Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (128 page)

“Yes,” squeaked most of the girls, though in Hannah’s case it came out, “Yes, Lady Susan!”

“
Don’t
call me that,” snapped Susan. “And
I don’t think I heard you, Miss Brown!
I’m warning you, I have friends who write plays and if you do anything dumb, posterity will remember you as Lavender, the Amazing Stupid Hostage.”

(Hermione was beginning to worry about just how many other Hogwarts students besides Harry had mysterious dark sides, and whether
she
was likely to develop one if she kept hanging out with them.)

“Alright, Captain Bones,” said Lavender in an unusually respectful tone, as they turned another corner along the shortest way to the library, passing through a rather large corridor studded with six sets of double doors, three sets on either side. “Can I ask if there’s any way for
me
to become a double witch?”

“Sign up for the Auror preparation program in your sixth year,” said Susan. “It’s the next best thing. Oh, and if a famous Auror offers to oversee your summer internship, just ignore anyone who warns you that he’s a terrible influence or that you’re almost certainly going to die.”

Lavender was nodding rapidly. “Got it, got it.”

(Padma, who hadn’t actually been there last time, was giving Susan
very
skeptical looks.)

Then Susan suddenly stopped in place and her wand snapped up and she said, “
Protego Maximus!
”

A jolt of adrenaline went through Hermione, she was instantly drawing her wand and spinning around -

But she couldn’t see anything wrong, through the greater blue haze now surrounding them all.

The other girls, who had likewise pulled into formation, were also looking puzzled.

“Sorry!” said Susan. “Sorry, girls. Give me a moment to check this place out. Thinking of a certain person has just reminded me that this hall we’re in right now, with all those doors, would be an
excellent
place for an ambush.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Now,” said a harsh male voice, blurred into unidentifiability by a buzzing undertone.

All six sets of double doors slammed open.

White robes filed silently forward, all-concealing white robes without marks of House affiliation and white cloth hiding the faces beneath the hoods. They marched out, and marched out, crowding the great corridor in numbers too high to count easily. Less than fifty robes, probably. Certainly more than thirty. All of them already surrounded by blue haze.

Susan said some Extremely Bad Words, so awful that at almost any other time, Hermione would have noticed.

“That message!” Daphne cried in sudden horror. “It
wasn’t
from -”

“Millicent Bulstrode?” said the voice and its buzzing undertone. “No, it wasn’t. You see, Miss Greengrass, if the same girl sends off a Slytherin message every day you fight a bully, pretty soon someone else will notice. We’ll have a talk with her after we’re done with you.”

“Miss Susan,” said Hannah in a voice just starting to quaver, “can you be super enough to -”

Wands rose in many hands. There came a series of blinding flashes of green light, a massive volley of shieldbreakers, at the end of which there was no more protective blue dome surrounding them, and Susan had fallen to her knees, clutching her head.

Barriers of solid blackness had sprung into being at both ends of the corridor. Behind the double doors that Hermione could see into, there were only unused classrooms, very dead ends.

“No,” said the male voice with that buzz overlaid, “she can’t. In case you haven’t noticed, you’ve gotten quite a lot of people very angry at you and we have no intention of losing this time. All right everyone, prepare to fire.”

The wands around the perimeter aimed again, low enough that their enemies wouldn’t hit each other if they missed.

And then another male voice, with a similar buzz accompanying it, suddenly said “
Homenum Revelio!
”

An instant later there was another massive volley of shieldbreakers and hexes, fired on reflex at the suddenly revealed figure, shattering the shields which had almost immediately begun to form around it -

And then, as that same figure fell to the ground, a stunned silence.

“
Professor Snape?
” said the second voice. ”
He’s
the one who’s been interfering?”

It was the Potions Master of Hogwarts who now lay unconscious on the stone floor, the dirt-spotted robes stirring for a final moment before they settled in place, his fallen hand outstretched toward where his wand was slowly rolling away.

