Harry and the Magic Factory
Chapter 18
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Harry shook the hand of both of the exhibition duelers. The "charms only" demonstration had been enormously fun to watch. The whole thing had taken more than twelve minutes; an exceptionally long time given the average skill level involved. But it was a stretch to the imagination to utilize only charms in an offensive way.
Levitation, silencing, and inverted bubble-headed charms were a given, as were various kinds of confounding, banishing, and summoning charms (attempting to summon the opponent, his wand, his glasses, or even his undergarments was highly effective and amusing) but the most useful realm for charms-only dueling was cooking/gardening charms. In the duel Harry had seen offensive use of a mind-boggling array of seemingly 'inoffensive' charms: vigorous cleansing of someone's face; gardening charms that sprayed dragon dung over a wide area (useful for trying to blind someone); blasting away at an opponent with vigorous streams of water; coating an opponent in dye; attempting to sear an opponent like a steak with a grilling charm; coating an opponent in fast-drying cement and blasting it with water; throwing vegetable peeling and cleaning charms around…
"Not sure I'll look at dinner quite the same way, again," Harry muttered to himself.
It was time for the start of the third round of duels: the round of twelve. Harry had eleven brief duels to blast through in the next forty or fifty minutes. He was planning on testing out some new ideas, especially silent casting that created no visible magical presence. No streaks of light, nothing to warn that a spell was incoming.
He hoped his opponents would appreciate the work he'd put in designing these new variations.
Harry wandered back toward the smaller dueling rings. Then he listened for the first draws of the round: "Moody and Black. Derwent and Lestrange. Karkaroff and Potter…"
Harry stopped listening after that. Igor was always interesting to duel, but he'd sat out last year's tournament for some unexplained reason.
Harry walked to his assigned dueling ring and prepared. For Karkaroff, Harry would use straight and overwhelming power. He'd save the newly designed effects for someone who could appreciate stealth and subtlety.
Igor entered the ring. He carried his seventy years well, still. Karkaroff prepared for the count.
"Three. Two. One." The spells began flying fast. Harry redirected many of them; two of them he turned completely back on Karkaroff. The vassal felt the sting of each. Harry launched into a pummeling line of silent, wandless casting. Freezing one of Karkaroff's fingers; heating another one up. Petrifying one of his feet; and sending a shocking burst of pure pain into another.
Karkaroff escalated. He sent a half dozen cutting and bludgeoning hexes toward Harry. Harry just turned them all away, each of them finding a permanent home in the protective wards around the ring. Karkaroff got nastier still, but he wasn't moving at all. He just stood at his end of the ring like a giant lump, a very easy target.
So Harry escalated his attacks. He started multiple-casting.
Instantly one of Karkaroff's hands was an undersized wing. He slumped toward the ground because his center of gravity shifted so quickly. And then Karkaroff felt three more spells impact. He felt a suffocation curse tear at his airway. The pain from his midsection suggested he was suffering from a chest-crushing spell – or maybe a pain curse that had hit him near his sternum. And he fell to the ground because of a tripping jinx.
His wand fell from his partially frozen, partially overheated left hand. He looked like a muggle science project gone awry.
Harry summoned away the man's wand, bound him, and then released his transfigurations and curses.
Thirty-one seconds, good but not a great response. Karkaroff was better at handling pain than he had been before. He was still training. Good.
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Amelia Bones had never seen people move like this – or spells fly with that kind of speed or variety.
Her Aurors – the ones she'd trained and supported, the ones who had abandoned their principles and mostly fallen into line with the encroaching darkness within the Ministry – would have been slaughtered to a man if they went up against wizards like these.
She smiled. It was a marvel to watch Alastor Moody against his second opponent, a Wilhelm Jigger
Alastor was dueling with two wands, as was his specialty, and he was really moving, leaping, jumping, and rolling around, inside that circle. He'd only been hit a few times. And that Jigger was really pumping out the magic.
