Harry amidst the Vaults of Stone
Chapter 11
"Muto plumbum," Harry repeated firmly, a bead of sweat appearing on his intent face. The tiny pellet of lead in front of him lay still and unchanged.
Harry moved his wand a fraction of an inch to the right, peering down through the jeweller's glass. "Muto silica," he intoned. The pinch of fine white sand under his wand turned translucent, then after several seconds of resistance dissolved into a few beads of water.
He moved his wand a fraction more, and uttered the words, "Muto carbonis." A sliver of charcoal immediately turned into a droplet of water.
Harry sat back and flipped up the magnifying glass. He eased the crick in his neck, frowning. It had taken him months of practise to get transfiguration to work at all, and he still didn't understand why some substances were so much harder to change into or from. Bewilderingly, some things were relatively easy to transmute in one direction, and almost impossible in the other. His introductory magic text was next to useless; it listed a huge number of limitations on various spells, but never discussed the why or how.
Harry's thoughts turned to a more advanced transfiguration spell, one which Filius didn't know he was practising. He had hoped it would be useful in cleaning up after his attempts by restoring everything to a single state. Unfortunately, it was much harder to ensorcel already-transfigured substances.
He held his wand steady underneath the jeweller's glass and focused intently on the shape of the magic. "Mutum ullus." The droplets of water nearest to his wand turned to ice, then graphite, and just when it seemed he was going to manage to make quartz sand again, a random thought about breakfast drifted across his mind.
Squelch.
"Earthen sod," Harry swore. He tried to wipe the honey off the end of his wand, with limited success.
The apprentice Longfang had been ignoring the human boy's antics. Now he glanced over from his own high stool and snorted. Harry made a face in response, not sure whether to try a conversation again. It hadn't been well received so far.
Longfang, who was not quite twice Harry's age, had fallen into the habit of coming early to practise in the jewellery workshop. Like Harry, he took advantage of the empty breakfast hours to work without interruption.
Longfang was brilliantly talented with magic and glass-shaping, but had been having trouble at home recently. His mother had gone missing on a business trip in the wizarding world. His father had been in a serious conflict with another Brother, the sort of conflict where somebody loses a finger, and it had gone to arbitration with the Council. The whispers from Harry's peers was that the whole situation was a slag-ridden mess.
Now, though, the sharp-toothed goblin shoved his stool back and spoke. "All magic is grounded in intent." He walked over. "Observe."
Greyish fingers spun in the air. Harry recognised the goblin-charm for dispersing pockets of noxious mine gas. But instead of flying all over the room, the remaining sand and water on the table gathered into a neat pool.
As Harry frowned, Longfang made a more complex sign – there were gestures for unmaking and making, and a glyph for low-quality coal which he recalled from his gadammeruk. The charm should have transformed the half-enchanted mess on the tabletop into charcoal dust.
Instead, the damp, honey-speckled sand divided itself into four neat rectangles, and formed solid charcoal rods.
Harry grimaced. "How...?"
The tall young goblin grimaced back, and leaned wearily back against the bench. "If you chose, you could forge an iron pipe with jewellers' hammers. Yes?"
"Er ...yes?"
"It would waste a lot of time and damage many hammers, but it is possible. So it is with magic. Enough power, enough will, and you can override the proper form. Even inadvertently. If your-" the goblin sneered - "wizard spell uses enough power to begin with, then if you focus wrongly, you may achieve something quite different from what the spell is supposed to do."
"I hoped it would just work better because the spell itself was stronger," Harry confessed.
"Hmm. And where are your wits? Did you leave them in your slippers this morning? Did you do anything to confirm it was safe before launching into advanced magic?" The goblin rapped bony knuckles against the top of Harry's head.
Harry looked down.
"No. I would have thought that your very first lesson would be: don't attempt powerful spells if you cannot control them. Perhaps that concept is too obvious to be a lesson, even for wizards." Longfang gazed at the spattered mess of honey, which had begun to transform of its own accord into coarse salt. "You were thinking about breakfast, yes?"
Harry nodded, cheeks red with embarrassment.
