Chapter I — A Labyrinth Within a Labyrinth
Dinner had ended.
For most of the party, that meant gathering their equipment and preparing to meet again in Strahd’s study.
For PaK, it meant dishes.
Rahadin escorted him from the dining room personally.
The route was not simple.
They climbed through a landing beneath faded frescoes of armored knights on horseback, passed motionless suits of armor and continued deeper into a castle whose corridors seemed to breed new corridors whenever PaK stopped looking.
He remarked on the size of Strahd’s home.
Rahadin agreed.
Some called Castle Ravenloft a labyrinth within a labyrinth.
PaK struggled with the word.
The Chamberlain understood him anyway.
Their route carried them through the old audience hall.
Rain entered freely through a broken window overlooking the valley, spilling across stone and gathering around an old wooden throne turned toward the storm. Moss and rot had already begun taking the chair.
PaK examined it with considerably more concern than reverence.
Someone needed to replace that chair before it became mushy.
Rahadin agreed that repairs were overdue.
Much of Ravenloft was.
The castle had been built for another age, another household, another court. Its most frequently used lower chambers remained maintained, but much of the upper castle had fallen into disuse. There were simply too many rooms and too few hands.
The audience hall was only one casualty.
They continued.
Another doorway revealed a cramped office drowning in books.
Dusty scrolls and tomes covered not only the shelves but most of the floor. Four heavy wooden chests stood between the bookcases, each fitted with iron locks. The only genuinely clear space in the room was the area immediately surrounding a massive black desk.
Behind it sat a bald man in tiny spectacles, scratching endlessly across a scroll.
Rahadin addressed him as Lief.
The accountant looked briefly at PaK.
Should another mongrelfolk be added to the castle directory?
Rahadin corrected him.
PaK was only a contract employee, not a permanent servitor.
Lief returned immediately to his paperwork.
PaK thought he seemed perfectly pleasant.
Just busy.
Rahadin led him onward.
Soon the grandeur faded further.
Dust thickened.
Cobwebs hung from the ceiling.
They entered what had once been a private dining room.
A long table remained set beneath decades of neglect. At its center leaned an enormous wedding cake.
Its white frosting had turned green.
Cobwebs hung from its tiers like lace.
A miniature bride remained perched at the top.
PaK studied it.
He did not think the cake was any good anymore.
Rahadin agreed.
This section of the castle was rarely tended.
Keeping Ravenloft clean was difficult work.
For a castle so large, there simply were not enough people left to maintain every room.
Then Rahadin opened the next door.
The bathroom contained a claw-footed iron tub.
It was filled with blood.
A blue-skinned woman with red hair, a bonnet and a maid’s uniform stood over it washing the same silver dinnerware the party had used only minutes earlier.
“Helga, this is PaK.”
She looked up.
Always a pleasure to have another hand.
Rahadin left the two of them to their work.
When PaK finished, he was to make his way to the study.
Surely he had been paying attention closely enough to find his way back.
PaK assured him that would not be a problem.
Chapter II — I Broke the Plate
Helga lowered another dish into the blood.
PaK immediately began helping.
There was no hesitation.
Eating had been followed by work for most of his life.
This, at least, was familiar.
He plunged his hands into the basin and began scrubbing Ravenloft’s silver.
Then he rolled terribly.
The plate broke.
PaK froze.
“Oh.”
The broken pieces slipped into the bath.
The blood began to move.
It rotated slowly at first, then faster, spiraling inward as though something beneath the surface were pulling it into a vortex.
Helga backed away immediately.
“Oh, now you’ve done it.”
PaK began apologizing.
Something rose from the bath.
A woman emerged from the blood without touching it.
A terrible wound split her neck and upper body exactly where the broken plate had struck the water. Blood poured from the injury, but instead of falling, it drifted upward into the air in long crimson strands.
Helga knew her.
Varushka.
She had thought they had already put her down.
Varushka wailed.
PaK became terrified.
The blood continued climbing until it gathered high above the room and then crashed back into the tub.
A spectral hand tore across PaK.
Then another.
He tried punching the apparition.
His fist went straight through her.
He tried again.
Nothing.
PaK looked helplessly toward Helga.
He could not hurt her.
But PaK had never been particularly good at giving up.
So he screamed at the ghost.
Varushka screamed back.
PaK screamed louder.
Somehow, it worked.
For one brief instant the apparition recoiled.
Helga saw the opening.
She lifted one of Ravenloft’s broad silver serving platters like a shield.
Then she threw it.
Not with the strength of a maid.
With the strength of something supernatural.
The platter flew across the bathroom like a weapon of war.
Silver struck the frightened ghost.
Varushka vanished with a shriek.
The platter continued through the space she had occupied, slammed into Ravenloft’s stonework and buried itself halfway through the wall hard enough to crack the masonry around it.
