Viryl’s plea had sounded as vain as it was stupid. He’d begged Darlah to tell him that things weren’t as they seemed. What could she say? That she’d stopped by to make some tea?

«Go away.» Darlah said, taking a risky step forward while keeping the dagger pointed at his solar plexus. Meanwhile, the inquisitor, who must have heard their exchange from wherever he was, had begun to fret and bang against the walls of his cell in the hope of being rescued. The noise seemed to be coming from below.

«Darlah, are you stupid? Do you think you can threaten me by waving that toy?»

No answer. Darlah didn’t step back half an inch and didn’t seem to want to lower her blade at all. The inquisitor continued to make a racket.

«Okay, let’s say your dagger doesn’t bounce off my armor. Let’s say you manage to kill me right here and now. Then what are you going to do? How do you plan to get out of this? They’ll hunt you down until you burn at the stake.»

«What else can I do? I know. You’re here to kill me, too.» Darlah said, tense as a bowstring.

«Did the inquisitor see your face?»

«What kind of question is that? Of course he saw my face. I was the one in charge of feeding them, until the others decided what to do with them.»

Viryl put a hand to his forehead and mimed the act of massaging his temples. His helmet prevented him from doing so, but he wanted to express his disappointment with that gesture. Then he continued: «Didn’t it even cross your mind to wear masks, in the unfortunate event that they managed to free themselves?»

«I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I don’t care. Either go away or kill me. Feneroth will welcome me into his green fields and Bolderan will avenge me. You will not win.»

«Who is Bolderan? The leader of your sect? The brown-haired guy with the braids? Or the slightly overweight long-haired guy? Whoever he is, I fear he is already dead. All four are already dead.»

That statement made Darlah collapse. Her knees sagged and with her voice broken, between the heart-rending screams of the inquisitor who yearned for salvation, she could only repeat: «Dead? Bolderan, Gasteron, Mulivia, Yerginia are all… dead?»

«Darlah, you have to kill the hostage and get out of here.» Viryl cut it short. There, he had told her plain and simple.

«I… what…? how can you ask me to do such a thing? I’m not a murderer, and the others… oh, if only you had never come here! What harm were we doing?!»

«Darlah, I don’t think you have many options. You have to take responsibility. Now that you’ve gotten yourself into this mess, you have to at least have the courage to put an end to it if you want to get out of it alive.» Viryl declared, with extreme gravity.

Darlah was disoriented. Viryl’s words had penetrated her mind and she knew she had to listen to him. Yet she felt blocked, she would never have had the courage to do something so extreme. «Please, do it yourself.» she begged him.

«Huh? No way. I’m already screwing the pooch, allowing you to get away with it.»

«At least come with me!»

The things one does for love.

Darlah uncovered a trap door hidden by a threadbare carpet littered with junk and lifted it. She went down a steep oak staircase first, holding onto the handrail with her left hand while her right gripped her dagger. Viryl followed her silently.

In the dark basement of terracotta bricks, lit by a single oil lamp, the hunchbacked inquisitor stood chained and gagged, in an unbearable stench of fermenting feces and urine. At the sight of the gleaming ethereal armor of a knight of the Royal Order of Ferlonia, he shuddered. For a moment his eyes shone with hope, and he let out a few groans of comfort.

«Do it.» Viryl ordered, standing with his arms folded at the foot of the stairs he had just descended.

Darlah staggered forward and stopped in front of the hunchback. He was helpless and kneeling, his arms raised and bound by chains secured to hooks that jutted from the ceiling. He was still wearing his religious robes, stained with his blood and excrement.

After a moment’s hesitation, Darlah took her knife in both hands and placed the tip of it against the inquisitor’s throat. He flinched and began to thrash about, moaning and screaming, his eyes filled with rage and fear.

«I can’t do this!» Darlah cried, hysterical tears beading her lashes.

Viryl sighed. He stepped forward, the metallic thump of his boots echoing in the filthy cubicle. Then he hugged Darlah from behind and placed his gloved hands over hers, gripping her own dagger. For the first time, Viryl could smell Darlah, a sweet, floral scent that somehow completely wiped out the uncontrollable stench of the dungeon. The inquisitor continued to scream and tug at the bracelets that held him immobilized, his bruised wrists bleeding.

«Look at those sad, desperate eyes. They are the eyes of a man who has taken countless lives, some of them young and innocent like yours. Outside these four walls, his actions would be considered righteous and sacrosanct. But here, we are the law, and our sentence is… guilty. His punishment…”

Suddenly, Viryl pushed Darlah’s hands forward and with them the dagger, sinking its tip into the inquisitor’s windpipe. Then, with a clean, arcing slash, the blade emerged from the left side of his neck, severing his carotid artery. A jet of blood stained Darlah’s tunic, wetting her sleeves and the fold between her breasts.

