Harry amidst the Vaults of Stone
Chapter 12
Harry's hand automatically moved to trace his scar as he thought. Bollotz shifted his weight beside him but remained silent.
"Why?" he asked eventually. "I mean, how can you tell?"
"I haff carved staves for three centuries," the dwarf Dur said, hooking his thumbs through his belt. "I am the master shaper, ja? I can smell holly is not right wand-wood for you. But this is not all. Your pápá tells me what the carver, Olaf-vander, he say. The wand shares the core of the dark wizard who tries to kill you, ja? Not unusual, but ven it happens to two people who are linked some way, almost always it is the 'brother wand' effect. This is ven two people have stronk blood ties. It is never because one tried to kill the other, ja? So. You are not related to this dark wizard, we know this. Was first question we asked."
"So..." Harry said slowly.
"So, best idea? 'Brother wand' effect is between dark wizard and himself, because dark wizard have exact same blood, same magic pattern, as self. Is simple, ja. Carver Olaf-vander hand you a wand which matches well the dark wizard, because he leave something behind in that mark on your head."
"He left a piece of himself?" Harry failed to suppress the shiver that gripped him. "A large enough piece that the wand was drawn to it, instead of ...me?"
He glanced up at Bollotz, who was looking down at him with glittering eyes. "We were aware there was something off about the scar already, yes? Something dark, and something light, all at once. The curse breakers could do nothing, not if we wanted to leave your magic intact. And your foster parents have made you swear to tell them if you have any unusual pain or sensations from it."
"Yes..."
"Yes."
"Ja," Dur added in his rolling voice. "But is still enough to worry. There are... river curls... are... in your, your line..." he waved a hand in the air and thought for a while in silence. "There are eddies in your continuum of magic, ja? The, eh, field around person. Can see the differences, sometimes." The dwarf looked down at his golden hammer again, and for a moment something dark and moving seemed to be reflected in the gleaming head.
"Eddies are always there, but contained. Only three cases where needs action. If you haff disturbance with magic, if you haff problem with old wound itself, or... if dark wizard returns. Head sorcerer, he is often goblin-friend, ja, and wisest wizard? Head sorcerer Dumbledore – he thinks the dark wizard not truly killed is, ja?"
Bollotz inclined his head. "So the Council has reported."
Dur turned back to Harry, and stared solemnly for a while at the small, jagged scar. "I can only more say, go to the Unseelie for help. Ask the spirits of the Holly Mound, ja? Or, if so dare you, the reavers in the Place of Thorns."
Bollotz scowled, making a cutting motion in the air with his hand. "We may yet, but these are not places for a human child."
"Who exactly are the Unseelie?" Harry asked, wondering why the very name struck a note of terror in him.
The dwarf gazed into the shadows for a while. "They... are neither here nor there. Not quite dead, not quite sleepink. Not quite of zis world. They were imprisoned by men, ja? Shackled in cold iron, trapped. Beneath the ground or in stranger places. They vait. They are old, ja, and terrible, but are patient. They will emerge again, ven the stars are-"
"Later, please." Bollotz made another sharp cutting motion with his hand. "Back to the matter at hand, yes?"
"Ja. If you will begin with these samples..."
The staff-making process proved even more interesting than Harry had expected, especially since he had an active role to play in it. His curiosity about the crafting was enough that his new questions and fears involving his scar were forgotten for the moment.
First he and Bollotz slowly sorted through hundreds and hundreds of different materials, with the instruction to put aside anything they had a 'good feeling' about. As they went, Harry tried to guess what the various samples and blanks were. He found that he knew all of the metals and minerals, and some of the types of wood, but was at a loss when it came to the parts harvested from animals, only correctly guessing turtle shell and ivory. Dur gave the right answers, Bollotz translating whenever the dwarf didn't know the Gobbledegook name.
As the piles grew, Dur also explained – haltingly and by analogy – the threefold functioning of wands (and staves, and similar tools). Firstly, they conducted magic, like lightning rods. Secondly, they stored magic, like jars. And thirdly, they wove magic into a more elaborate and purposeful form, like sewing needles.
