Chapter 40: Wards? What wards?

For disclaimer and author notes please see chapter 1. Additional AN: There may be some "Uh! That's not how it's done!" moments for you if you're an expert in explosives or demolition :-)

1989-04-23 08:05 UTC, Gaunt shack

Sirius blessed Dumbledore's habit of not trusting anyone and not telling anyone what he is doing or what he wants done.

He and Nick had apparated there as soon as they got the call from Bathsheba. (It seemed that Dumbledore had been making enemies pretty much all his life, if someone who'd known him almost all his life was willing to screw him over!)

Hobby was already there, having arrived just a few minutes before them. When they arrived, he was making a face - as if he had smelled something bad. And in a couple of seconds it was not Hobby's imagination - there was indeed a horrible smell; a mix of dirty, unwashed clothes, sweat, tobacco, and cheap booze.

"Oh wow", whispered Nick, gagging, then silently putting up a bubblehead.

"Well, with a name like Dung, what else could you expect?", joked Sirius, also in a whisper. Because, really, who else could it be?

But true to form, Dung was asleep. Hobby was gleeful; he thought there was some poetic justice in this. This bastard's negligence had been the cause of all the trouble between fourth and fifth year. And - though he couldn't swear to it - he was pretty sure he had leaked the plans of the "seven Harry Potters" to the death-eaters too, even if it was just by carelessness rather than malice aforethought.

Nick pulled them all behind a silencing charm anyway, just in case the petty thief woke up.

"How do we deal with this? Just stun him and finish off what we need to do?"

Hobby pondered a moment. That would certainly work, but...

"That will only make Dumbles more careful next time, like giving him a pepper-up or something before the stake-out. What we need is to make him lose confidence in this buffoon", he said.

"Won't that simply make him use someone else instead? Someone who is more competent?"

"He doesn't have too many allies who are willing to do this for him. Diggle is probably the only one left, and he was never a 'rough it out in the open' kind of person, so when Dumbledore makes him do things like this, he will resist. He'll question the whole thing, and resent Dumbles for eventually forcing him. And of course we will make sure that absolutely nothing happens when Diggle is watching, confirming his suspicions that Dumbles has gone a bit mad", said Hobby gleefully.

"So... what do we do? Wake him up, obliviate him, and send him away?"

Hobby took some coins out of his pocket, and sprinkled them, a few at a time, on the sleeping thief's face, who consequently woke up with a start. The coins stopped as soon as he woke up, to make sure his attention was on the coins already fallen near him.

Dung picked up all the coins (he even found one that had fallen under a nearby rock), and took himself off. At the kind of dives he frequented, the money he found would last at least a few hours - or at least as much time as Dumbledore himself was trapped at the ICW meeting.

The muggle explosives were waiting in a large truck a few hundred metres down the road. Remus walked to the end of the road, turned a corner, and waved to the truck driver. The driver put his truck in gear and slowly rolled forward, bringing it up to a pre-designated point (the edge of the muggle repelling wards, which Hobby had previously scoped out).

At that point Remus, Sirius, Hobby, and Nick went up to the truck. They unloaded the sixteen charges carefully, and manually. They were already prepared in all ways, needing only to be oriented properly, and then triggered. All sixteen of them were connected to the same trigger. This was one of the requirements that Hobby had feared would cause them trouble, but it turned out that urban demolition often requires that kind of thing, so - while it was somewhat expensive - it was easy enough to do.

(What did cause problems was the explosives experts refusing to simply give them the stuff and tell them what to do. None of them wanted to attempt disabling the muggle-repellant wards in case they were also booby-trapped - though they very much doubted that Riddle would think that far ahead. Finally, they had to say this was on private property that getting a security clearance for was almost impossible, and it was either this or lose the gig to someone else who would play by their rules.)

By now the truck had turned around and trundled off, the driver completely oblivious to the reality of this strange site at the edge of a small village.

(Later, he would meet with the explosives team. Comparing notes, they would be hard put to think of who could be living there that had a need for such high security. The explosives team had initially thought it was either some part of the royal family, or something similar, but now they were not sure. Eventually they gave it up, though they kept records in case they were questioned later.)

With four of them working in concert, it took no more than about ten minutes to place them all at the correct places. Each charge was pointed toward one wardstone, at precisely the distance required to produce the maximum impact on it.

