Sev had already sketched out in his mind precisely what he required for his plan; however, implementing it to his exacting standard took longer. In his best subject, Potions, instinct and a lot of general knowledge could nearly always bring him to the desired result, but the Arithmancy and Charms work needed for this was a far more complex procedure. A Potion could be 'almost right' - the wards for a piece of Arithmancy had to be perfectly accurate, or nothing would happen at all.
He borrowed from the Muggle idea of codes. The vast majority of wizards didn't have a logical bone in their body. Set a series of mystical challenges, and they might be overcome. Set a brainteaser, and you could pretty much guarantee that they'd still be sitting there stumped when the sun burned out.
With his ability to think himself out of the most convoluted of situations, Sev would have had no trouble devising a spell that nobody could break through. The trick, however, was in devising one that could be broken through in exactly the way he desired.
Indeed, the Christmas holidays had rolled up before he'd finished tinkering enough to so much as glance at the Foe-Glass. It was just as well, then, that he'd taken the time to familiarise himself with everything the Ministry had written about it, because when Malfoy returned from holidaying with his parents, he wanted to know everything.
"I spoke with Lord Voldemort," he said in a low voice, sitting down across from Snape in the Slytherin common room. Sev was amused by the way he endeavoured to make it sound as if the conversation had been on an entirely equal footing.
Lord Voldemort was the head of the Death Eaters. His name had begun to penetrate the public consciousness, although all but the most mighty wizards feared to whisper it - as if he might be some demonic figure summoned by the utterance.
Sev was in a position to suspect that this idea had been carefully cultivated. Voldemort was clever, dangerously so, and perhaps as adept at manipulating people as Snape himself. On the few occasions that Sev had been in his presence, he had been forced to play his deceptions with more skill than ever, skirting as close as possible to honesty to duck the risk of betraying himself.
The Ministry had no idea where this shadowy figure was hiding himself, although Sev was convinced his hideout was in fact the magical academy Durmstrang. That knowledge would have availed the Ministry little even had he chosen to share it - since nobody actually knew where Durmstrang was.
On the occasions Sev had been summoned before Voldemort, he had been transported there by Portkey. He had no way to make contact with the Death Eaters, only be contacted, but Malfoy had his own channels of communication. A fact that he was never slow to lord over Snape.
"I reported your work with the Foe-Glass to our leaders." Actually, Sev was more than sure it had been the Death Eater on staff who had first done that, especially since he had made certain all the main suspects were in the room when it was announced. "It seems that they're... intrigued."
"I thought they might be." Sev smiled thinly. Dumbledore's choice of bait had been clever indeed. The Death Eater movement had grown strong through fear and intimidation; the risk of showing their faces too early was no doubt a troubling one.
"So what have you found out about it?" demanded Malfoy.
"As little as possible." Sev smiled at him. "After all, it would hardly be... sporting... to deprive the Ministry of the fun of working it out for themselves."
Malfoy smirked, but then turned serious. "We need to get at the glass, Severus. Our people need to know how it works to learn how to defeat it."
'Our' people? Sev wondered just when Malfoy was likely to get a rude awakening to the fact that he was nothing more than the Death Eaters' errand boy. His charisma might allow him to rule the day in House Slytherin, but it would cut no ice with Lord Voldemort.
"I realise that. However, our masters would be less than happy if we tipped our hand in getting it." The Death Eaters had wasted no time in letting their young recruits know that mistakes would not be tolerated. Malfoy had to listen to him, because if any of his underlings screwed up, it would fall on his head as well as theirs.
"So what do you suggest?" he asked sharply. He always had Sev 'suggest' things, rather than actually tell him what to do. Just because Snape was demonstrably smarter than he was no reason for him to admit it.
"The festival," he said simply. Malfoy wasn't on his mental level, but he was no blunt knife either, and ideas always went down better if he was given the opportunity to flesh them out himself.
"Yes," he said slowly. "Yes, I could see that... Dumbledore will be distracted, all the school will be outside, everything will be in chaos..." Sev was amused at the way he sketched out the reasoning, as if obviously Snape must have just thrown out the idea without considering any of the reasons why it was a good one.
"Yes," said Malfoy again. "The festival it is. Now all that remains is for you to bring us a suitable plan."
"I'm sure I'll be able manage that," said Sev dryly.
It was amazing how much more smoothly plotting went when you were running both sides of the battle simultaneously.
It was late February before his perfectionist instincts would allow him to cease work on his security system and actually take a look at the Foe-Glass.
Dumbledore had chosen the device with care; worthless bait would tip off the enemy, but by the same token it could be deadly to let anything too valuable slip into their hands.
The Foe-Glass was indeed at the cutting edge of the Ministry's detector technology; however, the one they had furnished Dumbledore with was several generations behind the ones they were really working on, and had a few flaws that were already being ironed out in the later versions.
The Pocket Sneakoscope, by contrast, was a mere distraction. It might make an interesting gadget, but it certainly wouldn't catch any Death Eaters. As James and his friends had quickly discovered, the slightest little dubious thought would set it off. And in a school as large as Hogwarts, there were a lot of dubious thoughts.
Sev's thoughts, however, were fully focused on reeling in the suspects. His shields around the Foe-Glass were at last as complete as they were ever going to be. He had the headmaster individually call in the four teachers on his list, Malachite, Vitae, Fractalis and Ephemeria, and tell them each that he was giving them the access code 'in case of an emergency'.
