Chapter Twenty-Three – The Unspeakables

The apartment was neat, tidy, and welcoming. Candles floating in mid-air threw a dancing glow over Harry's shabby furniture; they made the second-hand carpet look new, the spotted couch venerable and inviting. The wooden floor shone as though it had been recently waxed and the golden writing on the bindings of books shimmered softly.

Hermione sat in Harry's only armchair in her formal Ministry robes. She had extended her right leg before her, and rested her foot on a cushion placed upon the coffee table; the posture outlined the deformity of a badly broken ankle. The skin was purple and tight, strained by the swelling underneath, and there were blisters forming on the inner side of the ankle. Her hands were crossed on her lap, her wand peaking from between her fingers — Harry thought at first that it was odd from Hermione to hold her wand with both hands, until he noticed that three fingers were missing from her right hand, leaving only the thumb and index.

Her arms and chest seemed unharmed.

Her face was devastated.

Where her right eye had been was now a gaping hole full of burnt crusts and dried blood. Her cheek, partly ripped off, unmasked her teeth in a horrible half-grin that prolonged her mouth. The ear had been torn off as well; a trail of dried blood went from the resulting cavity to slither down her neck and finally lose itself in the collar of her Unspeakable's robes. Her right nostril was gone, too, leaving a hole through which the air whooshed in and out: it was the loud breathing Harry had heard while he stood on the landing.

She observed him quietly as he took in her appearance. Then, in a motion that contained something both tragic and infinitely delicate, she turned her head to the right — offering to his gaze her pale, unmarred left profile.

"Hello, Harry," she slurred back at him.

They had also burnt off part of her tongue.

"Why?" Harry murmured.

"Your Oblivion spell," Hermione said in a very gentle voice. "They figured out I had talked to you. They broke the Spell to interrogate me."

"I know how to break an Oblivion spell," Harry said tiredly. "Mine aren't the hardest to break, far from it. It doesn't require—"

"Mutilation," Hermione finished. "No, it doesn't. That was just a dissuasion technique. So I never do it again."

The air whistled slightly as it passed through her damaged nose. For a minute or so, it was the only sound audible in Harry's cheery drawing room.

"Sit down, Harry."

He did as he was told and let himself fall into the couch. It was a mistake: his tired muscles screamed in relief almost instantly, the dull ache that filled him since he had left the Isiame city sprang back forcefully now that he was not busy struggling to keep himself upright, and he wondered how he would ever gather the courage to stand up again.

"You don't look so good, yourself."

Harry lifted his head and met Hermione's one-eyed gaze steadily. "I've been better," he admitted. "Why are you here, Hermione?"

"Not for what you think."

"What am I thinking?"

"You're thinking I'm here to kill you, Harry," Hermione said, in the same gentle voice. "You're thinking back on the moment when I begged you not to Obliviate me. And when you did it all the same. You're thinking that nothing, now, will stop me from hating you; you're thinking you're responsible for what I went through, for what I look like."

"Am I not?" Harry asked, in tones as soft as Hermione's.

"Of course," she breathed. Her left profile smiled at him, a smile from the old days. "You're Harry Potter. You've always been responsible for everything bad happening to the people you love; haven't you?"

Harry looked away. His hands had started shaking a little. A crushing weight was settling on his chest and leaving him short of breath, a kind of helpless sorrow that cut through his remaining strengths. It was her smile — the smile from the old days — and the thought of her destroyed right profile standing right next to it in the shadows.

"But you are just as responsible as I am," he completed, his voice rough.

"Yes."

Hermione closed for a second her remaining eye.

"Ron woke up," she whispered, and for the first time her voice broke a little. "You saved him."

Outlined by an aureole of candlelight, her brown hair plaited and curling on her left shoulder, the left side of her face untouched by time or pain, perhaps just a bit lined by weariness and lack of sun, there was an odd beauty to her. Then she turned her head to stare back at him, and the atrocious bloody grin was back under the gaping eye-socket.

"Ron was saved by one of the people you hunted down," Harry corrected her.

"Because you asked them."

"Yes."

"And is this… person now out in the streets, launching Dementors on wizards and sending werewolves to ransack villages?"

"No," said Harry calmly. "She's pinned to a tree by a sword that goes right through her belly and spine."

"Dead?"

"Yes."

Hermione's empty eye-socket seemed, somehow, to hold a gaze even fiercer than her remaining eye. Harry stared back at her, hypnotised by that dreadful emptiness; he would have had to make an effort to look away; this time he did not.

"Won't you ask me," Hermione murmured, "what I think of all that? What I am planning to do?"

"No," said Harry. "Only what I have already asked: why are you here? What do you want from me?"

Hermione uncrossed her hands and set them against the armrests, leaning forward as she did so. The move made the stumps of her fingers bleed again, and Harry saw the blood, black in candlelight, dripping lazily on the fabric of his armchair.

"I am here," she growled, exaggerating the grimace of her mutilated face until she looked monstrous, "because I don't care about these people. I don't care about their rules, I don't care about their stories, or about their reasons. I don't care about what they want or don't want."

"The Unspeakables?"

"The Unspeakables. The Aurors. The Third Kind. Hogwarts. All of them, they can burn for all I care. The world can blow up and I won't lift any of the fingers they left me with. I'll stand there and spit on the ashes. I swear I will, Harry. They killed that in me, at least!"

Hermione breathed in deeply, in a high-pitched whistle.

"But you — you saved Ron."

Harry closed his eyes. He ached all over and did not have the courage to correct her again.

"You saved Ron," Hermione repeated. "And… I was wrong. And there's nothing I can do that'll erase the fact that I was wrong, even if I thought I was acting for the best. I was wrong not to understand that you couldn't come to me for help, not in your condition, and that I should've come to you. But I'm not apologising."

"Then what are you trying to tell me?"

"Look at me, Harry."

