(A/N: Believe it or not. Before I realised that I was spectacularly bad at, and utterly uninterested in the subject, I studied Physics at university. So before I get a torrent of comments on the subject along with various people telling me that that was not what the thought experiment was about, or telling me that the inclusion of a Cat Witcher named Schrodinger was just an Easter egg. I want to let people know, up front, that I absolutely realise this. As I say, I studied physics so I know who Erwin Schrodinger was, why he was an important thinker and what the thing about the cat was about.

I laughed at the inclusion in the game and the joke about nobody knowing whether he was alive or dead.

But the story teller in me wanted to know why no-one knew whether he was alive or dead in the context of a story set in the Witcher universe. So that's what I'm doing here.

Also, as a reminder before similar criticisms turn up. I came up with my idea of what the Feline Witcher Fortress was before, as far as I know, it was decided that the Cat fortress was a travelling caravan of Witchers. I wish I had known that before I started writing up my own ideas. I like the idea of a travelling circus of Witchers and can think of many stories around that.)

(Warning: Freddie continues to use terms that might be considered racist and insensitive to modern readers. But please be assured that I would never use such language myself and that he is approaching the situation from ignorance and the fact that such things are outside of his experience.

Also, considerable discussion about mental illness (again). A reminder that Kerrass, Freddie and the rest don't really have the language or the knowledge to deal with this kind of thing so bare that in mind while you read)

-

The new Witcher's name was Schrodinger. Among the very first things that I said to him was to say, rather stupidly, that it was an unusual name and that I hadn't heard anything like it.

“Neither have I,” he told me in his strange accent. “If you do find someone who looks like me, sounds like me or has a similar name to me then please, let me know. I have been from one end of the continent to the other. I have travelled as far south as it's possible to go before you reach the end of civilisation. I have travelled beyond the northern mountains and explored the great tundra beyond it before having to turn back due to lack of provision and lack of work. In doing so, I have seen a lot of strange things. But I have never heard anyone who talks like me, who looks like me, or has a name close to what mine is.”

During our short journey from where Schrodinger ambushed me to where his camp-site was, it had been explained to me that Schrodinger had become a Witcher, just passing his trials a couple of decades before Kerrass himself. We hadn't had chance to go into too much detail but it seemed that Kerrass considered him as a kind of peer figure rather than an elder figure. Where Eskel was Kerrass' closest Witcher friend, Schrodinger acted as a kind of Elder brother, teasing and haranguing him as we walked.

He was an interesting man. Utterly outside my experience of Witchers. Every single Witcher that I've met was kind of closed off, taciturn, withdrawn and stoic. They are the outsiders of civilisation that look in on everything, observing and watching. Only small gestures giving away what they are thinking at even the best of times. A slight upturn of the lips in place of a smile. A slight hooding of the eyes in place of a frown and a slight gritting of teeth instead of a raging torrent of anger. Instead of this, Schrodinger was like an open book.

In the short time that I had known him since he leapt out at me from the bushes to the point where I was now sitting in his camp, he had laughed aloud more than Kerrass had in our entire relationship together.

I liked him. I didn't know whether a true and lasting friendship was possible as we had only just met, but I liked him a great deal. He was the kind of man that you find yourself telling your innermost secrets to, your deepest worries and your deepest fears. He has that trick of laughing with you at your own mishaps rather than making you feel as though he's laughing at you.

He had taken to me like another long lost brother, embracing me firmly and apologising for frightening me.

The entire thing felt really strange. Kerrass was beside himself with glee, all but leaping about from one foot to another in excitement, asking over and over again if she was here and where she was. For the other man's part Schrodinger smiled indulgently and told Kerrass that she was staying in camp so as to not lead any other travellers to the camp quite as easily and Kerrass sped off. It was as though he was a small child again, having been promised a treat that had long been anticipated. Like a child at Yule rushing from his bedroom in the early hours of the morning in order to open all the presents.

Schrodinger caught my gaze at the time and rolled his eyes in mock exasperation before linking his arm through mine and leading me down into the valley. The camp-site that I was led to was like a larger version of the same camp-site that Kerrass had instructed me to build all that time ago, but there was a certain “lived in” quality to it all that I found enticing. It was set outside a cave mouth, On one side it was backed by a large pond. This was fed from a stream forming a waterfall that fell down the rocks that formed the cave, the water then draining out the other end. I could see three possible routes for entry and or exit which meant that there was likely to be a couple more than that in reality, as Witchers never like to get boxed in wherever they camp. There was a large fire pit and I could see several frames on which were the stretched out skins of various animals. I could see boxes of supplies as well as an impromptu mattress that had been made out of blankets and straw along with a frame and tarpaulin that was obviously meant to keep the rain off.

“There is an alchemy lab inside the cave.” Schrodinger told me while we were approaching. “I have spare blankets and bed-rolls if you are going to be spending the night. Food is plentiful so you don't need to worry about that either.”

Schrodinger fussed over me like a house proud old woman. Setting out bed-rolls with a brief question as to whether or not Kerrass still snored while putting water on to boil so that we could have a hot drink. He showed me where he washed his clothes after suggesting that my brief mud bath would necessitate some....freshening up. Then he apologised for tipping me over into the mud with a slight but small smile. Needless to say we both blamed Kerrass for the temerity to not warn us both, properly, as to what was going on.

I bathed in the pond after being reassured that the water was clean and relatively pure but that I shouldn't drink from it due to the swamps and things feeding into it. Apparently the pigs and other herd animals in the woods drained into the stream and the others like it so it was always better to not risk it. He told me that he had a water purifying set up inside the cave which provided his drinking water but also fed his still.

“Never assume that a Witcher's alchemy skills are only for the proper brewing of potions and oils my friend,” he told me.

After also being reassured that I wasn't going to insult or offend “her” whoever she was, I stripped off my overclothes and leapt in to the pond. After which, a fire was built and my clothes soon dried out in the face of that double onslaught.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“You will meet her soon enough.” He told me. “She is currently deciding what to make of you and whether or not she likes you.”

“What happens if she doesn't like me?”

“Then we must hope that I can persuade her not to kill you.”

Something on my face must have tickled him as he soon fell about laughing. “I am joking my friend,” he said. “Not all of us share Brother Kerrass' sense of humour or the dour nature of the Wolves. I myself have been known to crack a joke once or twice a year at least.”

“That many times?” I made to sound amazed.

“Oh you would be surprised.” He stroked his face in thought as I got dressed. “So you must be Lord Frederick von Coulthard and if I recall properly, you are not appreciative when other people call you Freddie.”

“I think that that ship has sailed if we are being honest with each other.”

“Mmm, It is a wise man who knows when to accept things that he has no control of.”

“Thank you. But I am far from a wise man.”

“But isn't that something that a wise man would say? After all, did someone not say that a foolish man knows how much he has learned but a wise man knows how much he still has to learn.”

“Someone did. I don't know who though. Must be one of those things that I still have to learn.”

He laughed again. It was an infectious laugh and it seemed to echo.

Most people that I've ever met, and most people that you've ever met if you're honest with yourself, tend to laugh rather quietly, they don't want to embarrass themselves so they restrain their laughter until they figure out whether anyone else is going to laugh with them. Then, if more laughter does emerge they can start laughing a bit louder themselves.

Schrodinger clearly didn't agree with this philosophy himself and whenever he felt as though there was something worth laughing about, he laughed. Laughed, long and loud until he chose to stop. Kerrass is my subject when it comes to following a Witcher around and noting down how they work. When meeting Letho off to the north, I could see similarities between the two men. Their taciturn approach being the most obvious along with certain dry elements of their humour. Lord Geralt, Eskel and the other wolves that I have met are the same. Dry men, withdrawn from the majority of society with a mocking sense of humour who relax and warm up when they get to know you.

But this man seemed different. I suddenly had a burning desire to see how he worked. Thoughts rushed through my head about how things would have been different if I had met this man first. How would that first hunt have gone with the Nekkers. Would we have found who killed my father that bit quicker? Would I be engaged to marry a Vampire. I certainly wouldn't have encountered Marion, the woman who taught me a little bit about allowing myself to love....

Would we have found out what happened to Francesca?

So many thoughts that it was a little dizzying.

Fortunately I was saved by Kerrass emerging from the undergrowth with Schrodinger's companion and I felt my mouth open.

“Well that explains a few things.” I heard myself say.

“It often does.” Schrodinger commented in my ear. “Try not to stare though. She thinks it's rude.”

“She would be correct.” I commented, forcing myself to turn away so that I could try and process what I had seen.

“Would you like a drink now?” Schrodinger asked, grinning from ear to ear.

“Yes please.”

He pulled on a rope that was tied to his canopy. “She sometimes has that effect on people.”

A glass bottle rattled across the pebbles that made up the floor of the small beach that led down to the water. Schrodinger caught it up and pulled the cork out the top, sniffed the neck and passed it over.

“Take it slow. My moonshine is powerful stuff.”

I took a swig. He was not wrong about the power in the liquid. “I suppose it's one of those things that Witchers need to brew powerful stuff so that they can even feel it.”

“You would be surprised my friend, you would be surprised.”

I took another swig and turned to watch as Kerrass set up a chess board on the ground before sitting opposite the board, legs crossed with an expectant expression on his face. His opponent looked down on him magnanimously and with the air of great patience, snorting occasionally as Kerrass put the pieces out in the right order. Kerrass played white and advanced with one of his pawns. His opponent snorted and carefully, but precisely, pushed one of her own pawns forward with the tip of her horn.

Schrodinger's companion was a unicorn.

No matter what you're thinking about that image. I'm telling you that you are definitely wrong. Some of you might be imagining the stuffed unicorns that some people buy in order to have one sat in the corner of their room as a kind of ornament or furnishing. A talking point or a conversation starter. You might have even seen one. But trust me, those ornaments and furnishings are nothing compared to the real thing. I keep meaning to look into it but I too have seen these things and I am now convinced that these things are the creations of enterprising artisans and are not the product of killing a unicorn and stuffing it.

For a start, I have difficulty imagining anyone but the most hardened and experienced warriors hunting and taking down a unicorn if it was ready and able to fight.

You might be imagining a drawing with charcoal and chalk that children have made. The kind of thing where the unicorn looks cartoonish with a trailing rainbow coming out of the things tail. This is also not the case.

Unicorns are not colourful. Unicorns are not cuddly. Unicorns are not a fucking cartoon. A unicorn is a living breathing thing.

Lets break this down a little bit. For a start, there is no mistaking it for a horse. There are similarities. Unicorns have tails, a mane, a similar elongated head, hooves, four legs and biting teeth. But the musculature is different. Much more pronounced in the unicorn. We breed horses for different things. If you tried to take a cart horse to war, or used it as a long term riding horse, then you wouldn't get very far. Nor if you used a riding horse to pull a wagon, or a warhorse for that matter. This means that to a trained eye, even with a relatively small amount of training, even if you don't know the breeds in question, then you can look at a horse and tell the difference. Cart horses with their huge feet and massive shoulders. War horses with their spirit and the way that their hooves move that little bit more precisely. Riding horses which are much smaller relatively speaking.

This was not like that. Her musculature was different and it took me a while to figure out why. The difference was that she had chosen how she wanted to work. She had never been bred for a specific purpose. She was just there. It was a subtle difference overall but you could see it. Anyone who spent any amount of time around horses at all, would see the difference. Calling her more beautiful would be incorrect as well. The aesthetics of the animal were just different, that's all. If there was a way to describe it then what I would say is that the unicorn looked....more natural. It's the only term that really works for me. She looked like she was the product of nature rather than the product of being bred for a purpose.

The closest equivalent I can think of was....Elves and humans look fairly similar. Please don't be insulted by that but it's true. Both races have two eyes, a mouth, teeth, two ears, a tongue, similar facial structure along with two arms, two legs and similar, if not identical, sexual organs as well as digestive tracts and breathing apparatus. But if you put a human next to an elf you would be able to tell the difference. That would be what it looks like to have a horse and a unicorn stood together.

I don't know if Unicorns and horses can breed and I didn't dare ask her. I suspect that it would be the equivalent of asking a werewolf to mate with a dog. And a stupid dog at that.

That was the next difference.

I am not an expert horseman. I am not nearly.... interested enough to be an expert in horses. But there are clever horses and stupid horses. You can normally tell the difference if you spend enough time with the horse in question.

Looking at the way the Unicorn behaved...There was just....She was easily as intelligent as many humans that I have met. She was probably more intelligent than me. And you could just tell as well. It was the way she moved and the way she looked at people. In the same way that you can tell about things going on behind the eyes of certain kinds of people. When the Unicorn lifted her eyes from the board to look Kerrass in the face, you could tell that there was something going on there. There were thoughts, coherent sentences and structure to those same thoughts.

