Harry amidst the Vaults of Stone

Chapter 16

Within seconds of the alarm bells splitting the air, Bollotz had raised his staff of silver and yew. The tall sorcerer shouted a word, and a glossy purple shield flickered into existence around Harry, who flinched back in surprise. The goblins were springing into battle positions, cocking crossbows and kneeling around the guard platform to peer downwards.

The young battle-shaman who was on duty raised her hands, sending eerie maggot-glimmers corkscrewing around into the darkness below. The green-and-blue wormlights bolstered the faint dotted glow of torches burning in the depths. A dozen goblin-eyes tracked across every square foot of the rough-hewn walls.

Only Harry's foster aunt Talliapa, a wiry old matron with gold teeth and a barking voice, remained in the centre of the platform with him and Bollotz. She had immediately begun hashing together a plan with the master sorcerer, above the noise of the alarms.

"Get the boy to a saferoom! He is a liability here!"

Bollotz turned slowly in place, considering the echoing caverns around them and the narrow spurs of stone that spanned the chasm in various places. "We can't head up to the bank saferoom, a major breach in the 800s means the tracks will have been un-wrought. The secret words will have locked the carts, too."

"Well, you can't go up on the winding ledges, you'd be exposed from all sides, and the Downfall will be in full rush. Descend into the Maze?"

Harry followed the hurried discussion, waiting for orders. He was standing in a low fighting crouch, but his fists were clenched to keep them from shaking. He wished he was carrying his staff, so he had something comforting to grip.

Bollotz shook his head. "No. The alarms are coming from down there. It could be a cave kraken surfacing."

Talliapa narrowed her yellow eyes, listening. "That's the Treachery Bell ringing. It's wizards."

"The Western Way, then. If we spiral down through..."

"You can't, the Opaleyes will be roused for a fight. The false seven-hundred vaults? Hide in one of the furthest..."

Bollotz grimaced. "I don't want to chance dealing with a troll, and the sun-wards will be activated."

"Argh, shit and woodworm. The false eight-hundreds would be fine, but one of Thugdurn's blasted mechanical sphinxes got loose in there, too, and I don't know if they recovered-"

"It'll have to be one of the real vaults on this level."

"Yes. Seven-oh-eight is behind a secure passage. Take the Spidermaw Tunnel, go!"

Bollotz flicked his hand at Harry. They ran.

Granite walls flashed by, and Harry's legs burned. Behind him, Bollotz periodically thumped his staff against the ground as he ran, kicking up sparks that hung in strange patterns. Harry didn't know what the sorcerer was learning from this, and didn't have breath to ask. Whatever it was, it was causing him to curse occasionally.

Then there was a cataclysmic noise, and Harry was thrown off his feet.

Everything was shaking; the rock itself seemed to be bubbling beneath them. The thundering roar grew and grew, to a volume he would never have guessed possible, before suddenly waning. Harry's ears popped, and the noise of the alarms reasserted itself.

Boy and goblin both gasped "rocks fall," a swearword and a reality. Bollotz had instinctively raised his hands to strengthen his magical shield during the earthquake; the purple glow was now a solid disc in the air above them.

Gritty dust swirled around the tunnel. Jagged cracks had appeared in the walls and stones had fallen in places. Harry scrambled upright, hurriedly trying to remember which fork they were at.

"Up, up," Bollotz said distractedly. "Keep behind me now and step lightly, there could be more falls."

Curiously, it was that comment which made Harry truly realise how serious the situation was, and he shivered. Normally you wouldn't think of moving again after a cave-in, not before the rescue crews had arrived and made sure it was stable.

The next few minutes were filled with the terrifying, echoing thump of falling boulders, counterpoint to the insistent bells. Then they rounded a corner, and Bollotz halted in front of a wall of jagged rock, lightly veiled by swirling dust. The goblin groaned: the route to Vault 708 had fallen spectacularly. There was no way forward.

Bollotz spoke quickly and sharply as they backtracked to the previous intersection. "We will find as distant a vault as we can. I will open it and seal you inside. You will conceal yourself and remain absolutely still and silent until somebody fetches you. You will stay there. Only if nobody comes and you are in danger of dehydration will you try to convince the imp locks to let you out. Do not argue," he added in a hiss.

Harry stifled his objections, and began to follow again. His blood was boiling in his veins at the thought of an attack on Gringotts, but realistically, what could he do? His focus should be on surviving whatever could cause tunnel collapses.

