Who: The Baron’s enforcer and captain of Vallaki’s guard. The reason people in this town vanish when he points. As of Session 12: also, improbably, the man who fought vampires at our side.
The arm: His right arm is wrapped in leather to the elbow and is wrong underneath — as big around as a grown man. The fire powers are no longer rumor: we have seen the whole arm wreathed in flame, and watched him hurl a vampire twenty feet with it.
Status: Fought beside. Grieved with, almost. Currently holding our priest — and a report the Baron will not want to hear.
The meeting (Session 10)
We got perhaps forty paces from the Workyard. The street emptied — Barovian weather-sense for trouble — and where Vallaki posts one guard to a corner there were suddenly six, eighteen in sight, all carefully not looking at us. Then he came around the corner and filled the street.
“The baron wants to see youse.”
Sirius asked his name. “It’s a long name.” We went.
The file
- The guards are terrified of him, not of us. The shopkeepers found their floors fascinating.
- He escorted Sirius up to Victor’s attic — “don’t let him in any of the other rooms” — and waited.
- At the door, his hand came down on Fëanor’s shoulder, and that was the entire ceremony of our friend becoming collateral.
- Rumor already gave us the rest (the Wachter dinner): the Baron raised him; doors lock at noon when he walks; the lady’s considered opinion is that he “will have to be crushed… together.”
- He is right-handed. One of us needed to know. We have agreed never to discuss why.
Vallaki arithmetic (Session 11)
He stood in the Blue Water’s taproom — “The baron wants a status report” — and we told him, truthfully, that we had located six undead in the city. His reply, verbatim, deserves preservation:
“There are no undead in Vallaki.” But we’ve seen them. “It is impossible.” What if we bring evidence? “You literally can’t, because it’s impossible.”
Twenty-three of pure honest persuasion earned us: “It sounds believable, but it can’t be true.” What he was sent to demand is a piece of paper that says Lady Wachter is working with the devil — as if villains file paperwork. Terms struck: physical proof concerning Lady Wachter, by tomorrow morning. Fëanor’s board and lodging depend on it. Hours later, the undead that are impossible were running the streets in daylight.
The doors (Session 12)
The back doors of burning St. Andral’s exploded, two vampires landed prone on the flagstones — thrown — and behind them, screaming, flame roaring off the great right arm, came Izek. He had caught the two escaped spawn in the streets and delivered them to us bodily, two town guards at his back.
We record what followed carefully, because it changed how we see him. The vampires opened the throats of both guards in front of him — “Frederick, no.” “Not Petru too.” — and it turns out the Baron’s attack dog knew the names of his men. He grabbed a vampire by the head with the burning arm, informed it, “I will destroy you, starting with your teeth,” and in due course hurled it twenty feet into the inferno, where it crisped. Drew made a public show of wrapping him in Clover’s protective light — which promptly saved him from a falling roof. If that bought us one ounce of grace from the scary man, it was the best-spent magic of the day.
The crack
Afterwards he stood staring into the fire, and when we looked closely we saw a man whose entire world had a fissure in it:
“The Baron promised. The Baron promised me. This can’t happen. Evil can’t come into Vallaki.”
We tried to tell you, we said. His answer is the exact shape of the problem: “The vampires I believe. But the Lady Wachter?” A man who has now personally burned a vampire alive still cannot cross the second bridge — and the paper deadline underneath us all still stands. He went to report to the Baron. His parting words to us were “Do what you must,” which we have chosen to hear as a permission slip with very wide margins.
What was the promise? Who promises a man that evil cannot come into a city? We suspect the answer explains everything about him, and we intend, carefully, to find out.
Most of him back (Session 13)
He came to the church steps towing Fëanor — “A token of friendship. We are re-releasing him into your custody” — and snapped off the prisoner’s armband with the words “You can have most of him back,” which is the closest thing to a joke we have ever heard from the flame-armed man, and we hate that we sort of like him now.
Then the other thing. The man who grabbed a vampire by the skull and burned it alive while weeping over his guards thanked us for our assistance against “the masked men.” Officially, there were no vampires. There were seditious agitators in very obvious masks, throwing firebombs. He recited it to our faces without one visible flicker. And then he took the letter — our letter, the evidence, the actual paper his own deadline demanded — and walked it to the Baron, and there was nothing we could do.
At the festival he stands at the foot of the stage, in the rain, watching the crowd, defending a speech he knows is a lie, with a hanging scheduled on testimony he collected. We keep thinking about the crack. We suspect it is not done cracking.
Appears in: S8 (by name), S10 (in the flesh), S11 · S12 · S13. See also: The Baron of Vallaki, Quests & Threads.