Chapter Eight.
Pursuit.
James Leslie:You have led me a fine chase, but 'tis over now.
Jasmine de Marisco: Is it?
--Bertrice Small, Darling Jasmine
If you recognize it as JKR's, it's hers; if you don't, it's mine or history's. If you haven't read bestselling romance author Bertrice Small (Skye O'Malley, All the Sweet Tomorrows, Love Wild and Fair, Beloved, Unconquered, etc.,) you should. Major inspiration for this fic, especially the harem scenes, which, I do assure you, are coming in their own sweet time. So to speak. ;)
Draco held the Kitap-an-Dus in his right hand. With his left, he fitted into the open binding the torn half of the page he held, the one with Hermione Granger's drawings of inverted cones and enigmatic equations. At the corner of each page before and after it, the scattering of minute rubies glowed with a pulsing light. There was a gap or two; he wondered if there were more pages missing, and where they might be. Each wave of the light cast a brief red glow over the silent figures gathered in the dungeon. He closed his eyes. The red light illuminated the planes and angles of his face, throwing them into sharp relief between the snatches of darkness. "She's coming closer to the Hogwarts tower," he said at last.
"That's what you think?" asked Lucius Malfoy.
"That's what I know." Draco groped forward with his hand, toward the rubies, and felt the grainlike gems beneath the sensitive tips of his fingers. He could feel Ginny Weasley's presence through them, although he hadn't the slightest idea how. She was walking through a dark dungeon, her face white and strained with fear. He seemed to see the darkness with her eyes and hear the faint, faraway, echoing dripping of water through her ears. "Hermione," she said in a whimper. "Oh God, where are you?"
"Eleven thirty-five," said a low voice behind him, McNair's he thought it was by the Scottish burr. "The operatives will have tae return soon."
"Can you see anything? Hear anything?" asked Lucius.
"She's asking where that mudblood Granger is. I think she's talking to herself, I don't hear anyone else," said Draco.
"What else?"
"Nothing-- I don't think-- wait--" Draco picked up an almost inaudible sound of footsteps. Ginny probably couldn't hear it at all through the sound of her own frightened breathing. "Someone's following her. No--" he forestalled his father's next question "-- I don't think it can be Crabbe and Goyle and Pansy; she'd hear them a kilometre off and so would I."
"Creevey," Lucius said under his breath. "It has to be Creevey. Damn. I told him not to do this-- well, perhaps he can get her, the other Parkinson girl should be with him--"
"Colin Creevey and Ivy Parkinson are our operatives?" Draco asked, trying to keep the surprise out of his voice.
"They have been for months."
"Exactly when was I to be informed of all this?"
"You've known as much as you've wanted to know, Draco."
"And precisely what is that supposed to mean?"
"What have you been doing for the past year and a half?" countered Lucius. "Where have your energies been going?"
Draco winced at his father's old trick of answering a question with a question. In this particular case, however, he couldn't come up with any sort of answer.
"You might have been helping me," Lucius Malfoy continued in a dangerously soft voice. "It took me well over a year to discover the re-animation spell I used. I went further into the study of Necromancy than any living man has ever gone. It drained my powers nearly past repair. But not quite, my son, not quite, and luckily I did have help.."
What sort of help? wondered Draco. And from who?
."Now that our cause is on the rise again, you're happy to return to the fold. But where were you before this?"
Draco could think of no answer to make to that. Should he tell his father that he'd been lying awake in the Slytherin dormitory, night after night after night? Flying his Nimbus 2002 in the cold pre-dawn hours over the Forbidden Forest, swooping and diving and half-hoping he'd damn well crash into a tree and end those endless sleepless vigils? Going through the days as if pixy-mazed, attending classes and taking notes and passing tests with some detached corner of himself, the rest frozen in a sort of suspended animation? Staring out the window of his room and filling page after page of linen parchment with drawings that didn't make much sense, twisted renditions of bird or horse or tree, or disturbing likenesses of the people around him? Towards the end of the past year, he'd been drawing increasingly hideous portraits of the other Slytherins, capturing their malice and cunning and spiritual destitution with a skill that made him deeply uneasy. He'd done only one self-portrait, which he promptly burned.
