The party’s own record of a summons we couldn’t refuse, a half hour that one of us no longer owns, a friend taken as collateral, a coffin maker’s confession, six things upstairs that should not be in this town, a barman with feathers, and a canapé party used as a shield wall. We are down one cleric and up two writs. All is well.
The Baron wants to see youse
We got perhaps forty paces from the workyard. Where Vallaki normally posts one guard to a corner, there were now six — eighteen in sight, all furtively not looking at us — and then around the corner came Izek himself, eight feet of him, the demon arm as big around as a grown man. His entire diplomatic overture: “The baron wants to see youse.” Sirius asked his name. “It’s a long name.” We went. The eighteen guards formed a cordon and herded us through the military district to the burgomaster’s residence, past workmen carrying festival floats and flag-poles, and into a back office.
The Baron received us with his wife at his shoulder. We wish to record the Baroness carefully, because none of us have stopped thinking about her: she stood there the entire audience — the entire audience — with a fixed, unwavering grin, and said nothing that was not an echo. We have a theory about where smiles like that are manufactured, and it has twins in it.
The charge sheet: his little birds told him we performed a vigilante exorcism in the orphanage. (“Actual little birds?” asked Sirius, who deals better with literalism, and there followed a full minute of the town’s supreme authority explaining what a metaphor is while we variously did not help.) Vigilantism, you see, is against order, and order keeps the devil out, and all is well. Sirius talked our way out of the offense itself — retracted, never happened — but the Baron had not summoned us to punish us. He’d summoned us to hire us.
The offer: the Baron has heard awful rumors that Lady Wachter consorts with fiends and plans to bring the devil back into Vallaki. Bring him evidence of it, and he will have her judged by his totally impartial judges, sent to the Reformation Center, and — his words — we would be granted the Wachter residence entire. In the meantime we are deputized. We each hold a writ, sealed in wax: acting under the request of the baron, follow my orders. No badges. We asked.
Two more items from that office, recorded without comment. The Reformation Center is run by the twins — “experts at this sort of encouragement,” per the Baron — and either people come out of it thinking more appropriately, or they don’t come out at all. And two of the Baron’s own three household staff have disappeared in the last couple of weeks, which he mentioned in the tone of a man complaining about the servant problem.
For the file: our best read of the man is that he is not lying. He believes every word. He thinks he is protecting this town. Somehow that is worse.
The missing half hour
Since we were in the house, we tried to work our other patron’s angle — proof of what Victor did to Stella. The Baron allowed exactly one of us upstairs to meet his perfect, devout, attic-dwelling son. Sirius went, escorted by Izek (“Don’t let him in any of the other rooms”).
Thirty-five minutes later Sirius came back down, pleasant as ever, reporting a nice four-or-five-minute chat of no particular interest.
It took the rest of us most of the walk across town to establish, by patient cross-examination, what Sirius genuinely does not seem to understand is alarming: he cannot recall Victor’s face. He thinks Victor may have been facing away from him the whole time. He cannot recall the room having furniture in it. He compared the memory to “when you remember you were talking to someone in a dream and then you wake up.” He was up there half an hour and owns five minutes of it, and his considered medical opinion was that this is all quite normal for him and possibly leftover wine.
Someone went into our paladin’s head and took half an hour out of it, cleanly, and left him content about it. Hold that against what was done to Stella Wachter, who got whatever this is, but three years deep. We think we just met the thing that broke her, and it reads scripture in an attic.
Fëanor is collateral
At the door, almost as an afterthought: the Baron regretted that, the vigilantism having technically occurred, he would have to hold one of us — purely to make sure we understand who is in charge. Izek took Fëanor. He will not be harmed, we are assured, and will be returned to us so long as we make progress. As long as we behave, he need not go to the Reformation Center.