None of the traps had triggered - there was nothing magical in what they were doing, and the muggle equipment did not even register (it would appear).

They all stepped away from their respective quadrants and moved to Hobby's spot. Remus and Sirius put up powerful shields about a foot apart, while Nick conjured a physical shield, comprised of a six-inch think granite slab, sandwiched between the magical shields. With this protection in place, Hobby hit the trigger.

It was good thing they had those shields. The explosives fired perfectly, and all sixteen wardstones were smashed to smithereens at precisely the same instant, or at least as near as made no difference. But the destruction of so many ward stones caused a tremendous magical shock wave to rip through the surrounding area, so that all the trees, rocks, and other exposed matter was blasted by the magical shock wave, to a radius of almost a quarter of a kilometer. Luckily, there were no people or dwellings in that range.

Once the dust had settled, Hobby and Nick worked together to see if there were any other harmful wards present, but did not find any. The shack in the middle of the site was already in bad shape, but it was completely fallen down now, with no vertical structures visible.

Neither the front door, nor the snake they had seen nailed to it, could be identified from their position - everything had been flattened - so Nick once again got out a broomstick to get some perspective.

He landed beside Hobby after about ten minutes, having completed a thorough aerial survey. "Looks like it's clear all the way. I didn't detect any magical traps, and you can make out the rough boundaries of the shack and the internal wall separating the two rooms inside. Also the doors, and - if I look carefully - the windows. Where did you say the ring was?"

"On or under the floor", said Hobby. They proceeded slowly and carefully down the now debris-strewn path toward the shack. Since the walls had caved in, they decided to step over a part of the border that would have been a wall, avoiding the doorway itself, just in case there was something they had missed.

Guided by the feeling of something dark and evil, they methodically cleared away the rubble in one small area of what was formerly the front room. Nick decided not to use wizard magic, letting Hobby do it all with elf magic - again, just in case. No point taking chances.

A few minutes later, they encountered what looked like a small trapdoor in the floor. Lifting it revealed a simple wooden box inside, and even without any scans you could feel the taint from it.

Both of them had excellent occlumency, and anyway Hobby had already told them what this did to Dumbledore in his time, so they were prepared. They took the box back to the boundary, and all four of them apparated away.

Shortly after, Hobby came back. He spent a few minutes in the rubble, and, once he was satisfied, he left.

1989-04-23 09:00 UTC, Hogwarts

No one looked twice at an elf skulking around in Hogwarts - even Dumbledore did not know all the elves. The worst that could have happened would be if he was actually caught by a wizard (yeah right!), and then the wizard called for the head elf of Hogwarts to identify him.

That was too far from reality to worry about. Simply put, no one cared.

Hobby popped to the seventh floor, paced the required three times in front of where the door would appear, walked in, and spent some time looking around, trying to remember where he had seen the bust and the diadem.

After a bit of wandering around, he eventually realised that - once again - a broom was best, so he pulled a shrunken broom out of his pocket, brought it back to its original size, and mounted it. That proved very uncomfortable - he had never ridden a broom as an elf - so he changed to his wizard form, and took off. Maybe I should name my broom Hero, he thought, and grinned to himself. Hermione would get it, eventually. He was sure of that.

After a few careful, methodical, sweeps of the general area he remembered, he found the diadem. Levitating it into the bag he had carried for the purpose, he left the room and then popped off. He would have to come back later to work on the vanishing cabinet - he had suddenly had an idea about how to use that too.

Meanwhile, once he got back to Nick's place, that would be two more down. Only the snake left, and Harry's scar. And no magical solutions to the latter problem, so far. Well, there was still some time to go before that became an issue. The wraith was still just a wraith, and would likely be, for a few years more.

1989-04-23 10:00 UTC, location unknown

Once the two horcruxes were destroyed, the gang sat down to some serious planning.

"This is a landmark achievement, from my point of view. We've eliminated two of the major problem areas that were not directly related to wizards and witches: the dementors and the horcruxes", said Hobby.

"They're all gone? You never were clear on how many there were", said Remus.

"Well, in my time, his snake was one, but we have no idea when he did that. He doesn't have a snake right now, so maybe he did that at some later point in time?"

"If he did, he could still do it now, and we'd have to destroy it. You don't seem too worried?", asked Sirius.

"It's a snake. I can find it. It's usually with him anyway so at least we don't have to search for it".

Remus was looking at him, and could see something else was wrong.

