As promised, on the morning of the second day of the month of Neviticus Melfis sent news. A terse message which contained an address was delivered on Viryl’s Speculum. As for the textual content, it was limited to "he found it", without any greetings or pleasantries. This seemed bizarre to Viryl, who had not yet gotten used to the concise way of using the Speculum's chatbox, but Anker reassured him. He tried to make him understand that there was no need to write papal bulls for everything, like the time he had asked him to take an extra pound of bread when he went to get supplies.
It was just after nine, and Viryl and Anker were still having breakfast in the bar which during their stay had become the irreplaceable starting point for each new day.
Finally having a trail in their hands, they gobbled up their croissants, downed their cappuccinos and set off, immediately heading to the aforementioned place. As might be expected, the destination was a few hundred yards from the “Greedy Temptations Club” and traveling the route by public transport took half the time it had taken them during their nocturnal visits.
The omnibus left them at the Zaniarti Street stop, and from there they had to infiltrate the depths of the intricate maze of alleys of the night district of Meridania, which under the light of day showed all the rot and dirt hidden by the red signs of the night. After getting lost at least three times and asking for directions from a series of picturesque figures, each less recommendable than the last, they reached a dead end that ran between concrete buildings so large and tall that they blocked any ray of light, even in the late morning when the sun was at its peak.
Darlah's apartment was located in an ancient and dilapidated palace, nestled among countless others, all identical. It could only be distinguished thanks to its house number.
As was customary in popular housing, the door of the building was wide open onto the antechamber without any concierge service that could act as a filter for unwanted patrons. A lucky break, Anker thought.
When they reached the staircase of the building the knight and the fallen immediately sensed that something did not sit right. On the first steps there were scratches and traces of blood, cleaned up in a botched way. A drunken brawl? Possible. Yet, trying to reconstruct the dynamics of the event, it seemed that the attackers had hit head-on two victims side by side who were descending the flight of stairs. The amount of blood shed was too abundant to be attributed to a simple bare-knuckle fight. The residues were dry, but still well profiled on the wooden planks which had not yet absorbed them: they could not have been more than a couple of days old. In any case that disturbing finding could have had any meaning, and staying there and worrying about it too much would have been of no use. They had to go up.
According to what Melfis reported, Darlah's apartment was on the fourth floor. There were no elevators or magical lighting. All the light in the room filtered through tall, narrow mullioned windows that opened onto the galleries between one floor and another, therefore, flight after flight, there was an alternation between light and darkness. In the building, where the musty scent was surmounted by the pungent fragrance of incense, absolute silence reigned, broken only by the crackling of the unstable steps.
Anker, when he was about to reach the third floor, heard a creak and then the thud of a door slamming. Viryl, who was ahead of him, didn't seem to notice. In fact, when Anker reached the landing he could see that all the doors facing it were firmly bolted.
Having climbed the last flight of stairs and reached the fourth floor, the duo began searching for the entrance to Darlah's apartment. There was no need to read the labels attached to the doors, as their attention was immediately caught by one that showed obvious signs of forced entry. It was exactly the one they were looking for.
For Viryl it sufficed to place his hand on the door and push it gently to make it rotate softly and without friction on its hinges. The lock was broken and the door had just been pulled over. This time the omen was unquestionably bad.
«Darlah! Darlah, I'm Viryl, Viryl of Zelfiria! I'm not here to give you trouble, come out!» Viryl shouted as soon as he crossed the threshold of the entrance, cupping his hands around his mouth. His words echoed in the small, desolate room.
No reply.
«I'm afraid we won’t find her here, Viryl. Whatever the reason they decided to break into her house, I doubt she stayed here after that. If they didn't kidnap her, she must have gone to seek protection elsewhere.» Anker observed. Then he advanced into the antechamber and studied it carefully. It was a rectangular room without windows into which two doors opened: one, on the right, seemed closed, while the other, in front of them, opened onto a corridor. Parallel beams of light filtered through the blinders of the window located at its end and imprinted on the parquet of the corridor. That single source of light was refracted towards the entrance, making the outlines of the furniture barely distinguishable. From the little that could be perceived in that eerie dim light, there seemed to be no signs of a struggle. Anker added, completely superfluously: «This whole situation is way too fishy. It can’t be just a coincidence. That’s impossible that some random burglar decided to break exactly into this house right before we arrived.»