Or perhaps, Draco thought, he could simply say, I've been waiting, Father, waiting. I've been marking time, drifting through the days. And I think I'd rather die than go through that again, that waiting.
He could have been doing.
But he'd never really believed that a day like this would come.
"Why don't you admit it?" his father was asking in his chiding, disappointed tone."You'd forgotten yourself, and your duties as a Malfoy, as a von Drachen. You'd forgotten your destiny. I'm surprised you didn't simply cast in your lot with Dumbledore, Potter, and the mudbloods."
Draco raised his head. "I'd never do that," he spat.
"Maybe not." Lucius paused. "But you did forget."
Yes, he had forgotten.
Behind him, Draco sensed something very cold, no more than a breath of chill air. He knew it to be the presence of Lord Grindelwald. The Dark Lord wouldn't always apparate to the degree where Draco could see him; it was one of the things he had communicated during the link that afternoon.
But you vill always know ven I am here, the icy voice whispered in his ear, and it was Grindelwald's voice. Ah, my young apprentice, you did forget. There was more sorrow than anger in the words.
"I'm sorry," Draco murmured. "Oh, I'm sorry."
Nothing has been done, that cannot be undone.
"I don't deserve your forgiveness."
No need to humble yourself before me in such a vay. The voice was faintly amused now. I know you are not humble, my apprentice. You do not need to be.
Draco couldn't suppress a smirk at that. But even as one corner of his mouth went up, he saw his mother's eyes on him from across the circle, that great blue gaze that always seemed to hold an inexpressible sorrow. She sighed. He blinked.
"Mother? What is it?"
She shook her head and was silent, but then she was usually silent. Draco was troubled, although he could not have said why. But the dark silk hood of his mother's cloak was drawn over her bent head, and all he could see was the line of her cheek and chin. The moment had been broken somehow, and he no longer felt the link with Grindelwald, at least for now.
There must be close to twenty people down here, Draco thought. Waiting, suitcases in hand. Prepared to go... where? He had not the faintest of ideas, and curiousity was threatening to get the better of even him. But he'd be damned if he'd ask.
Ginny's feet were cold, he suddenly knew. She had no shoes on. Their tender undersides were bruised on the stones of the dungeon floor, and Draco winced when he felt her pain. She had beautiful feet; small for her height, white and rose, the skin like delicate old satin, the toes slender. He pictured himself washing her feet in a silver basin of rose-scented water, running a cloth over the perfect arch of her instep, drying them with a silk towel. Then kissing each one of those graceful toes and running his tongue along their tops, slowly taking them into his mouth, sucking on them, one by one, moving his lips up to the curve of her ankles, and then--
"Draco," said Lucius.
"What?" He recovered himself with an effort.
"You weren't listening."
"I'm listening now," said Draco, not troubling to deny it.
"I should think you'd appreciate an explanation of what's going on," his father said dryly.
He nodded, thinking that it was bloody well about time for one.
"We're Portkeying to the clock tower."
"Seems odd," said Draco noncommitally. "It's close enough to walk."
"Travelling by Portkey first lessens the spatial dislocation. It makes it easier for the human body to adjust to what comes next," said Lucius.
The clock tower... "I think I already know what comes next." Is he really telling me I'm going to have go through that again? Draco remembered the world-consuming pain almost detachedly, but his stomach was clenching into a cold knot. No, that can't be it. Because that would mean he'd have to go through it too, and Father's always been quite a bit more willing to put others through pain than to endure it himself... I should know... no, just stay calm, don't say anything, he wants to tell me, it's practically spilling out of him...
"You're mistaken there." Lucius shook his head. "You went one way. We will go another. The opposite direction, in fact. The path you travelled was quite a bit more difficult, I must admit."
"Difficult," said Draco with a sneer, "is not the word I'd use."
