Chapter Six
Snape staggered along yet another claustrophobic corridor. If he ever got out of this damned placed alive, he would remain above ground for the rest of his life. He'd even consider moving out of his dungeon rooms at Hogwarts, assuming he ever saw the place again. At the moment, he would not give much for his chances-of that or anything else. True, they had found a back route out of their previous imprisonment, but it had soon become apparent that it was a case of making bad matters worse. This was not surprising: Augusta would hardly have warded her rooms so securely then left the back door open; which meant that they were almost certainly headed further into her cavernous chambers instead of out of them.
The narrow passageway gradually widened, before ending in a door that looked like it was made of burnished bronze. There was an odor in the air, but Severus could not immediately identify it. His sensitive nose twitched as they paused before the portal; something was faintly acrid, yet with a myriad of other smells beneath, too many to name. He did not expect the door to be warded, unless it was a way out of the complex, which considering the direction they had been going did not seem likely. Finally deciding that standing around waiting for some miracle to rescue them was not a good use of time, he pushed on the door and almost immediately regretted it. A foul cloud of suffocating smoke ballooned out at them, laced with who knew how many toxic fumes. He dragged the two boys, coughing and cursing, back up the corridor, but before they could re- enter their old prison, he blacked out.
Coming around what felt to be a good while later, Severus gloomily reflected that it seemed he was still alive, and therefore had to deal with this mess. He sighed, groaned, and pulled himself off the floor. His protesting muscles reminded him that he was truly getting too old for this, and that he'd pay for the day's activities for quite awhile to come. A few more minutes and he'd managed to wake the boys up, although neither looked well. Of course, it was a bit difficult to tell with Valentin, whose appearance was already so off-putting as to be impossible to undermine much further, but Sophicles looked positively green. The creatures in cages near the back of Augusta's workroom, some of which were still alive, also looked extremely ill, but Severus wasn't sure if that had to do with the atmosphere or with whatever tortures to which they had been subjected. He momentarily considered releasing them, but there was no way to know if they would judge this a favor or simply use the opportunity to take out their wrath on his little trio. In the end, he left them where they were, deciding that he would come back for them if he ever found a way out of this himself, and if the risk in doing so seemed acceptable. It was not, he knew, a Gryffindor attitude, but thank God there were no pious Gryffindors around to remind him of it. Snape was grateful that the thought of rescuing any of the strange mixed up creatures in the cages did not apparently occur to the little Hufflepuff.
Eventually, with much bullying from Severus and protestations from the boys, he herded them back up the corridor towards the source of their illness. The door was still partly open and the air foul, but it was breathable, especially after they wrapped handkerchiefs around the lower portion of their faces to cut down on the stench. What effects the poisonous atmosphere might eventually have on them was yet to be seen, but staying around Augusta's storeroom, waiting for death or worse, was obviously the greater of two evils.
When they passed through the door, they entered a ruin of a room. Multicoloured puddles of potions pooled all over the floor, some still bubbling or hissing ominously. Cautioning the boys not to step in anything, Severus gazed around in wonder-even Longbottom on his worse day had never wrecked a room this efficiently. Potions dripped off the ceiling and ran down the walls and glass shards, from what he surmised had once been test tubes, lay scattered everywhere and crunched under his boots as he cautiously moved forward. There was not, that he could see, a whole container of anything left in the room and, if possible, the connecting chamber was in even worse condition. Severus had already begun to suspect where they were-it would make sense, after all, for Augusta to link her storeroom with her menagerie, as they both provided her with raw materials, so to speak, for her experiments. But if that was the case, what had happened to it?
Deciding, after a stunned few minutes, that there was no reason to waste time looking for Tihzeruk venom in this mess, as, even were they somehow able to find it, it would almost certainly have been adulterated, he shepherded the two boys across the dangerous floor to what he devoutly hoped was the main entrance. The unwarded door opened for him easily, and he stuck his head out into the corridor, grateful beyond measure to find that it was indeed the one he and Delaia had traversed earlier that day. Emerging from the room, he let the handkerchief across his face fall but, just as he was taking a breath of, relatively, clean air, he was hit with a stunning spell from somewhere back in the dark recesses of the corridor. Of course, he thought as he blacked out, he WOULD get caught with his goal in sight.
