Chapter 55: Toil and Trouble
"While you were sleeping," said Albus over a breakfast of scones, "I did some research. Unfortunately, gold's melting point is lower than the temperature of our potion, so the tongs would melt. I think we can enchant the gold to achieve a higher melting point."
"Oh," said Harry. "Am I still going to be able to…what was it…cold-forge them?"
"You could have cold-forged regular gold because it is so soft, but our gold will take on the consistency of steel, and thus have the forging temperature and melting point of steel which is much higher."
"Why can't we enchant the gold after I'm done forging the tongs?" Harry asked.
"I think it's safest if you do all of the work from a certain point, and if I interrupt it with an enchantment, the tongs will be invalidated. And as you are unable to do this type of magic at present, we have no choice but to do it in this order. I'm afraid you will have to learn to blacksmith."
"Blimey…"
Firstly, you will need a large metal object of some sentimental value to you.
"Uh…"
"Steel is probably the best. Wrought iron would also suffice, but I understand that it's more difficult to work with."
"I need to find a hunk of steel that I'm sentimental about?"
"Can you think of anything?"
"What, do you have a hunk of steel that you are sentimental about?" asked Harry incredulously.
"I found myself thinking of pieces of Hogwarts…perhaps some hinge or support beam?"
"I guess we should go find something, then."
They set off walking around the castle. There were very few students left at Hogwarts; most of them had left that morning for the break. Those students who were left were mostly in their common rooms. The castle was fairly quiet for Albus's and Harry's search.
Unfortunately, every hinge they found was too small, and most of the torch brackets were in the dungeon, which Harry was not sentimental about. The castle did not seem to have any support beams made out of metal; the whole structure was stone and magic. They finally reached the great front doors, which did have sizeable hinges and many ornate patterns in wrought iron, but Albus was unable to remove any due to the enchantments on the castle.
"What about the gate?" wondered Harry.
"The entry to the school? Most certainly wrought iron," said Albus, "but even more certainly protected by enchantments."
"Wouldn't hurt to check, though," said Harry. "Fancy a walk?"
They opened the heavy front doors and strode off across the snow-covered lawn.
They reached the front gates. Harry had been thinking of metal all day, and there, in front of him, was the biggest piece he'd seen all day. The wrought iron gates were so intricately sculpted; Harry wondered, for the first time, how it was possible to achieve a design so fluid out of a material so unyielding. Was magic involved? Albus answered him.
"Those were created by muggle blacksmiths back when the castle was created for its original owners."
"I thought the founders of the school built it."
"It was left to the founders by a descendant of the original owners. It was originally commissioned by a very powerful family, the name of which has since been lost."
Harry shrugged.
Unfortunately, as they had feared, the gates were guarded too heavily by enchantments to lift even an ounce from the twisted shapes of metal.
"Damn," Harry swore when Albus stopped chanting. "This is enough metal to make a train, but we can't use any of it."
"Sorry, what was that, Harry?" asked Albus.
"I was just saying it's so frustrating that all of this metal's here but we can't use it. Water, water everywhere but not a drop to—"
"No, about the train…"
"Oh, I know this isn't actually enough metal to make a train."
Albus's eyes twinkled violently and he quickly grabbed Harry's hand, dragged him through the open gates, and suddenly Harry found himself vanishing into the space of apparition.
When they appeared again, they were standing on the train platform in Hogsmeade.
"Wow, I'm not used to apparating like that anymore. What are we doing here anyway?"
"The tracks, Harry. They're solid steel—probably high carbon steel."
"Oh!" Harry thought about it. He was most certainly sentimental about the Hogwarts Express. Even his perimortem dream in the fog with Dumbledore was at platform 9 ¾. These tracks were his path home.
"Can we just…take tracks? Won't that…derail the train?"
"Look over there," said Albus, pointing off to the side of the tracks. There, poking out of a pile of snow, was a piece of unused track. "There are always pieces of track lying unused by the side of a railroad. To make sure it's sentimental enough, we'll use a piece that's in the track already, and put a new piece in its place."
Harry shrugged. "Sounds good to me."
Using Harry's wand, Albus conducted the railroad spikes to loosen themselves from one section of track. The twenty foot rail lifted itself out of place and set itself down onto the platform. Then, Albus levitated one of the pieces of track from the pile, removed the rust with an extra flick of his wand, and set it down where the old piece had been.