Longfang sighed, wondering not for the first time about his young human cousin. The boy was one of the most scholarly of his peergroup, yet lacked so much sense. It was probably his wizarding blood. The goblin shuffled his solder into a neat pile. "Come on, then. Breakfast. But clean that table first, or Bidpruk will flay you alive."
Bismuth leaned against the cave wall, silently observing Harry with her pale yellow eyes. He hadn't even looked up at her approach. He was too busy watching a rock.
After several minutes, the goblin girl grew bored. She coughed and stepped forward, picking her way towards him through the maze of boulders. "Harry. You realise it's your birthday, yes?"
Harry didn't turn his head. "Yes."
"Yes... and here you are, staring at a stalagmite."
A bead of water, which had been slowly forming on the talon of rock above, dropped. The just-turned-nine-year-old nodded, noted something down in a leatherbound notebook, took out a fine measuring rod, and scrutinised the tip of the stalagmite. Then he scribbled something else down, put the notebook away, and turned to look at her.
"Yes."
Bismuth rolled her eyes and scowled at the deliberately obtuse boy. "Is this some sort of punishment designed to teach you a meaningful lesson? Did you get sloppy with your charmsigns and accidentally stick one of the sorcery masters to the wall again?"
Harry scowled ferociously back at her, then bared his teeth to show he didn't mean it.
"No." He began making his way down from his stone perch. "It started when I was talking to Jaggir the Historian, trying to find out how the whole cavern system was created. She didn't know much about the actual cave formations, so she suggested we look at the study of geology which Planey the Odder composed centuries ago. She found a translation I could understand, but some of what he wrote doesn't add up."
"Like what?"
"His ideas about limits on the scale and growth of nonmagical and magical cave systems. So I'm trying to work out how fast they really form. I started out with just this stalagmite, but now I'm keeping track of two different limestone formations, a dolostone one in the upper levels, and a piece of dogtooth spar," Harry explained, finally dropping down through a cluster of boulders to stand next to her.
"Buh. So now you need to know better than the famous ancestors. And how fast are they growing?"
He frowned. "Slowly. It's so slow that any difference I see between them could just be a mistake."
"How very useful."
"It's still interesting."
Bismuth shrugged, then glanced at the letters painted on the base of the rock formation. "Working. Please stay away," she read aloud. "Cute."
"Necessary," Harry countered. "Some of the books say that you can damage stalagmite growth just by breathing on them."
Bismuth shook her head and forbore to comment, lest she be drawn into the madness. "I see. Congratulations on another year of making, by the way. Another year, another durance of growing, another measured light against the deepening dark, and all that. I think the humans say 'happy birthday'," she added snidely.
"That's what Filius said last week. He seemed really disappointed he couldn't be here today," Harry added thoughtfully. "And he gave me a book."
Bismuth shrugged. "Wizards are bat-guano insane. Who knows why they do the things they do." She looked at him sharply. "When you go off to learn wizard magic, I'm going to be so angry if you come back loopy."
She glanced back at the stalagmite. "Loopier," she amended. "Anyway, we're going to go learn to set snares with my uncle. Are you coming, or do you have more rocks to stare at?"
"I'm coming." They set off. "Uh, Bismuth, what do you know about dwarves?"
"Why do you ask?"
When he first heard he would be on a trip to a distant mountain to visit the Welsh dwarves, Harry had been excited. Then, when he'd thought about it, excitement had been supplanted by bewilderment. Badluk had said that less than a dozen people were going. Why was he, a child, included?
A trip to the library to learn about dwarves hadn't helped with the bewilderment. The Stacks had turned up a few references in old wizard newspapers to problems with 'street dwarves', and the dwarves were mentioned in numerous goblin treaties and foreign sagas. He knew that the Welsh dwarves had banded with the Brothers to help build Gringotts, once upon a time, and he recognised one or two dwarf-sigils.
But it seemed that few people outside the Brotherhood still recognised that the Welsh dwarves existed. The one small community of dwarves in Britain all lived in the single mountain-home, which the wizarding Ministry had no record of. Only a few individual dwarves exiled from the Welsh mountain for their crimes, or immigrating from other countries, lived in the wider realm of magical Britain. Most performed menial labour.
Harry's foster father had been uncharacteristically vague about the visit. He had only explained that one of the Gringotts sorcerers was in need of a new staff, which they would be commissioning from the dwarves.
