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TWL Chapter 473: Like Serpents in the Dark
🕑 Added 2025-07-01 01:14:46 +0000 UTCIt turned out that, of all the members of the School of the Viper after the founding of the Witcher Order, it was Letho whose way of thinkin
It turned out that, of all the members of the School of the Viper after the founding of the Witcher Order, it was Letho whose way of thinking had changed the most.
Kolgrim and the other two were both alarmed and awed by Letho’s audacious plan. Yet beneath their fear lurked a subtle anticipation—an urge to witness it for themselves.
In that state of anxious curiosity, the three of them peered through Iris's painting, spying the view of the Kaedweni royal palace, silently tracking the passage of time.
…
It was deep into the night. The hall remained utterly silent.
At first, candles had been lit in the palace's main hall, but one by one they had burned down and gone out. No servants passed by anymore. Even the guards only occasionally wandered past in between patrol shifts.
The bright lights of the night were now limited to bedrooms or studies, while the most heavily guarded areas lay on the outer edges of the palace.
Who would focus their attention on the great hall?
From a corner of the room, an oil painting depicting the primeval forests of Kaedwen suddenly burst into bright emerald flames. Streams of shimmering light flowed steadily from it, gathering and taking the shape of four human figures.
They emerged midair, and even the landing of the largest and heaviest among them didn’t make a sound.
They exchanged glances—then scattered like serpents.
Kolgrim, Serrit, and Auckes followed the plan, heading off to set fires near key landmarks to draw the night guards' attention. Meanwhile, Letho quickly oriented himself, then vaulted onto the roof.
His massive weight, a byproduct of his thick, muscular frame, didn’t hinder him in the slightest. Letho's bulky figure moved with the agility of a monkey, slipping between rooftops and rafters in a smooth and practiced flow.
Unlike the other three, this was Letho’s first time inside the Kaedweni royal palace. But the maps Kolgrim and the others had drawn, along with the guard rotation schedule they’d pieced together, had long since been engraved into his memory.
—Suddenly.
Letho’s motion shifted from swift to utterly still. With a spin of his body, he slipped into the shadow behind a great bell, his form blending seamlessly into the moonlit darkness.
Below him, a patrol squad passed along the corridor. Ahead of him to the left and right, two watchtowers stood, each with sentries turning their bodies in opposite directions.
The patrols looped around the tower, while the sentries rotated their gaze east, south, west, and north at regular intervals. Together, their irregular lines of sight formed an invisible net that covered everything ahead.
Letho silently processed the information in his mind. He had reached the most heavily patrolled zone between the front hall of the castle and the royal bedchamber.
He had to wait. He needed a blind spot in their vision.
He mentally recited the rhythm, tracking the footsteps of the patrol and the timing of the sentries’ rotations.
…
The patrol passed to the far side of the tower.
But the sentry on the left had his eyes fixed on the top of Letho’s hiding place.
Not yet.
…
The sentry to the left turned toward the open castle wall.
The sentry to the right had just turned away.
But at that very moment, the patrol on the ground reached the area ahead of him.
Still not yet.
…
Letho recited the rhythm silently, visualizing the sentries’ shifting lines of sight as threads weaving across the courtyard in front of the tower—constructing a mental diagram of their patterns and blind spots.
Finally, in a fleeting instant—
The patrol disappeared around a corner, cutting off their line of sight. The sentry on the left turned his back once more, no longer alert.
And the sentry on the right—was just about to turn and glance toward Letho’s hiding place.
But then he paused.
And yawned.
His eyelids fell shut involuntarily. He thought he heard the faint flap of wings above him, perhaps a crow passing overhead. By the time he blinked his eyes open and rubbed away the drowsiness, he failed to notice that the shadows behind the bell tower had subtly faded.
…
That’s the one.
Letho leapt in swift, silent bursts until he reached the peak of the tower. From that high vantage point, he scanned the palace grounds below, committing every building to memory.
