Ernst Larnak

Who

Lady Wachter's manservant, errand-runner and right hand. Polite, unremarkable to look at, and never far from her.

Where

Unknown. Last seen in the square at the Festival of the Blazing Sun.

Status

At large, armed, and no longer anyone's servant.

First met

Session 9, waiting at the orphanage door with an invitation.

The invitation

We met him before we knew what he was. He was waiting outside the orphanage when we came out: "Forgive the intrusion. My name is Ernst Larnak. I have the honor of serving Lady Fiona Wachter, my mistress. She has noticed that you have entered the towns and, in her words, immediately set about doing good works." We went to her dinner that evening, and he was there too, sent off to the kitchen to fetch us a recipe when she offered one.

The hands on the bones

Henrik named him the next day, in a side alley, frightened out of his wits: "Wachter's man wanted the bones… I handed them over to Ernst." Urwin told us not to waste sympathy: "Don't think of him as a person. Think of him as an appendage." Our own read at the time was that he seemed like a bit of a bloke.

That evening, at Lady Wachter's canapé party, he leaned on the wall across the room and watched us. "It seems your friend took a bit of a fright earlier." When one of us said Lily had only been delivering a message, he said, "I think the message was received loud and clear."

The story he told

Sirius went and stood beside him at the party and tried the Baron's writ on him. Ernst already knew about it. He had heard we were flashing it around town, and that the poor bowyer next to the Coffin Works was very distressed. Asked whether the Baron's authority reached this house, he told a story instead.

Two brothers. The younger did not play well with authority, and threw a rotten apple at the Baron during a festival. The elder tried to take the blame, and the guards took them both to the Reformation Center. There, "a tea that addles the mind and makes it hard to know truth from fiction," and "a room where if you're not constantly smiling, you are filled with bone-deep terror, and they leave you there for hours." The elder kept saying, "I believe in you. We will not break." So they were counted as no-hopers and put down in the dark, in a basement patrolled by creatures that brought too little food. The elder passed his share through to the younger: "you're still growing. I have plenty." Up above, the lady threw parties like this one and worked on the town until, one day, the brothers were let out. The elder had not eaten for weeks, and he died.

"You probably can guess I was the younger brother there. I am going nowhere near the baron. There's only one devil in Barovia, and you are flashing his writ."

One of us looked for the lie and found only fury. He pointed out Haliq in the hall and young Madalena across the room: "each one of us was rescued by the lady. You, I hope, have not picked the evil side here." Sirius told him he was not the one who took the bones from the church. "Don't know what you possibly mean." There were undead in the city, Sirius said, and he could show him. "There is evil in the city, certainly." Sirius left it there: "If you want to come look, you know where we are."

He did not come to look

The next morning, while we were fighting vampires and fires across town, Ernst walked into the Blue Water and invited Ireena to Wachterhaus. She went. We had told her nothing, and his was a kind offer from a house that had just opened itself as a hospital.

That same evening, while we were creeping through that house after the bones, he came up the stairs with his lady, looked straight at Lily in her commoner's cloak, saw a small scruffy child, and shoved her roughly out of his way. ("Me baby. Just a baby.") He spotted Muriel at the end of the library and did nothing about it. Then he went down with his lady.

The festival

He was in the square. When somebody in the crowd screamed that the guards had stabbed a man, one of us saw Ernst slip a bloody dagger into his boot. Later, when the square began to turn our way, it was his voice that shouted, "They broke into our house. They robbed a hospital." When the fighting started he hid in the crowd. When the mob knocked his lady down and killed her after she surrendered, we did not see where he was. Afterwards we looked for him and he was gone.

What we still don't know

• Where is he now, and what does he do with a knife and nobody left to serve? One of us said it plainly: he is going to come for us at some point.
• Whose blood was on the dagger?
• How much did he know about what was in Henrik's crates? We believe Lady Wachter had them sent to Henrik, and that Ernst did her errands.
• Whose were the very clean shoes that paid Milivoj? Henrik's boots ruled him out. Ernst's shoes, we have remarked more than once, are very nice. We have never asked him about them.