Kaer Morhen had learned to keep two kinds of weather in its stones: the honest cold that came from the mountains, and the older chill that lived in the mortar where memory had set the tone. In winter it spoke more often, and when it did, even the newest boards stopped their creaking and listened.
That was the room Geralt chose to have the discussion in—not because he craved drama, but because difficult sentences should be said in places that remember why a voice matters.
"Kaedwen was the hand on the torch," he said, quiet but clean, the kind of voice a blade recognizes. "Eleven-seventy. Their banners at the tree line. Their writ under the boots. They broke our house and called it cleansing. We will not hunt their contracts."
Vesemir did not flinch; he had stood in front of worse winds and worse boys. "Witchers are made to kill monsters," he said, not unkind, and certainly not a command. "The Path doesn't ask where the coin was minted. It asks where the teeth are."
"And that's why people confuse us for tools," Geralt answered. "Not men. Not a school. An instrument you lift when you like the song. We aren't objects. If someone wants our help, gratitude is the price of asking and the law of remembering. Not fealty. Not servitude. Gratitude. If Kaedwen comes with a purse and a prayer and no memory of what they did here, then they came to the wrong door."
Silence settled like an extra cloak on the back of a chair. It wasn't refusal; it was the old house deciding how to carry a new decision.
Vesemir nodded once, a craftsman conceding a measurement he wished were different. "No Kaedwen quests," he said. "But if a Kaedweni child is hungry on our road, we feed them and expect nothing for it."
Geralt's mouth tilted. "That's not a contract. That's a meal."
"Good," Vesemir said. "It will keep your sword lighter."
He could have stayed for the stew; it was the kind of night Rina made barley sing. Instead he took the smaller gate, because leaving by the big one invites applause and this wasn't a leaving that wanted to be seen. The vow hung behind him like a lantern he didn't have to carry—only make sure it didn't go out.
The road chose Vengerberg next. Not because it was safe, but because it was the right kind of trouble: markets where coin had learned manners, courts where mages bartered theory for influence, docks where rumor flowed faster than beer. Aedirn's capital, city of keen minds and quicker appetites—the kind of place a witcher could be mistaken for a gentleman if he remembered to clean his boots.
He did not go as "Arthur" this time. The knight's surcoat had served him on other roads, but Vengerberg spoke a different language. He went as a trader's guard on paper (the papers were excellent), as a sword-hand in truth, and as a problem-solver by reputation. No medallion out. No lecture offered. The work would find him; it always did.
On the first ridge beyond the keep he called up the interface that no one else would ever see—a ghostly parchment that lived where breath meets bone.
There were other tabs—alchemy, schematics, bonds—but he touched "Arcana" and felt his ribs ache the way old stones ache before rain. The thing he'd been saving for Vengerberg lived under that heading, wrapped in red runes and three warnings.
Master Slave Contract Spell (Supreme Variant)
Cost: 450 DP
Use: Binding of mounts and monsters to Master's command; monsters with sapience require separate pact and consent.
Effect: Shared senses-on-command, telepathic channel within 300 paces (line-of-sight), loyalty ward (betrayal backlash lethal), staggered endurance share in extremis (10%).
Restrictions: No compulsion of sentient beings without signed pact; no memory overwrite; breakage requires circle erasure + dual consent.
He purchased it. The knowledge arrived like heat: not a voice, not a list of steps, but the weight of a thing you now know how to do. He watched the DP counter drop as if coins had spilled out of his ribs.
DP: 1,000 → 550
It was the right cost. In a world where men try to own everything they touch, it mattered to buy the thing that refused to let ownership be theft. He could bind mounts; he could bind beasts that lacked the moral machinery humans like to pretend they invented. He could not bind a mind that needed a promise. For that, there was another circle entirely, and he owned that one too—but it required yes to sit opposite yes, and that kind of magic you can't buy wholesale.
The interface flickered. A new pane opened, bearing a seal he hadn't seen before and a sentence he had hoped for without telling himself he hoped.
Quest Engine Unlocked
Tiered Contracts now available. Complete tasks to earn DP + Bonus Rewards.
