When Thyssen had first decided to journey to Oxenfurt, he did not spend much time planning what he would do once he arrived. He assumed he would find his way to one of the institutions around which the arts of the city revolved; that is to say, either the Academy or any of the theaters that were supposed to be flourishing alongside the embankments of the city. Through these places he would find fellow troubadours and artists; no doubt there would be some men and women of genuine talent and perspicacity among them and, surely, one of them would provide aid and advice to a penniless colleague?
But on the morning that he finally rode through the eastern gate of Oxenfurt, Thyssen ignored the signposts directing him to the Academy and barely glanced at the placards advertising Madame Irina's latest production. Instead, he set his horse to a slow trot through the avenues which ran in circles around the island, occasionally pausing to ask a pedestrian for the location of the closest notice boards. Most told him to plow himself, for at the time the residents of Oxenfurt were not known for their good manners. Nonetheless, with a bit of persistence, Thyssen soon managed to visit all the notice boards within the city.
This did not take long for there were not many of these boards. In that bygone era Oxenfurt had not yet blossomed into its present expansive state. The best Redanians artists of the time were concentrated in cosmopolitan Tretogor and considered Oxenfurt a village indeed, suitable perhaps for a scholar but entirely devoid of the comforts necessary to sustain a creative life.
Few as the noticeboards were, Thyssen was satisfied to see at least a dozen postings advertising problems with ghosts. He read through several accounts of ghostly sightings, each ending with a plea for witchers, mages, or knowledgeable sages to drive the spectre away.
And so he set to work.
His first client was an old woman who ran a tavern at the edges of city. It was a dirty establishment, infested by rats and flies, though none of her boarders seemed to mind much. Her notice complained of a haunting by one of her former lodgers, a Temerian who drank himself to death after a particularly exerting visit to the brothel.
"Right bastard he was," she complained, "still owes me an oren for the room. And now Agota is pregnant…"
She gestured towards her niece, sitting nearby with her hands on a bulging belly and a grave expression on her face.
It took Thyssen some time to comprehend her meaning; and when he did finally understand, he made the mistake of voicing some doubt as to whether it was possible that the ghost impregnated her niece.
"Who else could it be?" the old woman hissed at Thyssen, regarding him with sudden wariness. "Like a hawk I watch her. Never sets foot out of my sight!"
It took considerable effort to calm her down. Thyssen could only mollify her by listening to her niece's account, lengthy and rather explicit, of how the boarder's ghost visited her one night and had his way with her. The man's death, it seemed, did not at all diminish his sexual appetite. In the interests of propriety, my dear reader, I will spare you the sordid details of this story.
The job paid a measly ten orens. Asking for half of the money ahead of time, and after purchasing the necessary supplies, Thyssen spent that evening producing a veritable cornucopia of noise in the Temerian's former room.
The old woman and her niece waited outside the tavern, all the guests having been cleared out for this dramatic event. This time he emerged literally covered in blood - he had made some minor cuts on his arms and embellished them with the juice of Cidarian tomatoes - and he was pleased that, as intended, the two women gasped and shivered with fear at the sight of him.
He treated them to a good story of the battle, recounting the supposed trading of blows and counterblows. An audience of boarders had gathered, most of them poor laborers who took lodgings on the city's outskirts, fishermen, washerwomen, tradesmen apprentices. And so, to his surprise, Thyssen found himself in front of an audience hung onto his every word. He stood in front of the tavern late into the evening, answering the questions the crowd was eagerly throwing at him. His descriptions of the battle flourished over time and the final version bore little resemblance to the initial one but, thankfully, no one seemed to notice.
Once the evening had turned into night and crowd finally dispersed, events took an all-too-expected turn: the old woman refused to pay him the remaining five orens, pleading her poverty, and claiming she did not have the money regardless. It was only after he threatened to give every ghost in the city directions to her tavern that she had managed to procure the coin, all the while cursing at him bitterly.
The full implications of what he had done did not dawn on Thyssen for quite some time. Whereas the story of Agota's impregnation by the dead Temerian had formerly brought forth only jeers and mockery, the tale now acquired credibility; not only had it been validated by a witcher, but it had led to an epic battle, the stories of which were rapidly spreading throughout the city, with many soon claiming to have seen first hand the vicious blows traded by the brave witcher and the fearsome ghost.
And thus, two more cases of pregnancies arising from spectral violations occurred within the next month. In both cases, the victims immediately sent for Thyssen. He charged the first of these fifteen orens, the next one twenty, and took care of it using the same method, to the satisfaction of all involved. He had grown quite adept by now at howling, screaming, and the making of eerie, otherworldly clangs.
And then the cases began popping up with a pleasing regularity. Vainly did the scholars from the Academy proclaim that such things were old wives tales; the more they insisted on it, the more everyone held them to be out of touch. Besides, it was well-known that the scholars were arrogant, that they looked down on the common folk; their opinions on this issue, as well as on all other issues, were cloaked in a tone of condescension that led their listeners to double down in opposition. A few witchers from the School of the Griffin passed through Oxenfurt that summer and added their voices to the scorn of the scholars; but it was of no use. By the time of the next planting season, in the fall of 1269, hardly a week would go by without an incident of ghostly impregnation.
Reader, do you imagine that eventually the truth triumphed, that Thyssen and his clients were found out as frauds? If so, I envy your naivete. Ah, how wonderful it would be to be young again, to have a simple and good-natured faith in the workings of the world! Alas, dearest reader, I regret to tell you that lies that strike at men's hearts always prevail over the truth.
Even the scholars who, for quite some time, made a sport of laughing at the ignorance of the peasantry fell silent once the young daughter of the Duke of Carentan had been impregnated, supposedly by a man the Duke had slain a good half-century earlier. The Duke was a generous supporter of scholarship; not only had he bequeathed much of his fortune to the Academy, but he spent considerable sums each year funding the projects purportedly undertaken by scholars in their free time. Not unaware of the source of their incomes, the scholars began falling mute one-by-one.
Indeed, only weeks later, the more desperate among them began writing tractates on the matter, claiming to find precedents to the recent events in the ancient texts. It turned out that Eigean Evelienn Deareadh, an anonymously-penned Aen Seidhe treatise about the next world, mentioned in passing a certain ghost that could ride a flesh-and-blood horse. If the spectral and the material could co-mingle in this way, who knew what was and wasn't possible? The few scholars who kept on insisting these tales were mere fabrications were made to feel unwelcome and soon found themselves seeking posts elsewhere. Soon enough, everyone but the lunatics who drooled and mumbled nonsense in the streets believed the city was in the midst of an epidemic of ghostly ravishment.