Harry opened his eyes and stared squarely at the nightmarish figure that had once been Hermione. He did not even flinch — the image of Daphne's butchered back and of Eunice's skewered body was imprinted in his brain. Hermione's face joined them in his personal gallery of horrors; he had exhausted his ability to be repulsed.

"What," he repeated gently, "are you trying to tell me, Hermione? I can't be here long, you'll have to come to the point."

Hermione nodded. "I'm trying to say that if I had done the right thing, if I'd come to you and if we'd started looking into things together, I'd have lost my spot in Martin's team. I wouldn't have learnt anything interesting. I already knew that back then."

For the first time, Harry felt the stab of an old anger. "What good did it do you to learn all that?" he threw at her. "You didn't understand anything. You never got the big picture. And whatever you found, you kept to yourself."

"Yes," Hermione said, leaning back in the armchair. "Until now."

"The Gearwheel Well."

The sight of Hermione had reactivated Harry's failing memory — the only place where he had ever felt Isiame magic, beside the Forbidden Forest and the Isiame City, was inside the Department of Mysteries itself, in the room full of cogwheels brought there by the Frenchman Martin.

"It's heavily guarded," Hermione replied. Her ravaged face was hidden from Harry; she crouched on the kitchen floor and busied herself with the contents of a small cauldron, which hovered over a magical fire lit directly on the tiles. "I don't think they made much progress studying the Third Kind magic that Martin managed to trap there, but they're still wary of it. There was one direct access through my old office, but you destroyed it."

"When we fought in the Well, we exited through the Archway Room," Harry reminded her.

Strange how that was just like old times, too. Hermione crouching beside a bubbling cauldron and himself leaning against the sink, watching her. With a little effort of imagination, he could picture them both in the very same posture in the girls' bathroom in Hogwarts, making Polyjuice — a lifetime ago.

Hermione was shaking her head. "That door never opens up in the same room twice in a row. Sometimes we get lucky and it drops us not too far away, sometimes it takes us hours to find our way back. There's a charm, though, to force it to pick a specific location; Martin and I are the only ones to know it. Martin is probably trying to change it now he knows I've defected, but it takes days to modify that kind of charm — he hasn't had the time."

Harry nodded.

"But can you find the door from outside the Gearwheel Well?"

She jerked back when her small cauldron trembled on the fire, the bright-blue contents fizzing and frothing.

"One of the entries is in the Brain Room," she said, her brows furrowed. "You remember the Brain Room, Harry?"

"Vividly."

"You need to get there. You'll see, we've modified the room a bit since the Brains attacked Ron, back in fifth-year. The way into the Gearwheel Well is precisely where you won't want to go."

Harry waited, but Hermione remained silent. "Can't you be more specific?" he said at last.

She snorted. "No. I'm an Unspeakable. I have more leeway than most of my co-workers, because I'm high-ranked. But even I can't speak plainly of some of our secrets without a big red alarm sounding in every room of the ninth-floor, pointing at your apartment and screaming, go there and kill everyone inside!"

"Fair point." He eyed the bubbling cauldron for a couple of seconds. The contents had turned petrol-blue. "You're sure this potion's going to work?"

"It should help," Hermione said slowly. "It's used to help with body damages consecutive to foreign possession of the mind. It was one of my projects when I found out about the mind-lock that the Third Kind had on Chloe Greengrass: find something to make you immune to their mind attacks. I was pretty far along when you interrupted me."

"You've experimented it on anything?"

"Myself," she said, turning her empty eye socket to him. "With no side-effects. And now, you."

Harry said nothing. When she maladroitly filled a glass with the blue potion, fumbling with her mutilated hand, he reached out to help her; she froze when his hand closed on hers to stabilise the glass, but she made no comment.

She gave him the potion. He gulped it down in one go.

Harry gave a shocked gasp. The thing was cold, colder than anything he had ever drunk — and there were sharp edges to it, somehow, as it slithered down his throat and froze his stomach. The sensation was just short of painful. After a few seconds the discomfort receded, leaving behind an odd feeling of… solidity. As though the potion had firmly anchored every particle of him in present reality. The pain in his muscles and joints diminished to something bothering but entirely manageable, his head cleared completely, and the bone-deep weariness he had felt since he had left Daphne to her fate lifted up.

"I feel… better," he admitted with an experimental shake of his head. "Well, I'm hurt and tired, but I'm not about to drop to the floor."

The left corner of Hermione's lips twitched. "It's a start."

Harry turned away and started opening drawers and cupboards, dragging out of their hiding places a set of dark clothes that constituted the Aurors' hunting gear, a pass that should open a few doors at the Ministry — though he did not believe it would be of much help anywhere near the ninth-floor — and, for Hermione, what healing potions he had left.

She shook her head when she saw the small dusty vials.

"I doubt they'll be of much help, my co-workers are the thorough type. But I can still try to make something out of those, it's better than starting from scratch. Thanks."

"You're welcome." Harry reflexively glanced back inside the cupboard, his hand set on the door to close it.

There was a brown-papered package at the very back of it. A package he could swear had not been there ten seconds before, when he had rummaged through the bottles cluttering the cupboard, looking for his healing potions.

"What?" said Hermione behind him.

Harry reached out. The package was smallish and very light. Robards' stamp was barely visible on one side of it.

"Why are you staring at that?" said Hermione. "You've never seen an old mop before?"

He threw at her a puzzled look. "An old mop?"

Understanding dawned on them at the same time. Hermione scrambled close to the spot where Harry crouched, holding the package.

"I see it as an old mop," she said, a little breathless.

"It's a package."

"Designed to be seen only by Aurors." A bizarre smile stretched briefly the left side of her mouth. "And certainly not by Unspeakables, it seems. I'd say it's safe, unless you have high-placed enemies in your own camp. But old Rufus didn't seem too happy to cooperate with Martin, so…"

"It's not from Scrimgeour," Harry said. "It's from Robards. I have no idea where he is, he was tailing Martin."

"Then he's dead," Hermione stated, coldly indifferent. "He's no match to Martin."