"A staff? As in, a magical staff, like on the wall of Sibilig's study? I've seen the warders use them, but I thought we made them."
Badluk grimaced. "Ah. Just as we no longer have the secrets of wandlore, we lost the important secrets of staff-turning after our best crafters were executed by the human Ministry, centuries ago. Besides, dwarven wood-carving is completely unsurpassed."
Harry's face betrayed his surprise at this admission.
Badluk shrugged. "Magic rings, shields and staves: if you ever have need of one, go to the dwarves. For anything else, goblinwork is the finest." He paused. "Don't say any of that in front of them, though."
Harry shook his head earnestly.
The days seemed to stretch out interminably until the trip out of Underfoot. But eventually they had loaded the magic carpets, gathered their belongings, and were waiting in a Gringotts courtyard. A horn blast echoed from the front, and the first carpet in the convoy drifted silently up into the night sky. Harry gave it a nervous glance, and a moment later, the flagstones dropped away, and the stars swallowed him up.
Three large carpets travelled in convoy under an ink-black sky. The first was flown by Wurmspitz, the Manager of the Diplomatic and Policy Department, attended by two guards. The last was flown by a sorcerer, Bollotz, and guarded by another two goblins.
Between them, Badluk sat cross-legged at the front of another rug, steering with small shifts in his weight. Mr Scintillion and Harry sat near the middle of the carpet, and at the back stood two more armed guards.
An hour into the trip, Boris Scintillion asked Harry what he was doing.
The boy paused in the act of ripping another blank page out of his notebook, which he had taken to carrying everywhere. "Working out the shape of the magic around the carpet."
He slowly raised the page into the air until the wind suddenly snatched it away, then moved a little further along the edge. "We must be travelling fast, but there's no flying insects and things, and I can't feel any – what's the word? – wind," he said, switching to English.
The shadows on Boris' face suggested he was smiling. "That's right. It's 'gizallthrap' in Gobbledegook, but it's not exactly a common word."
"Thanks. So I guess there must be some sort of magical cushion of air around us. Judging by what point the paper gets caught, the area extends far enough above us to stand up, but only an arm's length to each side."
Boris Scintillion shook his head, wondering if all goblin-raised children had such an interest in everything around them. "What about underneath the rug?"
"I don't want to look down," Harry admitted.
Badluk sneered and leaned carefully back to borrow a piece of paper. The goblin dipped his hand slightly below the level of the carpet, demonstrating that the paper was immediately whipped away by the hurtling wind. "The weave floats on the air directly. I may fly it, but don't ask me how it works. Mr Scintillion?"
Boris shrugged. "I expect that is a secret known only to the Turkish carpet cartel. Although now that I look at it properly, this doesn't look like an Eastern carpet..."
"Why not?" Harry asked, resolving to look up books of geography when they returned home.
"It actually comes from our Seelie contacts," Badluk said. "Proper carpet-weaving is a closely guarded secret, and as far as I know, the only crafters in the human world are the Turks and the Egypt-Peru Consortium. Presumably they all work the same way, though."
Harry went on to ask Mr Scintillion about magic carpets. Like foreign broomsticks, skyboats and cloud-grapples, they were illegal to import into the United Kingdom – a measure designed to prop up England's otherwise untenable domestic broomstick industry. But using any flying devices already within the country was completely legal, assuming it was done within the bounds of the Statute of Secrecy.
Harry looked out at the clouds faintly visible in the night. "If staves are like wands, is that why we're travelling in the dark? Because of the wand ban?"
Badluk gave his foster son an appraising look. "Partly. Magic staves are not in fact covered by the Ministry ban, but if the wizards knew they weren't simply weapons of close combat, they would immediately try to add them to the legislation. Also, the Welsh dwarves wish to stay out from under the eyes of humans, and there would be ...difficult questions asked about our journey if it were observed. That is also why Mr Scintillion is present."
"To smooth things over," Boris elaborated.
The accompanying sorcerer and guards could handle any magical emergencies, but the former curse-breaker's presence would be important if they did encounter any Ministry officials. Things could rapidly become difficult for a group of goblins and one human child travelling to an undisclosed destination by magical carpet. If that child were revealed to be the wizards' Boy Who Lived under a goblin glamour, 'difficult' would rapidly escalate to 'disastrous'.
