"Why are there so many rooms?" Harry wondered, as they were a little over halfway down the tower.
Most floors featured a looped hallway that ran through the center of the building, making basically a quarter of a mile trail to travel a full circuit of the level. Even just walking past at a brisk stroll and glancing around, it was taking them about ten minutes per floor (including time to take the stairs down), or six per hour. They'd eventually stopped to have lunch on the 23rd floor, and Remus still found that number amusing for some reason.
Harry considered, "You could almost fit every wizard and witch in Britain in here, right?"
He'd narrated some of the details to the Marauders guild channel, and Hermione had done the math for him. Each floor was probably upwards of a hundred thousand square feet of space, even after deducting walls and hallways. That could more-than-comfortably fit a couple hundred people per floor, and the number of rooms seemed to bear that out. Some floors had large, high-ceilinged suites and others had more, smaller rooms. None of them were furnished, and the dementors and commute difficulties probably lowered the market value, but the tower would serve as a pretty spacious high-rise apartment block for several thousand people.
"Maybe Ekrizdis was trying to outbreed the rest of the island," Remus mused. "Though their main issue would be food production, since Gamp's laws prevent it from being conjured. They'd be reliant on importing."
Dumbledore suggested, "Many of these rooms seem designed for storage. With shrinking and preservation charms, they could put in stores that would last even a full building quite some time." He didn't even comment on the idea that, if the dark wizard had his way, presumably many of the denizens would have the game system to allow them to preserve food indefinitely in their inventories.
"Pretty common tactic to raid the countryside for supplies back in those days," Dawlish agreed. "With the defenses on this place, it would have been hard to find them, much less roust out the society of dark wizard vikings raiding all of Europe." He nodded grimly, "Probably best the old wanker mysteriously keeled over. Lot of dark wizards have big plans, and then get sidetracked by pants-on-head madness and schemes."
"And the Ministry hasn't thought about making use of all this space?" Remus asked.
It was the headmaster that explained, "It's been discussed in the Wizengamot as a possible fallback position if the worst happens, the Statute of Secrecy is broken, and the muggles begin their witch hunts again. But would you wish to live here, given any other option?"
"I don't really want to be here now," Dawlish chuckled. "At least we're almost to the bit we can skip. Block of three floors that the stairs just go past coming up."
"That doesn't seem suspicious?" Harry asked.
The old auror shrugged, admitting, "Not a lot of curiosity to go around about this place. Most figure it's just where the dementors live."
Harry didn't think that seemed likely, and, sure enough, as they passed the first landing with no door out where one usually was he saw a glyph on the map similar to the last time he'd been into a dungeon way back at the Burrow. "I think there's a secret door here," he explained to the group. He moved up to the wall and peered at the map, hoping it would show the way to open the door the way it did at Hogwarts. Before giving up the secret, a prompt appeared:
YOU MUST GATHER YOUR PARTY BEFORE VENTURING FORTH
That about figured. It was time to get Dawlish into the party, apparently. He made Dumbledore party leader, then messaged him.
Whisper to Albus Dumbledore: Dawlish needs to be in the party before we can open it.
The old man gave an amused smile and said, "Well, John, I think we're moving from tour to exploration, if Harry can guess how to get this door open. Do you intend to be party to our bit of amateur archaeology?"
"If you can get it open, I'll have your backs," the auror agreed, and his name and statistic bars joined Harry's list.
With that, the "password" appeared on the map, and Harry's Conversational Latin was high enough for him to go, "Well, that's ominous." Before anyone could ask what was ominous, he went ahead and said, "Finis universae carnis venit coram me."
"Kid speaks Latin?" Dawlish boggled, as the bricks of the wall began to slide open, similarly to the secret passage into Diagon Alley.
"The end of all flesh is come before me," Dumbledore translated. He couldn't help giving an impromptu history lesson, explaining, "At least that's the King James translation, which was produced over a century after this tower was built. I don't believe there were any English translations at the time, so the quote comes from the older Latin bibles. The newer versions phrase it something more like, 'I am going to put an end to all people.' It's part of Genesis, chapter six, if I'm not mistaken, from the story of Noah's ark."
"Yeah, I agree with Potter. That's ominous," Dawlish said.
"Are we entering into a horror story?" Remus frowned.
As the door slid all the way open into darkness, Dumbledore shrugged and helpfully tossed off a few floating orbs of warm golden light to begin sailing ahead. The hallway seemed very similar to the ones on the upper floors, for all that it wasn't lit except by the conjured magical lamps.
All four had their wands ready as they stepped in, but other than the lack of pre-installed magical torches, the hallway didn't seem very different than any of the others they'd traveled down. The level was one with ceilings of middling height, only about fifteen feet. Like most of the other floors, doors extended off to either side at regular intervals, presumably for various rooms and suites.
"It doesn't look like dementors stay here," Harry said, though he'd expected as much.
"Secret bedrooms?" Dawlish asked. "There are the outlines of windows on the exterior, but they're all shut up. Everyone figured they were decorative."
"How hard did they try to transfigure them open?" Remus suggested. "I think we should check one." No one disagreed, so he went ahead and tested the first door on his right with a few detection spells, before using a simple, "Alohomora," to make it click open. "There was a locking charm, but it had deteriorated," he explained.
