"There isn't a single moment, you know," Lucius said. "Not a sudden blinding flash of insight in which you discover that you've been following a madman and your life is never the same again. It's a slow accumulation, a long process of watching the carefully crafted excuses one makes to oneself falling one after the other like autumn leaves. In the end, your imagination is your worst enemy. And then… one day you simply can't pretend anymore."
"Do you think he's mad?" Percy asked. "Truly mad?"
Lucius pursed his lips a little and tilted his head to the side, thinking. "I don't know," he answered finally. "There are so many ways of being mad. Bellatrix's is only one. There was a time, of course, when I would have said no, and even now I'm not sure I'd say yes with any certainty. Does it matter, really?"
Percy looked down at his hands. They were shaking a little, earth under his fingernails. He still brought his quill, out of habit, but there was no ink in it now. "Yes. If a man is sane, there comes a point when no matter how deluded he is, he can't go on denying reality. I don't say it won't be a long time in coming, but it will come given enough pressure. If he's mad… there are no boundaries to his world, are there? There's no reality for him to run up against."
"But even men who are sane can remain self-deluded until long past the point where accepting reality will do any good. Some of them simply won't hear, and have the power to silence the people who would make them hear. Some of them believe that to be convinced by reason is to turn one's back on faith. And some of them are afraid, afraid in a way that poisons them - a way that you, Gryffindor child, may never understand." Lucius spread his hands; a stray ocean breeze that smelled of the storm guttered the candle flame and blew a strand of his hair across his face like fine-spun cobwebs. "In this world, Mr. Weasley, as I daresay you have discovered, there are no points for effort. Intentions will only take one so far. What matters is how things end; and in the end, sane men can do as much damage as madmen, maybe more."
Percy looked up, biting on his lower lip. It was beginning to scar. "But why is he so afraid? I know that - that I'm too young, and maybe I'm the wrong House, and maybe there are things I don't understand. But why? What does he have to be so afraid of that the rest of us don't?"
"I will tell you honestly that if I knew that I would have slipped a lever under it long ago," Lucius said. "I can't even tell you with one hundred percent certainty that he's acting out of fear at all."
"What else would it be?" Percy asked slowly.
Lucius smiled, a little bitterly. "Shall I tell you the half-dozen things that occurred to you in the time it took you to ask that question?"
Percy closed his eyes and rubbed his fingers over them. They felt raw and grainy. "I can't make him hear. The Dementors took another family yesterday, and the baby died of exposure before we found them. She was just… lying on the ground at her mother's feet. I don't know what we could have done for her even if she hadn't already died. Mr. Malfoy, I don't know what to do."
"Forget about knowing Cornelius' heart, child," Lucius said. "Know your own."
Harry stepped out into the night air with a shiver, pulled his broom out of his pocket, and restored it to its normal size. He'd flown all the way here, at speeds that would have horrified Hermione a bit, but it was too cold now to fly all the way back. Telling himself he'd Apparate after he'd worked off a little bit of tension, he mounted his broom and pushed off, soaring into the London sky.
It was a game, in a way, flying through Muggle London without his invisibility cloak or a Disillusionment charm. Hermione had always hated it when he did that too, but fuck it - he and Ron had flown a Ford Anglia right out of the car park at King's Cross Station and the world hadn't ended. No matter what the Malfoys of the world said or believed, the truth was that the wizarding world's first and greatest defense was the unwillingness of Muggles to believe their own eyes; and that wasn't something that was likely to change just because Harry Potter sheared by their fifteenth-floor office window in the dead of night doing two hundred kilometers an hour on a racing Nimbus. But he was careful anyway, moved fast and didn't get too close, stayed low to the water going under bridges, didn't take the same route twice.
He couldn't remember now if it had been Hermione or Ginny who had told him that he did it because deep down he was trying to distance himself from the child he'd been, from the thought of what would have become of him if he'd never got a Hogwarts letter and grown up a Muggle; trying to convince himself that he wouldn't wake up one morning and find that it had all been a dream after all. It sounded like something Hermione would say but he heard it in Ginny's voice, with her affectionate, half-exasperated patience.
Unsettled, Harry slowed and pulled up to hover forty feet above a river barge. It was bloody cold. He wanted home and a nice warm fire. Gripping his broom a little tighter, he Apparated and watched the Thames flicker into the front gates of Hogwarts.
It was warmer inside. Checking his bristles for ice or damp, Harry made for the stairs, and nearly reached them before a sudden shout froze him in his tracks.
"Potter, what the fuck!"
Wincing, Harry turned to see Pansy storming down the hall toward him with Goyle trailing apprehensively at her heels. "Er," he said.
"What, I repeat, the fuck?" she snapped, bearing down on him like a pissed-off Beater down by a hundred points. "Draco disappears, he won't tell me where he's going, then he comes back and tells me and Greg we're to go to his father, now, tonight!"
"It's not safe, he said," Goyle put in, sounding none too pleased himself.
"'But Draco, darling,' I said, 'unless you haven't told me something, we don't know where your father is!' 'I know where he is,' he said. 'You have to go,' he said. And I said, 'Well, if it's so dangerous for us, what about the bloody students,' and do you know what he said? He said, 'It's too late for them.' Potter, you have three bloody seconds to explain!" Pansy sucked in a breath and glared.
Harry blinked at her in blank dismay.
"Oh, don't stand there giving me that stupid look!" Pansy exploded. "What is Draco talking about, and why is he trying to send us away? He won't tell us, but if anyone knows, it's you!"
"Wait, wait," Harry said. "What did he say, exactly?"
"I've just bloody told you what he said, word for word, now tell me what he meant or I'll turn you into a cockroach!"
"I don't -" Harry began, then closed his eyes and tried again. "I don't know what he meant. Something's upset him and he won't tell me what."
"Well, fuck it out of him for all of me, just -"
"Hush," Goyle said suddenly. "D'you hear that?"
Harry caught his breath and listened. It sounded like a bird at first, high and thin, a mournful wail that set his teeth on edge. Then there was a rush of flapping paper wings and two origami hawks sailed down the staircase, aiming unerringly for Harry to flap frantically around his head, fluting Help, help in voices like spilling sand.
"Christ, what now?" Harry muttered, yanking out his wand. "Somebody go get the Headmaster. Right, birds, you've found me, now go back to whoever sent you."
Pansy picked up her skirts and darted back down the hall. Not waiting to see where Goyle went, Harry got back on his broom and followed the birds up through the tall shaft of the stairwell, dodging the staircases that swung into his path.
The birds led him all the way up into the North Tower, past scandalized paintings to where a handful of girls huddled in a knot at the foot of the ladder leading up to the Divination classroom, four or five in Gryffindor and Hufflepuff uniforms. Harry swung off his broom and looked them over, but none of them appeared hurt.
"Was it you lot who sent out the birds? What's happened?"
"Something's wrong with Professor Trelawney," wailed one of the girls, a Gryffindor fifth-year whose name was forever escaping Harry because he kept wanting to call her Lavender.
