One had hair as white as driven snow and a sword in his hands which flickered like lightning. Behind him rode a blond woman who was drawing a bowstring. The third was a pretty young girl with a crooked sabre with which she slashed at Zadarlik.
Boreas Mun picked up the dropped spear and raised it over his head. The fourth horseman loomed over him like a mountain. On his helmet stretched the wings of a bird of prey. His raised sword glistened.
‘Leave him, Cahir,’ the white-haired man said sharply. ‘Save time and blood. Milva, Regis, this way...’
‘No, not that way,’ Boreas said, not knowing why he did so. ‘Not that way... That way leads to a blind barbican. You have to go up the stairs to the top of the castle. If you want to save the Lady of the Lake... You must hurry...’
‘Thank you,’ said the white-haired man. ‘Thank you, stranger. Regis, did you hear? Lead the way!’
After a moment there were just dead bodies in the courtyard. And Boreas Mun, still leaning on his spear. He could not release it. His legs were trembling. The jackdaws circling above castle Stygga were squawking and enveloped the towers and bastions like a black cloud.
Vilgefortz listened to the report of the mercenary who had rushed in breathlessly, with a stoic and calm face. But his restless and blinking eye betrayed him.
'Coming to her aid in the last minute,' he said grinding his teeth, 'I do not believe it. These things do not happen. Or only come to pass in bad plays in little theatres. Make me happy, my good man; tell me it is all a joke.'
'I have not made any thing up,' the mercenary said indignantly. 'I'm telling the truth! A few people have broken... A whole gang...'
'Okay, okay,' the wizard interrupted. 'It was a joke, Skellen, personally take care of this matter. You will have the opportunity to show me how much your army is really worth that you hired with my gold.'
The Owl jumped up and waved his arms nervously.
'Do not take this lightly, Vilgefortz,' he shouted. 'It seems you do not understand what threatens us! If someone is attacking the castle, they can only be Emhyr's people! And that means...'
'It does not mean anything,' the sorcerer did not let him finish. 'But I know what you're doing. If my presence gives you courage, then you can stand behind my back. Let's go! That goes for you too, Bonhart!'
Then he turned his terrible eyes on Ciri.
'As for you, forget your pointless hope. I know well, who has so unexpectedly appeared in a theatrical attempt to save you. I assure you that I will convert this farce into a scene of horror. Hey, you!' He motioned for one of his minions. 'Put the girl in dimeritium, shut her in a cell with three bolts and do not open the door. Or it is your head. Got it?'
'As you command, my Lord.'
The entered a corridor, the corridor came to a large room filled with sculptures, a real lapidarian. Nobody was in the room, just a few servants that fled at the sight of them.
They race down a flight of stairs. Cahir kicked down a door. Angouleme burst into the room with a war cry, her sabre knocking the helmet from an empty suit of armor that she had taken for a sentry by the door. When she realized her mistake, she broke out laughing.
'Heh, heh, heh. Look...'
'Angouleme!' Geralt shouted. 'Don't just stand there! Continue!'
Opposite them was a door, beyond which they perceived silhouettes. Milva without thinking twice, tensed her bow and shot an arrow. Someone screamed and the door crashed shut. Geralt heard the sound of a bolt sliding home.
'Come on, come on!' he shouted. 'There is no time to waste!'
'Witcher,' Regis said. 'It makes no sense in running around blindly. I'll... I'll make a reconnaissance flight.'
'Fly.'
The vampire disappeared, as if the wind had carried him away. Geralt had no time to marvel.
Again they met men, armed this time. Cahir and Angouleme rushed towards them shouting, but their opponents ran. More than anything, it seemed, thanks to Cahir's imposing winged helmet.
They ran into a gallery surrounding an inner lobby. The door on the opposite side of the gallery was scarcely twenty paces away when the walkway on the opposite side was swarmed with people. Cries echoed. And arrows hissed.
'Take cover,' cried the witcher.
Arrows fell like a veritable hailstorm. The feathers hummed and the tips tore into the pavement raising sparks, and reduced the stucco walls to a fine powder.
'Get down! Over the railing!'