“No,” said the first male voice, now sounding a bit more uncertain. Then it rallied, “No, that can’t possibly be it. He heard us passing the word, of course, and came along to make sure nobody screwed it up again. We’ll wake him up afterward and apologize and he’ll Memory-Charm the children so they don’t remember, he’s a Professor so he can do that. Anyway, we should make sure we’re
really
alone now.
Veritas Oculum!
”

Fully two dozen different Charms must have been spoken, then, but no more invisible people showed up. One of them in particular made Hermione’s heart sink; she recognized it as the Charm which had been listed alongside the description of the True Cloak of Invisibility, which would not reveal the Cloak, but would tell you whether it or certain other artifacts were nearby.

“Girls?” whispered Susan. She was slowly pushing herself to her feet, though Hermione could see her limbs swaying and quivering. “Girls, I’m sorry for what I said before. If you’ve got anything clever and heroic to try, you might as well try it.”

“Oh, yeah,” Tracey Davis said then, her voice trembling. “I almost
forgot
.” The Slytherin girl raised her voice, and spoke.

“Hey, all of you!” yelled Tracey in a high-pitched shaky shout. “Hey, are you planning to hurt me too?”

“Yes, actually,” said the buzzing voice of the leader. “We are.”

“I’m under Harry Potter’s protection, you know! Anyone who tries to hurt me will learn the true meaning of Chaos! So are you going to let me go?” It should have sounded defiant. It came out sounding terrified.

There was a pause. Some of the hoods of the robes turned to face each other, then turned back to face the girls.

“Hm…” said the buzzing male voice. “Hm… no.”

Tracey Davis put her wand away into her robes.

Slowly, deliberately, she raised her right hand high in the air, and pressed her thumb and forefingers together.

“Go ahead,” said that voice.

Tracey Davis snapped her fingers.

There was a long, awful pause.

Nothing happened.

“Yes, well,” said the voice -

Tracey said, her voice sounding even higher and shakier, “
Acathla, mundatus sum
.” Her hand, stretching up still further, snapped its fingers a second time.

A nameless chill went down Hermione’s spine then, a frisson of fear and disorientation like she’d just felt the floor tilt beneath her, threatening to spill her into some darkness lying beneath.

“What’s she -” began a buzzing female voice.

Tracey’s face looked pale, twisted with fear, but her lips moved, spilled forth sound in a high chant, “
Mabra, brahoring, mabra…
”

A chill wind seemed to spring up within the confines of the corridor, a dark breath that caressed their faces and touched their hands with ice.

“Fire at her on my count!” shouted the leading voice. “One, two
, three!
” and maybe-forty voices roared spells, creating a huge concentric array of fiery bolts that lit the wide corridor brighter than the Sun -

- for the short moment before the bolts struck and vanished upon a dark red octagon that appeared in the air around the girls, and then disappeared a moment later.

Hermione saw it, she saw it but she still couldn’t imagine it; she couldn’t imagine a Shielding Charm that powerful, a spell that would withstand an army.

And Tracey’s voice went on chanting, her voice sounding louder and more confident, and her face screwed up like she was trying to remember something
very exactly
.

“Shuffle, duffle, muzzle, muff.
Fista, wista, mista-cuff.”

Now all those present could feel it, heroines and bullies alike, the sensation of some dark will pressing down on them, a tingling in the air as something built and built and built. All the blue hazes around the white robes, all the shielding spells, had died out without any visible hex touching them. There were more flashes of light as more desperate spells were fired, but they fizzled out in midair like candle-flames touching water.

The black barriers at the two ends of the corridor had dissipated like smoke beneath the growing pressure, but their evaporation revealed the exits sealed, blocked by tiled slats of dark metal that looked stained as though with blood; and as Tracey chanted “
Lemarchand, Lament, Lemarchand
,” a dreadful blue light began to shine out from beneath the metal slats and between them; and the six sets of double doors slammed shut all at once, as panicked white-robed bullies began to pound on them and howl.

