The House of Wachter

Who

Vallaki's other great house. Lady Fiona Wachter, her late husband, her sons Karl and Nikolai, her daughter Stella, her manservant Ernst, and a household she says she rescued, every one.

Where

Wachterhaus, the finest house in the noble district.

Status

Lady Wachter is dead. She surrendered to the crowd at the festival and the crowd killed her. We did not stop it. Her raven was an imp, and Osric killed it. Karl and Nikolai are alive because they told the town the truth about their mother first. Ernst has vanished.

First met

Session 8, when Sirius bought her sons a drink. We dined with her in Session 9.

We dined at Lady Wachter's table, fled her sitting room, ate her canapés, burgled her house and took back the bones she had stolen. Then we stood in a square while the town she had fed for years stamped her to death. She was clever, generous to the poor, openly treasonous and utterly in command of her house. She kept her dead husband in her bed and a fiend on her shoulder. Her good works were real to the people she saved, and we write that down plainly because it is the most dangerous fact in this file.

Lady Wachter

Roger warned us about her before we met her: she talks about being for the people and comes close to criticising the Baron, and she's too rich for him to touch. "No one that powerful stays that powerful without being rotten in Barovia." Her sons told us, over the drinks Sirius bought them, that she was a bleeding heart and that if we wanted to do anything serious, we should talk to Mother.

Ernst came to invite us, with perfect manners: she had noticed that we had "immediately set about doing good works." She met us at her door. "My dears, my dears, welcome, welcome. It is good to see do-gooders in Vallaki." Her hand was warm. When one of us said all was well, she waved it away: "There's no need for that here. I have thick walls. The baron's madness does not extend here."

Over mutton and some very good fish that had come from somewhere far away, she laid it all out. Her husband, a commoner who took her name, died ten years ago, and she believed the Baron responsible. Three years ago Victor Vallakovich broke her daughter's mind. She wanted the Baron and his family crushed, "literally, if I can." Sirius argued her down from the whole family to the Baron and his son, and she settled for: "He and his son both are dead. They just don't know it." She offered us fifty gold for proof of what Victor had done to Stella.

She said the devil's name freely in her own house. Her family had been there "since before Strahd. Strahd is a Johnny-come-lately." He was "a rock slide. He is a force of nature. You have to bend to his whims." But the Burgomaster was "just a man who we can topple." Did she have power of her own? "Yes, I do." Izek, she told us, has fire to go with his demon's arm, and "He will not be swayed. He will have to be crushed." Her preferred method: "I am a mere weak woman. I prefer to have my agents stab, slice, behead. If you have a mace handy, you can do some crushing." Werewolves in the west take children. The winery's wagons were late. The Vistani were "just rot." She ran soup kitchens. And she asked us to invite Ireena to live under her roof, which we never passed on.

One of us said the devil's name five times across her dinner table. Nothing came. Our insight on the lady got nowhere: "She's very charismatic."

The raven that was not a raven

Halfway through dinner Sirius opened his divine senses. Lady Wachter herself was no fiend and no undead. The raven on the perch in the hallway was a fiend. Sirius asked Fëanor to join him in the smaller room down the corridor, where they held the least subtle conference in history. ("We are close followers of the Morning Lord.") Somebody was listening at the door. Moments later the fiend moved fast, up the stairs and out of the house, and did not come back that night.

Asked about her bird, she said it was a mere raven, a gift from a dear friend about ten years ago. She could not recall which friend. When Sirius put it to her that it might be a fiend from the lower planes: "You speak madness, sir. Ravens are plenty in Barovia. They are a sign of goodness. You can trust anyone with a raven."

Her sons filled in the rest at the inn. When their father died, Mama wrote to everyone, even the abbey, about raising him. Then she disappeared for a couple of weeks, and came back with the raven, and seemed at peace. It disappears for a bit sometimes, they said. That same night The Ravens of Barovia left a note in our locked room: "That being is no true raven."

Lily and the lady

We sent Lily with a note asking the lady to meet us at the church. A footman knew her at once. "Lily from earlier. Come on in." Lady Wachter was in her sitting room with the raven on her shoulder.

"Oh, Lily. Have you succeeded already?" "Lily, are you lying to me?" "Have you turned on me, Lily?"

