Geralt signed the lease beneath a window that watched the Pontar's slow gray coil, the notary's quill scratching like a cricket in winter. The villa was too fine by witcher standards and just shabby enough by Vengerberg's—two stories of river-stone and pale plaster, blue shutters gone a little chalky, a rushwork roof that whispered when the wind turned inland. It had a walled garden with an apricot that would bloom in three months and a gate that would not squeal if oiled. It would do for a month. That was all he needed.
The merchant who owned it had once traded dyes and now traded the memory of success; he signed quickly and counted the coin twice. Geralt counted the rooms: front salon for maps and notices, rear study for runes and circles, kitchen for heat and water, servants' hall for drying gear and stacking crates. He posted three rules in chalk on the pantry door for his own benefit: no debt, no noise, no questions. Then he hung his cloak on the hook nearest the back door—always the back door—and walked to the nearest notice board with a leather folio under his arm and nothing on his back but the sunlight.
The board by the Spire Quarter was angry with paper. Vengerberg's genteel hand had written most of it: Help, requests for discretion, infants' favors in return for coin whose ink still dried as mothers pinned the page. He read what mattered. Clay-pit deaths east of the brickfields—likely necrophages. Screams at the old ropewalk—spirits. Missing dogs by the tanneries—ghoul-feeders or drowners. "Bedded mire beast" near a willow-copse—alghoul, possibly arachas. And a polite, furious note from a glassblower who wanted the monster that had shattered his night removed without a scene—no wraith named, but everyone knew.
He wasn't here to kill them. He was here to move them.
He crossed town to the markets and acquired what his month would require: portable sigils etched onto thick, tanned monster-hide sheets; conductive inks sealed in waxed tubes; bone styli; spool after spool of dimeritium-thread cord; a backpack frame rigged to carry circles flat and low; meat-hooks and canvas sacks for the things that needed dragging but not bleeding. He bought line, wire, pegs, and a coil of broad net woven by a woman who knew how to catch fish that think they're smarter than men. He bought two crates of clay jars with stoppered mouths for essences and a box of pale chalk that would stay put in mist.
Then he went home to the bridge-house and lit the lamps.
The master–servant circles were the work of half an evening each: Supreme variant, cut true and slow, Master sigil centered and raised like a coin the mind finds without eyes. He inked seven in one sitting—seven would be enough to start the procession. Companion circles he inked in smaller script, for nekkers and endrega-drones, for ghoul-clutch and drowner-swarm, for the arachas if he found it with its back to the sun. Each circle got a number and a route—forest roads, fordable creeks, hollow ways from Vengerberg to the Blue Mountains, never crossing a village square, never brushing chapel-yard, always skirting scent where dogs would find them and make mouths go wrong.
He laid out the month like a campaign. The first week: capture, bind, and dispatch the feeders closest to the city—nekkers, drowners, alghouls, one grave hag if she made the mistake of feeding in daylight. The second week: endrega lines and the arachas if the willow announced it as truth. The third: foglets and leshies? No—he had promised himself not to touch a mind that remembered what words do. No leshen, no ancient—and certainly no higher anything. He would kill wraiths and nightwraths and penitent shades when the notices required it; you do not bind the unliving. He would harvest specter dust, essence, veins of hollow light, threads from the torn veil. The last week: sweep, send the last convoy, then scrub his name out of the city's tongue and leave before gratitude became gossip.
At the east brickfields, the clay-pit men had done what men do: they posted a polite notice and then went to work with sticks and lanterns because work lives in muscle memory and fear lives in the mouth. Four days of missing, two found dead with everything edible taken and the rest chewed because ghoul-teeth love habit. He found prints he could read asleep: necrophage pads, shallow in thawed clay; the sliding, petulant scrapes of nekkers around a dead dog; the unmistakable crescent of an alghoul's larger callused nails. Alghoul meant a spine that believed in itself. Good. Leaders make orders easier to stick.
He laid the net where the clay gave way to scrub and sat down with his back to a stack of bricks. He did not bait with meat. He baited with stillness. Scavengers prefer the man who thinks he can outrace them on his own two legs.
When they came—first cautious, then ambitious—he moved when he had to and not before. Two nekkers on the left, one in front, one to the right; alghoul behind the rush to make sure it owned the death. He gave them fear, then yielded it back to himself. The necrophage oil made silver stink like a lie. He cut one nekker's tendon, let it bleed onto the circle's edge, then kicked a second into the chalk like a stone thrown carelessly. The alghoul climbed the net as if it had always wanted to be a spider; he let it get exactly as high as the hooks would bear, then hauled and dropped so it thrashed into the circle, its blood arcing once, twice, then steadying to the pulse he needed.
