Empire of The Senseless

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Empire of The Senseless

by

Anna L. Milton

Chapter Four: The Blithe Assassin

Ginny Weasley had the kind of memory that stood to the events of her life as sticky paper stood to flies; trying to make her forget something was akin to trying to find the edge on a roll of transparent Spell-o-Tape. Nevertheless, despite the multitude of events neatly filed in her brain like so many insects pinned in labelled display cases, the scion of the House of Malfoy stood out as a particularly revolting cockroach.

It was not as though he had been particularly mean towards her. He wouldn’t be able to, in any case, given that he mostly gave no signs of acknowledging her existence. Nevertheless, she could feel his petty hatred directed slimily against her by virtue of being a Weasley, no matter her own personal aggravations concerning the nature of her family’s modus vivendi, not to mention financial heritage (or rather, lack thereof). Not that his prejudice disturbed her unduly. As she grew, she came to find that prejudice was as much a part of human social existence as vermin, salesmen and the occasional civil war. Besides, she found that prejudice, far from being the multi-headed monster it was generally depicted as, was often the grease on the axles of society. After all, for every great contribution for the betterment of humankind halted by group A’s incapability of coming to terms with group B and vice versa, there were at least two disasters averted by the circumstances that prevented the concatenation of two very dangerous ideas, even if those preventative circumstances were on the What Their Great-Great-Grandfather did to Our Great-Great-Auntie level. It all evened out in the end; she found that most things did, given enough geological ages.

What she had always been unable to stand (even if only in a discreet, quiet manner) in the dreary spawn of Malfoy during their Hogwarts years had been his unwarranted self-centredness. She had nothing against self-centredness per se, as she had enough amounts of it to sink a battleship (and in any case she firmly believed that any extant rules of behaviour did not strictly apply to herself), but she found that flaunting smugness was like wearing a lot of very bad perfume – it tended to attract insects and restraining orders. For someone with all the relevance and achievements of a long past-the-sell-by date, the Draco Malfoy she had known and, er, known at Hogwarts certainly had behaved as though he had won five Nobel Prizes, eliminated disease and hunger and devised a way to prevent toast from always falling butter side down. He put her in mind of a shaved terrier yapping at fenced Rottweilers.

Which was why her intellectual curiosity was piqued. The Draco now standing in front of her looked like he had discarded unwarranted arrogance in favour of warranted arrogance. He certainly seemed to have kept himself busy during his time as a missing man.

"Is Ms Weasley one of our business associates?" he asked smoothly, leaving his leaning place and turning to Snape in one fluid movement. Ginny observed him blankly. He was wearing a highly fashionable black outfit that seemed to have come into existence by virtue of a bunch of tailors getting together to beat the light out of some yards of fabric with very heavy sticks; she recognised the style – it was the "pale and interesting" look that was popular among certain segments of the wizarding world and would make Mephistopheles look like a hula dancer. And he no longer moved like he had done at Hogwarts, with a stilted, arrogant swagger. (When done right, this can cause untold joys in certain lookers-on; when done wrong, it stands to locomotion as an out-of-tune bagpipe stands to chamber music. Suffice it to say that, in his teenage years, Draco Malfoy had most emphatically belonged to the bagpipe field.) Now he moved with the fluid menace of quicksilver.

"Ms Weasley would like to learn the exact details of the aforementioned association before compromising her financial solvency, not to mention verticality and breathing capacity, over the envoys of the land of the living dead, if you’d be so kind," she interrupted dryly. Draco turned his grey eyes towards her, but he had obviously never faced the fearsome weapon known as Stare of Ginny, which wasn’t about to buckle under a detail as trifling as a putative death; he quickly drove his gaze away, mildly disturbed, which was most emphatically not a frequent state of affairs for him.

"Draco, Miss Weasley here has discovered the body of the late Mr. Crockford," Snape said calmly. "She may yet yield some valuable information."

Bet you a Galleon?, Ginny thought dispassionately, her face as impassive as a tax gatherer.

"The late Mr Crockford? Shall I assume a contract, then?"