The magic core in each tool absorbed magic from the environment, storing it, and using a small portion of it to enhance the power of spells. A wand that had been used repeatedly would run low on its reserves, and draw more on the caster. This was one of the reasons that spells couldn't be cast or held indefinitely.
But a wand also acted as a focus for magic. "Like drilling a hole, ja? Instead of trying to push a piece of metal with same weight through something using palm of hand, you let the tool do the work. You turn the up-down force into round-and-round, and the shaping makes it much effective." This streamlining was especially important when learning to cast a spell. After fully learning a charm, somebody should be able to cast it even with an inferior or misaligned wand. With practise and dedication, it could often be done with no wand at all.
If anyone present had been familiar with the concept of training wheels, that would have been an excellent analogy. As it was, Dur explained how a good smith could in time learn to identify all his hammers by weight and grades of iron by smell, could hear the rate at which metal was cooling and detect any flaws in it by changes in that rate... so that eventually, it would make no difference if the smith was working in the dark.
Wands, Bollotz added, were relatively weak tools, only storing so much magic. The cloaked goblin explained that wizards in Britain had foregone the increased power of staves for the speed and flexibility of wands. Any spell that required more precise gestures to shape the magic was much harder, or sometimes impossible, with a cumbersome staff.
"Ha," Dur boomed. "And staves are harder to carry about, ja? Smaller wand, so convenient, put in sleeve or shirt flap, everyone uses wand. But in Europe, everyone teach staffwork and use staff for warding, rituals, occasions of ceremony. Other countries, sceptres, compromise between power and speed. Or stranger things, ja? Amulet, tar doll, stone knife. Actual tool is not so important. But good fit is. These days, even among my people, we do not always tailor staff to dwarf, ja? Staff sometimes is handed on and is good enough fit, so not bother to craft new one."
The dwarf grasped the head of his golden hammer thoughtfully and continued to speak as he sorted through the piles. "Is even worse among humans. Everyone drawn to unicorn tail, so put that in wand, bang, there you haff it. Or give heart-of-dragon if the wizard can handle powerful core. Only sometimes, tricky customer, give them bone-of-griffin or feather-of-phoenix or several cores. Usually only end up with..." the dwarf fumbled for the word - "approximate fit, ja? And in families, often inherited wand is very good match because of brother ties. Is common knowledge. Often, but not always. So wizard ends up with family wand even if slightly too whippy or heavy to suit, or even core may be worn out. ...There."
It seemed they were done. Harry and Bollotz both had neat heaps of swatches and strips in front of them. A tiny flickering blue light appeared in Dur's hand, and his other rested on his hammer hilt as he looked down at each pile with intense focus. Periodically his stare would suddenly shift to either Harry or Bollotz, and he would pick something out of one pile and discard it or place it somewhere along the neat rows that were slowly forming in front of him. As he moved each sample he muttered about the various properties of the materials and the ways they might interact with each other.
It was fascinating to watch. Before long, the stacks of ingredients had been much reduced. Harry didn't pay much attention to Bollotz's staff materials. The goblin's pile was much smaller, presumably because he already knew what worked well for him.
Harry hadn't honestly felt drawn to any wood in particular, so he had chosen the ones that looked and felt nicest. Dur turned them over repeatedly in his hands, muttering about tension and graft and flow, until he scooped up two different slivers of wood with satisfaction, hands darting back to select several bottles of stain and varnish.
The core was just as difficult. Dur hovered for a long time over a jagged wyvern claw Harry had been fascinated by, and his stare was more intense than ever when he bathed a rope of basilisk skin in the blue light of his dwarf-charm. Harry had also picked up a kraken tooth, but that was frowned over and put back hurriedly. The eventual winner, though, was a segment of incredibly ancient hydra spine, complete with ossified nervous tissue. Bollotz seemed mildly perplexed by this, but whatever significance it had went over Harry's head.
Each staff also needed a cap for its foot, and a more elaborate headpiece. Harry and Bollotz had both immediately sought out goblin-silver, to Dur's grim amusement. The goblin sorcerer had also picked up a sample of coal and what looked like a fire-blackened shard of pottery, the latter of which was eventually discarded by the dwarf craftsman.