PaK stared.
That was one of the coolest things he had ever seen.
Helga had reached a different conclusion.
Good help was impossible to find.
They really needed to stop hiring contract labor from the mongrelfolk.
She would finish the dishes herself.
PaK had been fired.
He thanked her for letting him help.
Helga stared at him.
PaK left.
She had been very nice.
Chapter III — The Accountant of Barovia
Elsewhere, Da’amir had been entrusted with a simple task.
Take Validus and Haleria to the study.
After all, according to Strahd, Da’amir had once worked in Ravenloft.
Surely he remembered the way.
He did not.
The three recovered their weapons and armor from outside the dining room and began retracing what little of Ravenloft they understood.
Two paths waited outside.
Da’amir chose one.
The staircase climbed.
Every landing opened into more doors, more corridors and more possibilities.
Eventually they entered the office PaK had passed earlier.
Lief looked up.
Then he recognized Da’amir.
Of course.
The newly rehired minstrel had returned barely a day into service and was already asking for a paycheck advance.
Da’amir did not correct him.
He had a reputation to maintain.
Lief unlocked one of the chests and flicked him a gold piece.
One gold in advance.
Out of the kindness and generosity of Lief’s heart.
Anything further would wait until the normal payroll schedule.
Da’amir thanked him.
Validus, meanwhile, had noticed the paperwork.
Lief was preparing Barovia’s personal property tax manifest.
Every significant privately owned asset in the county was being categorized, assessed and taxed.
The Blue Water Inn’s wine collection alone represented an enormous luxury assessment.
Even property belonging to the Burgomaster of Barovia Village had been itemized, including the wagon Validus had recently helped destroy while attempting to repair it.
Barovia might be starving.
Its villages might be collapsing.
Its roads might belong to wolves and the dead.
But its tax rolls remained current.
Haleria stared over the desk.
Did Barovia also have a waste tax?
Lief looked up.
A waste tax?
She explained.
Blacksmith runoff.
Contaminated water.
Improper disposal of material harmful to the environment.
Lief immediately reached for a book.
PS 995 — Refuse and Sanitary Waste Removal Compliance.
Improper disposal of hazardous waste carried a special assessment of twenty-seven silver per ton.
Validus stared.
The Count’s government was very much alive.
Da’amir placed both hands on his companions’ shoulders and pulled them away from the desk.
They did not need to anger the man responsible for all of Barovia’s finances.
And they still had to find PaK.
Chapter IV — Liberarray
The party continued upward.
Eventually they saw PaK hurriedly leaving a room and slamming the door behind him.
He looked miserable.
“I broke a plate.”
The others entered the chamber with him.
The smell hit them immediately.
Dust.
Mold.
Rot.
The great wedding cake leaned at the center of the ruined private dining room, its frosting green and decayed.
PaK stared at the ground.
“I broke a plate.”
From behind the closed bathroom door came violent splashing.
Something struggled in the water.
A spectral voice wailed.
Helga could be heard yelling through the commotion.
Validus looked at PaK.
He believed PaK had angered a ghost.
PaK looked down.
“I broke a plate.”
Eventually he explained.
There had been a ghost lady in the tub.
She became angry when he broke the dish.
She attacked him.
Then the nice maid threw a tray through her.
The situation, PaK assured them, was under control.
The sounds behind the door suggested otherwise.
But they had somewhere else to be.
Unfortunately, nobody knew where.
Rahadin had told PaK to go to the study.
Strahd seemed convinced Da’amir already knew where the study was.
Neither could actually find it.
PaK decided to help.
He thought about castles.
Workplaces.
Rooms.
How servants moved through buildings.
Then he looked directly at the door in front of them.
A polished gold plaque was mounted upon it.
PaK pressed a finger beneath the lettering.
“Li…”
Validus told him to sound it out slowly.
“Liberarray.”
He had a good feeling about this door.
The others stared at him.
Then PaK opened the LIBRARY.
He was right.
Chapter V — The Study
Unlike the rooms surrounding it, Strahd’s study was immaculate.
A blazing hearth filled the chamber with rolling red and amber light.
Ancient books lined the walls, their leather carefully oiled and preserved. A luxurious rug covered the stone floor. Overstuffed divans and burgundy chairs surrounded a low table polished to a mirror shine.
Above the mantle hung a massive portrait.
The woman painted there was an exact likeness of Ireena Kolyana.
Strahd sat beneath it shuffling a deck of gold-gilded playing cards.
He looked up.
PaK had returned from his work.
Had everything gone well?
PaK immediately confessed.
He had broken a plate.
He had been excited to work and scrubbed too hard. He wanted Strahd to know it was his mistake and asked him not to punish Helga.