Harry glanced up, frowning. "What's wrong with her? Is anyone up there with her?"
"Marjorie Blake is," said one of the other girls. "She's… you'd better go up and see. Oh, do hurry!"
A fleeting and rather uncharitable thought about sherry ran through Harry's head. He shrunk his broom down to fit in his pocket and climbed up the ladder.
Thin moonlight spilled into the classroom, the only light in the room. Before his eyes had quite adjusted, Harry stepped forward - and walked straight into something clammy and fibrous. Cursing, Harry jumped back, narrowly avoiding catching his heel on the trapdoor, and wiped at his face. "What the hell - Sybill? Marjorie?"
"Harry," Sybill said from the darkness, her voice sluggish and thin. "Don't… don't come in. Don't come any closer. The dark will get you too."
"What the - Lumos!"
The light from his wand spilled weakly out into the classroom, as if the darkness were too thick for it to push through. Halfway across it met the moonlight, and between their lights Harry could see that the entire room was strung with dusty webs, stretching floor to ceiling like translucent curtains, veiling tea tables and cushions. Marjorie Blake was hanging in one like a fly, arms outstretched to the sides, head bent limply forward.
"Jesus Christ," Harry said. "One of you go get Madam Pomfrey! Run!"
Quick footsteps faded down the hall. Harry aimed his wand and sliced carefully through one of the webs blocking his way to Marjorie. It lifted gently, as though on an invisible breeze, then came back together. Gritting his teeth, Harry lit every candle in the room with a snap of his fingers and edged carefully forward, slipping sideways between two webs, watching for movement in the shadows. "Sybill? Where are you?"
"Listen to me," she said. He couldn't pin down her voice, couldn't see her in the weirdly dim light of the guttering candles. "There are more ghosts in this castle than anyone knows."
"Look, just keep talking," Harry said, crouching to slip under a web. "I'll get Marjorie out and then I'll come back for you, but you've got to tell me where you are."
"I don't know where I am," she said. "I'm blind, Harry. For days I've seen so many things that I couldn't tell anymore what was my inner eye and what was my outer one, and now I can't see anything at all. Take the child and go, before it gets you too."
"Before what gets me?" Harry demanded. Marjorie was only ten or fifteen feet away now, close enough for him to see that she was still breathing.
"Be careful," Sybill whispered. "Don't speak to anyone you don't know. Don't go down any hallways you haven't been down before. Stay out of the shadows."
Harry sliced through a broad sheet of web and barely managed to slip through the opening before it came back together. "What the hell cast all these webs?"
"I did," Sybill said.
"Dear God," Snape said from beside the trap door.
"I saw the Grim in your teacup, all those years ago," Sybill said. Her voice was getting fainter. "Tea leaves and palms and crystal balls. Maybe I was a bit of a fraud after all. But my great-great-grandmother had such a gift, Harry, and my mother could read a whole season's deaths in the winds of its first storm."
"Sybill, take down the webs," Harry ordered.
"Miss Lowsley, go and fetch Professor Malfoy," Snape said. "Quick, now."
A web brushed against Harry's hand, nearly tearing his skin as he broke free. "Ow! Sybill, what the hell? Why did you cast these? Take them down so we can get to you and Marjorie!"
"I can't," Sybill said. "I can't undo them. I can't stop them from growing."
"Son of a - Finite Incantatem!" Harry shouted, throwing every ounce of his strength behind it. The spell roared through the webs like a shock wave, shattering crystal balls into clouds of glimmering dust behind it and blowing out every window on the far wall, but the webs never so much as stirred.
"Sybill, for god's sake try to take them down!" Snape bellowed.
"No, Severus," she said, calm and a little regretful. "Do you know, I think they're my best work. My masterpiece, really. While Remus Lupin and the Weasley twins have been laying traps all over the grounds and the castle, I've been laying them here."
Harry dodged around a trailing line of web and reached carefully out to tug at Marjorie's arm. It wouldn't budge. "Are you saying something tripped this, Sybill?"
"Yes. The boys were guarding against physical incursions. I was guarding against… other things."
"What other things?" Harry ground out, cursing Sybill's predilection for cryptic pronouncements. Aiming his wand carefully, he traced a thin line of fire into the air around Marjorie's body, an inch in front of her and outlining her like a snow angel. "Was it Marjorie who tripped the ward or you?"
"I saw Hermione Granger before she died," Sybill said, and Harry's wand froze in midmotion. "That child never had so much as a spark of the Sight in her entire life. She had the most closed and rigid mind I have ever seen in all my years of teaching. So when I discovered that she was having visions I… I went to see her. I haven't been outside this castle in more than twenty years, did you know? The world has changed."
Harry gritted his teeth and began moving his wand again. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the webs stretch and ripple like a flag unfurling, widening by an arm's length, tendrils creeping across the floor to wind around a chair leg and surge upward. "What exactly was this spell meant to do?"
"What did you find out from Granger, Sybill?" Snape asked quietly.
"For fuck's sake, will you answer me first?" Harry snapped. He cast, hard, and the thin line of fire blazed into a blinding flame as sharp as a bladeward, hurtling forward and through the web. Harry grabbed Marjorie and yanked her back the second the web strands parted, trying not to touch the web stuck all along her back and tangled in her hair.
"She wouldn't tell me about her visions," Sybill said. "But she had them. I could feel it. Something had opened her Inner Eye as if it were a door blasted off its hinges."
Web strands floated on air currents, drawing closer, searching for the strands on Marjorie's back. Harry fried them to a cinder, maneuvered Marjorie awkwardly around toward the door, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he almost ran straight into Goyle.
"Give her here," Goyle said, glancing nervously at the webs. "You take down the ward and find Professor Trelawney."
"It isn't a ward," Harry said as he passed Marjorie over. "It started out as one, but this… Sybill couldn't have done this."
Goyle grunted assent, ducking under a web strand that floated downward a little too slowly to entangle him. "'S what Draco said. He said just to get everyone out and seal the place up for now. Coming through, Professor Snape."
"Hurry," Snape said. "I can only hold this path clear for so long."
"Sybill?" Harry called. Webs were curling around him, dusty with age as soon as they formed, thick enough now that he could barely see through them. He hoped to god whatever had made Sybill's spell go so disastrously awry hadn't brought something to live in them as well. "Keep talking."
"I don't want to die, you know," she said, sounding almost surprised. "I thought it wouldn't matter to me but it does. I've always been surrounded by death omens, by the foreknowledge of lives cut short. Terrible, terrible."
Harry ducked under a trailing web strand and burned through another, making his way toward where he thought her voice was coming from. The webs muffled sound like cotton batting; his footsteps sounded strange on the dusty carpets, and it was disconcertingly hard to tell where anything was. It was like the silence after a snowfall, and with the same strange, sourceless, pale glow. If he remembered the dimensions of this room right, he should have stubbed his toe on a tea table long before now. "I know. Keep talking."