"It's truly regrettable, but it had to be done. You needed to be untraceable during the journey to Malfoy Manor. You can be hidden by Concealing spells once you're here, but even Portkey leaves a signature. There simply was no other way. Dumbledore himself couldn't have found you between one and ten. And for all we know, he tried."
"So how did I get here?" Draco asked flatly, suddenly tired of all the idiotic games.
Lucius smiled. "It's not a question of how," he said, "but when."
Not how, but when... oh damn him, can't he ever just come out with anything clearly and plainly...
The clock tower.
When...
We will go another, the opposite direction, in fact...
When...
It is now the year which is in Western reckoning, 1566...
When...
He looked down at the torn half of the parchment in the book in his hands. The diagrams, the cryptic words, past, present, future... the timelines... the timelines...
And the puzzle fell into place.
"It's a contained wormhole," said Draco. "A time warp." He drew a shuddering breath, and a great excitement bloomed through him like a dark and poisonous flower. "I went forward a bit, didn't I? That's how I got here. But now we're going back in time. To Istanbul. Potter and the mudblood and that lot are trying to do the same thing, aren't they? And they think they're going to get the Jewel of the Harem. But they're not. We are."
And Lucius Malfoy smiled. It was one of his rare, fleeting smiles that lit up his entire face and gave him a beauty that would have made the fallen angel Lucifer, his namesake, sick with jealousy. "Well done, my son," he said. "Well done."
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Finding them was so much easier than Ginny had thought it would be that she was faintly surprised.
"Ow!" she heard Neville yell almost right away.
"Honestly, Neville, do watch your feet," said Hemione.
"I've never liked coming down here," Neville said faintly.
"Shhh." That was Harry; she'd recognize his voice anywhere, and she easily picked out the fourth set of footsteps as Ron's. They were all here! Had they perhaps thought that she'd taken the train on her own? No. They knew that she was being sent to St. Mungo's. Ginny knew that with a sudden, chilling sureness. They must have thought that actual aides were coming to get her; she couldn't believe that they would have known what was really going to happen, of course not. But the question still remained, why were they here?
Now they were moving more quickly, turning right, then left, then right again down the twisting corridors of the deepest dungeons. Ginny struggled to keep up. The darkness actually seemed to intensify until she could barely even see her feet by the ruby light, and her bare soles ached from scrambling along the rough stones of the floor. If she lost them now, she might not be found until the holidays were over. God, to be stuck down here for weeks on end, the darkness closing in on her, the rats creeping closer and sniffling about her, and maybe worse things than rats...
Ginny broke into an almost-run. She actually saw the retreating back of Ron's robes by the candle Hermione held in front of him. Then he vanished through a wall. The hall was empty. As Ginny stood, fighting not to break into wild tears, the footsteps following her came closer. She slipped into a broom closet and crouched on the floor, head between her knees, taking deep breaths.
Through the crack of the open door, she saw the dim outlines of two figures, each also holding a candle.
"I've lost her. These stupid dungeons," said the voice of Ivy Parkinson.
"Try a Finding spell," Colin said.
Ivy pulled out her wand and murmured some words. "Nothing. I might have known. It's too close to midnight; the tower's going to knock out any other sort of magic."
"Where d'you suppose the others are?"
"They've probably left. It's so late."
Colin reached up a hand and rubbed his face. "Damn, my nose is bleeding again."
"If you don't remember how to cast a Disanguination charm properly, that's hardly my fault."
"You don't have to be snippy about it."
"I'll be snippy if I please. The only thing we can do," said Ivy, "is to find the door ourselves. She's going to have to move then, and we'll hear her."
"Well, since we're stuck down here, no point in wasting a nice dark dungeon, is there?" Colin turned towards Ivy Parkinson and the candle in her hand. Ginny could see his smirking, lustful face clearly, a sight she could have lived and died happily without.
Ivy sighed. "Creevey, don't you ever think about anything else?"
His lips paused in their journey towards her neck. "No. Well, photography. I do try to combine the two. It helps to have a darkroom of one's own for that sort of thing."
"What, so you can capture the timeless artistic images of yourself wanking off?"
"Ivy! What about this morning?"