The Spidermaw Tunnel led to a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. At the end of each winding path lay a vault, or more commonly a dead end or a fiendish trap. They were near the end of the maze when a howling noise started up behind them, and the brisk march Bollotz had set suddenly turned into a run. The noise was growing unmistakeably louder by the second.

"What's – that – " Harry huffed.

"Don't know – not good – " the tall goblin replied.

After a moment, clattering footfalls were added to the mixture of storm-like roar and distant alarms. Bollotz had shaken his hood free and was chanting as he ran, words flowing faster than Harry could follow, and blazing orange and yellow glyphs formed in the air behind them.

A final corner, and they stood in a small cave, in front of the heavy steel door of a high-security vault. Harry staggered to a halt, trying to catch his breath, as the roaring noise behind them became a rushing thunder.

Time seemed to be slowing down for him – adrenaline, the word came to his mind from a book of muggle biology – and he watched Bollotz slowly, slowly reach out to the large diamond-screws that formed the vault number on the door. The goblin seemed to pale in recognition, and slowly, slowly, spun on his heel.

A question flourished, then died on Harry's lips when his sorcerous guard raised one hand. A stream of magic flung Harry into a shadowy niche near the ceiling. He distantly felt himself scrabble for a few seconds, barely finding purchase on the bare stone, blinking and breathless from the impact.

Then Bollotz's staff made curlicues in the air, and Harry was frozen against the rock wall. Automatically, he fought it, but found that he couldn't move a single muscle. There was nothing to do but watch as gloom flowed across the cave from every nook and cranny and wrapped around him, concealing him perfectly where he half-stood, half-lay in a hollow near the ceiling. A spur of rock blocked part of his field of view, and some automatic part of his brain that was always thinking about the world around him traced the vein of quartz in it, whispering its chemical properties.

Then the cap of the goblin's staff curled back down to the ground, time still flowing thick and lumpy and strangely in tune with the blood thumping in Harry's ears. Between one beat and the next, Bollotz moved into a defensive crouch, facing away down the tunnel, still looking pale and grim.

As the noise of rushing wind reached a crescendo, Harry gazed at the vault door that stood just down and across from his immobilised body, and wondered for a moment what was so special about Vault 713.

Everything that happened next, he would recall only as a series of strangely disjointed images, which came to him at the time through a haze of shock and terror. There would be no rhyme nor reason until he could piece it together in his mind.

First, two dark-robed figures sped towards the end of the tunnel like out-of-control bats, the air seeming to lie in dark tatters behind them. On reaching the cave, the first tumbled out of flight like a falling leaf. Harry's blood ran cold at the sight of Bellatrix Lestrange, Azkaban escapee, looking strained and struggling to kneel upright. She clutched a wand in her left hand; her right arm lay limp and broken against her side. Spell damage had bruised her face, swollen one eye shut, and seared away parts of the skin on her lower arms.

The second figure touched the cavern floor gracefully, lighting on the toes of first one foot, and then the other. His wand was already sweeping in a wide half-circle, and when the flurry of green sparks that emerged had slowed to a steady cascade, Harry was looking at what might have once been a young, balding man.

The reason that this was unclear was the man's head.

Oh salt and shale, the head. It seemed to be set crookedly on his shoulders, so that one ear lay where a normal person's temple would be. A completely dead face stared slackly out of the bulging neck area, smeared across much more space than a normal set of features would occupy, so that it curved obscenely around the contours of the skull. Worse, from this angle Harry could see just a sliver of a completely other visage; a cruel, snakelike face with dully-glowing red eyes that immediately seared themselves into the boy's memory.

The tattered and charred remains of what looked like a long purple scarf trailed around the wizard's neck and across his shoulder.

The unmistakeable smell of decay filled Harry's nostrils, a clear and striking note in the tunnels of the bank, which seldom held any odour other than smoke or hot metal.

Petrified as he was, Harry could just barely see Bollotz gritting his teeth and weaving together a complex shield of ancient white runes. Harry shrieked silently as he saw that it was already withering away beneath the acid-green sparks that flowed from the misshapen wizard's wand.

On the other side of the cave, a goblin Harry didn't recognise staggered to a halt, gasping for breath. He was squat and earthy-skinned, holding a black leather sack, and his expression was strangely vacant. Behind him, the clamour of pursuit was growing rapidly louder, but the goblin was completely ignoring everything that was going on around him.