Harry frowned, looking from the respectable manager who was his foster father to the carpet ahead flown by Wurmspitz, the prestigious diplomatic head. The rugs were heaped with many gifts and trade goods, things the dwarves apparently needed: salted meat, leather, wood and woven fabric. Surely nobody would mistake them for anything but a Gringotts convoy on official business.
The ensuing discussion of Ministry prejudice, in which Scintillion chose his words very carefully and ignored the occasional snarl or muttered comment from Badluk or the goblin guards, intrigued Harry. But as the night drew on, sleep managed to overtake him.
"Harry."
"Whah."
"Harry."
"Whah?"
"Get up, Harry Potter. You may never see this again."
Harry groaned and pulled himself up, arms buckling for a moment when they encountered more 'give' than usual in the surface he had slept on. Harry patted the carpet gingerly, and crawled to the edge. They were swooping down through a misty valley, dipping to almost kiss the surface of a horseshoe lake. As he watched, they climbed again to curve around the verdant, mist-clad face of a mountain.
Halfway around the slope, perpetually shadowed by a deep overhang, was a sheer cliff of weathered grey slate. The carpets slowed their rapid flight, drifting to a stop on the rugged plateau in front of it.
"The Gate of Gawaan, King Under Dwarves," Badluk announced, stepping down from the carpet. "What do you think, Harry?" He gestured the boy forward.
Harry slowly approached the wall. Up close, he realised that the faded stone cliff was a weak illusion. The real stone surface that lay an inch beneath the false image was dark, almost black, and completely unblemished. He looked it up and down, slightly uneasy at the fact that he was obviously being tested. That tended to happen a lot with the goblins. The elders looked for anything which could be made into an object lesson.
Scintillion frowned, and one of the guards muttered something, but Bollotz the sorcerer just watched with glittering eyes. Badluk, eyes also fixed on Harry, narrated the history of the gateway in a monotone.
"Created in the Century of Black Glass in what was then the mountain-home of Darkridge. Hewn from the living earth by the Welsh King Gawaan, beautifully inlayed by – us, as it happens, and enchanted by the Crafting Bard from the Utmost Depths beneath the so-called Holly Mound. Hinged and aligned by the king's son and daughter, Skarf and Ragni. All for the purpose of creating a safe place for trade between the Unseelie and the Welsh Dwarves. This was long before the Unseelie Court fell, before Darkridge itself fell, beneath the might of a combined army of Scots magi and – us, again. The Brotherhood's politics have always been fluid. And so the dwarves fled, and now we stand here, before the Gate of the Nameless Mountain. A pretty tale, yes?"
The dawn light seemed to run off the dark grey surface. But there was something, where it hit certain parts of the door - "Yes. Invisible runes again..." Harry muttered, taking off his glasses and leaning forward until his nose almost scraped the rock.
"The symbols, if you can see them, are the crest of Gawaan himself, the sceptre of the House of Llelor, and the six scythes of Enyyn Duras. The inscription at the top credits only the Crafting Bard in the construction – unsurprising, really. You will never meet a modest elf. The rest of the runes are old and magical, rather than descriptive, in nature."
Harry carefully traced the ones he could reach, then turned to stare at his foster father as the silence stretched out. "And do you want me to try to open it?"
Badluk gave a complex shrug. "You might try, I daresay."
Harry returned a long look, then turned back to the rock face. "Magrakkus." Nothing happened. "Ha'gplaz." He repeated the words four times, and the runes under his hands responded to the more powerful revealing-sign. Spidery silver lines appeared, a dim glow which stretched all the way up the stone wall. Symbol after symbol formed strips that described a huge rectangle in the rock.
He stroked the surface with one finger. "Ammrok tharg zan edkullen. Gate of Gawaan, please open for us."
Nothing happened, although Harry hadn't really expected it to. He tried modifying a dwarf-bolt charm, that being the only piece of magic he was certain had to do with dwarves. There was no bolt, but you never knew. "Portal of the Welsh Dwarves, unfasten your latch," he murmured.