We write it plainly so that we do not soften it: the government of Vallaki has taken our priest hostage, and the rate of ransom is denominated in evidence against Lady Wachter. We left him there. There were eighteen guards and an Izek, and we left him there, and none of us feel good about it.
The bowyer next door
Henrik’s Coffin Works: shuttered, silent, no reply to hammering. One entrance, a drainpipe to an upstairs window (noted, declined — very visible), and next door a shop called Celegal’s Bowyer, run by a grey-skinned, long-eared elf a very long way from wherever grey-skinned, long-eared elves are from. He was chatty, especially once the writ came out. What he gave us:
- Henrik lives in the shop, opens only on appointment, and has been dead quiet for about a week.
- About a week ago — and the bowyer flagged this himself as odd — Henrik took a delivery of coffins. A coffin maker. Receiving coffins.
- Vallaki supports exactly two full-time hunters, who made their standard pre-hunt arrow order, also about a week ago. No traps, no nets, no thrown gold. (These will be Milivoj’s hunters, out after the boys.)
We also sold him a heavy crossbow nobody was using. Opening offer 15 gold; a spirited haggle conducted with the assistance of the phrase “we are doing the Baron’s work — that’s not a threat” landed at 30 gold, and the seller left the shop five times richer than they entered this country.
What Henrik keeps upstairs
Deputies of the Baron do not loiter. Drew’s thieves’ tools found their way into Lily’s hands via an extremely public handshake, guidance was quietly applied, and the lock clicked open in full view of two guards who had already been shown the writ and given a big thumbs-up. (The guard squinted. It means everything’s good. All is well.)
Henrik was behind the door and slammed it back at us — then folded when we pushed in anyway. A worn, frightened man in work boots. 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.
He would say nothing in the shop — “I’m not saying anything. You can 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 while he stalled, Sirius quietly opened his sixth sense, and this once he remembered he had it. Straight through the ceiling of that shop: six undead, on the floor above us.
In a side alley, Drew leveled with him — no writ, no leverage, just the honest version: the Baron terrifies us too, he is holding our friend, we don’t care who annoys the Baron, we just don’t want anyone to die. And Henrik 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 bones in the Vallakovich crypt, Henrik collected them and handed them over to Ernst. He doesn’t have them. He never wanted them.
- The next day, six coffins were delivered to his shop, with instructions not to 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.”
So there is the chain, complete at last: Milivoj → the crypt → Henrik → Ernst → Lady Wachter. The man with the nice shoes bought the theft; Wachter’s household collected the goods; and payment arrived a day later in the form of six occupied coffins stored over a coffin maker’s bed like a threat written in furniture.
We told Henrik to sleep anywhere else. He has no money and no friends — “not very social,” he said, and fair — and we have added him to the list of people we are somehow responsible for. He knows everything we know. If the Baron’s people reach him first, he will say it all in one breath.
The barman has feathers
Mid-conversation with Henrik, Drew went very still: the alarm ritual on our room had just gone off. We arrived back at the Blue Water to a squirrelly Danika, a window that had been locked and was now open, a fluttering sound just out of sight — and on our floor, a second letter: “Trust is hard. Want to prove yourselves.”
We invited Urwin upstairs to help us understand our window situation. What followed was a beautiful, doomed negotiation in which he suggested things “flutter in” through open windows, we suggested that only someone with keys could have — “But we never told you the cake was poisoned” — and he slowly, visibly stopped bothering to pretend. He confirmed the Wachter raven is a fiend without blinking. He described the letter-writers, hypothetically, as information brokers, not warriors. And when we finally said, as gently as a room full of armed people can, that we all know what’s going on here —
he turned into a wereraven. Right there in our bedroom. Same mass, feathers like scrolled black iron, and genuinely one of the most beautiful and alarming things any of us have ever seen.
What Urwin Martikov told us, restored to man-shape, in the inn he runs as an information hub for the Ravens of Barovia:
- There are two cursed kindreds in this valley: the wolfkin, and the ravenkin. The Ravens are the second. The raven the last adventuring party cut down all those years ago was his Great Uncle Frederick.