That was another difference but the last difference was the thing that stood out to me. She was no-one's cartoon. She was no child's drawing or dream of romance. She was a terrifying creature, sorry, a terrifying person. She was a warrior and a poet and a soldier.

Her hooves did not sparkle. There was certainly a certain amount of sparkle and yes there was an aura of a rainbow about her. She was certainly magical but she was also frightening. The closest thing that I could define about this was this.

Her horn was not golden. It glittered and shone, like burnished steel and I knew what it was that had caused some of those puncture wounds in the people that the herbalist had seen. This was not a wand that she waved in order to summon the magic. This was a weapon. The weapon of a warrior born.

That was what she reminded me of. She was a soldier. She was a warrior and a fighter and she had the battle-scars and the memories and nightmares to show for it.

My heart ached and fled from what she showed me. I have never met anyone, or anything like it.

“You're actually doing quite well.” Schrodinger said, intruding on my thoughts. “You haven't drooled, passed out, spontaneously soiled yourself, orgasmed or haemorrhaged anything so you're doing quite well.”

“Does that happen often?”

“You might be surprised.”

“If you know who I am then you must also know who I am engaged to be married to.”

“True, is that how you reacted to meeting her for the first time?”

“You mean with the drooling, passing out, soiling myself, orgasming or bleeding from various orifices?”

“Yes.”

“Well, to be fair, I was already doing a lot of those things, but then again I had been poisoned just before hand so I wasn't really in control of my bodily functions. I wasn't orgasming though because as I recall she looked rather a lot like a corpse at the time.”

“Did the orgasming thing happen later?”

“Maaayyybe.”

I had to force myself to turn away from the sight of a Unicorn playing chess with a Witcher. It was one of those mythic images that I have seen occasionally while out on my travels with Kerrass. The sight of a Witcher on the edge of town waiting to see if someone was going to hire him. The undeniable power of a knight's tourney in Toussaint with pennants and flags flying high in the air. The coronation of an Empress. The flight of a Royal Griffin as it takes down it's prey. All of these things and the many things like them are the kinds of sights that make me wish that I could paint. In order to ensure that those moments could be immortalised forever rather than in my imperfect pencil sketches or in my rather clinical prose.

But this was a new one. So strange and otherworldly that the other thing that it made me think, was that even if I had managed to paint it, no-one would ever believe that it had happened.

But I forced myself to turn away and took another drink from the bottle that I had been given. Schrodinger was grinning at me.

“I uh.... I have a few questions.” I stuttered out.

“I thought that you might.”

I took a few deep breaths in order to properly settle myself.

“So I suppose that I'll start with the most basic of questions then.” I took another swig of the rather fortifying hooch that was actually rather pleasant once you got over the truly astonishing alcohol content.

“Please do.”

I took a deep breath. “Who are you?” I asked him.

He laughed.

“I take it that you mean that in the grander scale of things.”

“I do really yes. Otherwise there is no point. I know that you're name is Schrodinger. I know that you are a Witcher of the Cat school?”

He raised his eyebrows at my question but he nodded.

“I also know that you are the most unusual looking man that I've ever seen.” I went on.

He grinned at that.

“I know that your accent is not one that I recognise and I'm pretty wildly travelled as people go in this kind of thing.”

He nodded.

I thought for a while before shrugging after deciding that there was only so much that you could do in order to protect someone's feelings. “You travel round with the most unusual travelling companion that I have ever heard of.”

“Not an unfair observation.” He commented “Also, coming from a man who travels with a Witcher. Not a common experience itself, despite Cousin Geralt's activites.”

“I also know that I've never heard of you. That's not necessarily a massive thing if I was just someone on the street but I've spent the last.....two years really, studying Witchers. Kerrass has never mentioned you. Neither did Gaetan of the Cat school when I met him. Certainly none of the other Witchers that I have met have ever mentioned you and I'm pretty sure that I would remember a name like yours.”

“That is entirely deliberate on my part, I have to say.” He smiled. “I have worked hard to move through the world without affecting it beyond on a professional level. My brothers know not to go on about me and as for the cousins....”

(Freddie's note: It seems that Witchers refer to people of other schools as “cousins” and people from their own school as “Brothers”.)

“.... Those that I have met have understood my problems.”

“So can I ask a few basic questions just to get the conversation started?”

“Please.”

“Where are you from?”

He told me briefly about the fact that he had no idea where he was from and about his travelling habits in looking for where he might find his people.

“Do you not remember?”

“No I don't.” He told me. “Everyone has a different reaction to the mutations but my reaction was that I lost the entirety of my memory. It was as though the chemicals just reached into my brain and just removed them like a doctor might remove a limb.”

“So you have no idea where you come from?”

“No.”

“Did the older Witchers not tell you?”

“It was not really a focus of our conversations. I was still too busy relearning how to walk, feed and clothe myself that kind of thing. Muscle memory is a wonderful thing and it remembers much more than the brain does but by the time I had finished my training after all of that, The prospect of needing to know who I was didn't seem as important somehow.”

“But they told you your name.”

“Yes, and my peers kept telling me that as well so I know that it isn't made up. I would almost believe it were made up more if it had been something more boring. Like Thom, or Jon.” He grinned suddenly. “Or Kerrass for that matter.”

“You are aware that I can still hear you right?” Kerrass piped up from where he appeared to be losing badly.

“Attend,” came a voice, seemingly from nowhere. “You cannot afford to let your concentration wander.” It was a woman's voice and the overtones in my skull seemed to suggest that the voice belonged to an extremely attractive woman as well.

“I communicate telepathically.” She told me. Kerrass' opponent had lifted her gaze to mine which was when I realised that I was talking to the Unicorn.

“Oh.” I said before nodding slowly. “That would make a certain amount of sense yes.”

The telepathic contact felt different than it did when I talk to Ariadne. With Ariadne I get a sense of her moving around the place. I get the feel of the room around her, a sense of what she's doing and what she's thinking. I can feel the water on her skin and the clothes around her body. She is looking forward to trying out the sensual and sexual possibilities of this in the future, something that I am beginning to find a little intimidating.

She has a list of things that she wants to try when it comes to sex, showing off, not for the first time, that she approaches life like a scientist examining it from every angle. Physical lovemaking while we are also telepathically linked is on this list. I have told her several times that although I am more than up for trying things out but that I look forward to doing simple things like examining what her body feels like underneath my fingers and trying out all the many and wondrously varied uses we could find for a bed. She always laughs at this and says things like “Well we can do all of those things as well,” in a tone of mental voice that suggests I'm being uncommonly stupid.

But this telepathic contact almost felt cold. There was just a voice there. There was none of the extra...feeling of that voice.

How to put this.

If you listen to a person then you are not just hearing that person speak. You are also hearing the echoes of their voice around the room. You are seeing the body language with which they are also expressing themselves. So that the mere sounds of the words used become only a part of what is happening. The difference between listening to the Unicorn speak and hearing Ariadne or any of the other people that I've spoke to telepathically, was like listening to a person speak without being able to look at their body language, or hear the echo of their voice. It was just the noise. I could hear feeling and emotion but it was as though all of the other things that we use in order to communicate with each other had been removed.

That's the closest way I can think of to say it.

“You do not appear to be too surprised by this.” I looked over at her to see that she was gazing at me steadily. Which was when I noticed that her eyes were just slightly more towards the front of her head. They were still more towards the side than you would get in a lot of “predator” species but they were certainly that little bit more towards the front than a standard horse's eyes are. “I have spoken to humans before and they have assumed that they were going insane.”

“Hey,” Kerrass said from where he was frowning at the game board. “I thought we were supposed to be paying attention here.”

“I am,” she said. “I know exactly where all the pieces are. And I know where you are going to move next, as well as the next six moves after that, which is when I will checkmate you.”

He protested wordlessly. A sight that I enjoyed a great deal. Always nice when someone schools him in whatever thing that he was practising.

“I do have some experience in these matters,” I told her. “My fiancée speaks to me through telepathy on a semi-regular basis.”

“Is she a Sorceress?” The unicorn asked. I got a sense of a certain amount of wariness from her at this question.

“She is.” I admitted. “She is also a vampire.”

The Unicorn hissed audibly and bared her teeth as she turned on me. Kerrass looked up, a sudden expression of concern on his face as the Unicorn seemed to dip her head and be preparing to charge towards me, horn extended in order to impale me on the end.

But then Schrodinger started to laugh.

“I told you.” He said wagging his finger at his companion. “I've told you over and over and over again that you need to pay attention to the world around you. You've even seen me reading this man's travel journals and wondered why I was laughing at them. I told you then that the writer was having the misfortune to fall in love with a Vampire.”

“So?” She asked. The mental words almost seemed like a growl. If they had come from a human mouth then they would have come from the back of the throat. Deep and bass.

“So this is that man. He has no blemish on his mind, you know this already don't you?” The way he spoke to her was in the same gentle chiding that a person might use when they are pointing out the error in their spouses thinking. There was still love there and a depth of feeling that was almost touching but there was also a sense of correction, of turning her into the right channels of thought.

“I do,” The Unicorn admitted.

“So the Vampire is not aware of your existence. She does not know that you are here. She is not coming here even now and even if she did, she would probably only be curious and certainly not come with any murderous intent.”

The Unicorn looked sceptical. I don't know how she managed that as it strikes me that scepticism is a complex emotion and I have never seen that on a horse or horse like creature before. But I knew she was sceptical. It felt odd and slightly surreal. It was something about the way she flicked her tail from side to side and the tilt to her head. Maybe the movement of her lips.

I am never going to look at a horse the same way again.

Then she reached a decision. “If Kerrass trusts you then I shall trust you. And if Kerrass trusts her then I shall trust her.”

And then she seemed to just forget about it. Turning back to the game with the intense focus and concentration that she had had before.

“It would seem,” Schrodinger commented, “that Vampires and Unicorns did not really get on historically. Some kind of ancient war from before the conjunction of the spheres.”

I considered this. “I could probably arrange a meeting.”

He laughed. “Much though I think that might be fun to watch as I like the sound of your Countess, I don't think it would achieve anything. Unicorns seem to live in the moment a lot more than any other sentient creature that I've met. A lifetime of war will do that to you.”

I agreed.

For those of you that have not read The Bard's works on the travels of the Empress Cirilla through the different realms of time and space on the back of a unicorn then I will explain this. Unicorns have fought an almost constant war against a race of Elf like beings called the Aen Elle. Not to be confused with the Aen Seidhe which are the Elves that live in our world. Both of these races would describe themselves as being “True Elves” but that is a debate for another time. Unicorns can travel across the magical planes and move through worlds. Their home-world is one shared with these Aen Elle and they have warred over the centuries for control of that place. I cannot imagine that it would have been pleasant. For more information on the subject, I refer you to either the aforementioned works of the bard, or to the works of the Sorcerer Gerhart of Aelle and particularly his book on the subject “The Legends of the Elder Races”.

“But,” Schrodinger went on. “We were talking about my problems.”

“Yes we were. But before we go back to that. How close was I to getting run through then?”

Schrodinger didn't answer that. His eyes just gleamed.

It was not as reassuring as you might think.

“So, as I was saying. As far as I know. I have always looked like this. I looked like this when I woke up after the trials. And by the time I thought to ask, there was no-one around who could answer my questions about my past and where I came from.”

“The prevailing theory when I arrived at the school,” Kerrass spoke up from where he was setting up the game board for another round. “Was that the trials had mutated Schrodinger so that he looked like that and sounded like that.”

“So you are older than Kerrass?”

“That I cannot answer.” Schrodinger said. “I had been a Witcher for a number of years when Kerrass came to the school and we did not socialise. I was grown and mutated and he was just one of many children who we didn't want to become attached to.”

I must have frowned or something because he then answered a question that I had not asked.

“Most of those children die, or worse, so you don't become attached for fear that your heart will break when they die. Which is what they are most likely to do.”

“Seems harsh.”

“But human.” The Unicorn commented from where she was examining Kerrass' first move in the second game.

“And no-one treated me as being odd for the colour of my skin, at the Witcher school, or for the way I talked. We were always gathered from all over the continent anyway so no two of us spoke the same way or behaved the same way. The only etiquette that we shared was the deference to the older Witchers. It wasn't until I actually left the school that it struck me that my skin colour set me apart.”

“I've only really got Kerrass' accounts of the Feline Fortress. Have you read that issue?”

“I have, and with great interest.” He eyed Kerrass over my shoulder. It struck me then that he had positioned himself so that he could watch the Unicorn and Kerrass interact. Whether by design or by instinct but he kept looking over my shoulder to see how they were getting on.

“Did you not ask questions when you got back to the school after that first year on the path? After everyone was treating you differently I mean?”

“No. I just assumed that they were looking at me oddly because I was a Witcher.”

