PART I: AUSLÄNDER

1977

Die Wand

March 30th 1977

Ackerstraße, East Berlin

11.25PM CET

"Petrifizieren Totalität!"

Rosa cast the charm with a curved wrist. The young man to which it delivered a freezing jacket of immobility was a Grenztruppe, his flashlight and pistol clattering to the floor as he slumped forwards. Wilhelm rushed behind and past Rosa, staring at the rectangular green heap now beside the manhole-ladder.

They had agreed to use nothing but Lumos and anything simple, domestic, pedestrian enough to aid them in their flight. Nothing offensive, nothing in combat. Wilhelm would have blown up at the others - Rosa less so. He thought she must have panicked, gotten frightened when the trooper showed up before them without expectation.

What were they doing in the sewers? Were they searching for us?

"What happened?" Paul Ludwig rushed to the front of the line. There were thirty of them in all; with their bags and charmed objects there should have been enough to fill two floors of a Ritterbus at a slight squeeze. As things were, they were able to pass as carrying but one object each.

As Ludwig stood before her ready to hector on the essentials of secrecy and how her actions had endangered the entire flight, how the communities of the Eastern and Central lands would never join them at this rate if lapses like this kept happening, how she could have brought the entire NVA and the Russians thundering down on top of them, she knew that he was concealing the makings of an orchestral brass section in the space under his trilby hat.

"He saw us... he was raising his torch... he could have called for others..."

"You've thrown the entire mission into danger, we will have to pull out that this rate, I want everyone to observe this was by Rosa's hands, if that Mug dies then the Zauberer- Gerichtshof will have us all expatriated and sent into the Amazon deltas, it'll be-"

Wilhelm held his wand up, placing the illumination before Ludwig's lips.

"Enough! Rosa was protecting us. That Mug won't die, he's just seized up for a bit - memory-charm him and he'll think he slipped on the ladder and got a bit stiff in the cold whilst he was passed-out. Just think what she could have done with him - be bloody grateful you're travelling with her and not those Romanian buggers who'd Cruciatus anyone who asked to see a Mug passport."

"This is madness, we could have port-keyed faster than this hoo-hah, we're risking our lives!" A voice from the back of the line could be heard, with muffled agreements from others.

It was Hans Kohl, who whispered with the ghost of a shout. His concurrents were the fellows who had joined him from Saxony, arriving in the city three days before. They were used to the air of pines and rolling hills around them when they performed feats of prowess, trying to surpass their fathers in duels and make notches on the family woodcuts. Before the last great Muggle War, there had been a tavern in Börnersdorf, a little hamlet near Dresden, where the Kohlen and friends of the family would compete for the glory of dueling and brewing champions.

Now, as he had complained as loudly as much as frequently, he smelt not the victorious potion broths of his fathers, but the stench of the occupied city and the foreigners who marched through it on both sides.

But they had heard enough from and of Hans Kohl and his ancestors. The rest of the huddled, tired and anxious women and men crouched in the tunnel that evening wanted to be on the colourful side of the barriers. Most had grown up with Muggle neighbours; they'd had no choice but to blend suitably in; and most had been treated with decency, especially those native to the cities. As division took hold briefly over whether Rosa, the young sorcerer from Leipzig garbed in a brown overcoat and holding a firm and unshaken hand, had correctly dispatched their interrupter, Wilhelm took to the manhole-ladder.

They were at the right juncture.

Wilhelm at once took the lead, Ludwig protesting with a crowing reminder of each man and woman's proper status in the mission.

"We were all agreed, none of this comradely nonsense-talk! Ranks, titles, a solid heirarchy, that's what will get us past here, there's disorder breaking out in the ranks and it's going to get us all killed!"

He began rattling off each name and the decisions taken in the tavern cellars some hundreds of miles away by the main escape committees. Lists of participants had to be scrawled on toilet-paper, stuffed inside socks and stockings before being driven through the Inner Border checkpoints to the right places. The names were quilled up by men unknown to them. Men that not Ludwig, nor Wilhelm, nor Kohl, nor Brandt, nor Hinden, nor Kratz not any of the senior people in the group had met except for Heinrich Parsifal Hoffer, the Posen-Deutsch master sorcerer who'd held the Wehr and the Red Army back from his village in '45 with only his wand and his mind.

He was the great visionary for the escape; not a man of prophecy but a man of great learning, better than any east of the Rhine, so they said. But they had said much - they said that one day the wizards in the West would tear the Wall from its foundations. It was a story that kept the children from crying too much at bed. For want of food, for want of friends, for want of something their parents had not had, nor really their grandparents. Whatever misery came upon the Muggles, they were supposed to hide away from. Magical peoples elsewhere could slip by unnoticed and enjoy prosperity when the Mugs tormented one another with their gods and machines. Yet here, here in what the Mugs called the Fatherland, suffering was shared like unknown bushels from a poisoned orchard.