Harry felt a stupid surge of wounded pride. "Bet he can surprise you," he muttered crossly. Hermione shot at him a blank look, and he averted his eyes to stare at the package in his lap.

Hermione was right. Even if Harry had not seen Robards' seal, he could not think of anyone else that would drop a package made invisible to Unspeakables in his home. Turning the package over, he twisted and tore the brown paper. His Invisibility Cloak slid out to pool on his dirty kitchen floor, sending silvery flickers on the walls and ceiling.

There were a few seconds of stunned silence.

"What the — I thought it had been torn up by werewolves!" Hermione blurted out.

"So did I," said Harry. He took it in his hands. The silky folds ran liquidly along his fingers just like in his memories. "Hell, I was there when it happened…"

A folded piece of paper fell from the Cloak. Without letting go of the precious garment, Harry caught it before it hit the floor and opened it in a one-handed gesture.

"Potter," he read aloud. "I needed your Cloak, so I stole it and replaced it with one of my owns; it's not as good as yours — I don't know where you found yours, but I'll be damned if you deserve something that valuable — but it'll do the job since all you're doing with it is dragging your arse around the country at night and feeling sorry for yourself.

I'll return the Cloak when I no longer need it, whether it is because I've caught my target, or because he caught me. Maybe, when you get it back, you'll know enough to guess who I'm talking about.

And if you want to know, I took it right from under your nose when you were too drunk to notice. You're an idiot, and your Firewhisky is goddamn awful.

G. Robards"

The letter was dated back a year and a half from then.

"The Cloak," Harry murmured, staring at Robards' signature. "That's how he managed to follow Martin around and steal his medical records. It's too good for Unspeakables' detection spells…"

"If he gave it back," Hermione said in the same hushed voice, "either he caught Martin—"

"—or Martin caught him," Harry finished grimly.

"But the letter's eighteen months old," Hermione protested. "We were still stumbling in the dark then. Remember? We were writing lists of questions to be answered in your living room! We had no idea where we were going… How could he start tailing Martin a year and a half ago, when he knew even less than we did?"

"He was the Head of Department. Two months ago, he bugged Martin's office and heard the conversation I had with him — and the one you had with him just after that."

"That's how… Oh, the old sneaky—"

"He must've suspected Martin as soon as he set foot in Great Britain," Harry went on. "Martin got here already all obsessed about the Third Kind, didn't he?... He brought his Gearwheels and managed to trap Isiame magic with them… Wonder why he had to come here to do it, couldn't he stay in Paris?"

"No," Hermione interjected. "Apparently, the French still had old records about the Isiames, but that was all. All Isiames are in Great Britain. Word says Martin met them once, in the past, when he was visiting the British Ministry for Magic as an undersecretary for the French Ministry."

"… Yes and no," Harry said slowly. "He never met Isiames. He met my mother."

"Your mother was a witch…"

"She had been given Isiame powers," he explained, "so she could defend their city against wizards. She was the Isiame Knight, the last of her kind. Back in 1979, Martin was terribly wounded by Isiame magic — and by Wizard magic, too, because my father jumped into the fight; he got expelled from the Auror training programme for it."

"That would explain his obsession," Hermione admitted with a frown. "But where did the Isiame magic in the Gearwheel Well come from? He would never say how he managed to trap it there…"

Harry rose from the floor, his hands clenched on his miraculously-returned Invisibility Cloak, his eyes glued to it; it felt so natural in his hands. Like a nudge from his long-dead father, the wizard who had fought Alphonse Martin and won. His head was clear now. For the first time in weeks, he felt eager to go on — and win.

"I think I know," he said. "He had frightful injuries, of Isiame nature, but was cured in Paris. They used an old device to do it, something they didn't even know how to use, I think it was supposed to trap enchantments. He must've studied or stolen the thing, made it on a larger scale, and voila: giant gearwheels."

"But where did the magic come from?"

Harry looked down at her as he flung his cloak around his shoulders. His body vanished, leaving his head floating in mid-air.

"I'll ask him directly," he said.

Then, bending over, he kissed Hermione on her unmarred left cheek and pulled the Cloak over his head.

She smiled her new bloody smile as she looked right through him, her eyes hard as ice.

"Go, Harry Potter," she whispered, so low he had to hold his breath to hear her. "Go and save the world again."

London was a ghost city. The deserted streets, the blind windows, the mist crawling at knees' height — everything announced the coming of Dementors. The sky was clear, glassy and hard; a streak of light crossed it now and then: red, green, or purple, the colours burnt for a split-second on the snow-capped pavement and died. Far up above Harry's head, wizards fought… and Isiames answered.

Lightning tore the sky with no thunder on its heels. The wind howled at the stars before suddenly quietening. Snow whirled in thick clouds that never reached the ground. Above London the battle raged and Harry went, walking like a Muggle, invisible to all.

He took the old ways to the Ministry. The lift dissimulated into a broken-down telephone box took him down into the empty Atrium, littered with abandoned papers, hats, umbrellas and other objects of everyday life; small and sad testimonies to the wizards' panicked flight.

He didn't use the golden lifts. Following Hermione's instructions he headed straight for the house-elves' staircase, in a small dank space behind the lifts that most people did not even suspect was there. Harry reached into that small dank space, opened the door, and found himself looking at hundreds of house-elves.

They were completely still, and he could not guess how much time they had spent there, hiding in their own staircase. On each of the steps a single house-elf stood, whether the stairs climbed up into the upper floors of the Ministry or sank into the ground. Their eyes were huge as they watched him; their ears batted the air without a sound.

They stared at him despite the Cloak.

Harry blinked. The thought of saying hello crossed his mind, but uttering a sound in that compact silence suddenly seemed as ridiculous to him as singing a drinking song in the middle of a funeral. Their posture was not aggressive — although it was not precisely welcoming either. But he needed to go down.

He settled for a single, somewhat solemn nod, which none of the house-elves answered — but had they really seen him? — then started walking down the stairs, grazing the wall so as not to push the elves. They, in turn, flattened themselves against the opposite wall to give him space, never interrupting their silent staring as he went.

