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"Master witcher," a frazzled-looking matron says, setting a pouch down on the table that clinks promisingly. "I need you to lay a ghost to rest."
Lambert raises an eyebrow and gestures to the chair across from him; the table is small and rickety and tucked into the most secluded corner of the tavern, but there is at least enough room for two. "A ghost?"
The matron sits with a nod. "My grandfather, gods rest his soul, died not two months ago. A few days after his death, the - the problems began." She sighs and scrubs a hand over her face in clear weariness. "He did not like my husband, you see."
Lambert hums. It is not unusual, in his experience, for unsettled spirits to cause trouble for those they liked least in life. "Are the problems only for your husband?" If they are, that is, counterintuitively enough, a bad sign. A ghost which can cause trouble selectively is one that has held to its mind, or at least some part of it, despite its death, and those are the most dangerous sort, because they can plan. A regular wraith is predictable. A smart ghost can catch a witcher off guard.
The matron frowns thoughtfully. "No, I suppose not. They started with him, and he still gets most of it, but I've had problems, too, and even our little Lillian, and Grandpapa doted on her."
Lambert nods. "Alright. What sort of trouble are you getting? Start from the very first thing you noticed."
The matron taps her fingers on the table for a moment while she gathers her thoughts. Lambert appreciates that, actually. This sort of sensible conversation is a hell of a lot easier to navigate than hysterical sobbing or terse commands to 'take care of the problem, witcher, and get gone'.
"My Johann's an apothecary," she says at last. "He keeps snakes - three of them, or there were three. Adders. He uses their venom to make cures for poison."
Lambert suddenly wants to have a long conversation with this Johann the apothecary. He has lots of questions. He'll probably want to take notes.
"Grandpapa always hated the snakes - said they'd get out and bite Lillian. They never did. Johann's as careful as careful. But three days after Grandpapa died, Johann went to feed them and the biggest one was in the middle of the floor with its head torn off."
Lambert's eyebrows rise. That's a strong and rather worrisome starting point.
"Johann was distraught, of course, but he thought perhaps it had managed to escape somehow on its own, until he went to put the lid back on the tank. It's cheesecloth, several layers thick, so the snake inside can breathe, and it had been cut open."
"With a knife or claws?" Lambert asks, frowning.
"Claws, we think. The cut was ragged."
Lambert nods. That's not great. Ghosts who can manifest claws can usually dematerialize them at will, which makes fighting them really unpleasant unless they're trapped in a Yrden.
"Go on."
"Johann bought a metal mesh to cover the other two tanks, and that's worked so far, but almost every morning something has been knocked off the shelf in his workroom - often the most expensive materials he has. Outside of his workroom, our plants are being dug up, my milk has gone off, everything on my sewing table was swept to the floor and covered in soot, and our Lillian's favorite doll had its stomach ripped open and all the stuffing pulled out." The matron grimaces. "She cried all night."
Lambert grimaces, too. He's seen worse - far worse - than a ruined doll, but the mental image of a little fabric person with its guts ripped out…yeah, he can see why the kid cried. Especially since that could very, very easily be taken as a threat.
Maybe the matron's grandfather loved her kid when he was alive, but there's no telling what being dead has done to his affection.
"That was two nights ago," the matron says with a sigh. "Other than that - noises, every night, not all night but often enough to wake us, skitterings and scratchings like nails on the shutters. And sometimes it scares the cats in the street, and they set up awful yowling."
Lambert nods. Cats are sensitive to ghosts, for some reason; it makes sense that they'd react to the presence of an active and clearly malevolent one.
He scoops the pouch of coin off the table. "Let's go, then."
The matron's shoulders sag in relief as she rises. "Follow me, master witcher. Gods willing, you can lay Grandpapa to rest, and we can mourn him in peace."
*
The matron lives in a tidy stone house with its own tiny yard; the downstairs is the apothecary shop, workroom, and kitchen, while the living quarters are upstairs. Lambert isn't surprised to see that most of the plants are useful in making salves and balms as well as cooking. He can also see that almost half the plants have been disturbed recently, torn up and re-planted and somewhat the worse for wear because of it.
There's a strange smell, faint but definite, that gets stronger as he approaches the house. Lambert sniffs a few times and shakes his head. Maybe it's something the apothecary is brewing up.
There's a man of about the matron's age standing behind the counter in the shop; he looks up as they enter and sighs in clear relief. "You found him, then, Gertie."
"I found him," the matron - probably Gertrude, Lambert is guessing - agrees. "Where's Lillian?"
"I sent her to play with Maria and Emilia," the man - Johann, probably - says. "Best for her to be out of the house, I thought."
Gertrude nods vigorously. Johann turns to Lambert. "What do you need to know, witcher? Should we stay or leave to let you work?"
"Maybe find something to do in the garden," Lambert says. "And if I yell, get as far away as you can."