And then Lestrange was standing upright, and blood was pouring down the side of her face, and a troupe of goblin guards were racing around the corner even as the last symbols in Bollotz's shield curled in upon themselves and died. Harry was wordlessly willing them to please come back, but they did not, and the monstrous wizard was laughing as his wand flickered through the air, and Bollotz just barely parried the spell in time, and Lestrange was warding off the goblin guards with a stream of oozing, necrotic black snakes that gushed wetly from her wand, and –

And then a massive figure, bigger and hairier than any human Harry had ever seen, was lumbering into the fray alongside an unarmed goblin – the clerk Griphook, Harry barely registered. And now he realised with a sudden rush of relief that he was hallucinating, because the bearded ogre was batting conjured monstrosities aside with a pink umbrella.

– And go, the misshapen wizard was yelling in his cold, high voice, and something like you will bring it to me at the second place, and Lestrange had snatched the leather sack from that first goblin who was standing as still as stone. She started forcing her way through the throng to escape, and the guards were following her, unable to penetrate her storm of magic to strike a telling blow –

– And the man with the incongruous purple scarf was turning his attention back to Bollotz, a flick of his wand and the body of a fallen guard exploded in a cloud of gore, ribs flying through the air and turning into long, dark spears just before they reached the goblin sorcerer, who managed to force them away... the misshapen man was firing spell after spell at Bollotz, who was gasping and on his knees, staff splintering and smoking in front of him as protection after protection caved –

– And Harry's attention flickered back at the sound of clashing metal. The enormous bearded man had turned for a moment to chase Lestrange, but then halted; he was looking uncertainly back towards the vault, as Griphook was fighting with that eerily vacant-looking goblin, knife against knife, already bleeding in two places –

– And then a jet of ugly green light erupted from the grotesque wizard's wand, and Harry stopped struggling against the charm holding him frozen in place near the ceiling and just watched, unable to tear his eyes away from it. The spell was a colour that resonated darkly with some base and fearful part of him, and he couldn't look away as it tore unstoppably forward, before seeming to stop and just barely touch Bollotz's chest with a tiny tendril, and there it vanished in a flash –

– And Harry's eyelids refused to close when the suddenly empty-looking body collapsed to the floor –

– And still he was staring when the ugly man turned to face the bearded brute, who blinked as two different spells in quick succession bounced off his huge frame quite harmlessly. Harry felt the dark camouflage that had covered him vanishing away, and the bonds of paralysis loosen and evaporate. The giant was backing up, and the purple-scarfed monster followed him two steps forward, slowly and intently, and Harry managed to steady his footing for just a moment on the sloping wall of the niche as the magic that held him there expired.

A moment was all he needed to draw his long knife; he didn't even need time to think. He didn't even draw breath to yell.

He just flung himself forward at the two-faced wizard, one hand gripping tightly to stab and the other with fingers splayed to gouge.

And then there was pain like he had never felt before.

And then, nothing.

A noise, like something bubbling up from underwater.

There was darkness, and he wasn't sure if he had imagined the voice that rung in his ears. Then a little light came on inside his head, and the first sensation he felt was of something pleasantly cool and dry, pooled on his bare chest.

Then the pain gripped him, a dull burning on his forehead that made him tense up and writhe, and he realised he had no idea where he was, but it felt like the room was flying in circles, and he couldn't feel his arms or legs. The cool weight on his chest stirred in agitation.

Somebody prised his jaw open. A still distant-sounding voice said, "drink."

He didn't have a lot of choice, as a few spoonfuls of something lukewarm and tasting of earthworms trickled down his throat.

He spluttered, his head swimming even more, but the burning soon faded to a faint tingle. Then somebody poked him in the ribs.

"Ow," Harry complained vaguely.

There was a pleased grunt, and then two voices spoke at once, in two different languages.

That is the last time you go anywhere without me, "We needed to wake you early to make sure you were not damaged," Harry Potter. "Harry Potter. Since you appear" Foolish child! Trying to bite a "to be well, you should sleep again." salamander!

"Again," he croaked. "Separately."

There was a pause. "What?"

The snake lying on his chest gave a protracted sigh. Salamanders. You bit something that could burn you, my stupid friend.

