Chapter 50

Voldemort sat on a throne in the great hall of Castle Stalker, a roll of parchment in his hand, and his servant Bellatrix Lestrange seated on the dias below him. The windows in the hall were small, candlelight supplying almost the lighting. The walls and floors were stone, and every sound was made sharp by echos off the hard surfaces. Voldemort read from the parchment, Bellatrix waiting patiently as he did so. On entering the hall she'd noted a new interior wall, cutting the hall almost in half. From beyond the wall she thought she heard the occasional metallic noise, as if someone were working with tools. Although curious, she did not look about, instead sitting absolutely still and waiting until her master called upon her.

Voldemort was nearing the end of the parchment. 'Our source says that Potter left the school a few nights ago with some of his friends. I haven't been able to find out what they were up to, but I'll keep working on it. The entire school is in mourning over Dumbledore. They aren't telling the students happened to him, only that he suffered an accident and will be 'indisposed' for a while. Everyone thinks that whatever happened to the headmaster, it must have been pretty bad. McGonnigal is running things now and doing well enough, I suppose. But everyone's unsettled, including, I hope, Potter and his friends.'

Voldemort read the rest of Maude's report with satisfaction, and then passed it to Bellatrix. She took the paper with eagerness, not just because she wanted to know the contents, but also because of the mark of favour Voldemort was showing by sharing the report with her. She read it through carefully.

"If I may say, my Lord, this source you have inside the school is a real coup. I will not, of course, ask you who it is, but he is a most valuable servant."

Bellatrix was one of the few Death Eaters to whose opinion Voldemort could attach any weight. Most of his followers, aside from being vicious and cruel, were also shameless sycophants, and when speaking to Voldemort, were always trying to steer a course somewhere between the truth on the one hand, and on the other, telling Voldemort what they thought he wanted to hear. In other words, their information was almost useless. Bellatrix was one of the few that never concerned herself with what facts might or might not please her master, but rather only with the truth, regardless of whatever consequences might flow from that. She was one of the few of his followers who could give honest, unaffected praise of another. This also meant that her criticism of others carried equal weight; a handful of Voldemort's gang had been executed based on the performance reviews supplied by Bellatrix. It was a measure of the Dark Lord's confidence in Snape that the man was still alive, despite Bellatrix's repeated and serious criticism of him from the moment she had escaped from Azkaban not long after Christmas.

"I won't tell you the source," replied Voldemort, "but only because of my policy of never telling anything to anyone that they do not need to know. But I will tell you this much. I find that my followers attend to my wishes more closely when I have removed family considerations. It's so much easier for the Death Eaters to focus on my needs, when they don't have to worry about parents or siblings."

This hint was all Bellatrix needed to satisfy herself as to who was the source inside the school. She had wondered why her sister and her husband, Lucius Malfoy, had disowned their son. Now the reason was made plain to her: the Dark Lord had ordered it. This explained her sister's deep depression, having shut herself in her home after the Christmas holidays and hardly emerging since. Lucius she saw but rarely, and on those occasions his face hard and showing deep furrows that previously she had never noticed.

Castle Stalker was Voldemort's latest stronghold and now his favourite meeting place. Voldemort's morning had been busy, filled with a string of meetings, much of them devoted to a topic he did not particularly care for: money. Attempting to take over the world was an expensive undertaking, and the Dark Lord was always looking for more money to fund his operations. After he had resumed human form the previous year, one of this first acts was to reinstate the tithe on the bosses of Knockturn Alley and other areas where disreputable wizards gathered. But this was no where near enough to satisfy his needs. His latest scheme, inspired by the ancient dark lord Caligula, was rather complicated, but he was hopeful that it would pay significant dividends. Through bribery, blackmail and intimidation of healers at Saint Mungo's and elsewhere, Voldemort now received warning when a wealthy wizard was on his death bed. He would then send a follower, disguised as a close relative using Polyjuice potion. Once access to the dying person was achieved, it was trivial to imperious him, and cause him to rewrite his will, naming as his heir a Voldemort nominee. He'd acquired a couple of significant estates through this method, and if things continued at the same rate, this would be a healthy addition to his income.

But as the scope of Voldemort's operations increased, so did the demands on his treasury. Informants were often expensive. It would have been cheaper merely to bully people into giving him the information he wanted, but Voldemort was nothing if not a pragmatist, and what mattered to him above all else was results and the speed with which they were obtained. He was content to bribe rather than threaten, if the former seemed like the more efficient alternative. Having to constantly worry about money, where to get it and how it was being spent, irritated Voldemort intensely. But he had learned to force himself to pay attention to the money, because he had found in the past that everything went to hell if he did not pay attention to petty details.

A knock on the door told him that another petty detail had arrived, and would have to be dealt with. He waved his wand and the doors to the castle's Great Hall opened, revealing a dishevelled wizard well into middle age, his sparse, long hair in disarray. He was restrained by guards on either side of him, his face frozen in a mask of dismay. Anatoly Kasputin. The man had been a loyal follower before Voldemort's setback fifteen years earlier. And Kasputin had loyally answered his master's call the previous year. But he had lately displeased his lord, and was summoned so that he could pay the consequences. He had disobeyed the summons, and was now at Castle Stalker after having been hunted down.

"Don't be afraid," began Voldemort after the guards had dumped Kasputin in a heap before him. "You've been useful to me before, and I want you to be useful in the future. But you did show me real disrespect by ignoring my summons, don't you agree?" Kasputin hastened to agree with Voldemort, expressing the extreme regret he felt now at his foolishness.

