Chapter 223

Darkness, damp, and a heavy stench made up Vizima’s sewers.

Ahead lay unknown blackness. Then a point of torchlight flared around a bend, throwing a stained wall into view. Moss climbed over the blue bricks, foul water ran everywhere, and several shadows stretched across the ground, growing longer and longer.

Someone had entered the tubular passage.

Three Knights in silver-white armor, and one Witcher with a Viper Medallion hanging at his chest.

Each of them carried a torch. They moved in pairs, one pair on either side of the tunnel, careful, light-footed, doing their utmost to keep silent.

In the middle channel of the pipe, a dark brown river flowed, thick with food scraps, excrement, and all manner of drifting filth, a woman’s dress, a torn cloth doll, one leg of a dining table.

It looked viscous, and stank abominably.

The Witcher raised his torch to the wall on the right, lighting up a painted number. The number was blurred, plainly old. With his other hand, he unfolded the map and compared the markings on the parchment with the number on the wall.

Splutch. The Knight of the White Rose at his side suddenly stopped short. He had stepped on something by accident, a yellow-brown, sticky mound, still giving off heat, along with the fermented stink of digested matter.

“You struck gold, Knight Yagon.” Zerlin, on the far side of the little sewer stream, could not help laughing. The abrupt sound broke the silence at once.

Yagon’s face darkened to liver-red. He looked down at the fresh heap by his foot from point-blank range, clapped a hand over his throat, and gagged so hard he nearly brought up last night’s meal.

They had not been ten minutes in the sewers before the filth had already sullied a Knight of the White Rose.

“Gods, grant me an honorable death on the battlefield.”

“Quiet.” The Witcher made a gesture, and the three Knights instantly fell silent as graves.

All three had a deep impression of Witcher Roy. He did not possess an overbearing physique, but he moved with the agility of a Devil. They still remembered all too clearly the light sword dance he had performed on Black Gull Island, cutting down several of their comrades like death itself.

Rudolf, the former commander of the White Rose, had also fallen to him in a fair duel.

Knights obeyed strength, and they held a fair measure of awe toward the Witcher.

Roy crouched halfway down and used a stick he had found somewhere to stir through the dung. The overpowering stench of the sewers dulled his nose, and he could not tell exactly what sort of creature had left it.

But he was certain it had not come from a man.

Before long, the Witcher dug out several brittle little bones, no larger than matches, and half of a rat, still bloody and not yet fully digested.

“A Monster came through here not long ago. It hasn’t gone far.” He handed the torch to Yagon, then pulled a vial of Thunderbolt from the Alchemist’s Pouch he carried and drank it down. At once, purple-black veins, like worms, rose across his handsome face, and his eyes took on the cold glow of a wolf’s.