He tried several faltering words from his few encounters with Old Goblin. "Grimmak nothrog suggesi, gizak mirugug. Threshold to the mountain, hear my request."
Finally he tried simply forcing his magic into the door, not daring to draw his wand in daylight to help it along. "Reveal your secrets," he suggested. The dull cliff face continued to loom over him.
Harry took a step back and nodded to his foster father, who was humming infuriatingly. "That would be all the magic I can think of, in all the tongues I know."
Badluk cackled. "What are you going to do, then?"
Harry scowled. "I'm trying to think of any better words. Unless you think I should break the door down with your head?"
Badluk stepped forward. "Well, you might have tried knocking with your knuckles before my head, but the underlying suggestion is accurate enough." He rapped sharply on the rock three times, producing a surprisingly deep booming sound.
"We're expected," he explained.
"I would have figured it out."
"Of course you would have."
They flew on in silence for a while.
"I mean, not all doors are difficult to open, right?"
"Of course they're not."
"So the lesson is learned, this time."
"Of course it is."
"You deliberately let me think it opened by magic. All that stuff about the Crest of Gawaan and runes carved by elves..."
"Of course I did."
"You're so annoying," Harry said at last, staring at the polished stone walls flashing past them.
"Of course I am." Badluk grimaced at him for a moment, then gestured ahead at the two squat figures who had emerged to join the lead carpet when the cliffside opened. "I did not attend the last visit, but joined the previous one fifteen years ago. I recognise those dwarves to be the guides: Hazzad-tus, daughter of Holt, and Giggli, son of Glint. You will find that few of the beings here speak much Gobbledegook, and almost none will deign to recognise English."
"Is there anything I should... you know, do or not do? Say or not say?"
Badluk looked at him seriously. "There are... factors at play. Nevertheless, protocol would suggest that as a child, you don't speak unless spoken to. Don't touch anything unless invited to. Dwarves clasp arms in greeting. Don't bow. Don't stare. Don't ask difficult questions."
They flew on through halls of stone.
Reaching a large, round room, Harry helped Badluk and the guards unload the carpets. The dwarves took Wurmspitz aside to speak to him in some heavy tongue. They had the deepest voices Harry had heard, even compared to humans.
Badluk explained a little more to him as they stacked timber and furs onto stone pallets in the gloomy stronghold. There had once been nothing but hostility between dwarves and goblins, such that all friendly mentions of the dwarves had been struck from the archives, and the pre-Brotherhood goblins had rewritten the history books to make them out as a race of monsters.
Later had come the great spread of the humans, the mining wars and a terrible plague amongst the dwarves. By the time the Statute of Secrecy was forced upon the country, the dwarves had retreated to their new capital in Wales and the goblins were embroiled in centuries of bitter rebellion. From that separation had come tentative peace and then outright alliance. The dwarves and goblins, together with several other of the twilight civilisations, were united against wizardkind.
The dying breeds, like the dwarves, the extinct, like the wind-wights, and the exiled, like the Seelie, lent their silent support to the more politically powerful face of Gringotts. The goblins, in their semi-regular visits to the Nameless Mountain, traded permanently sharp goblin-silver for unbreakable dwarf-steel, rare creatures for rare metals, shackles of binding for rings of protection, and cut gems for wardstones.
Again Harry was surprised to hear the usual rock-hard Brotherhood pride in goblin workmanship above all else falter as Badluk explained how the enchantments woven into dwarven metalwork were stronger, because they used a special system of layered runes, and how dwarven stonework lasted eternally rather than merely indefinitely.
Then the carpets were neatly rolled and the goblins assembled. Hazzad-tus or Giggli (they looked almost identical to Harry's eyes, but if he had to guess, he would suppose the ostensibly female Hazzad-tus was the one with the shorter beard) rumbled something. The other dwarf opened a door in the wall which he hadn't even noticed. Harry stepped forward with the others into a world of fire and metal.
Remus Lupin gulped down one last cup of tea, scourgified the chipped mug and hung it with the others. After a careful walk around the cottage, he returned to the kitchen and picked up his old Hogwarts trunk.
Lupin's owl to Dumbledore about Black had gone unanswered. Fair enough; the great wizard was busy holding jobs as Headmaster, Supreme Mugwump, Head Warlock, and who knew what else. His reports and questions about Harry Potter had been ignored, too. Lupin didn't know what to think about that, even after the article in the Daily Prophet.
