April 2000 — Cachora, Peru
Harry kicks a small rock into the gutter. He mutters to himself, hands shoved deep in his pockets, eyes firmly on the ground. He doesn't understand why none of the guides he's encountered seem willing to take him to the Choquequirao ruins. Sure, they're supposedly cursed, but… People don't actually believe it, right? And even if they do, there has to be someone willing to take him.
He spins on his heel, stalking back toward the seedy bar. Someone in that smoke-darkened room is bound to be willing. He'll just have to flash a lot more gold. He doesn't like resorting to bribery — that's more Malfoy's territory — but he needs to get up there.
He strides through the swinging doors, wincing at the the way they creak and shudder. A rust-colored rain of paint flakes speckle his boots. He has to get himself under control before his magic brings the place down around his ears.
He firms his jaw and strides to the bar. The weedy man behind it peers up at him, beady eyes clouded by age and smudged lenses.
"Yes?" he asks. "What can I get you? Drinks only, mind." His hands never stop their slow, inevitable motion over the wooden surface of the bar, smearing the stains around with a gray towel that Harry thinks was once probably white.
Harry grinds his teeth, forcing his tone to remain even. "I need a guide."
The man blinks at him but doesn't stop wiping the bar. "And I need to be young again." He waits a moment. "Seems neither of us will get what he wants today."
Harry scowls. "I can pay," he says shortly. "Gold."
The barman stares impassively back at him, but he doesn't say anything else, just waits.
They stare at one another. Harry sees the beginnings of smug gloating swimming up from the depths of the man's cloudy eyes. Before it can fully surface, someone speaks up from the silent crowd of men behind them.
"I'll do it."
Harry turns slowly, half expecting the voice to have been only in his head.
Facing him is a short, squat man of middling age. His hair is shading toward grey at the temples, and his tanned face is seamed with wrinkles, but his eyes are clear and hard.
"I'll do it… for 5,000 Sol."
Harry blinks. It's an outrageous sum, more than a year's wages for the average worker in Cachora, and yet… No one else bats an eye. It seems they, at least, consider it a fair price. He sighs. He's brought that much — barely. It will leave him dangerously strapped for cash for the journey home, but… Well. Knowing Malfoy, he may as well not return without the medallion. They'll just have to make it up in the sale.
He nods and holds out his hand. His guide ignores it.
"If we go, we go now."
Harry looks skeptically up at the sun, which hangs decidedly higher in the sky than he would like. "But—"
The man glares at him. "Now, or not at all, outsider."
Harry nods.
He regrets that decision almost immediately. He'd hoped they'd take some of the burros tied up outside the bar. Not that he'd been looking forward to riding a burro, exactly, but he really isn't looking forward to making the climb on foot.
By late afternoon the next day, he's bruised and beaten, trudging grimly behind his guide as the man winds inexorably up the mountain. The man clearly doesn't believe in so mundane a thing as a path, and opts instead to veer away from any they come across, slicing through hanging vines and underbrush alike with a wicked machete that he'd whipped out of… well, Harry isn't sure where it was, but it's spent the last several hours almost constantly in the man's hand. It makes Harry's arm hurt just to watch him.
The jungle closes in around them, a million shades of green and a riot of colorful flowers and birds. The perfumed air is filled with the rhythmic thwacks of the machete, the hooting of howler monkeys, and the constant, ever-present drip of water making its way from the canopy high above.
Harry scratches yet another bug bite, hoping his magical inoculations will be strong enough to beat out whatever parasites and fevers he might otherwise acquire, and wipes beads of sweat from his brow. He hadn't prepared to spend the night in the forest, and he's regretting that bitterly now. He slept uneasily, unused to the night noises of the jungle, and not entirely trusting of his reticent guide. He's also not used to hiking at this altitude, and his lungs and muscles are burning.
He takes another swig from his water-skin, debating whether to call a halt. He doesn't think his guide would listen. Sighing, he treks on.
He tries to engage his guide in small talk, at first. Though he can hardly find the breath for speech himself, his guide moves implacably forward. But all his efforts are met with grunts and terse replies. After a succession of 'yep's, 'hmmm's, and 'no's, he's learned the man's name is Paolo and little else. Eventually, he gives it up as hopeless and focuses on his breathing. It makes walking a bit easier and, for a while, he doesn't mind the silence.
