The Tower of Swallows (The Witcher, #4)

by Andrzej Sapkowski

“I shall give you a horse, blacker than the night and fleeter than a nightly gale,” vowed the fortune-teller. “I shall give you a sword, brighter and keener than a moonbeam. But you demand much, witcher girl, thus you must pay me dearly.” “With what? For I have nothing.” “With your blood.”

“No.” She pursed her lips, to stifle something which was either a groan or a curse. “My face was cut by Tawny Owl. Stefan Skellen. But Bonhart… Bonhart hurt me much more gravely. More deeply. Did I talk about that in the fever?”

It isn’t the evil and indecent who are flung down into the depths, no! Oh, no! The evil and decisive fling down those who are moral, honest and noble but maladroit, hesitant and full of scruples.”

The mule was called Draakul. It was so named by Regis immediately after being stolen and so it remained. Regis was clearly entertained by the name, which no doubt had some amusing significance in the culture and speech of vampires, but which he did not wish to explain to us, claiming it was an untranslatable pun.

“Yennefer of Vengerberg’s dead?” “Aye, she’s dead,” the fisherwoman said, finishing her beer. “Dead as a doornail. Killed ‘erself with her own charms, making magic spells. Didn’t ‘appen long since, last day of August, just ‘fore the new moon. But that’s quite another story…”

“Dandelion! You’re asleep in the saddle!” “I’m not asleep. I’m thinking creatively!”

I noticed that in the beginning, Milva and Cahir would fearfully and anxiously feel their necks after awaking, but they quickly stopped doing that. The vampire Regis was—or seemed to be—an utterly honourable vampire. If he said he would not drink their blood, then he would not.

The conclusion thus being that the most effective defence against intellectual domination is roundly to affront the domineering intellectual.

Milva, it seems to me, had been greatly affected by her tragic accident—and loss. I write “it seems to me” for I am aware that being a man I cannot imagine what such a loss means for a woman.

Oi, Dandelion! Are you writing that down? Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare, hear me?”

That fact and that cry were supposed to be the arguments which would stop me murdering him. Well, it did and I don’t think it can now be undone. Which is a pity. For a chain ought to have been begun then, on Thanedd. A long chain of death, a chain of revenge, about which tales would still be told after a hundred years have passed. Tales which people will be afraid to listen to after dark. Do you understand that, Dandelion?” “Not really.” “Then to hell with you.”

Even the Witcher, that old sourpuss and bore, began to smile and enjoy life more, for he reckoned we were covering fifteen miles a day, which we had never once managed since leaving Brokilon. The Witcher had no work, for though the Dank Wilderness was so dank it would have been difficult to imagine anything danker, we did not encounter any monsters.

But, as the vampire Regis articulated, it is better to go forward without an aim than loiter without an aim, and with surety much better than to retreat without an aim.

Might one know, Geralt, what provokes your peals of laughter? Let me hazard a guess… Congenital imbecility?”

The priceless writing from the Dark Ages burned with a tall, bright flame. For a few short moments the centuries spoke with the soft whisper of paper blackening in the fire. And then the flame went out and darkness covered the earth.

His pals, who only the previous day—when he was paying for their drinks—had declared their undying friendship, were now practically sticking their heads under the tables, as though incredible marvels were occurring or naked women were dancing there.

And the second was for the honourable Houvenaghel, a merchant from Claremont.”

“Nothing works on the memory,” Tawny Owl grinned, “like nuts and honey, or a knout hovering over the arse.

You’re a skinny kid, as flat as a pancake, and as ugly as the seven sins. Even if the urge was strong, I’d sooner tup a turkey.”

“A swallow,” Ciri completed. “Zireael. My name.”

Come here, girl with a collar on her neck. Examine the marks etched into the blade. You don’t understand them, naturally. But I shall explain them to you. Look. The line delineated by destiny is winding, but leads to this tower. Towards annihilation, towards the destruction of established values, of the established order. But there, above the tower, do you see? A swallow. The symbol of hope. Take this sword. And may what is to come about, come about.”

A silver unicorn rampant on a black field. A unicorn.

“You won’t do it.” Bonhart’s voice resounded in the complete silence. “You won’t do it, witcher girl. In Kaer Morhen you were taught how to kill, so you kill like a machine. Instinctively. To kill yourself you need character, strength, determination and courage. And they couldn’t teach you that.”

“I chickened out. I was a coward. And I paid for it. As every coward pays for it. In pain, dishonour and hideous humiliation. And an absolute revulsion towards myself.”