But Dumbledore had always been secretive; all he could do was hope that the newspaper had been right, and that the boy was being kept at the absolute highest level of security. It hurt to think that such security might not even leave room to assure Lupin of the child's safety, but he had learned never to underestimate the power of anti-werewolf prejudice.
Lupin left a parchment envelope on the tiny kitchen table. It contained his rent paid up until next week. It said something about the character of the man that he felt ashamed he couldn't leave the sum for the whole month.
Many months had passed with no hint of – of the murderer's presence, and Lupin had finally concluded he had left the country. Si- Black had needed to repeat the stealth part of the Auror exam three times; he had never had a jot of secrecy or cunning.
Well – except that he had managed to disguise his ultimate betrayal.
Lupin squeezed too tight and cracked the wooden handle of his trunk. He sighed, fixed it with a wave of his wand, and closed the front door.
There was only one thing to be done now, and that was to hunt the man down himself. Nobody knew him better, after all, and there was nothing left for Remus in England. He would have had to leave the house soon anyway, unable to find enough work to keep up the rent. Even in a world with conjuration and transfiguration – and you didn't get through seven formative years with James Potter without getting good at transfiguration – there were bills to pay.
Lupin knew only the tiniest handful of werewolves who had managed to remain in civilisation. All of them other than himself were pureblood or old money. Most of them stayed out of society, their very existence hushed up by their families.
But generally speaking, you couldn't live in the human world if you couldn't hold down the most basic of jobs. Oh, you might survive – but you couldn't live.
Lupin locked the door behind him, pocketed the key to post, and Apparated away towards the Channel, never looking back.
If Harry had been even remotely familiar with beekeeping, he would have compared the layout of the fortress under the mountain to that of a hive. Each floor was a discrete layer, filled with large, many-sided rooms and short passageways between them. The ceilings were ten times as high as those of dwellings in Underfoot, but nowhere near as high as the roof of the main cavern of his home.
Each massive room seemed to have a single function. In some, the centre of the floor was stacked with barrels or blocks of stone. In others, a workshop or forge lay in the middle. Many otherwise empty rooms had a central bonfire or pit of coal. No room was so full that its contents reached the walls.
The air was warmer than Harry used to, and smelled of smoke, meat and hot metal. The walls were of cut and polished dark stone, lit by an eclectic range of torches, candelabra and gently glowing crystal orbs. The floors were variously tiled or covered in strange skin rugs – from white wolves, firebats, elk, and enormous bears.
Through it all paced the Welsh dwarves with slow, heavy footsteps, dressed in heavy leathers and furs. Most stood eye-to-eye with the goblins, but all were considerably wider. Bearded and lined faces turned to consider the goblin delegation's progress. Most were blank and solemn, although a few openly scowled at Mr Scintillion or looked at Harry with something approaching curiosity. In several rooms, dwarves gathered to talk in their booming voices. In a few others, they worked metal or wood with intense concentration. Apart from those rooms, and the sound of the goblins' footfalls, the stone fortress was silent.
They passed down through the layers of the mountain. Harry caught glimpses of a room full of iridescent moths, another in which a great serpent of fire coiled and writhed, and one where a waterfall roared down into an apparently bottomless chasm. By the time they had reached the rooms assigned as their quarters, Harry was cowed by this place so similar yet so different to home. He wished he had been allowed to bring Prettyroot.
Harry remained on edge as the visit continued. Unlike Underfoot, the days and nights weren't delineated by the glow of underground lights, and it seemed that the dwarves worked steadily around the clock. It was hard to keep track of when to eat or sleep.
In the halls, he was watched all the time – watched by dour and solemn dwarves whose language he couldn't speak. Badluk had showed his teeth and said Harry was going to have to get used to the experience, as it would no doubt happen again when he went to be educated in the wizarding world. A sneer automatically accompanied those words.
Several times he accompanied his foster father and Wurmspitz to one of the halls of the current Mountain King. All the discussion was in an old dwarven dialect he was unfamiliar with. Bollotz, the goblin sorcerer who was with them, translated a little for him, but the conversation was too dry for him to follow, especially when he was so intimidated by the inscrutable watching eyes.
