STATUS Civilian fixer, unaffiliated
SECTION Ship Inn regular; broker of information, favours, and worse
FIRST ON RECORD Session 15 – the Ship Inn assassination attempt

Valka is easy to place in a crowded room – long hair, an easy smile, and a set of teeth that catch the light wrong, metal where enamel should be. He was at his usual booth in the Ship Inn the night Zhakarov survived an assassination attempt that should have killed him outright, and he has kept turning up at exactly the moments the Agents needed something nobody else could get them since.

FILE NOTES

The teeth are the whole trick. Valka carries a tooth extractor – he claims it’s for opening locks – and a small velvet bag of his own pulled teeth. Pressed against an unconscious or restrained victim, one gets swapped in for one of theirs: they wake up with a bloodied mouth and an aching jaw, and a fixed point of leverage over them that lasts as long as the tooth stays in place. Try to hurt him afterward, or so the victims describe it, and the pain arrives first, sharp and immediate, behind the eyes.

His price is never quite fixed. When the trail on Griffiths went cold, Valka had a map to the family mansion in Paraisopolis – and the only currency he’d take for it was Agent Hawke’s own exhumed tooth, the one with the small black cross etched into it. The Agents dug up their dead colleague’s grave rather than walk away from the lead. Valka didn’t ask why the tooth mattered to him, and nobody offered – though given his own methods, exactly what he wanted it for isn’t hard to guess, and nobody has cared to ask him directly since.

STATUS: Filed under The Unknown. Useful, consistently, to whoever’s paying – which has been the Agents more than once, and will likely be someone else before long. What he actually wants out of any of it has never once been on the table.