«… Death.» Viryl declaimed solemnly.

Darlah stepped back and threw her dagger to the ground. Viryl, still holding her, followed her movements.

The inquisitor gasped in agony. Unable to bear the sight of that summary and crude execution in which she had played the role of executioner, Darlah turned in tears and buried her face in Viryl’s chest, who tenderly embraced her shoulders.

Viryl whispered in her ear: «Now wash yourself, put on your clothes and return immediately to Zelfiria, then go to class as if nothing had happened. I will try to stall. We still have two or three hours before my colleagues return from their recon. If we’re lucky, I’ll just tell them that I found the body of the last inquisitor and, trusting my word, they won’t even want to look at it: we’ll send the local police force who will simply give him a burial. If we’re unlucky and among them there’s someone who understands thanatology, it will mean that I’ll have to invent something, because they’ll be able to figure out that the inquisitor died after our clash with your sect and that therefore there was a fifth man. In any case, trust me. I’ve got your back.»

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*****

Viryl, sitting on the sand, was staring at the ripples of Lake Ophania. His mind was elsewhere.

According to the laws of the Kingdom, he had committed a horrible crime, punishable by death. If anyone knew about it, that is. Every trace of his involvement in the murder of the inquisitor had disappeared with his ethereal armor once he had released it.

Even thinking about it with a cool head, he didn't feel particularly guilty. It wouldn't have been possible to save both of them anyway. And if he had to choose between a young girl and an old hunchback and bastard, even putting aside his feelings, he would choose the girl a thousand times over. The others would certainly not have shared his opinion. But they only had a partial vision of things. They hadn't seen during the days of the Feast of Penance the sadistic pleasure with which those corrupt pigs, as far from the grace of Sylyphyr as can be, stoked the bonfires exuding the acrid smell of human flesh in Mercato Boario square in Classia. What harm would it do to the world to have one less inquisitor to sully it with cruelty? What harm would it do to have one more witch?

It had been four and a half hours since Viryl’s encounter with Darlah when Radios emerged from the thick vegetation north of the lake.

«Slacking off, pal?» Radios asked haughtily.

«Since I found what we were looking for, I don’t see why I should have stayed messing around in the woods.»

«And it never occurred to you that you could have warned via our homing crystals?» Radios asked, sitting down next to Viryl in the sand.

«If we’d remembered to set them in resonance, I would have,» Viryl said innocently.

«Where was him?»

«Remember when we were kids and it took us over three hours to get to the lake when it should have taken an hour, and you thought you were leading us in the right direction? Well, it looks like you took the wrong turn. There’s a path south that takes a long detour through the woods. The sect had imprisoned the inquisitors in one of the huts in front of which those disturbing guys celebrated the night of San Giovanni. As for the inquisitor, I found him dead with his throat cut.»

«Oh, too bad for him. But it makes little difference to us, they’ll pay us anyway. And finally we can put this trouble behind us.» Radios concluded, while he raised his homing crystal to the sky and made it resonate.

Nomenas and Elveria joined them after a good hour. As was to be expected, none of the three suggested that Viryl escort them to the hut where he had discovered the body. Not even Elveria, from whom it was reasonable to expect a new outburst of zeal and fussiness. They were simply very strict in receiving a detailed explanation on what to write in the report, so that the provincial police could recover the body without the possibility of errors or misunderstandings.

Evidently they all had a mad desire to pack up and leave that God-forsaken place.

*****

Viryl arrived in Zelfiria at around four in the afternoon. Despite the fact that there was no one to keep him company, he had an uncontrollable need to down a couple of cold beers. He bought them at a kiosk that sold porchetta on the main road, just beyond the gates of the city gate, and went to drink them in the abandoned villa. It would take some time to collect the fee for the mission he had just completed, Radios had to send his report to the headquarters first.

He sat down under the porch in front of the entrance, now eroded by time and weather, and cracked one of the two beers open with a masterful blow given with the blunt side of his trusty knife. He raised the bottle above the line of his eyes and began to drink it with greedy gulps.

Viryl jumped and almost choked when he felt soft arms wrap around him from behind. Warm, moist lips kissed his neck with a tender kiss, and Viryl set the beer on the wooden boards of the porch, holding back a burp. A floral scent as sweet as wisteria and as intense as rose invaded his nostrils. Viryl closed his eyes and let her kiss him a dozen times.