A wave of sleep came over Lily, and she shook it off and ran. Another came at the doorway, and she shook that off too, and kept running. When she looked back, the lady was standing in her doorway with the raven on her shoulder, watching her go, upset.

The canapé party

That evening Wachterhaus threw its doors open for an impromptu canapé evening, with forty or fifty citizens going in and out with plates. "She lets the poppets come in and have food," one of them told us. "She's so good." She had made a wall out of people we would not hurt.

Lily went in, and the rest of us followed her. Lady Wachter greeted Sirius among her guests. "Yes, well, here I am, amongst all these people. They love me." And then: "Your services are no longer required." Across the room Ernst leaned on the wall and watched us. "It seems your friend took a bit of a fright earlier. I think the message was received loud and clear."

Lily, hidden under the furniture, threw an illusory voice into the kitchen shouting "Fire, fire, fire!" Drew acted out a panic. A footman called Haliq calmly told everyone there was nothing to worry about, and nobody moved. Sirius asked the lady whether we should be concerned. "Probably not. My house is very safe, in a lot of ways." Ernst told Sirius his story of the Reformation Center and the brother who starved himself to feed him, and pointed out Haliq and young Madalena: "Each one of us was rescued by the lady." As we left, her voice followed us to the door:

"No one is beyond redemption. Anyone who comes to their senses can still do business with me. No one has done anything that could not be saved."

The hospital, and the cellar

The next morning the coffins in Henrik's shop turned out to hold vampires, Sirius told a street full of people that the servants of Lady Wachter had let them in, and the church burned. Within hours Wachterhaus was a hospital, with a hundred people through its doors and far more bandages and medicine than any house should have. She had been stocking up for something. And Ernst had been to the Blue Water to invite Ireena, and she went.

We went in cloaked as commoners and picked the cellar lock. Behind a pivoting wall were candles, a black pentagram with a chair at each point, and in one chair a frail, starved man who had been in the Reformation Center. His crime had been chuckling at a festival. "I was saved. The lady saved me. I owe her my life. I would do anything for her." Why was he sitting in a pentagram? "I was brought down here. Just told to sit here." The pentagram? "Decoration?" When he crossed the threshold with us, skeletons rose out of the floor and cut him down before we could stop them. We never learned his name. When the skeletons were dust, Drew looked at the pentagram properly. It was lightly scratched and not magic at all. Set dressing. Somebody had built a devil-worshipper's cellar in Lady Wachter's house and left it there to be found, and we think it was meant for us.

Upstairs, in the kitchen, the burned and the bitten lay on bedrolls. At the top of the stairs hung a great map of Barovia, and every door but one said No admittance.

Upstairs

The door marked No admittance. Lady Wachter only was not locked. Inside, under a family portrait, a man lay on the bed with coins on his eyes. To our medical eye he had died minutes ago. He had died ten years ago. Someone had cast Gentle Repose over him every ten days for a decade. There was one bed, and the lady's side had been slept in. (Osric moved that we take the body as collateral. It was debated, and declined.)

A poison needle on the iron chest in her closet put Lily on the floor. Inside were a hundred and eighty electrum pieces and a hundred and ten gold, a Druid Priestess' Tome none of us can read, and a letter to her from the devil, which reads like a licence to succeed the Baron as long as she keeps him. See Strahd's Letter to Lady Wachter.

We met the sons at last, helping the doctors. Nikolai knew Sirius at once and asked why he was wearing such detestable rags, and whether we were all wizards. "Mama's room is verboten," he told us. It was the one big rule. Karl asked whether we were wizards too. Behind the moaning door were Ireena and Stella, and Drew told Ireena everything. Sirius pointed the sons at their mother's open door: "Is that Papa? Is that your father?" And Ireena told us about the secret room off the library. Behind it, on a tarpaulin, were the bones of St. Andral and five scrolls.

Then the lady came up her own stairs with Ernst behind her, and looked into the storeroom, and said, quietly, "The bones."

