I. Milk for the Kitty
Vallaki had finally opened its gates.
The party entered exhausted, injured, and still dragging what remained of Salazar behind them. After a night spent descending Tsolenka Pass and walking across Barovia, they had reached the settlement everyone had told them to find.
Da’amir was already being taken somewhere else.
Izek had decided that they were friends.
The enormous captain dragged him through town, explaining that Vallaki was very pretty, very large, and protected by his hammer.
He held up a hunting axe.
Da’amir complimented it.
He also politely asked to be put down.
Izek obliged. Kitty did not like being held.
Their destination was a two-story tavern with a stone foundation, a sagging roof, and ravens perched among the loose shingles. A painted sign marked the Blue Water Inn.
Inside, damp clothes hung near the entrance. Lanterns lit narrow paths between crowded tables. Mounted wolf and deer heads watched from the walls. Two nobles occupied one side of the room, two hunters another, and an elderly man in a mustard-green coat sat beneath a wild arrangement of hair and spectacles.
The conversation stopped when Izek entered.
He had brought a kitty cat.
Da’amir introduced himself.
The room produced a careful murmur of welcome.
Izek wanted a table. Someone was already sitting at the one he selected.
The captain shoved the man over the bar.
Da’amir asked whether he would be all right.
Izek assured him that the man would walk it off. He should have known better than to sit at Izek’s table.
There was no indication that it belonged to Izek.
A waitress approached.
Kitty cat needed warm milk.
Unfortunately, some beast had killed much of Krezk’s dairy stock. The inn had none.
Izek howled.
His monstrous hand swept upward and tore the woman’s face away.
She collapsed beside the table, blood spreading across the floor.
Izek stamped his foot.
“Day is ruined. Going home.”
He left Da’amir sitting in the tavern.
II. Participation Mandatory
Elsewhere in town, Validus was appreciating the prospect of finally being around sane people.
He and Haleria set out to recover their companion.
Vallaki was densely packed but small. Its streets held shops, homes, and public buildings close enough that the party could cross much of the settlement on foot within minutes.
They passed an old stone church with cracked stained glass and a fenced garden of graves. The guards had suggested that its priest might explain the town’s laws.
Farther along stood a gloomy three-story building surrounded by overgrown gardens and mountains of laundry.
The faded inscription identified Saint Andral’s Home for Orphaned Children.
Its patron was Lady Fiona Wachter.
The party remembered the guards’ account of the attack there. They would need to investigate.
First, they needed Da’amir.
The town square offered more reasons to be careful.
Dead flowers filled painted boxes beneath tattered decorations. Townspeople drew water from a crumbling fountain while watching the strangers. Men, women, and children occupied a row of stocks, their heads concealed beneath crude plaster donkey masks.
Proclamations advertised the Festival of the Blazing Sun.
Participation was mandatory.
All would be well.
A blacksmith, a general store, an apothecary, and Blinsky’s Toys surrounded the square. There would be time to visit them later.
The Blue Water Inn stood beyond.
Its door was swinging open.
Inside, Da’amir sat beside a dead woman. The old man in the mustard coat was being spattered with blood.
He appeared to believe someone was spilling a drink on him.
Validus checked the woman’s pulse.
There was none.
Da’amir explained.
“Validus, they had no milk.”
III. The Third Barkeep
The man Izek had thrown over the bar finally raised his battered head.
Was he gone?
He was.
The man dragged himself back over the counter, collapsed into a chair, and lost consciousness.
Haleria asked whether he would consent to healing. With the innkeeper’s encouragement, she passed a hand over his injuries and called upon her magic.
He woke abruptly.
His head still hurt.
It hurt less than before.
The innkeeper looked down at the dead waitress.
Poor Katarina.
That was the third barkeep they had lost that month.
“Izek can be temperamental.”
The party offered to help. Katarina could be taken to the church, where Father Petrovich would see to her burial.
Validus produced bandages and wrapped what remained of her face.
Da’amir asked for wine.
That, too, had become a problem.
The inn’s delivery from the Wizard of Wines was a week late. Danika had been stretching the remaining supply into a watery house blend, to the considerable displeasure of the two nobles drinking nearby.
The winery belonged to her husband’s family. Such a delay was unlike her father-in-law.
The party remembered passing its sign on the road.
They could return once they had dealt with their business in town.
One noble offered fifty gold pieces if they brought back the wine. His brother matched it.
One hundred gold.
The vineyard had become considerably more interesting.
Beside them, the elderly circus performer announced that he needed his morning jog and promptly tripped.