Harry's pile still had a lump of amber, flakes of rose gold, some sort of spiralling fossil, and several different gemstones. These were slowly sorted and re-sorted into rows, and Dur's withered nose drew closer and closer to the wooden surface he was working on.
"Rose gold, too temperamental, not well suited to carry charge for oak. Amber could work. Ruby, for the weave, or agate, for the unmaking, ja? Yellow opal and green opal here too, more general use. The stone-shell is problematic fit, I think we leave that aside. Drawn to amber and ruby – maybe as they both let magic flow at such speed, like lightning splits an old tree... but amber and ancient bone and stone-shell, those three together, is much of coincidence. The bones of the earth, ja? Holds more power but warps it, wants to be alive again. No fossil wood chosen, surprising... maybe just a problem of heft, and white oak is wood-bone. Goblin-silver and ruby, too zealous together, no dampening at the end of spell, we must discard one. Still, must be two very different halves, range of choice suggests this. Yellow opal and red agate, but that gives us problems at the interface, ja? I think... yes."
The dwarf rapidly looked up at Harry, down at the materials, and plucked up his final choice. "We begin the craft, ja? Giggli, Hazzad-tus, they go to fetch enough raw materials from stores."
Dur handed the wooden trays of materials to the dwarf guides, who stumped off into the endless halls, then beckoned to the Brothers.
The adjacent room contained what looked to Harry like a woodshop, but with many tools he had never seen before, and whose purpose he could only guess at. Most were carved with runes or made of curious substances. His fingers itched to pick them up, but he knew better than to use another craftsman's tools without express permission.
A large lathe in one of the room's five corners shuffled about slowly on spindly legs. Harry and Bollotz watched as the dwarf prepared his work area, and then with the guides' return, began to shape the wood. Dur built both staves at the same time, in a slow but fascinating process, the creations seeming to grow underneath the dwarf's gnarly hands.
A length of hydra spine matching the sample was carefully lifted from a velvet case and sealed in a blank of rowan wood, heavily runed. The lathe drew elaborate sweeping patterns in the surface, which were inverted and spelled onto the inside of a thin layer of white oak. This was laminated onto the staff, and then a second layer flowed up the outside. A red-hot rune appeared near the base of the wood, and Dur let the smoke curl into the air as he turned to the other staff. Later he switched his attention again, and a final layer of white oak laminated itself to the staff, leaving it almost as thick as the dwarf's muscular arm.
Hours later, when the varnish had dried to Dur's satisfaction, he drew the golden hammer from his side for the first time. With a muttered charm he raised it high and delivered a ringing blow to the headpiece of Bollotz's staff, a perfect sphere of high-grade coal enmeshed in an elaborate filigree of goblin-silver.
Light flashed for a moment before he lowered the hammer again. The dwarf flicked a tiny errant wood-shaving off the staff, peered at it from each angle, and nodded in satisfaction. "Bollotz. Yours."
The goblin walked forward slowly and said something respectfully in the old dwarven tongue, before taking the length of wood. Something immediately glittered in his eyes. The sorcerer tapped the staff three times against the stone floor and produced a stream of blue-white sparks which formed the moving shape of a ibis-headed tomb guardian. Bollotz smiled broadly, showing his slightly pointed teeth, and swept the length of wood through the air, producing a wild howling noise.
Dur had already turned back to Harry's staff-in-progress, and gestured to the varnish drying on the wood's surface. "Tricky customer, ja? Always is harder if you have not had staff before," he added when Harry blushed. "But yes, very tricky. The stain made from giant squid ink and old elf-woad, very old, have used that but once before. The varnish, too, unusual. Is part lac beetle, part erumpent fluid, that much common. But your hand seeks out the vial with ground oliphaunt ivory. Taken from huge ancient tar pit by ice gnomes, traded to our ancestors long ago. Bones of the earth. I think you have more affinity for underground even than your goblin people, ja?" A small grin appeared on the dwarf's weathered face.