The circle woke like a document notarized with thunder. Supreme variant meant no talk. It meant command. It meant his blood on the Master sigil and their blood on the outer glyphs and obedience stitched into the air between. His knife nicked his palm. He let three drops go and touched power he could hear with his teeth.
You belong to me now. You do not touch a human. You do not touch a dog. You do not cross a road unless the road is empty and you can do so without being seen. You hunt only monsters not bound to me. You follow the forest routes on these thoughts. You stop at water here, here, and here. You keep pace with the alghoul if it keeps its head; if it does not, you let the next strongest lead. If a village dog finds you, you melt. If a man with a torch finds you, you sink. If anything with words speaks to you, you turn and go the other way until the words are a memory you do not understand.
They did not answer. They did not have to. The circle connected and hummed and then fell quiet. He scraped the chalk, lifted the hide, shook it clean into a sack, and pointed north-west by a thought that was more map than mind. They went. The alghoul set the rhythm. The nekkers clustered. One limped and then remembered it could stop limping because its new master did not need pity made into a show. Good. He watched them crest the low bank, slip into scrub, and vanish the way men never learn to.
Day Two: drowners. The Pontar's smaller children had taken to dragging dogs—and once, a booted foot—into the sluices near the tanneries. He did not usually bother with drowners in a city that knows to put boards over what it doesn't want things to climb, but this was about sending a language upriver. He stalked them by smell and by memory of a hundred such hunts. They tried to pretend they were floating refuse. He pretended to believe them. When they lunged, he did not move at all, and they learned what silver means when it refuses to be surprised.
He marked a shallow oxbow east of the gate where the river waded like a tired cow. There, he set another circle, pulled three of the lank, green-brown bodies into it, and blooded it with a slow cut to each neck. Their breath wheezed like broken flutes. The circle drank. He marked their minds with one command repeated until even the dumbest nerve learned: No human, no boat, no net, no dock. Only Marsh. Only Beast. Only North. He shoved them off into the slow water and watched the surface remember what it had been doing before he arrived.
Day Three: glassblower's street, belts of cold at noon and heat at midnight. He knew the feel of a nightwraith's perfidy before he turned onto the lane. He killed her. It was clean. Moon dust to make lies crumble, a silver through the hum that kept her upright, a word at the right pitch that tells a thing it is already gone. He took the strands of cold that clung to her and the dust that she made when the world remembered she had been a story and not a fact. He talked to the glassblower's wife in the doorway. "Salt across the lintel," he said. "Two iron nails on a string. No singing at the window for a month." She nodded with a seriousness that would keep her child alive. He did not bind wraiths. He let the dead stay that way.
Day Four to Six: endrega. First the drones—worker lines in the foundry bracken, pale green shells and the wishing-stick sound their legs make when they think no one hears. He put a circle under a woven frame, dropped it on a cluster as they scrabbled over a dead boar, nicked them one by one until the circle had drunk enough to know they were his. The drones took orders beautifully—no thoughts in the way, no ethics to consult, mere function waiting for aim. He sent them along the root-roads, six in a file, a seventh one flanking like a shepherd who had forgotten what lambs are.
The warriors were harder—he liked them for it. Bigger, faster, a flash of pushing violence that broke men's ankles because men forget that the ground gets a vote. He used stakes—a line of seven, head-high on him, chest-high on the endrega. He let one impale itself by its own arithmetic, dragged it backward without pity, and smeared its blood across the circle with the same unremarkable calm he used to butter a heel of bread. It fought longer. It submitted exactly the same way. You don't talk to machines. You load them.
On the sixth day he found the arachas. Willow-copse, as promised: a good-sized matriarch, webbing and earth bolstered into a low dome and half a deer left under it to rot just so. He paused. He did not take mother-things lightly. But this one had worked too close to a charcoal-burner's hovel, and a boy had bled on the leaf-litter the previous afternoon because he had thought the world owed him one glance up.
He brought the dome down with a chopping pole and a hook—on the web, not the body. She charged and he let the shafts take the brunt and let his feet do the rest. He baited the mandibles with silver and oil, let her commit to the taste of the thing that for once would not move, and in the moment she adjusted to chew, he ripped the hem of the dome, bled her on the circle, and finished the bond before she could decide she was allowed to be anything but his. It took longer to make her walk out of there without eating him than it had taken to bind her. He did not mind. She had a better right to resist than most. You do not farce yourself into the business of understanding something that isn't human just because you know how. You order it. You keep the orders simple.