“Ok.” I was finding it quite hard work to get information out of him. He seemed open and honest and he was certainly friendly enough. He just seemed as though he was evading questions. As though he had been doing it for so long that he was now doing so out of a reflexive action. As though it was second nature to him.

I took a deep breath.

“Who are you?”

He laughed. Of course he did. “My name is Schrodinger. I am a Witcher of the Cat school. My skin is black, my hair is brown and I travel around with a Unicorn who refuses to tell me her name.”

“Ok. There it is then. How long have the two of you known each other?”

“A long, long time.”

“Ok. Now I know that you're just playing with me.”

“I am. And I'm sorry. I'm not used to talking to people who don't know who I am.”

It was my turn to laugh.

“Kerrass.” I called turning back to the game where Kerrass was in the middle of conceding the second game. “Who is this man?”

“His name is Schrodinger.” He told me with a slight smile on his face. “He's a Witcher of the Cat school. His skin is black, his hair is brown and.....”

“Go fuck yourself Kerrass. You would not have brought me here if you didn't want me to know more.”

Kerrass considered this. His eyes twinkling for a moment. “That is true.” He admitted. He got up and bowed to the unicorn. “I will beat you one day.” He told her. She snorted in response.

“Then I will hunt.” She said disappearing into the undergrowth.

“Please don't kill anyone.” Schrodinger called into the undergrowth after her. I got a telepathic feeling of disappointment.

“His name is Schrodinger.” Kerrass told me after accepting another bottle from his brother Witcher. “I was first aware of him shortly after I arrived at the Feline fortress. He was among those Witchers that we novices didn't really get to talk to or associate with. The experienced Witchers.” He took a swig, making an appreciative face at whatever it was that he'd just had a mouthful of. “He was right when he said that we don't tend to associate with novices because we know that most, if not all of them, are not going to make it through the trials.

“Which is another thing that we never talk about. Being a Witcher is a lonely life. It's taught to us from a very young age. Even as apprentices we don't even socialise outside our immediate peers as those children that are older than us and more advanced than us are about to die and those apprentices that are younger than us seem so much younger, so much more innocent than we are and it makes us sick.”

“Mmm.” Schrodinger agreed. “We are taught to isolate ourselves. I sometimes wonder whether it was something that was done on purpose. If we are encouraged to do that so that we become self-sufficient and able to stand on the outsides of things easier. So that we can move and walk separately and relish our independence.”

“Schrodinger can also be something of a poet when he puts his mind to it.” Kerrass grinned slyly.

Schrodinger shoved him in the shoulder in response.

“I can see the point.” I said, grinning myself. It was fascinating to see Kerrass with a peer. I know that he had been around Gaetan in Toussaint but to be fair, I had other things on my mind at the time so I didn't really have time to watch how the two of them interacted. But in this case, Kerrass' behaviour was exactly like that of the younger brother. An equal physically and mentally but never losing sight of the fact that the other man was older, more experienced and maybe a little bit wiser. In return he felt as though it was his duty to needle at the older man. To remind him that they were equals in a lot of ways.

In return Schrodinger treated Kerrass with a kind of weary affection. A slight hint of condescension although I thought that it was a deliberate air that had been adopted in order to wind Kerrass up. A way of ensuring that Kerrass never forgot who was the elder here. It was as though they were constantly reminding each other of the social order while also reminding each other what they were both capable of.

“There is a point there.” Kerrass said. “But sometimes it can lead to a sense of weakness. I, for one, can certainly remember several times on the path where I might have wanted to talk things over with a comrade on the path, to discuss what I was doing and where I was going with things. To talk over methods and to exchange notes.”

“It used to happen.” Schrodinger said. “Indeed I can remember that that was part of the point sometimes when we all got back for the winter, where we swapped our diaries and journals over so that we could further our own knowledge about potion ingredients and the differences between Northern Royal banded Griffins and Southern Royal Banded Griffins.”

“I remember.” Kerrass said with a sad smile. “But then the soldiers came.”

“Then the soldiers came.” Schrodinger agreed.

I don't know how to describe how I felt at that moment. I had so many questions and so many potential answers in front of me that I didn't know which way to turn. I imagine it to be like being a miner. You get down the mine and discover that the seam of coal that you found yesterday has turned into a seam of Gold which is studded with Gems. Then you shine your light around a bit and you find that the Gold and Jewels have spread all around your area. You know that you're the only worker here. But you also know that there is more here than you can reasonably expect to extract in a day. Let alone take the stuff off to town to be weighted assessed and turned into capitol. So then you have to know where to start.

A slightly more lewd equivalent would be.... I have spoken about how Kerrass likes to approach taking me to brothels and about how he once paid for me to have “The royal Treatment”. I hope I don't make anyone too upset when I say that the royal treatment consisted of access to several women and as I was sent into the room to begin the debauchery there was an awful, wonderful and terrifying moment where I was surrounded by all of these beautiful women and I didn't know where to start.

That was what it felt like.

“What happened?” I asked.

“To the Feline fortress?” Schrodinger asked.

“Yes. I know that the mob destroyed the Wolves at Kaer Morhen but I haven't really heard, or asked about what happened to the Cats. It never seemed like the right time to ask.”

“You didn't tell him?” Schrodinger asked Kerrass.

“As he said.” Kerrass took a swig from the bottle. “It just never really came up. To be fair though, filling in his gaps in knowledge is part of the reason I brought him here.”

“Part of the reason?” The other Witcher asked.

“Part of the reason. But we need the Unicorn's presence for the rest of it.”

“The fall of the Feline fortress.” Schrodinger mused, stroking his chin with a gloved hand. Then he shook his head and looked at me. “It is not as exciting as all of that I suppose and the honest truth is that we brought that shit down on our own heads.”

He leant forward, taking a long drink from his bottle.

“Kerrass wasn't there.” He said after a long time. “Occasionally he tries to hate himself for that but he wasn't there and that is not his fault.”

“Are you telling me that, or him?” I asked looking over at Kerrass who was hiding his expression behind the bottle.

Schrodinger looked at me with a glint in his eye. “It could go either way.” It really is occasionally off-putting to speak to a Witcher who is cracking jokes. “But, as I say, the truth is that we were betrayed. Two Witchers, of our own school no less, betrayed us and led Redanian forces to our doorstep. A man called Brehen,”

Kerrass hissed at the name. “someone you might have heard of as being called The Cat of Iello.”

“Wow, alright then....” I breathed.

Again, another note for those people who don't know what happened. Everybody has heard about the incident regarding Blavikan where Witcher Geralt was involved in the deaths of seven men and one woman. Even though it is true that, by all accounts, he was forced into those actions and didn't have much of a choice, it would also be true that that incident was a blemish on the reputations of Witcher's everywhere. Particularly that of the White Wolf of Rivia who still carries the name of “The Butcher of Blavikan” and probably will until long after the day he dies.

But there was another massacre that happened before the one in Blavikan. Some argue that it has since been eclipsed by the massacre in Blavikan and maybe it has. Maybe the fame of Geralt contributed to that, that his reputation for heroism means that the supposed murderous actions in Blavikan resonate more and is better fuel for those who want to tar all Witcher as being dangerous, murderous psychopaths.

But the massacre in Iello was something else.

There are many different accounts as to what happened. The thing that tipped the matter over the edge into “massacre” varies according to the accounts. Some claim that the clients refused to pay the Promised price. Some others claim that the Witcher went back on the agreed deal and demanded more money that wasn't forthcoming. More people said that the clients could no longer afford the promised price and when confronted with that, the Witcher in question tried to take it by force. There are other stories of course. That the Witcher had a contract in the town and the guard forbade him from working. That his target was a prominent person in the town. That there were legal problems. It is all a matter of hearsay.

What is agreed though is that a Feline Witcher called Brehan strolled into the town square of Iello and started killing people.

The part of it that I believe on the grounds that a couple of sources agree on the subject, was that the Witcher in question had carried out a contract and that there was a problem with payment. Brehan took a hostage and threatened to kill the hostage unless payment was immediately forthcoming. Unfortunately the unreasonable time limit was ignored and the hostage's blood flowed freely. Then another hostage was killed and another and another until the events in Iello could finally qualify as being called a “Massacre”. From the accounts though, the massacre was horrendous and betrayed a cruelty that the massacre at Blavikan lacked. For what it's worth.

But wherever Witcher Brehan does turn up he has nearly always acted with cruelty and an excess of temper that would mark him as being a dangerous man to approach. I have not heard of him in a number of years and many people suggest that he is probably dead of misadventure on the road.

“But yes it was Brehan and another Witcher named Lexandre.” Schrodinger went on.” I don't know for sure but my understanding is that the two of them had known each other for many years and possibly came from the same class.”

“I've not heard of Lexandre.”

“No reason you should have. He was not unusual really. He had been on the path for forty or so years when he betrayed us and had basically decided that he had had enough. He told Brehan that he planned on leaving the path and Brehan being Brehan went on to concoct a plan. They both hated the feline school. Brehan had been expelled from the school and was considered a renegade by us.”

“Which is saying something.” Kerrass smiled darkly. “To be so much of a scary psychopath that even we, the Cat school, casts you out.”

“Quite.” Schrodinger put in. “But Lexandre just wanted a way to make some money so that he could retire in comfort. So the scheme was that they would steal some of the Witcher secrets of the school before selling them. There's no way of knowing who came up with which part of the plan, but all I know was that a large force of Redanian troops turned up to the keep one sunny summer day when the keep was substantially less occupied and set about killing everyone they found there.”

There was a long silence then.

“Brehan led them.” Kerrass said. “I spoke to Joel afterwards and he told me that Brehan had been at the front, killing the younger students.”

“Yes.” Schrodinger said. “There weren't many of us at the keep at that time. It was the middle of summer so there were only those of us who were involved in training the youngsters that were present. I remember trying to lead the youngsters away, through the tunnels but Brehan, or Lexandre had betrayed us well. At every exit there were more troops, picking off the children with well aimed crossbow bolts. They laughed as they killed and Brehan laughed the loudest.”

Kerrass put his hand on his friend's shoulder.

“They set fires on all the entrances you see.” Schrodinger said. “Kerrass told you that our keep was really a series of caves and caverns and that is true. But it wasn't as heavily patrolled. As I say, most of us were out travelling and working the path. So rather than advance into our territory they just set the fires. I still dream of smoke in the dawn sometimes. When I'm not careful. They knew that we, fully mutated Witchers could breathe poison you see. That we could tolerate the smoke and lack of oxygen. But the kids. The children and the madmen? They didn't stand a chance. I held one kid as he coughed his lungs out and another while he just stopped breathing. Axel and Cedric....”

“Two of the other teachers.” Kerrass whispered to me.

“....tried to cut us a hole through the troops but it was wishful thinking and we all knew it. They were unprepared for the fight and the troops had the back up of mages as well.”

“We think that the mages were after our secrets.” Kerrass went on.

“Yes.” Schrodinger grinned, flashing his teeth. “Unfortunately for the mages Lexandre had betrayed his fellows, snuck in during the chaos and made off with the diagrams and those secrets that he could carry. I laughed for a long time after finding that out.”

“How long ago did all of this happen?”

“Maybe, forty years ago?” Schrodinger asked Kerrass.

“That would be about right. I was down South at that point.”

Schrodinger's smile was sly. “Looking after your princess.

“Yes as a matter of fact.”

“I'm sorry.” I said.

“It was a long time ago. Long before you were born.” Schrodinger told me. “But would you feel uncomfortable if I told you that I can still smell the smoke that they sent down into the tunnels.” His eyes took on a distant kind of sheen to them. You see this kind of thing when people are lost in memories and dreams. “I remember the day light filtering through the soft fuzz of the smoke. The slight green tinge to it that told us it was poisoned. The strange sense of pride that I had in the kids. Not one of them screamed or shouted or cried. Even those who had not been with us for very long. Not one of them cried or got upset. They just...endured. As we had trained them to do.”

Schrodinger stared into space for a long while.

“Some might say that we deserved what happened to us after everything that we have done.”

“Including me by the way.” Kerrass put in.

Schrodinger ignored him. “But those kids... The last I heard, Lexandre was killed when he tried to sell some of the things that he had stolen and I hope that the bastard turns into some kind of spirit so that I can take the contract and send his soul into whatever comes afterwards for traitors.”

“What about Brehan?”

“Brehan is sick.” Schrodinger said with a grimace. “He is a monster now. The same as any kind of rabid troll or hungry Griffin. He's a feral vampire or a Grave hag or some kind of Alghoul. He needs to be put down like the sick cat that he is.”

“You sound like you are almost less angry at him.”

“I am. As I say, he was sick. Just one more Cat Witcher that we failed when we tried to mutate them.”