"The smell of death was so strong on her," Sybill whispered. "She thought divination was such nonsense, but she believed before she died."
"Bleeding fuck, when did this room get so big?" Draco muttered about half an inch from Harry's left ear. Harry whirled, hand raised to cast out of sheer reflex, then seriously considered hitting Draco instead.
Draco was wearing nothing but a black t-shirt and black track pants, looking tired, unusually disheveled, and thoroughly annoyed. Scowling, he lifted his wand and sent a stream of flame roaring past Harry's ear, crackling web strands into ash.
"It's not this big," Harry said. "Stop complaining and help me figure out what the hell is going on. And keep quiet. Sybill?"
"Potter, you are a judgment on me," Draco whispered. "And you aren't thinking either, as usual."
He hadn't taken much more than ten paces into the room to free Marjorie. That meant that from here he should have been able to see the door to Sybill's rooms. He couldn't see anything but dim candle glow and dark shadows that might have been walls beyond the webs, and knowing that the disorientation was a byproduct of the spell wasn't much comfort. "Right, then, you tell me what we'd use to - Incendio - track Sybill in a room that's been saturated with her presence for twenty-five years. Sybill!"
"The dark," Sybill said, her voice wavering just a little. "The dark is coming. Harry, listen closely."
Harry blinked, then rubbed his eyes. It wasn't his imagination, or hers - the room was getting darker, candles losing their ground against encroaching shadows, the circle of his Lumos charm was growing steadily smaller, and if they lost the light in all this strange webbing…
"Serpensortia," he said.
"Better," Draco told him.
"Malfoy, can you shut up for five seconds please?" Harry knelt in front of the snake, a cobra that flared out its hood and stared up at him with cold, incurious eyes. Find Sybill for me, he told it.
The snake nodded and slipped away. The webs caught the failing candlelight in crystalline shards, glimmering nets over blackness. Somewhere, from a very great distance, Harry could hear bells. "Sybill?"
"Almost all of wizarding Britain passes through Hogwarts' walls," Sybill said. "Some of those children, Hogwarts keeps. Not an army, but enough. Ghosts even to the ghosts. Hogwarts holds a thousand years of children, of young men and women, just one or two from each generation, who don't know what year it is and don't know that they're dead."
"You'd think that'd be bloody hard to miss, with the glowing and floating through walls and all," Draco muttered, ducking to follow Harry as he made his way through the webs after the snake. "Don't the other ghosts tell them?"
"They can't hear the other ghosts," Sybill said. "They can't hear anything. They're lost and alone, every one of them, wandering through a Hogwarts that looks empty to them. By themselves they have no power. But Hermione saw them, in a vision."
For a moment, Harry glimpsed something that might have been a table before the webs swallowed it. He dodged through a closing web and put out his hand, feeling for the wall. He couldn't find it. "Keep talking, Sybill."
"She saw them being torn apart, one by one, by the dark. One by one, all the way back to a child who learned Transfiguration at Rowena Ravenclaw's knee before smallpox took her. They were gateways, those children; the dark had to pass through them each in turn to get somewhere else. When they were all gone, Hogwarts only remained as an indistinct shadow in a neverending mist. Hermione didn't know what the vision meant, but I think I do."
"Potter, there's something moving over there," Draco whispered. "Not Sybill, it's too big."
"I see it," Harry whispered back. The snake was heading right for it, hissing back at Harry to follow. All Harry could see was shadow and faint, luminous lines, the unnervingly wavering carpet underneath him, Malfoy beside him, and whatever was moving in the dark. He followed the snake as best he could, ducking under webs and trying to keep his balance. The snake didn't seem to be having any trouble; Harry wondered if this was all illusion after all.
"What does it mean, Sybill?" Draco called.
"The dark isn't Voldemort - the dark is something he's called, something he thinks he rules but he's likely to find out differently. If Hermione had paid attention in Divination class she would have known to read the children's bones when the dark had passed through them, and that would have told her much that she was still blind to." Sybill's voice was growing thin, as if she were laboring for breath. "Voldemort wants Hogwarts because he believes that it's a gateway, or that he can make it into one. He thinks that he and the dark can tear it away from its moorings and pass through it into shadow."
"God almighty," Draco said in a strangled voice.
"Sybill," Harry said. "Don't move."
Somehow they'd come back around to Sybill's armchair toward the front of the class. A thick arbor of webbing stretched above it; settled in the webbing, a black spider the size of Hagrid patiently spun silk out of its spinnerets and wound it around Sybill where she sat in the chair. Only her head was left uncovered, and the silk was winding tighter. In front of the chair, the snake wove hypnotically back and forth, hood flared, rising to the height of Harry's collarbone with its eyes fixed on the spider.
"Ava-"
Harry's hand shot out and clamped over Draco's. "Don't. Either you'll catch Sybill in the blast or that thing will kill her when it falls on her."
"So what in buggery are we supposed to do, hope the snake eats it?"
"That's a king cobra, Malfoy. It's as fast as that spider and it can kill an elephant if it bites it in the right spot."
"Instantly?"
"No, but -"
"Right, didn't think so." Draco edged out away from Harry, moving carefully among the web strands, wand raised. "Get ready to catch it before it falls on Sybill."
Harry raised his wand and took aim, hoping that Malfoy had a plan that would involve instant spider death while not putting Sybill at risk. If he only wounded it, or if Harry cast Wingardium Leviosa too soon, the spider would attack the nearest threat and take Sybill's head off with one snap of its mandibles.
The spider shifted, long legs stretching lazily in its web, exposing a stark red death's head against the black of its abdomen.
"Fuck," Harry breathed. "Malfoy, get back!"
Draco was already backpedaling, dodging the moment before an outflung web strand would have tangled in his hair. "Bloody hell, that's a death's-head spider! I thought they were extinct!"
Get back! Harry ordered the snake. "They're meant to be extinct."
The snake lifted itself higher off the ground, slithering sinuously forward.
Get back, it can spit poison, Harry told it desperately.
These creatures are foul, it answered in its strange, unnerving hiss like a dog's growl. Eaters of young. Mate-killers. We kill them where we find them, human.
"Potter, bring the damned snake back before it does something that -"
"I'm trying, Malfoy -"
The snake struck like lightning, leaving behind a gory mess where one of the spider's fist-sized eyes had been. Harry cast right behind it, throwing a shield around Sybill and praying that whatever had gone awry in this room wouldn't corrupt his spell as well. The spider struck blindly and hit the shield, blue-white flaring where its mandibles touched magic, its cry as high and grating as crystal grinding into sand.
Draco shouted something in Hungarian and a thin, fiery net closed around the spider, molding to its exoskeleton and working inward. Ichor poured from its path, pooling under the spider, hitting the shield around Sybill and steaming into the air with an angry hiss into a red cloud that burned Harry's eyes. The spider crumpled, legs drawing inward, and the snake struck again, snapping a foreleg with a sound like a dry twig. For a minute Harry thought the fight was over; then the spider shimmered and vanished into a spire of oily dark magic, reforming again higher in its web and leaving Draco's spell behind.