Bronze: 40–80 DP + Mana Stone (low)
Silver: 90–160 DP + Mana Stone (medium)
Gold: 180–260 DP + Rare Boon
Platinum: 300–450 DP + Epic Boon (time-limited; consequences persist)
He didn't smile; he breathed. This was the work he preferred: difficulty declared, reward measured, consequences made explicit. The world rarely offers that. He touched the Vengerberg map. Pins bloomed where trouble had decided to be convenient.
Shadows Under the Spire (Bronze)
Summary: Suspicious disappearances in the Spire Quarter. Bodies found with eyes milk-white, no wounds. Investigate.
Reward: 60 DP + 1O Mana Stone capacity 5000 MP
The Drained Aqueduct (Silver)
Summary: Old aqueducts beneath the Artificers' Guild are fouling water in tenements. Clear source; return proof.
Reward: 120 DP + 50 Mana Stone capacity 20000MP
Silent Street Wraiths (Gold)
Summary: Three blocks near Glassmaker's Row go silent at dusk. Sounds carry but steps don't. Identify entity and dispel.
Reward: 220 DP + Rare Boon
The Envoy's Game (Flagged)
Summary: Kaedweni embassy seeks an "independent agent" for "delicate urban remedies."
Reward: 180–240 DP + Unknown (High Political Risk)
Status: VOW CONFLICT (Declined by Standing Rule)
He watched the last title burn through itself and vanish. The vow had teeth. Good. It was supposed to.
He laced the map closed and took the long way down from the ridge, skirting a camp by a frozen fen where someone who wore Kaedwen green tried to look like a hunter. He fed a child by the wreath of mist, left a slab of jerky for the hound that watched him with more sense than its master, and did not accept the coin the woman held out as if it were washing a sin away. Charity is not a ledger; it is a spill on a table you decide to clean.
The Pontar crossing tasted of metal and old promises. Vengerberg rose where a city should: at a bend in a river that liked to watch itself go by, high enough to see who was coming, low enough to sell them a bed. Gates wide enough for carts, narrow enough for law; guards who knew the difference between a sword and a problem. He gave the papers; they gave him a nod. He didn't ask what they'd charge him later to pretend to forget him. No sense borrowing trouble from a city that wrote it new every day.
He rented a garret in a tannery quarter that had learned to hold its nose with dignity. The building had once been a merchant's vanity, then a family's survival, now a pile of softened stone that still remembered how to keep weather out. He set three discreet wards that weren't signs so much as habits made visible: a hair over a latch (tells you who thinks you're careless), a pencil mark on the frame (tells you who likes to erase), a drop of oil where two boards kiss (tells you who doesn't know sound carries in old houses). He ate bread, cheese cut on the book he wasn't reading, the kind of apple that had decided to be good through winter because someone wrapped it properly in autumn.
He accepted "The Drained Aqueduct" first. Cities die from the feet up when water goes wrong, and he'd watched enough courts haggle over fountains to know tenements never get clean fought for them.
The guild clerk was all angles and apologies, the kind of man whose pen could hold a door ajar for a decade if you let him. "We posted citywide," he said. "Got scholars, charlatans, and three men who proposed to marry a culvert. The problem is not the plan. It's the thing that lives where plans don't reach."
"Drowners are honest," Geralt said. "They tell you they're a mistake and they make you pay for making them."
"This is worse," the clerk said, which in a city just means "I have been embarrassed in public." He handed Geralt a stamped chit and a key that a locksmith would call a grudge. "Bring back proof."
Proof is such a beautiful word. It prevents stories from stealing your work.
He went down where cities keep their second spine. The aqueduct wasn't Roman—this world doesn't have Rome—but it had a Roman's stubbornness. Stone vaults learned to carry more weight than their builders ever loved, channels taught water to mind itself, and somewhere in the dark, a wrongness hummed like a high string out of tune.
He did not light a torch until the last bend. Sight can cheat; smell rarely does in such places. Brackish. Sweet. Iron. Rotten root. And a note like—no, not blood—like the idea of blood, something that wanted to own that word and failed.
He turned the corner and found it: not drowners, not dopplers, but a bloated lily pad of rot sucking at the channel's throat, ringed with pale leeches longer than a man's hand. A corpse-bloom, a kind that breeds where runoff meets magic, fed by waste and apothecaries' secrets. If allowed to ripen it sends filaments up through brick and turns a whole block's water to sorrow.
