Interview with the Slytherin Childe
Part III: The Ministry Attacks – and Harry Fights Back
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Harry Potter pushed his way deep into the bowels of the school. He walked past where Godric Gryffindor had created his private dueling chamber, his secret library (although the man had obviously not been much of a reader given the paucity of titles and the small number of shelves still visible), and his bed chambers.
He walked on the underground path, seventy feet below the earth, that corresponded with the ward lines the Founders of Hogwarts had created ten centuries earlier. He was on familiar ground again. He, along with Serah the Ancient, had explored all these tunnels many times over the years. Just a few days earlier, in the early morning before he'd 'conquered' Hogwarts, he'd improved all the wards to the point where next to nothing could penetrate. Nothing, excepting for pure energy…those bastards!
"Bombs! It has to be Muggle bombs."
Harry was still incredulous. No potions could achieve that kind of damage; not unless they'd been brewed up by the bathtub-full. Bringing bombs – Muggle bombs – into this called for severe reprisals. These Muggles, along with the Ministry, would learn why interference was a bad policy.
Harry fumed as he thought over his longer range plans. Serah always hissed that he should plan three times before even taking a single breath in an unfamiliar location. Setting up a war was far different from walking into an unknown room…
"Bah!"
A massive rune stone floated behind him as his mind twisted and turned through the complications and options. It was one of the four dozen warehoused, unused rune stones from the original construction of Hogwarts. He'd found them years earlier in a partially concealed corridor near to where Godric Gryffindor had built his rooms. Even though they hadn't been put to use, they'd been soaking up ambient magic for a millennium. They were enormously powerful magical items.
He walked quickly until he came to a niche that had long before been created in the tunnel wall. He carefully placed the runestone into the space that had been left for this 'last resort' style rune. Once Harry turned a rune stone on in this location, according to the original warding plans, the entire Forbidden Forest would come under the jurisdiction of Hogwarts' own wards, plus any other schema meant just for the Forest.
He carefully inscribed in his own blood the first set of wards he wanted erected around the Forbidden Forest. He didn't have time to put the whole set into action – he was supposed to be fending off a Ministry attack right now – but he got the most important ones into effect.
Blood wards were powerful magic. Harry was now the only one who could ever bring them down. The Founders had erected the earliest of their wards in similar ways, but they hadn't been as cunning or as absolute.
Outside in the Forbidden Forest, every single human present, all of them employees of the Ministry, fell insensate to the ground. Humans of every sort – wizards, squibs, and Muggles – would not be able to walk about in the Forest any longer. At least until Harry put in the more nuanced components to the wards.
Harry turned around when he heard something coming from behind. He smelled the air. It was Serah. She was coming to check up on her pupil, it seemed.
"The wizards are stupid," she hissed.
"Had you any doubts?"
"Only on the timing, my youngling. Stupid or cruel people always demonstrate the depths of their stupidity and cruelty; they can't help themselves." She sampled the air in the corridor. Serah was perhaps more paranoid than Harry was. "Did you put on a show for your vile-writer?"
Harry smiled and nodded. "She'll do. She was dumb enough to cross the wards, or try, after being warned. She'll serve her purpose just fine…"
"And after?"
"We'll see," Harry said. "I think her fear has conquered her other instincts for the time being. Hopefully it will be enough to keep her in line. I don't have time to babysit – or to have you or one of my other snake-friends do that task…"
"I'd rather bite her than watch her…"
"I think I would prefer it, too. But the book she'll write is necessary before we begin the other work."
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Cornelius Fudge was sitting with baited breath in the well-hidden lower level of the Department of Mysteries, the never-discussed Operations Section. He himself had only visited the place four times in his tenure. It wasn't something people talked about, thought of, or even imagined. Fudge himself had been forced to learn Occlumency after his election before he could be informed of the section's existence or updated on any of its projects and plans.
As the muggles say, an old dog don't like to learn new tricks, especially Mind Magics. So true, Fudge remembered his nearly impossible struggles… Not that he considered himself old or a canine or anything. The general sentiment was appropriate, however.
But today Fudge was thinking about the Operations Section and the lower level of the Department of Mysteries. Today that secret portion of the Ministry was the center of the Reclaim Hogwarts operation. The top twenty operators had been mixed in with other skilled cursebreakers and Aurors – all under the most strenuous of secrecy oaths – and the head of the Operations Section was leading the operation from the command post in Hogsmeade. Fudge was with everyone else in the Section – observing, noting, and trying to spot failures or problems as they came along.