Johann nods, and he and his wife exit the shop hastily. Lambert takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders.
"Come out, come out, wherever you are," he murmurs, and draws his silver sword, and starts hunting.
He goes through the whole house, from the basement to the attic and back again, checking in every nook and cranny, behind wardrobes and under rugs, looking for the ghost's attachment object. And he finds precisely jack shit. His medallion, tucked beneath his tunic, lies quiet as a stone against his chest. He doesn't get a single whiff of the strange cold-burning scent of a ghost's presence, only that odd musky smell that intensifies and fades again without any rhyme or reason.
He ends up in the workroom, staring at the snakes in their tanks and frowning. Not at the snakes, necessarily. They look healthy and well-fed and content, curled up in tidy heaps. Just at the fact that for all that he doesn't doubt that everything Gertrude described happened, not a single thing in this whole house feels like ghosts. Not even the poor damned doll with its stitched-up torso.
But the doll smells funny. And so, when he steps forward and sniffs at the empty tank that used to hold a third adder, does the tank.
Lambert frowns harder and follows his nose.
The smell waxes and wanes - it's present in the pantry and the workroom, scant in the shop, strong in the room that was the grandfather's before his death. Lambert goes over that room with a metaphorical fine-toothed comb.
In the very back corner, under the bed and tucked against the wall, is a small box with holes punched in the lid, and it reeks of whatever the fuck he's been tracking.
It's also very clearly a cage for an animal.
Lambert frowns down at it. It can't be a very large animal, not when he can hold the cage easily in his hands. Small, then, and stinky, and -
"Oh for fuck's sake, it's in the fucking walls," Lambert says aloud.
He goes tromping down to the pantry again and hacks off a piece of a ham that's hanging from the rafters, then thinks for a moment and heads for the workroom, since that seems to be the creature's main haunt. He sets the meat down in the middle of the floor and backs up so he's not looming over it, then takes three deep breaths and concentrates. He learned this trick from Eskel, and it doesn't work nearly as well without Eskel's ridiculous near-mage levels of power, but for a house as small as this one, it should at least do something.
He raises his hand and casts Axii with as wide a radius as he can manage. "Come out," he says, projecting the order as strongly as he can. "Come have a nice little snack." He pours power into the Sign, grimacing at the tugging behind his breastbone as the Chaos flows out of him, and feels it spread through the house, down to the basement and up into the second floor and -
Catch something.
Something fierce and sharp and unlike anything he's ever cast Axii on before.
There's a skittering and a scratching, just like Gertrude described, and then finally out of a hole in the corner that Johann probably uses to sweep out the water when he's scrubbed the place down - which he does regularly, from what Lambert can tell - there pokes a little brown nose. A moment later the nose is followed by the rest of a little brown creature; it glances around with bright dark eyes and then comes scuttling over to the ham, which it begins to nibble at once.
It looks like a weasel, but scruffier. It's brown from nose to tail-tip, thickly furred, and clearly a predator of some sort, by the little fangs and sharp claws that scratch against the floor. Lambert has never seen anything quite like it before.
Lambert takes a single long stride forward and picks it up by the scruff of its neck -
And discovers he's holding a tiny whirlwind. Holy shit, the thing is fast and bendy and fierce. If he weren't wearing thick leather gloves, he'd be bleeding in half a dozen places almost at once. As it is, he yelps and bobbles the catch, flinging the thing into the air and then catching it again clumsily; it eels around in his grip and sinks its teeth into his nearest finger, the little fangs going through his glove and drawing blood.
"Gods damn," Lambert mutters, impressed, and casts Axii again.
The not-weasel settles down slightly. It lets go of his finger and chirps at him in fury, but at least it's not trying to claw his arms off anymore. "What are you?" Lambert asks it, and bends down cautiously to pick up the ham with his free hand and offer it to the not-weasel. The not-weasel bites it while glaring at Lambert as if it would much prefer to be biting him.
"I don't taste as good," he informs it dryly, and eyes its little claws. Yeah, they're sharp enough to get through cheesecloth. But why the fuck would it? Most sensible creatures avoid adders like the plague, for good and sensible reasons like not wanting to be eaten.
This thing apparently tore an adder's head off, though, so…
"Snake-eater," Lambert says slowly, thinking back to the bestiaries he's read on long winter evenings in Kaer Morhen with nothing else to do. "Little brown weasel-y snake-eater, can't be from the North or I'd have seen something like you before…"
Most of their bestiaries are about animals and monsters native to the North, for obvious reasons, but there was that one bizarrely dry travel journal from a Wolf who went all the way down to the southern tip of the Continent and back about two centuries ago, and couldn't write for beans but did see all sorts of interesting things, so Lambert slogged through the journal just so he could say he'd finished it, and yeah, he did write about a creature sometimes kept as a pet to defend against the poisonous snakes common in the warm southlands, they had a weird-ass name -
"Mongoose," he says aloud. "You're a fucking mongoose from Korath. What the everloving hell are you doing up here?"
