Harry amidst the Vaults of Stone
Chapter 7
There was a faint flash of warm orange light.
Harry held his breath as the ring seemed to wriggle, shrinking until it was snug around the base of his finger. At the same time, the golden band rippled, and a small, glittering ruby appeared, nestled in tendrils of gold. The gemstone was engraved with a flowing P, against the outline of a shield, sword and crown. Harry recognised the Potter family insignia from his new genealogy book. There was also a curious inner light in the ruby's crimson depths, which flared and died, then spluttered into life again as Harry watched in fascination.
When he looked up, his foster father's fists were clenched, and Ziggiz was peering intently at the flickering ring.
The goblin spoke without moving his gaze. "Now, you know that with your gadammeruk complete, you have reached your majority, as a full Brother amongst the Brotherhood?"
Harry nodded, as the light flared slightly brighter. "Yes."
"Intriguing," the elderly goblin murmured. "The resizing and the appearance of the crest-jewel would at least tentatively suggest the magic recognises him as the new Lord Potter. But the light is insubstantial and irregular. Perhaps... Lord Potter. Yes. The light strengthens substantially whenever I reinforce the idea that he is of age, or use the name 'Lord Potter'."
Harry shrugged, turning his hand to examine the ring from every angle. "What does it mean?"
Ziggiz looked up at last, cracking his knuckles in consideration. "I would venture that the magic is unsure about accepting an eight-year-old as the new head of family. Consider: in the wizarding world, heirs of Noble Houses become lords when they come of age. But there is nothing actually codified in wizarding law to that effect. This implies that what governs the process is one of those strange, ancient magics laid down in the time of Ragnuk and Merlin. Since you have earned your goblin majority, and possess a strong magical core, the magic is uncertain of your lordship. We need another test, I believe."
The elderly goblin tapped a thoughtful finger against his chin. "Harry, twist the ring sharply on your finger and imagine it becoming invisible."
Harry closed his eyes, rather confused, and did so.
"Ah, good. It would seem that much of the magic is working, yes?"
He opened his eyes. Ziggiz was smiling, and the ring was gone! His other hand went instinctively to his finger, and felt cool metal.
Sibilig leaned across and carefully examined his finger, apparently unable to find the golden band at all.
Experimentally, Harry twisted it back, willing it as hard as he could to reappear, and the ring faded into sight.
"Be welcome, Lord Potter, wizard of the High Bloodlines," Ziggiz intoned sonorously, causing Badluk to snigger nastily behind one hand.
"And now, I believe we ought to visit the Black Vault," said Sibilig.
"How were my parents betrayed?"
Badluk laid a gentle hand on Harry's shoulder. "We have investigated this, but the details are... not clear. Some sort of rare wizard ward was placed over their house, so that nobody but a single person was able to find them. Black was the one entrusted with the secret of their location. Then, one night, Voldemort appeared right at the house, and slew your parents."
Sibilig reached across to grip Harry's other shoulder briefly, as Badluk continued speaking. "That they were betrayed is obvious, as Black was quite unharmed when he returned to the scene. He then hunted down another of your parents' friends, a man named Peter Pettigrew, using a devastating spell which killed a dozen innocent muggles."
Harry shuddered. "So Black was a – what was it? A Death Eater."
"We don't know. He was imprisoned immediately, on the orders of three – well, you could think of them as equivalents of our Managers, for the wizarding world. Dumbledore, Crouch and Bagnold. Black was from a notorious family, but may have only been a sympathiser – his name did not come up when other Death Eaters were tried."
"Then again," Sibilig said, "Many who were named Death Eaters were later acquitted."
"You don't mean they escaped justice?" Harry asked, icy fingers clutching at his heart.
"Many claimed to be blackmailed, or impersonated, or magically controlled. Essentially, those with gold in their pockets were let go free. Others were imprisoned, or in some cases executed."
Tears of anger prickled in Harry's eyes. Goblins were raised with a deep desire for justice which often verged on pure vindictiveness. It was hard to hear that any of the followers of the man who had killed his original parents walked free, with the world aware of what they had done.
It became clear to him, as the wind of rail travel blanketed them, that he now had a second goal in life. If he could achieve just one more thing – after putting his adopted people on an equal tier with the wizard ruling class – it would be to bring these Death Eaters to justice.
