Interlude: Ignotum per ignotius

A man stood amidst the carnage, one foot near what once had been a wall and now was the brink of a ten foot drop, the wind tussling his hair, tearing at his heavy coat. With a closed expression, he surveyed the ruins of the city that stretched out in front of him; once pomp and resplendence – now a grey maze of haunted ruins, a monument to the dead, a place for silence, devotion and – perhaps – despair. But for how long?

With all that money Rendall had shoved down the Wizengamot's throat, the city might be back to its former glory within the week. And then, it would all be like a bad dream. 'Terrible business, that,' they would say. 'But life has to go on, you know?'

Except that it didn't for the thousands who had died, who would be forgotten, upon whose graves they would rebuild this temple of technology. It made him sick that street vendors would prowl the place, yelling, tricking tourists who came to experience the thrill of the aftermath.

Bitterly, the man spat. Well, piss on them!

Meditatively, he inspected the shards again. Was it really coincidence to find the shattered remains of an empty crystal phial in the perfect centre of the storm, exactly where those cursed nightmares had done their worst?

There could be a thousand reasons for an expensive magical potion in a Muggle house without any registered witches or wizards around. In all likelihood, it was just a coincidence.

After a brief bout of hesitation, he pocketed the bit of glass with a frown, observing a few of his men searching the area around Charing Cross, apologetic, weak-chinned British recruits nervously scurrying around their feet like impressionable chimpanzees in uniforms. He gave a snort. That was the ultimate insult. Instead of giving him some of the capable men and women they undoubtedly had, he'd been assigned fresh blood out of the academy – pink, shiny faces; snotty noses; and that peculiar expression of the overtaxed, that toothy smirk of the ignorant trying to impress.

Damnable geezers! Bloody hell, he really despised politicians and their stupid little games! With all the freaking laws around the world, you'd figure someone would've had the bright idea to outlaw pencil pushers already!

Bracing himself, he jumped off the ledge, hands still in his pockets as he landed heavily on the rubble below.

The average politician had the natural gratitude of a crocodile, or maybe – he considered, walking down what remained of the street – a particularly hungry shark. Dumbledore had saved the day – what a jolly good chap! – here's your shiny medal! Oh, and by the way, we're of the opinion you should concentrate on your duties as headmaster from now on, so if you really don't mind, we'd like to politely kick you out of the Wizengamot, please.

Angrily, he stomped at a battered street sign, feeling some amount of satisfaction as it completely broke off its base.

Didn't they understand? Didn't they listen? Without Dumbledore presenting his case to the ICW, he never would've gotten the necessary support to pull it all off, even with the man's help. A hundred of the best Aurors the entire world had to offer, three-fourths of his entire force, and still they had lost five men and three women – good people, people he needed! Why couldn't those blasted old yarn-spinning tossers do all the work? Why did he now have to speak with eight families and explain that their pride and joy had died during the course of their duty, died to protect a congregation of perfumed braggadocios on some forsaken corner of the globe?

Captain Luó, a man he'd seen wrestle with werewolves and charge at Dementors, had lost his life when he'd pushed a few of the newcomers out of the way the second those bloody terrors had descended on their impromptu meeting with the Muggles. And Adebayo, the recruit with the highest aptitude test performance for two hundred years, had died within a third of a second when two of those freaking monsters had torn her limbs to shreds.

And for bloody what?

'Oh, I'm sure everything's in order now. You won, didn't you? Good job, have a little pay rise. And now bugger off, we have governing to do!'

Won, he repeated in his head, spitting again. What the ruddy hell had they won? A few hundred thousand cadavers? A ruined city? Or perhaps, he suspected, gritting his teeth, a shiny new medal? They had lost, that's what had happened! The enemy vanishing didn't make you the victor – it simply made you the last man standing. Worse, those bloody fools hadn't even learned anything!

He was seething by the time he'd made his way towards his newly promoted deputy. The woman stood in the middle of a landslide of what must have been a collapsed building or two, a pink-haired British recruit at her side. It didn't surprise him at all that she seemed to be apologising with devotion.

'Sir!' The captain jumped up, ripping off a salute as edged as the storeroom of a goblin smithy. The girl too assumed a certain deferential, if thankfully less annoying, pose.

'This isn't your dratted army, woman. Who's the brat you're babysitting, Williams?' he added, seamlessly switching to Yong-Quan Xiang because he figured the probability of the girl being fluent in Chinese dialects was relatively minor. Carefully, he slid down into what looked like a crater.

'Her name's Tonks, sir,' she answered with a thick accent, managing to communicate her disdain for coordinate speaking terms with her direct superior in just three letters – if she had been speaking English, of course.

