Albie continued his investigation of the manor. The crystal sky light was now filling with sunlight. He felt his pail skin crawl. He escaped the sun filled room into a long hallway. Many bodies filled the hallway. Lined up in neat rows the bodies of men lay dead on blankets. Spaces were made in front of doorways. Most of the dead folk were men. They all seemed to have been wounded in the fighting somewhere else and then stabbed to death in this place. A trolley of empty cages sat halfway down the hall. The cages looked like the type that would hold rats or other small animals a moon mage might use as a sacrifice for healing.
Albie looked inside the rooms to see more of the same. A bed with an injured person and many more lifeless bodies on matts in somewhat orderly placement lining the walls. Bayonet wounds to the neck common to all the victims. Blood stains made the floor sticky. Flys buzzed around the room. The open windows helping to let the stench of death escape. Flower boxes on the windowsill were graves to wilted plants.
The young man used the stored moonlight to steal the lifeforce of the many flys. The black dots all dropped to the ground and the sound of buzzing in the room ended.
The mage limped out of the room back into the buzzing hall. The cart in the middle had given him an idea. He thought to the bees to separate the hive from his belt. They did so and he placed it on the wheeled cart. He now noticed a sack attached to the cart filled with dead rats. A moon mage who worked here must have run out. The bees attached the hive to the cart. The bees would need flowers if they were to grow the colony. He limped back to the window. He rooted around the soil and found some leftover seeds. He channeled the life of the ceaseless fly population in the room to grow the seeds in the flower box into a bouquet of fresh yellow flowers. The sent of flowers in bloom mixed with the sent of corpses. He sent the bees thoughts of the flowers and soon a few bumble bees had arrived. Albie did the same in the twelve other rooms in the hallway. The giant bees had begun eating the corpses. In the hallway. The acid sizzled. The fly population in the hallway and rooms did not decrease. Albie limped to the cart. Albie sent the bees a desire for a larva. The bees buzzed in complaint but after a few minutes a cell containing a bee larva was produced from the hive. Able channeled more life force into the small cell and grew a new queen bee. Her breed was not the same as the sweet bumble bees. He had made her an almost smaller version of the monster bees. A hint more magic and the new queen was building a nest of small carnivorous bees. Though small the city was filled with food. Bodies lined the streets. Flys rats and other scavengers owned the streets feasting on the dead city.
Albie heard musket fire in the distance. Someone must have found Lock. The bee he had left behind shared the feeling of having seen a bear chase around smaller creatures. Albie wished he could have seen it so he could take notes. He would have to make a monster for observing what was going on outside. As the second hive became ten bees strong the mage stopped channeling life force into the bees.
He walked down the stairs to see another hallway filled with bodies. Fire had struck this floor. Many of the bodies near the central stairs were burned beyond recognition. The other side of the atrium was a dinning hall. Albie limped in to find it mostly unoccupied. It had strange big metal boxes that were surrounded with puddles of water. Inside the boxes was spoiled meat. Deeper inside the kitchen's storeroom were mostly untouched by the invaders. The large pantry seemed to have been half eaten. That left a great amount of food left for the young man. Large sacks of flower, preserved fruits and root vegetables sat on the shelves approaching the end of their shelf life. Albie opened a jar to fined pickled apples. His stomach growled and he remembered he had not actually eaten anything in three days. He held the jar up and let the preserved fruit into his mouth. The apple jelly was tart and refreshing. Halfway through the jay however he coughed, and the black liquid brought his meal to an end as he spit out a wad of twisting apple slime that crawled to him before he crushed it beneath his boot. He wandered around the building a bit more and found a set of bedrooms and laboratories on the second floor. Places to practice magic and mix medicine sat unused. The equipment left him astounded. He had heard of many of the tools in the rooms but never imagined he would be able to afford them. Most of the medicinal herbs had already been used up. He could still do something with what was left.
Many of the rooms in this wing were free of bodies. Someone had come through and dumped the personal affects of the inhabitants all over the floor, but nobody had died here. The largest room had a four-post double bed and a portrait of a man and a woman. The man was the dead naked sun blessed man he had found downstairs. Sitting next to him in the portrait was a moon blessed woman. The pair was dressed well and radiated dignity through the oil painting. Both wore a half a moon charm and a sun ring.
Albie remembered the dead sun mage downstairs and remembered, "wasn't mage blood the main component of blood stones?"