Harry didn't know how he felt about Black having been denied trial. That goblin sense of justice was clashing with that goblin vindictiveness. He wanted to see the betrayer, the man who had apparently been a friend of his parents and named him heir to the Black family, suffer.
"Would he have been executed, if he had stood trial?" he asked at last.
Sibilig and Badluk shared a long look.
"There are fates worse than death," Ziggiz said quietly. "Azkaban itself could well be considered one of them. But while a clean blade may be considered merciful, to use Dementors for execution is heinous."
Harry began to ask more, but his foster father cut him off. "There are assuredly books on such topics in the library. Be warned that I do not personally consider them suitable for those of your young age. I would advise you to forego that knowledge until you are older."
Harry chewed on his cheek until they reached the Black vault, then tensed up when they entered it. The caution not to touch anything was louder and sterner this time, and he thought he could see why.
It seemed that House Black was much more well-travelled than House Potter. Much... blacker.
Harry gazed about at the artefacts around him, each fascinatingly mouldering and loathsome in its own unique way. The closest corner of the vault held a cracked bone cabinet displaying shrunken human heads, a stack of grisly books bound in warped black leather, a rack of snakeskin robes, some sort of ceremonial altar hewn from obsidian, and a dusty, dark-wooded wardrobe which shifted its weight uneasily on four carved feet.
Shuddering slightly, he followed Ziggiz across the chamber to another plinth. This one was made of polished jasper, and held a cushion. As Harry might have guessed, the cushion was black.
"Do I do the same here?" he asked, drawing his wand from his pocket.
"No. Hold." Badluk squinted at the plinth for some time, waving his hands in various signs over it to check for any unexpected magic. Eventually, he stepped back. "Tap the cushion. But with care."
Harry did so, and after a pause of several seconds, another ring appeared, with little fuss. This time, he didn't accidentally flick it off the cushion.
"Don't touch it," Sibilig cautioned.
Badluk picked up the entire cushion, and the two other goblins marched Harry outside the vault. Badluk followed, pausing on the threshold.
Ten minutes later, a pair of curse breakers had been called down from the offices, one goblin and one of the humans Gringotts employed. The experts stood just outside the vault and cast numerous diagnostic charms on the ring on its cushion just inside the door. Harry waited with his foster parents, Ziggiz and the guard, back near the mine carts. He watched with interest, but there was little to see at a distance.
At long last, just as Harry had been about to sit down and start playing with pebbles in boredom, the curse breakers stood back and beckoned them over. Apparently they could find no malicious spells on the ring, nor poison, nor hidden secrets.
Sibilig sighed and looked at her mate. "Very well. Harry, you may put it on. But you don't have to."
Badluk's features slipped into a scowl for a moment. Harry stared at the ring, then looked between his guardians. "I'm still not sure I want to be Lord Black. But I suppose I couldn't be a worse lord than the one who got my parents killed. So, if you're sure it's not trapped..."
He stepped forward and picked up the ring, admiring the craftsmanship for a moment. The band was made of of simple silver and platinum strips, winding around each other like snakes.
Then he put it on.
By the end of the previous day, Dumbledore was too tired and filled with tea to face the dreadful prospect of a visit to Azkaban. So, feeling only slightly guilty, he had put it off.
Now, his footsteps rang loudly on the crumbling stone corridors. Infrequent cries echoed a counterpoint behind huge, rusty steel doors. Over the centuries, every single part of Azkaban had been replaced numerous times - such was the power of Dementors to wither and destroy. The spirits were embodiments of entropy and loss.
Inmates tended to die within years.
Dumbledore reached the central stairwell of Tower C, Block 77, and paused for breath before attempting the upward climb. Bellatrix Lestrange's cell had been on the bottommost level, closest to the Dementors, where almost no light and no fresh air would ever reach.
He could not help but contrast the woman with the withdrawn but beautiful Bellatrix Black he remembered, a Slytherin prefect with the keen mind of a Ravenclaw and loyalty of a Hufflepuff. And as for the things she had done, unhesitatingly, recklessly, pridefully...
She could have excelled in any of the Hogwarts houses.
Dumbledore winced, having seen what the woman had been reduced to. He shook his head, glad of the phoenix patronus preening on one shoulder and Fawkes cooing sorrowfully on the other.