He wondered where they sat in the war. Werewolves were feared and cursed by wizards, and they had naturally gone with Isiames, their long-forgotten makers. House-elves had been enslaved by wizards — was it because of old links to the Third Kind? Would they turn against their current masters? Would they stand aside?

Would they fight with him, Harry Potter, the iconic wizard, against Sao?

Down and down he went, the elves forming a quiet and still chain on his left. Soft greenish light seemed to diffuse from the walls themselves, breaking his shadow into a hundred pale copies that flickered on the steps. He wondered who he would find first, Sao or Martin. For some reason he expected the old wizard to linger in his deserted department, endlessly studying Isiames' magic to counter them. If Sao had found him there as she dragged the child to safety, the fight was inevitable.

His heartbeat sped up at the thought. Hopefully, he would have to deal with only one of his two adversaries; even better, an adversary weakened by the recent fight…

The stairs abruptly ended in a cul-de-sac. The wall before him was bare and smooth, with for sole adornment the pale-grey imprint of a long-fingered hand, at elf's height.

Harry crouched and stretched out his hand to touch the print. The elves around him blinked all at the same time — then, all at the same time, vanished with slight pops. The light went out. Harry was alone in solid darkness.

He made contact with the wall right on the spot where he knew the print was, and a split-second later, he stood in the Department of Mysteries.

Several old-fashioned lamps hanging from golden chains flooded the space with bright light, and he needed a couple of seconds to get used to it after the time spent in the subdued glow of the elves' staircase. He looked round, trying to get his bearings, expecting to have to fight his way through the maze of the ninth-floor; but soon his eyes widened and his jaw went slack as he realised which room the magical staircase had dropped him in.

Three huge glass tanks sat, side by side, in the centre of a long rectangular room; the middle tank was the one Harry remembered, as large as a private swimming pool, full of rich green liquid. The tanks flanking it were unknown to him — one, on the right side, contained a pale pink substance that looked more gelatinous than watery. The left-side tank was full of inky black liquid that, contrary to the other two, swirled and boiled restlessly. Viscous grey brains drifted in the middle tank, sat motionless at the bottom of the right-side tank, and were jostled and brutalised without pity in the left-side one. Harry was in the Brain Room, right where he had wanted to be.

He glanced behind him at the empty stretch of wall where the house-elves' door had been. That much luck was impossible; anyway, it seemed impractical that the stairs could choose at random which chamber they ought to drop the house-elves in. The little creatures must have had a way of picking their destination themselves. But how had the elves known…?

The wall remained blank. A warm rush of gratitude swept over Harry's dread. It seemed to him that his walking was a little easier as he crossed the room cautiously, to stand before the tanks.

The Unspeakables, apparently, had considerably extended their researches on human brains; Harry didn't know what that thick pink substance was, but what he did know, was that he did not want to come in contact with the stirring black one. The sight caused unpleasant shivers to rise from his kidneys and shake his whole spine; it was like being approached by a hundred Dementors…

Liquid Dementors. They're drowning brains in liquid Dementors.

Harry ground his teeth. Hermione's voice rang in his ear, sharp and sardonic. The way is precisely where you won't want to go.

Of course, the path was there.

Still wearing the Cloak, he secured the sword in his left hand and his wand in his right, closed his eyes, and called for a tiny gust of wind.

Isiame magic surrounded him. It was strong and steady — as though it didn't care for a second that he was in the very heart of the wizarding stronghold. He was lifted off his feet, raised into the air, and gently dropped into the black tank.

The brains attacked him at once. Cords of thoughts wrapped around his arms, legs and torso, images flashed before his eyes — screams and battle cries — blood spurting everywhere — crying new-borns and terrified children — gaping wounds — death, death, death everywhere…

The sword shuddered. He brought it up before him and blindly slashed left and right through the tentacles of thoughts, struggling not to drown in the sea of violent memories; his blood beat dully in his ears, faster and faster. His body burnt with the embrace of the brains. He managed to free his right hand and lashed out with his wand.

The Charm Hermione had taught him came to his lips. It was ridiculously simple, barring the fact that it had to be uttered from the bottom of a tank full of murderous brains.

"Sésame!"

The black liquid flooded his mouth and nose and he realised he was about to drown.

Then he found himself coughing on a dusty floor; a floor that slowly revolved in a soft gold-green light.

He sucked in air, gasping a little; his heart was still hammering wildly and his skin was clammy — with sweat, he realised, for the black water had left his clothes quite dry. Angry red marks coiled on his skin where the brains had attacked him, but they didn't look any worse than bizarrely shaped sunburns. They throbbed, mildly distracting, but not incapacitating. The sword was beside him, along with the Invisibility Cloak, and his wand was still clutched in his hand.

He looked up into the rows upon rows of brass cogwheels, piling up as high as the eye could see, with no ceiling discernible. Their moves were slower and more sluggish than Harry remembered. Green sparks flew at times when two cogs came in contact.

There was something odd about these sparks, he realised after a couple of seconds staring at them. They flew from the cogs, and rushed straight to a point above his head. It was as though they were called up by a vacuum…

Harry rolled up his sleeves, secured his wand into his belt and fastened his Cloak to his shoulders. He glanced aside at the sword — but it would hamper him in his moves… He could always Summon it if needed…

He needed an effort of will to leave it behind; he finally started climbing the cogs, following the direction of the flying sparks.

After a few minutes, his ears picked up the high, tinkling sound of a child's voice. He paused and closed his eyes. He could hear her — it was the Isiame child, he was sure of it. It was the same sound, the same eerie memory that made him shiver at times without understanding why, the same childish voice that squealed I want the doggy! in the poisonous summer of the Forbidden Forest. The echo of her delighted laughter bounded over the copper cogwheels.