Antonius nodded. 'She any good? Or as useless as the rest of the lot?'

'Well, sir, she's sent another building tumbling down when she stumbled over the wrong kind of debris that was holding the dump together.'

'I don't see how one more ruin could possibly matter at this point,' muttered Antonius darkly.

Captain Williams gave him a reprimanding glare. 'But, luckily, we made a bit of a discovery due to her bearishness, sir, so I'm calling it about even for now.'

Antonius couldn't, at this point, help wondering if the woman was trying to get on his nerves with the formal speech. Chinese didn't help the matter either as it offered plenty of opportunity for politeness and formality, and despite her accent, Williams' knowledge of formal Chinese was sadly well-developed. Then again, was it a surprise? Every Auror turned into a bit of a misanthropist after a decade or two; you just couldn't help yourself when you had to bear witness to the trash of humanity day in and day out.

'And what did you find?' he asked, prodding a bit of demolition waste with his boot, switching to a Shuangfeng dialect just to see if the American woman could keep up.

She looked up, her dark brow wrinkled in annoyance. But she managed well enough. 'Well, sir, after Auror Recruit Tonks here,' she pointed at the completely bamboozled woman, 'triggered the second landslide, we couldn't help noticing this!'

Primly, she walked to the edge of the enclosure, picking up a bit of metal. Then, aiming at the centre of the waste-free space, she hurled it away with all her might. The pipe raced towards the ground until, still mid-air, it suddenly reversed, speeding back at Williams at exactly the same speed. The woman lazily moved her head to the side just in time to let the projectile pass by harmlessly. It flew quite an astonishing distance before crashing into another building further down the street.

Scowling, Antonius knelt, his black leather gloves running over the ground. 'Have you found any signs of a ward?'

'There is none, sir.'

'What did you say?'

'I said, "There is none, sir", sir!'

Antonius glared. After a second of completely ignored admonishment, he ran his wand over the ground, mumbling to himself. A verifiable fountain of colours lit up only to dissolve in air milliseconds later, no colour appearing twice. Eventually, the light show ran dry, and he looked up again. 'It's just spell residuum,' he concluded, his mind racing. 'The spell ghost effect.'

'Just spell residuum, sir? Residuum powerful enough to still imitate the original spell two days later? In desperate times, it's not unheard of for echoes of a spell to linger. But two days?'

Antonius didn't reply. Most of his men and women would've been able to do something about a falling building, probably, but how many would've been able to do so in the heat of the moment? Someone had though, in a state of panic and with awe-inspiring might.

'Anything else?' he asked, switching to Sandawe, feeling a not inconsiderable amount of smugness as he saw her confusion. Deciding he'd played enough – and more importantly won – he repeated the question in English. The British lass looked immensely grateful.

'A runner came with news, but nothing good, sir. I took the liberty of having a look,' she replied gravely in her natural Boston dialect.

Antonius shrugged. 'Lay it on me.'

'Pichler and Sokolov are still at St Mungo's, sir, and our colleagues are still just as convinced to be attending Durmstrang in their last year. A certain Healer Smith expresses his regrets, but he doesn't believe their condition will improve.'

'Memory Charm, was it?'

'A wicked botched-up Memory Charm, sir. The spellwork was, as far as I can follow his explanations, dilettantish, at least as long as we're talking technique. The force applied, however, was anything but.'

'No Auror or Obliviator, then.'

'Definitely not, sir. Even Auror Recruit Tonks here could likely make a better job of it.'

They both looked at her for a second. Seeing the gazes of the two highest-ranking Aurors of the ICW concentrated on her, the girl swallowed a bit before grinning. 'I, er, blew that test.'

Williams looked at her disdainfully. 'How can you call yourself an Auror if you can't even do that? You don't strike me as the subtle sort either, Miss Tonks.'

'Well, I got full marks on both subterfuge and duelling. That should count for something, shouldn't it?'

Antonius and Williams exchanged a glance. 'Anyway, I'm leaving it up to you, Williams. You know the drill; contact the next of kin, prepare the official paperwork, get the pension released – all the happy stuff. Congratulations on your promotion!' he said with a dark chuckle.

'Thank you, sir!'

'The second bit of news?'

'It's from the League, sir. They, I quote, "regret to inform us that all knowledge gained during the course of their legally sanctioned activities is subject to the strictest of confidentiality." The letter went on a bit, but they did at least confirm that Lethifolds don't leave...remains behind even if you get lucky enough to catch them off-guard.'

'Meaning we have no way to actually confirm if we really got them? Those blasted horn-blowing huntsmen are gloating to let us squirm in uncertainty, aren't they?'