"Watch out!" Harry shouted, and barely managed to throw a shield around himself, Draco, and the snake before the spider lunged forward and sprayed acid that melted the webbing around them and etched splatters into the stone floor. Undeterred, the spider leaped, landing on the shield and clinging to it a foot from Harry's face, back legs working in a blur to fling webs over the shield in a thickening mass that pushed back against Harry's spell with frightening strength. The snake hissed in fury, making mock-strikes that fell just before the shield.
"Get back so I can AK it!" Draco snapped.
"Through the shield? It'll bounce back at us!" Harry cast again, fast but careful, weaving a bladeward into the shield that sliced into the spiders' limbs and sent ichor hissing to the floor until the spider dissolved into mist again and reformed on the floor in front of them. Crouched down, it was as tall as Harry.
"Bollocks to this, I'll rend the bitch limb from limb," Draco said between his teeth. Dropping into a crouch, he slammed the end of his wand down onto the floor. Flagstones shrieked under the strain and transformed, becoming steel spikes that shot upward toward the spider's abdomen. A blast of acid melted them, but not before they had sheared away one of the spider's rear legs.
Harry glanced back. The webbing behind them had completely covered his shield from the rear, shutting out the light, impenetrable. "We're going to be blind in a minute. We have to stop it from going incorporeal."
Draco blinked, momentarily looking stunned. "God, I'm a fucking idiot," he muttered, and cast again, almost too fast for Harry to see.
A sigil burned into the spider's carapace. Harry didn't know it, but he could guess at what it did - he'd drawn its brother in the air for Remus hours ago.
Between Malfoy and the spider, the air was thick and choking with dark magic. Outside the shield, the spider gathered itself for another leap - and staggered, weaving drunkenly.
"The snake venom's getting to it," Harry said. "Now, before it throws off that sigil!"
He and Draco cast at the same time, the same spell, and the air the spider stood in was full of whirring blades. There was a moment of ear-grating noise, then the pattering sound of a thousand pieces of chitin raining down onto the stone; then nothing but the slow hiss of acid sinking into the floor. The webbing behind them melted into black wisps of smoke, then disappeared.
Harry dropped the shields and skirted acid toward Sybill. "Sybill? Are you all right?" he asked, clearing away the last filmy tendrils of web. She didn't answer. He checked her over; she was unconscious but breathing. Her pulse was thready and rapid.
"Potter, may I suggest that you get rid of the snake?" Draco asked thinly.
Harry glanced back. Thank you, he said to the snake. If you hadn't weakened it…
It is better dead, the snake said. Many things are. Send me back, human, this place is too cold and I am sleepy now.
Harry cast and watched the snake vanish, then hoisted Sybill in his arms and turned. The room was still off in some indefinable way but the only webs left were the thin, shabby cobwebs that Sybill's spell would have summoned. He picked his way through them to where Snape stood by the doorway with Poppy.
"I'll take her," Poppy said briskly. "Nothing bit either of you, did it? Any acid burns?"
"If it had bitten us we'd have exploded like blast-ended skrewts already," Draco said, coming up beside Harry and pushing his hair wearily out of his face with the back of his wand hand. "Potter, Severus, we need to talk. Even if the bloody things weren't extinct, there's no way a death's-head spider should have been able to get into the castle proper."
"Anything can come in if you know how to invite it," Harry said. "We have to know how Sybill cast those webs and what she meant them to do."
"Anything that hasn't been extinct for two hundred years, yes. I don't even know how to summon something that doesn't actually exist anymore; I doubt Sybill could have hit on just the right incantation by accident."
"Nothing passed through the wards tonight," Snape said, turning to watch as Poppy levitated Sybill down through the trap door and climbed down after her, grumbling as she went. From the hallway, Harry could hear Goyle's voice, deep and slow. "Not the grounds wards, and I'd swear not the castle wards either."
"Could there still be a colony of them somewhere under the castle?" Draco wondered. "God knows what else this place is sitting on besides the Chamber of Secrets."
"Let's talk about this tomorrow," Harry said.
Snape frowned. "Tomorrow?"
"Please," Harry said grimly. "I have to talk to the Weasley twins, and I don't think it can wait."
"Come in," the twins chorused as Harry was raising his hand to knock.
Harry opened the door. The twins were sitting on the floor beside the coffee table. Books were strewn around them in a way that would have given Madam Pince the vapors, braced haphazardly open with plates and other books and something that looked unnervingly like an elderly turtle. Candles floated in the air around them, dripping precarious trails of wax down into gnarled stalactites.
"Bit of excitement, we hear," George said.
Harry gave a short laugh, closed the door behind him, and came to sit on the couch next to Crookshanks. "You might say that. Listen, I'll tell you all about it later. Right now I need to know something."
Fred looked up at him, solemn. "All right, Harry. You see, when a mummy and a daddy love each other very much -"
"Down, Fred. Remus says you have a theory about what Voldemort is doing. I need you to tell me what it is."
The twins looked at each other, all traces of teasing vanished in a moment, then looked back at Harry. "There are some things we need to know first," George said. "Did Hermione ever tell you what she saw?"
Harry swallowed and looked away. "No," he said. "She… said she'd seen horrible things, but she looked like she was seeing something beautiful too. She said she could see the end coming, everything coming undone. And she said her body didn't feel like hers anymore, like she'd died and her body hadn't realized it yet."
"Everything coming undone," Fred said. "What about Crouch? Did he say anything about his visions?"
"No. Just that he had them."
"And you've only had two visions that seemed to come from Voldemort, correct? The one where he said he could teach you to see, and the one about what happened to Hermione?"
"No," Harry said. "There was one other, right before the one about Hermione. It was Voldemort talking to Lucius Malfoy in a garden. Look, Hermione's autopsy -"
"All in good time, Harry," Fred said. "What did Voldemort say to Lucius?"
"He was talking about a flower that only grew in the deep desert. Something about it being inevitable that if something beautiful was born out of desolation, desolation would reclaim it in the end. He said it was safe in his garden, but he wondered if it pined."
"Hm," George said. "I'm not quite sure if that fits in with our theory or not."
"What is your theory?" Harry asked.
Fred pulled a book toward him and began leafing through the pages. "You said Crouch and Hermione both told you that death was a power."
"And what does power do? It makes things happen," George said. "How do you measure power? You measure it by what it can make happen and how strongly."
"What does death make happen?" Fred asked.
Harry frowned. "You're going to tell me, I trust."
"We are. But let's take a bit of a step back, first." Fred turned the book around and pushed it toward Harry, open to a page with a photograph in the center. Harry leaned forward and looked at the picture. It was a fading sepia print of a girl in a white pinafore, with dark hair falling to her shoulders in neat sausage curls tied in the back with a large black bow. She was sitting in a high-backed chair, eyes closed, head tilted a little forward, one hand curled loosely in her lap. Nothing in the photograph was moving.