"That depends, as you know. I called you here because of that."

Ginny, apparently crossed out from the immediate universe for the moment, surveyed the situation serenely. It was a knack she’d had more or less since the whole Chamber of Secrets brouhaha, when she had been so close to Death as to practically be able to invite herself over to tea. With time, she had come to realise that every human being’s final destination was, in fact, to die, and the actions of a lifetime were the tabloid magazines in the great Waiting Room of Existence (no matter how expensive or luxurious the office or practice, the little coffee table in the waiting room always has six-months-old tabloid magazines in which the covers are typically dedicated to the newfound love/recent divorce/impending marriage of some hyphenated one; scientists have yet to explain this phenomenon, but it is suggested that it has something to do with spontaneous mass accretion, or possibly with the fact that the gods have a bizarre sense of humour). And Death as the worst thing that could happen wasn’t really that bad a prospect. To start with, no one had yet come back from the dead to complain, and human beings being what they were, Ginny was absolutely certain that, if Death’s service was anything less than perfect, someone would have already risen from the grave to demand a full reimbursement. With that as the worst case scenario, it was much easier to cast an unemotional eye upon life. After all, in terms of the universe, the most catastrophic human action had the importance of a prawn rissole.

"Mr Crockford’s demise came rather unexpectedly, apparently. I think there’s only two conclusions to be had," she said gnomically. The two men looked at her.

And then she saw it flashing momentarily between them, some sort of secret communication that stemmed from years of acquaintance. She had seen it often before, passing between the eyes of her brother Ron and his two best friends – the language of membership of a close-knit circle that would forever be barred to her. Draco Malfoy had been missing, presumably dead, since the middle of the war. She wondered about what had happened to him – what had he done, and what had been Snape’s role in all of that.

She also wondered about what they were saying, wordlessly, to each other. That language was also barred to her.

"Oh?" Draco finally said, nonchalantly. "And what conclusions would those be, then?"

"Well, he either died of natural causes or he did not." It was not convenient to be the Mage Who Knew Too Much. Then again, it was never convenient to be the Mage Who Knew Too Little, either. The Mage Who Knew Exactly Enough and Did Not Get Thrown Into a River With Weights Tied to Their Feet was her favoured niche. "How old was he?" she sighed, with a blasé look.

"Forty eight," Snape answered, looking at her with the air of someone trying to figure out the trick.

"Ah," Ginny said, and looked down at her robes again, smoothing out a crease. When she looked up again, she caught Draco’s glance at Snape – but this time she understood it. This time the meaning was clear for the Esperanto of third wheels everywhere, and it said Does she know?

"A little, Mr Malfoy, a little. Contrarily to what you may think, I am not entirely stupid. I found the body. Mr Snape made me a job offer, the details of which remain rather clouded. And your job, it seems, is to determine whether Mr Crockford’s journey to the headstone farm was on schedule or not."

Draco took a step towards her, and eyed her like one examines a formerly friendly little puppy who has just eaten the postman raw. He had no wand nor weapon in his hands, and yet transmitted a feel of pure, unadulterated menace, like a naked blade.

Then he reached into a hidden pocket, quick like lightning, and extended a little black card. Ginny did not even flinch. Card-waving was not exactly high on her list of "catastrophes that make you tear all your clothes and cry out ‘Doomed! We’re all doomed!’".

"For you," he said evenly. "Not many people are granted this privilege. Use it well."

She took the card with a suspicious hand. Malfoy had been an unrivalled fly in the ointment at Hogwarts, and he did not seem to have lost those abilities with time. In the little black rectangle, golden words were embossed.

Always at Your Service

Owl/flare: The Ushers

Demiguise Square, London

She stared blankly at them. Surely not… She had heard words about this, about certain goings-on at Demiguise Square, about what you got when you sent owls to "The Ushers", who, in the language of rumour and whispers, were known by many names. Things mentioned by a friend of a friend of a friend… But surely it was all no more believable than any other tale recounted with relish as having happened to the cousin of a brother’s colleague…

"I thought this was an urban myth," she said, carefully storing the card. She was aware it was pretty feeble, as far as ripostes went, but it would have to do.