His scan of the Death Eater's mind had found nothing that could be called savoury, nothing that could be called sane, and absolutely no trace of recollection of a plan to abduct the Boy Who Lived. She had barely even remembered the name 'Harry Potter', at first. By the end of his mental interrogation, though, she was standing, railing against her chains, raving incoherently about the infant who had vanquished her dark master.
The horrifying grey shape of a Dementor drifted up the stairwell, keeping far from the light of Dumbledore's patronus.
Should he bother with Sirius Black? The man had been imprisoned slightly longer than his cousin; he could not be any saner than her. And if anyone had known of a plot to seize Harry Potter, the dark lieutenant Bellatrix would have.
Dumbledore's phoenix warbled a snatch of music in his ear, and he sighed. The Potters' betrayers was his last lead. He really could do nothing more than follow it up.
He put his foot to the stairs, ready for the long trek up to the storm-swept surface necessary before he could travel down again to the depths of Tower A, but suddenly stumbled.
The Headmaster just barely caught himself before falling, silver and red phoenixes fluttering into the air in consternation. He clutched at his hand in shock, scarcely able to believe what had just happened.
And even before looking, he somehow knew which of the invisible regency rings had abruptly vanished from his finger.
The Black ring adjusted itself smoothly to Harry's small finger, the slight chill sensation from it flowing unpleasantly across his skin.
He watched as a bulge emerged from the tangle of precious metal, splitting to reveal a stone – black opal, he absently identified – nestled in claws of silver and platinum. A slight inner light flickered into existence, sending patches of grey scuttling intermittently across the opal's surface.
Harry turned the ring slowly against the torchlight, trying to make out what was marked on the gemstone, as his foster parents crowded in behind him. After a few seconds, he realised the glittering black crystal inlay matched the Black family crest of ravens and dagger, on a background of vines.
"Ridiculous," Badluk murmured. "Black jet against black opal? Tasteless, in my opinion. Terrible design."
"Well done, Lord Black," said Ziggiz.
"It may be best to keep this a secret for now," Sibilig said. "Not Brotherhood-secret, just secret until you decide how to handle it."
Harry nodded. He had been quietly trying Exuctiron, Magrakkus and a few goblin-signs in the hope of discerning the properties of his two new rings, but the artefacts' complexity was far beyond him. All he could make out was that they were magical. Now he twisted each ring with the opposing hand, and willed them invisible.
"I have studied the process a little. Assuming the magic has accepted you as Lord, the rings act as signet rings for magical contracts," Ziggiz lectured.
"They will also allow you to pass directly through the doors of your respective vaults. Their value as social symbols is hugely beyond the art with which they are wrought. I suggest you wear them everywhere and essentially forget about them. They are no doubt already bespelled permanently clean and indestructible, but I doubt there are any particular properties beyond those I have mentioned."
A stray thought struck Harry. "Does this mean I'm Lord Potter Lord Black? Or... Lord Potter-Black? Or do I get to choose which one?"
His foster parents exchanged mildly amused looks. Ziggiz gave an elaborate shrug and began to walk towards the carts.
"Since you are both Lord Potter and Lord Black, you can call yourself whatever you damn well please," Badluk said.
"Language," the goblin's mate warned.
"I think I'll stick to Harry. So... when can I start exploring the vaults?"
Dumbledore turned away from the fireplace in the guardhouse at the summit of Azkaban. He was still a little shaken. The first dreadful inference he had made from the disappearance of the Potter ring was that Harry had died, and the Potter lordship had passed on to some formerly unknown adult heir. But after a heart-stopping few seconds, his frantic check had showed the blood wards on the Dursley house still functioning.
The idea had then struck him, halfway up the stairwell on the way to firecalling Amelia, that young Harry had been placed under an ageing potion for some nefarious purpose – perhaps to fool the same inheritance magic he had just witnessed. Perhaps the Aurors' investigation had been noticed, and someone's secret agenda had been hurriedly moved up.
Amelia hadn't thought it likely, but hadn't been able to offer a better explanation. What sort of power could create a Potter heir when there had before been only an eight-year-old boy? She had informed the Headmaster she would ask her contact in the Department of Mysteries, and then told him to alert her if the regency ring returned – which could be consistent with a potion wearing off. Finally she had asked him – well, ordered him, really – to check in on his final suspect.
