Harry Potter and the Enchanter's Heir
I really shouldn't be starting another fic – Tears of Flame is going slowly enough as it is – but I was re-reading Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci series, and I just thought how brilliantly Harry could fit into all that and voila! This fic was born. For those not familiar with Diana Wynne Jones, you may find this chapter slightly bewildering. The Harry Potter characters will turn up in the next chapter, I promise! Don't give up on this fic yet.
Disclaimer – I own neither Cat Chant nor Harry Potter, or any of the respective worlds which belong variously to Diana Wynne Jones and J K Rowling
Chapter 1 - In Which a Headache is Exceptionally Stubborn, and Cat Prepares for the Worst.
Cat Chant's job was giving him a headache. Cat was very busy and important, so it always gave him headaches, but this particular one had stubbornly taken up residence and was refusing to budge, however Cat cajoled, coaxed or threatened it.
It was, perhaps, something to do with the fact he had died recently. Cat never felt at his best after a death – new lives did tend to itch so. But this life was much worse than normal. It fussed and ached and refused to settle down, which irritated Cat immensely. He thought that perhaps, since it was his last life, it was punishing him for his carelessness in losing the last eight, or maybe trying to remind him to be more careful with this one.
Cat slumped on his desk, groaning. He couldn't often do this, as it wasn't, strictly speaking, the done thing for a personage of his stature, so he could never do it in polite company. Fortunately, his current company was merely a cantankerous ginger cat, so that was OK.
Cat was tall and lean, with pale skin and long fair hair. His blue eyes were full of suppressed energy and his face was crammed with quiet stubbornness. The reason for Cat's particularly persistent headache was a rather thorny problem that he had been wrestling with, on and off, for years, but that his recent death had pushed to the forefront. Cat needed a successor.
Cat was Chrestomanci, the only nine-lifed enchanter in existence. Indeed, that was the problem. The post could only be held by a nine-lifed enchanter, and there simply wasn't one. The nearest Cat could find was a six-lifed sorceress in Surrey. But that was no good. Six lives and the power that went with them simply wasn't enough to watch over all the magic in the world, and ensure no one was doing harm with it.
Cat worried absentmindedly at his new life. He missed the comforting feel of his last life, which he had lost in an unfortunate incident involving a tiger, a forest fire and a catering size jar of mayonnaise. It gave his problem a large degree of urgency, being on his last life – he needed to find and train his replacement before he died, and from pat experience, he knew that once he got going he tended to lose lives at a rate of knots.
Cat mentally reprimanded himself for fussing at his new life, and gave a sigh of resignation. It was no good. He'd postponed and procrastinated for years, with a vague hope that a nine-lifed enchanter would turn up in the world sooner or later. After all, he'd taken some finding. But somehow he'd always known it would come to this. World travel.
Cat had a strong dislike of world travel, due to an unfortunate incident in his youth where his sister, his only close living relation, had world-jumped, after giving Cat as a human sacrifice to a group of villains and rogues seeking to destroy the previous Chrestomanci. Gwendolyn had been vindictive and spiteful, and Cat knew that the world was better off without her, but the experience had left him jaded, with a cautious and guarded approach to world-jumping that, if he was honest with himself, came partially from the slight lingering fear that he would meet Gwendolyn, in whatever world she had made her way into.
Now, perhaps, would be a good opportunity to explain the theory of the Related Worlds. There are twelve of them, all speaking the same languages, although actually there are more than that because each world is really a set of nine worlds, called a series. The only one which is a single world is Eleven, but we needn't go into that. It is thought among experts that all the worlds were once one world but then, back in prehistory, something happened which could have ended in two ways, both completely different – say a continent blew up, or didn't blow up. The two things couldn't both be true in the same world, so another world split off from the first one and the one world became two worlds, side by side but quite separate, one with that continent and one without. And so on, until there were twelve.
Series happen in a similar way. Take series Seven, which is a mountainous series. In prehistory, the Earth's crust buckled more than in this world. Or series Five, which is full of islands no larger than France. These are the same right across the series, but the history of each world is quite, quite different. The easiest example, perhaps, is Cat's series, series Twelve. Cat's world, World A, is orientated on magic, which is usual for most worlds. But World B split off in the fourteenth century and turned to science and machinery. World C, the next world along, split off in even earlier, in Roman times, and became divided into large empires. And World G, which we have more than a passing interest in, split off from World A far more recently, after the witch burnings of the seventeenth century, where the magic users of World A created the post of Chrestomanci, to protect non-magic users from magic and vice versa, while still being able to use magic openly, whereas in World G, the witches and wizards hid themselves from non-magic users, and allowed themselves to become fairytales and bedtime stories.
But anyway, back to Cat. He had, by this time, resigned himself to the inevitable. He raised two fingers to his mouth, unfocused his eyes as he called on his power, and gave an ear-piercing whistle. Cat was very proud of this ability, and never failed to take an opportunity to use it, particularly as it annoyed the staff so. For example, his assistant Karami Malone, who had appeared upon his whistle, fixed him with an exasperated look.
"Really, Chrestomanci, sir, do you absolutely have to call us by whistling like that? It gets my nerves all ajitter, and it does tend to set off the cats, caterwauling and carrying on."
Cat fixed her with a solemn stare and nodded gravely, saying, "My dear, it is the only way."
Karami had flyaway hair, a button nose and a plump, motherly air about her. She had no magic herself, unusually among the castle staff, but her organisational skill and sheer ingenuity made up for that amply.
"Now, what was it you wanted, sir? I was right in the middle of drafting that letter to Lord Dorchester about the hemlock."
"My dear Karami, I'm afraid I will be away for quite some time. Kindly cancel my engagements for the next two weeks. I'll leave the castle in your capable hands. Please try to keep Janet under control, and make sure the hordes of Montana children, bless their dimples and dolls, aren't underfoot in the kitchen. Whenever they go in there, everything seems to come out tasting of nothing but cinnamon."
"Cancel your engagements, Chrestomanci? What, even the Minister?"
"It cannot be helped, my dear. I must take a trip through the series. If anything vital comes up, just call."
"Through the series? Don't you normally send Janet or Dr Itriwi on that kind of thing? The Minister's been most difficult recently. It took me the best part of a month to get him to agree to meet you."
"Well, you'll just have to spend another month rearranging it, Karami. It must be me to go this time. I've been putting it off for long enough as it is."