“That “we” failed?” I asked

Schrodinger sighed. “Yes, that we failed.” He rubbed his eyes. “Forgive me. I haven't talked this much for a long time.”

“It is getting dark,” Kerrass commented. “And Freddie can take some getting used to. Perhaps in the morning we can start talking about how you got yourself into this mess with the village and we can talk about the other reason that I brought Freddie here.”

“There's more than one reason?” Schrodinger grinned at his brother.

“There's always more than one reason.” Kerrass told him. “You taught me that, remember? Teacher?”

“Fuck off.”

“But,” Kerrass turned to me and looked at me strangely for a moment. It was an odd kind of expression. It reminded me, in a strange way, of the way that he had looked at me when we had first started travelling together. Of those times when he would occasionally look at me and decide whether or not he would be better off murdering me in my sleep. “But hold nothing back from Freddie. About me I mean. Tell him everything. I promised him that much recently and he deserves the answers.”

I stared back at him for a moment as the words sank in. Then I frowned.“Wait a minute, what?”

“I'm going off to find us all something to eat.” Kerrass said. “I also want to see what happened to those villagers that were following us. I want to know more about how they think if we're all going to get out of here alive.”

“Wait a minute Kerrass, what answers?”

Kerrass looked at me for a long time. “I wasn't one of the lucky ones Freddie.” Then he turned and strode off into the undergrowth.

“I really fucking hates it when he does that.” I heard myself say. “It's as though he feeds off being the strong and silent man of mystery.”

“He does.” Schrodinger says. “It's his shield. It's all of our shields really. We hide behind them just as we hide behind our fancy sword moves, our signs and our pirouettes. The strong silent type. We don't handle being around people well so we pretend that we've got nothing to say so that when we do actually talk, it ends up sounding like wisdom.”

“I always thought that he did it because it made him attractive to girls.” I commented.

“That's one of the better side effects. But it is a side effect. Kerrass has been using those things and those little assignations to patch over his broken heart for as long as I've known him.”

“And how long is that?” I asked.

“I thought I told you. I was around when he was brought in.”

“You did.” I said with a smile. “But you also dodged the question. You said that he was kind of mixed in amongst the crowds with the other apprentices. I think we would both agree that that isn't really the same as knowing someone.”

He looked at me flatly but there was still a bit of humour in there as well. “I knew that you were clever but that was a little close to the bone.”

“When did you properly meet Kerrass?” I asked. “And why does he think that that's some kind of big secret?”

“He.... I thought we were done with these kinds of questions for the night.” He protested after a moment.

“You said that.” I told him with a smile. “You and Kerrass. I agreed to nothing. I merely agreed with the statement that it was beginning to get dark.”

“Mmm. I would have hoped that some of my hooch might make you feel a bit more tired than you are though.”

“Oh, don't get me wrong. That is undoubtedly having an effect. Enough of an effect even that I have resolved to stop drinking it until I have something to eat or until I get more answers. Correct me if I'm wrong but we are not overly blessed with time.”

“No you are right.” He sighed. “And it's undoubtedly the reason that Kerrass brought you to me. That and whatever this other reason is that he's talking about but let's settle for the main thing for now.”

He peered at the now empty bottle. “Gonna need a refill.” He stomped off and rooted around in a box where he emerged pulling out another bottle.

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“This is not a nice topic.” He said, pulling the cork out of the neck and sniffing the end. “Are you sure you want to know?”

“I always want to know.” I told him. “It's my curse. If you read my journals do you remember the incident when I followed Kerrass into a set of woods that nearly cost me my sanity and my soul, let alone my life, in order to satisfy my curiosity.”

“I do. Both times in fact.”

“Also that time that my curiosity nearly tore my family apart.”

“I think, from memory, that your family had enough going on, that it was in the middle of turning itself inside out without your input anyway. If anything your action and intervention led to a wound being cauterised and a cancer being removed. Yes it hurt and it caused untold damage but your curiosity solved that problem.”

“Or about the time that I insisted upon knowing who “Jack” was.”

“Do not speak his name.” Schrodinger snapped. It struck me as an ingrained and rehearsed response. The kind of thing that you learn from a young age. Like saying thank you after someone gives you something or the fact that you bow towards the King.

“It's even conceivable that it was my curiosity is the reason why I'm marrying a Vampire.”

“Curiosity killed the Cat.” Schrodinger said musingly. “The oldest little proverb and we so often tried to ingrain it into our apprentices. Don't be curious. Don't follow the lines into strange places until you don't know where you are. But in doing so we cut out one of the most important lessons that we have to learn. Do you know what the rest of the saying is?”

“Curiosity killed the Cat.” I said, “But satisfaction brought her back.”

“Yes. It did.” He sighed and took a long drink from the bottle. “Yes it did.”

He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “I was the keeper of the cages.”

I waited for more for what seemed like a good few minutes. “I'm sorry.” I told him. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

He laughed suddenly. “No, no I suppose not.” he took another swig. “I know that Kerrass has told you about the problems with our mutagens.”

“He did. He told me that Feline mutagens, although, theoretically, producing a greater quantity of viable Witchers than any other school, had a significant problem. That being that as well as being more likely to survive the process they were also more likely to be dangerously insane. So insane in fact that they often needed to be put down.”

“That's true. Dangerously insane. That's a nice way of saying it. The slightly more accurate way of saying it would be that we might not have killed them. But we destroyed their minds. It was something about the way that we applied the mutations that seemed to result in the change.

“So instead of killing people you drove them insane?”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“And that's the major difference between you and the other schools?”

He scratched at his chin. “I don't know if it's the major difference, the only difference or what. Do you know about the thing with the Elven blood?”

“I do. Kerrass explained.”

“Did you know about the rumour that The Cat school was created by a bunch of angry Wolven rejects?”

“I had heard that rumour.”

“It's more than possible. I don't know for sure either way to be fair. All of this was happening long before I was born. But it would explain a few things. A group of Witchers unhappy about the way that they were treated during their apprenticeship decided to run away, stealing a bunch of mutagens along the way and deciding that they could do it better.”

“To be fair to everyone involved. I could see that happening. Speaking as someone who all but ran away from home because I didn't agree with the plans that my parents and tutors had for my future. Their plans were a lot less painful than those that apprentice Witchers get made subject to of course.”

“True. I can see it happening as well. If I continue being honest with myself I can also believe that a group of young Witchers thought that they were being created at the whim of mages to become slaves to those same mages. That they just wanted to be Witchers without the input of all of these magic users. I can see that as well.”

“Sooner or later, the children have to leave the parents.” I commented.

“They do. But we've gone of on a tangent now. The points are that instead of killing our apprentices, it was actually more common for us to drive our apprentices insane.”

He looked at my face as though he was looking for something. Some trace of condemnation, maybe sympathy, I'm not sure which but I did my best to try and keep my face as neutral as possible.

“There was still a high mortality rate though. Many still died. But that was the problem, at the end of the day, we were still Witchers. And the problem is that you can tell what is going on when someone dies. We all know what that looks like.”

“Lifeless eyes, lack of breathing, no pulse, that kind of thing.” I agreed.

“But how do you tell whether or not someone was mad? I don't know and neither did anyone else. It's because of this that men like Brehan, may he burn in a fire while being violated by a poker, slip through our checks. We were just looking to make Witchers but they kept slipping through the cracks. Then someone who is slightly less sane than is entirely ideal starts teaching the apprentices and suddenly we're teaching our kids that you shouldn't feel any kind of empathy towards the people that live on the continent.”

“Is that how it happened?”

He shook himself from his train of thought. “What?”

“Is that how it happened. Is that the reason that the term Cat Witcher is synonymous, in some parts of the world, with the term “mad man”?”

“I don't know.”

I stared at him for a long time. I still wasn't sure what to make of this man. He was much more emotional than other Witchers are. He was a lot more friendly, open and.... I wanna say honest about his feelings and intentions. But there was something about him there that I didn't like. There comes a point when you're questioning people and trying to get to the truth when you have to push the person that you're talking to.

“I don't believe you.” I told him.

“What?”

He started to say something else but I cut him off.

“You don't know me but you have to know something. I love Witchers. I do. It's not just that my best friend is a Witcher although that is part of it. Nor is it just because I grew up with the stories of the White Wolf in my ears although that is a part of it too. I love Witchers because they are unique. No-one does what they do. No-one can do what they do. No-one else makes a study of things in order to destroy them. No-one else's ultimate goal is to make themselves redundant. The end goal of every Witcher is to destroy all the monsters in the world and when that's done? They don't know the answer.

“The Empress tells me that there has been another Conjunction of Spheres recently. She also says that there is an increase in monster population which means that more Witchers are needed. Fair enough. I can even believe it what with everything I've seen. But the end goal is still the same. You want to work your asses off to make yourselves redundant.

“Now I've met Wolven Witchers, I've met Bear Witchers, I've met Viper Witchers and I've met Cat Witchers. I've also read and talked to everything and everyone I can reach on the subject of Witchers and the thing I come to over and over again.... The thing I get told over and over again is that Cat Witchers cannot be trusted. That they can't be relied upon. When I first told people that I was travelling with a Cat Witcher I was told that I should flee from him otherwise I would find myself in a ditch somewhere with my throat slit.

“Why is that I wonder? The answer is that many of those stories are probably true. I believe Kerrass when he talks about how the Cats decided that they would change along with the way that the world itself was changing. That they were simply looking for new people to hunt, a new niche to carve out for themselves. But that in doing so, some of them went a little too far or that they got the wrong end of things. That sounds right and I know that he believes it.

“But then you come at me and try to give me some excuse about how you were all taught by madmen and that is an excuse. If I'm honest, that sounds a little bit like putting the responsibility onto someone else because you don't want it.”

“I....”

“Another Witcher told me something important. He told me that what was done to him was monstrous. That in turn that created a monster and that the monster then made more monsters. He went on to say that if there was one thing that redeemed the Witchers as a whole, it was that they had all decided that they would no longer create new Witchers. That they would break this cycle of abuse, neglect and....lets call it what it is.... torture.

“But the way you tell it is that if those troops hadn't arrived. If Brehan and that other one hadn't led them to the Feline keep. Then you would still be doing those things to children and you would be blaming the evil that you committed on a daily basis on some invisible madman that had taught you all that this is the right thing to do. So just to be clear here. Did you, did any of you think, for one moment.... “Hang on. We're going a little too far here”?”

Schrodinger said nothing.

“Just to be clear as well. I've seen Kerrass when he struggles with whatever is going on in his head. I've seen him shake his head to dislodge errant thoughts or ghost voices that he can't control. I've met Gaetan and seen the enormous stress that he puts himself through every time he goes anywhere near people and it's all too easy for me to imagine him just snapping and killing people. I can absolutely see it, and I can absolutely believe it.”

“I thought you liked Witchers.”

“I do. I do like Witchers. And I have a lot of sympathy for what you've been through because this was something that was done to all of you. But don't pass the florin. Don't try to pass the responsibility for your actions and your decisions onto other people. You did these things. You were the school that decided to creep through the night and ambush another school of Witchers. You were the school that led the mob to Kaer Morhen. You are the school that killed itself, by your own story it was your own Witchers that brought doom down upon yourselves. You did that. Not the Wolves or even the Vipers and those men are difficult to like. It's especially reprehensible to blame that on people that can't defend themselves. Madmen are mad and cannot entirely be blamed for their actions. You are sane. Take some fucking responsibility.”

Silence settled over the clearing for a while. My hands shook as I took a drink. I hadn't realised how angry I had gotten.

Schrodinger sighed. “You are right of course even though I do think that you've just hung me out to dry without knowing my story.”

I forced myself to laugh. “I'm sorry. But it really did sound like you were passing the blame on to other people. Mad people at that who can't defend themselves.”

“Which I was really.” He took a swig from the bottle.

I took a deep calming breath.

“So you were the keeper the cages?” I asked.

“I was.”

“What was that? It sounds like a title. I can imagine a fencing master. I can imagine someone training people in the proper use of signs, alchemy and Lore. What was it about the Cages?”

Another difference. I could almost see Schordinger's humour coming back to him. “I'm not sure I should tell you.” He joked. “After all. You might go off on a big diatribe as to how Cat Witchers are evil people who don't take responsibility for their own actions.”

“I might.” I told him. “But, as I've said before. I am too close to the subject now. I know you. I know Kerrass and I can't help but think of you, and Gaetan and Kerrass going through all of these things and, I'm not going to lie. It turns my stomach and even hurts when I come to think of the fact that my friends did these things to each other.”

“It is a problem.” He mused. “And I treated Kerrass worse than most but if you really want an example of the horror that we did to each other. Ask Cousin Geralt about all the stuff that was done to him during his trials. I once teased him by saying that there is a reason that his hair is white and that it wasn't due to the mutations.” He sighed and took another swig from his bottle, only to discover that he had emptied it. “I should stop drinking there until I've eaten something.”