After all, Black had been there that final night. Perhaps he knew something. Perhaps... perhaps he had already secretly broken out of prison.
Perhaps, Dumbledore thought, he had better go and see, before becoming too stressed by fanciful scenarios.
So he set off once more, his worry compounded by the tendrils of fear the Dementors were able to extrude past his patronus. He was heading to a cell deep in the black stone depths of the wizarding prison.
Each of Azkaban's three towers had seven levels, with thirteen prison blocks per level. The vast majority were empty, or housed inert Dementors. The prison fortress had been built by a dark wizard in an age long past, then claimed and warded by the Ministry to keep the loathsome fear-spirits they had captured from Grindelwald's broken armies.
It took a quarter of an hour for Dumbledore to reach the lowest level. He let himself into the cell with the key the Aurors had provided to him. The huge steel outer door swung noisily open, then closed firmly behind him before the small inner portal unlocked.
Sirius Black lay on a narrow pallet, chained to the wall by one ankle, watching Dumbledore enter. His eyes were sunken and slightly wild, but completely alert, not vacuous as Bellatrix had been.
When he spoke, the voice was not much more than a rasp, next to inaudible over the storm raging outside. "It's Pr'fess'r Du'bledore. Wha'r you doing h're."
"Black,"the Headmaster said icily, eyes like hard blue stones.
The ragged man struggled to a sitting position, clasped his bony hands to equally bony knees, and hung his head.
Dumbledore stayed near the doorway. The chains would reach exactly halfway across the room from the far wall, but he wasn't going to take any chances.
"What have you done, Black? What was Voldemort's contingency plan? What did you know he would do to Harry Potter? Was it not enough to send your best friends to an early grave?"
The criminal refused to meet his eyes, but muttered angrily at the floor.
"Wh're w're you? Wh're w're you when they died? Why d'n't you 'gree t' be th' secr't keeper? Why not you, Du'bledore? Wh're th' hell w'r you?" Sirius Black's challenge was barely audible.
The wretch had just opened his mouth to say more, when he jerked upright. Black gave a curious coughing cry, clutching at one finger.
Dumbledore watched a expression of extreme shock appear on the haunted face, and took a cautious step forward. A band of pale, clean skin had appeared on the skin of Black's otherwise filthy finger.
The criminal began to shake. "Th' ring. Y' want'd th' ring, D'bledore? 't's no use to me h're. Ha, 'm black no m're," he added with a cackle. "They st'le that too, d'n't they? Th' d'ment'rs? Eaten it? Th', th' Black name. 's ne'r been a happ' thought b'fore, d'know why th'd wait till now t' steal it. Ha, Black no more, j'st Sirris. I c'n't be Sirris. Y'r not sirris, they'd say. Not sirris..."
His voice trailed off into hoarse, manic laughter.
A cold trickle of fear ran down Dumbledore's spine.
"Your ring disappeared? Your family signet ring was summoned – you were Lord of the Black family! Who was your heir? Tell me!" Dumbledore waved a hand, and a gust of arcane wind picked up the criminal, shoving his withered, barely-clothed body upright against the wall, despite the magic-dampening chains.
Black's eyes were bulging and rolling about as he struggled and shrieked. "Th' heir. Th' heir, o' course. No... 'e's dead! Th' ring's gone! Harry! 'arry! Harry, 'e's just a baby, th'y can't kill 'im, e's jus' a little lad... James 'nd Lily, th'y're dead! Do s'm'thing, D'bledore! H'rry, no! I've got t' get t' 'im! 'arry! Harry!"
Sirius Black began screaming, cracked voice splintering further. His hands knotted into fists, body limp against the stone and tears making tracks through the grime on his cheeks.
But Dumbledore had caught his eyes when they flickered across the room, and was already diving deep into the man's mind.
Severus Snape was not a happy man.
He was not happy that he was in the mansion of Lucius Malfoy, a man he privately despised, but a man his persona required him to maintain an affability towards.
He was not happy that he was there at the behest of Albus Dumbledore. The order had come just when Snape was near a breakthrough in his private research, which Dumbledore bloody well knew.
He was not happy that he was playing hunt-the-Potter, a painful reminder of his oath. He hadn't expected to have to give a flying unicorn turd for the boy's welfare for another three years.
He was reasonably happy that he was drinking a four-hundred-year-old wine, but it failed to offset even a single one of the other things he was not happy about.
