Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Original text copyright © 2002 by Andrzej Sapkowski

English translation copyright © 2020 by David French

Excerpt from The Blade Itself copyright © 2006 by Joe Abercrombie

Cover design copyright © by Blacksheep-uk.com

Cover images copyright © by Depositphoto

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Originally published in Polish as Narrenturm

Orbit

Hachette Book Group

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New York, NY 10104

orbitbooks.net

First Edition: October 2020

Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Gollancz

Published in arrangement with the Patricia Pasqualini Literary Agency

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937432

ISBNs: 978-0-316-70535-6 (hardcover), 978-0-316-42369-4 (trade paperback), 978-0-316-42368-7 (ebook)

E3-20200909-JV-NF-ORI

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Prologue

The end of the world did not occur in the Year of Our Lord 1420, although much had indicated that it would.

The chiliasts’ dark prophecies that predicted the End quite precisely—on the Monday after Saint Scholastica’s Day in the month of February of the year 1420—did not come true. Monday came and went, Tuesday, too, then Wednesday: still nothing. The Days of Punishment and Vengeance preceding the coming of the Kingdom of the Lord never arrived. Although a thousand years had passed, Satan was not loosed from his prison, nor did he go out to deceive the nations in the four quarters of the Earth. No sinners or foes of God perished from sword, fire, hunger, hailstones, fangs of beasts, stings of scorpions or venom of snakes. The faithful waited in vain on the peaks of Tábor, Beránek, Oreb, Sion and the Mount of Olives, and in the quinque civitates, the five chosen cities, for the second coming of Christ, as foretold in the Prophecy of Isaiah. The end of the world did not come to pass. The world neither perished nor went up in flames. Not all of it, at least.

But things certainly weren’t dull.