Draco threw her a disparaging glance. "Most things are. Don’t try to show anyone that card."

Snape had been eyeing the scene with some amusement. Granted, it was more or less the same time of amusement that the Roman public felt while watching a particularly expansive gladiators’ fight, but it was amusement nonetheless. However, fun and educational as it was to watch people try to slaughter each other in the various senses of the word, he had work to do. He cleared his throat, and for such a quiet sound, it was surprising how much it was similar to a foghorn.

"If you’d be so kind, there are things to do," he said. "Draco, this is now up to you. See what you can find."

The words seemed to have some unexplainable effect on Malfoy. His conceited, taunting self immediately morphed into a calculated display of professional coldness. Ginny eyed him suspiciously as he walked smoothly towards the door leading to the office. Draco Malfoy at Hogwarts had been a rich, pampered bully with the depth of a pancake and whose entire philosophy and reason of existence seemed to be to win first prize in some Upper Class Annoying Twit of The Decade contest. Imagining that simpering Little Lord Fauntelroy working was akin to picturing McGonagall posing for Playwizard in leopard-skin knickers. But his missing years had changed him – he was still the old Draco, and yet he was not – the haughtiness of his youth now under the rein of his, for lack of a better word, profession, like a very big steed ridden by the kind of horseman you really don’t want to show up for Sunday lunch.

"Is this door clear?" Draco asked, ignoring her pointedly.

"I think so," said Snape.

"I wonder if I can be allowed to guess what you do," Ginny said evenly, as Draco opened the door with a gentle move of his gloved hand, like a caress. He turned to look at her, poker-faced.

"Yes?"

"You are a hit wizard." Her voice didn’t register reproach. After all, there was no call to go around being judgemental at people.

"We call ourselves assassins," Draco said, almost benevolently, and treaded into Maurice Crockford’s erstwhile office like a sleek feline.

"You’ll find that Miss Weasley has a predilection for the more colourful paperback nomenclature, Draco," Snape said dismissively behind her. Ginny ignored this.

"Whatever the name, you still kill people for money," she said, and then, because she did not like to commit herself irrevocably to one single move, added, "unless the job specifications have greatly changed in the last few years, of course."

"No, they haven’t," Draco said breezily, as he stepped around the room with the delicacy of a dusk butterfly kissing the surface of a lake. The body of the late Mr Crockford remained at his desk, growing colder by the minute, his face still invisible between his arms, under the carefully combed brown hair. Ginny felt there was some sort of deep cosmic significance in this, possibly having to do with Death the Great Leveller Coming to All Men, or the sheer irony of falling from a really nice seat with a good view of the top of the world to a place where people treated your dead body like a sort of background feature. It made you wonder, but she didn’t include herself in that "you", because if you started wondering about things, as soon as you knew it you were babbling on about life being a shadow theatre with really bad accommodation and all your friends were putting hemlock in their tea. "We remain always The Merchants Whose Commodity is Death. Do you have a problem with that?" Draco said, turning back to her, the capitals evident in his voice, the question falling into place like a marble slab. Ginny thought of saying something, but the wizard’s glacier manner told her he was very serious. Dead serious. She shook her head. "Now stay where you are."

Ginny remained with Snape in the little archive room, looking as Draco seemed to conduct a sort of wild goose chase with the Invisible Man in the adjoining room. The blond wizard circled around the fallen body, prodding the office in various ways she didn’t quite know about. He closed the door in front of her, opened, closed it again, this time slower. Ginny could have glared, but the look on Draco’s face stopped her: it was the look of someone who had climbed the mountain of concentration so quickly they were actually already going down the other side. It was a look that she expected to see in Malfoy’s face as much as discovering that he’d become a chartered accountant.

"You can come in now," he finally said. "The room is clear."