"Is this a Muggle photo?" Harry asked.
"No," George answered. "She's dead."
"She's what?"
"Photographs used to be expensive," George said. "You saved them for special occasions. A child who died, this might be the only photograph of them you ever had."
"We don't do it now, of course, for a lot of reasons," Fred said. "But people were still doing it in Tom Riddle's lifetime. Not long into - the most recent photograph the author of this book found was from 1937, and the book was written in 1954 - but he would have remembered. Maybe he would have seen them, if his family kept them."
"Why this, though?" Harry asked. "Why not a portrait? This is a bit ghastly."
"Portraits are more expensive, for one, and were even then," George answered. "But think about what a portrait is. Sure, it moves and talks and all, but you're still seeing the person at one remove - you're seeing them through the artist's eyes. A photograph, in a sense there's no intermediary. The image is created by light reflected from a physical form - her form, just like yours as you sit there right now. No matter how long ago this picture was taken, in a way you're looking at that little girl with nothing between you but the glass of the camera lens."
"That's a cheery thought," Harry grumbled. "So what's all this mean, that I should tell Voldemort to take a picture and he'll disappear in a puff of logic?"
"Patience, Harry," Fred said reprovingly. He pulled the book back, snapped it closed, and returned it to one of the stacks. "On to Topic B: have you ever tried to buy a pensieve?"
"No," Harry answered.
"The odds aren't good. Not just because they're rare, but because their sale is controlled, like time-turners. You and Malfoy might be able to pull rank as Hogwarts Defence masters and get one, with the discreet wheel-greasing aid of the Malfoy fortune, but your average bloke on the street can't get one."
"It's too easy to abuse them, for one thing, to just live in your memories forever," George said. "And there's another thing about pensieves. People think that whatever you see in them is accurate, because they think that everything that happens to you is stored somewhere in your head where you can play it back like a photograph. It isn't. Your brain reconstructs things, reinterprets them, fills in blanks. In a way the memories in a pensieve are like Professor Trelawney's tea leaves - you know Voldemort's drawn a target on your student so you see the Grim in his teacup, cause and effect. Not that you're not still seeing tea leaves either way, but whether or not you see the Grim - that depends on a lot of things, and only one of them is the objective reality of what you're looking at. Any road, there's a lot of damage that can be done by people thinking memory is infallible, or thinking pensieves are. That's why pensieve memories by themselves aren't admissible as evidence in criminal cases."
"So that's why -" Harry said, then shook his head, setting thoughts of Sirius aside. "How the hell do you two know all this, anyway?"
"About memory? From making the Patented Daydream Charms," Fred told him. "If we'd had to create the entire daydream in every detail the stuff would go for fifty thousand galleons the ounce. Much easier and cheaper, and probably more effective, to just create the shell and let the person's brain fill in the rest."
"What really started Fred down this road was when Remus was talking about Dumbledore hoarding people's memories in that pensieve, even ones he ought not to have, ones from people who wouldn't have given them freely." George pulled another book out of the stack and blew dust off it, making Crookshanks sneeze. "Bless you. Now, it's unsettling enough thinking of the world's foremost Legilimens having a habit of sneaking other people's memories and keeping them locked up in a cabinet. But then you have to think - what does he do with them? Does he keep them there like a reference library in case he needs some sort of information? Does he only pull them out when he needs to convince surly Potions masters and gullible teenage boys that he's on the side of the angels? Or does he just like hoarding bits of people's lives so that he can feel like he has some sort of secret power over them?"
"What does he do with them?" Fred echoed. "Why so many?"
"He told me in my first year that it didn't do to live in your dreams," Harry said slowly.
George opened the book to a page marked by a tasseled bookmark. "Probably believed it, too. But that's the joy of a pensieve, isn't it? That you can live in someone else's."
Harry really didn't like where this seemed to be headed. "Right. Go on."
"Third topic: necromancy." George turned the book around and directed Harry's attention to an old Victorian line drawing of resurrectionists in a churchyard. There were two of them, bewhiskered and incongruously dressed in top hats and evening coats, bent over an open grave, hoisting out a woman's shrouded corpse. The church loomed behind them against the moon, shadowed and grim.
"This is where you know more than us, Harry, so you'll have to stop us if our theory has holes," Fred said. "Remus told you all about that graveyard we found while you were off putting paid to Barty Crouch, Jr. He said something while we were there that we thought was a little odd at the time."
"He said the dead don't come when you call," George said. "Our first thought was that of course they do; that's why the whole field of necromancy exists. But we did some looking into it and found that they don't. That's why Voldemort can't just reach out and bring the dead out of every churchyard in England. You have to be there with the body. You have to be able to touch them. The dead can be powerful, but only if you go to them."
"Funny story about that," Fred said. "Supposedly Jesus knew a bloke named Lazarus, who died. When he heard about it, he said Lazarus is sleeping. Let's go to him so I can wake him up."
"And everyone else said Lord, he'd be lucky to just be sleeping," George put in.
"So then Jesus knew he was surrounded by morons, and he rolled his eyes a bit and said in words of one syllable, Lazarus is dead, yes. Nevertheless, let us go to him."
Harry eyed them. "How do you know all this?"
"It was in a novel Dean Thomas left at our house," George said. "Bloody scary book, too. You wouldn't believe the sorts of things Muggles think up."
"Well, what happened?"
"Dunno, it didn't say. From context I'm guessing that Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. But the point is, the dead don't come to you. You have to go to them. And wherever they've got to, the necromancy never really brings them back. It just reanimates their bodies. If you catch them freshly dead and you're very good and very lucky, you can reanimate them with vestiges of their former personality."
"Or if you've, for instance, put part of their soul away somewhere for safekeeping," Fred said. "In a Dementor, say."
"The point here, young Harry, is that - ghosts not withstanding - there's a barrier between us and the dead," George told him. "If you want to call on their power, you have to walk right up to it and knock on it. And this is where we come back to where we started: death is a power. It makes things happen. It transforms people in a way that puts them forever out of other people's reach. The only thing that can touch them is exorcism, and that only if they've come back to this side of the barrier."
"Send someone beyond the barrier completely, once and for all, and they're unreachable. Untouchable. God only knows what kind of power you give them, because we only ever see faint echoes of it here; and yet it's enough to make necromancy one of the most powerful branches of magic that exist."
"Right, you're doing fine so far," Harry said slowly. "Keep going."
Fred pushed the little girl's photograph forward again. "Funnily enough, when you look at it like that the closest thing we have to necromancy that's not necromancy is this - photography and pensieves. Not that there's part of your soul in them, of course, but Voldemort proved with his diary and his music box that you can put part of your power in them and forge it into something that looks an awful lot like your soul. But the fact that it's not your soul doesn't mean it's not real. There was a little girl once, and she died, and her parents took a photograph of her. If that hadn't happened, this picture wouldn't exist."
