Chapter 239

By the time they had ridden for nearly noon, the sky had turned leaden, packed with dirty clouds. There was dampness in the air, but the rain never truly came, and so the traces on the ground remained.

The four Witchers followed those traces, riding hard for a day and a night, and before dusk on the following day they reached a stretch of tall, dense woodland.

A familiar smell of blood drifted through the air. The Witchers secured their horses and stepped into the undergrowth, boots sinking into thick, soft humus.

The fluffy umbrella-like branches above blotted out most of the light, making sight difficult. The Witchers could make out only the straight tree trunks close at hand and the low bushes beneath them, but that was enough. To them, such things were natural cover.

They bent their backs like cats, walking on the balls of their feet, gliding like wraiths from one piece of cover to the next. About five minutes later, an elk ran out of the bushes into their sight, and in the path it had crossed there lay a corpse.

The man was lying on his back beside a fir tree. Judging by his face, he was around thirty. His coarse, filthy linen clothing was soaked red with blood.

The muscles in the arms bare of cloth bulged like little hills, and inside the loosened collar on his chest the hair there was thick and black. He had the build of a man-sized bear.

Yet such a man had died without the least chance to resist. He had not even managed to draw the weapon hanging at his belt before being cut down in a single move.

Roy examined the corpse. The mortal wound was a cut across the throat.

It was a wound as precise and clean as a surgeon’s cut, thin as a blood-red thread, neither too deep nor too shallow, just enough to sever the windpipe and carotid.

The Witcher ran his fingers across the wound and could almost see the scene in his mind. The man had been relieving himself before the fir tree when the attacker slipped up behind him without a sound, clapped one hand over his mouth, and let the cold blade kiss his throat for an instant before withdrawing with calm, easy grace.

“A good hand...” Letho touched a bit of the blood, still holding a trace of warmth, and summed it up in a few terse words. “Not a shred of strength wasted ... that sort of control over the body is near monstrous.”