Snape snarled inside, and began the long, convoluted process of extricating himself from Lucius' home, trying to remember all the pathetic pureblood niceties the blasted man had tutored him in over the years.
What a sodding waste of time on all counts.
Lucius escorted the younger man to the Floo, hands clasped behind his back. He was crisply polite towards his old colleague, and extremely thoughtful underneath.
Severus was not so skilled an actor that he could completely fool Lucius Malfoy. Had he not been the potions master's sponsor and friend for sixteen years?
One of Lucius' deepest contacts at the ministry had caught wind of an investigation around Harry Potter, and from this unexpected visit, which had Dumbledore's fingerprints all over it, it was fairly easy to deduce that the child had actually gone missing.
It had worried Lucius, to hear a rumour from only a single source, and then to be unable to pick up the whole story. Lord Malfoy was not as close to the Minister, Millicent Bagnold, as he might like. He was already moving useful people into government positions wherever he could gain a political toehold, but the highest offices were – currently – unassailable.
The British Ironbelly, they called her. She was ...inconvenient.
That he had come close to missing something as important as this, though – miss it completely, suggested he needed to speed up the expansion of his network.
Lucius watched the green flames blaze and return to bare coals, already resolving to make his own inquiries about the Boy Who Lived.
The remainder of the week saw Harry exploring his new vaults in the afternoons, always with a clerk and a guard at his side. Sometimes Badluk or Sibilig had time to spare, and pitched in. Occasionally one of the other managers in his huge extended family stopped in.
According to his genealogy book, the Potters and Blacks were Ancient And Most Noble Houses. The 'Noble' part came from wealth, land holdings, and the fact that a male pureblooded heir had inherited for seven generations. The 'Ancient' part came from several hundred years of existence.
From what Harry could see, the remaining Black Family fortunes amounted to ...almost nothing. The Black vault didn't even have as much money or jewellery as his own birth parents'. Presumably the Blacks' remaining wealth was tied up in holding enough land to stay Noble.
On the other hand, some of the possessions in the vault might be worth some sum, if the nasty enchantments on some of them could be removed. Harry had sworn not to touch anything at all, even coins or documents, even with gloves on, without getting it cleared by a curse-breaker first. Whenever there wasn't one available to help him, he worked in the House Potter vault instead.
The goblins had been... fairly impassive about his newfound wealth, particularly the art objects, although Badluk tended to make little jibes that Harry knew weren't meant maliciously. Of course, the Brothers would have known about his inheritance from the start. They knew, and Harry knew they knew, that he would use it wisely. The money could help him, which would help them. Harry had learned his basic lessons in fiscal prudence properly, even if his numeracy was decidedly below his literacy.
The fact that Harry was inheriting things from the dead was fundamentally against goblin ideals, of course, and it made him feel terribly awkward. Wealth was to be redistributed, for the good of all, according to who could produce the greatest works with it. He had asked if he could place the contents of his vaults in the great gold-stores, warehouses and reliquaries of the goblin nation, but a hastily-convened Council of Counters had decided against it. Gringotts itself, where his wealth was held, was neutral ground. He would need to act as a wizard, and that entailed banking with goblins. And the money was more accessible there, given that it would only be spent aboveground.
He was similarly uncomfortable inheriting things from his parents' betrayer, but took a pragmatic approach to it, just as he had with the lordship. He had already suffered his parents' murders – why not see some small justice exacted, in the form of reparations? And if Black ever walked free, as he now knew some Death Eaters had...
Harry, thinking all this, shivered involuntarily. Hearing an aggrieved cough, he forced his mind back to the ancient pottery urn in front of him. The craftsmanship was extremely poor, but even if it turned out to be empty, the pot's very age would make it valuable. The neck was sealed up with beeswax, and embedded in that wax was a curse – once dangerous, but now weakened by the passage of centuries.
Harry gripped the neck of the urn carefully with long silver pliers, while dipping a heated steel skewer obliquely into the opening. Blaglung the Fortunate, a master of the curse-breaking field, was crouched nearby, watching with a very close eye.
The wax melted away from the skewer, and a moment later, something green and wispy emerged from the urn, unravelling into the air. Harry carefully withdrew the metal.