"The thing about pensieves, though, and the reason the Patented Daydream Charms work," George put in, "is that your brain can't always tell the difference between what's real and what's not. You went to the seaside last summer. Were there gulls? Maybe, maybe not; your brain doesn't care. It puts them in anyway because there are supposed to be gulls at the seashore. They don't have to be real for you to remember them."
"But generally there has to be some experience, some reality, at the basis. But not always. How do you make people see something - something you could put in a pensieve, for instance - that doesn't exist or hasn't happened?"
"You give them visions," Harry said hollowly.
"That's our boy," Fred said. "Think how many visions you'd need to create an entire world. Think how much power, how much of Death's power, you'd need to push that world straight past the barrier and into another realm where you'd be untouchable and undying. It would sort of be the ultimate victory over death, wouldn't it?"
"Now we get back to Voldemort," George said, closing the book in front of him.
"What does Voldemort want?" Fred asked, leaning closer. "Eternal life, right? Weren't we always told that he was trying to find a way to cheat death, because he was so afraid of it, and that's why he wanted the Philosopher's Stone?"
"But is that really it?" George said. "Because the great thing about being a wizard is that eternal life is yours for the asking as long as you don't mind being all transparent and glowy."
"But you can't really act on anything," Harry observed. "Not directly. You've no real power other than what you can borrow from the living. In a way I think the dead have more power if they're not ghosts."
"Well thought, Harry, hold on to that for a bit," George said. "Another factor is that once you're a ghost, the world has a habit of passing you by. Remus said he and Myrtle were talking about this, about how it's like getting old in a way, feeling like you've been standing in the same place the whole time and everything is moving farther away from you."
"Remember Olive Hornby? That girl Moaning Myrtle is always going on about?" Fred asked. "When we were at school we got curious about her, so we pulled in a favor at the Ministry and had someone look her up."
"She died of Lacey's tachycardia when you were ten years old," George said. "All these years Myrtle's been going on about her, and she's been cold in her grave all this time."
"Myrtle doesn't know, or if anyone's told her she doesn't remember. To her Olive is always going to be fourteen."
"So Voldemort could die and come back as a ghost, but he'd be powerless and he'd never tolerate that. And when you come down to it really, setting ghosthood aside, humans only have two choices: live or die. Voldemort doesn't want to die any more than anyone else does; but if he can shed his skin, so to speak, if he can become something else - well, maybe he can cross the barrier and have all the power he wants, unreachable."
"Bloody hell, if that's all he wants I'll have visions at him 24/7 until he goes away," Harry said. "What's the catch?"
"The catch is this: what if he needs those visions to maintain his power? Or what if he just hates us enough to drag the whole wizarding world along with him?" George asked. "Power isn't wandering by yourself beyond the barrier forever."
"And then there's Hogwarts," Fred said. "Voldemort wants it. Why? Not for nostalgia purposes."
"Jesus," Harry said. "Sybill just told me why he wants it. 'He thinks that he and the dark can tear it away from its moorings and pass through it into shadow,' is what she said. He thinks he can make it into a gateway."
"Hogwarts is full of ghosts," George said. "Full of history. Full of shadows and the handprints of the dead. With towers where for a thousand years we've been encouraging children to have visions in their Divination classes. How much would it take to tip it over into some sort of giant pensieve where you could live in the visions you gave other people? Live forever, if you set the pensieve up in the right place. You could even bring the other people with you so they could have visions for you forever, or until you sucked them dry and left them insane, necrotic husks that not even the Dementors could find nourishment from."
There was silence for a minute, broken only by the snapping of logs in the fireplace and the soft rustle of Crookshanks nosing about under parchment.
"Malfoy's right," Harry said finally. "We have to go back down into the Chamber."
Poppy was bending over Sybill's bed when Remus came into the hospital wing, leaning into a long shaft of moonlight with her hair pushed back over her shoulder, her wand tracing almost-luminescent spells in the air over Sybill's forehead. Behind her, nearly blending into the shadow, Severus stood with his arms folded into his sleeves and watched her.
"How is she?" Remus asked softly when he was close enough.
"Blind," Poppy said tersely. "And I don't understand why."
"There's no injury to her head or eyes," Severus said. "She wasn't bitten. I can't find any poisons in her bloodstream. No curses or hexes. And yet she can't see."
"There are eight children in this school who have good strong Sight," Poppy said. "Two Slytherins, four Ravenclaws, a Hufflepuff, and a Gryffindor. Severus, we have to quarantine them until I find out what caused this. They could be in danger as well."
"Who are the Slytherins?" Severus asked.
"Aldis Ketteredge and Marjorie Blake."
"Slytherin House can spare neither," Severus told her. "Quarantine the rest. I'll have Draco shield their room."
"If it's a question of their being spared -"
Remus tuned them out and moved closer to Sybill's bed, frowning. "If her Sight was that strong all of a sudden," he said under his breath, "who's to say that she wasn't blind? She could still have heard, at any rate, and she knew Harry's voice."
Severus looked up at him, his attention caught. "Who?"
"Hermione." Remus reached out and touched his fingertips to Sybill's forehead. Her skin was dry and papery under his hand, feverish.
Nothing bled, which was unsurprising; she was still alive, after all. But the feel of her, the sense of something terribly wrong just underneath… his own skin remembered that feeling.
"Has Potter ever had a vision that didn't come from Voldemort?" Severus asked abruptly.
Remus glanced up and shook his head, meeting Severus' eyes with grim understanding. "I don't know."
"Well, find out," Poppy ordered. "If this is some sort of magical contagion - we've had people from the Ministry in and out sniffing after Draco, people going to St. Mungo's, children going to Hogsmeade… We could all be carriers."
"And if we are, Draco will either take it directly into his father's camp or die keeping it away," Severus said.
Remus rubbed a hand over his forehead, suddenly weary. "Dear god. What next?"
Poppy's mouth thinned. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We don't know that Sybill caught this from Hermione, or even that it's something that can be caught. In the meantime, we need those children protected."
"Canaries in coal mines," Severus mused. "Muggles take birds into mines in cages because if there are poisonous fumes present the birds will die first."
"Barbaric," Poppy said tartly. "And our children aren't canaries in any case, not unless they've been eating the Weasley twins' sweets. I'm going to move Sybill and Marjorie into the isolation ward. We'll know more when Marjorie wakes. In the meantime, Remus, you're to come with me and tell me every detail from Hermione's autopsy so that I can find out if whatever happened to her ended up as something that could be transmitted through the security wards on her room."
Remus sighed, thinking wistfully of his bed. Not that it did him much good anyway; he'd left the twins drowsing on it and reading Defence texts, and if they'd fallen asleep there'd be no shifting them and he'd be sleeping on the couch. "Yes, Poppy," he said obediently.