"Quite the most exciting two minutes of my life, I'm sure. Anyhow, I saw you with Weasley! You'd take anyone."
"I do fancy redheads," said Colin. "I'm just following Malfoy's lead in that, you know."
"Likely," said Ivy with a trace of bitterness in her voice. "He never has anything to do with them."
"You don't know that story about him and his French cousin in St. Tropez last Christmas hols, do you?" Colin's voice was very superior. "She was one, I've heard... he loves them, and hates them. Honestly, Ivy, you're better off with me--"
The sound of fumbling hands. Then a slap. "Stop it," whispered Ivy. "We've got work to do. It should be right about here."
Ivy pulled a large glass bottle from beneath her robes. She unstoppered it and shook out something across the wall; Ginny couldn't be sure in the near-total darkness, but she thought it was a glittery substance. It hung suspended in the air much longer than it should have. Then it scattered itself across the wall in a deliberate pattern. It was a door.
"I knew it," said Ivy with some satisfaction. "A good Revealing potion works every time."
"Calls for a celebration, don't you think?" Colin pushed Ivy up against the wall. "Come on, Ivy, a knee-trembler, anything, after all I've done for the cause--"
Ivy was trying to push him off her; Colin was pressing her back to the stone, and neither of them was paying much attention to anything else. Ginny wrenched herself out of the closet and ran through the shimmering door. Their yells of surprise followed her into the dungeon.
Ginny's hands were glowing slightly green from the potion that had rubbed off onto them, and she able to see everything in the room. It was small and cramped, the walls dripped with cold, mossy damp, and there was nothing at all in it except for an old bicycle tyre lying in the middle of the floor. But there was a sharp ozone smell in the air, which was still crackling faintly. Without hesitation, Ginny grabbed the tyre, praying that she'd gotten to it in time. The sudden yank behind her navel told her that she had. But just as the Portkey began to pull her away from the dungeon, she saw Colin and Ivy bursting through the wall and stretching out their hands towards it as well.
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"Ten of twelve," said McNair. "There's nae mair time tae waste, Malfoy."
"We need those operatives back, McNair," said Lucius.
There was a shuffling of feet and a sound of indistinct murmurs as a nervous restlessness spread through the room. The plan had met a hitch.
"We'll leave without them if we must," said Lestrange in his high, nasal voice. "This is cutting it too close for my comfort as it is."
"If we leave without the Weasley girl..." muttered Lucius, breaking off in mid-sentence. He seemed to be considering something.
In the pause, the air crackled. Crabbe, Goyle, and Pansy Parkinson Apparated with a pop. Pansy looked furious, Goyle was red with rage, and Crabbe bore his usual resemblance to a block of uncarved wood. No-one else was with them.
"Where is Ginny Weasley?" demanded Lucius.
"We lost her," said Pansy.
"I do not take kindly to failure," Lucius said, but Draco had the odd feeling that he wasn't nearly as angry as he pretended to be. "But there's no time to talk about it now. Come and come quickly." He moved forward, towards a long white silk sheet draped over the obsidian altar. In the still-pulsing light of the rubies, it resembled a winding sheet, a shroud for the dead. The circle closed around it.
They don't have Ginny Weasley, thought Draco with a sort of incredulous fury. I should've known. Trust that lot to botch it up! Bloody hell! Why didn't they send me? I'd have had her back here, all right! He was filled with the baffled frustration he'd felt when he was ten years old and was told he couldn't go to the grand Christmas gathering of his Malfoy and Tessier cousins in the south of France because he'd had that ignominious Muggle disease, chicken pox. Draco had pouted and whined for weeks, hexing every house elf who came into his room or even walked past his door. How dare fate keep something from him that he wanted so much?
But this, of course, was worse; he was nearly seventeen, not ten, and he wanted Ginny in a way that was anything but childlike. The frustrated hunger in his body seemed to follow him all the way through the Portkey. Unbidden, it mingled with his hurtful memories of the scent of salt roses one year before in St. Tropez, and of the dark golden eyes of his cousin, Marie-France Tessier.
Desire.