Bollotz looked up from running his fingers over his new staff and made a small displeased noise.
"Is joke, is joke," Dur said without removing his attention from a strand of heated goblin-silver. He was directing the metal over the foot of the staff, forming a solid base. "Still, something to think about, ja?"
An hour later, the dwarf finished applying the Invisible Runes with a tiny, bristle-less brush, and ran a cloth over Harry's finished staff. It was topped with three claws of goblin-silver, clutching a bipartite gem. In deference to the hydra spine core, Dur had split each claw into three interlocking strands. The smooth, perfectly round crystal they clutched was made up of two hemispheres: one of vivid green opal and one of amber, warm liquid orange dancing in its heart. The gem was flawed and the amber cloudy – when the dwarf held the staff up to the light it cast coarse and mottled shadows on the floor – but together they formed a gem larger than Harry's two balled fists. There was no visible seam between them, each half appearing to grow naturally out of the other.
Dur stood it on end, and it stayed upright when he took his hand away. The pale staff was slightly taller than Harry himself. "Is most adequate work, I think. Now, important – this is tool. Is next best to indestructable, ja? Hang your coat on it, wedge door shut with it, use to fight or spit suckling pig, but always remember, is tool. Respect for a tool does not mean mount on wall so it cannot be damaged. Means proper maintaining, but also means use it."
"Yes, sir. I will."
The dwarf grunted. "Now, just as important: follow me."
Harry was first allowed to touch his new staff in an empty stone room. Bollotz had made sure he was wearing his leather undershirt and explained that people had been known to 'spurt flames uncontrollably' until they were used to a staff's power. Dur laughed and muttered something which Harry didn't understand, but suspected he might when he was older.
"It should help that you have used a wand before." Bollotz shrugged, and stepped out.
After the footsteps had receded, Harry approached the staff. It was leaning innocuously against the wall, pale and strangely serpentine. Light glittered through its headpiece as he held out his hand.
The shock he got from contact was sharp and burning, almost like a snakebite. It might not have been the most powerful object he had handled in his time wandering Gringotts' vaults of stone, but it seemed to be an extension of his own power. His fingers clenched instinctively around the white oak, and a wind sprang up from nowhere to tousle his hair, shimmering down his arms and bursting into fat electric blue sparks when it reached his family rings.
"Seams dripping with ore," Harry whispered reverently, slipping inadvertently into Parseltongue. "Blood and shale. That... that is not like my wand at all."
It was a full minute before his breathing was under control enough to leave the room and thank Dur profusely for the creation.
The dwarves seemed almost thrilled to see Harry with his new staff. Beards twitched up at the corners. Ancient faces cracked into laugh lines like glaciers calving. The King of Dwarves clasped his arm, and Bollotz stood behind him and murmured formulaic responses for Harry to repeat.
And then, just like that, it seemed that all business had been completed and the trip was at an end. The goblins moved out of their assigned quarters. The carpets were loaded with ingots of mighty dwarf-steel, fine spellproof shields, and an assortment of runed cogwheels which would bear any torque. It seemed very sudden.
Harry was far from stupid. He knew his family history, had witnessed the increased attention the human Gringotts employees gave to him. He knew that no other human child would have been taken in by goblins, no matter the contents of the will. He knew that, in fact, he was politically important – although he wasn't certain of the how or the why. He knew that his Brothers wanted to be the hand, and him the tool, that would forge greater freedom and prosperity for the many-times-wronged goblin nation.
But it still took until the very end of the visit for him to realise what was strange about the attention he was drawing. It was difficult to tell from the dour Welsh dwarves, but they seemed to be weighing him up as some sort of future saviour. And the receiving of the staff seemed to be the capstone of that, like foreign dignitaries exchanging gifts after signing a treaty.
He thought back to the Swiss gnomes, and a few other briefly-introduced luminaries from the nonhuman world. Was he being lined up to champion the cause of much more than Gringotts?
Harry's fingers danced through a series of tiny balls of light, knotted together in strange ways.