'I couldn't possibly comment, sir,' replied Williams stiffly, pushing up her glasses with her pinky in a characteristic gesture. 'But I'm relatively certain that we successfully caught them all. True, the storm didn't immediately dissolve, but no traces of strange weather phenomena or casualties could be found within New Forest. It's just a storm – it'll blow over.'

'As storms are wont to do.' Antonius gazed at the small circle they stood in. It was quite cramped with three people, and Pichler and Sokolov had been found lying down, unconscious but bodily unharmed – mostly.

In his experience, that particularly painful contusion Pichler had suffered more often than not hinted at women involved. So two people at most, at least one of them female, both magical. One of them must have used the Memory Charm – but the spellwork was simply too shoddy to be compared to the lingering magnificence of the echo.

But why kick the Auror? Revenge? Anger? Then why only kick one? He knew Pichler – had known him, he corrected himself, gritting his teeth – and the man had been a bit rough around the edges but ultimately fair. Why not kick Sokolov too?

No, this wasn't something personal; hadn't he made extra sure to only pick Aurors with no acquaintances or familiar bonds to British pure-bloods? This smelled of desperation. A trick maybe? A diversion? So he knew that at least one of them was a woman who didn't try to overwhelm his Aurors with magic – smart girl. Sokolov's wand had been found, in contrast to Pichler's, and the man had let loose a true cornucopia of spells! And the first after the disillusionment had been a stunner. He might even have gotten one of them. If Sokolov had lost, and Antonius really doubted this, then it had more than likely been the one with the Memory Charm who'd somehow overwhelmed him. The sneaky approach maybe? The man had always been a hothead.

So one of them was knocked out, the other somehow battled with Sokolov. And then those scumbags erased their memories but did a bad job of it. Or maybe not? What if the purpose hadn't ever been subtlety but brute force permanency? In that regard, the elusive perpetrator had definitely succeeded – the bastard! He couldn't completely rule out the possibility that the Memory Charm was a faux lead yet, but somehow his guts told him to not go down that road.

So they were desperate, committed or foolish – likely a mix of all the aforementioned. And then the building fell. Could desperate, committed and foolish people have managed to pull off such a splendid solution? Doubtful. Also, if you were willing to kill the life and memories of your enemies, would you go out of your way to save them in a pinch? Probably not. Maybe it was just coincidence they had survived?

'Williams, have you found any trace around the area? Blood, hair, fabric – anything!'

'None whatsoever, sir.'

Antonius scowled. 'Hundreds of people have died in this street, Captain.'

'It is as I said, sir. All biological traces in the entire street have been removed. There's nothing left except bird droppings.'

He grunted. So there really was a third party involved. Someone not only powerful but also clear-headed, someone who'd tangled with Aurors in the past...

'Tonks, I assume you're familiar with the area?'

'Er, yes?'

'Tell me, is this – by any chance – more or less directly north of the second checkpoint we had before it was overrun?'

The girl looked a bit confused, but then she nodded. 'I think it is, more or less.'

So this spot just so happened to be right in the middle of the Lethifolds' first and second hunting ground?

His fingers fumbled with the sharp bit of glass in the pocket of his leather coat. 'Girl,' he barked, 'how far could you blast a small potion with your wand?'

'Oh, you mean like you might do a Bludger? I don't know, a few blocks with a solid Blasting Charm? The phial would have to take the hit, though.'

'Williams?'

'Yes, sir?'

'Write another letter to the damn League. If they continue refusing to cooperate with us, I'm going down to Guadeloupe myself to ram my wand up their tight little arses. Wrap that in diplomacy and make it sound urgent, understood?'

The woman looked blankly at him. 'I'll try, sir. But I thought you said we were done with the whole monster hunting business.'

'Oh, we are. I don't give a damn about that anymore.'

Grinning, he looked south. So what if being an Auror left you dysfunctional as a human being. There was at least one thing you were good at. This wasn't a case of nightmarish evils invading the lands of men no longer; no, this was a crime. Someone had attacked his men, someone had damn nearly killed them – killed their personalities at least. Someone was toying with him. Someone, his eyes widened a bit, might even have some amount of control over those blasted Lethifolds. Maybe there even was a connection to their appearance so far up north?

'Tonks, you're going to forget every word said here.'

The girl looked at him, deciding whether to follow this command or not. True, officially, he didn't have any kind of authority over her but...

Barely one second later, the girl made a career-saving decision. 'Yes, sir!'

Antonius nodded grimly at his deputy, and she returned the gesture. This was what they did best. The only thing they really understood. No more fancy words, no more politicians – now, his mouth twisted into a hungry grin, it was time to begin the real hunt!