Chapter 5

That night Vernon Roche slept badly.

Ever since the day he and Geralt had come back from the hut on the cliffs to find the Kaedweni camp empty except for some soldiers and a mass of dead bodies, he dreamed vividly. His nightmares were haunted by visions of his men hanged in the canteen with bags over their heads, concealing their pain-twisted features and accusing stares. He could hear them whisper in his head, and the sound very nearly drove him crazy every time.

The horrible stench of burning hair, rotten flesh and feces crawled up his nose. Nausea welled up inside him. When he tried to move he felt rooted to the spot, fighting against invisible bonds but achieving nothing. In his ears resounded the clash of metal on metal and the screams of the dying, filled with agony and silent imputation.

This night, something new slipped into the old, well-known nightmare: The cries of a woman, quiet at first, but then growing louder and louder and louder until it became ear-splitting. Vernon tried desperately to cover his ears and block out the sound, but he still could not move. Then he saw Ves, cowering under the table in the canteen and crying, eyes red and sore, her legs pulled against her body and shaking with sobs.

"Save me.", she pleaded, her voice no more than a whisper. But he couldn't. Vernon tried, he struggled, howled, cursed, but nothing changed. Then Henselt appeared out of thin air. He grabbed the female soldier's upper arm and yanked her to her feet violently, laughing in a cruel, prurient way that made Vernon grow cold with horror and hot with disugst and revulsion at the same time. Ves screamed again; a distressed, pained wail that shook him to the core.

"Please, no... No! Stop, please!", she begged, but Henselt only laughed harder, ripping her clothes off and pinning her against the wall. Then Ves suddenly turned her head and looked right into Roche's eyes.

"Help me, Vernon.", she whispered. "Help...me..."

And then the scene changed abruptly. Instead of Ves, there was another woman - a woman who seemed strangely familiar to him - and instead of Henselt there was another man. He had no eyes and no nose, only his grinning mouth was leering in the plain, white mask that should have been his face.

Suddenly Vernon felt different, smaller and weaker. He noticed he was standing behind some kind of cloth, a curtain maybe, and was peering through a slit into the room. For a second he was confused - what was going on here? - until it all came to him at once, hitting him hard like a slap to the face.

The woman was his mother.

Emotions he thought long forgotten came rushing back to him, clawing at his heart. Anger, disgust, frustration, helplessness, jealousy, shame - his head was spinning violently. All those feelings had accompanied him every day when he had been a child. Memories flashed before him, memories of men, many of them, that he had despised, and memories of his mother's tired smile that had never really reached her eyes.

She had never told him, but Vernon had known she was a prostitute as long as he could remember. He never mentioned it, and his mother did not talk about it, either. Most of their time together they had spent in silence. Back then, the silence had not been unpleasant. Now, in his dream, the silence that filled his ears almost physically hurt.

Vernon's tiny hands were clamped into the rough linen curtain and shaking slightly. He did not want to look, did not want to see his mother like this again- He froze.

The man lying on top of his mother had stopped moving. For a second, nothing happened. Then he started turning his head towards the child behind the cloth with excrutiating slowness. Vernon's heart beat fiercly in his chest, he started sweating.

And finally, the stranger was looking at him, directly into his eyes. He was no longer faceless. The man had turned into Dethmold the sorcerer.

"Kill me if you dare.", he snarled, his lips twisted into a mad, taunting grin. "You are never going to catch me. You can't even-" In mid-sentence, his voice changed into that of Iorveth. "-save your own men. Their death is your fault alone. You had to play conspirator, and they paid the price. You have only yourself to blame."

Vernon opened his mouth to scream, but no sound escaped his lips. He struggled. No no no no no-

He jerked awake with a hoarse shout, panting and bathed in cold sweat. His teeth were clenched tightly and his face was twisted into a grimace of fury.

"What ever it is you negated, I beg to differ and say yes. Just on principle."

Vernon was startled out of his paralysis by Iorveth's quiet, quizzical voice from somewhere to his left.

"Then you beg to be wrong." He grumbled, wiping his brow. "On principle."

Iorveth chuckled drily. "Sounded like quite the bad dream you had there. What a nice discovery; even the hard-boiled, imperturbable commander Roche has nightmares once in a while."

"Hmph. None of your business."

"Maybe not."

The silence that followed was uncomfortable. Vernon sat up and took in his bearings, as far as this was possible in the dim light of the moon. Next to the little fireplace they had set up yesterday he could make out a shape sitting cross-legged on the ground. The trees around them moved in the gentle breeze and made a faint rustling noise that somehow seemed to calm him down a bit.

"You don't look like you've slept that well either.", he noted to Iorveth, but not without putting a note of spiteful reproach into his voice.

"Did you really expect me to go to sleep next to a man that wants me dead? And I'm not even starting to think about your intentions"

That in turn made Vernon chuckle. He glanced over to Geralt who was dozing on the other side of the fire, completely oblivious to their night-time conversation.

Again there was silence, but this time it felt like Iorveth was waiting for something. Vernon suddenly remembered what had been nagging at him since this afternoon. He felt reluctant to say it, but he did anyways.

"If you're expecting me to thank you for saving my life - I'm not intending to."

"I didn't think so. But it's already a surprise to me that you even remembered."

For some reason this pissed Vernon off. He felt like the elf was trying to hurt his pride.

"I don't simply forget about being saved, even if it's by a filthy non-human. Which is a disgrace by itself.", he growled through gritted teeth.

"I guess that's as close to a 'thanks' as you can get.", Iorveth sighed. "But I don't forget my debts either. In our duel at Flotsam, you spared me, be it unintentionally. We are even now."

"Oh, so that's what you were playing at all this time, wasn't it? You're still sulking because you lost against me back then!"

"You wish, silly D'Hoine."

"What, you wanna have another go? Fine with me!"

"Not now, it would be an unfair fight. Like beating a child with a stick."

"What was that? You little-"

"Hey, could you guys pipe down a bit?", Geralt suddenly said from where he was lying. "There are still people trying to sleep. Not everyone wants to hear the two of you bitching at each other like a freshly married couple. Go and get yourself a room or something."

"Excuse me?!"

But Geralt had already turned around and gone back to sleep. Vernon laid down with a bemused mumble and stared up at the star-spangled sky. He did not fall asleep for a very long time, only shortly before dawn he slipped into an uneasy, dreamless slumber. Several times he could hear the sound of someone tossing and turning from Iorveth's direction, and once he heard him moan quietly in his sleep. The next morning however, he was not sure if he hadn't just imagined it.