“Goodnight,” said the devil.

THE VOICE OF REASON

I

The witcher unlaced his shirt and peeled the wet linen from his neck. It was very warm in the cave, hot, even, the air hung heavy and moist, the humidity condensing in droplets on the moss-covered boulders and basalt blocks of the walls.

Plants were everywhere. They grew out of beds hewn into the bedrock and filled with peat, in enormous chests, troughs and flowerpots. They climbed up rocks, up wooden trellises and stakes. Geralt examined them with interest, recognizing some rare specimens—those which made up the ingredients of a witcher’s medicines and elixirs, magical philters and a sorcerer’s decoctions, and others, even rarer, whose qualities he could only guess at. Some he didn’t know at all, or hadn’t even heard of. He saw stretches of star-leafed melilote, compact balls of puffheads pouring out of huge flowerpots, shoots of arenaria strewn with berries as red as blood. He recognized the meaty, thickly veined leaves of fastaim, the crimson-golden ovals of measure-me-nots and the dark arrows of sawcuts. He noticed pinnated pondblood moss huddled against stone blocks, the glistening tubers of raven’s eye and the tiger-striped petals of the mouse-tail orchid.

In the shady part of the grotto bulged caps of the se-want mushroom, gray as stones in a field. Not far from them grew reachcluster, an antidote to every known toxin and venom. The modest yellow-gray brushes peering from chests deeply sunken into the ground revealed scarix, a root with powerful and universal medicinal qualities.

The center of the cave was taken up by aqueous plants. Geralt saw vats full of hornwort and turtle duckweed, and tanks covered in a compact skin of liverwort, fodder for the parasitic giant oyster. Glass reservoirs full of gnarled rhizomes of the hallucinogenic bitip, slender, dark-green cryptocorines and clusters of nematodes. Muddy, silted troughs were breeding grounds for innumerable phycomycetes, algae, molds and swamp lichen.

Nenneke, rolling up the sleeves of her priestess’s robe, took a pair of scissors and a little bone rake from her basket and got to work. Geralt sat on a bench between shafts of light falling through huge crystal blocks in the cave’s vault.

The priestess muttered and hummed under her breath, deftly plunging her hands into the thicket of leaves and shoots, snipping with her scissors and filling the basket with bunches of weeds. She adjusted the stakes and frames supporting the plants and, now and again, turned the soil with her small rake. Sometimes, muttering angrily, she pulled out dried or rotted stalks, threw them into the humus containers as food for mushrooms and other squamous and snake-like twisted plants which the witcher didn’t recognize. He wasn’t even sure they were plants at all—it seemed to him the glistening rhizomes moved a little, stretching their hair-like offshoots toward the priestess’s hands.

It was warm. Very warm.

“Geralt?”

“Yes?” He fought off an overwhelming sleepiness. Nenneke, playing with her scissors, was looking at him from behind the huge pinnated leaves of sand-spurry flybush.