The goblin-charm was not, in truth, all that complex. Nor did it require great power – obviously; after all, he was only a child. It had taken him an hour to patiently pull all the threads together, one by one, and a single slip could have unravelled the whole edifice. But now it was finished, and it told him exactly what he needed to know.
He sat alone on a high stool in Bidpruk's jewellery workshop, surrounded on three sides by a web of light that looked like the cat's cradle left by some strange, fiery creature after it had hurriedly left for a suddenly-remembered appointment.
The pattern dipped and spiralled towards where his glasses lay on the workbench, curling curiously around the six rune-knots. The play and quiver of it told him what the second of the four enchantments on the frames did.
"Magnification," Harry said aloud with delight. He tried the first few handsigns of the appropriate goblin-charm, blinking as his eyes prickled in response. The weave before him shimmered. He prodded it a few more times, and when he was certain, let the threads drift away, sagging forward a little with exertion.
He put on his glasses, and found himself staring at the tiniest pits and cracks in the smooth stone bench before him.
"Perfect."
"What are you staring at?" Prettyroot coiled up the boy's arm.
"The table. I have found that the magic on my glass eyes can see much smaller things."
"I thought you did not hunt insects."
Harry grinned and stroked the snake's head. "I do not."
"You will hunt me insects?"
"Perhaps. It is also useful for the making of small things."
"A great triumph, then?"
"Yes. I must find Bidpruk, to tell him."
"The surly one," Prettyroot hissed.
"Yes, the surly one." But first...
Harry drew his wand, noting - as he always did now - the difference from his staff in the tug it gave on his magic. He grabbed a stray piece of copper wire, and looked down at it through his glasses, seeing every detail magnified.
Feeling pleased at not having to position the jeweller's glass, he firmly pictured a wooden button. "Mutum ullus." This would let him work in his own time – even at home, in front of a nice fire.
The wire had curled up and started turning into a button. Now, as his attention wavered, it suddenly veered towards the shape of a scrap of tinder. The result was a sort of bushy copper disc, which pinged resolutely into its final form.
Harry prodded it cautiously. It dissolved.
"More practise required," Prettyroot said with a sibilant laugh.
Governor Marchbanks pursed her lips. Whoever had been educating the boy had allowed far too many ideas to enter his head. Not that she was against education, of course. That would be quite hypocritical of her. But there was only so much of it one should inflict upon the very young. She wished he would stop asking questions about everything. It was unnerving.
She put down her teacup and turned the page.
"And this is a still taken of the Durytsian Frieze, at the base of the Sixth Arch of Piedmont, again demonstrating the influence of the Hellenistic Period of Wizarding Culture, which still has great impact on our arts today..."
Perhaps there was something wrong with the boy's head, that the Healers weren't picking up on. Merlin knew, Lord Malfoy had been of no help in the half-dozen times they had met here. Marchbanks glanced across at him. The man barely even tried to instil culture into the boy, instead letting her take the lead and spending most of his time gazing into space or watching the child.
She reflected for a moment on how young Malfoy looked for a lord. Although heavens knew he had must have looked even younger when he had taken up the Head of Family position. That was almost a decade ago, when his father, Lord Abraxas Malfoy, had died in mysterious circumstances.
The boy was staring at the open book. "When you say 'our arts today', do you mean..." he began.
Marchbanks sighed internally. If he was as eager as this in their next session, she would have to resort to deportment lessons.
"And then we looked at the history of their costumes," Harry recounted, "Which seemed a little pointless. Still, it was better than learning how to drink tea. And all the different things that a gift says, depending on what it is and how it is wrapped."
"Really," said Badluk flatly, tapping his fingers agitatedly on his desk.
Harry nodded. "That was two seasons ago. I think..." he trailed off, looking into space.
"Yes?"
"I think wizards must have developed a coded system of gift-giving as a backup language in case their mouths and ears suddenly all collectively fail."
Harry's white staff spun through the air, meeting his opponent's simpler pole with a clack. He turned slightly, letting the goblin girl's weapon slide away from his.
The dwarf-carved staff was essentially indestructible by nonmagical means, so he had started using it for sparring. He was used to a shorter weapon, but no doubt he would grow into it.