She watched the short, three minute duel with awe. Alastor was using defensive techniques she'd never seen before. He was actually redirecting already cast spells and crashing them into the shields surrounding the duel. And his offensive spells were things she'd never heard of. He only spoke the incantation for one of every three spells he cast, but she couldn't identify a single one of them.
"What have they done here? How can they have advanced so far in just fifteen years?"
More than one citizen of the Potter Estate heard her comment and smiled. They knew the answer; it was for Amelia to discover the truth for herself.
She watched Moody fell his opponent using a flurry of non-lethal spells. She could see him ratcheting up his combat easily, switch from tripping and stunning jinxes to cutting and burning curses. Moody could be lethal. It was mind boggling.
She hadn't really believed what her niece Susan had told her. She had hoped it might be true, but she really hadn't believed it. But, being here, seeing all of this. Her mind was in turmoil. Moody could take on – and defeat – and entire twelve-person company of her Aurors now. Any of these duelists she'd seen could defeat or kill at least four or six of her best trained Aurors.
"What stops people with this much power from taking over Britain," she muttered, not quite to herself.
It was a comment on herself and on the culture she'd grown up in that she couldn't immediately answer her own question. It took a certain kind of evil to lust after conquest, after all, and a certain kind of reserved honor to push power towards neutral or even positive ends. In Amelia's black and white world, all power was used for sinister or doubtful purposes: Fudge, Umbridge, the Zabinis, and Dumbledore perhaps most of all.
Only in the back of her mind did a little turn of phrase pop up: "Watch what they do, not what others say."
Amelia Bones wandered from circle to circle then. She was looking for Dark Arts curses, for pain curses, for unhealable cutting curses, for signs of corruption that might have infiltrated the educational systems here. But she saw nothing.
Still, with an Auror's zeal, she wandered between the dueling circles looking for evidence. She was looking for the lie that would prove all this, the idea, the stories her niece had told her, all the high idealism – she was looking for the lie to prove all this false.
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Bracus Snape was seated in the last seat in the last row of the small room where his father would be tried and sentenced. He was wearing a cloak over his head and face. He wanted to hear and see without his presence possibly influencing his father's words. A lot of the crud in his head had been cleared out in the last few days, like a rotted carcass swept away in a rainstorm.
The room wasn't very full, just a few interested souls, a few who knew the Snape name from before the creation of the Potter Estate, a judge, the jury of seven citizens, and an absent defendant. One last person came in before the door behind them all sealed. He was Bracus' healer, or at least the apprentice who had performed most of Bracus' treatment.
Diggory, one of the families nearly ended in the war. Hmm, Bracus was recalling more and more nowadays. His father had mentioned them a handful of times and never with any fondness.
Bracus heard noises coming from the front of the strange room. A door opened and three people came out, Severus Snape and two minders. Severus slumped into a chair and scowled at everyone and everything in the room.
And that was before anyone felt the Truth-Compelling Wards snap into place throughout the room. Even Bracus suddenly wanted to make a full confession about every infraction of the rules he'd ever committed – and that was quite a few.
Severus went ghastly pale and seemed like he was having trouble breathing.
The judge sitting at a table across from Bracus' father just rolled his eyes. "Let's get this underway. My name is Teodor McFusty and I am the jurist for this proceeding. Today we will be trying Severus Snape for a variety of crimes, first as a liege man to the late Tom Riddle, secondarily for his attack on the Potter Emporium at Diagon Alley, and thirdly for his abuse of his son which led the son to commit his crimes while here."
Bracus hadn't expected that last part. He wanted to curl up in his chair and die. At least no one knew that he was in the room at the present moment. It was just mortifying. But, perhaps, Bracus might gain something in listening to his father's explanations. Never apologies, rarely explanations, but Bracus knew that these people and their wards would force Severus to speak.
"The truth wards are in effect, so none of us – jurist, jury, witness, or defendant – may lie inside this space. Mr. Snape, please tell the jury the date when you received your Dark Mark."
Bracus was impressed by the question. It was designed not for a yes or no answer, which might have been easier to lie about. It asked for specific information that would quickly confirm Snape's role as a Death Eater.
