Chapter 235

By evening, the clouds that had hung over Vizima all afternoon had finally blown apart.

The sky looked as though the rain had washed it clean, blue and clear, with a dreamlike rainbow hanging across it.

By then, the Witchers had already searched through most of the Arachas cultists’ dwellings and found certain things amiss.

The cultists came from all manner of backgrounds, merchants, laborers from the lowest ranks, craftsmen, beggars, soldiers still in service, government officials of Vizima, even serial assassins.

Aside from the laundress and her husband, the first pair the Witchers had found, nearly half of the cultists had chosen suicide.

And before dying, every one of them had found some hidden place to lay their bodies to rest, locked cellars, storage closets beneath staircases, attic spaces behind ceilings. It seemed they had all meant to delay the discovery of their corpses.

As for the manner of death, slit wrists had been the mildest of them. Others had drunk rat poison, and the most dreadful had burned themselves alive.

Faced with those charred corpses, blackened beyond recognition, the Witchers were deeply unsettled. What sort of mind, or rather what sort of force, had sustained them, letting them endure the agony of flames eating through flesh and blood without crying out for help or calling to anyone outside?

Or perhaps they had viewed their own acts as martyrdom.

“Damned unnatural.”

Beside those who had killed themselves, the Witchers found their scriptures without exception, filled with scattered notes, some like diaries, some like half-mad self-dissection. Taken together, these writings roughly pieced out the lives of those who had written them.

A flock of pained people, all of whom had once suffered some shattering upheaval in life. Or else outright deranged minds, laying out their twisted worldviews in painstaking detail.

It was hardly strange. A god like the Arachas, evil and cruel, a thing that praised human sacrifice, could only ever attract lunatics and madmen.

Any normal person would keep away from it of their own accord. So even after decades of growth in Vizima, the Cult of the God of Ill Omen numbered no more than this scattered handful of cultists.

The dead yielded no clue at all as to Abigail’s whereabouts.

As for the other half of the cultists, perhaps they had felt it was not yet time to throw themselves into the arms of the Arachas. Before Adda could settle accounts with them, they had quietly withdrawn from Vizima. They had swept away everything of value from their homes, leaving the Witchers nothing but empty rooms.

...

“There’s only one cultist left.”

The three Witchers came to the poorest street in the Temple Quarter, the Arched Alley.

In the narrow lane, a ragged old man sat cross-legged on the flagstones. Since it had only just rained, the ground was wet and cold, so he could do nothing but curl his gaunt body in on itself like a pitiful stray dog, shivering as he muttered broken words under his breath.

Clink.

A copper coin dropped into his empty bowl ... but the old beggar’s expression did not change. His eyes remained hollow and numb.