* * * Albus slipped between the rows of celebrating elves with a cautious tread. Augusta, who had remained remarkably level-headed in all the confusion, had pulled an invisibility cloak out of her valise and handed it to him a few seconds earlier, with instructions to untie as many prisoners as possible. "I'll get their wands back, then we'll see about reasserting some order around here," she stated, with the air of someone who believed that the pandemonium had been arranged just to annoy her.
"But, without a cloak, how will you . . . ?"
Augusta merely looked amused. "I was carrying that for the use of a little assistant of mine; I haven't needed such things in quite awhile," a fact she proved by promptly disappearing in front of Albus' eyes. He hadn't even heard her utter an incantation.
He threw the cloak over his head and carefully made his way to the nearest table, the increasing level of chaos aiding him in not being perceived, despite the fact that he bumped into several elves and trod heavily on more than one set of toes on the way. He carefully bent over one of the captives, a teacher by the look of him, and explained the situation. He wasn't worried about the man giving the game away. The Durmstrang people had not impressed him as being nervous types, and besides, the man was gagged. By the time Albus worked his hands free, Augusta was by their side with a bunch of wands she'd liberated from somewhere. Handing the man one at random, she gave terse instructions for him to help Albus release the others; he nodded and hurried to obey. They were only able to free about half a dozen before an elf, slightly less drunk than most of the others, spotted them. Pointing a bony finger in their direction, it opened its mouth to warn its fellows, and suddenly disappeared. It did not look to Albus like it left of its own accord, and he assumed Augusta had had something to do with it.
He and Professor Teplouhov, the man he'd released, spent the next few minutes freeing another dozen wizards and one very upset witch. This last was a tiny, bent old woman with a face like a dried fruit, dressed all in black, her white hair flowing almost to the tops of her antiquated boots. She was, Albus guessed from several of her remarks, some type of head housekeeper, and therefore took the elf revolt as a personal affront. She began laying about her with a gnarled old cane as soon as she was free, and despite Albus' appeals that she stay close beside him where he could protect her, took off through the crowd, scattering elves as she went.
After that, of course, it was impossible to hope that the elves would not notice that they had a problem in their midst, and soon Albus forgot about looking for the old woman as he was bombarded by assaults on all sides. Having given his invisibility cloak to an injured Durmstrang student, who could not have protected himself otherwise, he faced a mob of enraged elves with only Teplouhov and a few other unknown professors around him. Within a few minutes, they were fighting back to back, their little circle dwindling in size as the elves closed in. Another professor dropped at his side, hit with some type of elf version of a stupefy charm-at least Albus hoped that was all he'd been hit with-when he suddenly lost his field of vision as some type of cloth was thrown over his head. He quickly realized that Augusta had enveloped him in her shimmering green cloak and, as the elves almost immediately switched their attention to his remaining companions, he had to assume they could no longer see him.
"I think a strategic retreat might be in order," she whispered in his ear, "the odds are too great here to be sure of success."
"But we can't leave; what about the Headmaster?" Albus had lost sight of the man in the melee, but didn't doubt for a moment that he was still in great danger as soon as the elves took care of the present problem.
He felt Augusta shrug, her body pressed closely up against him. "I never liked him anyway," she murmured. "Come, I'll get you out of here."
"No!," Albus couldn't believe she just intended to abandon her colleagues to what had to be almost certain slaughter. "We have to help them." He turned to face her, as difficult as that was to do in the small confines of their covering. "You go for help-see if there's anyone else available to aid us. I'll stay here and do what I can. They've just been drugged-it may wear off soon."
"And if it doesn't?" Her black eyes glittered in the dark. "Would you be willing to sacrifice yourself to help a group of people you don't even know?"
"I have no intention of sacrificing myself," Albus responded, hoping that was true. "But I won't just leave them."