Viryl cautiously advanced towards the corridor, studying every move he made. Darlah's signature floral scent still permeated those rooms, and his mind was taken back nearly forty years. For a moment he closed his eyes and breathed deeply, while a feeling of oppression began to tighten in his stomach. How much he would have liked to feel a cold blade placed on his neck, emerging from the darkness. How beautiful it would have been to see those bright lilac eyes wide open again. “Whatever mess you've gotten yourself into, once again I'll help you get out of it,” he pictured himself telling her.
What a childish fantasy. Instinct told Viryl that this time things wouldn't go that way at all.
The corridor gave access to two further rooms. The first, on the left, was suddenly thrown open by Viryl, who immediately pulled back to avoid a possible assault. A kitchen. Nothing out of place, at least by Darlah's standards. Despite her venerable age, she had not yet learned to wash dishes and pots after using them.
Now it was time for the second one, on the right. Viryl hesitated before it. Shafts of light fell slanting from the blinders onto his leather trousers and boots, tracing brilliant semicircles. Anker had advanced to the opposite end of the corridor and was waiting for his companion's move, leaning on a corner. Viryl turned, while he put his hand on the handle, and for a few moments they looked at each other. Anker nodded, encouraging him to lower it. It seemed that Viryl was suddenly afraid to continue.
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Then, suddenly, just as he had done with the first one, he opened it wide and withdrew. He looked inside the room for a moment, but then stepped back again, putting his hands to his head, his face taking on an expression of immeasurable despair.
«No! No! Hell no! fuck it, no!» Viryl shouted, as he fell to his knees and bent over. Anker winced.
Slamming his left fist against the doorframe again and again, until his knuckles bled, Viryl continued to scream relentlessly, «No! No! No! Fuck! It can not be! No! No! Hideous sons of a whore!»
Anker, who thought he had half an idea what to expect, reached the kneeling fallen knight and peered into the room. He was wrong. He had to put his hands to his mouth and tighten his glottis to avoid regurgitating croissants and cappuccino.
From the large window of the living room a powerful beam of light shone obliquely onto the wall opposite the entrance, dividing Darlah's horribly mutilated corpse into an illuminated half and a dark one.
The woman, still in her nightgown, had been pinned to the wall by her joined wrists, and then she had been disemboweled. Her insides dangled to the ground in a sunny puddle around which flies were already fluttering. Her gaunt head fell forward, her bright blonde locks caked in blood covering her abdomen. Her eyes were closed, and her facial muscles contracted in a pained grimace.
Viryl stood up with his back arched backwards, shouting at the ceiling: «Bastards! Bastards!», and he turned around throwing a powerful punch at the opposite wall, covered in green wallpaper. It seemed to Anker that the entire room was shaking. «Bastards…» exhaled Viryl: «I swear… I swear on the name of the Lord, that I… I…»
Anker, shaken as well, placed an arm on Viryl's shoulders and in the most empathetic tone of voice he could muster, whispered: «Viryl, we will find them and you will have your revenge. But now we have to search this place inch by inch. If possible, without alarming the whole neighborhood. And then we have to leave. We're not safe here.»
Although Anker expected at the very least to receive a right to the face, his words calmed Viryl, and he felt his tense muscles go limp under his arm. Viryl sniffed at him and nodded, then in a hoarse voice said, «You're not wrong, boy. What the hell is wrong with me?», finishing with a stifled laugh.
Anker watched him make his way towards the living room, with straight shoulders and confident bearing, and thought, feeling pity for him: “Nothing’s wrong with you, friend, on the contrary. But now you need more than ever to be in control of yourself, or we fuck up everything here.”
First Viryl inspected the body. After staring for a few moments at the inanimate face of the woman who in the distant past she had loved almost to the point of self-destruction, he focused on the pin stuck in her wrists. Turning to Anker he observed: «Do you see this nail? It has a peculiar shape and does not have a head that can be beaten with a hammer. It was synthesized and planted with magic."
Viryl thoughtfully stroked the beard of his chin, and added: «Of course, it could be the work of a mercenary. But is there all this difference between mercenaries and the Knights of the Order of Libertas? I would say no.»
«Do you think that the colleague of Melfis he sent to look for her…?» Anker started to ask, pausing as if to cast that horrible thought out of his mind.