Steel for men, silver for monsters, oil for both. He worked methodically: superior necrophage oil along the blade's whisper, a rag over the mouth for spores, a little vial of juniper extract under it because juniper sometimes persuades death to keep its voice down. He slashed the filaments first; they whip if you ignore them. He burned the core last, because fire makes these things go loud and he wanted the sound to happen on his cadence.
He didn't use signs. Not because pride—because practice. His strikes were the sort you can teach a boy with a stick and a song: tip-low when your foot is wrong, edge-flat when you have to test where the bone lives, angle out to keep the hilt clean. When the bloom reared, he let the vault teach it humility; stone is harder than arrogance. When it sagged, he put the blade in where a butcher would to stop a ham from being a leg. Then he lit the oil with a paper that had meant to be a poem once and watched the thing fail in the right direction.
Proof was easy: a globed jar filled with a wedge of the husk, cap sealed, guild wax on top so they wouldn't accuse him of raiding their apothecaries' back bins. He walked back with the jar under his cloak because thieves are braver in alleys and stupider in markets.
He placed it on the clerk's desk. The clerk went a color his mother had warned him about. "That was in my city," he whispered, scandalized by the reality of his own sewer.
"In the part it pays not to ignore," Geralt said.
The interface chimed, that little thrill you never really stop getting when the world concedes you did the thing you said you would.
Quest Complete: The Drained Aqueduct
Reward: +120 DP
DP: 550 → 670
He took the resin because the road loves to wet a man it's trying to ruin, and he took the clerk's gratitude because men like him practice it too rarely. Gratitude is a lesson; you reinforce it where you can.
"Shadows Under the Spire" came next because the Spire Quarter paid in coin and secrets and he liked both when they arrived at the right angle. Eyes milk-white, no wounds—it was either a gas no one knew they were breathing or a thing that liked looking at souls more than skin.
It was the second. Not quite a wight, not a night hag—something between, a "between" that cities breed when three sad songs get sung under one roof too often. He watched where the bodies lay. He watched where lanterns failed. He mapped the quarter in how cats decided to refuse it—they know. In the end it was a matter of luring it into a mirror and introducing it to the idea that it wasn't invited anymore. No signs. A circle of salt, a rhyme a midwife taught him once in a village that didn't make it, a cut on his hand to remind the room that blood is a tool, not a story. The thing left. It didn't go far. It never does. But it left their breath alone.
The boon this time was small and perfect: Runeweave (x2), a cloth that holds chalk lines in the rain. You can't explain how rare that is to a man who hasn't watched circles run off a step right when you need them to stay, so he didn't bother explaining it to himself either. He'd use it. He already knew on which stair.
The "Silent Street Wraiths" would take a full night and an accomplice who understood city echo; he flagged it for the dark of the week when sound behaves. The Engine offered a Platinum task—a plague under a counting-house dressed up as a curse—but he declined it for now. Platinum brings other people's consequences home. You don't light that fuse when you've just found a bed that learns your shape.
He turned away from the board and almost walked into the envoy. You can smell a courtier even in a tannery; they bring rooms that part for them like bread. Kaedweni colors somewhere a good dyer had made subtle; the knot of a man who had studied how to tie ties.
"We have a matter that would suit your…efficient reputation," the envoy said, offering a document that looked like a pet begging to be fed.
"No Kaedwen work," Geralt said, without anger.
"Not even urban?" The envoy smiled with his teeth. "The king's coin is king in any city."
Geralt looked at him and saw the tree, the torches, the straw on the keep's floor that had burned so hot Vesemir said he could smell it a year later. He shook his head. "You burned the wrong house for the wrong reason," he said. "You can hire another pair of hands."
"You witches," the envoy began—and there it was, the old stain, the word some men prefer to the right one when they want to keep their pride from getting wet.
"We are not objects," Geralt said. "And if you can't remember gratitude, you will at least remember the price of forgetting."
He left before the man could decide whether to be insulted or afraid. Insult suffering belongs to other rooms. Afraid can get you killed by a fool in a nice coat. He chose his stairs without teaching either lesson today.