Two fingers forced his eyelid open. A goblin he vaguely recognised – that unsympathetic healer with the unfortunate wart – she had taught him how to splint a limb – stood in a dimly lit room. Cave. Room, he decided. He wondered vaguely why he was there.

Goblin-charms made little rippling disturbances in the air, which smelled of smoke and medicinal moss. "Concussion, perhaps? Hmmm? Do you remember who I am, who you are, why?"

He thought, managing to open both eyes by himself.

"Harry. Cave. A... salamander?"

The healer scowled down at him, shook her head, and said something.

Whatever it was, he didn't hear it. Terrible images were filling his brain. Bollotz's lifeless eyes were staring up at him, and Griphook was lying still with two knives in his back, and a goblin's body was rupturing as bones exploded from it, and a dead face was hanging slackly from where a man's neck should have been, and now Harry was retching violently.

A hand tilted his head firmly as he gasped for breath. A murmured incantation, and the smell of expelled bile faded from the air. He kept his eyes shut. "Dead," he mumbled. "Bollotz. He died. Right there. And Griphook. Others. Dead."

There was a quiet murmur of confirmation.

He had to ask, but he didn't want to. Time ticked by, and Prettyroot flowed up his chest and wound comfortingly around his neck; he didn't want to ask, but he had to.

"The others?"

The healer looked away for a moment, then rattled off six names. Harry felt them sitting on the edge of his consciousness. He was deliberately keeping them out, not letting them sink in.

Instead, he turned to scan the room. The healer – Brassruuk, he remembered, she was Brassruuk the Impatient – let go of his head and leaned back to perch on a high stool.

There was someone else waiting, in a corner, also seated on a stool. One of Bogripple's secret clerks.

Harry eyed the stout goblin, who was holding a clipboard. His head still felt a mess, but he couldn't put off asking. "What... happened?"

The man with the two faces had been identified as Quirinus Quirrell, a Hogwarts professor, which was a deeply troubling fact. The story behind those two faces was not clear; but some sort of dark magic gone wrong was the theory of the moment. He might have been seriously cursed. He might have been possessed. He might have been someone completely different, merely wearing the empty skin of Quirrell.

Whatever he had been, he was dead.

Harry's mere grasp had burned him to a cinder. True, the blade right through his eye probably hadn't helped. But judging by the distinct holes Harry's fingers had burned into his skull, like a hot poker through crumpled paper, it was the touch that had finished him.

Nobody seemed able to explain exactly why that had happened – although Badluk, when he had joined Harry, Brassruuk and the clerk, admitted to having suspicions. The name 'Voldemort' was mentioned.

Bellatrix Lestrange had managed to escape, severely wounded, taking an illegal portkey as soon as she reached the Gringotts foyer.

Harry scowled at this unwelcome information. His thoughts returned to the cave outside the vault, and the last man. "What about the ...big man, with the beard? What... I mean, what was he, even? What happened to him?"

The information clerk – one of Manager Bogripple's spies – answered this with reference to a clipboard. "Rubeus Hagrid. A sorry sort of wizard. A half-giant, I would assume. We took him into custody, which would not have been easy but for the fact that he was struck by an unknown curse. We couldn't identify it, but he was having some sort of seizure or fit. He was there on quite legitimate business, sent by Chief Warlock Dumbledore to withdraw the vault's contents. The guards witnessed him trying to detain the Lestrange thief. He was clearly trying to help, so we released him after he regained consciousness a few hours ago."

"Is he okay?"

The goblin shrugged. "We offered a portkey to St Mungo's, since he was quite badly wounded, but he refused, insisting that he preferred to recover on his own."

Harry put down the sick-bucket he had been given, and lay on his side. His foster father was rubbing his neck. "The vault contents? Security? Damages?"

"We are digging out two vaults and re-building five sections of track. Lichen Boulevard was completely destroyed. Vault 807 was breached, but by the vault-owner, Lestrange. The council is yet to convene to decide the protocol to deal with that, but there will be a full audit, and possibly fines for reparations. The wizard magic wreaked some havoc in the Boulevard. Vault 713 remained secure, of course, and has now been emptied."

"The old man has the rock," Badluk said. "We are well shot of it."

"Who? What rock?"

Badluk visibly hesitated, shifting slightly on his stool. "Dumbledore visited personally when he heard what had happened. I will speak no more of it, but he does not find much favour with us at the moment."