Ginny stepped in quietly as Draco walked – or rather, glided – to the side of the body. "Don’t touch anything," he ordered, although, surprisingly, there was no meanness to it. It was an instructive, rather than spiteful, command, much like the discreet little signs painstakingly affixed to red buttons that read "Doomsday Machine – for your convenience, do not push this button".

"Nothing?" Snape asked, materialising besides her.

Draco shook his head. "As far as I can see it."

"Excuse me," said Ginny, "but a Killing Curse wouldn’t exactly redecorate the entire room, would it?"

Draco lobbed a venomous sneer at her. "Are you daft, Weasley? You might as well drop a little note to the MLE whenever you use a Killing Curse, it leaves a magical print a mile wide. Honestly, have you been asleep for the last five years? Even blasters leave too big a trail, you silly girl."

Ginny was unmoved. "Indeed? How fascinating."

Draco looked at her owlishly. He opened his mouth to answer, but he inexplicably found his eyes watering. Part of him, the part that saw thing as they were supposed to be, was telling him that this tail-end Weasley was just a stupid witch who’d never amounted to anything much. Another part, which tended to see things as they were, was looking at her inexpressive, almost unblinking eyes much in the same way as a rabbit contemplates an oncoming lorry’s headlights, and was alerting him to the wave of disquiet that seemed to emanate from her like personality-smog.

However, something like that coming from a Weasley didn’t square with his view of reality, and so he pushed it aside for the moment and returned to the task at hand – which was sensible, rational, logical. "He wasn’t killed by magic," he said evenly, and gently raised the late Maurice Crockford off the desk.

Ginny looked on. If any of the two men were expecting her to wince, she was not too sad to disappoint them. Maurice Crockford had been, except perhaps for something in his manner and the set of his jaw, a rather nondescript wizard. When he was alive, he’d been the sort of man you instantly expect to crop up in city councils. He had given off an air of good-natured efficiency and, judging from what little Ginny had seen, a sporting sort of self-confidence in public functions. True, he was – or rather, had been – a politician, but the magical government system (which took the idea of direct democracy, and placed it on the table and looked at it somewhat bewildered while developing a headache) meant that, if nothing else, at least their politicians had to lie much less than their Muggle counterparts. He was certainly not the kind of wizard you’d blindly follow, ready to righteously smite whoever was supposed to deserve being righteously smote, and after recent events, that came as quite a relief. Politically speaking, what people were yearning for, in a sheepish, feet-shuffling kind of way, was for someone who’d make the tea and remember to take out the trash, and Maurice Crockford had been it.

He wasn’t anymore.

The body of the man who had been Maurice Crockford was the colour of mouldy cheese, a bloodless pallor slowly turning grey. His face was oddly puffed and blotched, as though blood had been trapped beneath its skin and then had refused to leave just to be contrary. Between his slightly parted eyelids, Ginny could see the ghosts of his irises, watery, solidified things, like two poached eggs served on a glacier.

She felt sorry. Not for the death itself, which was not disturbing her unduly, but for its circumstances. She’d had more than enough experiences with embarrassment to wish it gratuitously upon others, and dying like this was the cosmic equivalent of three flying plaster ducks hanging from a wall.

"No blood or wound that I can find," said Draco, finishing a superficial exam of the body. "We have to take him from here," he added, looking up from his crouching position.

Snape seemed to face this with the kind of no-nonsense briskness more commonly associated with sports mistresses of the bloomers age.

"Is it safe?" he asked, almost perfunctorily.

"It will have to be," said Draco, uncoiling like a spring. "There’s not much more I can do here. We can always take him to the Hall," he added.

"Too risky. It’ll have to be his sister, I’m afraid. Bessie’s near the Door, do you think that will be too far? Right – Miss Weasley, take his feet, I’ll take the head."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You heard me. Come on, Weasley, get hold of his feet." He walked towards the body and held it under the arms. Ginny remained motionless, as though she was trying the words in her head. "Don’t tell me you’re afraid."

"I told you the dead don’t bother me," she said calmly. "But I don’t see why we should go to all that effort when we can use a simple Moving Spell."