So far it was absolutely textbook. Cursebreakers from three directions throwing everything they had against the wards – then the release of the eight Muggle bums, or was it boombs? – from the north. The shockwave of energy had certainly been enough to knock down the anti-Floo wards and who knew what else it might have taken down from that nasty cocktail of wards…
Then the search and destroy team floo'd in from Hogsmeade. The top Aurors and the cloaked Unspeakables. It'd be an utter bloodbath. A pity if Albus and the other teachers had to die to reclaim the old school – but doing nothing was earning Fudge record low approval ratings in the polls. Nothing was worse than low numbers, even spilling some innocent blood.
Besides, that Dumbledore fellow finally owned up to the fact he wasn't so lily white, didn't he? Ha! A horcrux. At least Dumbledore had fallen more in the public's regard than Fudge had. Ha!
Fudge leaned back to enjoy the battle. He was secure in the knowledge he was solving the problem.
However, many floors upstairs, Cornelius Fudge's life was becoming infinitely harder. The horcrux spirit of Hannibal Lestrange was currently passing through Cornelius' most secure wards surrounding the small room where his most secret files were hidden away from prying eyes.
But no wards could stop a spirit, not one as powerful as Hannibal Lestrange.
Within ten minutes, he'd duplicated everything Fudge considered worthy of his top level of secrecy. The single copy of a report issued after the razing of Azkaban: the one that said there was a ninety-five percent chance that Sirius Black was actually innocent of any crimes. The one that Cornelius had tried to destroy over and over again, only the magically imbued parchment keeping it intact. The report, of which Cornelius said, "if I can't destroy it, then certainly I can bury it." The report Cornelius has scrawled his signature over and stamped "Official Secrets Act: Most Vitally Secret."
There was nearly two hundred kilos of similar material. The man was dumb enough to keep running logs of who paid him bribes as well. What kind of a midget-brained politician did such things? In Hannibal Lestrange's day, this sad excuse for a Hufflepuff would have been devoured by more powerful forces within two hours of setting foot inside the Ministry.
Hannibal continued his search. The Minister's briefcase held a few interesting tidbits as did his locked desk drawers. Then Hannibal searched the papers and possessions of the staff in the Minister's outer office. More gold!
The man should know better than to write such incendiary plans down. An entire copy of his plan for sacking Hogwarts was sitting on the desk of one Dolores Umbridge, the newest member of the Minister's staff. Stupid, very stupid.
Hannibal read the document closely and realized that his Master was going to be very angry very soon. All the people who inhabited these offices were already marked for death, but how many others would now join them?
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Kingsley Shacklebolt was finishing his fourteenth year as an Auror, but only his third year as a veteran of the Operations Section – so he was also the guinea pig sent through the Floo first into Hogwarts.
He landed with a thump and found himself sprawled out on a dusty stone floor. This clearly wasn't the Hogwarts Headmaster's office.
He stood up and threw some Floo powder into the fireplace. "Three Broomsticks," he shouted. It was all too clear something had gone wrong. And in an operation like this one, one thing going wrong usually meant a lot more would be going wrong very shortly.
The fireplace flashed. Kingsley tried to step through only to be thrown back to the floor as another body landed on top of his.
"Shit," the Afro-Caribbean Auror said. "Use the Messenging Spell. Stop them from coming through. It's some kind of one-way trap…"
Here, a third person came through the Floo. And then, in rapid order, four more. Kingsley felt the pain when his thigh bone broke under the strain.
"Ahh! You're breaking my bones, you assholes."
Kingsley used his powerful upper arms to push himself away from being underneath the human pile.
Thankfully, that was just in time. Alastor Moody came through and his ridiculous peg leg would have impaled Kingsley had he still been lying in his original spot.
"Constant vigil—"
But Moody didn't get the finish his thought. He petrified right in front of Kingsley's face.
"What? How?"
That was when Kingsley heard sounds behind him. He turned, and stopped himself from completing the turn. There was a great snake there, a basilisk. And the Hogwarts ghosts, too. What was this place?
The ghosts began attacking – with magic. Stunners, pain hexes, the whole works. Because of the way that they were jumbled on the floor, it was like clubbing sleepy kittens. Kingsley was one of the last to succumb. His last conscious thought was, "At least I'm not petrified like Moody was."
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Fudge was pacing now. The team inside Hogwarts hadn't reported in. Nor the one in the Forest. And the one at the gate seemed to be under attack. And they couldn't apparate out.
"What's going on," Fudge bellowed.
