Who: Henrik, Vallaki’s coffin maker. Takes great pride in his specialized coffin nails — they curve, in a particular way, as they’re hammered home. Signature work; any smith in town knows them on sight.
Where: The Coffin Works, production district — he lives in the shop. Next door: Celegal’s Bowyer, run by a chatty grey-skinned, long-eared elf.
Status: Confessed. Homeless in place. On the list of people we are somehow responsible for.
The confession (Session 10)
He slammed the door on us, folded when we pushed in, and would say nothing in the shop — “Take me to the Reformation for all I care” — which told us plenty about what the inside of that sentence feels like. So we walked him out toward a drink, and in a side alley Drew leveled with him: no writ, no leverage, just the Baron terrifies us too; he’s holding our friend; we just don’t want anyone to die. And he broke, the way Milivoj broke, because this town is full of small men being squeezed by large hands:
- Ernst — Lady Wachter’s man — threatened him. The lady wanted the bones.
- Hours after Milivoj left the sack in the Vallakovich crypt, Henrik collected it himself — that’s when his nails hit the dirt — and handed it over to Ernst. He never wanted any of it.
- The next day, six coffins were delivered to his shop. A coffin maker, receiving coffins — the bowyer next door flagged it as odd without being asked. His instructions: never open them. He knows what’s in them. He has not been upstairs since. “I either get killed by them, or killed by her, or killed by her men.”
And we must record the first thing we did, because it matters: we checked his shoes. Dirty. Workman’s boots. He is not the man with the nice shoes.
What was upstairs (Session 11)
Sirius’s sixth sense had read six undead through that ceiling, and we collectively assumed zombies. We went back in the morning to finish it — Henrik, mercifully, had slept at the Blue Water — and learned three things in quick succession:
- There is no paperwork anywhere in that building. Not a delivery note, not a manifest. Whoever supplies Henrik does not do receipts. (We were hunting evidence for Izek. There is none.)
- A pristine, professional, expensive alarm ward sat on the stairs, and none of us spotted it before it went off like the wrath of god.
- They were never zombies. Vampire spawn. Six. Someone had moved them out of the coffins into person-sized crates — unmarked, save one small silver sign. Four went out the windows into the morning streets. Two stayed, and made their point mostly on Lily. Muriel unmade both of them.
The shop is now the outbreak’s ground zero: burst windows, two piles of dust, and a town looking for someone to blame. Henrik knows everything we know, and his coffins just confessed for him. He is very high on the list of people we are somehow responsible for.
Taken (Session 13)
The clock we kept not-quite-getting-to ran out. With the criers’ package — no vampires, festival tomorrow, all will be well — came the line we’d been dreading: Henrik, arrested, sent to the Reformation Center for “harboring the seditious elements.” Poor, frightened, coffin-making Henrik, in the building that eats minds, in our place, for the crime of warehousing the things the state says never existed.
The record also preserves the debate on whether coffin-making is an inherently sinister trade: “You tell me the last time you met a coffin maker you thought was a fine, upstanding servant of the Morning Lord.” — “People always die. It’s one of the most stable incomes in the village.” — “Compelling.” We are aware that the joke is doing load-bearing work over the guilt. He is now first on the list of people we are somehow responsible for, and the list is getting long.
Appears in: S9, S10, S11, S13. See also: Ernst Larnak, The House of Wachter, Muriel Vinshaw, Quests & Threads (the bones), Vallaki.