Harry closed his eyes, trying to working out why, and felt Prettyroot slither onto the pillow beside him. "Voldemort... You said Dumbledore always believed he'd be back. If that-"

"Yes. The old man jumped to that conclusion readily enough, too. Almost as if he had forewarning, yet failed to share that with us. It had only been suggested that the thief Lestrange would be interested in the – item."

"If that was... then he'll still be back..." Harry couldn't summon the strength to open his eyes again.

"Don't worry about that right now."

Harry lay still. "I killed a man," he said fuzzily. Shouldn't that have disturbed him more?

"You took a thief. His life was forfeit under every law we have. You know this, yes." Yes, of course... But still...

The last thing he heard his foster father say, before he drifted back into sleep, was that the funerals would be in two days' time.

Harry got through all the proceedings that followed in a kind of horrible blur. For the parts where he needed to be in Gringotts, Boris Scintillion kept him under a regular dose of Cheering Charms. Harry noticed the wizard was also casting them on himself. For the parts where he needed to be in Underfoot, Harry closed his eyes as much as possible and kept close to Prettyroot and his parents.

Tribbleglean, the goblin who had killed Griphook while under a mind-controlling curse, was cast out of Underfoot and the Brotherhood. It seemed terribly unfair to Harry, but then, so did the deaths of eight brave goblins. The lore and the law said that the blood was upon his hands. There was nothing to be done.

The vault guardians were shuffled around to make up for the gap left by a slain dragon and three destroyed Unsdugu. The Brothers began searching amongst their counterparts for a replacement Ukrainian Ironbelly.

The body of Griphook was lowered into the Insurmountable Depths, beneath even the Great Below, on a thick rope, which was paid out for hours until it snapped under its own weight. A warrior's funeral for a lowly clerk, who had died in combat.

The same ceremony was performed for the six dead guards, Harry's foster aunt Talliapa amongst them. Wooden replica crossbows and axes, lovingly carved by their children, nieces and nephews, were packed alongside their bodies for the descent. It would have been a criminal waste to send them off with the real objects, of course.

Harry dropped a sprig of greencliff willowherb after his aunt, and cried a little as it vanished into the blackness.

Some of the Council of Counters adjudicated over the distribution of the possessions of the slain, and Harry was required to attend that, too. Most of the objects went into the coffers of the Brotherhood, to be given to those with the greatest Craft. Those items whose value was sentimental went to the families of the slain, who were most in need of them.

Bollotz, as was traditional for a sorcerer of the highest degree, was carefully embalmed by his brethren and sistren, skin stretched waxy and tight over carefully-dried flesh. Then his body was bound in sturdy rings of goblin-silver, and placed cross-legged with his ceremonial mask and his staff of sorcery in a stone niche within the Unfathomable Maze. Future rune carvers would, one by one, set in place the elaborate glyphs that would integrate his deathly shell into the Gringotts security system.

Harry cried a little more as they walked away between the tall, statue-like forms of the unliving Undsdugu, who stood silently with animalian heads bowed.

And then life went on.

The parchment trembled as Harry's hands shook with dull anger. This week's Daily Prophet articles had not been pleasant to read. The murder of goblins wasn't even mentioned by this journalist. Instead, the wizard had pestered goblins terse with grief until he had elicited a suitably sensationalist quote.

"We're not telling you what was in there, so keep your noses out of it if you know what's good for you," Harry read aloud. Vangrashk had said that; Vangrashk whose brother had been gruesomely killed just days earlier.

He crumpled up the paper and threw it into his foster mother's fireplace.

There had been a formal commiseration from the Goblin Liaison Office, apparently. Of course, the Ministry had no comment to the press. Financial disruption got in the way of good governance, so it was best to maintain the pretence that Gringotts was unassailable.

Harry glanced around at Sibilig's office. If events had not unfolded as they had, he would be looking at the walls of kelp-and-sand huts right now. The trip which Harry had been looking forward to – it seemed a very long time ago – had been cancelled. The estuarine Mer would understand; death was of no great importance to their strange aquatic culture, but neither were things like appointments and schedules. The Brotherhood would send a delegation some other time, when things were less grim.

"I want you to work on your Mermish regardless," Sibilig instructed him, her usual stern scowl relaxed to a mild one. "There are supposedly freshwater merfolk at Hogwarts, isolated from their brethren and not in contact with the other magical races. If this is true, we should have somebody there to make a friendly gesture."