Poppy shooed Severus out of the ward and carefully levitated Sybill's bed. Remus pulled out his wand and lifted Marjorie's, then followed Poppy into the isolation ward. A bit of judicious shifting of the furniture and they were installed underneath the windows, still unconscious. Poppy picked up Marjorie's wrist, cast Tempus, and watched seconds tick away.
"Her pulse is erratic," she said finally. "Too slow, then too fast. I wonder if she's seeing anything."
"How can a set of spells be like a virus?" Remus wondered. "Spells have to be cast. They don't cast themselves."
"No," Poppy said slowly. "But I'd bet if you asked Fred and George Weasley it wouldn't take them long to come up with a spell that tricks its host into casting it on other people."
"But what was done to Hermione, and Barty Crouch - it needs Dementors."
"Yes. And the Hereditus charm has to be activated after it's cast. That doesn't mean that it can't be prepared." Poppy adjusted the sheets over Marjorie's shoulders, smoothed them down, and gestured for Remus to follow.
Poppy's office was small, full of sunlight during the day and glowing with amber lamplight now. On a shelf to one side of the room, a complicated structure of glass and fluids burbled quietly to itself. Poppy went to it, examined the hourglass in front of it, and adjusted the flame under a bright red liquid that spat up tiny gouts of fire when the bubbles in it burst.
"Are the Weasley twins doing all right?" she asked, moving aside to begin busily arranging beakers of translucent potions on a tray. "They've had some nasty shocks one on top of the other."
"They're strong boys," Remus said fondly. "When I came down here they were in my room arguing over the use of briar rose in binding hexes and feeding Crookshanks leftover salmon."
Poppy glanced shrewdly up at him, catching his eye and making him lose whatever else he had been about to say in a sudden rush of alarm. "Those boys think the world of you, Remus," she said in a steely voice.
Remus swallowed hard. "Er," he began weakly.
"They're strong boys, but they're only boys in many ways. They may not know quite which end is up at the moment, or what they really want." Poppy set a mortar and pestle down sharply on the tray, punctuating. "They're a bit vulnerable just now, you know. And I fancy you are too, though you don't see it yourself."
"Er," Remus said in dawning horror.
"Just you be sure they don't wind up being hurt any more than they already have been."
"But -"
"I'm glad we had this talk, Remus. You know, don't you, that you can come to me with anything? Good, good. Even if it's only for a bit of advice? See to it that Fred and George know they can come to me as well."
"But I'm not -"
"Now, then." Poppy pulled out her desk chair and sat briskly down, folding her hands on the desk in front of her. "Sit down and tell me what happened at Hermione's autopsy. Start at the beginning and go straight through to the end."
Remus sank limply into the chair across from her and tried hard to collect his thoughts.
"Oh, god," Draco said. "Not you."
Harry pushed past him into the sitting room, pointedly ignoring the fact that Malfoy had clearly almost been asleep when he knocked. "Yeah, me."
"Well, what do you want?"
"I want to know why you told Pansy she had to leave. I'd like to know how the fuck you know where your father is when you didn't know when Ron had you under Veritaserum, but I'll pass on that for now because I really want an answer to my first question." Harry grabbed the decanter of scotch from the table and poured himself a shot.
"Potter, do you have the faintest idea what time it is?"
"Yeah. Too late, according to what you told Pansy." Harry pulled out a chair and spun it around to sit straddling the back. "Come on, Malfoy, out with it."
Draco stood looking silently at him for a long moment, arms folded. Then, clearly deciding that Harry wasn't going to leave until he got some answers, he pulled out another chair and sat in it in a rather more conventional way.
"Right," he said, gesturing vaguely with his fingers. The bottle slid across the table toward him and a cut-glass tumbler began meandering its way through the air toward him from the cupboard. "You know, Potter, you really are a bit like a bull in a china shop. You see one thing and one thing only, and that's whatever your goal happens to be at the moment. It made you a damn fine Seeker and would have made you a good Auror - of a sort. The problem is that you never learned how to turn it off when you came off the field."
"Malfoy -"
"Weasley, now. Weasley was a piss-poor Keeper for the same reason he's a good Auror and good at chess: he keeps his eyes on the pattern, sees what's going on over the whole board at once. Keepers can't do that; they have to be goal-focused, literally. He'd have made a fine Beater with a little training. I could never figure out why you didn't understand that and put him in the position he was suited to play."
"Right, point taken. What is it you think I've missed this time?"
"Whatever it is that's happening to us, it's already started," Draco told him, concentrating carefully on pouring himself a drink. "When we were doing Granger's autopsy, I lifted my hand into the light and I could bloody near see through it. As soon as I walked onto Hogwarts grounds I was as solid as ever. Whatever's affecting us doesn't affect us here - or it affects everyone and everything here, so you can't see it unless you go off the grounds. Brother Karel told us about a case a bit like Granger's. He said by the end the poor bastard was almost transparent in the right light. That's why I told Greg and Pansy they had to leave. They haven't been here that long. If they leave now, maybe it will reverse itself, or at least not get any worse."
"So somehow or other Voldemort's come in under our radar and screwed us in spite of ourselves," Harry said grimly.
"Maybe. Maybe we were meant to be dead already. No way of knowing."
"Right," Harry said, and took a long drink. "Get dressed. We're going back down into the Chamber."
"Potter," Draco said between his teeth. "I don't bloody care if it is to save the world, I am not getting out of bed at one in the morning to go spelunking in the fucking Chamber of Secrets. It can wait until tomorrow night."
"You're already out of bed," Harry pointed out.
"Temporarily. Are you always like this when you're being heroic and determined? My god, you must have exhausted Weasley and Granger to the point of utter despair."
"Malfoy, stop being a big girl's blouse and go get dressed, unless you're going like that." Not that Harry would have minded; Draco looked better in rumpled track bottoms than anyone had a right to at this hour.
On second thought, maybe it was a bad idea after all. Saving the world had been much easier when Harry was eleven years old and could barely tell the difference between his dick and his earlobe.
"Oh, for -" Draco threw up his hands and shoved his chair back. "Right, I'll go get dressed. Because clearly there is no sleeping when St. Potter of the Overachieving Adrenal Glands decides that the time to save the world is when everyone is half asleep, bitchy, and possessed of remarkably poor judgment. You know, Voldemort is probably in bed right now."
"Yes, but is your father?" Harry called after him.
There was a moment of silence from the bedroom, broken only by the pointed slamming of wood on wood. "Well, probably not, but someone has to keep Aunt Honoria out of the single-malt or she starts -"
Harry buried his face in his hands. "Malfoy, I'm sorry I brought up your batshit family. Just get dressed."
Still scowling, Draco appeared in the doorway of his bedroom rolling up the sleeves of a dark grey jumper. "I'm dressed. I take it you talked to the Weasley litter? What did they have to say?"
Harry bit his lip, silent and unsure.
Draco rolled his eyes. "Yes, by all means let's keep the flow of information between Hogwarts and the Malfoy family going in one direction only. It's not as if we might be helpful or anything."