Day Seven: he stood on the roof of the bridge-house and watched the sky for Viv. When she came, black against far gray, she dipped once and sent him an image that was more feeling than picture: lines moving where no men walk, beasts feeding on beasts, no huts, no smoke, no fire. He sent gratitude down the string of their connection—light, unadorned. She took it and whirled away.
He harvested during the walk-days. Spirits do not care about schedules, and wraiths love weeks when men are tired from honest work. He answered three small notices in the Church Quarter where the priests wish they did not need men like him and then remember what their lips say when their people are afraid. Noonwraith at the flax; penitent at the third stone yard; one night hag that had traded its last secret for teeth. He took dust, hair-thin threads of charm, bits of bone that had forgotten what names are. He placed what he did not need in the temple box with no explanation and no request for thanks. He did not bind the dead. He unmade them.
Week Two slid into Week Three like a river over a smooth rock. He sent a drowner-swim through the reed-choked south cut—low water, slow movement, mist even at noon. He bound a bruxa's feral ghoul pets in a cellar where she had woven curtains over two bones and a pathetic lie, then killed her neatly because he does not tolerate the pretense of love built out of hunger and night. He skipped the damp cave where a leshen had taken root beside a spring and crossed himself with a habit learned on a different road because he had promised not to drag a mind that remembers its oldest tree from its place to satisfy a month's need. He warned a woodcutter who would have fed his ax to the spirit with a song in his throat and lying salt on his boots. The woodcutter looked at him and saw only a man with white hair and an unromantic way of telling the truth. That would keep him better than charms.
He learned the streets so well that he could have walked them blindfold—the turn at the cobbler's could be cut if the fishmonger's cart had gone early; the alley behind the soap-boiler's would reek on Thursdays, and smell mattered if a thing that hunted by it had taken to following his least shadow. He cleaned the villa at midnight, not from vanity, but because chalk dust breeds where men are tired and chalk dust would be the thing that killed a child if it got into a cup. He slept three hours a night if the city was quiet and one if it sang.
He sent the fourth convoy on Day Ten: endrega, three drones and a warrior, a new alghoul who had thought he could kill what had already been told where to put its feet, and five nekkers who had learned patience in a single gouge of blood. He added rules for the alghoul: if the warrior displays challenge, give way and follow at two lengths; if the warrior falls, assume command and carry on. He changed nothing about the nekkers. They were happiest not thinking.
Day Eleven, he sat on the villa's rear steps with a pot of boiled eggs and tore shell by habit. The notices had started to change. Fewer screams. More polite requests to "consult." He ignored most of them. A witcher who stays too long in sight becomes furniture. Furniture is not allowed to refuse being touched. He took one "consult" because it came from a brickmaker missing three men and one woman. He found the bone-mire where the endrega had been taking their cut. It was empty. His orders had removed the reason for these letters to exist. Around the mire, mushrooms had begun to return, the white kind children blow into the air for wishes. He stepped around, not through them. You do not crush the seed of peace with a boot when the month claims you.
On Day Twelve, he went south of the ropewalk to address the screams there. The ropewalk was a story already told: a place where men once wound fiber and now wound fear. He found a night-wraith's nest built out of frayed twine and rat-skins and one ribbon that had held a woman's hair while she worked. He undid it without ceremony and salted the ground. He took the specter dust that would help him bind nothing and kill everything that should not be here and left the ribbon on the ropewalk's gatepost as a signal to the foreman: go back to work if you can do it with a conscience; if not, move the work five paces and see if the world becomes honest there.
On Day Fifteen, he caught a foglet by accident. It had taken to prancing beside a marsh-track and hiding when men looked the way boys hide behind a chair too small for their ambition. Cunning is not the same as intellect. It lunged and he let it slip its own grasp, then pinned it through the calf to make it bleed where he needed it. He bound it knowing this one would test him harder. Foglets are made of patience. Commands have to be timeless. He simplified. Do not seek. Do not speak. Do not show. Walk. Hunt only feral things whose breath you can hold in your own without learning how to say their names. If light touches you, you are a shadow. If men shout, you are wind. If anyone offers you bread, you are not. The foglet shivered and left like a shrug.
He sent the biggest party on Day Seventeen: two arachasae (the matriarch had found a male and nearly killed him; he bound him and decided almost dying should mean you get given a job), six endrega-drones, one warrior, a padded, sullen ghoul that had outlived its bruxa and did not know what to do with its hands now, ten nekkers, three alghouls. He threaded their orders like a rope. Do not eat each other. Do not touch the road if the sun is a coin too bright to look at. Carry on. Carry on. Carry on.