“I thought that Witchers had a tolerance for that kind of thing.”

“We do, but we would be lying if we tried to claim that alcohol doesn't have an effect. How to explain the responsibilities that I had?” He mused.

It was getting really dark now and he started to build a fire as he talked. “Kerrass told you about the cages that we used to keep the dangerously insane in.”

“He did.”

“Well, that wasn't all that the cages were for. Going into the area of the caverns that was set aside for the cages was like walking into a dungeon. Or a Cell-block in a Watch-house. Small boxes made out of metal. Your father was a hunter, I imagine he kept his hounds in cages?”

“He did.” I said, kneeling to help break up sticks to build the fire. “But you would need bigger cages than that to house humans.”

“They were. The problem we had was this. When you come back from your trials and the mutations are taking hold. In the other schools they would tie the person to a bed in order to stop them thrashing around and hurting themselves. Then they would wait to see if the apprentice survived. We did that, but the bed that we tied them to was inside a cage.”

“Why?”

“Because if they survived, there was a good chance that they would set about trying to hurt us as well as themselves. My predecessor at the cages told me that the practise had to be started when one apprentice woke up and set about eating his neighbour. Which poisoned him of course because they were still going through their own mutations. It might be a Witcher legend that we told each other to explain the things we did to each other but...”

“Of course.”

“So we put them in cages. They were not large, I can admit that. Enough room for a bed and for others to go in and examine them and walk around the bed.”

“How about their....their sanitary requirements.”

“You mean chamberpots?”

“Yes.”

“They were dangerous. Both because they could be used as weapons but also because the mad men would throw the contents at passers by. We had still not come up with a solution to that problem when I refused to do it any more. We tried various things. We tried making the apprentices hold the chamberpot while the mad-man did his business.”

“That must have been used as some form of punishment.”

“It was. But then the madman broke free and clubbed the apprentice to death with the chamberpot while his own faeces ran down his leg.”

I took this information in silence as I processed this mental image.

“I'm glad I haven't eaten anything yet.” I told him.

“I have to have some measure of revenge for the earlier comments.”

I grunted but otherwise said nothing. I hadn't meant this to be an interview. I really hadn't thought of it as research or anything of that nature. When you're preparing for an interview or an investigation you need to spend some time thinking about what you're going to ask. Thinking of some quips or jokes that you can use to keep the conversation flowing when one or other of you runs out of things to say. Here though, I was unprepared. It had only been that morning that Kerrass and I had set out from the inn, myself not knowing what we were going to be facing.

Now I was sat across from another Witcher. Another perspective on the hated and feared Cat school of the hated and feared Witchers of the north. It wasn't that I didn't have the questions, it was that I had so many of them that I didn't really know where to start. I wanted to know about Kerrass obviously. That there were some elements of his story that I didn't know was not a new thing. He'd been alive for approaching a hundred years and I only knew a fraction of the things that he had done in that time. So another perspective on that was attractive. But also, this was someone who seemed to know more about Cat Witchers than that. He knew more and I wanted to know it.

My instincts were also about the fact that I felt as though we had come to the crux of the interview. You see, the person that is being interviewed is also aware that they are going to be answering some questions. Which means that, on some level, they are prepared to talk. Even if they don't intend to actually say anything, they are aware that I am after some information and so they are thinking about that information. That's why the best thing to do if you're being interviewed and you don't want to tell anyone anything is not to shout, scream or try to intimidate the person doing the interviewing. Don't try to divert the interviewer, turn the question or initiate a debate. Simply say nothing. Because a skilled interviewer or debater will turn that around on you and before you know where you are, you have told them everything that they wanted to know in the first place and there's absolutely nothing that you can do about it.

Of course, the danger being if the interviewer has access to a torturer but that's a conversation for a different day.

But there is a skill to it and one of those skills is to know when the tipping point of the interview is coming. For those who wonder, the tipping point is that point where the best thing to do is to shut up and just let the person that you are questioning get on with it. Just let them talk. Provide them with silence in order to make sure that they fill it with whatever is on their brain. The overall technique is to ensure that they are thinking of the thing that you want them to tell you about and then just sit back and let them talk.

As I sat there on a blanket that my host had provided for me and watched him, wishing I had my paper and quills with me. I realised two things. The first was that we were no longer having a conversation about the many many things that I wanted to discuss. Instead, I was performing an interview. I didn't ask him as to whether or not he realised this or whether he was angry that his brother (Kerrass) had brought a really nosy bastard (me) to his camp in order to ask a load of really nosy and pointless questions about things that he (Schrodinger) would rather forget.

But I also realised that he was ready to talk. So the best thing to do in this situation is always, and I do mean always, keep your mouth shut.

“I don't know the truth.” He began. “I don't know if the Cat school was founded with Elven involvement because the Elves saw that there was a need for Witchers, or because some people, whether Witchers, mages or a combination of the two, kidnapped a group of Elven children to experiment on them to see if they took to the trials that bit better. I don't know if our school was started by a group of Wolven rejects who thought that they had a better idea of how to create Witchers than the way that they did it at Kaer Morhen. With mages dictation everything about the mutation process and monitoring it and controlling it. I don't know which is true.

“I can absolutely believe both. I can absolutely imagine a Witcher, fed up of being ordered to commit horrible acts on the apprentice Witchers, whether you want to call them children, apprentices or even subjects. I can absolutely imagine a group of clever Witchers, deciding that the Mages were doing it wrong, were being too cruel, pushing it too far, doing things in an awful torturous way for their own ends. Or if you prefer, I can also imagine a group of Witchers deciding that the Wolven mages and masters were being too gentle with their subjects.

“I would like to think the former but you are correct in thinking that that might be naïve to think that way. That the rebellion of the men that became the Cat school was entirely altruistic seems rather far fetched as well. I don't know the answer. I would like to think that the Cat Witchers would look down at the children that they had done these things to and feel a certain amount of pity. Unlikely though that might be.

“What I do know is that the other schools practices were dogmatic. They taught that the Witchers needed to be created in the same way, over and over again. The only school that tried to iterate was the Wolven school, that experimentation resulted in the White Wolf himself who many, including me, would declare to be the greatest Witcher that ever lived. But even for the men carrying out those experiments, the mortality rate of the other subjects was far too high. During a time when the world needed Witchers, One Witcher, even of Cousin Geralt's quality, for the loss of so many other potential Witchers along with the sheer monetary cost of the other alchmical and magical components, that was too much.

“Again, you might call it naivete but I would much rather believe that it was their desire not to put any more children through those horrors rather than their desire to save the money required for those extra procedures that caused them to stop those experiments.

“But no-one else tried to improve the process. No-one else tried to make it better, easier, less painful or less stressful. No-one but us. Is that why it all went wrong? I don't know the answer to that. I hope not but there it is.

“What I do know is that we managed to reduce the mortality rate. And we genuinely managed that. That is an achievement and I for one feel as though we can hold onto that and be proud of that.”

He petered out for a moment. One of the few times that I felt it prudent to add a little goading. “But?” I said quietly.

“But did that directly result in the lack of sanity in the survivors. That is the question that we keep on asking ourselves and we to which we still don't know the answer. I doubt that we ever will. Another one of those questions that will never be answered. In our iterations, we made the process more survivable but is that more cruel? Again, I can't judge that. I do know that more people had a chance at life but I suppose that the human body, no matter how elven in it's make up, is not supposed to take all the stresses and the, let's face it, the torture that we put it through.

“So at the end of the day, did all we achieve turn out to just be an exciting and terrifying way to trap a soul in a body long after it would normally have fled. Would it normally have talked to itself and said the equivalent of “Fuck this, I'm getting out of here,” but because we trapped it inside the body it had no other option but to turn on itself and attempt to cannibalise it's own house in an effort to get out.”

“There is a more troubling notion.” I suggested feeling the need to put my pennies in the jar as it were. “I'm not saying for a moment that this is true and I should say that Theologians have been debating this problem for centuries without coming to a satisfactory answer. But what if the soul, as you say, gave it up as a bad job and left but you kept the body alive. As I say, I'm not saying that for a moment but some people do suggest that that's what madness is.”

He shook his head. “I don't believe that for a moment. I don't. I've dealt with those people who are mad for many years of my life while the trials were being committed and I don't believe it. I saw a man who couldn't help himself but try and put his thumbs through the eyes of everyone that he met. He hated himself for that but all he saw was the condemnation in the eyes of his victims. Even when all there was was pity. He wept at his actions and you cannot hear something like that and not think that somewhere under all of that there is a soul in torment.”

“As I say, I'm not saying I believe it.”

“And there are many other kinds of madness too. The depressions, the tempers, the inability to feel empathy or the failure to process current events into memories of the past. I know that Kerrass has talked to you about all of these.”

He sat in silence for a moment and I judged it best not to interfere. “My school is guilty of a number of things.” He said after a while. “But our greatest crime is that we drove the schools apart. They no longer talked to each other despite the best efforts of someone like Vesemir of the Wolves, bless him. If we could have gone back and shown someone like the Griffins or the Vipers what we had managed to do with the mutation process and prove that the trials could be improved, then what else could we have discovered. Might Witchers now be more dangerous. If we found out how to make the trials more survivable and the Griffins had found a way to curtail the madness that our methods resulted in?.... You know the standard mortality rate of Witchers?”

“I seemed to remember something like four in ten.”

“Which is about right on average. We didn't keep records and if we did they have long since been lost, stolen or destroyed. But even if we had raised that to five out of ten, let alone six, seven or eight out of ten. Can you imagine what we might have achieved. But no, our leaders had to lead the youngsters in a misguided attempt at needless revenge against an enemy that had all but forgotten that we were cross with them and certainly didn't return our hatred until afterwards.”

He sighed.

“But I'm off topic. I was the keeper of the cages. The short description of my job was that when those young Witchers came out of the cavern that was set aside for the purposes of making the mutations happen, they would be brought out on a stretcher and given into my care.

“You cannot imagine what it was like. I have read your account of what Cousin Letho put you through and although he missed out a lot of what happens, he is largely correct when it comes to the nitty gritty so you will know what the youngsters looked like when they came to us.”

“It can't have been pretty.”

“You have no idea what it was like. No-one can. You have no idea what it was like.”

He was there. There at the moment when he would just keep talking now. Lost in his memories of times gone past and all I had to do was to just sit there and let him get all the words out.

Some might call this process cruel.

It is. Make no mistake but it is.

Some others might call this process manipulative.

It's that as well.

But it is also vital. They say that those people who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it and anyone who has studied history to more than a passing degree would know that this is true. You want an example?

The Empire invaded the north three times. Three times in living memory. Even if you try to argue that the first time was the Emperor using a foreign adventure to prune his higher command structure with some military action that he knew wasn't going to work.

Which he did.

Even if you argue that the Northern monarchs provoked the second war, which they did, although they were heavily manipulated into doing so by the Greater Empire and an Emperor that was much cleverer than they thought he was.

Even if you allow for all of those things. Then surely, we should have seen the third invasion coming. Surely we should have. The proof of this is that many people did. One of the reasons for King Demavend of Aedirn's descent into drunken indolence was the fact that his country had been carved up by Nilfgaard and Kaedwen after both invasions and he was surrounded by so called allies who told him that such things would never happen again and that he didn't need the help that he was begging for.

Don't get me wrong, his bitterness against the Elves of Dol Blathanna is legendary as well as his dynastic struggles and the growing power of his Lords that worked hard to undermine their king. But one of the reasons that they were doing that was because Demavend was trying to centralise Command and Control from the Lords in order to properly prepare for another Nilfgaard invasion. He deserves his reputation towards the end of his life of lechery, drunkeness and sullen laziness, but let history also show that he was right.

My father is another example. One of the richest men in Redania managed to become even richer by virtue of buying up weapons and armour in preparation for the third invasion that he knew was coming. Before accusations start flying, he donated a lot of those items to the crown before Radovid had to order their seizing. Yes, my father went on to trade that donation for other things but one of the reasons that our family became so rich, influential and powerful is because my father predicted another invasion from the south and our troops were among the best trained and the best equipped troops to take the field.

Speaking of Radovid, despite his active madness, he also predicted the invasion from the south. One of his justifications for the crimes committed against the non-humans was because he was worried about how they would support the southern invaders. Obviously this was a mistake as all he did was to drive Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes and Halflings into the Nilfgaardian ranks but the prediction was there.

It is not a small thing to say that we lost because the greater part of the Northerm kingdoms were too busy with their own concerns that they didn't bother looking south. That they hadn't learned from their own past to see that this kind of microscopic world view was exactly the weakness that the Emperor could take advantage of. Indeed it is his methods in just about everything. The oldest strategy invented. Divide and conquer.

