He was too slow to shield himself. She lunged from close up, two-handed, cutting him across his chest and stomach. And at once sprang back, whirled around, evading Fripp’s blow, and slashing the crouching Jannowitz across the neck. Jannowitz pitched over headfirst against a bench. Fripp leaped over the bench and the corpse and struck powerfully. Ciri parried obliquely, made a half-turn and jabbed him in the side above his hip. Fripp staggered, sprawled onto the table and instinctively extended his arms in front of himself to keep his balance. The moment he rested his hand on the table Ciri hacked it off in a swift slash.

Fripp raised the stump spurting blood, examined it intently and then looked at the hand lying on the table. And suddenly dropped–sitting down heavily on the floor with a thud, just as though he had slipped on some soap. He sat, yelling, and then began to bay, with a savage, high-pitched, long-drawn-out wolf-like howl. Crouching under the table, the blood-drenched beggar heard the ghastly duet continue for a moment–the monotonously yelling serving wench and the spasmodically howling Fripp.

The wench was the first to fall silent, her screaming ending in an inhuman, choking croak. Fripp simply fell silent. ‘Mamma…’ he suddenly said, utterly distinctly and lucidly. ‘Dear mamma… What is this…? How did…? What has… happened to me? What’s… the matter with me?’

‘You’re dying,’ said the disfigured girl.

What was left of the beggar’s hair stood up on his head. He clenched his teeth on the sleeve of his coat in order to stop them chattering.

Cyprian Fripp the younger made a sound as though he was having difficulty swallowing. After that he uttered no more sounds. None at all.

It was completely silent.

‘What have you done…?’ the innkeeper groaned in the silence. ‘What have you done, girl…?’

‘I’m a witcher. I kill monsters.’

‘They’ll hang us… They’ll burn down the tavern and the village!’

‘I kill monsters,’ she repeated, but in her voice suddenly appeared something like surprise. Something like hesitancy. Uncertainty.

The innkeeper moaned and groaned. And sobbed.

The beggar slowly emerged from under the table, moving away from Dede Vargas’s body, and his hideously mutilated face.

‘You ride a black mare…’ he mumbled. ‘On a night as black as a pall… You sweep away the tracks behind you…’

The girl turned around and looked at him. She had already wrapped the shawl around her face and the black-ringed spectral eyes looked out from over it.

‘Whoever meets you,’ the beggar mumbled, ‘will not avoid death… For you yourself are death.’

The girl looked long at him. Long. And rather dispassionately.

‘You’re right,’ she said finally.

Somewhere in the swamps, far away, but much closer than before, a beann’shie’s plaintive wailing sounded a second time.