Haleria offered assistance.
He insisted that falling was part of his profession. He remained perfectly capable of looking after himself.
Then he tumbled down the stairs, somersaulted onto his feet, and spread his arms for applause.
He was facing the wrong direction.
When none came, he continued down the street.
Da’amir lifted Katarina’s body.
The party went to church.
IV. A Courtesy for the Dead
On the way, Da’amir asked Validus why he wrote names in his ledger.
Validus explained that his own name and family were to be forgotten. Remembering the dead was a courtesy he expected to be denied himself.
Da’amir considered that.
“Don’t you ever think some names aren’t worth honoring?”
“Never.”
Every name belonged in the ledger.
The bells were ringing when they reached Saint Andral’s. Organ music sounded through the doors as morning Mass began.
Haleria drew her shawl over her hair and quietly entered. The others followed with Katarina.
PaK remained outside with Salazar.
The music was too loud.
Inside, candles burned low beneath stained glass depicting a rising sun. A priest in white vestments embroidered with faded gold stood before the congregation.
“You need not smile.”
They did not need to pretend their hearts were untroubled. They did not need to call suffering joy.
For a little while, they could set their burdens down.
The congregation confessed to mistrusting neighbors, turning away from suffering, and mistaking survival for goodness and obedience for virtue.
Haleria accepted a service card and joined the singing.
The priest noticed the visitors.
In their honor, he read the Prayer of the Traveler.
A traveler had asked the Morninglord how to know that morning approached when the mountains hid the east and the sky offered no sign.
“You shall not know.”
Then how could the traveler continue?
“Light the lamp.”
And if dawn never came, another traveler might see that lamp and know they were not alone.
Da’amir thought of Lumi.
Father Lucian stepped away from the lectern to speak about faith.
Faith did not mean waking every morning certain that all would be well. He had never met such a man, though perhaps one lived beyond the Mists.
There were a few quiet laughs.
Saint Andral had lived with hunger, plague, fear, and grief. He had opened his doors anyway.
The people of Vallaki could not command the clouds to part. They could not command wolves to remain in the woods, the dead to remain buried, or the Devil to forget them.
They could command their hands.
Their tongues.
Their doors.
A child emerged carrying a candle and began replacing the flames that had nearly burned down to their holders.
One became two.
Two became four.
Four became eight.
The service ended with a blessing for hungry neighbors, mourners, and strangers pursued by darkness.
“And when fear tells them that kindness is dangerous, remember, sometimes it is, but be kind anyway.”
V. Katarina, You Are Remembered
After Mass, Lucian gave the altar boy a silver piece for lunch at the Blue Water Inn.
He asked him to remind his older brother that the church needed him back at work. The gravedigger had reportedly been ill for several days.
Then the priest beckoned the party forward.
He recognized Katarina.
They explained what had happened at the inn.
Such deaths were becoming more common.
Lucian sprinkled holy water over her ruined face.
“Katarina, you are remembered.”
He prayed that the Morninglord would keep her somewhere the Mists could not reach.
Then he asked for help carrying her below. With the gravedigger absent, the work had been accumulating.
Da’amir pointed out that they had brought someone with experience.
PaK explained.
“The master used to make me dig the hole.”
They followed Lucian into the crypt.
VI. Consecrated Ground
The air beneath the church was cold. Cobwebs and debris filled the spaces between the tombs.
Lucian drew his covering closer and spoke of the approaching winter.
Haleria asked how the valley could already be so cold.
They received little sunlight here.
That was why they prayed for it.
The priest directed them toward a large burial chamber that should still have room.
Haleria opened the door.
Something pale and enormous began moving toward her.
Lucian stared.
“That’s impossible. This is consecrated ground.”
The creature continued forward.
Other dead things began emerging from the crypts.
The party had come to bury one body.
Several others had decided to get up.
Validus studied the undead and called out their weaknesses. Slashing weapons and vitality would serve them well. His whip began to glow as he prepared to exploit what he knew.
The giant struck him hard enough to throw him backward.
Smaller corpses pressed into the passage. Haleria was hit as she struggled to find room to work. Much of her healing magic had already been spent on the mountain.
PaK drew the Durst longsword and raised his shield.
Da’amir moved into the fighting with his rapier, striking at the creatures crowding the priest. One caught him and held on.
Lucian answered with a burst of divine power.
Two of the undead were destroyed.
The rest kept coming.
Validus brought down the giant and turned his attention to the wounds the battle was producing. PaK held his ground with sword and shield while Da’amir fought to free himself from the dead hands gripping him.