"Can you imagine having to lift one of these without magic?" Harry asked, bending over the piece of track. "I bet it would take six…or maybe eight strong people to lift." He put one hand one the rail, grabbed it and tugged, testing just how heavy it was.
To his surprise, he lifted it as easily as if it were made of balsa wood. He lifted the entire twenty foot steel rail off the ground and balanced it in his hand.
"Harry, that is over one thousand pounds of steel."
"It doesn't feel like it. Are you sure it's steel?"
"Harry, this is incredible. Not only can you perform phoenix teleportation, you also have the phoenix's ability to lift immensely heavy loads."
"That's just great. Of course, at this point I'd trade my kingdom for the ability to go to the bathroom without an escort."
They finished putting the new section of railroad into the track and teleported back with the old one ("I'm driving this time," said Harry before he teleported them back his way). The piece of railroad stretched across nearly all of Albus's office. Firstly, they needed to cut it down into appropriately sized pieces. Albus tried using Harry's wand as a torch to cut the metal, but the railroad was too thick.
"I thought I'd try the old fashion way," he said. Harry smirked, laughing at the idea that a magical torch was the old fashioned way. Albus waved the wand and a two foot long piece broke off one end of the track. Albus continued slicing and dicing the metal until he had a pair of identical bars about an inch in diameter and two feet long.
"Excellent," said Albus. "Now we will call Nicolas."
Nicolas and Penny were at home, so Harry teleported himself and Albus there.
"We were just about to leave for a lunch in Costa Rica," said Nicolas. "I'm glad you caught us. I presume you would like to do some alchemy? Do you have the steel?"
Albus held up the two rods of steel.
They opened up the room where the stone was, Harry used the stone to change the steel into gold and they were on their way within ten minutes.
Back in Albus's office, Harry got a house elf to bring them some lunch while Albus chanted over the two, now gold, bars. Albus finished up and joined Harry for lunch.
"The bars are now the consistency of steel. I've tested them with a file. The tooth marks don't show up as much, so the metal has hardened."
He waved Harry's wand twice. A very large and oddly shaped hammer appeared along with a pair of heavy steel tongs.
After they were finished eating, Nicolas showed up at Albus's door and started giving Harry instruction on Blacksmithing.
"First you'll need a space where there are no objects that could potentially light on fire or explode."
Albus waved his wand and a large space cleared in the center of his office. The stone floor was exposed to make a fifteen foot diameter circle.
"Albus, you don't want him blacksmithing in here. Your office will smell like soot for weeks."
"And be covered in soot too, I presume. You said the same thing about the dragon blood, and I cleaned that all up. Proceed."
"Now…here's an anvil." Nicolas waved his wand and a large steel anvil appeared in the center of the space. The anvil was bolted down to a two foot block of wood, which brought the surface of the anvil to just below Harry's waist level.
"And you need a forge," said Nicolas.
"Hold on a moment, Nicolas," said Albus. "Harry…Why don't you try heating the metal yourself."
"Er…ok," said Harry.
He went and picked up the pair of steel tongs and grabbed one of the gold bars with it. He then concentrated on the gold bar, and tried to conjure his phoenix flames.
Immediately, the bar burst into flames.
"Hmm," said Nicolas. "I don't believe it will get hot enough. You have to focus the fire more. Blacksmiths don't use campfires, after all. They use large coal fires with a bellows to direct the flame and pump in more air."
Harry didn't really understand what that would look like, not really knowing what a bellows was, but redoubled his efforts. He focused on making the flames faster, hotter, more concentrated, and the gold began to glow.
"That's good, Harry," said Nicolas. "May I see that for a moment?"
Harry handed him the tongs. Nicolas dropped the tongs immediately with a shout.
"What's wrong?" asked Harry, alarmed.
Albus quickly levitated the bar and tongs and set them down on the anvil so that nobody stepped on them.
"All of the bones in my hand have exploded," replied Nicolas with a grimace. Harry looked to see that Nicolas's hand did, indeed, look like it had been barbecued on the outside and exploded from the inside.
"What? But how?" asked Harry, mostly wondering how Nicolas was still talking instead of shrieking in pain.