Something flashed in Augusta's eyes for a minute, but was gone before Albus could identify it. She held his gaze for a few seconds, then smiled. It was, he noted with surprise, a rather nice smile. "Then take this," she fished a necklace out of the top of her blouse and threw its silver chain around his neck. She kissed him, quickly, but on the lips. "I'll go find allies. Have fun." Suddenly she was gone, and her cloak with her.
The cloak must have had some type of charm on it to muffle sound, because it seemed to Albus that, as soon as Augusta left, a wave of noise broke over him. He came out of what felt almost like a trance, and began dodging curses again, yet somehow it was a great deal easier than before. Perhaps the elves were losing coordination because of their inebriation, but then, that had not seemed to cause them problems a few minutes earlier. Albus waded into the melee, smiling as he hexed elves out of his way left and right. Augusta was right-this WAS almost fun.
* * *
"It's Severus." Delaia knelt by Snape and rolled him over, noting that Apollo's curse had certainly had the desired effect, for he was out cold. It also looked like his nose had taken the brunt of the fall; that usually protuberant appendage was now angled slightly to the left. Too bad the spell had hit the wrong person.
"Severus!" Looking appalled, Zosimus dropped to the ground on Sev's other side, "Oh my God, what did I do?"
Delaia couldn't resist. "Honestly, Apollo, you just stupefied him. He'll be alright." Her aunt shot her a dirty look, but didn't reply. Just then, Delaia noticed two other forms, peering out of the ruined lab with pale, frightened faces. With difficulty she identified one as Sophicles. To the filth on the boy's robes from the cave incident had been added several more layers of grime and something sticky that made his hair stand on end; when he took off his glasses to peer at her, two marginally cleaner circles around his eyes made him look like an owl she'd once owned. The figure with him looked even worse, being so grimy that Delaia could hardly make him out at all, especially in the corridor's very poor lighting. It was that last problem that had caused them to mistake Severus, muffled up as he was, for Augusta a moment before. That and impatience, Delaia had to admit. They had both been very tired of hanging about a stuffy corridor waiting for the sorceress to return to her lair.
"It's alright, Sophicles," Delaia reassured him. "It's only us. We, er, got a bit confused and hexed Hieronymus. He'll be ok in a minute."
Sophicles nodded dumbly, but said nothing. Neither did the shadow at his side. Delaia returned her attention to Apollo, who was performing an ennervate charm on Severus. He finally came around, but seemed sluggish and out of sorts. Typical. Delaia couldn't imagine what he'd been up to, but it didn't appear that he had run up against Augusta, so she couldn't believe his day had been any worse than hers. "Come on, let's go," she urged. Now that they had the boys back safely, she wanted to get out of there before the lab's proprietress returned.
"He's hurt, can't you see that?" Apollo asked her testily, while trying to wrap a blue silk scarf around one of Sev's hands that had been scraped in his fall. "Did you kill her?," she asked him eagerly.
"If you mean Augusta, we didn't even see her," he responded, confirming Delaia's assumption while endeavouring to stand up. "Would you please stop that?" He brushed off Apollo's attempts to help him with bare civility. Apollo, far from looking offended, slipped a supporting arm around his waist as they finally climbed out of the corridor. "I am perfectly alright, will you unhand me?!" Delaia was so busy paying attention to Sev's little argument with a still smiling Apollo, who suddenly seemed in a much better humour than she'd been all afternoon, that she didn't immediately notice anything wrong.
It wasn't until they entered one of the main halls of the complex and were turning towards the side passageway that led back to their rooms, that she saw it. A group of very strangely attired house elves were standing near several suits of armor a little way up the passage. As they drew slowly nearer, one of them, who seemed to be wearing a funnel on its head for some unknown reason, looked up and saw them; a second later, a mass of screaming elves came running at them, waving torches and small kitchen implements. They glanced at each other briefly, then, as a vase smashed into the wall just over her head, spraying her with fragments of porcelain, Delaia spoke for them all. "Run!"