These are the things that history teaches us. The reasons why we know that Demavend, Radovid and my father knew that Nilfgaard was going to come back is because they wrote it down so that we can all go back and read about it.

One of the problems for historians in general is that not many people know how to write stuff down about their daily lives and thought processes. Of those people that can write stuff down, there is an even smaller percentage that has enough time to write that stuff down. Which means that someone has to do that for them, which is when people like me come in.

This stuff has to be recorded. It must be recorded. Both the good parts of our history needs to be recorded, the stuff that we are proud of and want to be remembered for but also the bad stuff needs to be remembered.

We need to know that we wiped the Elves out and have all but driven them to extinction. We need to remember that so that we can learn from our, and their, mistakes. We also need to remember that Magic itself is not the enemy, nor is knowledge. It is those people that would use this stuff for evil acts that are the enemy and they need to be defeated. People Like Dorme, Cavill, Edmund, Cousin Raynard and all the rest.

But the other thing that needs remembering is what we did to those children when we turned them into Witchers. Rather than dealing with a problem ourselves, we created a slave caste of people to do it for us. We literally created a new race of people and expected them to solve all our problems for us for free. Sound like an exaggeration. The next time you hear about a Witcher being conned out of his fee, I will remind you of this situation.

So yes, I pushed him into telling me this story but if it goes on to inform others, to inform those men and women that are working to bring new Witchers into the world under more controlled, humane and less barbaric conditions.... If it can do that, then I have to admit that I am sleeping fine tonight.

And even if it doesn't. Then the effort would still be worth it.

“No-one can imagine what it was like,” Schrodinger told me. “We had a cave where the mutations were monitored. Rather than having a mage on site in order to properly maintain the mutagenic levels and to monitor the flow of mutagens, one of our forebears had managed to persuade a gnome to create us a machine to do it for us. Before you ask, I have no idea where the machine is, or what it looked like. I only saw it a couple of times as they were, and are still I suppose, jealous of their secrets and didn't want the process to get out into the rest of the world.

“I also can't tell you whether or not what we had done was to actually kidnap the gnome but the few times that I met him, he seemed happy at his work and he certainly wasn't guarded. Knowing the Gnomes, it is not entirely impossible that we did kidnap them and then when we presented them with the problem they were fascinated by the idea and stayed to see it through.

“But it was awful. Absolutely awful.

“They had a cavern you see. A cavern where the students were put through it. They were tied down to tables, really little more than extended ropes tied around lumps of rock. They could do them in pairs as that was all we had the room for. I know that Letho showed you some of the ways that they connected up the tubes. Some into your neck, some into your elbows, your groin, through the veins in your feet. There was one set of things where the needles had to be pushed through the eye in order to get to the cornea and into the brain.”

He shuddered.

“Luckily, I had long since passed out due to pain and terror when they did that to me. I can't imagine having to stay still while they inserted needles into my eyes. But after all that was done, after they'd pulled out the needles and untied all the clamps, they would be tipped onto a stretcher and carried through to my cavern.

They called it Schrodinger's kingdom. Quite a large cavern all things considered with rows of cages. Maybe twenty of them all told. We were lit by torches and by a hole in the ceiling that let in sunlight or moonlight. Sometimes I had to cover that hole and we had a pulley system set up so that I could pull a tarpaulin over the hole. Modern scholars, scientists and Magical folk might claim that the moon doesn't have an effect on the human brain, or even the Witcher brain for that matter and that all the rumours and superstitions about that kind of thing come from a very real and understandable fear of were-creatures turning in the moonlight. But you speak to any watchman on the continent that has to deal with the madness that occurs on the night of a full moon. My kingdom was no different. The howling and the screaming alone were enough to drive normal men to insanity.”

He had this thing where he seemed not to want to talk to me. He would constantly find little tangents to go off on, to find something less dangerous or less risky to talk about. This does happen and you have to be careful with how you handle it. Some people need to be brought back to the first point carefully and precisely with some pointed comments and questions. The other option is to just wait for them to run out of things to say so that they bring themselves back to the point that they were supposed to talk about. I don't know about that and I often play it by ear depending on who I was dealing with. In this case, other than wondering if he was alright and wondering why he had so much difficulty keeping to the topic at hand I just let him get on with it. Doing my best to commit as much as I could to memory in order to transcribe it later.

I was also struggling with my own memories. Long term readers will remember that I was captured and for a while, my soul was subject to the Beast of Amber's crossing. During which time, some of the visions that I can remember involved my being locked in a cage along with rows and rows of other cages to either side of me, above and below, and being tortured. The stuff that he was describing about what had happened to those apprentice Witchers was very evocative for me and I was struggling to keep my head in the present. I was sweating freely and having to bite my lip or pinch the back of my hand surreptitiously. I needed the pain in order to keep myself in the present rather than to backslide into memories that I couldn't control.

“But they (Freddie: The Witcher attendants or apprentices) would bring them in, take them to the cages that I would direct them to and tie them to the beds. Then they (Freddie: The newly mutated) were formally in my care.”

He sighed.

“One of the reasons that so many of them struggled to keep hold of their sanity was because their first feelings in the open world was this one. They had just been through the awful, awful things that had happened in the other cave and now they were here, having to deal with their newly mutated bodies with all the changes to their sight, hearing, smell and physical sensation and they were suddenly surrounded by mad people. Screaming, shouting, groaning, spitting mad people who mostly spent their times living in their own waste.”

Another sigh. It turns out that if Schrodinger wasn't laughing then he was sighing.

“Can hardly blame them for going mad really. I'm being unfair though. Some of the madmen were relatively sane really. They just couldn't be trusted around other people. But they were no less loud. Instead though, they would be screaming that all their fellows should keep quiet so that the “kittens” could get their rest. In all honesty, they were the worse people to deal with. Because you could see the potential in those men, potential that was just being wasted on an overwhelming desire to consume the flesh of others or to perform unspeakable acts to unwilling victims. They knew that they were sick and could not be released but at the same time, they hated themselves for what they saw as their own weaknesses.”

He paused for a moment.

“It's impossible for me to disconnect myself from those people.” He said. I don't know whether he was telling me that or whether it was just something that he had to say aloud. “I distinctly remember waking up after my own trials. Testing my limbs and finding that I was tied down, only for grey haired men to come and peer into my eyes with light that was too bright. I remember the pain and the weakness and the horror as I realised that I didn't even know my own name. It is impossible for me to describe, the existential terror of not even knowing how to articulate, even in your own mind, that you do not know who, or even what, you are. I had lost everything, even the language used to form and express the pain, and now these strange things with their glowing yellow eyes were causing me pain.”

“So you lost your entire memory then?” I felt a bit of a need for some clarification.

“I did. Bits started to come back almost immediately. Fortunately, language was among the first things that came back and that way I could at least understand that the word that they were shouting at me was my name at the very least.

“But they bring the Kitten (Freddie: I took this term to mean the newly mutated young Witcher in this instance. It certainly puts other's use of the term in a different context) in and tie him down to a bed. Then the medics come in and the masters of the mutations and they examine the poor lad. Trying to see if the mutations were being rejected or accepted by the body. There is no easy way to tell if this is the case before it actually happens though. You can always tell when it's happened or is happening. If the body is rejecting something then it starts bleeding from the orifices. Blood, or pus or some kind of other liquid. It is never pleasant. I once saw a Kitten leak all the water from their body. And it was water, the substance was tested by our alchemists later to see what it was so that we could try and prevent it from happening again. All of the water in the body just started leaking from the eyes, mouth, ears and.... until he died of extreme dehydration.”

I could not help but shudder.

“More often than not though, they would examine them and declare them fit and they would become my problem. It makes it sound much fancier than it actually was. My job was to keep them contained and alive until they came to their senses enough to be released onto the path or released out for a trial of the Mountain. You know what a Mountain trial is do you not?”

“I do. It's a test to see if a person is fit to be a Witcher. Most often used when a person has a difficult transition through the trials or when the mutations don't entirely take properly.”

“That's right. Most, came to their senses relatively quickly.”

“How long is that?”

“A week.”

I shuddered again. A week is still along time to be caged up in a cave while your body was strange to you.

“Then they would be taken off to be trained in the use of their new bodies. To get used to their new strength, speed and agility.”

“But you yourself have said that many of these men were still not entirely sane.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “They were not. How do you test for sanity?”

I didn't have an answer of course. “What about the rest? Those that didn't make it.”

“Those men. They would stay in the cages.”

“How long for?”

“Until it became clear that there was nothing that we could do for them or that they could not be made useful in other ways. We worked hard to try and save them. We found that some of them managed to reach some form of sanity if they consumed particular herbs and potions. If we made them elixirs then it meant that they could ignore whatever it was that was driving them to insanity. This process took time, sometimes months and if it didn't work, or if they were too dangerous to try and contain, then one of us would have to go into the cage and put the poor thing out of their misery. There was always a desire to iterate. To get better and to prevent the mistakes of the past from happening again if we could possibly help it.”

“Who did that? Who went into the cages to end their lives?”

He said nothing.

“It was you wasn't it.” I wasn't asking a question.

He still said nothing. After a while I gave up waiting for him to start speaking again and decided that it was time to prompt him again. Time to get things moving.

“Kerrass once told me about one of these madmen who was kept in a cage but was used to teach Alchemy. That Kerrass used to have to clean out the man's cage.”

“That is true.” Schrodinger shifted his weight, presumably in an effort to try and make himself more comfortable. “As I say, occasionally the madmen would recover enough of their wits in order to be able to function on some level. The man that you are talking about had a distinct and urgent desire for fresh liver. From a human if he could get it. If we couldn't get it from elsewhere then he would do his very best to take it on his own accord. It was a frenzy, the hunger of a man so starving that he could no longer control himself. He was another man consumed by self-hatred but he had a mind for alchemy like you wouldn't believe. We never had the luxury of being able to cast aside valuable resources like that one.”

The way he said that sent a shiver down my spine.

“This must all sound awful to you.” He commented.

“Awful is one word,” I told him. “In that I feel awe at the prospect of people doing that to each other. Especially after it had been done to each of themselves as well. You all underwent those tortures but that didn't stop you from doing it to others.”

“No.” He mused. “No it didn't. I wish I had a glib answer for that. Something funny or charming, even a deflection would have been enough to be able to sidestep what we did.”

“Did you ever try to stop? You won't have been on the path while you were doing this surely.”

“No. And I didn't do it for long. I found that I couldn't. There is a high turnover from the Master of the cages. The school could never keep one for long. I spoke to my predecessor when I took over and I spoke to my successor after I left. I actually did the job for several stretches and everyone who takes on the role, the same as with the masters of apprentices, have ideas about how they will be the ones who do it better. How they will be the ones to save lives and turn things around but in the doing of the job we find that there is no other reasonable way. You can make small changes and adjust things in certain ways but sooner or later it just comes down to the fact that there is no other way to do things.”

“Why couldn't you do it for very long?”

He scratched his chin and sighed. “There is a strange kind of fatigue that comes with having to deal with it all. In having to look after people that you feel an intense empathy for, which of course I did. When there are children lying in front of me begging for me to make the pain go away. Screaming and bleeding and sweating. All before they have the awareness or the mental... whatever it takes to try and beg for death.” He sighed again, this time it didn't put me in mind of a sigh so much as it reminded me of a groan. “All they wanted was an end to the pain.”

Here again I was tempted to steer him away from the remembered agony that he was clearly feeling. It is the instinct of a human being to look after their fellows and to help through that pain but I needed to hear this. I needed to record this so that you could hear it. As it was though, I swore that I could hear tears on the edge of his voice, trembling on the edge of things.

“But there's nothing you can do for them. They are Witchers by this point and the pain that they feel is the shock of the bright lights that they are unused to and the extra sensations and the intense hunger. It is their mind rebelling at the things that have been done to it and there is no cure for that malady. After a while you get to that point where you just find yourself shutting down. You go through the motions and become like a machine, a golem or a gargoyle as you just do what you have to over and over again without the love and the affection that is vital to the proper caring of these individuals. They need the sympathy and the encouragement. They need to be able to feed off your strength in order to find their own. This is not the trial of choice this is not even a trial. The very fact that they are still alive means that they have made it and now they must survive the re-entry into the world unless it tries to kill them. That is...tremendously difficult and those kids need you to be able to provide them with that encouragement and that strength. But sooner or later you just, or I certainly did, you just run out of strength to give.”

I grunted. “A friend of mine works as a doctor in Oxenfurt. She spent time with the armies and she once told me about that. She called it “A weariness of Empathy”.”

“Doctor Shani?” He asked.

“Do all Witchers know her?”

