Corpses Swaying in the Breeze
Until the time of the white light and the white frost, Velen would never lack for mud or misery. In all else the land was poor, yet those never ran dry. Mud to riddle the ground with sucking mires, and misery to fill the air with an endless dirge of lamenting cries.
These swamps had always been so. A diseased sea of mud and swamp-water, peopled by half-starved nordlings scraping by on meals of speared frogs and mashed acorns, and fully starved beasts to feed on half-starved nordlings. A peasant in these regions was as likely to die from starving as he was filling the bellies of the legion drowners, fiends, and water hags who called Velen home.
A miserable, horrendous realm, but fertile soil for a Witcher plying his trade, or so Geralt had learned.
Though even Velen's most bountiful soil offered only a meager crop it seemed.
Geralt wore a scowl as he counted out the latest harvest. A pouch of fifty coins, and those for a Katakan. The most he'd earned in three jobs this last week. More and more he was coming to empathize with Gaetan, that Cat School Witcher he'd spared a few days before.
"Two hundred crowns short." Geralt groaned. "All this to book passage on a leaky tug captained by a drunken halfwit. To Skellige no less. Come on Roach, best get moving. Liquor will keep Wolverstone safely moored in the Golden Sturgeon for a while more, but it's only a matter of time before he drinks the place dry."
The mare didn't answer, unless one counted a snort of acknowledgement.
He'd been speaking to her more and more, probably a testament to the long solitude. For a few days now she'd been his only company but for the makeshift gallows and hanged men. Twenty or so swayed from the boughs of a nearby alder. The corpses were men and women, of various ages and walks of life. One wore rags and was thin as a shorn twig, whilst another was trussed in silks and filled out with the doughy pudge of nobility.
All the same now in death. Rotting meat hung from the same tree, heads hidden by the same thatched burlap, necks tied by the same twine of hemp.
"Nilfgaardians hung half the village. The Ealdorman too by the look of things." Geralt sighed. "Shit. Well here's hoping the Nilfgaardians mind their notice board, otherwise this was a lot of riding for nothing."
That was becoming a disconcertingly common occurrence. He was running dry of contracts, having scoured the Mire, Mudplough and Crookback Bog alike. But everywhere there were fewer peasants and fewer nobleman. Both meant less work for Witchers, and less coin for his purse.
These paltry contracts weren't enough. Not if he wanted to get to Skellige. To Yennefer. And maybe, just maybe to Ciri again.
"That is if our good captain doesn't drive us against the rocks, into a storm, or bust his liver before we get back." Geralt mused shaking his head. "Oughta just buy a canoe and row there. At least then the Skelligers will be too busy laughing their asses off to board me."
With a final bemused glance at the swaying bodies of hanged men, Geralt and Roach bounded in a steady canter through the densest part of the thicket, and out onto a dirt road muddy from heavy rainfall.
It snaked its way out of the deepest part of the mire, and up the summit of a small hillock atop which sprouted an old elm. It reminded Geralt dimly of the Hanged Men's Tree to the north, just a bit smaller, not so wizened or ancient. Mainly the resemblance came from the fact that like the Hanged Man's Tree it's branches bowed with corpses.
"Oh come on." Geralt snapped. "Even Emhyr can't possibly hang this many men. Have the Nilfgaardians started importing them? Is this that fabled gift of culture and law I've heard so much about? An entire forest decorated with rotting corpses? I guess the flies and necrophages do give the place some much needed character."
Geralt throttled his annoyance. Witchers weren't supposed to get annoyed after all. Stripped of emotion, calm in the face of danger and horror.
"Let's hope we find Midden as more than a smoking cinder Roach."
It had been a mistake coming here, but one forced on him by desperation. Usually Velen was a tantalizing prospect beckoning Witchers on the path. Monster abounded there, and someone needed to kill them. It wouldn't be farmers or the millers or the bakers, so it fell to the Withcers. That was the only thing they were good for after all.
Killing Monsters.
By silver or by steel and always for gold. The only trouble was stomaching the pox-ridden air and not being swallowed when the marshy ground suddenly subsided into a mire of mud and frogspawn. Or simply standing the pervasive feeling of hopelessness in the air.