They fell to the ground, each with cover, behind decorative columns with carved floral motifs. However, not without injury. The witcher heard Angouleme scream. He turned and saw that she was holding her arm. From her sleeve blood was seeping.
'Angouleme!'
'It's nothing! The arrow pierced me cleanly!' the girl said, her voice trembling slightly, confirming what he had seen. If the tip had chipped a bone, Angouleme would have fainted from shock.
The archers, launching their arrows from the end of the gallery, called for reinforcements. Some ran around the sides, looking for better shooting angles. Geralt cursed and calculated the distance to the archway. It did not look good. But staying where they were meant death.
'We have to get the hell out of here!' he shouted. 'Listen up! Cahir, help Angouleme!'
'They are going to mow us down!'
'We have to go! There is no choice!'
'No!' Milva exclaimed, rising with her bow in hand. She stood up and took a firing position. She looked like a statue, a marble Amazon with her bow. The archers in the gallery shouted.
Milva released the bowstring.
One of the archers flew backwards and smashed against the wall, and where he slumped to the ground, the red spot splashed to the plaster resembled an octopus. From around the gallery sounded a cry, a roar of anger, rage and horror.
'The Great Sun...' Cahir whistled. Geralt squeezed his arm.
'Let's go! Help Angouleme!'
From the gallery, a shower of arrows fell upon Milva. The archer did not flinch when one arrow showered her in a cloud of plaster dust, or jump when marble fragments shattered around her. She quietly released the bowstring. A new cry and another archer collapsed like a puppet, spraying his fellows with brains and blood.
'Now!' Geralt cried, watching the guards flee from the gallery, and fall to the floor, taking cover from the incoming missiles.
Only the three bravest returned fire. An arrow hit the wall and dusted Milva's hair in lime powder. The archer blew a strand of hair from her eyes and readied her bow.
'Milva,' Geralt called after Cahir and Angouleme had run to safety. 'Enough! Run!'
'Just one more,' said the archer, with the feather of the arrow at the corner of her mouth.
The bowstring hummed. One of the brave three screamed in pain, leaned over the rail and fell against the pavement of the patio. Seeing this, the other two faltered. They fell to the ground and huddled. Those who were rushing into the gallery were apparently reluctant and stayed in safe shelter from Milva's arrows.
With one exception.
Milva evaluated him on sight. Not very tall, dark complexion, brunette. With a glossy protector on his left forearm and a glove on his right hand. The girl saw that his compound bow was beautifully crafted, with a fitted handle and a curved staff as it tightened smoothly. She could she how tense the chord was as it crossed his swarthy face, she saw the arrow's feathers touch his cheek. She saw that he measured exactly.
Milva readied her bow, strung it deftly, and aimed. The string came up to her face, one of the feathers grazed the corner of her mouth.
'Harder, harder, Maria, to the mouth. Move your fingers on the bowstring so the arrow does not come loose from the notch. Let your hand rest on your jaw. Aim! Both eyes open! Hold your breath! Shoot!'
The bowstring, despite her protector, painfully bit into her left forearm.
Her father wanted to say something, but fell into a fit of coughing - dry, crisp, torturous. The cough was getting worse, thought Maria Barring as she lowered th
e bow. Worse and more often. He coughed yesterday, just as I aimed at a deer. And for lunch we had boiled cabbage. I hate boiled cabbage. I hate being hungry. And misery.
The older Barring gasped and wheezed harshly.
'You hit an inch from the center, oaf! A whole inch! I told you not to move or drop the bow! And you sit there wiggling as if someone had put a snail in your ass. And you spend too long aiming. You'll get weary hands, just shoot! Or you'll keep wasting arrows!'
'I hit it! And not a whole inch, but barely half a span from the center!'
'Do not argue! The gods punished me when they sent me you instead of a son and moreover, awkward as a boob!'
'I'm not a boob!'
'Well, show me. Shoot again. And learn from what I've said. No wiggling, like you're stuck in the ground. Aim and shoot without hesitation. Why are you crying?'
'Because you scrutinize me.'
'It's a father's right. Shoot.'
She tightened the bow. She was crying. He saw it.
'I love you Maria,' he said softly. 'Never forget that.'
She let go of the string, the feathers barely touched the corner of her mouth.