Harry nodded, and put it on his list of so many things to do.

Harry's birthday slipped by unnoticed in the mess, but Filius brought him his Hogwarts letter. Apparently, post owls had been unable to reach him, no doubt due to the magical defences arrayed around Underfoot.

After some wheedling, his foster parents allowed him to go to Diagon Alley for his school supplies. It should be quite safe, as Lestrange couldn't have healed yet from her grievous wounds, and a goblin glamour would make him indistinguishable from the other Hogwarts students traversing the Alley before term started. He was accompanied by Filius, Scintillion and Brown, and he assumed other Gringotts wizards were keeping track of them from a distance.

Their first stop was the papery wonderland of Flourish & Blotts. Thanks to Filius, Harry owned most of the first-year textbooks already, but rounded off the set now with A History of Magic, One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi, and the much lighter Magical Drafts and Potions. He found several other books that looked interesting, but didn't choose as many as he might have, as Brother Filius had told him that the Hogwarts library was very extensive.

Something about the display of Hogwarts textbooks captured Harry's attention, though. He scowled as he examined the titles.

"There is a strange pattern behind these authors' names," he observed aloud. "The advanced Charms books are all penned by Stephantasia B'dazzle. Magical Drafts and Potions is from someone named Arsenius Jigger. The Encyclopedia of Arithmancy is written by Terrence Warder. And... I remember my transfiguration book is by a writer called Switch. Either the universe is playing a strange joke, or they are all pseudonyms."

"Ah yes, there is quite a correlation between the author's name and their topic, isn't there," Flitwick chirped, looking up from a biography he was perusing. "But I'm afraid that there is no chicanery or disguise at work."

Harry frowned, looking back at the shelves and counting. "But it can't simply be coincidence. Probably a full third of the authors have a name that is linked somehow to their work. That doesn't just happen."

He thought carefully, while Ms Brown sat down on a reading stool, clearly aware that they weren't going to be moving on until the puzzle was solved.

"Okay..." Harry said slowly. "Suppose people in the wizarding war – people who were targets – chose new names to protect their identities. They might have chosen a name according to their trade."

Filius shook his balding head. "It was the muggleborns who were most at risk during the war. Therefore having a surname not recognisable as being from one of the known wizarding families would make you more of a target for You-Know-Who. I think you've got quite the wrong idea: the names you're looking at are from very old-established families," he added squeakily.

Harry nodded, accepting the hint. "Well, the subject area can't have been named after the family name, because that would have been tremendously long ago and words change over time. And it would still be too much of a coincidence that those words were named after those families, and it still wouldn't explain why people with that particular name are still the ones writing... the textbooks... oh."

Flitwick nodded happily as light dawned.

"It must be that a particular skill or expertise runs in a family, then," Harry said. "Presumably the B'dazzles became known for their charms work, and the Jiggers their potions, the Warders – well, all warding is grounded in arithmancy..."

"Yes, I believe you've hit upon it. The Potters, after all, would once upon a time have been potters. My grandmother's surname was Chandler, from which we can assume that I have actually chandlers in my ancestry. Children tend to go into their family's line of work, and parents like to pass on their particular skills and talents. Arsenius Jigger comes from a long line of Jiggers who brewed commercial-grade potions. Just a jigger of this or that, you see. With a high quality potion, you need no more than a jigger. It's something akin to advertising."

Filius smiled brightly, and began to levitate Harry's stack of books up to the sales counter. "And the more renowned a family is for a skill, the more likely a member will gravitate towards the profession, and the more likely they will rise to the top to teach or write. You'll find many of your Hogwarts professors, too, have monikers related to their particular domain."

As they moved on to the apothecary, Harry asked uncertainly whether he should have read all of his books before school. He had finished Waffling's Magical Theory, and had read through the first Standard Book of Spells. He could only cast a few of the charms in it, but had planned out what he wanted to work on next. He knew all the theory sections from his transfiguration book, too, and had finished his Defence text, but had found it unhelpful. The author went off on all sorts of strange tangents. Most of the spells described couldn't be kept up continuously, and were slow or complicated or just too esoteric to be of much use. Like a jinx to ward off kappas, or a countercurse for use specifically against toothache curses, or a projectile-deflecting shield that was eighteen syllables long.