No easy task.
Velen was misery cast in mud. If it wasn't monsters it was plague, if it wasn't plague it was famine, and failing those it was bandits in the wood and so on and so on.
These days it was war, and the swamp was a different world, choking under the Black Sun and the Redanian Eagle.
Dandelion had used to jest that it was anyone's guess which Velen would run out of first. Hnaged men or trees to hang them from. Only the men weren't exclusively hung anymore. To the north Radovid and his Witch Hunters had started burning them. Though Nilfgaard not wanting to be outdone, seemed fixed on supplementing Velen's flagging rate of hangings.
The men of the mire were gutted and gored, the women raped and slashed, the children if they escaped the fates of their parents were sent along the trail of treats, and it was better not to think on what fate befell them when that road finally ended in Aard Cerbin.
Geralt had changed his mind. Velen needed no character, not from Nilfgaard or anyone else. It needed enough oil to fill its mires and one well-placed match to put it out of its misery.
Judging by the rate of their hangings though, Nilfgaard might soon obviate the need for such drastic measures. Nilfgaard was second to none for hangins. They hung them by the dozens on calm days, and by scores on exciting ones. They hung so many that the boughs groaned with dismay. They hung so many it seemed Dandelion's purely rhetorical question might find an unexpected answer all too soon.
Geralt had seen only a smattering of trees still bare of Nilfgaard's grisly ornaments. So which would run out first.
The trees to hang men from? Or the men to hang from trees?
If Geralt were a praying man, he'd pray Velen ran out of trees first. If Velen ever ran out of hanged men, he'd be out of a job. There'd be no one left to hire Witchers on the path, pockets light and bellies empty.
"Something ends, something begins." Geralt repeated the prophecy, squinting his cat's eyes through the glare of dying sun as he rode up the hillock.
But what was beginning, this time of madness and contempt? And what was his place in it? Dandelion had once told him the Nilfgaardians had come to end their world. So had Eredin and his Dearg Ruadhri. And so would Tedd Deireadh when it came. A new world would be born when the sown seed burst into flames, but would there be a place for Witchers in it?
Folk these days spared nary a thought to monsters, save as a nagging nuisance. Their thoughts had turned to the war, to witches in need of burning, and maybe nonhumans too, and Witchers when all others were smoldering on the stake. The monsters hunters for hire were a dying footnote to history. The Trial of Grasses was gone, and rare was the Witcher who still invoked the Law of Surprise.
Slowly but surely, the last of their number would die away, and not slowly in their beds. A short, grisly death waited for Geralt as it did for every Witcher. They were monsters sure as the leshen and chort they hunted.
Witchers had no future. They'd only a dying present.
They'd done their task too well, culled the monsters so thoroughly they'd voided the need for their continued existence. Those thoughts had been on his mind when he'd faced Gaetan. How many of his brothers were left in the world? How many did one have to kill to wipe out the monster slayers altogether? Scores, dozens, certainly far less than a hundred and even fifty was a generous estimate these days.
So no, Geralt felt confident in saying the Witchers had no place in the future. Mayhap the Witcher in him was already dead? He'd besieged the la Valettes with Foltest, changed the fate of realms at Loc Muinne, taken a job for Emhyr var Emreis for the sake of a girl the heartless Witcher loved like a daughter.
So maybe his Witcher's spirit had been smothered long ago. Maybe as early as the forest of Brokilon, or earlier with hist last wish in Rinde. But he'd still his Cat's Eyes and sisters of silver and steel, and he had his Path laid out before him.
He'd play the part, until that Path finally found it's inevitable end.
A sudden noise jerked Geralt from his sudden bout of navel-gazing. Something midway between a squeal and a cry for help. Just over the hill or thereabouts. Too dry for Drowners, too far from the woods for leshen. Perhaps Ghouls or Endrega.
Geralt drew his silver sword at once.
Killing monsters for free? What sort of Witcher are you turning out to be?
Geralt decided to leave that query to the philosophers. Let Dandelion answer it in a song. For now he'd do the thing he was made for.
He spurred Roach on and broke over the hillock's rise, to find his monsters there, writhing in the high beams of the setting sun.