Just when he is about to try again, Paolo holds up a hand. Harry bites his lip, forcing the words back, and looks around. They've reached what once must have been a large clearing, though now it's only a thinner patch of vegetation. Harry thinks it generally uninteresting and is turning away, assuming this to be a rest break, when Paolo's machete comes down in three smooth swipes and the vines part like a curtain.
Behind them lie the ruins. Harry stares, dumbfounded. He'd have gone right past, never realizing what he was missing. He sees the gleam of gold winking from amid the moss-covered stones, and steps forward.
Paolo stops him with an arm across his chest.
"You go from here," he says when Harry turns to him. "I go no further."
"But—" Harry starts, but Paolo has already faded into the mist. Harry realizes two things in that moment. First, that the sky has grown noticeably darker than it had been when they'd begun this journey, and a thick- gray mist has sprung up to further blur the landscape, and second, that he is alone.
He turns again, scanning the trees, but there is nothing.
A monkey howls in the distance. A parrot squawks.
Harry shivers.
He turns back to stare at the ruins. It's folly to start now. It will likely be full dark by the time he's retrieved the amulet, and he doesn't think he can find his way back reliably in the daylight, much less the dark.
Then he remembers that he is a Wizard, dammit, and he can just apparate away whenever he likes.
Considerably cheered, he steps forward into the clearing. The air seems almost to thicken around him, resisting him, and as he presses on it suddenly sucks him inward.
Wards.
He hadn't thought that there would be wards.
He is an idiot.
He stands perfectly still, waiting for whatever defensive magic is still active in this place to repel him. The minutes tick by. One… two… five.
Harry sighs and steps forward, relieved. The defenses must have worn off with age.
His straining ears register the tiny hiss before his conscious mind does, and his muscles react instinctively, dropping him instantly into a sideways roll.
The blow dart quivers in the tree not three feet from him; the crimson-painted tip gleams wetly. Harry gulps. Cinnabar.
So. Not all defenses are gone, then. He'll have to be careful.
Malfoy's informant was right. There's a second layer of rooms in the temple, hidden from muggles in a layer of wizard space, folded around and set atop the visible rooms. The Medallion is in the fifth room he tries. The first four present him with traps and puzzles — all with deadly consequences. He avoids some, disarms others, and accidentally trips a few. Luckily, those are the easiest to deal with.
The rooms themselves are gorgeous, rife with history and magical artefacts. Harry is nearly tempted by the winking emeralds and sapphires, the softly glowing rubies and diamonds, the piles of shining gold.
He knows better. A quick detection spell confirms it — the rooms and everything in them are laced with cinnabar, mercury, and a handful of other poisons. In this temple, greed leads irrevocably to death. And Harry has a mission.
Get in, get the medallion, get out. He repeats this in his head, a mantra to keep him from temptation. Get in, get the medallion, get out.
Who knows what curses lie on those riches, even if he dared to risk the poisons? He's here for one thing, and one thing only. And then…
In the fifth room, the medallion gleams as if it has just been polished, a burnished gold circle roughly the size of Harry's palm, emblazoned with a rising sun.
It hangs around the neck of a desiccated body, hair still attached to its gray, papery flesh.
A mummy.
A guardian.
Harry belatedly raises his wand. He casts a quick revelio, just to be sure, but…
Nothing happens. He's cut off from his magic. It's still there, potent as ever, but completely out of reach — as if an invisible veil has fallen between it and him.
He gulps.
He waves his wand again, in a quick succession of patterns, casting curse detection and disarming spells one after the other.
Or, he tries to cast. The wand remains limp and lifeless in his fingers.
Right. The muggle way, then, and hope like hell that it's not coated with poison like everything else.
He'd cast the same detection spells on this room from the passageway, though. Nothing had shown up. He'll just have to trust to luck, he thinks, wishing belatedly for the dose of felix felicis waiting in his cupboard back at home. He's saving it for when he really needs it. He's beginning to think that time is now.
He slips the wand into his back pocket, wipes his sweaty palms on the thighs of his jeans.
He can do this.
It's just a mummy.