But no one could have seen it. For the cottage with the sunken, moss-grown thatched roof was well hidden among the fog and the mist, in a boundless swamp in the Pereplut Marshes where no one dared to venture.

Whosoever sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Genesis 9:6

Verily, great self-righteousness and great blindness are needed to call the gore pouring from the scaffold justice.

How the bloody hell do I get myself out of this pickle now?

He accepted it, feeling on him the somewhat mocking gaze of Regis and Cahir, to whom he had occasionally moaned during the trek about human ingratitude and stressed the pointlessness and stupidity of selfless altruism.

And now he was glowing with happiness, pride and a sense of importance, like every liar when his lies accidentally turn out to be true.

For the law is not jurisprudence, not a weighty tome full of articles, not philosophical treatises, not peevish nonsense about justice, not hackneyed platitudes about morality and ethics. The law means safe paths and highways. It means backstreets one can walk along even after sundown. It means inns and taverns one can leave to visit the privy, leaving one’s purse on the table and one’s wife beside it. The law is the sleep of people certain they’ll be woken by the crowing of the rooster and not the crashing of burning roof timbers!

For, after all, the result of all great crackdowns on miscreants is always that the miscreants enter the ranks of the guardians of public order en masse. Your vision is a world of bribery, blackmail and entrapment, a world of turning imperial evidence and false witnesses. A world of snoopers and coerced confessions. Informing and the fear of being informed upon. And inevitably the day will come in your world when the flesh of the wrong person will be torn with pincers, when an innocent person is hanged or impaled. And then it will be a world of crime.

“Just a misunderstanding between friends. A lovers’ tiff. It’s already been patched up!”

“Everything indicates that Ciri is dead. She perished, two nights ago, at the Equinox. Somewhere far from here, alone amongst hostile people; strangers.

Ciri stroked the black cat, which had returned to the cottage in the swamp, as is customary with all cats in the world, when its love of freedom and dissolution had been undermined by cold, hunger and discomfort.

It is well known that when a witcher inflicts pain, suffering and death he experiences absolute ecstasy and bliss such as a devout and normal man only experiences during sexual congress with his wedded spouse, ibidem cum ejaculatio. This leads one to conclude that, in this matter also, a witcher is a creature contrary to nature, an immoral and filthy degenerate, born of the blackest and most foul-smelling Hell, since surely only a devil could derive bliss from suffering and pain.

“The phallic cult was typical for primitive civilisations. It could also serve as the birth of a theory that the human race is yielding to physical degeneration. Its forebears had phalluses like clubs, but their descendants were left with ridiculous, vestigial little pricks…

Oh, fire of vanity, how difficult it is for an artist to quell you.

A creature that took around a million years to discover that one can execute some sort of operation with a gnawed bone using its two hairy hands? After which it shoved the bone up its rectum and shrieked for joy?”

It’s impossible to utterly destroy humans and cockroaches; at least one pair always remains.

“Do you know, Witcher, what the greatest snag of longevity is?” “No.” “Sex.” “What?” “You heard right. Sex. After almost a hundred years it becomes boring.

“Will I get Ciri back?” The answer was immediate. “You will. Only to lose her at once. And to be clear: forever; irrevocably.

“I—you see—am errant. But not, ’pon my word, erratic! Oh, it’s my horse. Come here, Bucephalus!”

“Your silver medallion with the wolf. Schirrú had it. Now you’ve lost it forever. It’ll melt in that heat.” “Too bad,” he said a moment later, looking into the flaminika’s cornflower-blue eyes. “I’m no longer a witcher. I’ve stopped being a witcher. I’ve learned that now. On Thanedd, in the Tower of the Seagull. In Brokilon. On the bridge on the Yaruga. In the cave beneath Gorgon. And here, in Myrkvid Forest. No, I’m not a witcher now. So I’ll have to learn to manage without my medallion.”

“You are, though,” Esterad continued, “as it’s been said before, a whoreson of upright character. And that’s why I like and respect you,

‘On the way to eternity everyone will tread their own stairway, shouldering their own burden.’

As ever, that same perfume… Yenna…”

“The time will come,” said the golden-eyed woman, “when absolutely no one, including children, will believe in sorceresses. I tell you that with deliberate spite. By way of revenge.

“Are, then, Chaos, art and learning,” said the woman, whose name could not be uttered, “according to you, the Powers capable of changing the world? A curse, a blessing and progress? And aren’t they by any chance Faith? Love? Sacrifice?

“No one wants to suffer. But yet it is our lot. And some suffer more. Not necessarily by choice. The point is not the bearing of suffering. The point is how it is borne.”