"This one's furnished," Harry explained, his young eyes adjusting faster to the dark room than the others'. Sure enough, as the headmaster caused one of his floating lanterns to drift in, it revealed something that seemed to just be a bedroom, in a 15th century style. An ornate cedar wardrobe, an oak dresser with inset washbasin, a small bookshelf, a chair and writing desk, and a four-poster bed filled most of the space. "Preserving charms?" he wondered, since it had survived the damp tower for five centuries.
Dumbledore did his own detecting charms and said, "Quite faded, were there any to begin with. It is a mystery that none of this has decayed…"
"Nothing to make it decay?" Remus figured. They turned to look at him and he explained, "Between the dark magic and the dementors, nothing seems to grow here. How long would it take something to rot if it was sealed in a space with no rats, no bugs, not even any fungus? This place may be a perfect time capsule, especially since it was sealed enough that it doesn't feel very humid in here."
"I wonder if they used magic to open and close the windows," Harry said, having walked over to a square of the wall that was clearly set up as an exterior window, with a sill and everything.
"Best not to try until this has all be cataloged," Dumbledore suggested, having gravitated to the small bookshelf. "If these have become brittle, a change in moisture in the room could result in them falling apart. I fear to even leaf through them until conservators have inspected them."
"And they may be full of traps and dark magic," Remus warned.
"That as well," the headmaster agreed, sadly. His fingers still lingered a few inches from the books, as if longing to see whether they represented new material for the Hogwarts library. Given Harry's difficulty finding books from the period that referenced Ekrizdis, he realized that even in wizarding society, a trove of 500-year-old books could represent a massive amount of lost information. Changing gears, Dumbledore said, "If we find more rooms like this, we can assume that this level was where Ekrizdis' apprentices resided. We know from the journals that he was recruiting several scions of local families to join him here."
Sure enough, the other rooms were configured similarly. The dark wizard had seemingly had even more apprentices than Sagittarius Black had surmised, as the level was far from empty. Perhaps fifty wizards and witches had called the floor home, and their effects would be a boon to scholars. Each was empty but seemed lived in. Some beds were made with various levels of effort, while others had their sheets mussed as if the resident had not bothered to move them after getting up. Chairs were pulled from desks like someone had just gotten up. Toiletries were placed quick to hand around washbasins, and drawers were often partway open. Each room looked like the resident had left for the day but planned to come back soon, and no one had come behind to neaten up.
"Guess they didn't have house elves," Dawlish figured, after a room that had housed someone that was probably a slob, given the lived-in disarray.
"Given the level of secrecy and the participation of secondary children," Dumbledore mused, "they likely had none to call upon. Particularly in those days, a family's bonded elves going missing might have raised more suspicion than the loss of a non-inheriting child."
"They may have brought human servants, however," Remus suggested. "I think employing muggles for that kind of thing was more common back then. And I can't imagine a few dozen wealthy young wizards doing all the cooking and cleaning themselves."
The headmaster shrugged, "In formal apprenticeship, it used to be more common to demand such services of the students. Many hands may have made light work."
"There are still more levels," Harry figured. "Let's see if we find rooms for servants?"
In addition to the apprentice suites, that level had some rooms that were clearly storage for things like linens, as well as bathing chambers that were little more than spaces for tubs. The ability to use magic to create water and remove waste certainly reduced the complexities of such bathrooms, and also explained why wizarding society felt so superior to muggles. They genuinely had been able to rely upon creature comforts beyond the ken of mundane society hundreds of years earlier.
Centered along each of the faces of the tower was another stairway that went down a single level, linking the floor they'd entered to the one below without needing to use the tower's corner stairways or the secret passages. The level seemed to be mixed-use, appointed with places that appeared to be kitchens, dining rooms, studies, practice spaces, and even rooms marked out for rituals. To Harry's suggestion, near the kitchens there were smaller, less-nice rooms that were likely quarters for servants.
"Well I'll be. Basically a whole mini-Hogwarts hidden in here," Dawlish admitted, when they were mostly done exploring the level. "And one more floor below that's also hidden. I wonder what they did there."
They eventually found the way down in a concealed stairway in the middle of the block of ritual rooms, that might have otherwise seemed like a materials closet (if the explorer didn't have Harry's map). With Remus in front and Dawlish right behind, Harry was pretty sure that he could answer that question before he even set foot on the floor, since his quest finally updated.
THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (MAIN QUEST)
A secret from your past has escaped.
* Get to Hogwarts
* Learn about the crimes of Sirius Black
* Learn about Dementors
* Learn more about Ekrizdis
* Investigate Azkaban for what Ekrizdis left behind
O Defeat the guardians
O Descend to the basement laboratory
As Dumbledore sent more floating lanterns out, it became obvious that the entire floor was as empty as possible, with the sprawling space only broken up by simple, square, load-bearing columns. Stone ceilings, floors, and walls disappeared into the distance as over two acres of tower space opened without obstruction, wrapping around the walls of the interior courtyard.
And humanoid figures began to shamble out of the shadows toward them, each a red dot on Harry's map. There were dozens of them.