Haleria called upon her ancestors.
Spirits filled the crypt, gathering into a veil through which the undead struggled to find their targets. The creatures stumbled among the apparitions, reaching for people they could no longer clearly see.
Lucian released another burst of power.
The corpse holding Da’amir fell.
Freed, Da’amir drove his rapier through another creature’s skull and withdrew it as the body dropped.
PaK cut through a plague-ridden zombie.
It burst across him.
He continued into the spirits and discovered that seeing through them was not particularly easy for him either.
Haleria’s ancestors were very loud.
The party wore the remaining dead down with steel, crossbow bolts, and Validus’s whip.
The crypt became still.
Lucian hurried toward a stone sarcophagus flanked by hooded statues.
He pushed aside the lid.
It was empty.
VII. The Missing Bones
The bones of Saint Andral were gone.
Lucian explained that the relic protected more than the church. Its consecration extended over Vallaki, keeping the Devil from walking into the town.
Someone had taken that protection away.
PaK could not understand why anyone would want bones with no meat on them.
These were different bones.
Only Lucian and the gravedigger had access to the crypt.
Milivoj.
The boy who had stopped coming to work.
Lucian feared that someone had offered him money. A chance at a better life for himself and his younger brother might have been enough.
The party could look for him at the orphanage.
PaK suggested finding him, killing him, and recovering the bones.
Lucian objected immediately.
If the boy had been manipulated, they would forgive him. They would not kill him.
PaK asked how they could know he would not do it again.
Validus answered.
“Forgiveness does not require you to forget, PaK.”
The boy could live without being permitted back into the crypt.
Haleria added that they would not kill children.
PaK remained puzzled. Taking the only thing keeping a bad place safe seemed like a very large crime.
But he gave his word.
He would not kill the boy.
Lucian tried another explanation. Sunlight could always illuminate the picture.
PaK agreed.
Otherwise, it would be dark.
Katarina was finally laid to rest.
Before they left, Haleria asked whether Lucian could teach her the power he had used against the undead. He offered to discuss instruction once the bones were returned, though it would take time and sincere devotion to the Morninglord.
Haleria promised to consider what that meant.
She then placed two gold pieces in his hands for the needy.
Lucian accepted one.
The other he returned.
She still needed money for Vallaki’s registration papers.
VIII. The Slayers of Salazar
When the party returned to the Blue Water Inn, Danika was cleaning blood from the floor.
Haleria offered to help.
Danika told her to rest.
The old circus performer had also returned. He continued falling down stairs, mistook PaK for a beautiful woman, shook one of his tendrils while greeting Validus, and began petting Salazar’s corpse.
He believed it was a dog.
The missing third head appeared to concern him only as evidence that the animal had been castrated.
One of the hunters recognized the carcass more accurately.
Szoldar had laid many snares for Salazar. The strangers had killed a beast he had been pursuing for some time.
He invited them to join him and his husband, Yevgeny.
Yevgeny requested that Szoldar stop calling him “hubby wubby” in public.
A decanter of the house wine arrived.
Szoldar toasted the slayers of Salazar.
The old man spilled his drink over himself. Haleria helped him and exchanged his empty glass for her full one.
He thanked the young gentleman.
Haleria reminded him that she was a woman.
Shortly afterward, he ran away after Validus’ bird in pursuit of lunch.
Yevgeny identified him as Rictavio, a foreign circus performer who had somehow outlasted the others who came with him.
Perhaps being an idiot had helped.
With Rictavio gone, Haleria recounted the battle on the mountain. Salazar’s leap from the cliff, its charge through the snow, and its terrible three-headed scream became a much more enjoyable experience from a tavern table.
Szoldar had another hunt in mind.
IX. Until the Full Moon
A pack of werewolves stalked the valley’s settlements.
They stole children.
Szoldar had been trying to kill their leaders. Their latest attack had struck Vallaki itself.
The pack had crashed through the gates and descended on the orphanage. Izek and the guards had fought them, but four children were carried away before the creatures retreated.
At the gate, the party had heard about mongrelfolk who had been let inside, and children who had died.
Szoldar was describing werewolves that had forced their way through, and children who might still be rescued.
He intended to bring them back.
According to the hunter, they had until the next full moon before the children could be turned.
Haleria remembered the previous night.
A new moon.
Fourteen or fifteen days remained.
The party offered assistance, though they would need to prepare.
Validus opened Van Richten’s Guide to the Lycanthrope.
Silver was the key.
