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October 24 - November 26, 2024
In Tretogor, the arch-spy Dijkstra leaped up and reached for his dagger, waking the wife of the state treasurer.
“Jarre.” Triss had calmed down. She placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder and squeezed hard. “You’re the only man in the temple. We’re all watching you, looking for support and succour from you. You must not fear, you must not panic. Master yourself. Do not let us down.”
Moreover, powerful spasms of the facial muscles are occurring. If it is tetanus the girl is done for. Let us hope it is only the facial nerve… Or the trigeminal nerve. Or both of them…
“You don’t even know who I am—” “You are a wounded girl,” he interrupted, “running from somebody who does not flinch from injuring girls. Do you wish me to pass on some tidings?”
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.”
I was thinking yesterday that I’d dispatch you all, for a bit of amusement and diversion, but you’ve come yourselves, saving me the bother. You’ve won my heart by so doing. Thus I shall let you choose. How do you prefer me to take you: the playful way or the painful way?”
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.
Her hand, Triss noticed, was the colour of old brick, and her exposed, knotty arm must easily have measured twenty inches in girth. Triss’s waist measured twenty-two.
The conclusion thus being that the most effective defence against intellectual domination is roundly to affront the domineering intellectual.
In exchange for such a meagre haul the cormorant Cahir could not count on imperial grace. In any case, he was far from the pike he wanted to be thought of as. He was small fry, just like us. When the war was raking both the earth and people’s fates like an iron harrow, who was paying the slightest attention to small fry?
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.
He did no more than what a normal fellow does to his wife on returning home from the tavern on Saturday evening—just gave her a kicking, slapped her a few times, and nothing more.
“When you leave my home and courtyard, when you close my gate behind you, then shall I respect your privacy, the secrecy of your affairs, the specifics of your profession. And I shall not meddle in them, be certain. But in my home I shall not allow you to abuse human dignity. Do you understand me? Outside my gate you may drag the wench behind a horse, if you wish. In my home you will remove that collar. Forthwith.”
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.
Perhaps you favour humane killing? You can afford that luxury. You mainly fight creatures, which, however ridiculous it sounds, also kill humanely. I cannot afford it.
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.
Your vision is a world where people are afraid to venture out after dark; not for fear of cut-throats, but of the guardians of public order. 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
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“I do,” Fulko Artevelde replied almost at once. “I have no choice. Angoulême is yours. For I know you’re only cooperating for her sake.”
“Like every vampire, I’m invisible to magical visual probing and scanning; that is, to a detecting spell. A vampire may be tracked using an analytical spell, from close up, but it is not possible to detect a vampire with a remote, scanning spell. The detection will report that there’s no one there. Thus only a sorcerer could be mistaken regarding us: to register four people, where there were actually five; that is, four people and one vampire.”
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.
“Geralt the Witcher of Rivia didn’t deserve a better fate. He was a simpleton and a fool. If he’d had a finer, more honest and honourable death, legends would have sprung up around him. But he didn’t merit a legend.”
“Without his witcher’s amulet he’s unable to work magic, and I have it. Take him.”
“Quiet, Nilfgaardian… You’re heavier when you talk…”
“A soldier doesn’t question his orders,” said Cahir, feeling the dressing on his head. “Doesn’t analyse them, doesn’t ponder over them, doesn’t wait for them to be explained to him. That’s the first thing they teach a soldier where I come from. So you can understand that not for a second did I ever question an order which was issued to me. The thought of why I had to capture a Cintran princess didn’t even cross my mind. An order’s an order.
By accident, it was my group the men spiriting Ciri away ran into.
The flaminika, you ought to know, is an extremely shrewd woman, and noted that you have abandoned witcherhood, not as a result of ideological changes, but because you were compelled to by circumstances.
“Anyone,” Avallac’h wiped his hands on a rag, “can foretell the future. And everyone does it, for it is simple. It is no great art to foretell it. The art is in foretelling it accurately.”
You will lose one of your companions in the next few weeks, perhaps even days. Perhaps even hours.”
Defend yourself! Don’t leave home without a handy Gabriel crossbow. A Gabriel is your guardian, a Gabriel will protect you and your dear ones from bandits.” Sales were phenomenal. Soon every bandit packed a Gabriel during robberies.
No, I’m not a witcher now. So I’ll have to learn to manage without my medallion.”
Only Mahakam surpassed Kovir in the extraction and processing of iron ore, but transports full of metal serving the production of alloys went from Kovir to Mahakam.
The sea is free and open. Trade is free. Profit is sacred. Love the trade and profit of your neighbour like your own. To hinder someone’s trading and profiting is to break the laws of nature. And Kovir is no one’s vassal. It’s a sovereign, autonomous—and neutral—kingdom.
“Take that impish cat, that tiresome pest, and give it to your neighbour. Then you will know happiness. You will be rid of the cat, and will delight your neighbour. For most often it is so, that our neighbour does not desire a gift, but to be given.”’”
“It’s easier to stab a king than a spy. They won’t get me. They’ll never get me.”
Crystal balls only permit telecommunication with another correlated crystal ball. Even the local dwarven bank has a crystal ball for talking to another at headquarters.
I’m ninety-four years old. But treat that, please, as a confessional secret.
“Pavetta,” Crach interrupted, still deep in thought, “did not perish during a storm. The storm began after her death. The sea reacted as it always does to the death of one of the Cintran bloodline. I’ve investigated that matter long enough. And am certain of what I know.”
Yarl… She’s a clever and essentially good woman… But she doesn’t have any scruples. She is ruthless. And merciless.”
The portal on the island, Tor Lara, while it existed, negated all teleportational magic within a considerable radius. But, as you certainly know, the Tower of the Gull exploded and disintegrated, making teleportation possible. Most of the participants in the events on Thanedd got off the island using portals they opened.”
In normal gaols the inmates were still traditionally separated according to sex. In military citadels it was different. Emperor Fergus var Emreis—confirming women’s equality in the imperial army by special decree—had already ruled that if it was to be emancipation, then let it be emancipation. Equality ought to be complete and outright, without any exceptions or special privileges for either sex. Since then, inmates had been serving time in mixed cells in the strongholds and citadels.
A carter who came to Dun Dare with his wife and daughter, he said that years ago there used to be witchers in the world, so they say… They dealt with every kind of villainy.
Evil fears pain, impairment, suffering, death, the end! When wounded, Evil howls with pain like a dog! It rolls around on the floor and squeals, watching the blood spurt from its veins and arteries, seeing its bones stick out of stumps, seeing its guts crawl from its belly, sensing that with the cold, death is approaching. Then and only then does Evil’s hair stand on end and Evil finally yell: ‘Mercy! I repent of my sins! I’ll be good and decent now, I swear! Just save me, staunch the blood, don’t let me perish ignominiously!’
Autocratic tyranny ought to be finished, a constitutional monarchy introduced, and after that democracy…”
“The power of the people. A system where the people will rule. The citizenry of all states, through the most worthy and honest representatives chosen in an honest election…”
The Elder Blood that flows in your veins gives you power over time. And over space. Over the dimensions and the spheres. You are now Master of the Worlds, Ciri. You have a mighty Power. Do not let criminals or rogues take it from you and use it to their own ends…