"Leave out the martyr act, Malfoy," Harry said, stung. "It's not as if you've been falling all over yourself to tell me what your father thinks Voldemort's doing. Or what your father thinks he's doing, come to that."
Draco tilted his head and looked Harry over thoughtfully for an uncomfortably long time. "I'll tell you what," he said finally. "Convince me you can be trusted not to throw a spanner in the works and I'll tell you what my father's plans are. Don't get too excited - it's going to take a lot of convincing."
"I thought you didn't agree with what your father was doing. Why do you have to trust me not to interfere?"
"Because he's still my father, no matter how wrong-headed he might be at the moment," Draco said quietly.
Harry sighed. "Right," he said after a minute, grudgingly, rather wishing he didn't understand. "Let's go. The Chamber's not getting any warmer or drier."
"I hate you, Potter," Draco said conversationally. "By the way, weren't we meant to wait for the elder Weasley to come back? It seems ill-mannered to roust him out of bed at the hour that God forgot."
"Bill? I owled him a couple of days ago. His parents need him more than we do right now. It's just us, I'm afraid."
Draco's eyes flicked up to Harry's, unreadable. The silence between them stretched a little too long.
"Come on, then. It's your show this time," Harry said finally.
The tunnels toward the Chamber seemed unsettlingly close with only two torches and no Myrtle to light their way. Harry kept his grip on the torch tight and his breathing carefully regular, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other.
"God, I can see my breath," Draco grumbled. "What a sodding miserable place."
"You can't give me any hint about what we'll be facing in those rooms?" Harry asked over his shoulder.
"If I could I'd have done it by now. This isn't the kind of thing one wants to be coy about, as a rule."
"Bloody Slytherin," Harry muttered.
"Are you impugning me or Salazar?"
"Him, at the moment. Well, you don't look too worried, anyway, that's something. And you haven't brought anything but your wand. So I'm guessing that either there's no guardian or you're not concerned about our ability to take it down if need be. Just as well; if we need to come back -"
"You," Draco said quietly. Then, as Harry glanced back at him in puzzlement: "If you need to come back."
Harry stopped, frowning, and turned back to face Draco. "Right. Are you going to explain that or just let it hang there cryptically?"
Draco sighed and rubbed the back of his hand over his forehead. "I'm going home, Potter. In the next few days. There are just a few more things that I need to do first."
Harry let go of the torch and sent it to hover a little away from them. "Draco," he said.
"Look, I'm… I'm tired. I feel like hell. I won't be much use to you for much longer anyway." Draco gave a rather wan attempt at a smile. "Might as well go home and be of no use to my father."
Harry swallowed, fighting down the tightness in his throat. "We need you here. You know that."
"Yes. But…" Draco trailed off and shrugged, expressive and rueful.
"Don't go," Harry said. "Not yet. Please."
Draco looked away, absently drawing sparks out of the wood of his torch with quick, spare movements of his fingers. "You're asking," he repeated. "And what would happen if I did as you asked, Potter?"
Harry frowned, a little thrown. "What?"
"Suppose I stayed - setting aside the fact that it would kill me, of course. Suppose I turned my back on my father, my friends, everything I was raised to believe about duty and half the things I was raised to believe about the world in general, because you asked me to. Would you love me for it? Would you even like me? Or would I be the dog you had neutered so he wouldn't run out in the road, only to realize too late that it was his metaphorical balls you liked about him to begin with?"
At a loss, Harry could only stare at him. For a dizzy, ill moment he wished Hermione were there, all impatient hissing whispers, feeding him the right answer as she'd done in school. Telling him, for fuck's sake, what to say. Tell me what to say.
Draco's mouth quirked in a small, sardonic smile. "Right. Now let's go, shall we? It's late."
Harry put an arm out across his path, bracing his palm on the cold stone. Draco stopped just in time to avoid running into it, glaring at Harry.
"Five days," Harry said. "Give me five more days to break the Hereditus charm. Then if you want to go back to your father I won't say another word, but for god's sake let me make it so that it's your choice and not the spell's."
Draco shook his head. "The spell's unbreakable. There isn't even a palliative. Do you think no one else has tried?"
"Let me try."
Draco's sigh stirred the tendrils of hair at Harry's neck. "My choice will still be the same, you know."
"I know," Harry said. "Just… let me give you this one thing. Let me know in my heart that this is the choice you would have made whatever happened."
There was a long, uncertain silence before Draco nodded reluctantly. "All right. You'll have your five days, for all the good they'll do you."
"Bloody Malfoys," Harry whispered, drawing a strand of Draco's hair through his fingers. "You're all stubborn and wrong-headed and -"
Draco's hand flashed up and caught Harry's hard, stilling it. Harry froze, instantly on the alert, every sense straining into the darkness to catch the echo of the light, fast footsteps that he'd thought he'd heard. Beside him, the torches wavered once toward the Chamber and then were steady again.
"The doors at both ends want Parseltongue to open, don't they?" Draco asked, his voice barely audible over the faint crackle of his torch.
"Right, and we'd have heard the Chamber door. Fucking thing could wake the… dead…"
"Ghost?"
"We'd have felt it go past, this close."
The silence stretched longer. Harry couldn't hear anything, couldn't see anything, couldn't find a sign that there was anything in the tunnel besides the two of them. Draco turned and knelt, torch held away from him in his right hand and his wand in his left, and inscribed a glowing latticework spell onto the stone. It spilled across the floor in a glimmering pool of magic that flared to scarlet, then sank into shadow.
"That spell - it's on your family's crypt, the one in Caithness," Harry said. "Etched into the bars on the outer doors."
"Sometimes, Potter, you are unnervingly observant. It makes me feel a bit like I've forgot to button some critical article of clothing. It's… a memory charm, of a sort. The dead can't abide it. They can pass it, if they're powerful or very determined, but they generally don't."
"What does it make them forget?"
"Nothing," Draco said, rising to brush absently at the knees of his trousers. "It makes them remember."
"Right," Harry said, looking away, his voice suddenly strained. He didn't really want to know what it made them remember. Right now, he could imagine all too well how oblivion might be preferable. "Except that, whether it was something dead or not, we don't know which side of that spell it's on."
"So we ward it off or find out what it is. Either way, point to us."
Point to us, whispered the shadows, throwing Draco's voice back to him with a strange, distant hollowness as if he had spoken into a cavern.
"What do you feel?" Draco asked quietly.
"Off," Harry answered. "Like the ground's not quite steady. Or like I'm just waking up and nothing seems quite real yet. But nothing that ought to explain footsteps or weird echoes."
"I wonder," Draco said. "I think I was wrong. Those footsteps; they sounded light, wouldn't you say? Like a smallish child's?"
"Yes, but -"
"Tell me, Potter - were you in a hurry when you passed through here the first time?"
Harry blinked. "Yes," he said slowly. "Ginny… I was. I remember every step of this bloody tunnel."
"Let's get moving," Draco said. "And hope we haven't left it too long already."
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