“Most of us do.” He admitted. “She looks us in the eyes which is rare. She doesn't inflate her prices because we are Witchers and treats us the same as she treats everyone else. You cannot understand how precious a commodity that can be sometimes.”

I nodded. “Do you do all of this caring by yourself?”

He laughed. The first time in a while so it actually startled me when he did. “No. That would be impossible. I had anywhere between six and two dozen madmen in my care at any one time. I could not do all of that by myself. But that is what the powers invented Apprentices for.”

I found myself laughing along with him despite the horror of the suggestion. I had heard that sentiment expressed by so many craftsmen and craftsmasters over the years that I had been travelling with Kerrass, posing as his apprentice, that it had become a joke. The Apprentices get all the shitty jobs, even more than those people that get called “Assistants.” I have no idea why as you are certainly not learning about things if all you are doing is menial chores that any idiot can do. Some masters call this “paying their dues” but I sometimes wonder if they do this to their apprentices because their masters did it to them and so on.

“It was part of our trials of choice. We made the apprentices care for those people gone mad or recovering from their mutations so that they knew what was going to happen to them. So that they could be properly prepared for what happened next and how it was going to happen. That way, if they stayed, they couldn't complain that we had lied to them about what happened.”

I nodded. It did make sense in a twisted kind of way. “Where does Kerrass fit in here? I assume that this was the thing he meant when he said that you should tell me everything.”

“Ah Kerrass.” He said. The way he said it almost made it sound like it was a sigh. “Poor Kerrass.” It was getting towards full dark now and he was staring at the fire, watching the flames dance and using it as a way to project his own memories in front of his eyes.

“This is going to sound really macabre.” He told me with a sidelong glance. “But we used to have a pool among the more senior Witchers at the fortress.”

“A pool?”

“Yes, it might not seem like it or it might not sound like it but when you're an established Witcher, if you have nowhere to go at the end of a season you head back to the fortress. When you get there, there is absolutely nothing to do. Nothing at all. You can read, you can train but beyond that there are absolutely no amenities. You have commented on the factor yourself. Life as a Witcher can actually be called rather boring. You go to a town or a village, sometimes a city, get a contract, hunt, kill, claim reward, move on go to another place, repeat over and over again. We all know that this is how it goes. And although there are very many monsters in the world with many different varieties that can scare and terrify. There is only so much shop a Witcher can talk with another Witcher. There is only so much time you can devote towards mourning the fallen. So what else can we do when we run out of things to talk about?

“We can get involved in the lives of the students, either as extra instructors or just sitting around and watching. Or we can gamble. Gwent, dice, who can do this or that the fastest. A truly inventive mind can think of a potentially infinite number of things to gamble about. Who can eat that roast chicken the fastest. Who can climb the wall the fastest. Who can run from one of the cavern to the other and back the fastest. We gambled small coin largely. Small coin, bragging rights and chores.

“But the other thing that we could gamble on was the fate of the apprentices.”

“That sounds grotesque,” I commented.

“And it is. But as I say, we needed to occupy ourselves. It was a way of distracting ourselves from the horror that we were going through. That we put these kids through on a daily basis. It was a way of making each other laugh.”

He stopped suddenly and looked at the sky. “Getting late. You hungry?”

“I am if I'm honest.”

“Kerrass'll be back soon with whatever he's managed to find.” He got up and started moving around the camp-site. He began by building up the fire and setting up a cooking stand to hang a pot over. I found watching him to be a little strange as he used the same movements that Kerrass did. The same slow care to ensure that the construct wouldn't just tip the dinner into the flames.

“It started with the lowest stakes game. Betting on which kids would make it through the trial of choice. The grueling and horrible training along with all of the disgusting things that our herbal concoctions did to them along with the disgusting trials of puberty all happening at the same time. You could buy in as many times as you like. A copper per name, you could only take each name once. The pot was split evenly between all those who chose the right names. We used to keep the pots in small pouches that we hung off nails around the common hall. It was a game as to what we could tell the students when they asked what was in the bags as to who could tell them the most disgusting thing. I used to tell them that we kept the ashes of nosy students in the bags but they never believed me.

“The gambling became more serious as they started being put through their mutations. Then it was a game of who was going to survive. There was an element of skill to it too. As to who passes the trials of choice, that can very so it was more about luck than any kind of sound judgement. We were just picking the child randomly that we placed our bets on but when it came to acceptance of the mutagens?”

He shook his head as he filled a bucket of water from the stream.

“There were so many factors that it was impossible to track all of them. How much Elven blood did they have in their history. How tall were they, how had they taken to their herbs and elixirs. How was their muscle tone and on and on and on.

“Kerrass was middle of the pack on both pools. He was no Cousin Geralt who took to the mutations so well that they risked trying other things on him. As far as I know, Kerrass wasn't a child surprise or anything. He was just an unremarkable child from an unremarkable village in the ass-end of what is now Northern Redania I think, although I didn't care enough about the details to check.

“I never spent time with the younger apprentices when I was in charge of the cages. I didn't want to like them knowing that one day I might have to take their lives while they drooled their sanity onto the floor so I didn't know of Kerrass until he came into my domain.

“I left it until it was becoming clear who was the most likely to survive which is when I would get together with the Master of Apprentices. A man called Nayhan at the time who told me that Kerrass was an unremarkable student really. He was not the best sword, nor the best shot. He was talkative and charismatic but was useless with alchemy as he lacked the patience of a true alchemist. That is not unusual though. It takes a few close calls to really focus your mind into learning all the potion formula. Nayhan told me that he got bored easily and had a bit of a temper but again, that is not unusual for a lad his age. All that apprentices want to do is to be given their swords and their medallions and to be let out onto the road. They don't care about the knowledge that they need or the other tools of a Witcher's trade they just want to get out there so that wasn't unusual. It just marked him for one of those Witchers that would either die on his first hunt.... sorry, he told you about the trial of Death didn't he?”

He took out a small wooden board and a sharp knife before starting to peel some potatoes and chop some carrots into the pot.

“He did,” I responded. “Can I help with any of that?”

He wordlessly handed me some turnips which I started working on with some industry.

“We thought that he would probably fail is trial of death but that otherwise he would make a fine Witcher. Nayhan's opinion of him was that he was a romantic. That he saw Witchers as wandering knights, travelling the world and righting wrongs. That the truth would be a blow and the question would be whether or not he would survive it. He went in for the mutations and no-one thought any the more of it.”

There was another pause as Schrodinger stared into space for a while. I only saw it because I looked up from chopping lumps of turnip to go into the stew which was when I saw beneath his mask to the Witcher that lay beneath it. I had a bit of insight into the man then. He was much older than Kerrass. Not an elder of the school by any stretch, certainly not as old as the fabled Vesemir of the Wolven school but this was a Witcher that had been travelling the world for well over a hundred years. I didn't ask him his age as it seemed rude but it was then that I realised I was being shown beneath his Mask. The face and the personality that he wears whenever he has to interact with people.

At first I was angry with myself for not having seen beneath the mask as I had seen Kerrass with his many and various masks all the time. I had seen the masks that courtiers wear and had worn more than a few masks myself. This man could teach lessons in how to wear a different character on your face. Somewhere, the stage lost a fine actor when Schrodinger became a Witcher rather than an actor.

But now I saw beneath that in an unguarded moment. I should really be flattered that he felt comfortable enough to let me see it. That he was relaxed in my presence enough to show me what he was really thinking. He looked old, incredibly sad and haunted. Haunted by many things. This was a man that had walked the cliff-edge of madness himself and vividly remembered what he saw there. He looked tired as well, worn down by so many things, things that I didn't recognise and couldn't have identified if I tried but there was also a defiance shining in his eyes and around the jaw-line. It was a man.....

He reminded of a soldier that I had once met during the war. I was young then, maybe sixteen or seventeen and working as part of the signalling corps helping to decode Nilfgaardian messages as well as reading and translating our own military codes. I put together intelligence and tried to figure out what people were doing. I was eating my rations once when a soldier came in from the front. He was tired, sore and had that kind of sullen rage that I remember being so common in the troops that were actually stationed along the front. The rage born of a desire to finally bring the enemy to battle. Born from a place of frustration of being away from home and watching your friends die one by one. For whatever reason, he brought his bowl of soup and hunk of stale bread over to the small, young signalman who was eating alone. Mostly because I was ashamed that I wasn't a proper soldier and that there were people out there doing my dying for me.

I was a prick when I was seventeen. Some might say that I'm a prick now but I was REALLY a prick when I was seventeen.

This soldier and I fell to talking and I remember that determination in his face too. That defiance that said that he wasn't done yet. That he still had things to do and an enemy to defeat.

Schrodinger had that look about him.

He must have realised that I had stopped chopping my turnips because he shook himself from whatever memory that was engulfing him and looked over me. The mask was back but it looked so natural on his face that I couldn't really... I could barely tell the difference.

“I served as the master of the cages in four batches of time. The first time was before Kerrass arrived and I managed to serve for two years before I had had enough and set back out on the path. It was in my second batch of time where I was master for four and a half years, give or take, when Kerrass was brought into my chambers and up until that point I had not seen anything like it.

“He heard voices. He described at as like being surrounded by people who alternated between whispering in his ear to screaming and shouting.

“To be clear though. It wasn't that there were more than one person living in the same body. He never spoke with a different voice or have memories that didn't belong to him. He was just listening to things and to people that weren't there. You could watch him having conversations with them and those conversations were absolutely chilling.

“For a start. The voices wouldn't let him rest. They were always talking to him so he could never sleep. When he lay down to sleep then they would start talking louder. Sitting nearby we could hear him pleading with them to quieten down to let him sleep but somehow, worse than that, was the voice that he referred to as being called Jenny. Jenny was a woman's voice and she seemed to try and protect him and want to keep him safe. She seemed to be screaming at the other voices in his head to quieten down and let him sleep. To me, and my helpers, on the outside of the cage, Kerrass would suddenly cover his ears with his hands and scream for them all to be quiet, to listen to Jenny and to just let him sleep.

“So that was what we tried to do first. We tried to sedate him to let him rest. Sleep is the great healer, the ultimate doctor and when people are hurt or sick the best thing they can do is get some rest and it was the same with the young Witchers in my care. If we could just get them to sleep then things would improve. But he couldn't sleep. Even sedatives that our most skilled Alchemists came up with. Sedatives so strong that they would kill normal humans and Elves while sending Dwarves to sleep for several days, only managed to get him to shut his eyes for a matter of minutes before he would wake up, tears streaming down from his new Witcher eyes as he pleaded and begged them to leave him alone.

“He told me once that the problem was that just because he was asleep, didn't mean that the voices stopped talking which came with it's own perils.”

“I don't follow.”

“According to Kerrass, and I really suggest that you talk to him about all of this because I can't.... All I can do is give you the outsiders perspective as to what all of this looked like. But he said that just because he was asleep didn't mean that he couldn't hear them. And being asleep, he couldn't not listen to them.”

Schrodinger took another bottle out, examined it for a moment before taking the cork out and pouring the contents into the pot.

“Something for the flavour.” He told me. “Nothing like a bottle of red wine to add some flavour to an otherwise rather bland stew.”

“Sage, salt and garlic would do just the same kinds of things.” I told him.

“They would,” he agreed. “Do you have any?” he asked hopefully.

“Not on me, no.”

“There you go then. I will just have to settle for the wine that I stole from the inn in town a few days ago.” He sniffed the pot. “I just hope that Kerrass comes back with some meat. But anyway...”

He settled back down and pulled out a clay pipe. “Do you smoke?”

“Not me, tobacco gives me a headache.”

“I'm not smoking tobacco but I take your point.”

“Does it not give away your position to people hunting you?”

“Not really. They only come so far into the woods before turning back. They don't want to be trapped out here when it begins to get dark. Rather wise of them really. My biggest danger is when I need to get some more supplies.”

“Sorry, yes. We were talking about Kerrass though.”

“We were.” He looked a little bit disappointed, as though he was cross that he hadn't managed to distract me from the former topic of conversation.

“He had difficulty when he did sleep.”

“Yes.” He made that gesture that Kerrass makes to light fires. “It seems that the voices would tell him to do things. When he was awake, he could resist that but when he was asleep, he had less, or even no, resistance. So he would wake up and it became the most logical thing in the world to attempt to dash his brains out against the bars of the cage. Or to attempt to throttle the next person that came into the cage to give him food or something. But those weren't the scary times,”

He took a deep puff on his pipe.

“The really scary ones were when one of the voices was talking to him and you could it in Kerrass' eyes, that the instruction made sense. That it sounded right to him but that instruction was utterly...utterly wrong. When he looked at you with that slightly considering expression as though he's considering what the best method is to rip out your throat with his teeth. As it turns out. That's what he was thinking.”