He knew men would start to see them despite his rules. You cannot move that much function across that much country and not rattle something that thinks fear is a talent. Viv flew the route every second day, ghosting them with a shadow that looks like omen enough to shut a gossip down. He relayed what she sent: campfires snuffed, woodsmen who decided ale is colder in towns and went home early, one pack of wolves that tracked the train for a day, decided they did not like its taste, and found something more elegant to be themselves about. He let himself be pleased. The work pleased him when it went right and when it went right without anyone knowing they had been kept safe, it pleased him twice.
On Day Nineteen he slept an hour with his boots off and woke to the smell of rain. Rain was good. It would wipe his chalk off the places that shouldn't remember him and slick his monsters' tracks so that even a hunter who wants to be clever will think he is looking at deer.
He killed three more spirits by Day Twenty-One. He denied four more the right to keep playing at being men. He took what should be taken from their unreal mouths and left nothing anyone's children could find and make a game of. He harvested two penitent tears—rare, like a pearl in a cheese—and sealed them in the clay jars. He would use one to teach a boy later that forgiveness works the way the world works: sometimes you get it because you earned it, sometimes because the person you wronged decided to stop carrying it like an anchor.
By Day Twenty-Three, the city's edges breathed easier. The notice board felt less like a wound and more like a list one could read without tasting copper. The glassblower had slept five nights. The brickmaker had hired a second man. The ropewalk had sanded the posts where rot had flirted with permanence. Vengerberg is not a grateful city. It is a busy one. That would do.
He sent the last convoy on Day Twenty-Four: ten drowners from a far cut that had decided dog tastes like victory; eight nekkers (you never run out of nekkers; they're proof that gods like jokes); one foglet; two alghouls; one endrega warrior that had survived a fight with a boar and remembered, once held, how to follow a thing without fighting it. He watched them go from the bridge, river grim as pewter, sky ready to make the world wet. He put this command into the bond so hard he tasted the circle: The last two miles, crawl. If a bird lands on you, you've gone too fast. If you hear laughter, lie down. If you see smoke, be gone. When the mountain smells like iron and old oil, stop, and the men who live where the stones know their names will tell you where to sleep.
On Day Twenty-Five, he scrubbed the villa. He dismantled the circles and burned their crumbs in the hearth. He rolled the hides and tucked them into oilskin. He packed his jars and wrapped them in wool and wedged them behind his smaller chest where a thief will find a bigger one and leave satisfied. He wrote a single line on a sheet torn from a ledger and slid it under the notary's door: One month complete. No damage. He left a coin too large with it to satisfy the city's appetite for being paid twice.
He left a payment in a different currency in the glassblower's cart—two bottles of river-sand that had been charmed for clarity by a woman who still loved him in a way that made her angry; he had bought them for a favor he never needed and now the gift needed to leave his hands. He left a payment at the ropewalk—three clean steel hooks, forged at Kaer Morhen, to replace the ones someone's grandfather had bent and never fixed. He did not leave his name. That kind of name is the worst kind of trouble.
He took the back door. He went by the fishmonger's just as the man hung the morning's catch. He bought one because you always buy one when you leave a place by the river; it tells the river you understood it. He fed Viv a strip and she made the low noise she makes when she remembers the sky is full of work and the work is not complicated yet. He walked out of Vengerberg as a man with a package under his arm and a month in his pockets and an entire line of mindless obedience moving through the trees toward a keep that could use them to keep people alive.
He did not speak to the monsters he had claimed. He did not pretend they needed to be thanked. They were his orders made flesh and chitin and water and hunger. They would guard what he told them to guard and eat what he told them to eat and die where he told them to die if it came to it. It would not come to it soon. He had chosen well and ordered better.
He killed every wraith and specter that deserved to be ash and nothing where he found them. He harvested what his craft would use to keep such things from growing back. He did not clean the city of its rot; no one can. He cleaned it of the rot that can be moved with hands and the rot that will listen to a calm voice that does not stutter when it tells the night its work is finished.
On the ridge above the river, he stopped to watch the water pretend to be new. He tasted the air for rain and found it. He breathed. He had spent twenty-five days inside other people's worries. He had made monsters into a wall he could trust. He had left the dead where they belonged and the living where they could go on.
The villa would be rented next month to someone who likes apricot blossoms and the idea of a view. The city would forget him exactly as it should: a man with white hair who paid on time and did not make noise. The monsters would arrive at Kaer Morhen in lines that would not look like war to anyone who didn't understand function. Vesemir would smell mud on them and remember how to make a voice that monsters understand. The children would sleep through a night in which nothing with teeth tested the door. Viv would circle, pleased with sky and consequence.