Once he’d confirmed his direction, he ducked down and descended swiftly, like a skier gliding downhill. Reaching the roof’s edge, he latched onto a beam with his right hand and swung his entire body forward in one fluid arc under the moonlight—
[Thump.]
With a soft sound, he landed lightly on the window ledge, as though his body bore no weight at all.
Ahead of him, three windows over, a balcony glowed with the brightest light in the night-shrouded palace.
“Not the bedroom... the study?” Letho tilted his head slightly. Given King Henselt’s infamous reputation, he didn’t exactly strike one as the type to burn the midnight oil over matters of state.
Effortlessly, Letho slipped over to the ledge above the study. Hanging upside down, he used the shadow’s cover to peer inside.
The moment his eyes adjusted and he saw the scene within, he paused, blinking in mild surprise—then curled his lips into a faint smile.
“Well then... this might be easier than expected.”
…
The spacious study was filled with more than a dozen guards. They stood along the walls in uneven formation, their eyes meant to scan the room—but they were all fixed squarely at the center.
It wasn’t fascination that held their gaze—it was discomfort.
On an operating table in the middle of the room, a pale-skinned elf lay bound. His entire body was covered in tiny puncture wounds, slashes, and raw patches where flesh had been cut away.
He was a test subject—and one who had clearly endured no small amount of torment.
Henselt lounged lazily on a sofa, his bloated belly supporting a glass of red wine. His mood was foul.
“Well? Hurry up and tell me what breakthroughs your research has made! Look at the damn sky—it’s almost morning! If you can’t give me a satisfying result, I’ll show you what happens when someone wakes me up for nothing!”
He jabbed a finger toward the mutilated elf. “You’ll end up just like him!”
The mage standing beside the operating table showed no change in expression in the face of Henselt’s threats and curses. He merely gave a slight bow.
The Four Great Kingdoms all possessed considerable strength. Just as Temeria once had Triss, Keira, and Fercart serving as high-ranking mages, Kaedwen had not one, but an entire Council of Advisors.
Among a council of court mages, there are always one or two whose brilliance eclipses the rest—so much so that the others are often forgotten.
Take, for example, Sabrina Glevissig, now widely known as the 'Daughter of the Kaedweni Wilderness'. She had served as the kingdom’s primary advisor for years, her reputation and power far surpassing those of her peers in the council.
Sabrina was also known for her fiery temper, which had made her relationships with other mages in the council notoriously tense. At present, she was away on the Isle of Thanedd and had yet to return—leaving the door wide open for the others to curry favor with the king.
“Your Majesty,” the mage said with a smile, “I wouldn’t dare disturb your valuable rest unless I had made a real breakthrough.”
As he spoke, he turned over his hand to reveal a small glass-ceramic jar resting in his palm, glowing faintly with a soft blue light.
Henselt frowned. “Is that... a Northern Wind Bomb?”
Ever since Lann had slaughtered his way through the Northern Wars, every nation had begun taking magic and non-humans much more seriously. And after Lann re-established the Witcher Order, the witchers themselves had returned to the attention of the Northern elite.
Everyone agreed on one thing: anything that Lannister so strongly endorsed had to hold real value.
Thus, mages and advisors across the major kingdoms resumed their studies on all things witcher-related. And among the witchers' arsenal, alchemical bombs were the first to catch Kaedwen’s attention.
These weapons—originally researched by sorcerers and alchemists but perfected by witchers—had never been popular with the ruling class, primarily due to their high cost and impracticality. After all, in human society, any problem a bomb could solve could usually be handled just as well by a dagger or an arrow.
But Henselt had taken a special liking to these alchemical bombs—for one simple reason: amusement.
The various methods of using bombs to kill non-humans—burning, poisoning, freezing, fragmentation—aroused him in a way that plain old blades or whips simply didn’t.
“So you dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night just to freeze another elf? Have you completely lost your mind?” Henselt bellowed. “And in the study, no less? Are you trying to get me killed?!”
The mage quickly bowed his head and wiped the sweat from his brow.
Back when Sabrina was around, he never had the chance to get this close to the king. He had spent quite some time preparing this evening’s 'demonstration'.