* * *
Apollo didn't need to be told twice. Hiking up her robes, she sprinted down the corridor, towing a still befuddled Severus with her. She now wished she'd used slightly less energy on that stupefy charm, as she would prefer him more fully awake. Unlike what was probably true of the others, Apollo knew precisely what was wrong with the elves as soon as she saw them. What she couldn't figure out is how they obtained the deinhibitor, and why it had affected them so strongly. It was, after all, a fairly mild solution that should have simply made the Durmstrang champions ignore their instructions to go to bed and get a good night's rest before the next tournament event. Instead, they would have been up, doing whatever they did for fun, and hopefully exhausting themselves. The elves, on the other hand, were acting as if they'd drunk a bucket of undiluted serum each. Damn that stupid Gryffindor-couldn't he even drug someone correctly?
Apollo glanced behind her and noted that the crazed creatures were gaining. Delaia had slowed a couple of them down with a few well-placed impediment charms, but there were just too many to deal with individually. What they needed was to get a counter agent into their bloodstreams, and fast. A moment's reflection decided the issue, and she whispered a plan quickly to Delaia, who nodded her comprehension.
"Go. I'll cover you."
Unwilling to leave Severus behind, especially in his condition and with Delaia having two exhausted boys to see to, Apollo dragged him with her. They ran around a bend in the hallway, then ducked into an empty room as soon as they were out of sight of their attackers. Zosimus could hear Delaia hexing their pursuers as they pounded up the corridor after her; when no one attempted to enter the room, she assumed they were safe. "Circe, that was close!" Zosimus leaned against the door in relief. "I think I might have a way to end all this, but we have to get to the kitchens." Peering out the door, she noted gratefully that the coast seemed to be clear. "You wouldn't happen to know any shortcuts, would you? I'd rather not meet up with any more of those little devils if we can avoid it."
When Severus didn't reply, she turned around, only to find herself slammed against the door, his wand at her throat. "All right," he glared, looking very menacing all of a sudden, "who are you and what did you do with Apollo?"
Snape staggered along yet another claustrophobic corridor. If he ever got out of this damned placed alive, he would remain above ground for the rest of his life. He'd even consider moving out of his dungeon rooms at Hogwarts, assuming he ever saw the place again. At the moment, he would not give much for his chances-of that or anything else. True, they had found a back route out of their previous imprisonment, but it had soon become apparent that it was a case of making bad matters worse. This was not surprising: Augusta would hardly have warded her rooms so securely then left the back door open; which meant that they were almost certainly headed further into her cavernous chambers instead of out of them.
The narrow passageway gradually widened, before ending in a door that looked like it was made of burnished bronze. There was an odor in the air, but Severus could not immediately identify it. His sensitive nose twitched as they paused before the portal; something was faintly acrid, yet with a myriad of other smells beneath, too many to name. He did not expect the door to be warded, unless it was a way out of the complex, which considering the direction they had been going did not seem likely. Finally deciding that standing around waiting for some miracle to rescue them was not a good use of time, he pushed on the door and almost immediately regretted it. A foul cloud of suffocating smoke ballooned out at them, laced with who knew how many toxic fumes. He dragged the two boys, coughing and cursing, back up the corridor, but before they could re- enter their old prison, he blacked out.
Coming around what felt to be a good while later, Severus gloomily reflected that it seemed he was still alive, and therefore had to deal with this mess. He sighed, groaned, and pulled himself off the floor. His protesting muscles reminded him that he was truly getting too old for this, and that he'd pay for the day's activities for quite awhile to come. A few more minutes and he'd managed to wake the boys up, although neither looked well. Of course, it was a bit difficult to tell with Valentin, whose appearance was already so off-putting as to be impossible to undermine much further, but Sophicles looked positively green. The creatures in cages near the back of Augusta's workroom, some of which were still alive, also looked extremely ill, but Severus wasn't sure if that had to do with the atmosphere or with whatever tortures to which they had been subjected. He momentarily considered releasing them, but there was no way to know if they would judge this a favor or simply use the opportunity to take out their wrath on his little trio. In the end, he left them where they were, deciding that he would come back for them if he ever found a way out of this himself, and if the risk in doing so seemed acceptable. It was not, he knew, a Gryffindor attitude, but thank God there were no pious Gryffindors around to remind him of it. Snape was grateful that the thought of rescuing any of the strange mixed up creatures in the cages did not apparently occur to the little Hufflepuff.