Then Tracey’s hand slashed to her left, and she cried “
Khornath!
”, then her hand pointed below her and ”
Slaaneth!
”, above her ”
Nurgolth!
”, and then, to her right, ”
TZINTCHI!
”

Tracey paused, took a deep breath; and Hermione found her voice and cried, “
Stop! Tracey, stop!
”

But there was a strange wild smile on Tracey’s face. She raised her hand still higher, and snapped her fingers a third time; and when she spoke again, beneath her high girlish voice there was an undertone as though some lower chorus were chanting along with her.

“Darkness beyond darkness, deeper than pitchest black.
Buried beneath the flow of time…
From darkness to darkness, your voice echoes in the emptiness,
Unknown to death, nor known to life.”

“
What are you doing?
” shrieked Parvati, and the Gryffindor girl stretched out a hand as though to pull down the Slytherin, who was now starting to float upward into the air; and both Daphne and Susan grabbed Parvati’s arm at the same time and Daphne cried out, “Don’t, we don’t know what will happen if the ritual is interrupted!”

“
Well what happens if it gets COMPLETED?
” screamed Hermione, as close as she’d ever come to total brain meltdown.

Susan’s face was white as chalk, and she whispered, “I’m sorry, Mad-Eye…”

And Tracey spoke on, her body floating higher and higher off the floor, her black hair whipping wildly around her in the chill winds.

“You who know the gate, who are the gate, the key and guardian of the gate:
I bid you open the way for him, and manifest his power before me!”

The corridor was plunged then into utter darkness and silence, so that only Tracey could be seen and heard, like there was nothing left in the universe except her and the light illuminating her from some nameless source.

The shining girl raised her hand one final time, and with dreadful gravity, pressed her thumb and forefinger together.

And within the darkness Hermione looked at Tracey’s face and saw that the Slytherin girl’s eyes were now, to the exact shade, the green of Harry Potter’s.

“Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres!
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres!
HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES!”

There was a snap like thunder, and then -

Harry had chosen to assume a rather relaxed posture, as he sat in a low chair before the mighty desk of the Headmaster of Hogwarts: one leg cocked over his knee, and his arms sprawling casually to either side. Harry was doing his best to disregard the noise from the surrounding devices, although the one directly behind him that sounded like an owl hooting desperately as it was put through a woodchipper was pretty difficult to ignore.

“Harry,” the old wizard said from behind the desk, the aged voice level as the blue eyes stared out at him from beneath the shining half-moon spectacles. Headmaster Dumbledore had garbed himself in robes of midnight purple; not true formal black, but dark enough to come close indeed to deadly seriousness, as the wizarding world counted the meaning of fashions. “Were you…
responsible
for this?”

“I cannot deny that my influence was at work,” Harry said.

The old wizard took off his glasses, leaned forward to stare at Harry directly, blue eyes to green. “I will ask you one question,” the Headmaster said in a quiet voice. “Do you think that what you did today was -
appropriate?
”

“They were bullies and they came to that hallway with the direct intent of hurting Hermione Granger and seven other first-year children,” Harry said levelly. “If I am not too young for moral judgment, then neither are they. No, Headmaster, they didn’t deserve to die. But they
did
deserve to be stripped naked and glued to the ceiling.”

The old wizard put his glasses back on. For the first time that Harry had seen of him, the Headmaster seemed to be at a loss for words. “As Merlin himself is my witness,” said Dumbledore, “I haven’t the faintest notion of how I ought to react to this.”

“That’s pretty much the effect I was aiming for,” said Harry. He felt like he ought to be whistling a merry tune, but unfortunately he had never learned how to whistle reliably.

“I need not ask you who is
directly
responsible,” said the Headmaster. “Only three wizards within Hogwarts might be powerful enough. I myself did not do it. Severus has assured me he was not involved. And the third…” The Headmaster shook his head in some dismay. “You loaned the Defense Professor your Cloak, Harry. I do not think that was wise. For now that he has escaped detection by simple Charms, he surely knows that it is a Deathly Hallow - if, indeed, he did not know from its first touch upon his flesh.”

“Professor Quirrell had already deduced my possession of an invisibility cloak,” Harry said. “And knowing him, he has probably guessed that it is a Deathly Hallow. But in
this
case, Headmaster, it so happens that Professor Quirrell was under one of those face-concealing white robes.”