Albus appeared next to Nicolas with a tiny vial. He then conjured a seat and pushed Nicolas down into it before carefully pouring the contents of the tiny vial over Nicolas's hand.
"Phoenix tears…thank you Albus," sighed Nicolas. "Yours, I presume?" he asked Harry.
Harry shrugged. "Dono—But why did your bones explode?"
"Steel gets so hot," he explained calmly, "that it can vaporize the liquid in bones so fast that they expand and the bones can't take the pressure, so they explode."
"But the tongs weren't hot."
"They were, Harry. You seem to be immune to heat at the present," said Albus.
"I'm so sorry, Nicolas," said Harry, horrified.
"I've had worse," he replied, flexing his almost-healed hand.
"But…the tongs weren't even glowing!" said Harry.
"Steel can be 700 degrees without turning red," said Nicolas. "Generally, it's important to always test everything in a blacksmith shop before grabbing it. I would have had I been aware of your heat resistance."
Albus put his hand over the gold rod, feeling its heat radiating out.
"Albus—test it with the back of your hand," said Nicolas. "The reflexes in our hands are such that if we touch something hot, our muscles will contract, and we will grab whatever we were testing."
Nicolas spent the afternoon teaching Harry how to blacksmith. Apparently he'd trained under a master for ten years in the early eighteen hundreds. Said master blacksmith required that Nicolas make five hundred points (a short rod with a pointy end) before moving on to hooks (points bent into a hook shape). Fortunately for Harry, Nicolas only required five points.
"I really don't see the point, so to speak, of doing any of these at all," said Harry before making his first point. He had his hammer in his right hand and a pair of tongs gripping a small rod of iron in his left.
"Humor me," said Nicolas.
Harry lay the bit of steel down on the anvil and took a swing at it.
He missed, and the hammer bounced high off the anvil with a resounding bell tone.
Harry muttered something under his breath about bigger pieces of metal probably being easier to hit and swung the hammer again.
This time he hit the metal, but it had already cooled down too much to make any sort of difference. He reheated it with his phoenix fire power and took another few, significantly smaller, swings with the hammer trying to get the end of the piece of steel to resemble a point. When he was done making the point, a good fifteen minutes later, he showed it to Nicolas.
"Good," said Nicolas. "Now make a better one."
By the time Harry was on his fifth point, he could get it done in only two heats (which, Nicolas informed him, was at least twice as long as it takes a "real" blacksmith) and make it look fairly neat.
"Now," said Nicolas, "take this." He handed Harry one of the gold bars. "Work on lengthening it. Switch bars every heat so that they are as similar to each other as possible. Do that until they're both about three feet long and thinner at one end."
"Oh," said Harry. "Ok. How long should that take?"
"I don't know. Maybe a day. Call me when you are done."
"A day?" Harry asked, stricken.
"Well, you're a new blacksmith, so maybe more like two days."
"Great," muttered Harry.
And with that, Nicolas bade them farewell and stepped into the fire and was whisked away.
Harry sighed. "What are you going to do while I'm doing this?" he asked Albus.
"I? I will read." He swept to his chair, grabbed a book, and put his feet up on the desk.
The hours went by marked by the rustling of turning pages and the ringing of the anvil. Twice Harry asked Albus to transfigure him a bigger hammer because he felt like he wasn't making fast enough progress. A heavier hammer hit harder and moved more metal. With Harry's increased strength, he could wield a large sledge hammer in one hand. Regardless, he wasn't finished thinning the metal by dinner, and at eleven, Albus insisted that he stop.
"I can work through the night," said Harry.
"I am sure you can. I, on the other hand, need to sleep and cannot leave you alone."
"Oh," said Harry. "Alright. Er…"
Albus looked at Harry over his half moon glasses and smiled.
"What is it?" Harry asked.
Albus used Harry's wand to conjure a mirror and pointed it at Harry. Harry was covered in little bits of metal and soot. He laughed at his reflection.
"Excellent," said Harry.
Albus pointed Harry's wand at Harry and said "Scourgify!" Harry was immediately clean—and in pajamas.
They chatted their way up the stairs and into the Headmaster's bedroom. Harry worried about the long hours sleeping side by side with Dumbledore, but he was so tired from blacksmithing all day that the second his head touched the pillow he was immediately unconscious.