The Tower of Swallows (The Witcher, #4)

by Andrzej Sapkowski

I had to run from there, too, after the publication of another treatise… Incidentally, the work dealt with totalitarian power and the criminal character of imperialist wars,

The evil and decisive fling down those who are moral, honest and noble but maladroit, hesitant and full of scruples.”

“I scolded him so much he choked on his blood,” she crowed. “And the others were cowed at once. That’s what you call terror!”

for though the Dank Wilderness was so dank it would have been difficult to imagine anything danker, we did not encounter any monsters.

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.

Knowledge, my dear, is a privilege, and privileges are only shared with one’s equals.

“I’m sorry, Witcher, but it must be thus. We druids cherish and venerate life in all its forms. But sparing the lives of criminals is sheer stupidity. Only terror deters criminals.

“That large rock suspended above the water,” pointed out Crach an Craite, leaning on the rail, “is Kaer Hemdall, Hemdall’s Watchtower. Hemdall is our mythical hero. Legend has it that with the coming of Tedd Deireadh, the Time of the End, the Time of White Frost and the Wolfish Blizzard, Hemdall will face the evil powers from the land of Morhögg: the phantoms, demons and spectres of Chaos. He will stand on the Rainbow Bridge and blow his horn to signal that it is time to take up arms and fall in to battle array. For Ragh nar Roog, the Last Battle, which will decide if night is to fall, or dawn to break.”

For I think, Ciri, that you are the chosen one.”

“Winter’s coming.”

“You can sneer,” she clenched her teeth, “without having any idea how much evil you’ve done to the world, you aged scholars, you theoreticians with your books, with your centuries-old experience of reading moral treatises so diligently you didn’t even have time to look out of the window to see what the world was really like. You philosophers, artificially shoring up artificial philosophies in order to earn salaries at universities. And since not a soul would pay you for the ugly truth about the world, you invented ethics and morality; nice, optimistic sciences. Except they’re fallacious and deceitful!”

Lara Dorren