Strahd paused.
Helga had been there?
Yes.
Then this was not PaK’s failure.
PaK was inexperienced.
Helga was not.
If the experienced worker failed to teach the inexperienced one how to properly handle Ravenloft’s silver, then the fault belonged to the teacher.
Strahd thanked PaK for bringing the matter to his attention.
He would speak to Helga about hoarding knowledge.
PaK tried one more time to accept responsibility.
Strahd had already reached his conclusion.
Then he looked toward Da’amir.
He was pleased his old friend had remembered the way to the study.
Da’amir said nothing.
Strahd lifted the cards.
Dinner was finished.
Now they would play.
Chapter VI — Rückstich
Strahd called the game Rückstich.
An old game of Borca.
A game of tactics.
A game of warfare.
A game of gambling.
A perfect game, he thought, for distinguished heroes.
The rules were built around conquest.
Every player began at ten points.
The goal was to reach zero.
Each hand, the players competed for four prizes within a chosen trump suit:
High.
Low.
Jack.
Game.
Before the hand began, players bid on how much they believed they could conquer.
Two.
Three.
Four.
The winner of the bid chose the ruling suit and accepted the risk.
Make the bid and the score fell.
Fail and the wager was added back instead.
A careful player could decline to bid and still steal points from others.
A reckless player could gamble everything and end the hand worse than before.
Once the bidding ended, players followed suit, trumped their opponents, concealed valuable cards and fought to deny the bidder enough victories to satisfy their wager.
“War,” Strahd observed, “is nothing but gambling and waiting for the correct moment to use the resource.”
Chapter VII — Learning the Table
At first, Strahd played slowly.
Painfully slowly.
Everyone at the table was learning the game for the first time.
He explained every hand.
Allowed mistakes to be corrected.
Reminded them how trump worked.
Explained why someone had lost a point.
Explained why someone should have saved a card.
Explained why sometimes helping another opponent was the correct tactical choice.
Da’amir immediately began gambling.
His first serious bid was four.
It went badly.
Then he did it again.
And again.
He would recover a few points only to throw himself back into danger with another aggressive wager.
Validus approached the game differently.
He quickly realized that Strahd was the immediate enemy.
It did not matter who took the bid if doing so did not allow Strahd to win points.
He began treating the game less like a free-for-all and more like a battlefield.
Haleria hated the uncertainty.
She rarely bid unless she felt secure.
More often, she passed and scavenged whatever points emerged from other players’ mistakes.
PaK barely bid at all.
He simply played.
And somehow, while everyone else tried to control the table, PaK kept collecting points.
A hidden Jack.
An Ace at the right moment.
A low card nobody had accounted for.
Sometimes Strahd himself gave PaK a point because somebody else was the bidder and denying that player mattered more than denying PaK.
The score fell.
PaK edged closer to victory.
Strahd seemed delighted.
This was what he wanted.
A worthy opponent.
Chapter VIII — Divide and Conquer
The longer the game continued, the more obvious Strahd’s methods became.
He did not treat every player as his enemy simultaneously.
When Da’amir bid, Strahd might deliberately feed points to Haleria.
When Validus controlled the hand, Strahd might help PaK.
When Haleria threatened the bidder, Strahd encouraged it.
Victory did not require every opponent to lose equally.
It required the correct opponent to lose now.
Da’amir and Validus slowly stopped playing the game the same way.
To them, there was only one meaningful opponent.
Strahd.
If one of the party won, that was good enough.
Da’amir began bidding simply to deny Strahd control.
Validus was willing to sacrifice his own score if it helped PaK or Haleria move closer to victory.
Strahd noticed.
He insulted their play.
Called their choices foolish.
Mocked their wasteful bids.
But whenever PaK made a good play, the Count praised him.
When Haleria stole a point from the current bidder, he rewarded the tactic.
The party had seen something similar earlier that evening.
Two wines.
Two choices.
A toast over a divided table.
Now Strahd was doing the same thing with cards.
Chapter IX — The Rules According to Strahd
Da’amir did not stop.
Even after falling far behind everyone else, he continued bidding aggressively.
Sometimes the hand barely justified it.
Sometimes it did not justify it at all.
It no longer mattered whether Da’amir himself could win.
What mattered was preventing Strahd from doing so.
Eventually, Strahd had enough.
Da’amir prepared to bid again.
Strahd looked at him.
“You are not sandbagging this again. I finally have a good hand.”
The Count’s eyes flashed red as his Vampiric Charm took hold.
Da’amir’s mouth opened.
“Pass.”
Strahd smiled.
“Thank you.”
For hours, everyone had been sitting at a card table, and now everyone remembered exactly who was sitting across from them.
Strahd still did not object to PaK beating him.
PaK had played properly.