Snape sneered, dismissive. "I don’t want any magic here. You heard the man, these things can be traced. And I don’t want this room’s magical field cluttered up either, in any case. Not until after tonight." Ginny was about to ask about what exactly was going to happen that night, but Snape ignored her pointedly and turned back to Draco. "Now, Draco, lead us out."

Ginny sighed inwardly to herself. She knew perfectly well that now there would be nothing else to it but to go on with the game. She stepped up to the body gingerly and leaned down to its expensively leather-clad feet. She was not a heavily built woman, but she was strong, and she picked up the wizard’s ankles without much effort. Draco backed away silently, and she and Snape eased the body off the chair.

"How about the dossier I brought?" she asked, casting a glance at the purple folder on the desk.

So this is how it goes, then? She wasn’t one to surprise herself, but she couldn’t help but grant a cold mental nod at her reaction. Here she was, dead ankles firmly held against her hips, about to move a body in secrecy along with a spy and an assassin, and she managed to find space in her mind for the problematic of folders. Amazing.

"Leave it," Snape said. "Your story must hold."

They started shuffling around the desk, when Draco halted besides them, and turned his head like a curious bird.

"Don’t you notice… something?" he asked.

Ginny kept silent, her eyes moving slow and cold towards Snape, who was carefully eyeing Draco, his face bearing an expression of undisguised interest. She chalked a point in her favour. Paying an interest was valuable and good; getting involved was a different kettle of the seafood of your choice. She had once heard some sort of parable about a man who, by virtue of looking at a tree, was unable to see the forest; he probably went away, in any case, because the rest of the parable concerned the noise the tree made by falling if there was no one there to listen to it, or something of the sort. Possibly the man had been squashed by the falling tree – it would certainly explain a lot of things (no one said the parable was intelligent; it was just a parable). In any case, she had come to understand it. In the great chess game of life, you must always pay attention to the whole board.

And right now, Snape wasn’t doing so.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

Draco looked at his former professor with a guarded countenance. He enjoyed his job. It didn’t have any of the quirks of other careers, like reengineering and office memos. Also, sometimes you got to meet some very interesting people, although, granted, not for very long. They even had a very good retirement plan, and expenses with work accidents were fully paid. Of course, these were generally funeral costs, but it was nevertheless a caring profession.

It wasn’t a job where you got very far if you didn’t keep your mouth shut. In fact, you were very likely to get under, instead, although not very under – six feet generally did the trick.

"It’s the smell, isn’t it?" Ginny said, quietly. After all, she wasn’t a needlessly cruel woman. Draco would have sighed in relief, if he could.

"Yes."

Snape cocked his head sideways very slightly. He seemed to be scrutinising the horizon like a seaman. "Yes," he finally said. "Yes, I can see what you mean. Just a hint, isn’t it? Like…"

"Incense," Ginny completed. Both men lobbed cutting glances at her. "It smelled that way when I came in," she said calmly. "As though someone had been burning incense in a closed room."

Snape sniffed very gently. "Incense, eh? Yes… I’d say… of course, it has been a long time…"

"She’s right, actually," Draco said. "There seems to be a certain… incense-y quality about the air… but very faint. Very, very faint."

He paused, and then he seemed to somehow stop, not like a human being turning still, with that silence that is peculiar to clockwork and anthills, but to actually come untethered from all the markers of life, a stilted, frigid statue. Ginny looked at him from the corner of her eyes; the body was heavy, and her hands were aching, but she kept silent. It was almost like contemplating a conjuring trick, some fiendish sleight-of-hand. She considered the fact of his work, and found herself being little surprised.

Then the black-clad wizard came to himself again, all of a sudden, like a switched flipped on. He turned slowly to look at Snape, and again there was that thing, that communication between them that might as well have been performed in Mandarin as far as Ginny could tell. Then Snape nodded, gravely, and said, "for later."

Ginny could tell he was mildly displeased. She could also tell that her shoulder joints felt as though they were about to fall off and her elbows had probably fallen off already and were just keeping up appearances. She stared lowly, the visual equivalent of the growl at the edge of hearing and reason, and sidled fractionally towards the door.