In the end Harry grew bored and managed to sway Gritzam, one of the guards, into walking with him through the honeycomb halls of the Nameless Mountain.
They wandered past the workshops, stopping often to see the small differences in the way dwarves worked iron or cut stone. They examined, from a respectful distance, the huge tapestries and mosaics that adorned the walls of several chambers. Hazzad-tus, who Harry had indeed picked out correctly despite the uniform drab furs, solid figure and dense beard, accompanied them a few times. She spoke heavily accented Gobbledegook, and haltingly described to them the history of the mountain, the nature of the runes around the walls, and tales of great artefacts her ancestors created. Harry in turn tried to pick up a few dwarven words for the important things – mainly metals and architectural features.
They sometimes passed one of the goblins in their wanderings. Harry noticed Mr Scintillion never left the chamber they had been allotted, but just sat reading and casting Cheering Charms on himself.
Harry practised a little with his wand – the lintel of every doorway in the fortress was a keystone for the powerful secrecy wards that kept the human Ministry away – but the whistling charm seemed stifled and out of place in the ringing gloom of the mountain.
After almost a week, Badluk took Harry with him again to the hall of the Mountain King. Inside the chamber, a dozen Welsh dwarves stood in conversation around a single seated figure.
Harry could sense a difference in the atmosphere this time. The stares sent his way were more frequent and more appraising. Wurmspitz and Badluk continued to speak in the old dwarven tongue, but at one point Harry was asked to reveal the Black and Potter rings on his fingers. He had no idea why the dwarves would think such things mattered, in this strange and isolated world. The goblins had made it clear that the titles were all but meaningless, apart from the seats on the Wizengamot that came with them.
The small, white-bearded King of Dwarves sat silently throughout, slowly tapping weathered fingers on his stone chair. The ancient figure waved off or nodded slightly to the advisors who appeared at his side, but his gaze continually returned to Harry.
Harry, for his part, clasped his hands behind his back and tried not to let his legs tremble. Again he wondered why he was here – in this chamber or in the mountain at all. Was he just a curiosity, as the first human in the Brotherhood and with his strange personal history in the human world? Sometimes, amongst the goblins, he felt he was just a lesser piece in the Council's political game of Hnefskafl – was this just an extension of that?
Just when Harry's legs felt like they were going to fall off, a dwarf broke off from murmured conversation with the sorcerer Bollotz and walked forward, a small golden hammer swinging at his side.
Harry awkwardly clasped the arm offered to him, as he had seen done, and the dwarf's stony face cracked to speak rough Gobbledegook. "Harry Potter. I am Dur Goldbarad. I work wood and carve rune, and stand for the king ven he cannot, ja? We haff some questions. You are pleased to answer?"
"Er, yes. Sir."
"You speak to groundworms, ja?"
Harry blinked, then caught on. "Snakes? Yes, sir."
The dwarf grunted. "And you haff been reading in the field of justice, ja? And all the wizard custom."
"Yes sir. I have to work on my normal studies most of the time, but I've looked at some law books."
"Ja, you go where interest takes you. Good. You are much famous in the world of wizard?"
"I- that's what they tell me." Harry rubbed at his scar nervously.
The dwarf Dur leaned forward. "They tell you, you destroy a dark lord, ja? And the curse that famously leaves no mark, it leaves a mark on you. No vitnesses to say what curse used, either. Your pápá says, you are thinking child, you read about Dementors and caves forming, you know there is problem here. You vill stand still as I look at it, ja?"
Harry swallowed and nodded. Dur leaned down slightly to squint ferociously at his forehead, occasionally glancing down at the golden hammer thrust through his belt. At last he reached out one finger and rested it on the scar.
"Hmmm. Much is unexplained, ja? Still. You can use the magic? Goblin magic? Wand magic? Either."
"Um, I can do some of both, sir."
"Good. Follow."
The dwarf nodded across the room at his seated king, then turned on his heel and marched towards the door. Bollotz the sorcerer caught Harry by the elbow and pulled him along in the dwarf's wake.
The guides stood at the entrance to the huge octagonal meeting room, waiting for them, and fell in behind. Dur was walking briskly down the stone hall.