"They didn't seem to be fazed by what we did," came the voice of the chief of operations.
"But the wards came down…"
"It looks like they brought down specific wards. We attacked so they attacked back. It's a loss, I think. You'll need to get your negotiating hat on, I suspect…"
Fudge shouted out more questions and got unpleasant, but true, answers back. "You're fired," he shouted.
The chief of operations laughed. "You might be the Minister of Magic, Fudge, but you don't have the power to fire me."
"Well then, who does?"
The laughter resumed. "No one who respects you."
At that, Fudge gathered his belongings and stormed out of the room. He linked up with his four bodyguards outside the upper level of the Department of Mysteries. "Where's Petrus, Dolores, and the others?"
"In conference room Alpha, Minister."
So that's where Fudge went.
As Cornelius Fudge stepped across the threshold, he saw some fairly remarkable, and infinitely disturbing, things. For one, Dolores Umbridge stood up from her seat, although it was hard to notice the shift in height, and then her head promptly fell off her body. Cornelius began shrieking like a girl. And when his other three top staffers moved to help him and the dead Dolores, they seemed to lose their heads as well.
"What in the name of Merlin's golden tresses is going on?" Fudge made less sense shouting than he normally did.
Fudge turned around looking for whoever was doing this horrible desecration of his personal staff. He looked pleadingly to his lead bodyguard, Dawlish, for assistance. That's when his entire team of body guards also seemed to lose their heads.
Fudge had enough.
He fainted dead away and hit his head on the corner of the conference table. It would be some hours before he was missed or discovered. Luckily, his head wound stopped bleeding before then. He was the only one of the nine occupants of the room to survive – and only then barely.
"I tell you, there were ten men – no, a dozen burly assassins – lying in wait in that room. They killed everyone before I could even get my wand out, you see…"
Fudge was a politican, and thus, an accomplished liar, but no one who heard his tale was quite sure what to believe that day. It could be true, after all, and there were eight dead. No one other than Fudge had seen these ten, no, dozen assassins. But no one quite absolved Fudge for what happened…and for surviving it.
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Harry spent twenty minutes examining the documented plan of the attack before he began to swear again. "They actually approached the Muggle Prime Minister about using nuclear weapons against us. At least someone in government is smart enough to say 'no' from time to time. The Muggles have earned a partial reprieve, then, for being smarter than their wizarding counterparts."
It was enough.
He walked into the small dusty room and awakened one of the captured attackers. "You were one of the ones captured at Azkaban, weren't you? Their top ward specialist, right?"
The man just scowled. But it was true enough.
"Do you know that we punched through your precious wards in less than three minutes? And, even then, your team of guards and Aurors wasn't able to do a thing to stop us. Embarrassing, isn't it?"
The rest of the interrogation went the same way. This one refused to answer Harry's questions. Harry tried, he really did. Five whole, unanswered questions. Harry lost his patience.
So Harry fed him – one who had been personally warned about never returning to Hogwarts, on pain of severest punishment – to Serah the Ancient. She hadn't eaten in two years and she was much happier after a plump, fattened meal.
"Raw and wiggling is really the best way," she hissed. "And the bones add a nice crunch." Harry gladly translated for the rest of the restrained audience.
After that, the other Aurors and Unspeakables were quite a bit more willing to cooperate.
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Harry Potter washed and fixed his clothing before he returned to find Rita Skeeter. She had completed the press release. It was appropriate and based on facts – hardly the stuff that had made Rita famous, but just the needed thing.
He had the horcrux spirit of Albus Dumbledore begin the process of disseminating it throughout Britain and the world. He still had to decide what to do with the volumes of material that Hannibal Lestrange had brought back. He had to clear the innocent, then punish the rest of the morons at the Ministry.
So many paths, so many delights possible, so little time.
When Rita looked with terrified eyes at Harry and began to fling out questions, Harry sighed. He plucked his cherry wood and griffon feather wand out and said, "Obliviate," while concentrating very clearly on Rita's scattered mind. Specifically on what he wanted removed from that mind.
A few moments later she looked rather glassy eyed and was no longer in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Harry gave her a few moments to return to her right mind.
"Now, as I was saying Rita, my first teacher was a spirit named Tom Riddle. He'd been a student here at Hogwarts, was gifted in Potions and Defense and quite a few other disciplines, including the Mind Arts, but he'd been stupid enough to leave one of his horcruxes out where I could find it. Well, that was after I'd found Salazar's book that discussed the various paths to immortality; he was quite sharp about the methods for detecting them and the numerous downsides to constructing them…"