PaK already carried the silvered Durst longsword. More weapons would cost money.
The nobles’ wine bounty could supply it.
Yevgeny had questions about PaK. Szoldar wished he would stop asking them quite so bluntly.
Validus clarified that PaK was not undead.
His exact nature remained a subject of investigation.
PaK had a simpler answer.
“I’m a PaK.”
X. The Wrong Stairs
At last, Haleria asked Danika about rooms and food.
For their offer to retrieve the wine, Danika would provide both. Consider it a down payment.
Wine was the lifeblood of the valley. The real vintages let people feel, for a little while, as though they had left it.
Danika feared what would happen if the supply remained empty.
The guest rooms were outside, up the exterior stairs.
PaK had already taken the interior ones.
He opened a door and found two children staring at him.
They screamed.
Monster.
PaK apologized. The doors looked the same.
From below, Haleria ordered him downstairs. When she began threatening to drag him down by a tentacle, PaK objected.
He had made a simple mistake.
There was no reason to become so upset.
Then he rolled over the railing.
He landed on a table in the middle of someone’s meal.
The table broke.
“I tripped.”
Danika put her head in her hand and muttered about mongrelfolk.
PaK apologized again, handed over four silver pieces, and asked that the man’s dinner be paid for as well.
He went outside.
There he found Rictavio standing in front of the outhouse, pleased to have finally located the well.
PaK explained the mistake.
The old man had been following a bird. Now he was tired and having difficulty finding his room.
PaK offered to help.
He took Rictavio’s arm and carefully guided him back inside, one step at a time.
XI. Not Another Step
Rictavio’s room was at the end of the hall.
He fumbled in his pocket and produced a key and a handkerchief.
Would PaK unlock the door?
Of course.
The mechanism clicked.
Yellow gas erupted from the frame.
PaK turned. Rictavio had already covered his mouth.
“You don’t belong in this world, monster.”
PaK collapsed.
The old man dragged him inside and shut the door.
Below, the others saw yellow smoke drift over the balcony. Their first concern was what PaK had broken.
Validus drew his whip and went upstairs with Haleria.
Inside the room, PaK lay unconscious on a bed. A kit of monster-hunting equipment had been unfolded across the table.
The helpless circus performer held a revolver against his skull.
Not another step.
Validus demanded that he leave his mutant alone.
The old man rejected the description.
PaK was a fleshwarp.
He knew exactly what had been brought into Vallaki.
Then Validus noticed the emblem embossed in silver on the revolver.
The Van Richten Society.
They belonged to the same organization.
It took considerable persuasion, and Haleria’s presence did little to improve the stranger’s mood, but eventually the gun lifted away from PaK’s head.
They should have used the passphrase.
They also should have known better than to parade a fleshwarp through town.
“How long did you think your little mutant argument was gonna hold up?”
Da’amir looked at Validus.
He had known what PaK was all along?
Validus wanted to understand why PaK was what he was. Announcing it to everyone would not help.
The old man informed him that, once PaK’s usefulness ended, protocol required liquidation.
Da’amir asked what that meant.
Killing him.
XII. Doctor Rudolph Van Richten
Validus asked the stranger’s name.
The man appeared offended that members of his own Society needed to ask.
He opened a copy of his guide and held its portrait beside his face.
Doctor Rudolph Van Richten.
Validus’s own copy had been damaged. The replacement drawing explained some of the confusion.
Van Richten assumed the Society had finally sent a rescue mission.
They had not.
He had been trapped in Barovia for ten years.
Apparently, nobody cared.
Haleria explained that their own journey through the Mists had gone wrong. Van Richten accused her of delivering them to her fanged master.
Validus attempted to keep the conversation from becoming a fight.
Van Richten revived PaK with smelling salts.
PaK thanked Rudolph for the nap.
The doctor looked at Validus.
Had one of the other mouths remained conscious while the principal head was asleep? Could they remove a mouth and test whether it continued receiving information?
Validus had theories.
PaK asked them not to cut him up. He liked being able to help people.
Van Richten assured him that they would leave him able to work.
Permission, apparently, was unnecessary.
Da’amir thought it prudent to clarify his own standing with the organization.
Van Richten gave him a battlefield appointment, tapping his shoulders with the cane.
He was officially a member of the Society.
The doctor was pleased to have a double agent.
Da’amir had considerably less confidence in that description.
XIII. The Wedding
Van Richten remembered him.
He also remembered his friends.
“You and your friends really fucked things up.”
There had been a wedding. Allies had gathered in one place, hoping to bring some hope into Barovia and strengthen their resistance to the Devil.