Schrodinger looked at me sidelong, considering. Then he shook his head as a decision was made. “He did it too. Twice. One apprentice didn't pay proper attention to our warnings about how to behave with Kerrass and got to close. He trivialised it because Kerrass was curled up into a foetal ball on his bed, or at least as much as his bonds would allow, and he was whimpering. The lad didn't think much of this as there were other crazy people in the cages at the time who were actively gibbering and throwing their own bodily waste around. In comparison to that, Kerrass seemed relatively harmless. But then the poor, stupid little fuck brushed against Kerrass carelessly and Kerrass was on him before I could do anything.

“The other time was during some training. This was early on, we were trying to see if working Kerrass would help him to be distracted from the voices in his head. We were trying a couple of different alchemical elixirs that he could take in order to either dampen down the....well the volume of the voices or to help Kerrass to be able to ignore them. We had found a mixture that seemed to help but we needed to know how much. Was it useful or were we just pissing into the rainstorm.

“We took him out into the practise yards and gave him a wooden sword. We didn't trust him with a sharp weapon because we weren't that stupid.”

He laughed at a sudden thought. It was the first time I had heard that sound from him in some time and it startled me. “Don't get me wrong. We were pretty stupid but not that stupid.

“We started slow. Working the most basic of the sword-forms. Little more than practising the basic stances. You probably know them. The striking Falcom, the slinking cat... That kind of thing. Then we started some basic fencing which was when it all fell apart. We asked him what was happening and it seems that the voices were giving him contradictory advice. Telling him to do this, or that. Telling him to dodge, parry or strike. They often contradicted each other and argued against each other and the cacophony in his mind was overwhelming.

“But we took him outside, he was training, it was no better or worse a day than any of the others when some apprentices took a short cut through where Kerrass was training. There is, or was, no real way that you can segregate the keep. Sooner or later people need to walk through everything. The only caverns without multiple access routes were the cavern of cages and the mutation cavern. But these apprentices walked past and, One of them laughed and suddenly Kerrass spun. I wasn't there as I was busy with the other caves but I was told that he looked startled before a look of terror and rage crossed his face. He bounded across the room, the grown Witchers who were with him were taken utterly by surprise and he caved in the skull of one of the apprentices with his practise sword.”

He shook his head and sucked on his pipe hard enough to make a glow spring up from the bowl.

“The violence and the rage in the action took everyone by surprise. Apparently he stood there, covered in blood and brains and bits of skull fragment and grinned at the horrified onlookers. You know the grin I mean, the one where you keep saying that you think you see fangs.”

“I've always meant to ask about that....”

“That grin.” Schrodinger emphasised the point with a gesture of his pipe. “Then he told the watchers that they didn't need to worry. That he had killed it and they were all safe.”

He blew out a cloud of sweet smelling smoke.

“He didn't get let out of his cage again.”

“And rightly so,” came Kerrass' voice as he moved into the circle of firelight. Schrodinger almost looked relieved. “I hated myself for those two deaths for a long time and I still regret them bitterly.”

“It was not your fault Kerrass.” Schrodinger insisted. It had the sounds of a long argument.

“I know. But that doesn't mean I can't feel it. I brought rabbit. Your wife showed me where all the traps were.”

“Your wife?” I asked.

“The unicorn.” Kerrass told me as he carefully put the rack of rabbits nearby. As it turned out, he had already skinned and cleaned them meaning that they were ready for the stew. “Brother Schrodinger has his own interesting stories to tell and they tie into what I brought you here for. But that's a story for a different night. Tomorrow probably.”

“Kerrass,” I began after looking at him for a moment. “I had no idea...”

He stopped me with a raised hand. “I never talked to you about it because....well....shame and embarrassment are powerful feelings. Also...” He sighed. “How do you tell someone that you hear voices?”

“As I recall, you told me about them early on.”

“I did. I tried to make them a joke as I recall in the hope that you wouldn't ask too many questions, and you took it as such.”

“I did.” I echoed him. “But since then....Sorry Kerrass.” I shook my head as I realised I was about to start criticising him for not telling me his deepest and most private secrets. “I'm sorry.” I said again. “I'm sorry that I didn't listen.”

“Ah Freddie,” he grinned handing over my packets of cooking herbs to Schrodinger who inspected them before making an appreciative face and adding them to the pot. “This is one of those situations where you will apologise and I will apologise and then we will keep apologising to each other. It becomes boring awfully quickly I find.”

“But you got better.” I said. “You got better to the point where you could stand it.”

He smiled, a little sadly. “No, No I didn't. I didn't get better, I got stronger. I warn you though that I am not yet ready to talk about how I got stronger.”

“May I ask why?”

“You can always ask. I'm just....she might be listening.”

“The Unicorn?” I felt as though I was being stupid. “There are a lot of “She's” by now.”

“No. I promised that I would tell you everything. I will but I am not ready yet. Schrodinger will tell you now what it looked like. One day, hopefully sooner rather than later, I will introduce you to my Goddess. Don't let Schrodinger get away with not finishing the story though. He likes to leave things half said and half done. He likes to leave the mystery around.”

“Not unlike certain other Feline Witchers of my acquaintanceship,” I commented.

“Well, I had to learn it for someone. In the meantime.” Kerrass rose to his feet and struck a heroic pose. “I have rabbits to add to the pot.” He strode over to the carcasses like a man on his way to do battle.

“So,” I began, turning back to Schrodinger who had been watching the pair of us with gleaming eyes. “So he got better.”

“Yes he did. But first he got weaker.”

He added some more of whatever it was that he was smoking to his pipe. I had already noticed that Kerrass was waving the smoke away from himself with an expression of distaste.

“After the incident where he clubbed that lad's brains out, Kerrass was locked away. During which he just started to get worse. He didn't sleep for much more than an hour or two a night. His appetite was reducing and the only thing he seemed to be able to keep down was water. You have to remember that as well as all of the things that were going on with his mind, his body was still keeping up with the awesome changes that it was going through. To survive that a body needs food, water and above all it needs rest. You can't just let that kind of thing go.

“He was pale already, even by my standards he was pale but his face had taken on that shade that comes out the other side of pale. A kind of light bluish green tinge entered his skin. We began to see the veins standing out on his skin. The way they do when a person has taken too many potions. His eyes were already bloodshot due to the changes that they had gone through and the tearing up was also not unusual for someone who has just been through the trials but he also had huge black shadows under his eyes which seemed to sink deep into his skull. His hair began to fall out and he was losing weight.”

Strangely, Schrodinger seemed to have become more comfortable now that Kerrass was sat nearby. Less ashamed of telling someone their deepest and darkest secrets.

“The worst thing about it was that he stopped screaming. He had just lost the strength that he needed in order to get that out. Instead, he just lay there. There were still the outbursts of murderous rage but they were becoming fewer and further between and what there was was much weaker. He could barely hear us over the noise of the voices in his head and we were holding him down to force food, liquid and medicine into him just to keep him alive.

“You would be forgiven for thinking that he was getting close to death. He wasn't. He was getting closer but he had a long way to go yet before he died. He was a Witcher now and we take some killing.”

Schrodinger sighed. Kerrass was cutting at the rabbit carcasses with his knife.

“When this kind of thing happens which, I need to emphasise, is not unusual. We call the masters together. The mutations master, myself, the alchemy master and the master of the Elements....”

“In charge of magic,” Kerrass chimed in when he saw my confusion.

“.... Yes. Me as well and we all get together to decide what to do about the Kitten in question. We had already had several debates on the subject of Kerrass' survival but there came a time where we could no longer delude ourselves. There was nothing more that we could do to help him.

“I'm not going to deny that I felt for the poor Kitten. I always did, it was part of what made me a good master of the Cages. That I had empathy and sympathy for these people. After all, it had been me that had been tied to those tables once. Every single one of the Feline Witchers has woken up on one of those beds in a cage and every single one of us has felt the tug of madness while we lie there. You said it yourself best when you were talking about your brother....Every single Feline Witcher looks at those poor, madmen and thought to themselves. “I was lucky”, or as you put it more eloquently “There but by the grace of the Powers lay I”. Kerrass had fought every step of the way. He had refused to give in, had refused to let these voices get the better of him and he sweated and bled and screamed at them. But as it was, he was failing and he knew it too. Like the others. He didn't tell me that he wanted to die. He told me that he wanted the voices to stop.

“So we had our second meeting. It was always a two meeting process. The first meeting was when we all got together to ask whether there was anything else we could do for the Kitten in question and when all of us would say that there was nothing else that could be done we would all go away and try to come up with a solution as to what else could be attempted. We also let the sufferer know what is happening because it seems only fair. Then we go back a couple of days later. If there is still no alternative or suggested solution then we again, warn the sufferer and leave it another couple of days.”

“Why the delay?” I asked. “Why not get it over with?”

“Because Witchers believe in destiny. Individual Witchers might claim differently but they are lying. Whether or not we're a child surprise or whatever we believe in destiny and sometimes destiny, or luck if you prefer, will intervene. It does happen occasionally. Others would suggest that the incentive that their lives are about to end also has an effect on the sufferer and that has dragged things out of the mud before now. All of that is supposition of course. The truth is much more likely that it was a tradition. Invented before I became a Witcher myself.”

“The other reason,” Kerrass said. “Is that the apprentices are brought to watch.”

I was appalled. “That's horrific.”

“Yes it is.” Kerrass agreed. “But like the practice of having the apprentices come and help cleaning out the cages, it is important that they take on their trial of choice, knowing all the facts. It is seen as a lesson and a learning experience. Horrific? Yes. But it is a good lesson worth learning. But organising the apprentices together for a gap in the lessons takes a bit of time to organise. It's a sombre occasion, like a funeral and if there are any other brothers in the local area then they do their best to attend as well. Again, it could have been any of us.” He tipped a load of meat into the stew.

“It very nearly was you.” Schrodinger commented. “It was a three day delay in Kerrass' case. He was informed but he took it in his stride.”

“I barely remember it in truth. I was trying to argue with one of the voices who wanted me to gouge out my own eyeballs on the grounds that I wasn't using them properly.

The thing that got to me was that Kerrass was actively making light of the situation. A coping mechanism? Maybe. I will let you be the judge but I was appalled and aghast.

“I went to Kerrass on the morning of the second day, he was due to be killed the day after.

“I'll never forget it. I walked into the cavern as I always did. I was carrying Kerrass' breakfast as I always made a point of feeding and caring for the Kittens that I was about to end myself as it seemed only fair and decent.”

He stopped, sucking on his pipestem and staring into the fire while Kerrass stirred the pot.

“The cavern was quiet which is always unusual. Normally someone in there is weeping, screaming or shouting. But it was quiet, deathly so. I remember my medallion jerking as I walked in, my apprentices were all asleep which is no unusual in and of itself although rather lax of them. I was just about to head over and kick them awake with a few choice words when I saw Kerrass in his cage.

“He was loose from his bonds which was the first thing that got to me. He was all but a skeleton at this stage so there was no way that he could have broken free but he was loose. He was kneeling, like a man at prayer at the edge of the cage, holding onto the bars with a death grip so tight that his knuckles were visibly white. He was resting his head against the bars too. He was sweating profusely as I approached. I carefully set my burdens down and dragged my apprentices to the cage to help me. As I got closer we could see that he was trembling with fatigue, his breath hissing between his teeth and his eyes were tightly closed.

““Kerrass?” I remember saying.

““Shhhh,” He hissed softly.

““What?” I was confused.

“It's so quiet,” he told me. He spoke in a hushed tone. Again, the same way that people do when they speak in a church.

“He looked up at me and he was weeping. “It's so quiet” he said again.”

“We had to pry his hands away from the bars and when we got them away, they trembled. We fed him and he ate hungrily. We cleaned him up and put him to bed where he fell instantly asleep. I had never seen anything like it. He slept through until the following morning when he was supposed to be put out of his misery. The other masters came to see the miracle and Kerrass calmly and quietly asked for breakfast and his morning Elixirs. He ate and started doing some gentle exercises in his cage. For all the world, other than the Elixirs that he had been prescribed. He looked like a lad just out of his mutations. He answered some questions, he was lucid and calm. He just told us over and over again that he had seen something and had been given the strength to fight the voices off. He was self-aware enough that the solution was not all consuming and he understood why were nervous. He promised to tell us if the voices came back and agreed to being tested including an eventual trial of the Mountain. You know what that is right?”

“Yes.” I said. “You asked me that earlier. It's when a Witcher is tested under supervision before he departs on his own for the path.”

“Correct. We asked him, over and over again as to how this had happened. He told us that it was a miracle. We made jokes as I recall, jesting about how miracles are the purview of Gods. He would just chuckle and say that they were also the purview of Goddesses.”

“Which is not an unfair observation.” Kerrass called from where he was stirring the pot.