"I'm glad to hear it," replied Voldemort genially. "Now why don't you save me having to recite why I am displeased with you? Why don't you explain it for all of us?" Bellatrix sat back in her chair and smiled. She liked hearing wayward wizards forced to confess. The tale was not long in the telling. Kasputin had been given the task of raising money in Eastern Europe from some new sources that Voldemort had identified. Very quickly the money had flowed in, gold and silver in all kinds of denominations from the various wizarding communities in the Slavic countries.

"And did I reward you for your success?" asked the Dark Lord.

"Very much so," said Kasputin.

"Then tell us why you were completely unworthy of receiving any kind of reward."

Kasputin confessed that the reason he had forwarded so much gold and silver was that he had debased the coinage, melting it down and adding non-precious metals and then reminting the coin, that it appeared to quintuple in value.

"But that was only part of your fault," observed Voldemort. "Please explain the rest."

"I kept one-fifth of the coin for myself"

"Indeed," replied Voldemort with a smile. "In fact, you became rather wealthy. Aside from your naked greed, what really upset me is that you took me for a fool. Did you not think that I would recognize debased coinage the moment it passed through my hands? Do you think I am a simpleton?"

Kasputin in his terror assured the Dark Lord that no, he did not think his master was a fool. Bellatrix stifled her laughter at the man's discomfiture. It was sport to her, watching the man's face betray in turn his fear of execution and his hope for a reprieve as he tried desperately to read each expression of Voledmort, to interpret the meaning behind each of his sentences. Unlike Kasputin, she knew what was in store for him the moment he entered the room. She knew very well how to read Voldemort.

"Good. Now you are very fortunate that I caught onto you as soon as I did. None of the debased coins you gave me was circulated and I kept them all. I also have the coins recovered from your home, your bank and also the house of your late lamented parents."

Kasputin, previously unaware that his aged parents had been executed, stifled a moan. "And so as we speak, the debased coins are being melted down, the precious metals extracted, and the coins re-minted in their proper denominations."

The Dark Lord waved his wand, and what had previously appeared as a solid brick wall on one side of the room disappeared, allowing Kasputin to see the furnace at work, over it a crucible with its contents of molten gold just visible. A group of goblins held another crucible, this too filled with liquid gold, and poured it down a funnel, where it would then be shaped, weighed and hot stamped into new coins. Bellatrix was intrigued by what she saw, suspecting that her lord's cruel sense of humour was about to be displayed.

"Before I give you your next assignment, I need to give you a little history lesson," said Voldemort. Kasputin's face showed the relief that flooded through him. He would be permitted to live! "Yes, you are still of some use to me," continued he-who-must-not-be-named. "A little over 2,000 years ago there was a Muggle named Crassus. He was the richest man in Rome, and all things considered, was probably richer than any man before or since. He also had military ambitions, and was given the honour of leading a Roman army against the Parthians. But he ignored wise advice, acted impatiently and to his surprise and dismay, found himself defeated by an army one quarter the size of his. When he attempted to negotiate a surrender, even this task was beyond him. He allowed himself to be captured by the Parthians, who executed him. Have you by chance heard how Crassus died?" Kasputin had not. The noisy clatter to his left distracted him, as the goblins continued to work the furnace. He tried to focus all his attention on the impromptu history lesson.

"Then I shall tell you," continued Voldemort. "The Parthians had a very deep sense of what was right and fitting and they thought it would be inappropriate to execute Crassus simply by beheading him. They thought there was a more appropriate way of making a statement. And so, while some soldiers forced open his mouth, others poured molten gold down his throat."

No!" shrieked Kasputin, only just now awakening to the fate that awaited him. "No! No! No!" His shrill shrieks ceased at a wave of his master's wand.

"On the contrary, yes, yes, yes — unless you can give me a good reason not to. I'll give you a chance to speak, but don't waste it on useless screams." Another wave of the wand, and the Dark Lord listened with barely veiled amusement as Kasputin begged for his life, reminding Voldemort of all the good services he had performed prior to Voldemort's difficulties fifteen years earlier. Voldemort allowed the desperate man to catalogue these services at length, nodding as he did so to acknowledge the veracity of Kasputin's claims to having performed loyal deeds. When the man began to repeat himself, Voldemort did not need his wand to silence him; a mere gesture sufficed.

"All true," said Voldemort cheerfully. "Every word of it. You have done good service for me in the past. But weighing everything in the balance, I think I'd prefer that you die." The man's voice again began a shrill protest.

"But what about you said before? You said that I could still be of service to you, and that's why you needed to tell me the history just now!" Bellatrix waited for what she was sure to be the punch line, willing herself not to laugh.

"That's true," replied Voldemort. "And you are going to perform a service for me, and right now. You see, for years people have speculated on how much Crassus suffered from the method of his execution. Was his death instantaneous? Or was his demise long and lingering? Did he die of burns, or did the liquid metal caused the water and acid inside his stomach to instantly boil, leading to an internal explosion? You are going to help us answer this age - old question. And when I have the answer, I'll also have a nice after-dinner anecdote, too. Now don't be too upset about it. You're lucky I'm not using you to test my new trebuchet." Voldemort nodded to the guards.

The two guards flanking Kasputin pulled him away from the foot of the dias. A smile played across the face of Bellatrix in anticipation of what was to come. Kasputin struggled, trying to find a purchase for his feet in the stone floor, but he was dragged inexorably closer to where several goblins waited for him, the forge furnace blazing away, the crucible's contents growing even hotter and a red light cast over the whole scene as if hell had opened up just for him alone.

The goblins laughed at Kasputin's screams and cries. When they had joined Voldemort, it was for just this sort of work. Gringott's didn't pay all that well until you reached at least the management level, and it didn't provide much amusement, other than the occasional foreclosure and eviction of a wizarding family who defaulted on a mortgage. Where else but in the Dark Lord's service would they have gotten the chance to do in a human, and in a way that would bring honour to them and their families when the story was told and re-told for generations?