Work makes a city smaller. You learn the cutpurse who likes to eat a pear while he cuts and leave your purse in the wrong pocket so he gets a surprise instead of a living. You learn the churn of the market where the fishmonger's mother writes the prices so the son can pretend to haggle and you don't play that game unless you're bored. You learn which alley belongs to an alley-cat and which belongs to a man with a knife and how both require the same courtesy: announce your feet or bring a gift.
Between jobs he practiced the circle he had bought with bones. Not on minds that could answer back—on a half-wild courser he planned to leave with a caravan headed out west, on a pair of battered mules he bought from a dockside man who'd named them both "Ass" as if the joke made starvation less pointed. The Supreme Sigil took ink on canvas and made it live; you don't really understand a circle until you've drawn it dull and watched it fail. He failed twice on purpose and once by accident (earned himself a mule that shunned him for the afternoon out of principle; they are excellent teachers). By week's end the channel sat in him like a harp string kept in tune. He would use it where it belonged: on beasts that want to follow a man who knows where he's going.
The Engine dinged once more as if to insist the world can be a ledger when it's polite.
New Quest Tree Unlocked: City Core Maintenance (Vengerberg)
Chain: 0/4 Completed
Node Boons: 10 Mana Stone (absorb and store natural mana) capacity 10000MP
He picked the second in the chain because locksmiths always like men who arrive with fobs and Mercators always appreciate a man who knows how to ask for a token elegantly. Elegance buys you a silent door and a nod that keeps friends instead of buying a favor that attracts enemies.
Night breathed like a cat along the roofs. He made the wraith-streets his study, chalk in his hand, Runeweave around his forearm like a promise, and the voice of a city-acoustics savant at his shoulder—a woman who made her living tuning restaurants so wine tasted better because conversation didn't fracture when it reached the ceiling. Sound is where the dead hide most often in cities. He said little. He walked right. He wrote circles that wouldn't run away when the dew arrived. The rest of it was a lullaby for things that forgot how to lie down.
Reward bells came and went. DP rose, not because it matters to a man who knows how to leave a room empty-handed, but because it is better when the work shapes a future you can name.
He didn't look back at the Kaedweni quarter again. Someone would drag that envoy toward another man with a sword; that man would do what he thought a sword was for. Geralt had decided what his was for, and the vow had learned to walk on its own feet.
He worked until late winter pushed its shoulder under the door and the tannery learned to be quiet again. He hunted things that needed to be handled, and he walked away from things that wanted their name in his ledger. He brewed at a rate that made the cellar look like a plan rather than a hoard: more Superior Dimeritium, because mages love to forget humility; more Dancing Star, because fire is the language fools understand; enough Dragon's Dream to make a street remember who owns the air; Grapeshot for when bravery packs shoulder-to-shoulder in numbers; Petri's Philter in a locked box for the fight he hoped not to meet.
He took three Bronze and two Silver contracts in sequence, then the Gold he'd flagged for the right moon and the right woman with the right ear. He let Platinum wait because Platinum likes to think it can call you by your first name. It can't. Not here.
On the night the first buds threatened the spindles of the plane trees, he added the numbers up because men who refuse to count are soon counted out.
DP: 670 → +60 (Spire) → +220 (Wraith Streets) → +100 (Chain Node) → +90 (Side Bronze) → +140 (Side Silver) = 1,280
Boon Inventory: 120 Mana Stone Different Capacity
He could take that home if he wanted: not just the numbers, but the way they had been acquired. No crowns from Kaedwen. No gratitude unpaid. No work done for men who forgot what a house feels like when it burns.
He sent a final note north: "Vengerberg will hold through spring. Returning on rivers if the river will have me." He set it with a runner who could beat his own tongue to the next town and not tell anyone what he carried.
On the morning he chose to leave, he visited the Spire Quarter without a contract. He bought a child a sweet because the child hadn't asked and that's who you buy for. He nodded to the guild clerk who had learned to ask "How" before "How much." He stood on a bridge and let the river carry other men's opinions away, because a city's best habit is reminding you that the world liked to exist before you arrived and would keep going after.
Then he turned his face toward home—not because winter demanded it, but because vows do. The Kaedweni banners would still be where they liked to frighten sheep. The envoy would still be polishing his teeth. The keep would still be counting bowls. And Geralt would walk in with work done the right way, with circles that know what they're for, and with enough DP and enough boons to make the next season's problems something you can meet with a steady wrist and a breath that doesn't lie.