Eventually, with much bullying from Severus and protestations from the boys, he herded them back up the corridor towards the source of their illness. The door was still partly open and the air foul, but it was breathable, especially after they wrapped handkerchiefs around the lower portion of their faces to cut down on the stench. What effects the poisonous atmosphere might eventually have on them was yet to be seen, but staying around Augusta's storeroom, waiting for death or worse, was obviously the greater of two evils.
When they passed through the door, they entered a ruin of a room. Multicoloured puddles of potions pooled all over the floor, some still bubbling or hissing ominously. Cautioning the boys not to step in anything, Severus gazed around in wonder-even Longbottom on his worse day had never wrecked a room this efficiently. Potions dripped off the ceiling and ran down the walls and glass shards, from what he surmised had once been test tubes, lay scattered everywhere and crunched under his boots as he cautiously moved forward. There was not, that he could see, a whole container of anything left in the room and, if possible, the connecting chamber was in even worse condition. Severus had already begun to suspect where they were-it would make sense, after all, for Augusta to link her storeroom with her menagerie, as they both provided her with raw materials, so to speak, for her experiments. But if that was the case, what had happened to it?
Deciding, after a stunned few minutes, that there was no reason to waste time looking for Tihzeruk venom in this mess, as, even were they somehow able to find it, it would almost certainly have been adulterated, he shepherded the two boys across the dangerous floor to what he devoutly hoped was the main entrance. The unwarded door opened for him easily, and he stuck his head out into the corridor, grateful beyond measure to find that it was indeed the one he and Delaia had traversed earlier that day. Emerging from the room, he let the handkerchief across his face fall but, just as he was taking a breath of, relatively, clean air, he was hit with a stunning spell from somewhere back in the dark recesses of the corridor. Of course, he thought as he blacked out, he WOULD get caught with his goal in sight.
* * * Albus slipped between the rows of celebrating elves with a cautious tread. Augusta, who had remained remarkably level-headed in all the confusion, had pulled an invisibility cloak out of her valise and handed it to him a few seconds earlier, with instructions to untie as many prisoners as possible. "I'll get their wands back, then we'll see about reasserting some order around here," she stated, with the air of someone who believed that the pandemonium had been arranged just to annoy her.
"But, without a cloak, how will you . . . ?"
Augusta merely looked amused. "I was carrying that for the use of a little assistant of mine; I haven't needed such things in quite awhile," a fact she proved by promptly disappearing in front of Albus' eyes. He hadn't even heard her utter an incantation.
He threw the cloak over his head and carefully made his way to the nearest table, the increasing level of chaos aiding him in not being perceived, despite the fact that he bumped into several elves and trod heavily on more than one set of toes on the way. He carefully bent over one of the captives, a teacher by the look of him, and explained the situation. He wasn't worried about the man giving the game away. The Durmstrang people had not impressed him as being nervous types, and besides, the man was gagged. By the time Albus worked his hands free, Augusta was by their side with a bunch of wands she'd liberated from somewhere. Handing the man one at random, she gave terse instructions for him to help Albus release the others; he nodded and hurried to obey. They were only able to free about half a dozen before an elf, slightly less drunk than most of the others, spotted them. Pointing a bony finger in their direction, it opened its mouth to warn its fellows, and suddenly disappeared. It did not look to Albus like it left of its own accord, and he assumed Augusta had had something to do with it.
