Coal flicked on a light in his large empty house. Nobody there to greet him or welcome him home. He paused a moment to listen but the house remained silent.
As he usually did, he removed his coat and hung it on a hook in the entrance way. He made his way through to the bar area, what he called the entertaining room. With a click of his fingers a large table appeared in the middle of the room. There he deposited the contents of his trouser pockets. The knife, the vase, and several small pebbles, vials, and velvet bags. He summoned a chair to go with it and there he sat down and pondered things a moment. Thinking back to what else had been inside the house, he focused on an item at random, a music box. Then he fixed his gaze on an empty spot on the table.
A rock appeared in mid-air and landed on the table with a loud thud. He peered at it from each side before picking it up and turning it over in his hand. It was approximately palm sized, smooth and oval in shape, and there was absolutely nothing unusual about it that he could tell.
“Interesting,” he remarked aloud to no one.
He tried once more, a different item this time.
He was rewarded again with another rock. Similar in size and shape but different from the first one.
“Hmm.”
On his third attempt he tried for something outside the house but on the grounds, a small pine tree he’d seen in the backyard.
A tree appeared on his table, its’ roots still encased in a thick chunk of soil. A piny smell filled the room.
“Well, that’s that then,” Coal sat back with a look of satisfaction.
He summoned a piece of paper and pen and wrote a note for the housekeeping that would come in the morning instructing them where to plant the new tree. Then he put his pebbles, vials, and bags, back into his pockets. Taking the knife with him in hand, he left the vase and tree on the table for now.
He dropped some things into a drawer in his main office, the one without the windows, and while he was doing so he found a note someone had left on his desk. It read:
Ask him about the human.
-S
Coal frowned, summoned a silver lighter, lit the paper on fire, and then put the ashes in the trash. He recognised the hand but the message made little sense to him in his current state of mind.
He left his main office, closing the door and locking it behind, twice with one key, both physically and magically.
He made his way into the hallway which lay to the east of the bar lounge, on the larger side of the house, the side that housed most of the rooms, including the master bedroom. It was this room where he went. But he was not headed for bed. Just off the master bedroom, and behind a bookcase, was a hidden door with a hidden latch. Behind this door lay Coal’s second office. This room was protected, much in the same way that he had just found Milton Estate to be protected. Not even he could summon something from this room, nor should anything be able to get in or out. It was in there that he left the knife before returning to the entertaining room.
He sat once more at the large table and studied the vase. Natasha would come by for this so he did not wish to lock it away, nor did he wish to leave it in the open. But there were spells for this, one in paticular which very conveniently required ‘dirt from beneath a pine.’
He separated out some of dirt and wrote another note. One that stated ‘Do not clean!!!’ with an arrow pointing to the new circle he’d made. In the centre he placed the vase. He got about half way through the rest of the set up before he had to go and find the book for the spell he was trying to remember. He returned a few minutes later to finish off all but the very last thing. Only one ingredient remained, blood.
He stood still a moment, considering his options. He went to the kitchen and there he found a plate of food, prepared earlier by the chef and ready to heat and eat. He stuck it in the microwave and set it cooking for two minutes. Then once more, he disappeared into the east side of the house. This time he only went a short way down the long hallway, off which lay many bedrooms. He took a door on the right, just past the downstairs bathroom and right before the door to the mansion’s large garage. This door opened into some stairs. A dark, concrete staircase which Coal hated to go down due to the sheer narrowness of it. Still, it was the only room in the entire house that was well and truly soundproofed both with and without magic.
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He flicked on the light and descended the staircase, closing the door behind him. There were two doors at the bottom of the stairs. The far door, a few metres along and on the left, led to a secret passage, one that came out at various points on his land, an emergency escape hatch of sorts. Some of the tunnels which branched off even led to portals, pre-established teleportation rings which would take him to specific places, although he hardly ever made use of them.
It was the other door, the one on the right, the very closest one, which he opened and stepped through. On the other side of this door, lay three solid cells. In one of these cells stood a man in shackles, beaten, bloody, and bolted to the wall.
The man looked up weakly as Coal stepped into the room. Coal smiled calmly at him. Without making it too obvious he studied the man’s condition. He needed information from this man. Information he had yet to get and it would not do to have the man die on him before he had given it.