Severus struggled against the question for a good long while. But eventually, "July 2, 1977" was what he spat out.
He'd just convicted himself. Bracus sighed in relief. He'd been so scared when all this news had first hit him. He'd believed he really was indebted for his life to his father and to that Headmaster. But, as the barriers inside his mind crumbled, Bracus saw what he really was. Convenient. Suitable for sacrifice. A pawn in an idiot's chess match. Utterly reprehensible.
"And what specific methods did you use to avoid becoming a vassal to Tom Riddle?"
Snape was so confused by the question he didn't try to fight it.
"None, of course. I didn't fight it. Anyone who didn't want the mark would die when it was applied; it was the Dark Lord's cruelest method of killing someone. It took hours for the person to finally expire if they truly didn't want the mark."
"So," Jurist McFusty continued, "you wanted to receive the Dark Mark?"
Severus nodded.
"Tell us what you had to do for your Initiation, Mr. Snape."
Severus was back to scowling now. He resisted the truth wards for a long time before he finally spat out an answer. "I burned down a house with four Muggles inside it."
Bracus felt that his breakfast was about to come back up. It was so much worse knowing the truth than he'd expected. How could anyone? A house? Defenseless people burned to death, because of his father, because of that hopped-up halfblood Tom Riddle…
"And how many of them were children?"
The answer was instantaneous. "Three of them."
Bracus stopped breathing for a second. How could this man have ever been a father?
"Moving on, please explain the poison you developed to kill the Oompahs, or house elves, employed by the Potter Emporium."
Severus spoke for a few minutes on the concoction, delivering more than enough information to fully confirm his guilt. Jurist McFusty asked several follow on questions before he moved on to the final line of questioning.
"Describe the effects of the indoctrination potions you used on your son, Bracus."
Severus sat, unmoving, in his chair until he appeared to have suffered a silent stroke. Finally, the cumulative efforts of the wards forced Severus into an answer that no one liked.
"The potions that I used, and that Albus Dumbledore helped me to refine, were traditional for the Prince family. I was subjected to many of them as was my mother, Eileen. They make it advantageous for a family member to learn the family history, to adopt the family credo, and to observe the family's political and ethical beliefs…"
The Jurist stopped Snape at this point. "Explain what you mean by 'make it advantageous,' Mr. Snape."
"Well, you feel no pain when you're following the family's guidelines. When you attempt to think otherwise, it's rather unpleasant. Nausea, pain, in severe cases temporary blindness…"
The smattering of folks in the room were not pleased by this revelation.
"And did you accompany this indoctrination potion with other means of reinforcement? Physical means?"
Snape nodded. "Of course, the potion isn't strong enough on its own. Don't you know anything about pureblood practices?"
"Enlighten the jury…"
And, with that, Severus forgot everything he knew about self preservation. He laid out the entire schema: how to corrupt and destroy an innocent mind in forty-seven steps. Most of them were gruesome to a fault.
"…and if the child isn't sufficiently cowed by being placed under the Cruciatus, then one progressed to illusions of others under Cruciatus, friends, favorite relatives, favorite pets… yes, pets seem to work especially well with the very youngest children, think they're supposed to be the master, supposed to protect their own pets… so they end up giving over their own souls to protect their illusions of pets being tortured, yet it's only a very strong willful child who needs to progress this far down the path… of course, Bracus was such a child, a delightful, sweet, cheerful beast until he was four, still asking questions at the age of seven, a particularly difficult child to reign in…"
Here Jurist McFusty stopped the testimony. He looked positively ill.
"Mr. Snape, we've heard enough now of your family's traditions. We've also heard that you have nothing to say in mitigation of your work with the Death Eaters or your attack on the Oompahs. Do you have anything to say for yourself regarding your treatment of your son?"
The wards in the room wouldn't let Severus lie. So he remained silent.
"Fair enough. The charges have been read and the evidence heard, members of the jury, please commence your deliberation."