He had taken opportunities when they appeared, conserved his position and slowly worked his way toward zero.
Da’amir and Validus had done something different.
They had refused the premise.
They were willing to lose personally if Strahd lost with them.
That, more than defeat itself, irritated the Count.
The game continued.
PaK reached one point.
He needed almost nothing.
One stolen High.
One hidden Low.
One Jack.
One successful piece of Game.
If he simply allowed the others to bid, the odds favored something eventually falling into his hands.
Instead, for the first time that night, PaK made a serious bid.
Strahd immediately recognized the mistake.
For three hours, the Count had played slowly enough for beginners.
Now he stopped.
The old general appeared.
PaK had exposed himself.
Strahd seized the opening.
The Count’s cards became precise.
Every resource suddenly seemed to arrive exactly when required.
The game that had spent hours slowly crawling across the table ended in moments.
Strahd reached zero first.
He leaned back.
It had been a good attempt.
Unfortunately, Strahd was the victor.
Chapter X — Goodnight
Strahd rose and stretched.
The evening had been wonderful.
The guests were welcome to spend the night in Ravenloft if they wished.
Otherwise, they could continue toward Vallaki.
His Children of the Night would not trouble them on the road.
Validus thanked him for the hospitality and courtesy he had shown them.
Strahd indicated a staircase behind them.
It would take them down to an exit.
Then he wished them adieu.
The party considered staying.
Not for long.
Their safe passage existed tonight.
There was no guarantee it would exist tomorrow.
Better to leave while Strahd’s promise remained in force.
Before departing, Da’amir used a piece of cheese to lure his rat familiar, Lumi, from Ravenloft’s walls and tucked her safely into his pocket.
At least he remembered one thing about the castle.
Then they descended Strahd’s staircase.
Chapter XI — The Exit
The staircase ended in a thirty-foot-wide chamber.
At its center burned a stone brazier.
Its tall white flame produced no heat.
Seven cup-shaped indentations had been carved around its rim. Each contained a spherical crystal twice the size of an eyeball.
Above the brazier hung an enormous hourglass suspended from heavy iron chains.
All the sand remained trapped in the upper chamber.
Two enormous statues of mounted knights watched from opposite sides of the room.
And beneath the hourglass, glowing words had been written in Common.
Cast a stone into the fire:
Violet leads to the mountain spire
Orange to the castle’s peak
Red if lore is what you seek
Green to where the coffins hide
Indigo to the master’s bride
Blue to ancient magic’s womb
Yellow to the master’s tomb
Haleria immediately wanted nothing to do with it.
This was not an exit.
This was gambling with their lives.
She began opening doors.
One led to a cobwebbed chamber and another unexplored doorway.
Another opened onto a balcony overlooking a room flooded with black water.
Two nearby staircases climbed upward into still more unexplored sections of Ravenloft.
No simple road.
No obvious front door.
Only more castle.
More doors.
More stairs.
More decisions.
The labyrinth PaK had described was real.
Haleria became increasingly uncomfortable.
Perhaps they should simply retrace their steps.
Validus saw another danger.
What if refusing to use the exit Strahd had provided offended Strahd?
Nobody knew.
That was the problem.
Chapter XII — Violet Leads to the Mountain Spire
The party returned to the poem.
Yellow was immediately rejected.
Nobody wished to visit the master’s tomb.
Green sounded like crypts.
Indigo led to “the master’s bride,” but after everything Strahd had revealed about Tatyana, reincarnation and his long history, nobody could safely assume what, or whom, that actually meant.
Red promised lore.
Blue promised ancient magic.
Both could lead anywhere.
Haleria preferred Violet.
The mountain spire.
At least that sounded like a place outside Ravenloft.
There were mountains near Vallaki.
There were mountains near Krezk.
Either possibility got them out of the castle.
The others pointed out the flaw.
Barovia had more than one mountain range.
Violet might send them toward Mount Baratok.
It might send them toward Mount Ghakis.
A fifty-fifty chance.
Haleria still preferred it.
The others were unknown in ways she could not quantify.
Violet was dangerous.
But Violet was bounded danger.
And she wanted out.
The party voted.
Violet won.
The crystal was lifted from its indentation.
Dropped into the white flame.
The fire turned violet.
It wrapped around them.
For an instant, Ravenloft disappeared.
Then came wind.
Freezing air.
Snow.
A blizzard swallowed the world.
Stone rose around them through the storm.
They had escaped Castle Ravenloft.
They had also been transported to the gatehouse of Tsolenka Pass.
On the opposite side of Barovia from Vallaki.
Deep in the mountains.
At the place where Da’amir’s former companions had died.
The Count had promised them an exit.
He had not promised them a convenient one.
And somewhere behind them, far across the valley, Castle Ravenloft disappeared into the storm.