Good,' said her father. 'Good, my daughter.'
He began to cough in a terrible, rattling way.
The black archer was killed on the spot. Milva's arrow struck him under the left arm and penetrated deeply, more than halfway down the shaft, shattering ribs, and smashing the lungs and heart.
He fired a fraction of a second earlier and the red feathered arrow struck Milva low in the abdomen. It tore into her guts and severed an artery and shattered her pelvis. The archer fell to the floor as if hit by a battering ram.
Geralt and Cahir cried out with one voice. Aware that the Milva was down, the archers in the gallery once again jumped up and fired a hail of arrows. One of the arrows hit Cahir's helmet. A second, Geralt swore, combed his hair.
Milva left behind her a large, shiny trail of blood. In the place where she lay, in a blink of an eye, it had grown into a puddle on the floor. Cahir cursed, his hands were shaking. Geralt felt overwhelmed by despair. And rage.
'Auntie!' howled Angouleme. 'Auntie, don't die!'
Maria Barring opened her mouth, coughed horribly and spit blood down her chin.
'I love you too, Dad,' she said clearly.
And she died.
Vilgefortz's shaved minions could not cope with the struggling and screaming Ciri. Some servants had to go to their aid. One received an accurate kicked that made him recoil, knees bent and clinging with both hands to his groin.
But this only served to infuriate the others. Ciri received a punch in the neck and a slap in the face. She turned and another one gave her a kick in the hip and someone sat on her legs. One of the bald minions and a young man knelt on her chest, fingers tangling in her hair and pulling hard. Ciri howled.
The minion also howled. Ciri saw blood drip from his bald skull, staining the white outfit with a macabre drawing.
A second later the lab became a hell. The furniture as overturned with a crash. The strident pops and cracks from glasses bursting mixed with the hellish howls of the confused people. The decoctions, filters, elixirs, extracts and other magical substances spilled onto the tables and the ground, mixing and combining. Some, contacting, hissed and burst forth in clouds of yellow smoke. The room was immediately filled with a caustic stench.
Amid the smoke and tears produced by the stench, Ciri looked in shock at the thing that moved about the laboratory. A black figure resembling a gigantic bat. She saw the bat hook the minions in flight and releasing them high in the air, yelling as they fell. Before her eyes, it
snapped up one of the servants that was trying to get away and slammed it against a table, where he began to howl and shake, spraying blood on retorts, stills, beakers and flasks.
A fluid from some broken container sprayed a lamp. It hissed, and the lamp exploded. Ciri had t dodge the fireball headed at her face. She clenched her teeth to keep from screaming.
In the steel chair, which was prepared for her, sat a slender, gray-haired man in a black jacket. He gritted his fangs into the neck of a young minion, which rested on his knees and sucked his blood. The bald man groaned and his limbs twitched convulsively.
Pallid blue flames danced on the tables. Flasks, retorts and stills exploded in the heat, one after the other.
The vampire drew his fangs away from his victim's throat and look at Ciri with onyx black eyes.
'The opportunity arises, he said, as if in explanation, 'when you just can't resist the drink.'
'Do not fear,' he smiled where he saw her expression. 'Do not worry, Cri. I'm glad I found you. My name is Emiel Regis and I, although you may find it incredible, am a friend of the witcher Geralt. I came to this castle with him.'
An armed mercenary ran into the burning lab. Geralt's companion turned his head towards him, hissed and bared his fangs. The mercenary screamed terribly. His scream soon faded into silence or the distance.
Emiel Regis dropped the minion's body to the ground, stood up and stretched just like a cat.
'Who would have thought?' he said. 'Such an insect, and yet he had great blood in him. This is what we call a - hidden quality. Let's go, Ciri, I'll escort you to Geralt.'
'No,' Ciri said.
'Do not be afraid of me.'
'I'm not afraid,' she protested, bravely clenching her jaw so that he could not hear her teeth chattering in terror. 'No, because... Because Yennefer is imprisoned somewhere here. I have to find her as quickly as possible. I fear that Vilgefortz... Please, sir...'
'Emiel Regis.'
'Warn Geralt, good sir, that Vilgefortz is here. He is a sorcerer, a powerful sorcerer. Geralt has to be careful.'