«I knew you’d come here! I’m a listener, you know? You told me that if you finish a mission early, you stay at the abandoned mansion and wait for the end of the shift at Ledomor’s Delights, so that when you come there are few customers and you can stay and chat with me as long as you want!» Darlah exclaimed, peeking her big lilac eyes next to Viryl’s face.

Viryl wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her onto his lap, she let out a little cry at the feeling of being moved so easily. He fixed his intense brown eyes on her lilac ones and, without saying a word, kissed her full lips. She slid her fingers into his thick hair and held him close, as if she never wanted to let him go.

*****

And instead, in the end she let him go. Five years later Darlah would abandon the villa where she lived with Viryl in Toverzana, disappearing without a trace. A couple of years later she would return to look for him, but she had given Viryl too much time to reflect on the toxic and destructive power she had over his life, and that time he was the one not to be found.

The love story with Darlah had been a crazy and adrenaline-filled ride.

The first few months, while she was finishing her studies at the high school in Zelfiria, had been all in all normal. After that bad adventure with the Inquisition Darlah seemed to have settled down. All her malice was now directed at inventing ways to make love to Viryl away from prying eyes, given that she lived with her parents in a miserable stone house with a couple of rooms in a village outside Zelfiria, and in the residence of Yustass there were always servants and Donna Lurtinia with her ears pricked up. They had gotten laid a few times on the first floor of the abandoned villa, but that place smelled of mold and was full of mites and dust. A couple of times they had a quickie in the public latrines behind Crocifissione square. She had blown him outside the cemetery of Zelfiria, and they often made love in the woods.

Once Darlah graduated, she decided to enroll at the University of Toverzana, in the province of Fratta di Ponente, to continue her studies in the faculty of alchemy, and Viryl followed her. The city on the border with the League of Free Communes gave Darlah a new breath of freedom, and her taste for everything forbidden was rekindled stronger than ever.

Even in the western provinces, Viryl had plenty of work to do, and he spent most of his days away from home. When he returned, Darlah was always high or drunk. She smoked mostly Heliotrope joints, but soon developed a taste for psychedelic drugs, which she claimed allowed her to astral travel. Viryl was both repulsed and aroused by the state he found her in, and they had sex on several occasions while she was high. The rhythmic way she wriggled wetly on his erect penis, without any lucidity, was an experience as squalid as it was exciting. Darlah’s self-destructive influence rubbed off on Viryl, who never took drugs, but began drinking more and more often, sometimes recklessly.

Things began to go south during Darlah’s sophomore year of college. Headquarters began to increasingly require Viryl to go on long, complicated missions, and he would sometimes have to be away from her for weeks at a time. During those absences, Darlah had begun attending the meetings of a new pagan sect, and it wasn't long before she was dragged into orgies and sexually promiscuous situations.

Darlah was extremely competent in hiding her escapades, and months passed before Viryl realized that he was a fully fledged cuck. Their relationship suffered its first irreparable crack. Viryl initially wanted to break it off and was furious, but Darlah did everything she could to make him stay: sweet words, delirious declarations of love, promises she wouldn't keep that behavior. A night of tears and hysteric cries.

Of course, Darlah didn't stop attending the sect's meetings, and Viryl became more susceptible to those types of signals, but without ever being able to solve the problem and falling more and more into indifference.

As time went by, Darlah began to feel a sort of perverse pleasure in cheating on Viryl and letting him know. Every time Viryl went away, she took advantage of it to indulge in all kinds of wickedness, and then promptly showed Viryl the signs of her adultery that she bore on her body. Scratches, bruises, burns. Having that kind of control over him, a total dominion over a man so powerful and at the same time a slave to her pussy, gave her a feeling of well-being and omnipotence.

Viryl, on the other hand, did not enjoy these new, incomprehensible attitudes of Darlah at all and, after a period in which he was pervaded by feelings of dismay and impotence, at the umpteenth affair, he found the strength to leave her and return to Zelfiria. Darlah went to get him back and brought him back to Toverzana. A two-year push and pull began, in which they broke up and got back together at least three times.

Viryl was fed up with his relationship and, during his travels, he in turn cheated on her by going with prostitutes. Under the covers, things had cooled down and they slept together without practically touching each other anymore.

During Darlah's fourth year of university, in a particularly cold month of Pendecrestes, Viryl returned from a mission and found the house empty. He waited for Darlah's return for about twenty days, with his anguish that took the form of a hole in his stomach that never healed, from when he woke up in the morning to when he tossed and turned in bed at night without finding peace.

On the twenty-third day of Pendecrestes, a date that would remain branded in his brain for a long time, Viryl decided he had waited enough. He gathered all his things and returned to Zelfiria.