Sapkowski, Andrzej - Witcher 05 - The Lady of the Lake by Sapkowski Andrzej

Author:Sapkowski, Andrzej [Sapkowski, Andrzej]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Fantasy / Epic, Fiction / Action & Adventure, Fiction / Fantasy / Historical
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2017-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

The next place was one of the foulest Ciri had visited. It certainly appeared in the top ranking and at the top of that ranking.

It was a port, a port channel. She saw boats and galleys by jetties and posts, saw a forest of masts, saw sails, sagging heavily in the still air. Smoke, clouds of stinking smoke, were creeping and hanging all around.

Smoke also rose from behind crooked shacks by the channel. The loud, broken crying of a child could be heard from there.

Kelpie snorted, jerking her head sharply, and stepped back, banging her hooves on the cobbles. Ciri glanced down and noticed some dead rats. They were lying everywhere. Dead rodents contorted in agony with pale, pink paws.

Something’s not right here, she thought, feeling horror gripping her. Something’s wrong here. Get out of here. Run from here as quickly as possible.

A man in a gaping shirt was sitting under hanging nets and lines, his head resting on his shoulder. A few paces away lay another. They didn’t look as if they were asleep. They didn’t even twitch when Kelpie’s horseshoes clattered on the stones right next to them. Ciri bowed her head, riding under the rags hanging from washing lines and giving off an acrid odour of filth.

There was a cross on the door of one of the shacks painted in whitewash. Black smoke left a trail in the air behind the roof. The child was still crying, somebody shouted in the distance, somebody closer coughed and wheezed. A dog howled.

Ciri felt her hand itching. She looked down.

Her hand was flecked with the black dots of fleas, like caraway seeds.

She screamed at the top of her voice. Shaking all over in horror and revulsion, she began to brush herself off, waving her arms wildly. Kelpie, alarmed, burst into a gallop, and Ciri almost fell off. Squeezing the mare’s sides with her thighs she combed and ran her fingers through her hair, she shook her jacket and blouse. Kelpie galloped into a smoke-enveloped alleyway. Ciri screamed with terror.

She rode through hell, through an inferno, through the most nightmarish of nightmares. Among houses marked with white crosses. Among smouldering piles of rags. Among the dead lying singly and those who lay in heaps, one upon the other. And among living, ragged, half-naked spectres with cheeks sunken from pain, grovelling through dung, screaming in a language she didn’t understand, stretching out towards her bony arms, covered in horrible, bloody pustules …

Run! Run from here!

Even in the black nothingness, in the oblivion of the archipelago of places, Ciri could still smell that smoke and stench in her nostrils.

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