He and Professor Teplouhov, the man he'd released, spent the next few minutes freeing another dozen wizards and one very upset witch. This last was a tiny, bent old woman with a face like a dried fruit, dressed all in black, her white hair flowing almost to the tops of her antiquated boots. She was, Albus guessed from several of her remarks, some type of head housekeeper, and therefore took the elf revolt as a personal affront. She began laying about her with a gnarled old cane as soon as she was free, and despite Albus' appeals that she stay close beside him where he could protect her, took off through the crowd, scattering elves as she went.
After that, of course, it was impossible to hope that the elves would not notice that they had a problem in their midst, and soon Albus forgot about looking for the old woman as he was bombarded by assaults on all sides. Having given his invisibility cloak to an injured Durmstrang student, who could not have protected himself otherwise, he faced a mob of enraged elves with only Teplouhov and a few other unknown professors around him. Within a few minutes, they were fighting back to back, their little circle dwindling in size as the elves closed in. Another professor dropped at his side, hit with some type of elf version of a stupefy charm-at least Albus hoped that was all he'd been hit with-when he suddenly lost his field of vision as some type of cloth was thrown over his head. He quickly realized that Augusta had enveloped him in her shimmering green cloak and, as the elves almost immediately switched their attention to his remaining companions, he had to assume they could no longer see him.
"I think a strategic retreat might be in order," she whispered in his ear, "the odds are too great here to be sure of success."
"But we can't leave; what about the Headmaster?" Albus had lost sight of the man in the melee, but didn't doubt for a moment that he was still in great danger as soon as the elves took care of the present problem.
He felt Augusta shrug, her body pressed closely up against him. "I never liked him anyway," she murmured. "Come, I'll get you out of here."
"No!," Albus couldn't believe she just intended to abandon her colleagues to what had to be almost certain slaughter. "We have to help them." He turned to face her, as difficult as that was to do in the small confines of their covering. "You go for help-see if there's anyone else available to aid us. I'll stay here and do what I can. They've just been drugged-it may wear off soon."
"And if it doesn't?" Her black eyes glittered in the dark. "Would you be willing to sacrifice yourself to help a group of people you don't even know?"
"I have no intention of sacrificing myself," Albus responded, hoping that was true. "But I won't just leave them."
Something flashed in Augusta's eyes for a minute, but was gone before Albus could identify it. She held his gaze for a few seconds, then smiled. It was, he noted with surprise, a rather nice smile. "Then take this," she fished a necklace out of the top of her blouse and threw its silver chain around his neck. She kissed him, quickly, but on the lips. "I'll go find allies. Have fun." Suddenly she was gone, and her cloak with her.
The cloak must have had some type of charm on it to muffle sound, because it seemed to Albus that, as soon as Augusta left, a wave of noise broke over him. He came out of what felt almost like a trance, and began dodging curses again, yet somehow it was a great deal easier than before. Perhaps the elves were losing coordination because of their inebriation, but then, that had not seemed to cause them problems a few minutes earlier. Albus waded into the melee, smiling as he hexed elves out of his way left and right. Augusta was right-this WAS almost fun.
* * *
"It's Severus." Delaia knelt by Snape and rolled him over, noting that Apollo's curse had certainly had the desired effect, for he was out cold. It also looked like his nose had taken the brunt of the fall; that usually protuberant appendage was now angled slightly to the left. Too bad the spell had hit the wrong person.
"Severus!" Looking appalled, Zosimus dropped to the ground on Sev's other side, "Oh my God, what did I do?"
Delaia couldn't resist. "Honestly, Apollo, you just stupefied him. He'll be alright." Her aunt shot her a dirty look, but didn't reply. Just then, Delaia noticed two other forms, peering out of the ruined lab with pale, frightened faces. With difficulty she identified one as Sophicles. To the filth on the boy's robes from the cave incident had been added several more layers of grime and something sticky that made his hair stand on end; when he took off his glasses to peer at her, two marginally cleaner circles around his eyes made him look like an owl she'd once owned. The figure with him looked even worse, being so grimy that Delaia could hardly make him out at all, especially in the corridor's very poor lighting. It was that last problem that had caused them to mistake Severus, muffled up as he was, for Augusta a moment before. That and impatience, Delaia had to admit. They had both been very tired of hanging about a stuffy corridor waiting for the sorceress to return to her lair.