J'ai envie de toi... she had whispered to him, her copper curls falling over her bare shoulders as he knelt before her and she fell back against her bed as if in a swoon.
Deception.
J'ai besoin de toi...
Betrayal.
Plus profond, plus forte, vite, vite, mon cherie, mon Draco!
And, with a great rush in his head like the roar of the sea outside her villa in the south of France, he tumbled into the Malfoy clock tower.
When Draco opened his eyes again, he was at the bottom of a twisting staircase, the air smelling of dust and old, dried wood. The dark cloaked figures ahead of him were moving steadily up the stairs.
"I was never comfortable with the idea of using her," his father muttered to Lestrange, climbing the steps directly ahead of him." Never. I certainly do realize why she was... mumble, but too many things might go wrong."
"Oh, I understand. Believe me, I do. I know what you fear." The other man's voice lowered even further and took on an unpleasantly insinuating tone, but then, Lestrange always sounded that way. "Mumble mumble... can be so... foolish, shall we say, at that age..."
"I quite agree," said Peter Pettigrew's whining voice.
"Exactly," said Lucius Malfoy. "Exactly. How good it is to find... understanding."
Draco wondered exactly what they were talking about. But then he felt long, icy fingers at his temples, and closed his eyes as a surge of energy drained out of him. I wonder what sort of effect this is having on me... well, no time to think about it now... Lord Grindelwald flickered into shape behind him. An uneasy murmur went up and down the stairs. None of them could see the Dark Lord apart from Draco, but there was no mistaking his presence in the tower.
Grindelwald asked in a silky voice. "You vould replace Ginny Veasley vith some other girl?"
"It would be simpler," said Lucius. "Ginny Weasley is an unknown quantity in so many ways; there are too many secrets surrounding her, too many mysteries that all my efforts have not been able to crack."
"You believe that Pansy Parkinson vould be better, perhaps?"
"Yes, yes!" said Lucius, sounding relieved. "She is a known quantity. We need fear nothing... unpredictable with her. With the Weasley girl, on the other hand, anything at all might happen. You know of what I speak."
Grindelwald shook his head in mock disappointment. "You do not trust me, my friend. How very disappointing that is."
"I don't mean that at all, only that-- ahhh--" Lucius suddenly stopped on the stairs, clutching at his left arm, his face grimacing as if in near-unbearable pain.
"You have already one mark from your old master," Grindelwald said softly, continuing to drift up the staircase. "You vill soon have mine-- if I believe you vorthy of it."
"I am, my lord, I am!" said Lucius. Draco thought with a faint trace of amusement that his father was starting to sound the way he always had when he used to grovel before Voldemort in the old days. "I mean, I will be, I don't doubt you, never think that--"
"Enough." Lord Grindelwald raised his hand in a sideways motion, and Lucius Malfoy staggered forward, breath hissing through his teeth. "See that you do not, my friend."
Draco caught his father's eye and smiled smugly. "The Dark Lord didn't look pleased, Father," he said in an undertone as the group crowded into the clock room at the top of the stairs. "I thought I'd keep you informed, since, of course, nobody would know apart from myself."
"Remember what I have told you, my son," Lucius replied. "The unfledged dragon should not try his wings too soon." In the near-total darkness of the clock tower, his face was impassive. Can you challenge me yet? it seemed to ask.
No... Draco thought reluctantly. Not yet. But the day will come, Father. The day will come.
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Ginny was in a small square room with a dirt floor, and a steep spiral staircase went up into darkness before her. She could hear many footsteps clattering up the wooden stairs far ahead of her. Behind her, Colin appeared with a pop and grabbed the back of her robes. Ginny ran up the stairs as fast as she could, ignoring Ivy's hissing as she appeared as well. She stumbled up the stairs, sobbing; once her foot caught painfully on a nail and Colin came within a hairs' breadth of seizing her, but she jerked her ankle loose and his hands closed on empty air. Her thigh muscles burned and the stitch in her side was a burning brand, but she had to keep going, keep climbing. What am I going to do once I get there? she wondered.