- They have been working against the devil for seven hundred years. “He is almost literally the land” — but he is not omnipotent, and they do what can be done. They are told by the Vistani that one day a party of adventurers will topple him. Seven hundred years of parties so far. He does not hold his breath, and said so, kindly.
- We have been under watch by an agent named Mirabel. (We passed along a compliment on her plumage.)
- Their clan holds the winery. The wine problem is a Raven problem. Noted.
- The lore of the bones, from Raven records: the bones of St. Andral and the church together make a hallowing strong enough that lesser undead cannot enter the city at all while the bones sit in their place. The devil himself could enter the city — but never the church. Take the bones out, and the city’s doors swing open. The six coffins upstairs at the Coffin Works are not a coincidence. They are what the theft was for.
- Ernst barely exists as a person — “think of him as an appendage” of Lady Wachter. And Wachterhaus itself is warded to the nines: the Ravens have never gotten an agent inside. The one house in Vallaki that is a black hole to the information guild is the one the bones almost certainly sit in.
And one more thing we worked out together, and wish we hadn’t: the Festival of the Blazing Sun is in four days, and attendance in the streets is mandatory, by law of the Baron. If you wanted to uncork six coffins for maximum harm, you would do it into a street the whole town is legally required to stand in.
Lily and the lady
The plan was sensible. Lure the meeting onto our ground: a note to Lady Wachter — we have information about your daughter; the Baron is watching us; meet us at the church, neutral ground — delivered by Lily, hooded, forgettable, with the rest of us positioned at St. Andral’s. We even discussed a covering note to the Baron so that the visit would read, from his side, as us diligently investigating. Every part of it was sensible except the part where the Wachter footman recognized Lily on the doorstep and cheerfully insisted she come inside.
So Lily was alone in the sitting room with Lady Fiona Wachter, raven on her shoulder. “Have you succeeded already?” Lily produced the note and her worst deception of the evening. The temperature dropped. “Have you turned on me, Lily?”
What we know happens next, because Lily is still here to tell it: a wave of unnatural tiredness — shaken off; a dead sprint for the door; a second wave on the threshold — shaken off, luck riding shotgun; and then flat-out flight through dusk streets, with a proper diversionary route home, because Lily has done this dance before in worse cities. The last thing she saw was Lady Wachter standing in her own doorway, raven on her shoulder, watching her go — upset.
The note stayed behind on the floor. Technically, the mission was accomplished. We have written Lily a commendation and are all pretending our hearts did not stop.
What we told the priest
Before round two, we took Father Lucian aside at St. Andral’s and gave him the shape of it: Ernst collected the stolen bones; the Wachter raven is a fiend; we are walking into that house. He took it about as well as a good man can take heresy about the parish’s favorite noblewoman — “She’s Lady Wachter” — but we have seen his face when things he can’t believe turn out true, and we settled on terms we can live with: he holds his tongue for now, and if we do not come back, he takes all of it to the Baron. A dead man’s switch with a kind heart.
Sirius floated leaving the locket — our little imprisoned shadow demon — in the church’s keeping. Not yet. Not until the church can protect itself again.
The canapé defense
We reached Wachterhaus at half past seven, at dusk, braced for wards and worse, and found instead: a party. Doors thrown open, lamplight everywhere, forty or fifty delighted citizens flowing in and out with plates of good food. An impromptu canapé evening, announced barely an hour before — that is, announced immediately after a small hooded messenger fled the premises. The poppets adore her. She does this sometimes. She is so good.
Understand what this is: it is a fortification. She has bricked herself in behind the town’s affection, and every wall is a person we refuse to hurt. Sirius walked in through the front door regardless, and got the audience the rest of us could see coming: gracious, glittering, raven on her shoulder, surrounded by witnesses. He offered our information anyway. Her answer, complete:
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary. Your services are no longer required.”
