.’

‘Little countries like this,’ said the one who stretched out his syllables, ‘have always been a paradise for spies, and favourite locations for rendezvous. So they also attract counter-intelligence and narks, diverse professional snoopers and eavesdroppers.’