'You have to be careful,' Regis repeated his warning, staring at Milva lying motionless. 'Because Vilgefortz is a powerful sorcerer. She went to free Yennefer.'
Geralt cursed.
'Come on,' he shouted, to wake up the spirits of his companions. 'Let's go!'
'Let's go,' Angouleme stood up, wiping her tears. 'Let's go! We need to kick some ass!'
'I feel in me,' the vampire hissed with a sinister smile, 'a power with which I could smash down this whole castle.'
The witcher looked at him suspiciously.
'I don't think so,' he said. 'But try and break through to the upper levels and stir it up and try and lure away some attention from me. I'll look for Ciri. She has not been treated well, vampire and you left her alone.'
'She demanded it,' Regis explained quietly. 'In a tone that ruled out any discussion. I admit, I was surprised.'
'I know. Go to the upper floors. And hold on! I will try to find her and Yennefer.'
He found her. And it was fast.
He met them out of the blue, totally unexpected when running around a corner in the corridor. He was met with a sight that made his blood boil and the veins stick out on the back of his hands.
Yennefer was being dragged down the hall by a group of guards. She was ragged and bound in chains, but it did not prevent her from putting up a fight with her captors and swear at them like a porter.
Geralt did not let them recover from their surprise. He slashed once and only once, a short economical movement of his forearm. A guard howled like a dog, turned on the spot and smashed his head into the plate armor statue standing in the hallway alcove; he slipped to the ground and smeared blood over the armor.
His three companions released Yennefer and quickly backed away. But one grabbed the sorceress by the hair and held a knife to her throat just above the dimeritium collar.
'Stay away!' he shouted. 'Or I'll slaughter her! I'm not kidding!'
'Me either,' Geralt twirled his sword and looked the man in the eye.
The man could not stand it; he released Yennefer and ran back to his companions. All of them had their hands on weapons. One of them took an antique halberd from the wall. They spread out into a semi-circular attack position.
'I knew you'd c
ome,' Yennefer said, straightening up proudly. 'Geralt, teach these ruffians what a sword in the hands of a witcher can do.'
She raised her hands high, lifting the shackles. Geralt grasped Sihil in both hands, cocked his head slightly and took aim. He slashed. So fast that no one saw the blade move.
The shackles fell with a clatter to the floor. One of the guards sighed. Geralt tightened his grip, moving his index finger under the hilt.
'Don't move, Yen. Tilt your head slightly to the side, please.'
The sorceress did not even blink. The sound of the sword striking metal was very faint.
The dimeritium collar fell beside the chains on the floor. On the sorceress neck appeared on tiny drop of blood. She rubbed her wrists and laughed. She slowly turned to the guards. None of them held her gaze.
The one with the halberd carefully as if afraid to break it, laid it on the floor.
'With someone like that, he mused, 'the Owl can fight her in person. I value my life.'
'We were ordered...' muttered another, retreating. 'We were ordered... The decision was not ours...'
'We have never treated you badly, ma'am,' said a third, his mouth going dry. 'While in prison... Bear witness....'
'Be gone,' said the sorceress. Liberated from the dimeritium, she stood erect with her head held proudly and in their eyes she appeared as a giantess. It seemed to them that her tousled, black mane touched the roof of the vaulted corridor.
The guards fled. Hunched as if expecting an attack from behind, but none of them looked back. Yennefer returned to her normal size. She threw her arms around Geralt's neck.
'I knew that you'd come for me,' she whispered, searching with her mouth for his lips. 'That you'd come, even if...'
'Let's go,' he said after a moment, gasping for air. 'Now for Ciri.'
'Ciri,' she said and in her eyes for a brief moment blazed a fearsome purple fire. 'And Vilgefortz.'
From around a corner a mercenary crossbowman jumped out, shouted and fired. He aimed for the sorceress. Geralt jumped as if driven by a spring and waved his sword. The arrow deflected and flew over the head of the archer, so close that he had to duck. He did not have time to stand again because the witcher jumped forward and skewered him like a carp. Further along in the hallway stood two other, who also had crossbows and fired them, but their hands were shaking so they did not find their mark. In the next moment, the witcher was among them and they both died.