And across the room, leaning on the wall, watching us the way a man watches a job: Ernst. “It seems your friend took a bit of a fright earlier.” We said she’d only been delivering a message. “I think the message was received loud and clear.”
So the pretense is over on both sides of that particular table. She knows we know something; she doesn’t yet know how much. And as the rest of us withdrew to regroup — one of us didn’t. Lily slipped into the crowd of canapé-eaters and did not come out. As of the end of these notes she is inside Wachterhaus, unnoticed among fifty happy citizens, with a maid posted on the staircase between her and whatever is upstairs, and the six of us minus two are standing in the dark outside the best-defended house in Vallaki trying to decide what we even are right now.
Late that night, Urwin found the visible remainder of us looking troubled, and offered the only advice the Ravens ever give for free:
“There is more to Barovia than Vallaki. You can just leave.”
Where we stand
- Mid-scene at Wachterhaus: Lily is hidden inside the house, alone, uncaught; the rest of us are outside; the crowd of citizens is her cover and our cage. Fëanor is the Baron’s hostage. Four days to the Festival of the Blazing Sun, when the whole town is required by law to be in the streets. Level 4.
- The bones: chain complete — Milivoj → crypt → Henrik → Ernst → Lady Wachter. Almost certainly inside Wachterhaus, which is warded so thoroughly even the Ravens are blind there. Our “services are no longer required.”
- Six undead in coffins sit on the upper floor of Henrik’s Coffin Works. Nobody else knows. They haven’t moved yet. We are gambling — with the Ravens’ cautious agreement — that they are being saved for the festival, and that returning the bones beats fighting them.
- The Ravens of Barovia are wereravens. Urwin Martikov is one; his family runs the Blue Water as an information hub and their clan holds the winery; Mirabel is our tail; they broker information, they don’t fight, and they are, in their own words, probably the only good group in this bloody place. Their offer to gather intelligence stands. Standing order upgraded: never harm a raven.
- Our writs: we are deputies of the Baron, tasked to prove Lady Wachter consorts with the devil — which may simply be true. The Baron is not lying; he is worse, he is sincere; the Reformation Center is run by “the twins” and not everyone comes out. The Baroness’s grin will be in our dreams. Two of the Baron’s three staff have vanished.
- Victor Vallakovich took half an hour of Sirius’s memory and left him smiling about it. It is our only sample of what was done to Stella, and it makes the Wachter task and the Baron task the same shape: everyone in power in this town breaks minds.
- Henrik confessed everything to us and is sleeping next to six coffins because he has nowhere else. Father Lucian holds our dead-man’s-switch. The Blinsky toy for Aragal, the winery run, Bluto at the lake (promised to the Ravens “within a day or so,” now overdue), the locket for the abbot, the hunters after the boys — all still open, all now queued behind the bones.
Questions on our minds
- How do we get Lily out — or is the better question what Lily can find before she leaves? Where in a warded house do you keep stolen holy bones — and can she even touch them safely if she finds them?
- How do we ransom Fëanor with “progress” when our evidence against Wachter is real but our witnesses are a terrified coffin maker and a paladin with a hole in his memory?
- What are the six things in the coffins, and are they waiting for the festival — or for an order that could come tonight, now that the lady is upset?
- What did Victor do to Sirius in that attic, and is it what he did to Stella? Is the “proof” Fiona wanted currently missing from inside our own paladin’s head?
- Who is the man with the nice shoes? Henrik’s boots ruled him out. Ernst is “a bit of a bloke.” The Baron’s own staff are vanishing. The nice shoes are still walking around Vallaki unaccounted for.
- Can we do this at all without the Baron — and if we can’t, is handing Lady Wachter to the Reformation Center a rescue of the town or just feeding the other monster?
- “You can just leave.” The Ravens meant it kindly. Four days to the festival. We are not going to leave, are we?