We scattered. Drew smashed the storeroom's window. Sirius swept the bones into the bag of holding and shouted, for the benefit of a house full of commoners, "Blasphemy, she stole the bones of St. Andral! We must return them to the church!", and went out onto the roof. Osric found a window that opened. Drew pushed a desk against the door and dropped out after them, leaving Ireena behind in the storeroom. Lily passed herself off as a small peasant child ("Me baby. Just a baby."), and Ernst shoved past her without a second look. The raven came to rest on Lady Wachter's shoulder. Their final form.

Lily and Muriel stayed behind among the patients long enough to hear the lady's sons catch up with her:

Karl: "Mama, I think we've got some questions for you." "Not now, Karl." "But it's disgusting." "We'll talk about this later."

The fountain

That night the Baron's criers announced that there had never been vampires in Vallaki, and Izek told us Lady Wachter would hang the next day on our testimony. At the festival, in the pouring rain, she climbed onto the lip of the fountain and answered him:

"His so-called sunlight is as fake as his smile. How dare he scorn our dead. How dare he deign to ignore our fear. How many of our friends and family died yesterday? You all saw it. They were vampires. Vampires in the town. He could not protect us… The Wachterhaus is done smiling for a tyrant. A tyrant whose own son abused my daughter and has avoided any and all consequences of that crime… They will attest that the Baron's son and his Reformation Center are twisting the minds of the citizenry. They will attest. They will back me up."

The square

The talk "later" never happened. Drew called on Nikolai and Karl in front of the whole town, and they said what they had seen: "It's true. Mama, Mama, she has done things it seems. She has kept Papa's dead body in her bedroom for years. It's true. It's true." They stepped away from her. It is the reason they are alive.

She held up a bloody bandage: "Ask whose linen they bleed into. Ask whose door was open last night. Then ask where he was." It didn't work. When we proposed Ireena, she and the Baron both claimed the town. "How dare you? This is mine by rights." The crowd turned on them both.

She drew a rapier from her dress and backed against a house. Her raven became an imp, burlier than an imp has any right to be, and went for Fëanor. Clancy kicked it, Fëanor's lance went through it and the Baron together, Clover shot it, and Osric finished it with four strokes of his sword. From under the crowd's feet she cried out, "Oh, my compact." Then: "I surrender." Fëanor, whom the table was steering that day, urged the crowd on. The rest of us stood back. They trampled her to death.

Afterwards

Ernst was seen in the crowd slipping a bloody dagger into his boot, and later shouted that we had robbed a hospital. When it was over he was gone. One of us went to gather up what was left of Lady Wachter, so that she would not be left in the street.

The sons stood at the edge of the square, very sad. One of them asked us: "There was some weird stuff, but did she have to die?" We reminded them how many people had died because of her the day before. Then they wanted wine, because the inn was running out, and they asked: "What's gonna happen to Stella? What's gonna happen to our sister?"

The household

• Karl and Nikolai, the sons: rowdy, fashionable, kind and not very bright. Four and a half stars, would drink with again. Their friend Bluto went north to the haunted lake to right a wrong and never came back, and they asked us to find him.
• Lord Wachter, the husband, still on the bed upstairs with coins on his eyes, and nobody casting Gentle Repose on him any more.
• Ernst, the manservant, who has his own page: Ernst Larnak.
• Haliq the footman and young Madalena, both rescued by the lady, Ernst says, and a house nurse called Elise, who kept the hospital running.

What we promised

To the sons: that after the Reformation Center we would go west to the winery and bring back wine, and that Stella would be looked after, with Ireena. Before that, to find Bluto. Their mother's commission for proof about Victor, fifty gold, she cancelled herself; we found the proof anyway. See Look for Bluto, Go West to the Winery and A Cure for Stella and Lydia.

What we still don't know

• What was her "compact"? It was bound up with the imp, and it went with it.
• Who gave her the raven? She said a dear friend. The sons said she came back with it after two weeks away.
• What happens to Lord Wachter now nobody is casting Gentle Repose on him? His sons don't know the question exists.
• Who staged the pentagram, and who was it meant for?
• Can the bitten in her kitchen turn into what bit them? One of us thought a few looked like they were turning. We don't know.
• Where is Ernst, and what does he do now that the woman he would have died for is dead, and we let it happen?
• What is Lady Wachter? Answered, Session 14: not a fiend and not undead. A woman with a compact, and now a dead one.