The mongoose chirps at him again.
"Why am I asking you?" Lambert says, rolling his eyes at himself, and turns to carry the damn thing out of the house and ask Gertrude and Johann if Grandpapa happened to know any traveling merchants who sold exotic animals.
He gets exactly three steps before the temperature suddenly drops like a rock and there's a horrible thin howl, and his medallion thumps against his chest in a frantic tattoo.
"Fuck!" Lambert spits, drops the mongoose, casts Quen, and draws his silver sword all in one motion - and a good thing he does, too, because the ghost that comes swooping down on him from above is definitely one of the thoroughly nasty kind, complete with claws and a remarkable lack of sanity in its glowing green eyes.
"I shall have vengeance!" it howls, swiping at Lambert with both clawed hands, and Lambert ducks and rolls and casts Yrden, only catching one leg of the wraith, not nearly enough to hold it long enough for him to kill it -
And the mongoose jumps up from where he dropped it and bites the damned wraith on the ankle. Hard.
The wraith yells. Lambert bounces to his feet and swings his sword at the wraith's throat, and it goes through easy as anything - unfortunately, because that means it wasn't solid enough to hit. The wraith dissolves. The mongoose chirps and dances in place.
The wraith re-forms, and the mongoose goes for it again.
Lambert has never had a weasel-like creature help him fight a wraith before, but it's surprisingly useful, actually, mostly because even if someone is dead, having an angry creature going for one's ankles is a damned good distraction. It takes a minute of dodging, but finally Lambert does manage to pin the whole wraith in a Yrden and then cut its head off with silver.
"What's your fucking object?" he asks the silvery dust drifting to the floor. "Tell me it isn't the mongoose." He doesn't want to have to kill the fierce little thing.
The mongoose is still doing its war dance, and Lambert follows its gaze to the snake tanks. The empty tank, in fact. The one that was the first victim of the haunting-and-or-mongoose.
The one that does make his medallion shiver, just a little, when he touches it.
Lambert hauls the tank out into the yard and smashes it to pieces, then lights the pieces with Igni and watches it burn to ashes.
And then he looks at the mongoose, which is sitting on his boot and gnawing idly at one of his bootlaces, and sighs.
"So," he says to Johann and Gertrude, who are watching the whole scene with wide eyes, "as best I can figure, your grandfather bought himself a Korathi mongoose - a snake-eater. I'm guessing he was planning to use it to kill the snakes, rather than risk getting bit himself. And then he died before he could actually do it, so he came back as a wraith. As long as the mongoose was making trouble, I guess he figured that was good enough." He shrugs. "I caught the mongoose, though, so…well. He's not going to trouble you anymore."
Gertrude nods, wiping at the tears rolling down her cheeks. Johann sighs. "I knew he didn't like my snakes, but really," he says, wrapping an arm around his wife's shoulders. "I didn't know he hated them that much."
"If it helps, he probably didn't, when he was alive," Lambert offers. "Wraiths get stuck. They don't have room for more'n one emotion, and it's usually anger." He shrugs again. "If that's what he was thinking about when he died…"
"Then his ghost could think of nothing else," Johann sighs. "We will give offerings for him at the Temple this evening, and thank the gods his soul has been laid to rest at last." He eyes the creature sitting on Lambert's boot. "Will you…ah…remove the animal, also?"
Lambert looks down at the mongoose and wiggles his foot. The mongoose chirps and bounces up, claws catching in the thick fabric of his trousers, and comes scuttling up his leg and torso to perch on his shoulder and begin snuffling curiously at his hair, ear, gambeson, and sword-hilts.
"I guess I will," Lambert says dryly. The mongoose sticks its nose in his ear; the whiskers tickle abominably. Lambert flinches. The mongoose chitters and pulls away just long enough to stick its whole whiskery face down the collar of his gambeson.
"For fuck's sake," Lambert sighs.
Gertrude sniffs hard and lets out a wet little laugh. "It appears to approve of its relocation."
"Little bastard," Lambert grumbles, nods to the couple, and goes striding off to find a tavern with some decent ale.
The mongoose on his shoulder braces its little paws on the edge of his pauldron and chirps with interest, tail tickling his neck as it wriggles.
Lambert has the feeling he's going to have to get used to the sensation. The mongoose seems to have decided that fighting a wraith together makes them friends, or some such thing.
"I'm calling you Ankle-biter," he informs it. Ankle-biter chirps and climbs onto Lambert's head. Lambert sighs and reachs up to nudge the mongoose back onto his shoulder.
Assuming the mongoose makes it to winter, he's going to enjoy seeing all his brothers' expressions. Especially if he can get Ankle-biter to help clear out the nest of snakes down in the crawlspaces below the kitchen. Now that'll be useful as hell.