Wilhelm clambered up the steel handlebars of the ladder. It was too close to boyhood play for him not to imagine him sticking his disorderly auburn hair through a knight's helmet and out above a medieval parapet. But now he could think only of the camps he had been told about in the Muggle school and in muttered discussions among the elders. The school had said that only the brave communists had been put there, murdered for their commitment to the working-class by the reactionaries. The elders had said other things. He had been old enough early on, about the time he had let go of the dada-bear he carried incessantly as an infant, to realise that none were telling him an unvarnished story.

As he poked cranium and cap above the manhole, he allayed the fear by thinking briefly why he was there. Was it to get the education he wanted? Was it for lofty ideas shared around the smoking-table about conscience and the spoken voice? Was it for the women, the music, the jeans, all the things he read in the snatched letters from cousin Rolf? How could he proceed above this manhole without clear sight of what he was proceeding towards? The West. Oh to the West, he was always told, where they have food for the taking and drink for the drinking. And women for -

"Muglights, get down Wilhelm!" Hans Dix, the less intransigent Hans of the group, hissed with fraternal viciousness to him as Wilhelm felt a hand pulling him down from the steel parapet.

Muglights were known to every witch and wizard in East Berlin and beyond its limits far out across Germany and into the Ironland. They spelled death or certain failure for those hoping to make it out beyond the walls and wires which bound them to this grey, cold place. Muglights were one of the few Muggle objects that they genuinely feared, with a trepidation that even Ludwig and the stern Kratz and even a powerful man like Hoffer could succumb to. Some among the Berlin magical volk had come to fear all intense light and heat. It was for the hours they spent in them, unable to move.

"Why couldn't we have bloody transfigured?" Some ignorant man, soon harangued down to more helpful silence by his wife, muttered as Wilhelm descended the ladder with Hans Dix's hand still at his back.

The Muglights could detain you, it was thought, and keep you from moving from a state of freeze - whilst preserving you in uncomfortable heat that rose in intensity. It was like petrification but irreversible (so far, that was - nobody had dared approach any wizard trapped in the lights for long enough to try complex counteracting magic). Superstition about Muglights, as with the Mugs generally in the East, was rife and Rosa had long encouraged Wilhelm to separate fantasy from fact when it came to understanding and predicting them. It was hard to come by reliable means of studying them.

His mother was convinced the Mugs had harnessed some unknown entity of power to control them; all the darkness and evil in the world channeled into these great beams of polarising light and fixated on anyone who tried to make a break for the world beyond what this army of Mugs controlled. He had long believed that before abandoning it as a childish exaggeration. But many persisted in this and related convictions.

The Mugs had with their wicked, impenetrable mechanical sciences developed a form of high-intensity candle which could immobilise any magical person by setting small fires in objects made with properties found in the magical world. The Mugs had stolen petrifying agents during the last muggle War and engineered a means to project them out of torches, thinking stupidly that they were deploying a kind of drying hose. The Mugs had built Die Wand across a site of ancient Dark magic and had no clue what they were actually deploying when training lights on magical folk. All of these ideas and hypotheses and more were swapped around tavern tables and the passageways beneath the Ironland, but most of all in Germany. Each possessed its own charm though never what was demanded of any sufficient explanation. Such was the criterion set by Hoffer, who respected one thing among a few inventions of the Muggle world. Muggle logic, he persisted in telling them, had its uses. And by that logic, he dismantled each proposed reason for the Muglights affecting witches and wizards as they did.

Hoffer had instead proffered the theory that Wilhelm had come to respect the most. According to his inductions from the many reports they had received over years of escape efforts, Hoffer believed that Mugs had used some manner of Dark Magic to build the Muglights without them necessarily knowing it. Someone outside, from the magical world, dark wizards were manipulating the Mugs who controlled Die Wand and playing them like pipe-organs.

This caused first consternation and then horror for all who gave Hoffer the benefit of listening to his theories. None among the group now shivering beneath the manhole cover at this crossing of Die Wand besides Wilhelm had brought themselves to accept any component of the thesis. The Mugs were plainly responsible for the wizards of the Ironlands' current, past and future misery and the Mugs alone. That their homeland was even called the 'Ironland' now was squarely down to the Mugs.

"The very suggestion that any of our people could be in any way responsible for the present state of things is reproachable nonsense, it's a blasphemy, an utter blasphemy to even suggest such a thing!" Ludwig would go on at length, coming close to shaking a fist towards Hoffer before regaining the decorum befitting his hat.

"It is positively wicked to accuse anyone among us of collaborating with them to any such length. What would they gain from it? What benefit could it yield them? Why would they hen us all, including themselves, behind these walls and wires and lights with no means to disapparate! And do explain to me again, Mr. Hoffer, why we cannot but once try to depart via our own methods and not by this Muggle-co-opted donkey work!"

During every one or every other escape committee meeting, Ludwig would spell out his grievances to Hoffer between his demands for Hoffer's silence on his theories. With a slight application of hand to his cheek - there was no beard to tassle with, though Hoffer resembled a man bereft of one - he would lean back and expound once again on why they could not don their robes and Disapparate.