No, don't think of that. Just a— a thing, now. Not alive. Not anything to worry about.
He steps forward quickly and slips the chain over the mummy's head.
A papery hand reaches up and latches around his wrist, and Harry's skin grows cold.
"Fuck," he whispers, and he's never meant it more.
The hand tightens, bony fingers closing around his arm and squeezing tight.
Harry wants to scream.
Slowly, ever so slowly, he turns his head. He locks eyes with the sunken eye-sockets and desiccated eyes of the thing holding him.
Then he wrenches his arm sideways and back, rolling away from the thing sitting on its golden throne.
He takes the medallion with him.
He takes the arm with him, too. It breaks off cleanly from the body, tearing with a sickening crunch of bone, and he scrabbles at it. After a few seconds, the fingers relax, and he hurls the thing away from him.
He looks down, eyes wild.
He has the medallion.
He has to get out of here.
He lurches to his feet and out the door, down the corridors, running blind. By some miracle, he avoids the traps, and then he's out, out into the fading afternoon light and he's never been so happy to see the weak rays of sunlight in his life.
He looks down at the medallion in his hand. "How am I going to get you out of here?" he wonders as the rush of adrenaline fades, leaving him cold. He can't apparate, not with the medallion. He'll have to walk. But which way is the way out? His eyes light upon the hacks and cuts made by Paolo's machete, and he smiles.
He stumbles along the path of broken branches, squinting into the darkening gloom and mist around him and wishing he'd paid more attention to their route. He'd assumed he'd have a guide on the way out, too. A foolish notion, now that he thinks of it, but there's no help for it now.
He pats the pocket where he's stowed the medallion. Still there. Good.
A blade whistles through the air, scant inches from his cheek, and he swerves abruptly to the left
The vipers are in the middle of what seems to be a family argument.
Harry groans. Of course, he would end up as the mediator to a family of hissing vipers, all while being chased by Zabini's goons. What else did he expect? He frowns, trying to follow the conversation for a moment, fifteen different grievances and sides being argued at once.
It's really too bad he can't use magic, he thinks, as he continues to listen with half an ear to the drama playing out before him. It would be so much easier to take care of Bulstrode and Goyle if he could.
Of course, they can't use magic either — which they obviously know. He's been set up.
The knowledge hits him like ice water to the face.
He's been set up. That bastard Paolo set him up.
He thinks of the pocketful of gold he'd given the man, the pocketful he's no doubt wheedled out of Zabini's goons.
It's a small consolation, to know he probably won't live to enjoy it.
The snakes are hissing at him, demanding his attention.
He apologizes, tongue slipping smoothly around the hissing sounds of parseltongue, and turns his attention back to their disagreement.
A malicious chuckle startles him, just as he's putting the final touches on a solution that works for everyone.
"Sitting in the dirt, Potter? My, my. That's a new low, even for you."
"Shut it, Bulstrode," he returns angrily. He stands slowly, dusting off the knees of his trousers and glaring at her. Goyle appears suddenly beside her, swinging a heavy club against his meaty palm. Harry winces as it thwacks dully against the skin.
Bulstrode grins triumphantly, taking advantage of his distraction, and raises her wicked blade.
He narrows his eyes and hisses "These are the ones I told you about. I will collect my payment now."
The snake closest to him, the matriarch of the colony, bobs her head regally. "Agreed."
Then, they attack, writhing forward in a hissing mass, surging toward Bulstrode and Goyle's feet.
With an earsplitting shriek, she turns and runs, tossing her blade to the dirt and yanking a protesting Goyle with her. The moment they cross the magic dampening field, they spin away in a whirl of apparition.
Harry stares down at the dull metal, mystified, and then winces as he watches the blood well up from the deep gash on his thigh.
Episkey, he thinks, then, right. No magic. Um. He's feeling woozy, and this is so not good.
He grips his wand tightly, pressing his left hand to the wound to try and stem the flow of blood, and uses every ounce of magical strength and stubbornness within him to send out a Patronus, shoving it past the magical barrier put up by the medallion.
He doesn't have the strength to control or direct it at all, so it's really just a magical S.O.S. broadcast on all channels — the equivalent of an amplified shout of "help!"