Flitwick nodded, pleased, and told him that he would need to be well-versed in all his textbooks by the end of his first year, and that he would personally be delighted to see Harry move on to advanced material and extra-curricular study. Harry looked speculatively at the three latest tomes and wondered how far he could get through them in the month or so before class.

Harry bought a pewter cauldron and several sets of phials at the apothecary, as well as his basic potions ingredients and three smaller, stackable tin cauldrons in case he wanted to experiment. The artificer next door set him up with a telescope and scales, both in brass, but it was the samples of tropical woods that he gravitated to. Goblins didn't usually work with surface timbers. Harry chatted for a while with the shopkeeper about varnishes that would protect from chizpurfle and other common forms of magical borer. The artificer seemed surprised at the depth of knowledge belonging to the unassuming young boy.

Harry put off the boring business of being fitted for his uniform robes until there was little left to do, and bought the scarf, tie, cloak and other Hogwarts accoutrements. He earned a small frown from Madam Malkin when he declined to purchase the prescribed dragonhide gloves, though – Underfoot's leatherworkers would surely be able to produce something of superior quality to mere wizardwork.

The last stop was at the pet store, where Harry bought a half-dozen baby mice for Prettyroot. Filius said she wouldn't be allowed to come with him to Hogwarts, but after first year he could apply to his head of house to bring a pet that needed more care than the owl, toad or rat mentioned in the Hogwarts letter.

They were almost back at the bank when a thought suddenly struck him. When he was at school, would his snake companion remain intelligent, or would she degenerate into a regular rock worm as if she had never been exposed to Parseltongue? Had he read anywhere whether or not the effect was permanent?

Harry thanked his minders and hurriedly took his leave, worrying all the way down to Underfoot.

Prettyroot herself, when he found her in the garden, didn't know what would happen to her when he left. In between throatfuls of mouse, she explained that she didn't even remember her original awakening from non-sapience. Harry tracked down the books and references which Badluk had found when he originally investigated the ability, but they had no answer. Bewilderingly, most of them seemed to imply that all serpents were innately intelligent, and Parseltongue just a magically-inherited language. That was just ridiculous, of course – anyone could see that snakes didn't exhibit intelligent behaviour, and Prettyroot confirmed it.

There was only one thing to do, apart from secretly smuggling Sssthsnnss into Hogwarts, which Harry had decided would be his last resort.

So he began to experiment with snakes. On Buvolok's day of rest, Harry dragooned his goblin friend into helping out by trapping a dozen young rock worms. Harry spoke to each of the strange, dragon-headed serpents for a different length of time. Then he divided the snakes into separate cages and enlisted Prettyroot to speak to them periodically, to detect if and when they were becoming dumber.

Buvolok wasn't sure what they were doing and why, but had long ago learned to just accept Harry's seeming eccentricities. Apparently the human boy's longstanding serpent friend might possibly lose her memory and mind when he left for wizard school, and this would help them ascertain whether or not it would happen.

The rock worm which Harry had spoken one sentence to joined its brother (the control snake) in nonsentience before an hour was over. It was a full day before the one-minute-conversation snake lost its intelligence, and then a week passed before the same happened to its two-minute-conversation counterpart. By the time Hogwarts was a looming encounter rather than a distant dream, Harry had sketched what looked like the start of what his books called an exponential curve. Since he had been speaking to Prettyroot every day for many years, he was relieved to be fairly certain that she would be safe.

And so the days flew and crept past by turns.

Between his other studies, which had departed from the traditional crafts as he prepared for school, Harry expanded his experiment a little. He watched a conversation between Prettyroot and a 'mute snake', intending to speak one word at a time in Parseltongue to observe the process of it becoming intelligent. It turned out that just exhaling noisily was enough, if he was thinking about speaking Parseltongue. So was speaking gibberish while looking at a snake. On the other hand, Prettyroot couldn't turn a snake sentient even when immediately repeating aloud the Parseltongue words he whispered to her. Interesting.

The days had flown and crept, and he was lying on a cavern floor, taking down the results in one of his many notebooks, when it struck him that he was going to leave home for Hogwarts and the world of wizarddom the very next day.

Author's notes:

→ This chapter was meant to be an exciting one and I'd like to thank my friend Tilly for reading through it and assuaging my doubts about that.

→ Next chapter: roll on, the Hogwarts Express. Finally.

→ Thanks for reading and please do review if you have the time, I like to watch the little numbers piling up.