Strahd had blown up the church.
Van Richten had barely escaped. He believed the others dead until he learned that Da’amir had survived and continued toward Tsolenka Pass without him.
Da’amir apologized.
They should have sent word.
Haleria asked whose wedding they were discussing.
Getting an answer required surviving several more of Van Richten’s opinions about her people and her character.
She called him a geriatric bastard and suggested that his hips would eventually turn to dust.
He threatened her.
Validus intervened.
PaK offered to return the conversation to cutting him up if everyone would calm down.
Da’amir finally answered Haleria.
Lumi’s wedding.
Van Richten had his own interpretation of Da’amir’s later association with Strahd. Perhaps it had been a clever infiltration. Surely he now knew enough about Ravenloft to explain how they should enter it.
The others explained the amnesia.
Van Richten produced an enormous cold-iron bullet and proposed a treatment.
Validus stopped him.
The damage was physical. Shooting Da’amir in the head would not improve the situation.
He did not want to use the book again.
XIV. Professional Methods
The conversation returned to PaK.
Validus described how wine had briefly made him more articulate, as though something beneath his altered form had surfaced.
Van Richten spoke of identifying the source of fleshwarping and interfering with its effects. He described a previous subject whose severed tendrils had been prevented from regrowing through dispelling magic.
PaK thought that sounded painful.
Validus thought it sounded interesting.
The doctor proposed a full autopsy once they were finished with him.
Then the discussion moved to the winery.
Van Richten considered the wine supply a useful means of managing the population. Keep it flowing when people needed to remain quiet. Interrupt it when an angry mob might serve a purpose.
He claimed to have replaced a Vistani camp’s wine with water and watched its inhabitants enter Vallaki in search of drink, where they were arrested.
Validus considered the possibilities.
For now, they needed the winery operating again.
They also needed the bones of Saint Andral.
Van Richten offered to investigate while they dealt with the wine. When they mentioned Milivoj, he immediately began proposing methods of interrogation.
Validus asked that the boy not be hurt.
Van Richten produced a vial of bottled sunlight.
They could threaten to blind him.
Validus began nodding.
Haleria struck his arm and named what they were discussing.
The torture of a child.
Van Richten offered a different method involving his revolver, an apparently loaded chamber, and repeated threats of execution.
Validus remembered the Society’s current manual.
Torture tended to produce the answers an interrogator wanted rather than reliable information.
Van Richten maintained that it worked. He supported the claim with an account of a werewolf den he had filled with smoke while questioning its captive alpha.
He had obtained the information.
He had let the others suffocate anyway.
The party would rest before deciding their next move. They could pursue their existing lead together or divide the work between the bones and the wine.
PaK wanted to go to bed.
Nobody had cut him open.
It seemed a reasonable time to leave.
XV. Constant Vigilance
Validus tried to follow him.
Van Richten caught his collar with the cane.
He was not going anywhere.
The doctor had noticed the two punctures in his neck as soon as he entered the room.
Doru’s bite.
Validus was put on the bed while Van Richten prepared a transfusion. Da’amir went to check on PaK. Haleria remained in a chair beside the procedure.
Blood passed directly from the old doctor’s arm into Validus’s.
The lingering weakness finally lifted.
Van Richten continued insulting Haleria while he worked. She continued returning the favor.
Validus explained that they had served together in the Society for three years.
Long enough, Van Richten thought, to know the passphrase.
It was his son’s name, Erasmus.
He said that Vistani had kidnapped the boy and delivered him to Strahd.
Then the transfusion was finished.
Validus had not expected to find anyone from the Society here.
Van Richten informed him that, at their current rate, the only person they were going to meet was the reaper.
Constant vigilance.
They could begin by making themselves less conspicuous.
Validus pointed out that killing Salazar had earned the local ruler’s favor.
Goodwill was quickly forgotten in Barovia.
PaK needed a cloak. Haleria needed to stop advertising her lineage through her jewelry. The fact that they had killed a goat would not make everyone comfortable with their presence.
Validus admitted that he had not considered the cloak.
Haleria had more objections to the advice directed at her.
Before the argument could begin again, Validus suggested that they finally prepare to rest.
Van Richten opened a drawer.
He withdrew a crumpled packet and held it out.
“Memorize this before you have Izek come and skin you alive.”
The legal code of Vallaki.
They had found their destined ally.
He had nearly executed PaK, offered to shoot Da’amir, argued with Haleria, and given Validus his own blood.
Now he was assigning reading.
All would be well.