A moment's inattention cost him as Bludfrang swept his feet out from under him, followed a moment later by the expulsion of breath as he hit the ground.
"Yes, yes, keen strike," he muttered to a chorus of background sniggers.
"Maybe stick to using it for magic?" the young girl said, mirth dancing in her eyes. "You used to be able to beat me at least one in three times."
"He can only do sparks with it," Ratspan interjected from the side of the courtyard.
"The curse-breakers don't think it's important for me to learn staff magic yet, and none of Brother Filius' wand spells carry over well," Harry said, leaning on the length of white oak and watching for sneak attacks. "Everyone keeps telling me I need to 'learn control', but they haven't really said how."
"What happens when you try your little wand spells with it?" Gitztick's pole suddenly swept through the air, and Harry shifted his grip to avoid being rapped on the knuckles. The two fighters began circling each other, the older goblin shaking one of her plaits over her shoulder with a practised flick.
"Not a lot. The wand uses too much precise motion. I've only gotten results with the basic transfiguration spells which don't use gestures, and then the staff is sort of... too powerful."
Harry jabbed, and Gitztick leapt back easily, almost knocking Harry over with her riposte. Bludfrang moved into range and struck at the other goblin's knee, but her staff was parried at the last moment.
"Hence that inkwell in the library with the solid block of bronze instead of ink?"
"Actually, it should have turned back by now." Harry feinted to one side, but Bludfrang ignored it.
"So you're going to dare set foot in there again?"
"...Maybe next week."
"Do you want to see something keraghakursk?" Harry asked, using a goblin word which would be directly translated as "akin to the roaring of mole titans in the utmost depths", but in the parlance of the young meant "completely awesome".
The loner Longfang glanced across at him. "Will I regret it?" the goblin youth asked warily.
"Just come look."
The goblin was eventually persuaded to peer down through the finest jeweller's glass in Bidpruk's workshop, under which Harry had fixed his glasses in a stand, with their own magnifying charm switched on.
"...What am I looking at? What are all these things?"
"I've got samples of well water, saliva, and a silty cavern pond."
"This is the pond, right?"
"No, that's the drinking water. This is the pond."
Harry slid a new dish of water droplets under the makeshift apparatus.
"...I will never drink water ever again."
"...and the muggle book Sibilig got me calls them protozoa."
"Marvellous!" Filius squeaked, and fell off the stool.
"Advanced economics," said Badluk, dropping the ledger on the table and sitting down.
"The sort without any maths?" Harry asked hopefully.
"No," came the grim reply.
"But we have a fixed exchange rate," Harry frowned, turning a cushion over and over in his hands with increasing frustration.
Badluk held up one cautionary finger. "Well spotted. Normally, arbitrage would be a serious problem. However, we have certain advantages. Firstly, approximately half the gold in existence is completely unknown to the muggle world. This drives the rate up."
The goblin raised another finger. "Secondly, monitoring anyone trying to sell any sort of magical gold to muggles is one of the duties the otherwise ineffectual ICW actually takes seriously."
Another finger joined the first two. "Thirdly, the bank independently tracks the exchanges made by any person or business each year, and clamps down on those who play the markets. Gringotts currency exchange fees are already, shall we say, not negligible, and are prone to becoming somewhat more substantial when wizards try to mess with us."
A fourth finger. "Fourthly, while the Ministry requires us to exchange muggle money, they also compensate us for a reasonable percentage of what are typically losses each year. And finally, the vast majority of wizards have a strongly-ingrained idea that muggle money is worthless to them. In short? It works as long as we keep an eye on the clever ones."
"So somebody using magic to make large quantities of, um, luxury goods, selling them to muggles, then trying to change the profit to Galleons..."
"-may not find it quite as easy as they would like it to be, yes. I believe also that the Ministry taxes income based on any dealings with the muggle world at a substantially higher rate."
Harry nodded.
The small, dark-haired boy weighed the bag in his hand thoughtfully. The noise of the bank's main foyer echoed around them, muffled by the intervening stone wall.