The small crucible beside them blazed white for a moment, showing the curse had successfully been captured and dissipated, and Harry placed the skewer back inside the burning, rune-encircled pot. Then he sat back on his heels, consciously relaxed his shoulders, wiped the sweat from his face, and cleaned his glasses on his sleeve. He smiled, hearing Blaglung mutter an appraisal of a job adequately performed.
Harry was astounded at how many secrets he had learned in just the first few days after becoming a Brother. The goblin-oath he'd sworn was better than wizarding oaths, which could kill you if you broke them – even inadvertently, unknowingly, or reluctantly. The goblin-oath stopped a person revealing secrets entirely, unless it was fully premeditated. Even then, a person might only manage the most circumspect of answers before their magical core collapsed and they died.
Because of that powerful safeguard, Harry was learning many of the things which would let him train as a Gringotts worker – learning the right way to touch the vault doors to open them, how to intimidate an imp-lock or outsmart a dwarf-bolt, how to navigate the Unfathomable Maze if he needed to travel without using the carts, during a lockdown or tunnel accident.
He was learning more dangerous things, too. And not all of them within the Black vault, surrounded by purple candles and scarred curse breakers.
He learned from his foster father the innermost secrets of investment and interest, where wizards' money could be made to wander in between vault visits.
Badluk also showed him how Galleons were protected from forgery. The long half-life of magical particles meant conjured gold – infinite in supply, even if extremely difficult to make permanent – could be easily distinguished from normal gold. Gringotts Galleons used exactly 2% real gold, 50% conjured gold, 23% real silver, 23% conjured silver, and 2% conjured platinum. Each coin carried a permanent magical signature which marked the goblin who made it, and a numeric code that matched an apparently random, but actually elaborate, nigh-unbreakable pattern. Subtle spells on the money caused some extremely nasty things to happen to those poor souls who dared try to duplicate it.
One of the bigger secrets Harry discovered was the vast hoard of gold and other metals in the depths of Underfoot, and similar hoards in goblin cities all over the world. Without those hoards, the price of gold would be noticeably lower. As it was, the value of the precious metals in a Galleon was very slightly higher than the current face value of a Galleon. That was why the money was enchanted to be unmeltable... as well as indestructible, unVanishable and protected from modification or disenchantment.
And then... then Sibilig had shown him the other things, in the deeper and less-travelled places of the stalagmite city. Underfoot was filled with carefree people, but these places were patrolled by permanently scowling guards, dressed in heavier armour than those in the bank above. Inside these caverns were huge empty shipyards and steel foundries, dragon breeding grounds and troll enclaves, ranks of siege weapons and vast stockpiles of weapons and armour.
Harry had walked these stranger streets in his foster mother's shadow, keeping well away from the huge blast doors and thick bars in many places.
He marvelled at the stonework and intricate wards of the chokepoints. He stared at the armoured mole titan, bound to pillars the size of houses in chains of bright steel. He solemnly examined the water-powered drop hammers, which stood ready for the mass production of ammunition – in case there was ever a time when quantity somehow became more important to the Brothers than quality.
Untouched by war for centuries, the warehouses were fuller than they had ever been. Harry had been taught that the last goblin rebellion had ended in 1803, at a huge cost on both sides. The books said that the wizards had only won through the intervention of foreign nations, primarily France and the Netherlands.
Fortunately, a complex peace agreement had been brokered in 1865, returning Gringotts to goblin autonomy, and the treaty had held.
Harry couldn't help but feel that any future uprisings could be much more successful than those of centuries ago.
Dumbledore jerked back from Sirius Black's mind, his own head reeling. Legilimency on a long-term Azkaban inmate was never pleasant, but Black was filled with an emotional turmoil that Dumbledore could barely begin to grip. There was desperation, agony, and ...love? Black had truly not expected that Harry would go missing, but there was much more to it than that. There was an underlying need to know that the child was alive.
Dumbledore had felt remorse lurking in there, he knew it, amidst flickering images of the man cradling young Harry Potter in the ruins of his parents' home. It wasn't the simple remorse Dumbledore had dared to hope any of Voldemort's chosen could feel. It was, almost without a doubt, remorse at having failed the Potters.
"He's not dead," the Headmaster gasped, letting Black slide down the wall into a heap, and feeling like collapsing himself. "He's not dead."