Harry squeezed his eyelids tightly shut and inclined his head, straining his too-sharp hearing in the hope of catching more of her voice. It had dropped to a distant rumour far above him. She sounded happy. Was she talking to someone? Was she free to go and play? Had she — and it was as though Harry's stomach had filled with ice at the thought — had she witnessed Daphne's torture? If only he could hear her talk, maybe call her abductors by their names, so he would be sure…

"By the festering thong of Morgana, what the blaze is that!"

Harry's eyes shot open. The low, rumbling murmur had been barely audible, but it had come from somewhere very close to his position, behind a row of small cogwheels spinning faster than most. And it had definitely not been a child's voice.

In fact, it had sounded very familiar.

Up above the child burst out laughing again, and a small whine answered her from behind the small cogwheels. Harry loosened his grip on his own wheel and lowered himself to an inferior level; he moved very carefully, but he soon realised the grating of copper against copper and the panicked panting of the person hiding nearby covered any sound he might have made.

He drew closer. The panting voice was now breathing out a stream of curses, each more abominable than the last. Harry had to bite the inside of his cheeks to keep from laughing, but his grin died on its own as a smell of putrefying flesh struck his nose, while he crouched only a few steps from his target.

"Fancy seeing you here, Chief," he whispered as he rounded the last corner.

Gawain Robards gave a start and opened his mouth to scream, and Harry slammed his hand hard over the lower half of his boss's face. The Cloak slid off his shoulders and pooled around his feet.

For a few seconds, both Aurors surveyed each other in absolute silence.

Robards's face was gaunt, unshaved, and distorted by the lumps and hematomas that swelled under his skin. His robes were filthy, his hands were covered in scratches, and his right leg no longer existed. A rotting stump just under the knee was all that was left of it. The smell of decaying meat was unbearable; the flesh was puffy with necrosis and it wept from long cracks in the blackened skin; from the look of it, the gangrene was creeping up the thigh.

"Merlin," Harry breathed.

Robards mumbled something under Harry's palm. He hastily removed his hand. "Sorry, Chief?"

"I said: you should see the other guy," Robards repeated with a smile that looked more like a pained grimace.

"Who is he?"

"Martin," Robards growled.

Harry nodded. "Where is he now?" he asked.

Robards's face lost what little colour it had left and he jerked his head upwards. "Up there," he said in a barely audible whisper.

His eyes shut and his shoulders started shaking uncontrollably. Harry's first alarmed thought was that the infection in his leg was now raking his entire body, and he reflexively grabbed his boss's wrist to feel his pulse — but the truth was much worse: Gawain Robards was terrified. He was emitting small scared sounds, shaking with dread, and it was a relief to Harry when he started swearing like a drunk bartender again, as though trying to ward off the fear.

"Merlin's hairy balls, Potter," he bit out feebly a minute later. "You know I'm no coward, but the thing that grabbed Martin and took him up there… I'd rather face a Basilisk coming of out You-Know-Who's — well — I'd rather face any horror from our world than come closer to that creature…"

"You'd have a hard time trying, with that leg," said Harry. "How…?"

"Martin," Robards repeated. "Old rat caught me a few days ago. He wasn't much fitter than me when we were done jinxing each other; just enough to lock me up in an old cell of my own Ministry, and then forget all about me. He would've finished me off, but he and his little French friends found another target."

He slid an oblique glance towards Harry, who realised who he was talking about, and suddenly found himself unwilling to hear more. He had seen what Hermione looked like now. He did not need the story behind it.

Robards seemed to sense his former apprentice's reluctance. "Anyway," he said, "I used their, er, distraction to break out of my cell. I might've made it out but Granger escaped, and they all started searching the Ministry… I met Martin not far from here, we resumed where we'd stopped and my leg blew up. Then…"

A shiver shook Robards's massive torso again and his mouth twisted in the same ugly mask of terror. "… Then… Then she appeared. She didn't even look at me… and I started whimpering like a baby. Just because she was there. But — but she wasn't interested in me anyway. She grabbed Martin and she dragged him behind her like a potato bag. He was yelling himself hoarse, in English, in French, cursing her and begging her and then just screaming his head off. And that was a fierce opponent, Potter, ruthless, cunning and brave in his own way. And there he was, wetting his robes in front of— of—"

He shook his head and fell silent. His face was grey and his breathing shallow.

"Sao," Harry completed. "Her name's Sao. She's an Isiame. She's bad news, but I know her."

Robards stared blankly at him. "You can't take her," he said dully. "You're a wizard. She'll paralyse you just by standing there. I've never felt that before…"

"She's powerful, and she knows mind tricks," said Harry. "They have a way of forcing emotions on others. But one of them taught me how to fight back."

Robards had a sudden feeble laugh. "You think you can take her."

Harry looked at him steadily.

"How did you get here?" he gently asked.

Robards sighed, winced, and grabbed his leg to lift it off the copper floor. "I… sort of crawled in a hole that opened up out of nowhere," he growled. "And then I was in here, and it was ten times worse… and… this damn leg… I can't even drag my sorry arse any further from them."

"Then don't," Harry said. "Cover my back."

"You can't take her."

"Someone has to. And I've had a good teacher. You have a wand?"

Robards positively snarled this time, his eyes flashing harshly at Harry. "Who the bloody rotting hell do you think you're talking to, Potter?" he furiously whispered. "I'm not incapacitated enough to fail to pick up a wand when an Unspeakable drops it."

He held out a short, surprisingly slender wand that looked like a frail child's toy in his big square hand. "Martin's," he explained. "Trust the bloody frog to have a sissy's wand. I can barely hold it without snapping it in two."

"Good."

Robards nodded grimly and rapped himself on the head with the wand, once; the liquid that ran from the wand to envelop his whole body had the colour of the copper gearwheels all around them. Harry rose from his crouching position, carefully so as not to hit his head on the creaking cogwheel that overlooked them both, and swung his Cloak back on his shoulders. Martin was down. Robards had Harry's back. His heart beat fast and strong, and for the first time, something like battle lust pulsed in his wrists and at his ears.

