‘Don’t be clever, Schirrú. I said she’s been sufficiently beaten. Pick her up. How do you do, Yennefer?’ The sorceress spat red and lifted her puffy face. At first she didn’t recognise him. He was wearing a kind of mask, covering the entire left side of his head. But she knew who it was.

‘Go to hell, Vilgefortz,’ she mumbled, gingerly touching her front teeth and cut lips with her tongue.

‘What did you make of my spell? Did you like it when I lifted you and that boat up from the sea? Did you enjoy the flight? What charms did you protect yourself with to survive the fall?’

‘Go to hell.’

‘Tear that star from her neck. And to the laboratory with her. Let’s not waste time.’

She was dragged, pulled, occasionally carried. A stony plain, with Alkyone lying smashed on it amid numerous other wrecks with protruding ribs, like the skeletons of sea monsters. Crach was right, she thought. The ships that disappeared without trace on the Sedna Abyss weren’t victims of natural disasters. Ye Gods… Pavetta and Duny…

Above the plain, in the distance, mountain peaks thrust up into the overcast sky.

Then there were walls, gates, cloisters, floors, staircases. Everything somehow odd, unnaturally large… Still too few details to let her work out where she was, where she’d come to, where the spell had carried her. Her face was swelling up, making observations all the more difficult. Smell became the one sense supplying her with information–she smelled formalin, ether and spirits. And magic. The smells of a laboratory. She was brutally shoved down into a steel armchair. Cold, painfully tight clamps slammed shut on her wrists and ankles. Before the steel jaws of a vice tightened on her temples and immobilised her head, she managed to glance around the large and glaringly lit room. She saw one more armchair and a strange steel construction on the stone floor.

‘Yes indeed,’ she heard the voice of Vilgefortz from behind her. ‘That little chair is for your Ciri. It’s been here for ages; it can’t wait. Neither can I.’

She heard him up close, literally felt his breath. He stuck some needles into her head, attached something to her ears. Then he stood before her and removed the mask. Yennefer sucked in air involuntarily.

‘That’s the work of your Ciri,’ he said, indicating his once classically beautiful, now hideously mutilated face, criss-crossed with golden clasps and fastenings securing a multifaceted crystal in his left eye socket.

‘I tried to catch her when she entered the Tower of the Gull,’ the sorcerer calmly explained. ‘I meant to save her life, certain that the teleporter would kill her. How naive of me! She passed through smoothly, with such force that the portal exploded, blew up right in my face. I lost an eye and my left cheek, as well as a lot of skin from my face, neck and chest. A very disagreeable, very bothersome, very complicated accident. And very ugly, isn’t it? Ha, you ought to have seen me before I began to regenerate magically.