"Well. I know the coins we make are charmed half-weight. Which is easier because of the conjured gold content, yes?"
"Yes."
"Yes... but I'm sure this is lighter still for the volume. I mean, even if it contains other coins, made of lighter metals. Is it a standard charm on the bag?"
"Yes. It is very convenient for working in the bank, and we sell money pouches with a similar enchantment. Still. You do see the problem?"
Harry frowned, and hefted the bag again. "If you want to buy something expensive – property, say, or a whole shipment of something, or even just a precious work of craft, then coins are still too heavy and bulky to carry around. That's without even thinking about security."
"Yes. That too." Badluk grinned nastily, showing all his teeth at once. "The one wizard charm every banker knows about is the Switching Spell. It turns pickpocketing and petty theft from a true skill into an idle pastime. Literally half of our complaints come from the fact that we let idiot wizards walk out the doors with bags of money, unprotected against Switching Spells. It's all good fun."
Harry dropped the bag onto the cart, where it jingled. "So..."
"There are alternatives. Direct transfers from vault to vault, if the parties can conveniently agree to meet. Warders and wizard locksmiths, for spellproofed bags. But Gringotts also offers personalised tokens, bank drafts, and various writs of exchange."
"For a – what was it – 'non-negligible' fee?"
Badluk grinned again and tapped the money bags on the cart. "I might, off the record, go so far as to say 'rather substantial'."
A dirty and haggard figure moved through the gloom of Number 12, Grimmauld Place. In his wake lay a stunned house-elf, two crushed curse dolls, and the incinerated remains of a swarm of Doxies – testament to Auror reflexes that had rusted with disuse, but had not vanished completely.
Sirius Black cursed quietly to himself, stolen wand outstretched, as he edged shakily up the stairs. The blood-warded safe under the dining room cabinets had been empty but for a dozen Galleons, which he had pocketed, a loaf of century-old waybread, which he had hesitantly eaten, and a gem-encrusted pickle fork, which had bitten him when he picked it up. The quick application of a standard healing charm had helped, but some of whatever poison or curse was on the blasted utensil had got through. His hand was aching and swelling up, and from what he could see in the dim light, it was becoming a nasty colour too.
There was something else for him here, though, that he needed to find before he could leave and tend to his wounds. Enough information had filtered down to his cell in Azkaban for Black to know that he was the last male of his line. While normally that wouldn't matter a damn to him, he was going to need every resource at his disposal. And although this was a distasteful resource, it was also a unique one.
There was a time when Black would never have bothered planning ahead. Prison had changed him.
He stepped cautiously into the living room. What he was looking for gleamed back at him from the mantelpiece.
Sirius Black stole across the carpet, picked up the small silver jewellery box, and Apparated far, far away from the house at Number 12.
Author's notes:
→ I struggled with this chapter a lot, but I hope never to go a month between chapters again.
→ Thanks to all you reviewers out there. I read them all, even if I don't usually do individual replies. Thanks to the reviewer who pointed out that Belgium didn't actually exist until 1830. Corrections are always appreciated!
→ I'll address a few questions here:
→ Transportation is such a fundamental thing in everyone's lives that I think there must have been many diverse forms of magical transportation throughout history. I have only the haziest notion of what a 'cloud-grapple' might be, but it's probably something archaic that nobody uses anymore.
→ Yes, the dwarf doors were a callback to Lord Of The Rings. I tend to use literary references liberally; there are at least five more of them in this chapter, including more Tolkien, Lovecraft, Douglas Adams, and Ursula Vernon.
→ In this fic, Gringotts is secure against a lot of wand magic, but remember that wandless is canonically a very rare art for wizards, and Occlumency and Legilimency rarer still. Hence Malfoy.
→ Once again, it is way too early to start considering 'pairings'. Honestly, guys. If the only reason you're reading this fic is in the hopes of high-quality romantic intrigue, you're going to be pretty disappointed.
→ Pacing is indeed pretty slow, but people have said they like the depth of detail. I suspect (hope?) that by the time this is actually finished, it will either be multiple-books-length or I will have written multiple book-length sequels.