"I'm going to take her," he said to Robards's Disillusionned shadow.

"And I'll be damned if I don't blow up this entire cursed place over us all if you fail," replied Robards in a sinister murmur. "See if she likes it."

Harry did not say goodbye. Robards had always said Aurors who did were wasting the time necessary to save their own skin.

It was several minutes after he had left the Head Auror behind that he realised something had changed: the light was dimmer around him, the showers of green sparks that flew upwards were scarcer… and the gearwheels were grinding to a stop, one after the other. When he looked down behind him, he found himself staring into darkness. The gearwheels had stilled. Their power had been sucked out of them and channelled upwards, above Harry's head.

The child was still chattering now and then. At times Harry could catch another sound — a weak, pitiful sob. Martin.

No sound at all came from Sao, either in human or wolf form. It was starting to make Harry nervous. His eyes kept darting left and right at every inch of progression he made, expecting to see the Isiame lying in wait in the shadows, her staff pointed at him. At the same time, he could not help beginning to hope — maybe she wasn't there at all… Maybe she had left the child and her prisoner to get involved in the fight going on outside, in London's sky… Maybe Harry had a chance to rescue the child and leave without confronting her…

A small dark-haired face appeared suddenly from behind a still-moving cogwheel, directly over Harry, and looked down at him. Harry stilled.

The child's brilliant-green eyes scanned the cogwheels in Harry's vicinity, a perplexed look on her small candid face.

"That's funny," she mused aloud. "It smells like the doggy. My favourite doggy, Alphonse," she added, calling over her shoulder. "He's all white with eyes just like mine. Eunice says I can't have him, but Sao says I can have him if I want to, and if I behave. But I don't want to behave. It bores me."

She pouted and frowned directly at Harry again. Harry held his breath. He did not want to reveal himself, not just yet, not until he was sure Sao wasn't going to spring from—

"It smells just like my doggy, but he's not here!" the child whined. She hit the cogwheel she leant on with her little fist, making green sparks fly off the copper. "Oooooor, maybe he's hiding. I don't like it. Stop hiding."

Harry caught himself just as he was about to remove his Cloak, in a very natural gesture, as though there was nothing more evident in the world than obey a six-year-old's commands.

The little girl raised her eyebrows. "I said, stop hiding, doggy. I'm all alone with Alphonse and he's no fun. I want to play."

All alone with Alphonse. Martin did not present much of a threat, judging from the whining sounds he made from time to time. The child was alone, a huge tank of Isiame power whose only safeguard was now pinned to a tree, hundreds of miles from there. And bound to lose her temper if that situation went on.

Harry made up his mind. "Okay, okay," he said soothingly, shrugging off the Cloak so it hung from one shoulder from a single strap, without covering his body at all. "Here, I'm no longer hiding. Make room for me."

The child made a pouting face again. "But… where's the doggy?"

"I'll call him out if you let me up," said Harry impatiently.

She seemed to think on it for a few seconds. Behind her, a small quavering voice whispered, "Potter… don't…"

"Shush, Alphonse," snapped the little girl. "Alright, boy, you can come up."

It was strange being called 'boy' by such a tiny bit of a woman, but Harry made no comment and climbed the last couple of feet of shining copper with relief.

The child clapped her hands and said in the same high-pitched, commanding voice, "Now call the doggy."

"In a minute," said Harry distractedly.

The scenery that greeted him was peculiar. Martin lay in a small heap of bruises and blood and pale-faced terror on a large, slowly revolving cogwheel. There were no bounds that Harry could see; yet his arms were stretched on either side of him as he spun, making him look like an insect pinned to a collector's board. There was no sign of Sao, or anyone else for that matter. On the other hand, a large sphere of green light hung in mid-air directly over Martin's head. As Harry watched a fistful of sparks zoomed up from the depths of the Gearwheel Well and were absorbed in the sphere.

"Did you do that?" he asked, transfixed. It was a beautiful sight. "You sucked the power out of the gearwheels?"

He turned. The child stood with her feet slightly apart, her fists on her hips and an unpleasant pout on her face.

Harry heaved an impatient sigh. "Did you do it?" he repeated. "Or was it Sao?"

He was distantly aware that Martin had started whining feebly behind him, but did not pay attention. He felt as though he was missing something; the child's expression made him uncomfortable. Or maybe it was the complete absence of anyone beside her, which did not make sense. Or maybe it was the blood that stained her arms, front and jaw, now clearly visible in the green light diffused by the sphere…

"Sao?" the little girl repeated, her head cocked to one side. "No, no, no. Sao's just a maid. I'm the Queen. All this green light belongs to me. A Knight stole it — that's what Alphonse said — and now it comes back to me."

Harry heard his own voice repeating, in a passable imitation of puzzlement, "A Knight stole it?" while in his mind he saw the child's arms dripping with blood after she dug out the three arrowheads out of the backs of Ron, Luna and Parletoo… The three arrowheads…

"Yes, yes, the power was in a Knight, and it should've come back to me when the Knight died, but it didn't, because nasty Alphonse Martin trapped the power here. I went to get it back."

"Oh," Harry said vaguely.

It was as though someone had switched on the light in a part of his brain full of dark, ugly things he had not known were there. Three arrowheads. Only a few hours ago, he had ripped three arrowheads from Daphne's back. Daphne, who had been lying in a pool of her own blood in the child's bedroom. The child she was supposed to watch over. The child who now stood in front of him, covered in blood, while two of the most powerful wizards Harry had ever met cowered and whimpered in her presence…

A candid smile illuminated the child's cute face. "Daphne was so bossy," she said sweetly. "I'm the Queen. I don't like bossy nannies. So I tricked her. She won't wake up soon, ha!"

Harry's mouth had gone dry and there was a tingling sensation in his hands and feet. The sphere glowed brighter still. How had she known exactly what he was thinking? "And Eunice?" he asked, his voice hoarse.