The man dropped his eyes to the floor as if too tired to hold his head up. His russet coloured hair was damp with sweat and his body marred in cuts and bruises. He otherwise looked healthy however and Coal deemed him fit to donate a pint.
He drew the man’s blood and then he summoned the plate of food from microwave. He sat it on a stool in the corner of the room. He set the collection of blood just outside the door way. Then he returned to the man, still locked to the wall and now staring longingly at the food.
“Now tell me who authorised the latest use of the facility?” Coal asked.
“I don’t know,” replied the man. His eyes never left the plate of hot meat and veges. The smell of gravy filled the cell, even managing to mar the stink that emanated from a bucket in a corner of the room.
“What were they doing there previously?”
“I don’t know.”
“You lie.”
The man shook his head. Never once did he glance at Coal. “I’m just local politician. I don’t play ball with the big boys. I don’t know how or who gave him access to that facility or what they did there before. But if those in Mercy find you’ve taken me, they will still kill you.” Finally the man raised his eyes to look directly at Coal. His eyes were a balanced mix of blue and amber and they burned with hatred. “And they will ravage your land, and no aristocrat will ever-”
Coal hit him across the face with a quickly summoned steel fighting pole.
The man dropped his head and after a moment of silence he replied more sombrely, “You can’t let me go and we both know it, so why would I tell you anything?”
“I can always wipe your mind. Maybe you wake up tomorrow with your wife and kids standing around your hospital bed and the newspapers report that a lost climber was miraculously found with only a slight head injury. Or maybe a broken leg. A shattered spine.” Coal waved his hand absently.
The man chuckled. “They’d notice, and you can’t risk it.”
Coal smiled faintly and sighed. He turned to go. He’d let the man think it over for a bit before he let him down to eat what would by then be a cold meal. Halfway to the door he paused, remembering the note that Stella had left, he tried one more question. Turning back to the man he asked, “What about the human?”
The man looked up with a completely different expression this time, one of surprise. His eyes darted to the left and then the right. His brow furrowed. He seemed to be thinking things over.
Coal waited patiently.
“They... they sent him to Witchhaven.” The man looked over toward the food again then back up a Coal.
And from all of that, Coal knew that the man had been telling the truth. He didn’t know anything more. His defiance was not bravado but desperation. Coal smiled. A smile so genuine that the man’s shoulders relaxed in response.
“Please...” the man whispered.
Pole in hand, Coal let the man down. Only the binding collar around his neck remained, enchanted with a magic which bound his powers.
Coal watched at the man ate the food and then he offered him a glass of fine whiskey. The man swallowed it down in one chug. Coal would have sipped it. “You’ll be back with your family tomorrow,” he told the man.
“Thank you,” the man replied with a sigh. His tired eyes looked down at the empty glass of whiskey.
Then, before the man could raise his gaze up, Coal summoned a sword, and slit the man’s throat so deeply and swiftly that no awareness of the event could have graced the man’s mind even for a moment.
That was two politicians from Mercy he’d killed this month now. A dangerous game to be playing but even more dangerous would have been leaving either one alive to point the way back to him. This one hadn’t been as much of a necessity but he’d been conveniently caught by one of Coal’s smarter lackeys and Coal had need of information. The lands around the modern city of Mercy were run by different rules than that of the aristocratic lands but each respected the rights of the other to rule in their own way. A delicate peace, balanced in turn by each region’s agreements with the sorcerers, and each aristocrat’s cooperation with one another and their own local councils. But that facility in the middle of the wastelands changed things. It was no man’s land, and just the fact that a politician from Mercy had come to an aristocrat for help pointed to discontent and corruption within that government. Coal would never have known about the facility if not for that. Or maybe Stella would have told him as she had told him other things. There was a weakness there or maybe a secret weapon they had been working on. Coal wasn’t sure yet but he would find out.
He left the room in a mess. He’d have his special cleaner deal with it tomorrow. He returned to the entertaining room with his freshly drawn pint of blood.
After the spell was done he found he wasn’t much in the mood for dinner and so he retired into the music room and sat down at the piano. There he stayed for the better part of two hours, his fingers dancing over the keys, as the instrument produced the most beautiful but haunting melodies.