"It's alright, Sophicles," Delaia reassured him. "It's only us. We, er, got a bit confused and hexed Hieronymus. He'll be ok in a minute."
Sophicles nodded dumbly, but said nothing. Neither did the shadow at his side. Delaia returned her attention to Apollo, who was performing an ennervate charm on Severus. He finally came around, but seemed sluggish and out of sorts. Typical. Delaia couldn't imagine what he'd been up to, but it didn't appear that he had run up against Augusta, so she couldn't believe his day had been any worse than hers. "Come on, let's go," she urged. Now that they had the boys back safely, she wanted to get out of there before the lab's proprietress returned.
"He's hurt, can't you see that?" Apollo asked her testily, while trying to wrap a blue silk scarf around one of Sev's hands that had been scraped in his fall. "Did you kill her?," she asked him eagerly.
"If you mean Augusta, we didn't even see her," he responded, confirming Delaia's assumption while endeavouring to stand up. "Would you please stop that?" He brushed off Apollo's attempts to help him with bare civility. Apollo, far from looking offended, slipped a supporting arm around his waist as they finally climbed out of the corridor. "I am perfectly alright, will you unhand me?!" Delaia was so busy paying attention to Sev's little argument with a still smiling Apollo, who suddenly seemed in a much better humour than she'd been all afternoon, that she didn't immediately notice anything wrong.
It wasn't until they entered one of the main halls of the complex and were turning towards the side passageway that led back to their rooms, that she saw it. A group of very strangely attired house elves were standing near several suits of armor a little way up the passage. As they drew slowly nearer, one of them, who seemed to be wearing a funnel on its head for some unknown reason, looked up and saw them; a second later, a mass of screaming elves came running at them, waving torches and small kitchen implements. They glanced at each other briefly, then, as a vase smashed into the wall just over her head, spraying her with fragments of porcelain, Delaia spoke for them all. "Run!"
* * *
Apollo didn't need to be told twice. Hiking up her robes, she sprinted down the corridor, towing a still befuddled Severus with her. She now wished she'd used slightly less energy on that stupefy charm, as she would prefer him more fully awake. Unlike what was probably true of the others, Apollo knew precisely what was wrong with the elves as soon as she saw them. What she couldn't figure out is how they obtained the deinhibitor, and why it had affected them so strongly. It was, after all, a fairly mild solution that should have simply made the Durmstrang champions ignore their instructions to go to bed and get a good night's rest before the next tournament event. Instead, they would have been up, doing whatever they did for fun, and hopefully exhausting themselves. The elves, on the other hand, were acting as if they'd drunk a bucket of undiluted serum each. Damn that stupid Gryffindor-couldn't he even drug someone correctly?
Apollo glanced behind her and noted that the crazed creatures were gaining. Delaia had slowed a couple of them down with a few well-placed impediment charms, but there were just too many to deal with individually. What they needed was to get a counter agent into their bloodstreams, and fast. A moment's reflection decided the issue, and she whispered a plan quickly to Delaia, who nodded her comprehension.
"Go. I'll cover you."
Unwilling to leave Severus behind, especially in his condition and with Delaia having two exhausted boys to see to, Apollo dragged him with her. They ran around a bend in the hallway, then ducked into an empty room as soon as they were out of sight of their attackers. Zosimus could hear Delaia hexing their pursuers as they pounded up the corridor after her; when no one attempted to enter the room, she assumed they were safe. "Circe, that was close!" Zosimus leaned against the door in relief. "I think I might have a way to end all this, but we have to get to the kitchens." Peering out the door, she noted gratefully that the coast seemed to be clear. "You wouldn't happen to know any shortcuts, would you? I'd rather not meet up with any more of those little devils if we can avoid it."
When Severus didn't reply, she turned around, only to find herself slammed against the door, his wand at her throat. "All right," he glared, looking very menacing all of a sudden, "who are you and what did you do with Apollo?"