"Out with it, what's biting you?"

Hobby looked at Penny. She would be the one most likely to curse him when he said what he had to say.

"I'm not sure if all of you know the exact circumstances of my death, so let me tell you what was apparently supposed to happen", he said. "Simply put, I was supposed to get hit by a killing curse from Riddle".

That got the expected reaction - outraged shouts and anger, from at least three members of his audience. Only Nick did not react, instead he was just watching Hobby shrewdly.

"Why?", asked Penny in a clipped tone.

"Would you like to guess", he asked, with a grim set to his face.

Nick moved closer to Penny and put an arm around her, hugging his wife of six centuries to his side. She knew that he knew, and she was at least his intellectual equal. It was only that Nick's involvement in these things was more, while she had spent more time with Harry than being with the other four.

So it only took her a few seconds more. She clapped her hand to her mouth, and looked at Hobby, eyes wide.

"What the heck is going on, can someone please explain to us", pleaded Sirius.

Remus looked at him. "Harry has a horcrux in his head, probably in the scar", he said, looking questioningly at Hobby.

Hobby nodded. "But I have an idea", he said quickly before Sirius could say anything or react in any way.

"It had better be good", growled Sirius, after a few seconds.

"Let's remember why I came back as Dobby. I want to make sure Harry is not affected by any of this while growing up, or at least as little as possible. I intend to make sure that he lives a long life, and old age is the only thing that he would eventually die of", he said.

"But the horcrux in him will always be there, and Riddle will not truly die until Harry does. What I plan is simple: make Riddle irrelevant. Here's my plan", he said.

"There are ways to capture wraiths, but they are not always reliable in the long term. And there are ways to keep a human in stasis for, effectively, forever. Even a simple draught of living death will suffice, as long as no one knows where he is and cannot feed him the antidote. That is what we will do - find some way to make Riddle essentially become a non-entity for the next one hundred and fifty years or so."

He stopped and waited for a response.

Eventually, Nick nodded. "The draught of living death is too risky, in case we are unable to hide the location well enough, or someone actively searches for him. Yes we'd use the Fidelius, of course, but I think I may have a better method. We'll talk about it later, once I have had some time to think it through."

"OK".

"So what does this mean for the war against Riddle? Does it make capturing him more urgent? Less?" Sirius clearly needed more information.

"Well... he can't split his soul any more - he's already lost a lot, and he will go completely insane if he tries it again. I believe even he knows it. So all we need to do is prevent him from growing to full strength - we either get him as a wraith, or in the very early days after he gains a body, if he manages to do that".

"No. No body", shivered Hobby. There will be not even the remotest chance of someone like Cedric dying this time, he thought, while his face hardened. Thankfully, none of the others asked him what this was about, though it seemed that Sirius would ask him later.

"If things go according to plan, he will possess a homunculus at some point, before he tries to obtain a body. Of course, he has - or will have - no followers left to help him with this, so he will be a wraith, possessing someone, willing or otherwise. We have to get him then. Before he possessed humans, I believe he also possessed snakes and other animals - if we can catch him at that, even better."

"We'll work something out Hobby", said Nick.

"We will. Now, I have something else to discuss, of much lesser importance but important nevertheless". He paused to sip some water, and continued. "There is a vanishing cabinet in the room of requirements in Hogwarts. This needs to be repaired, but if it can be repaired, the other end opens up in Borgin and Burkes in Knockturn Alley. I think, if we repair that, and ward this end somehow to prevent anyone other than us making it back, we have a fantastic weapon in our hands. How we use it is up to us".

"If I remember correctly, this is literally the only such pair in existence; all the others are either lost or were destroyed by someone", said Penny.

"Great! Do you know if it can be transported by elf?"

"I'm sure it can. No one wards against elves! No one expects elves, it seems", she said.

Almost to himself, Hobby mumbled, "what are we, the Spanish Inquisition?"

"So, if I bring it here, can we repair it?", he asked.

"I'd rather you buy the other end first, secure it, and only then get this one", said Nick.

Hobby looked at Sirius. "Would you do the honors? Go to Borgin and buy it off of him - you can threaten him however you want!"

"Where should we put it? I'd rather not have it anywhere the kids could find it". While Harry and Hermione did not visit that often, they did visit sometimes.

"I'm sure I have some other property somewhere lying unused", shrugged Sirius.