Of course, all the access codes were genuine. That was the whole point. The Death Eater would probably test the code they were given, sneaking in but not actually touching anything. However, there wasn't an absolute guarantee that an honest teacher might not be tempted to do the same - and Severus Snape always wanted an absolute guarantee. So, instead of watching and waiting for somebody to sneak in, he remained deliberately oblivious. They would find out the identity of the Death Eater when they made a real attempt to steal it; all things in good time.
Meanwhile, school life plodded on. The young cadre of Death Eaters were temporarily free of spying duties, and turned their attention to other pursuits. Colin Crabbe again turned to the possibility of a career in petty theft, and Simon Lestrange continued to severely disconcert anybody who met him with his detached gaze and equally detached personality. Even the teachers were beginning to notice it, although they never said anything. Presumably it was bad teaching practise to admit that you thought one of your pupils was quite possibly a psychopath in the making.
Nick Avery had a great many things on his mind, all of them female. Malfoy, by contrast, had 'laid claim' to Narcissa Salenica. Sev thought it a rather dubious honour, considering the fact that Malfoy thought of her as 'his girl' in the same way that he referred to 'his books' and 'his clothes'. Despite all the evidence that it was a thoroughly unsavoury relationship, the other Slytherin girls were screamingly jealous.
People were stupid.
Goyle and Nott had appointed themselves Malfoy's new bodyguards. Despite the fact that they were younger, they were both built like brick walls, and nobody was going to argue with them. They were the terror of the school's younger students, selecting victims almost randomly and playing around with spells that were just a little too nasty to be dismissed as youthful pranks.
As summer approached, the Quidditch teams battled it out in the pattern that was almost set in stone by now; Slytherin and Gryffindor put down all in their path to get together for a final, brutal head-to-head battle that always just narrowly went to Gryffindor. By now James Potter and Malfoy were both captains, and there was never a Gryffindor vs. Slytherin match without at least one nasty injury.
Malfoy continued to declare Quidditch "completely unimportant", a phrase he liked to use for anything he lost at, and complain about the anti-Slytherin bias. Even if it wasn't part of his cover, Sev would have had to have agreed it existed... however, it was also not unjustified.
Professor Malachite, the head of house Slytherin, was endlessly frustrated by the way his house was always put down - more often than not, by the actions of its own students. He couldn't understand how Dumbledore had refused to punish James and Sirius for nearly killing Snape the previous year.
Malachite was taking points off Gryffindors left right and centre, at the slightest provocation. His arch enemy, Gryffindor's head Ellida Vitae, countered that by doing exactly the same to house Slytherin. She never got Malfoy, however; he was always far too good at playing the innocent.
For all their mutual hatred, Malachite and Vitae were never far apart; Snape suspected they followed each other around hoping for a chance to catch the other in the act of favouring their own house. The perpetually nervous Professor Fractalis would turn pale and dash away whenever he saw the arguing duo headed his way. Unusually, instead of locking himself away with his books, he was spending an awful lot of time with the Potions professor, Janeida Ephemeria.
Snape took this all in, waiting and watching. Then, one weekend at the beginning of summer, the Dark Mark emblazoned on his arm suddenly grew black and burned with pain. He wasn't particularly surprised; he'd been expecting it since Christmas.
There was no message sent to him, but by now he knew what to do. He rose out of bed in the middle of the night, and padded out into the Forbidden Forest.
Last time he'd been out in the forest on one of these trips, he'd noticed a set of curious marks on the ground. Tonight, he noticed them again, and freshly made; a series of ruts in the ground, as if made by a very wide wheel - except there was no way any wheeled contraption could navigate through the twisting pathways of the Forbidden Forest.
Sev's logical mind had an overwhelming compulsion to make connections and build patterns. He'd seen these marks before when he'd been going out to find the Death Eaters' concealed Portkey; what was the link?
However, that was a puzzle for a later time, for the meeting that was coming up would need his full concentration - a rare condition indeed. There were very few things Sev couldn't do with most of his mind a million miles away - verbally fencing with Voldemort was one of them.
The Ministry of Magic liked to reassure people that the Death Eaters were vicious but basically arrogant and stupid. That might hold true for the vast majority of their members, but in some cases it didn't; Voldemort, like Malfoy, was arrogant and very intelligent.
Where Malfoy's intelligence equated to a kind of charismatic cunning, however, Voldemort thought in a very similar way to Severus Snape. That, in Sev's mind, made him more dangerous than the rest of his followers put together.
Sooner or later, he knew, the conflict with the Death Eaters would hinge on getting close to Voldemort. Resentful bigots with a taste for glory were not rare, but get them alone, and they were generally spineless. It was only when they were brought together that they became powerful - and it was Voldemort who brought them together.
No doubt James Potter, had he been in Snape's situation - something which his very noble nature made impossible - would have conceived some wild plan to heroically take on Voldemort himself. Sev knew he was light-years ahead of his fellow students, but he was still seventeen years old. If Voldemort had a brain as quick as his own, and no compunction about gathering knowledge from the nastiest places imaginable, who knew how powerful he might be?
James was a Quidditch Seeker at heart; charge in, zip ahead of everybody else to save the day, and let the whole world know you were doing it. Sev, though he never played the game for lack of an opponent, thought like a chess player. You couldn't win a game of chess by charging the king with your most valuable piece.
And he knew himself to be one of their side's most valuable pieces. Nobody else could infiltrate the Death Eaters so fully, because nobody else had the presence of mind to be so deceptive from the very start. Not many people had the ability to start spinning a web of lies and secrecy at the age of eleven.
If he tried to make a move against Voldemort, he would not only fail, but remove himself from the game, costing their side dearly. 'Blaze of glory' might have a nice heroic ring to it, but it was no way to win.
And Severus Snape always played to win. He stepped up to the Portkey in the dark, and took hold of it.