Dumbledore's head was filled with a despair that hadn't been present in Bellatrix's mind. He wasn't sure why he was reassuring Black, who was still yelling. But he did know that there was something deeply, deeply wrong here. "Harry's not dead," he repeated. "He's gone missing. Somebody's taken him, we don't know who or how. I thought- I thought-"
Black was still shrieking, apparently without rhyme or reason. Fawkes was screaming too, inexplicably, and Dumbledore's patronus was flickering and fading.
Unable to bear another moment, the Wizard of the Light retreated blindly through the doors, which locked themselves behind him, and staggered down the stone halls, the screams of the imprisoned all around him rising to join the chorus in his mind.
Seven years ago, after that fateful night of the Potters' betrayal, the path of the greater good had never been clearer to Albus Dumbledore. Lucius Malfoy had bought his way clear of custody the very next day, along with a full third of the other Death Eaters captured in the aftermath of the Dark Lord's defeat. Dumbledore had known that Black, brought in scant hours afterwards, could have done the same. Even if the man was laughing and shrieking hysterically when the Aurors brought him in, even if the Black fortunes had been diminished with time, it was still a distinct probability. The Lord of an Ancient and Most Noble House could do almost anything he pleased, in those times. He could certainly have pleaded Imperius. And then Black would have got his hands on an infant Harry Potter.
So Dumbledore had ...reacted.
A little tweaking, a word in Crouch's zealous ear, a document which Bagnold had deliberately signed without reading, and the possibility of a trial had simply gone away. Black had been shipped off to rot in the lowest parts of Azkaban. If anything, he had been a poster child for the idea that the Ministry was bringing Voldemort's most dastardly followers to justice.
Albus Dumbledore stumbled down the deteriorating stone corridor, feeling sick to his stomach.
Thirteen goblins sat around a polished stone table in the Gringotts boardroom. The Ministry had made a quiet inquiry about Harry Potter, and Gringotts had responded, truthfully, that his parents' account still stood untouched. Then, within days, rumours about the Boy Who Lived had started spreading. Whatever was going on in the Ministry had first escaped to certain privileged ears, then trickled down to the general public.
Most of the Council believed it would be best to come straight out and tell the Ministry where he was, before the news truly broke and a witch-hunt began for "Harry Potter's abductors". Being proactive would give them an edge. The Ministry would negotiate to prevent the announcement going public before they were ready. Any government wanted time to spin things in their own favour, and if there was one thing the goblins could do well, it was negotiation.
Others, though, wanted to let the rumours flare and die first, wait a few months or years, then invite various interested factions to Gringotts to meet Harry. That would let them make any precautions they thought necessary, and make contingency plans for whatever level of public outcry was provoked.
The debate continued long into the evening and then into the night, and Sibilig excused herself to be at home to make sure the subject of their discussion went to bed.
Eventually, Flattaks of the Currency Trade Department made a suggestion. She knew of a good intermediary, a person who could keep secrets, a person who could make recommendations based on their sense of the collective consciousness of the wizarding world. Her second cousin would be perfect for the part.
The managers exchanged looks, then, slowly, nods. "Yes," somebody said at last.
"Yes," said King Gurmsalt, and began to write a letter.
Author's notes:
→ Thanks, everyone, for reading and reviewing! Reviews are really helpful, they let me fix the leaks in the plot-pipes and help me decide on the way things should go.
→ In response to some concerns:
→ I'm trying not to make Harry too mature for his age, but goblin Nurture may be overcoming human Nature.
→ I'm not a Ron-basher, but in JKR's books his most obvious traits are jealousy, laziness, opposition to learning, and lack of empathy bordering on selfishness. Maybe it's just me, but these seem to make him a better stooge than hero. I doubt he'd get on well with goblin-raised-Harry.
→ People ask about 'pairings'. I'm not sure I'll even write any. I'm definitely not opening that particular basket of beetles until he's in his teens. If I do, I'll try to make it realistic.
→ I personally can't stand fics where Harry befriends all goblins, everywhere, by somehow being the first wizard in a thousand years of goblin banking to say "thank you" to a goblin. This is a ridiculous premise, given that (a) muggleborns exist, and wouldn't know to act inhumanly to goblins, and (b) the British have a culture of politeness. Being on their good side by actually growing up goblin seems much more realistic, especially when their decision to take Harry in was a calculated choice.