She shrugged. "I think Sao killed her," she said matter-of-factly. "I can never read Eunice's mind because she's so closed, but Sao is easy. And Sao always wanted to kill Eunice. Is she dead?"

Harry nodded. His right hand strayed to the leg holster where his wand was tucked; his fingers brushed the wood. The sword was waiting for his Summon at the bottom of the Well…

His head suddenly snapped back as though a fist had caught him in the chin. His entire body was lifted off the floor and thrown backward; the breath was expelled from him as he slammed into a hard surface, his arms stretched and pinned to it. He blinked back the sudden tears the impact had brought to his eyes, and when his vision adjusted again, he found the child rubbing her tiny fist and scowling at him from several feet away.

"I am Clio," she said distinctly, each word hammering into Harry's stomach, leaving him gasping for breath, "I am Queen of Isiames. And you are a bad doggy."

Harry was suspended in the air, pinned by an invisible force to another vertical cogwheel. He watched in absolute helplessness as she drew closer to him, squinting a little.

Martin spoke suddenly, unexpectedly, from somewhere on Harry's left. His hoarse voice talked urgently in trembling French, which Harry did not understand — but which the child, from the way she stilled and averted her eyes, did.

"You're silly, Alphonse," she said crossly across one of the Unspeakable's sentences. "Of course I will be Queen when I'm grown-up. But there is no Queen now, so I am it anyway."

Another murmured, hoarse sentence in French. Contempt twisted the child's little pink mouth. "I'm not that young," she huffed. "I have been alive for a very, very long time. I got bored, that's all. Maybe I'll grow up now that Eunice is dead, Sao always said she didn't want me growing up."

"Six ans," whispered Martin. "Sept, tout au plus… Ce n'est pas très long, même… pour… une toute petite reine…"

But Clio had had enough. She stamped her foot and jabbed her finger towards Martin, squealing, "Six! I'm six, but you don't listen! I've been six for — oh, you bore me!"

There was a horrible gurgling noise on Harry's left; he twisted his head as far as he could, but the cogwheel he was sprawled across prevented him from seeing Martin. The next sound to reach his ears was a wet snapping and popping, and finally, a damp squishy thud that was elucidated in a gruesome way when Martin's heart came sliding a few inches into Harry's field of vision, across the copper floor.

The sweet and tepid smell of blood hit Harry's nostrils; he nearly retched. The child had walked over to Martin while she was murdering him, and she reappeared, sauntering a little, fresh blood dripping from her hands.

"But you will understand," she said with mock sweetness. "Won't you, doggy? You're smarter than poor Alphonse, aren't you? If I tell you I am Clio…"

With an effort, Harry detached his eyes from the heap of shapeless flesh lying in a pool of blood to stare at the nightmarish cute figure that pouted up at him. She stood with her arms behind her back, like a tiny schoolgirl about to recite a poem.

"You are Clio," he repeated numbly.

And then, quite suddenly, light flooded his mind — and he could hear again the two soft voices, he could almost see the two women who were long dead, one blonde-haired, athletic, classically beautiful as a Greek statue — and the other frail, dark, green-eyed, with a voice so pure and clear, he had doubted it could come from a human throat.

"How is your little Clio?"

"My little devil will be four years old next spring… When you see her running around among dogs and horses and wrestling with the servants' children, it's hard to believe she will be the queen of Isiames one day."

"You are Clio," he said again, this time incredulous. "No, you're not. You can't be. That was centuries ago…"

The child took a few steps towards him. In her round-cheeked, fine-boned, naively cheerful face, the green eyes had a flat and dull glint. Time, thought Harry, horror-struck. Time had thrown a transparent veil over those eyes, who had witnessed so many people ageing and dying, while the eternally young brain behind them never gained the maturity it needed to process along all those lives that flickered in and out like so many butterflies…

"I have been six," the child repeated in a patient voice, "for a very, very long time. My mummy was Queen Cassiopeia, the Queen who lost Hogwarts. She went mad. They locked her up and told me they would tend to me. Mummy was supposed to give me her staff of power, to make me Queen, when I got older. But she never did. Want to know why she never gave me the staff, doggy?" She drew closer still and reached out, tiny blood-stained fingers coming inches from the skin on Harry's knee. Instinctively he started thrashing against the invisible bounds that kept him stuck to a copper gearwheel.

Beside him, the ball of green light had gone so bright it made Martin's blood shine black on the floor. No more spark was flying towards it, and the gearwheels had all gone still.

"You want to know why I'm still six years old, doggy?" the dull-eyed child repeated. And before Harry could do more that open his mouth to speak, she dug into the sphere of green light, pulled out a handful of it and shove it in her mouth.

The child swallowed the light and rose in the air — as naturally as she would have climbed a couple of steps — until her face was level with Harry's, then set a tiny hand under his chin and made him look straight into her eyes.

The mental assault had none of Eunice's subtlety, but the power behind it was such that it flooded Harry's mind effortlessly, sweeping away his consciousness with the mindless natural force of a tidal wave.

He was in bed, waiting for the murmuring voices outside to quieten. The servant sitting at his bedside to tend to him — watch him — was nodding a little. She had not realised that Harry was humming very, very quietly; he had to be careful, for they had forbidden him to sing or hum. At that moment he did not feel like obeying. He was annoyed at being watched, annoyed that they would not let him see his mother, and yet his mother was Queen, why wasn't she at his side now?

So he hummed, and the girl's eyelids were drooping. He had never tried to put anyone to sleep on purpose, but tonight was special. Tonight, he wanted to see his mother…

The watcher fell asleep at last. Harry slid his legs out of bed — smooth, hairless, chubby tiny legs — and got up. Long dark hair fell about his face. He was very small.

He padded silently out of the room. The longing to see his mother was a sharp pain, such as he had never felt before, not even when she had stopped paying attention to him whatsoever; not even when she had pushed him back impatiently — "leave me alone, Clio!" — just so she could ask again about Aunt Rosalyn.