A silencing ward rippled up and blocked the words of the jurors from everyone else. But Bracus Snape didn't care. He was still shivering and trying to keep from crying out in pain. All those things his father had said, all those things done to him. Just listening to his father admit these things had further torn down the memory charms Bracus had forced upon him. As Snape discussed these horrid practices, Bracus could suddenly remembered what everything looked like, what it felt like. He could remember months when all the little animals near Prince Manor seemed to undergo horrible torment whenever Bracus set a foot out of line. Even if it was an illusion, it was still horrifying.
Bracus had everything he needed now. He knew the measure of his father. He would neither forget nor forgive. No, he'd do his father one better. He'd simply ignore his father, the brutalizer of his youth. He'd embrace life as a squib and ignore everything that Snape and Dumbledore had tortured into him.
What better vengeance than to silently destroy a man's plans, to end his family's horrible practices toward children? To be as well adjusted and happy as possible in light of his upbringing… That was revenge.
The Jurist silenced the room again. The Jury had completed its deliberations. As a group they stood up and said, "Guilty on all counts."
That was when Severus woke back up. He fought off some of the effects of the truth wards, the powerful spells that had compelled him to tell the whole truth of his situation, even if it was against his own self interest.
"How can that be a trial? You asked me twelve questions…there was no Wizengamot, no barristers, no other people testifying other than myself. I demand true justice," he shouted, before Jurist McFusty silenced him.
"Justice here is swift, accurate, and fair, Mr. Snape. We need no witnesses other than yourself under the influence of the truth wards. We need no adversarial process as you described because it only introduces lies into the process. You yourself were given an opportunity to mitigate your crimes but were unable to tell us something truthful. And, as Lord Potter told you, all Death Eaters, plus any who would attack us directly, fall under our jurisdiction. You will remain silent as I describe the penalties for your crimes, Mr. Snape."
Bracus swallowed. He hated his father, hated him with every atom of his existence. But he hoped his father would live. He hoped that these people would leave his father his life, and only his life. Bracus wanted his father to live, to remember, and to feel pain for another hundred years or longer. He wanted his father to know how much Bracus was going to reject the Prince-family traditions.
Jurist McFusty looked at Snape. "For accepting the Dark Mark of Tom Riddle, you are made vassal to Lord Potter. Your assets, holdings, titles, inventions, and patents now all belong to him. Your life also belongs to him, although he may further assign you as he wishes…"
Bracus sighed. It wasn't a death penalty.
"…a full recounting of all your Death Eater activities will be taken so that reparations may be made to your victims. For your crime of attacking the Oompahs of Potter Emporium, you are convicted and will be turned over to them in due course…"
Bracus hadn't even thought of the house elves getting justice. Did they have a form of capital punishment for attacks against them? Anxiety built up again inside Bracus.
"…and, for your brutal attacks against your son, Bracus, you will make full reparations with the only remaining asset you possess. Your magic will be stripped from you and given to your son…"
Bracus started choking on his own spit. It was only the swift action of that Diggory fellow that kept Bracus from dying right then. Diggory gave Bracus two swift thumps to his back. "Thank you," he muttered after he was human again.
Magic. He never thought he'd have magic. It was, in theory, possible for his own core to refill with magic. But it sounded like his core itself was damaged. Now… to possess his father's magic. Bracus didn't know what to think.
Severus Snape, of course, did know how to react. His howls and screams were completely silent as he was still under a silencing spell. Vicious streaks of tears lit up his abnormally pale face.
The Jurist ordered the room cleared so that further interrogation, and reparations, could be made. Bracus felt Diggory's hand when Diggory pulled him from the room. "It wasn't what I expected either, Bracus," Cedric said. "I'm sorry for what he did to you. And sorry for what seems the only way to give you back your magic. But I know you, the real you, well enough to hope you'll make good use of this very rare gift."
The pair talked as they returned to the room where Bracus Snape was staying. Cedric had a lot of things to tell Bracus.
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Colin Creevey was having the time of his life. His younger brother was here. His camera was here. And he was taking some incredible photographs that no one would ever believe. Not least of all that rag, the Daily Prophet.