"As you know, Mr. Ludwig, the majority of our group have not been beyond the Muggle-designed Inner Border, not least since their last war, and certainly very few of them have ever been as far afield as France or England or Italy. Those that have so made their last visits many years ago, their memories faded and even the well-kept ones preserve only images of places and buildings long since changed or swept from their foundations."

Ludwig would retort with a pride that almost made him hop sideways, pointing to the cellar or the cupboards where treasured objects of the group were kept.

"We have a Pensieve! There is a Pensieve in the cupboard that anyone here can use, anyone who knows the Alps or the Pyrenees can dunk his or her head inside and we'll have a perfect landing ground!"

"Apart from the flagrant illegality of trans-national Apparition under the Statute of Secrecy, the odds of success are diminished with every passing year and every new acquisition of land by Muggle developers out West."

"But Ricardo insists that he can-!"

Hoffer would tire, and with each time the subject arose he would tire more rapidly, ending with his final coda on the matter of Disapparition from the Ironland.

"Ricardo cannot transport all fifty-four of this community to his uncle's holiday cottage in Catalonia where he spent every summer as a boy, crafting butterfly swans from the parchments of love poems he sent to that local village girl he met in the lake - oh you've told me this one, Paul, I've been spared no detail. He could take at best four or five of us and as soon as he arrives on the ground, the Spanish Wizengamot will make their entrance, of course expected by no-one. If they don't arrest him and the others, they'll certainly stop them coming back for the rest of us. It'd be enough to create an international incident for the Muggles and one they might just make another war out of, now I'm sure none of us here want that on our hands?"

And that would be the end Hoffer and Ludwig's exchange of opinion on the matter. So the committee meetings went in the dining-room of Ludwig's house in the village where it was all cooked up.

"Come on, get us out of this filthy blasted sewer, I want to be in the forests of the Fulda riding my broom again!" Konny Fester piped up from below. He was in his early twenties but held the agitation of a child denied passage down the stairs on Christmas morning.

His education, like Wilhelm's, was incomplete and he lived in the precarious state of an unfinished adolescence. Broom riding had been a rare, exhilarating folly conducted in the utmost obscurity in some woods where it was hoped the Mugs had not sent their soldiers, dogs and listening-devices. One had to go deep within the German interior to find a spot remote enough from the border that you would not run into the regiments of counter-invasion forces and spying apparatus built to withstand the penetration of the American Muggles. That is why he dreamed of flying freely in Fulda, where the Americans would be all around him too focused on invading the Ironland to care about him soaring above them on a brand new broom. Perhaps an English one. Or why not an American one?

Konny, also like Wilhelm, had been forced to go through a Muggle school and was told in regularity of the perennial threat posed by the Yankees and their spy planes, economic sabotage and punk music. The Free German Youth brigades and their insufferable lectures and holidays were filled with warnings about anything American, but the music always stood out. Men and women in leather with spiked, bloodied hair and faces screaming incomprehensible incitements to chaos in well-furnished capitalist recording studios.

Wilhelm couldn't understand what they were saying on the bootleg tapes he listened to with his Muggle friends, and his English was normally good. Ramones, Iggy Pop, the Dolls that came from New York - all of it was the work of the American ruling class. That was what they were incessantly reminded of at school, at camp and right up to their graduations.

The hell with graduation, he had decided. He had heard of a programme for uneducated and fallen-behind wizards in England that was particularly good. Only rumours, but they were better than anything he had heard in the Ironland. Seventeen and ready to study what he should have been learning from the age of eleven. Of course he had been to the little classes that Hoffer, Ludwig and some of the other elders in the village threw together as best they could, teaching the spells they half-remembered from the old textbooks but it was no proper comparison.

No time for bitterness, he reminded himself. Freedom was in sight.

The bickering beneath him continued. Rosa pulled him further back. Her arm upon him was sudden, the most unexpected of any that could have reached forth. A rush had descended his spine at the unforeseen contact. In a moment it was gone and her arm was elsewhere and he stood considering how close they came and dreaming of learning the spells denied to him and making a better wizard at his age than any above him and finally getting to ask-

Some fool from the back lurched forwards, he knew it was one of the purists, he could tell from their dress. They thought the Mugs were worthless in their containment and restrictions. The ones among their group of twenty did at least. Was it? No. Not Kohl.

Hans Kohl had lost the brown over-robes he had donned at the beginning of the escape, which made him look several octanes scruffier and in synchronicity with the rest of the group. But what he had all of a sudden thrown on was something significant even by the standards of the Kohlen. Wilhelm and Rosa knew that they despised the Muggles, the "filthy, leeching, vegetable-headed Mugs".

He now appeared to be wearing black overalls, an unintended parody of the uniforms the Muggle authorities had many of the SED members dressed in for Party functions. There were efforts made at grandiosity, some kind of strings or elongations attached to the buckles to recapture Deutsch wizarding dress of old, but it was a pale imitation. Soon he could add great adorning to the robes that he and his brethren had been denied to wear for so long. No more would the Mugs be the masters of them.

"Hans you fool, they'll make you an icicle you petulant twerp!" Rosa shouted after the man whom so recently was a boy who practiced his spells with a forest twig in the phantom place of their forbidden wands.