The Baron Promised

The church fought all of us as it burned, with smoke that blinded, backdrafts that knocked us flat and rubble raining from the roof. Father Lucian burned one vampire to dust with a word, and pulled a mace from under his own altar for the other. Then the back doors burst open and two more vampires landed on the flagstones, thrown, and behind them came Izek with flames pouring off his great right arm and two guards at his back.

We watched those guards die. "Frederick, no." "No, Petru too." Izek took the vampire that killed Petru by the head. "I will destroy you, starting with your teeth." He did, and threw it twenty feet into the fire. Sirius put fifty-seven points of radiance into another and tried to high-five Muriel on his way past; she declined. Osric cut down the last. All six from the coffin shop were dust.

It wasn't enough. Seventy per cent of St Andral's was gone, and fourteen houses with it. At the very end Sirius went back for the sunburst statuette on the altar, came out blinded by the smoke, and put it in Lucian's hands. "Remember, Father, Lathander lives in our hearts, not in our places." Izek stared into the flames. "The Baron promised. The Baron promised me... Evil can't come into Vallaki." When we told Lucian where the bones had gone, all he could manage was "The vampires I believe, but the Lady Wachter?" Izek went to report to the Baron. "Do what you must."

Two stories were already going round: that Lady Wachter had thrown her house open as a hospital, and that an angel of the Morninglord had come down and named her evil. Sirius was keen to meet this angel. Had he perhaps flown over a crowd while glowing? "Absolutely not possible." At the Blue Water, Urwin gave us commoners' cloaks and the worst news of the day. "Your friend, she left. I couldn't stop her." Ernst had come and invited Ireena to Wachterhaus, and she had gone as his guest. We had never told her anything.

So we went in after her, hooded among a hundred refugees, through a cellar door Lily picked. Behind a pivoting wall were candles, a black pentagram, five chairs, and a starved survivor of the Reformation Center whose crime was chuckling at a festival. "The lady saved me. I owe her my life." When we walked him out, skeletons rose from the floor and cut him down before Sirius's shield could reach him. "I feel like I've failed myself, my religion, and my God." We never learned his name. Afterwards Drew looked properly at the pentagram. It was scratched into the floor with no magic in it at all: set dressing, built for someone to find. Possibly us.

We climbed anyway. We left the silverware in a storeroom ("We're not common crooks") and liberated a basket of beets. We crossed a kitchen full of the burned and bitten, some of whom did not look as though they were healing so much as changing. At the top of the stairs, a hallway of portraits and mirrors. Something moaned behind one door; the others said No admittance. Over the stairhead hung a great map of Barovia, and Drew set about committing it to memory.

We stopped there, on the highest floor we knew about, unrested and nearly spent.