"OK. For now, put them both in the same place, fix them up, test them. Make sure they both work, then gradually increase the distance between them".

"Will do".

1989-04-23 11:00 UTC, Hogwarts

Again, no one noticed him. He paced as required, and entered the room that, in a past life, had been gutted by fiend-fyre.

The cabinet, unfortunately, resisted all attempts at shrinking it, so he realised he would have to bodily lift it in order to pop out with it. Not easy for a wizard, but trivial for an elf.

Since Sirius was not yet ready with its future location, he decided not to do anything with it right now, but wait till Sirius had decided where it needed to go and had fixed up the place as required.

1989-04-23 12:05 UTC, Gaunt shack

Dumbledore was livid.

He had left the ICW meeting as soon as it broke for lunch, telling his former peers that he needed to check on something and would be right back. Magically, apparating directly from Zurich to the Gaunt shack was no big deal for him, but the meeting would restart at 2pm Zurich time, and he had to be back by then. And even then he would have had to skip lunch.

He spent a few minutes trying to figure out what exactly had happened here,who had done what, and to what. His observations did not give him anything to be happy about.

Clearly, the wards had been utterly destroyed, and the shack was effectively gone - rubble, of the kind that he remembered from the muggle war in the 1940s, was all that was left. Worse, even the area around the shack appeared to have been blasted - there were bit of trees and shredded vegetation behind him.

He stood there, in the mild early summer noon-time, and calmed himself down. There was no point risking the ire of the ICW by not turning up for the second half, because going after Dung right now was not a matter of urgency. He could always contact him later to see what he knew about wizards that could utterly destroy such a strong and complex ward scheme.

So, for the moment at least, there did not seem to be anything worth hanging around for here. if he apparated back to Zurich right now, he would get there about twenty minutes past the hour. He could grab some lunch with his former colleagues before the afternoon session resumed, and no one would need even know he had nearly done a runner on them.

But something stayed him. This rubble... looked different. It didn't look random enough; if he squinted, he could see that someone, or something, had swept a path through it.

Slowly, carefully, he moved forward, trying to feel for any wards that remained. Unlike Nick, he was not prepared with a broom; indeed it did not even occur to him that an aerial survey would have helped. Still, he slowly gained confidence and moved faster, until he was suddenly at what he was sure was the center of the structure.

Right in the middle, a small area was cleared. A piece of muggle paper, weighted down on one side by a piece of the rubble about the size of a brick, fluttered idly, even though there was no wind to speak of; clearly it had been charmed to attract attention.

Dumbledore scanned it for everything he could imagine, but found nothing. Carefully, he levitated the piece of wood holding it down, and picked up the paper.

It was blank. And then, as if it had recognised him, words appeared

Enjoying Zurich?

Clearly, someone wanted to rub salt into his wounds. They would pay. Oh yes, this Phantom would pay - he did not know whom he was dealing with.

More lines appeared. A human hand... no, a fist. The back of a fist.

A second later, the middle finger extended upright.

Dumbledore howled in rage. He completely lost it - a temper tantrum the likes of which he had not had since, oh, forever. He mouthed profanities, he uttered imprecations against the Phantom, against Sirius, against Minerva, Remus. Even little Harry was not spared his temper, however impotent it may have been.

The rational part of his mind said there was nothing he could do about it for now, and he needed to get back to Zurich. There would be hell to pay if he did not make it into the ICW meeting chamber before the doors closed for the afternoon session. This part of his mind also said that having a spot of lunch in the luxurious ICW dining room would help him calm down.

It might have been nice if the same part of the brain was also in charge of the mechanics of apparation. The ICW dining room had never seen such excitement in the thousands of years it had existed: a former Supreme Mugwump, one of the most powerful wizards in the world, apparating in.

The people he was facing saw that a large chunk of his beard and most of his hair on one side had been splinched. Dumbledore, with a sheepish smile, started apologising.

"I am most terribly sorry, gentlemen; I have had a bit of bad news and I have not been thinking straight. I should not have apparated in this condition". After a pause, he added: "or directly into the dining room at all".

Having said that, he casually stepped away from where he had landed, and started repairing his beard and hair.

The complete silence was broken by sounds of retching from behind him. Apparently the people he had his back to, were losing their lunch.

He turned to see what was wrong, and now the people who he was previously facing started to make the same kind of noises.

It took him a while to remember that clothes could also be splinched.