Snape seemed to take the hint, even if only unconsciously.

"Right. Let’s get going," he said. They walked, or rather, shuffled geriartrically towards the archive room’s door, and after a few false starts, managed to negotiate the table and go through the little service door. Draco, who’d opened it for them, had stepped ahead and now stood in a corridor shut off at one end by a small square window whose frosted glass let in the white light outside. The other end turned abruptly into the bowels of the building. The assassin raised one hand silently and then sidled away from sight like the blown-out flame of some rare and curious candle. "You can come," he whispered shortly, and after a bout of impromptu contortionism during which Ginny would swear Snape muttered something along the lines of "bugger all this", they managed to negotiate the corridor’s difficult straight angle and trudge onto a much longer corridor lined with occasional doors. Draco stood calmly next to the first door on the right, which proved upon inspection to be marked "Personnel Only".

It was open. Ginny suspected this had not always been the case. That would mean that Draco had picked the lock in about five seconds. She filed this possibility under "Relevant Considerations".

"Get in and be quiet," he whispered, ushering them in. Ginny and Snape walked with some difficulty into what appeared to be no more than a stuffy maintenance room. Various cleaning items of the magical world occupied its shelves and its walls, and a large waste-bin trolley was swaying gently from side to side beneath the sickly yellow light of the more down-market class of magilamp.

Draco shut the door behind them. "You can put him down now," he said, and the body was promptly lowered onto a patch of clear floor. Ginny’s arms’ muscles felt as though they were performing the physical equivalent of an aria involving lots of fat women in horned helmets and spiky corsets, but nevertheless, she did not wince, nor did she even alter her expression in the least. She could see that, with this kind of wizards, that was simply not done.

"Thank you for your help, Ms Weasley," Draco said. "You can go now."

Ginny startled.

"Can I?"

"You must leave through the front door," Snape said, his back turned to them, head lowered, looking at the dead man on the floor.

"Must I?"

"Oh, will you stop with the stupid questions?" said Snape, turning brusquely to face her. Ginny could see that he was certainly not in the mood for a symposium on the matter.

Maybe it was the way his eyes coruscated like a pair of very angry beetles. It was certainly a hint.

"No need to get angry. No one can say I don’t have esprit de corpse," she said dryly, adopting a dead earnest face.

Draco’s hand shot out at her wrist in a blur. She blinked at the gloved fingers coldly encircling her pale flesh. It was as though he hadn’t moved – as if, quite simply, his hand had passed from one position to another in a whisper of time. She looked up at his face. He was smiling. It wasn’t a reassuring smile.

"Listen, Weasley, my collaborator here made you a request," he drawled in tones of polite menace. "Which I am sure you will comply with, won’t you?"

The pressure on her wrist increased fractionally. He wasn’t hurting her, but his steely grip, combined with the kind of grin more frequently found on bottles and black flags, made pretty clear that pain was one of a set of possibilities, and not necessarily the most unpleasant of them.

"I don’t recall saying I wouldn’t," Ginny answered, nonchalant like a starlet by a celluloid swimming pool.

"Very kind of you," Draco said, hand still firmly clamped on her wrist. "Now be a good witch, go back the way we came and tell the chaps downstairs Mr Crockford doesn’t want to be disturbed, will you?"

"What if I find someone? Say, an house-elf, for instance?"

"I doubt it. The little buggers are never around this time of day. And if you do find someone, just tell them you got lost, looking… looking for a bathroom, for instance. I’m sure you can think of something."

She eyed him coldly. Escape routes were fine. She had come to learn their virtues. On the other hand, embarrassment was not. But he was right about one thing – she would be able to think of something. She had also come to learn that. She had had to.

Draco paid no attention to her frigid glance. He was bent on ushering her out.

"Meet us outside the building," he said, business-like. "We’ll be there in about ten minutes. And so will you, of course."

Both of them knew she would, and she let this pass without protest. So he flashed her a carnivorous smile, pushed her out and shut the door rather unceremoniously on her face.

TBC…