He was so very small, the journey took a long time. He did not know where she was kept. He had never visited that part of the great stone house, but his feet were taking him through immense dark corridors and empty rooms, never hesitating, and he knew his mother was at the end of the road. It was natural to him — he had always managed to find his way back to his mother.

He had to hide a couple of times from long-robed men and women, many of them, all hurrying away in the same direction. In the end he found her.

There was a large metal grille, with thick bars, going from floor to ceiling. A guard was slumped against the nearby wall, snoring. Through the gaps between the bars his mother stood in her white Wolf's shape. She was so beautiful Harry stopped in his progression, his heart filled with joy and wonder.

She had not seen him. Just when he was about to run to her, the Wolf bent her white head and ripped the flesh off one front paw, then off the other. Blood gushed out of the wounds in thick streams. The Wolf staggered and fell forward; her glistening red muzzle turned towards Harry, who had frozen on the spot.

And then there was no Wolf on the cell floor. Just Harry's lovely-faced mother, her mouth stained with blood, both forearms maimed and bleeding, and her soft eyes glistening with tears.

"My poor baby," she breathed out. "Go back to bed."

Her eyes closed and she let out a long sigh.

Harry averted his eyes and saw, beside her, her Staff broken in halves.

He walked up to the bars and pressed his face to them. The smell of blood filled his nostrils. His mother was very white in the face. He did not understand.

The guard woke up with a sudden jerk, saw Harry, smelt the blood, and let out a shout.

Harry looked up at him.

"My mother," he said very distinctly in a deep voice, "was Lily Evans. She was killed by Lord Voldemort."

He was no longer tiny with long dark hair, standing in a dark stone corridor. He was not either the already-battered young Auror, who had fought his way through the enigma of the Third Kind. Looking down, he saw he was wearing his old Hogwarts uniform. His body was slighter than he remembered; reaching up to his face, he found his old glasses perched on his nose. The slight stiffness in his right arm from where Lupin had bit him was gone. He felt seventeen again.

Before him stood little Clio in a long white nightgown. They faced each other on a green hill overlooking the calm waters of a lake, in a valley surrounded by tall and wild mountains. There was no castle perched on the familiar cliff towering over the lake. No Forbidden Forest covered the ground between the water and the mountains.

"Who's Lord Voldemort?" asked Clio, cocking her head to one side.

"A mean wizard. Where are we?"

"In your mind. I like you, doggy." The child's eyes were huge, and not so veiled as they had seemed before. "You look like Mummy's Wolf. And your mind is a nice place. You're my favourite doggy."

Harry's throat was dry.

"Your mother was Queen Cassiopeia," he stated. "The Queen who lost the battle to wizards, in Hogwarts. You were four, then."

"Long time ago," said the little girl. "I don't remember, I was too little. I only remember my mum."

"And you never grew older than six…"

"No." She kept staring at him, unblinkingly. "Sao said it was because of the Staff. It was broken, see. It was the power that should have made me Queen. Eunice didn't want me to know that. Nor did any of the other maids I had before Eunice and Sao. That's why I'm taking back the Knight's power."

"Why?" said Harry. "What good will it do you?"

"I will use it to make Mummy come back."

"How?"

Clio frowned. "The wizards killed Aunt Rosalyn, so Mummy broke the Staff and died," she said crossly, as though it was obvious. "If I kill all the wizards and if I mend the Staff, Mummy will come back." She was getting aggravated; putting her fists on her hips, she stamped and whined, "I want Mummy!"

Harry contemplated, with a mixture of pity and horror, the tiny little girl who had lived throughout centuries of hiding, turning over and over in her immature brain the events that had ended with her mother's bloodless body on the floor of an underground cell…

The potion Hermione had given him made him heavy; his stomach was churning a little with it.

"You're sinking in the ground, doggy," said Clio with sudden interest.

He looked down and saw that, indeed, his feet had disappeared below the grassy ground; weeds stirred and brushed against his knees. His stomach churned worse than ever, and his windpipe constricted. Unexpected fear stabbed him through the queasiness; he had to get out of this beautiful place, out of his undamaged seventeen-year-old body…

His throat tightened further and he choked. The child stared at him with a mildly surprised expression on her face.

Harry squeezed his eyes shut and dived, head first, into the ground. The earth parted in liquid waves and swallowed him whole; for maybe two interminable seconds, he suffocated in compact darkness, struggling to call back the reality he had left — the green light, the dark blood spreading over shiny copper surfaces, the tepid smell of it dampening the air…

Electricity zapped through his body and made his teeth snap together. He dropped and landed on his feet. His vision cleared, and he was standing over Martin's heart — and over the child who had fallen hard on her buttocks and was blinking up at him with a lost, pathetic expression on her face.

Harry had just the time to register that he was holding his wand aloft in the classic Summoning gesture — though he could not remember drawing it — before a buzzing sound reached his ears and the double-faced sword shot over the edge of the Gearwheel Well like a javelin. He caught it with his left hand. It was vibrating against his skin, as though eager to attack. The child's mouth dropped open and she raised her hand. The sphere of green light flashed once. Harry's windpipe closed down.

A defiant bellow disturbed the perfectly silent scene, and Gawain Robards surged over the edge of the topmost cogwheel, covered in sweat and blood, teeth bared and eyes bulging with barely veiled terror. Still gripping his cogwheel for support, he waved his wand madly, and a Patronus in the shape of a huge silver bear rushed from it and ran on all four, all fur, claws and bared teeth, towards the little girl sitting on the ground.

Clio's eyes widened and she recoiled, wrapping her little arms around her head with a shrill squeak of fright.

And Harry, through the mist of red pain brought by lack of air, drove the sword in a slashing gesture right through the sphere of light. It flashed, disrupted, sent green sparks flying through the room like fireworks; Clio jerked once on the floor and went completely still.

The light swirled, danced before Harry's eyes — unless he was seeing the stars invoked by his air-deprived brain? — and enveloped him whole, until the world around him was filled with an emerald glow and the faint, faraway but unmistakable song of the trees.