"After some negotiation, our hosts have agreed to make both of us new staves," the goblin muttered to Harry.
It took him a moment to process the words. "Why? What- do I need one?"
"In part, it is a gesture. There are other subtleties, which Badluk will tell you or not as he sees fit. But a staff is a very …dwarven gift. They don't use wands at all." Bollotz paused. "They seldom use staves either, but there are strict customs regulating when and to whom you may give an axe, which is the only viable alternative. Since you're not marrying one of them, and you haven't saved their lives..."
They turned a corner, and the goblin let go of Harry's arm, satisfied he was keeping up.
"Dwarves have never had a wand ban inflicted upon them. Thus their skills with wand-carving and, by extension, staff-turning, have never waned. This is a unique opportunity for you. Staff and wand magic are very different to the signed forms of magic which you know. A staff is essentially a heavy-duty wand, but it take a slightly different skill to use. With it, you will in time be able to learn the more complex magics of our healers, ward experts and curse breakers if you wish. You will be the first person, after Brother Filius, to know goblin spells and wizard spells. Most of the staff magic is only different from that of wands by accident of history, but again, the subtle differences in the actual... implements, if you will, make the distinction stronger."
Bollotz folded his arms inside his heavy cloak. "As you may have realised, magic itself works differently for goblins and humans. All of us are magical, but most of us have magic to a lesser, rather than greater, degree. There is more variation in those of us who are true sorcerers, too. Witches and wizards certainly vary in perceived power, but most of that is simply skill or lack thereof. Actual squibs are rare, and genuinely weak wizards rarer. There is a large gap between the wizard and the muggle."
Harry watched the dwarf striding ahead of them turn into another hallway. "But goblins cover the whole range?"
"The full spectrum, yes. Everyone is taught goblin-charms to the best of their own particular abilities. The few of us with genuine power tend to go into trades that actually involve magic, and learn to use staves to enhance our power further. The rest become craftsmen, who need a certain amount as well. Those with almost no magic tend to do the banking, the mining and the soldiering. Sibilig has learned a certain amount of staff magic, as she oversees training of the curse-breakers. Badluk is a sorcerer too, but magically weaker. I myself am extremely powerful." The goblin's fingers danced in the air as he continued.
"We can teach you some spells for a staff which we could not for a wand. But most you will learn to cast with either. Do you know the word 'synergy'? An apt metaphor would be... stronger muscles allowing you to climb cliffs faster, but also making you more adept at blacksmithing. Or the quite different applications of mathematics in the accountant's and warder's arts."
Bollotz snarled down at Harry's deep grimace. "Yes, mathematics is fundamental to several branches of magic. You already know this. Just as you know you will have to rise above your laziness at some point, and persevere until your understanding is better."
His expression softened. "Boris Scintillion tells me your numeracy would still be considered ahead of your human peers."
Harry sighed, and nodded. The goblin continued. "I doubt you would be allowed to use a staff at the Hogwarts school, but it will be useful at home. Of course," he added quietly, "there is no Ministry trace on a dwarf-made staff, either."
Then he stopped short, and Harry did too, as Dur halted in the middle of a round room, amongst many old wooden cabinets. He beckoned the goblin and human forward, then waved at the flat drawers around them. "Small samples of all woods, each core or capping piece we use, are in these. Ven it is time to craft we shall draw on our stores, ja, but first we must find a match."
"Each staff is a unique thing. It haff almost what you would call..." the dwarf stared at the ceiling for a while, searching for the word. "A personality, ja? The medium – the wood, the core, the cap, see – together with shape and unseen runes make it very distinctive, very-" Dur waved his hands – "Very whole."
"Will it be like my wand?" Harry asked. "Crafted from holly and phoenix feather?"
"Good question. Typically, ja, if we know a medium is a good match then we might use it. But I think what is in your wizard wand is not matched to you."
The dwarf extended a hoary finger until it hovered over Harry's scar.
"I think it is matched to that."
A lump of rough stone cracked and fell away from the wall before the relentless chipping.
Bellatrix paused for a moment, staring blankly at the patch of grey sky showing through.
Then she raised her piece of rock and continued.
Author's notes:
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