Geralt's Arc

Chapter 6 of 17

The dragon was gone, and Geralt had nothing. No name for the one who chained it. No trail down the mountain but the one he and Rain had climbed. They rode two days south to the nearest town, and he turned the problem over the whole way. Someone had bolted a living dragon into stone and left it to rot. That took power, coin, and hate. Somebody had seen it done. Somebody always did. They found the market first, a wide sprawl of stalls under bright awnings. Weapons hung on one wall. Barrels of spice and dried fruit crowded the aisles. Geralt moved through it slow, listening. He asked a smith about old prisons in the peaks. He asked a trader in furs about strange work done long ago. Most looked at his white hair and swords and turned away. A Witcher asking questions emptied a stall faster than a fire. "You frighten them," Rain said. She walked at his side, cold and sharp in her purple dress, and the crowd parted for her the way it fled from him. "Let me try." She stopped at a spice trader's table and spoke soft. Coins changed hands. The old man leaned close and muttered. Geralt watched her face harden as she listened. They took the news into the tavern across the way, a two-story house with a warm common room and a painted sign above the door. Geralt bought two ales he did not want, only for the right to sit and talk. Rain waited until the serving girl left. "He knew the story," she said. "Everyone here is too young. But the dragon was chained by a mage. One powerful enough to carve those runes and hold a dragon still while he bolted it down." She wrapped both hands around her cup. "A sorcerer. One of mine." Geralt set down his ale. "You know him." "I know of him." Her voice dropped lower. "He was cast out of our order for what he did to living things. We thought he was dead. He is not." She met his eyes. "He has a tower in the eastern marsh. The trader's grandfather saw the wagons carry the chains east." Geralt sat with that. His hunt was not over. It had only changed shape. The monster was not a beast in a cave. It was a man in a tower, and now that man had a place on the map. "You could turn back," he said. "He's your kind. Not mine." Rain shook her head. "That is why he's mine to answer for." She held his gaze without flinching, and the cold in her face was not aimed at him anymore. "East, then. Together." Geralt drank. He had a name he could not speak yet, a place he could ride to, and a sorceress who no longer looked at him like a killer. The trail was open. It led east, into the marsh.