«I don't know yet, but maybe analyzing the crime scene can help us.» Viryl replied, taking a few steps back. He slowly rotated on himself to observe more carefully the exotic furnishings of the living room and the display cases overflowing with vials and powders of the deceased alchemist. Everything was still precisely in place. Describing what his eyes saw, Viryl assessed: «Even in this room there are no signs that Darlah tried to defend herself from his attacker. This opens up two possibilities. Either she was tricked into remaining helpless with a mind control spell or something alike, or she was aware that she could not escape her execution.»
«But this still doesn't tell us anything about who carried out the murder.» Anker retorted.
«Not, it doesn’t, boy.» Viryl agreed «If Darlah had fought, we would definitely have some proof. Fibers from the killer's clothes, hair, blood. So all we have left is to speculate. And if we have to speculate, then the most logical hypothesis is that Darlah was killed because we were about to find her. Yet that doesn't explain how the instigator learned we had received a tip or why they allowed us to find her body. If they wanted to leave us groping in the dark again, wouldn't it have made more sense to just make her disappear? No. They wanted to give us a warning, or maybe a message.»
«Viryl, if that damned monster that we found in Veltagia knew my name we have no reason to believe he didn't know yours too. Maybe it knew about your past, and that you would ask for help from Darlah. It's likely that she's been spied on since we set foot in Meridania, and that they decided to kill her when we got too close.» Anker observed with uneasiness.
«The monster… the monster! The Fearkan wanted to kill us!» Viryl exclaimed, as if he had been struck by an epiphany. He went to the large window of the room and, bathed in the golden light of the morning, as he peered outside, he mused aloud: «Whoever is behind this business wants us dead. But since we are not easy prey like a defenseless prostitute, he doesn't want to take the risk of attacking us right in the center of town, out in the open. There is the risk that, by defending ourselves, we could make a commotion and raise a fuss. They're trying to bait us, boy. And if it gives me so much so…»
Viryl paused, looking upwards, and then exclaimed, pointing to the slope of the roof of a nearby building: «Here's the bastard! They're breathing down our necks!"
For a few moments he had glimpsed the helmet of an ethereal armor, but he had retreated behind the ridge line of the roof as soon as his gaze had met it.
«Knights of the Order of Libertas...» Viryl commented after a few seconds.
«Knights? Against us? And we're supposed to survive in enemy territory without even an Exoplion?»
«I won't sugarcoat it, boy, we seem pretty damn screwed. I'm afraid our only choice for now is to play along. They must have left us a message in this apartment, let's look for it.»
«Viryl, in what way would you like to play along!? If things are as you say we must retreat. We have no chance of escaping! If they won't attack us as long as we remain in crowded places, we should go to the station, get on the first stagecoach, and review our plan in a place that is not hostile to us!»
Viryl looked at Anker with a grim and resolute look, and ordered him: «You are still young. Take that stupid handkerchief off your saber and go back to Ferlonia, because it's clear that this will be your last chance. I have some business to do here.»
Anker stubbornly held his gaze, and stated with conviction: «I also have business to do, but I have no intention of committing suicide. I'm telling you we need to regroup.»
«Sorry boy. Suicide you say? Suicide will be. Beggars can’t be choosers.» Viryl reiterated, firmly confirming his intentions, and turned his back on him.
«Then it's suicide.» Anker echoed. He had never seen Viryl shy away from a trap. He didn't give a damn. With contempt for the danger he threw himself into it and fought through it tooth and nail. And now that the unfinished business was so personal there would be no way to make him give up.
Anker followed Viryl towards the entrance and then to the door on the left which was still closed. Beyond they found a hallway which led to two further rooms. They inspected them carefully. In the bathroom, beyond a tub full of cold water and a shelf full of make-up and perfumes, nothing caught their attention.
In the bedroom instead, on the night table next to the unmade bed, they found exactly the directions they were looking for. The diary that Darlah had kept for the last three years was placed there in plain sight, open to its last page, covered in her elegant, curly characters.
Did the killers know it was there? Reading it, the knight and the fallen unequivocally learned that they did and, probably, they had left it themselves in plain sight after censoring part of its content.
Were the killers already aware that Darlah kept a diary? In all likelihood not, but that unexpected discovery had been exactly what they were looking for. Rather than leaving the task of leading the two prey into the lion's mouth to a sloppy message written in blood on a wall, the sadistic task was carried out by the last handwritten words of the murdered prostitute.