Luna Lovegood was talking to the other Apprentices when Colin showed up in their little grouping near the front of the largest dueling circle. "…Daddy was so bemused by what the Prophet kept printing about me and all of you that he actually decided to shelve our issue on the eleven varieties of Snorkacks. We'd managed to collect pictures of all but the Crumple Horned variety, too. But, he'll put that issue out soon. And he had so many new readers now…"
"I was so angry," Colin said. "They made up all these quotes attributed to me. They described things we'd never seen. Like saying I was appalled by what I saw of the treatment of house elves here, beaten to within an inch of their lives. I can't believe they'd just start lying like that."
Luna looked surprisingly 'with it' upon hearing Colin's words. "They've been making up stories – and hiding others – forever. I think the Ministry actually owns a part of the paper. And that goblin-eating Fudge certainly has dossiers on all their staffers and editors. Tiny little man pulling strings on even smaller marionettes, right?"
Fred and George smiled. They knew that there was more to this Luna than their sister, Ginny, ever saw. Quite a bright girl, perhaps even mischievous.
Susan Bones spoke up then, "My aunt couldn't even control what they decided to print. She'd haul them into court when they libeled someone, but then they'd get pardoned or something. That Fudge and his cluster of advisors, oooh, they make me so mad. My aunt's a smart woman but Fudge treated her better than a secretary. As if she hadn't been an Auror for forty-two years; as if she couldn't crisp his arse in a duel any minute of any day…"
"Making these people out to be renegades or proto-insurgents or what-not. It's more slander and libel. There's no Dark Lord so there has to be some kind of evil enemy lurking around to ensure the Ministry can keep up the vile things it's doing. Even they need an excuse and that misnomer for journalism called the Daily Prophet is happy to provide it. And, of course, the sheep who read it just believe it. Even the ones who shop at the Potter Emporium badmouth the place when they're not inside it. And that 'security station' they set up outside the place. Don't they have a single lick of subtlety in that whole building," Luna was on a roll.
Then a massive sound filled the air. The new Apprentices figured the final round of the Dueling Tournament was now underway. The first and second placers would duel to ensure that they were in their proper ranks.
Harry Potter versus Alastor Moody.
Colin had his camera out. His brother Dennis, soon to be of the Potter School, was pointing at everything he saw. Colin kept snapping away even though most of the duel was actually invisible. Invisible even to that bizarre magical eye Moody wore.
For Harry Potter's first action after bowing to his opponent was to completely disappear from view. Colin captured a wonderful image of Moody's magical eye spinning like a child's top trying to see where he'd gotten to. He obviously hadn't left the dueling ring – as that would have signaled a victory for Moody – but the blasted eye couldn't spot the young man through his invisibility.
More than one witch or wizard thought, 'How is that possible?'
Then Colin's camera caught the most incredible images.
Moody's magical eye summoned from out of his head. Landing just outside the magical barrier.
Moody hit by seven curses at the exact same time. He clutched at his guts while his hair sprouted tulips and he began vomiting slugs.
The Moody hit by a number of seemingly invisible spells, to more gasps from the audience. Moody's clothes changed colors, his feet were transfigured into tentacles, and his wand hand was encased in a giant block of ice.
Finally, Harry had made himself visible once again, fashioned ropes to bind Moody, and stunned the poor man. Then Harry quickly put the man to rights: returning his body to its original shape, returning the man's eye, and finally restoring the man's consciousness.
"Blast and double blast," Moody shouted. "Couldn't do a sodding thing. Constant vigilance, my pockmarked arse. I just curled up like a scared schoolgirl, Potter. Excellent work. Intimidating as all hell."
Colin captured pictures of it all. Harry maintained his number one ranking. Twenty-two seconds in all. Moody, of course, got a five minute break before defending his second place ranking against Sirius Black.
And Harry walked off the stage after smiling, bowing, and nodding to his audience. And he just disappeared again.
"Now that's magic," George said.