Then suddenly Colin's hand seized her. She kept struggling forward, dragging him; Ivy was pulling at her hair and both of them were pushing her on at the same time. They had all reached the top of the stairs. There was a great clockface filling the whole of the far wall, and the clockworks attached to it were making a whirring sound before striking. Ginny elbowed Colin in the neck and he fell back.
The clock began to strike. Harry, at the head of the group, leaped directly into the clock. Ginny stifled a scream. He had vanished. On the next tolls of the great bell, Ron, Neville, and Hermione followed him.
Now Ivy was holding Ginny's robes in both her hands, and although she was small and delicate, her nails were very sharp. Ginny thrashed back and forth and managed to break free. Ahead of her, the last person was moving towards the clockface, walking with a limp, and she saw the nimbus of grizzled hair about his head. It was Professor Moody. Then he, too, was gone, on the tenth stroke of the clock.
Colin's hands were on her again as Ginny desperately tried to go forward. He was holding her back by pulling on all the loose material in her robes. She could hear the beginning of the eleventh toll of the clock.
"No! No!" she shrieked. "Let go of me, let--" There was an enormous ripping noise from behind her, and suddenly she was free. Ginny ran forward as fast as she could. The clockface shimmered. The sound of the eleventh toll was beginning to die away. There was no time to think. She launched herself into the air. Behind her, in a last, frantic backwards glance, she saw Colin Creevey, holding her robes in his hands and staring at her with a crestfallen look on his face.
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The tower clock at Malfoy Manor had begun to toll. With each of its basso profundo strokes, another group of cloaked Death Eaters went through the clockface. Some, like McNair, Lestrange, and Notte, wore their uneasy, swaggering bravado like a not-too-convincing disguise, their faces tense with the fear they really felt at walking into the unknown. Some, like Pettigrew, Crabbe, and Goyle, were quivering visibly. Some, like Narcissa Malfoy, seemed to show no emotion at all. Pansy followed the blonde woman, biting her lip and casting glances back at Draco. And some were cloaked so heavily that he couldn't yet tell who they were.
"Have they gone through at Hogwarts yet?" Lucius asked his son in an urgent voice as the clock struck seven.
"I don't know. I can't tell what Potter and the rest are doing. Only her," Draco replied.
Then Lucius rushed forward and he was gone too. But Draco still stood, the presence of Lord Grindelwald behind him, somehow knowing that he couldn't leave until Ginny did. The clock struck ten. What in hell was keeping her? He could still feel the bond between him and her like a thin silver thread. Stretching. Stretching. And then, with a lurch, she was through, and he no longer felt her.
In the space of a heartbeat, Draco knew that he couldn't have been sure he actually would go through with this, not with the memory of the inhuman pain he had felt the last time so fresh in his mind. But Ginny had gone, and where she went, he would go; where she fled, he would pursue. The clock struck twelve. The sound began to die away. And in that moment, he moved forward and followed her through the worlds.
A/N: Pansy's English words are basically a translation of the Turkish ones. Why does Pansy know a Turkish spell, you ask? Ahhhh..... all will be made clear...
When Ginny is tapped on the second floor and she asks who it is, the Bloody Baron replies "I am Lukas von Drachen." He then asks her if the fate of man will repeat itself , again and yet again, and tells her, as he told Draco, to go to the doom appointed for her. Nothing like German for expressing the angst-ridden. ;)
So the journey's begun, thank God! Glad that's done; this was a hard chapter to write and it got revised about 8,000,000 times. Now things will just get more and more interesting... ;) Next stop: 16th century Scotland. And don't worry, we'll be getting Draco and Ginny back together in the next chapter! But maybe not the way you think. Just to clarify things a bit, Marie-France is not Draco's first cousin; they're second cousins once removed through their grandparents, so it' s not as weird as it sounds. When he goes through the clock tower, Draco remembers her saying to him, I want you, I need you, deeper, harder, faster. Gee, what could she be talking about? Snerk. But why does she look like Ginny? Oh, you'll find out. Eventually. Mwah ha ha. I am so evil sometimes...
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