Empire of The Senseless

Empire of The Senseless

by

Anna L. Milton

Chapter Five: Make My Day

The woman was standing in the corner where two cramped, old streets met. This, in other circumstances, would suggest the possibility of a transaction in the field of negotiable affections (although, truth be told, for this particular woman, the chimney sweep would really need an enormous broom). The woman, however, did not look as though she was waiting for Mr Amount, first name Right. In fact, she did not look as though she was waiting for anything; she gave off the impression that the feeble world might very well Apocalypse itself or something as much as it pleased, but she was certainly too solid to have anything to do with that sort of nonsense. This woman loomed.

She had come to appreciate that. It was a benefit in her line of work; even though it had not helped her through her sullen, dreary youth, except, of course, to ensure that she had definitely not been on the receiving end of any occurring bullying, which, come to think of it, had not been an unreasonable trade-off.

She drew her robes closer to her voluminous figure. The morning air was sharp and cold and she had been waiting for an hour now. Generally, a woman built like a concrete wall standing for an hour in a street corner is not what can be termed "inconspicuous," but this woman had the remarkable ability of looming at will; if and when she desired it, she could escape notice almost completely. It was not as though she faded into the background (unless, of course, the background was made up of a herd of elephants) - she just became irrelevant in other people's eyes, much like a statue, which was, in a way, highly appropriate, as she had the general size and shape of one, though absent of pigeon-derived decoration.

In any case, there weren't many people around at this time of day, especially in this area. She did not mind waiting, but it wasn't exactly the sort of activity that made her jump up and down in excitement. She had definitely never got up from bed shouting "hooray, hooray, today I'll get to stand in a corner and watch!" She scowled, trying to make the bird leave his nest by sheer willpower; it gave her the look of an extremely furious bulldog, which was also very useful in her line of work. Combined with her size and magical dexterity, it had stopped many a mage and loosened many a bladder. She beamed at herself. You should always feel proud of a job well done.

The watch on her left wrist buzzed softly. She raised it to her mouth and flipped the face open. Beneath the Muggle display there was a magical one, all moving orbs and shiny hands and a complete absence of numbers or indeed anything that could be understood by anyone who didn't have a mind as straightforward as a drawing by M. C. Escher on hard drugs.

"Bulstrode," she said to the watch. A muffled voice answered her, criss-crossed with noise.

"--gjjjffg-- here. Looks like our man may be --prrreek-- go through the back door," it said. "I've got Macmillan round the back. See what he has to say. When he --barkshjj-- out, don't lose--"

The rest of the communication was cut off. Millicent Bulstrode shook the watch, and then snapped it shut with a sigh. The watches really weren't very good. In fact, in terms of functionality, a glass anvil probably scored marginally higher. They only worked over short distances, and communicating through them was akin to trying to do petit point embroidery on a roller coaster, but the point was that they did work. Millicent had had the chance to be grateful for them more than once before. They generally used little elf or New Zealand owls to convey their messages when flaring was out of the question, but in certain circumstances, where discretion was the watchword, the watches had an edge over the owls. They were faster, allowed some resemblance of conversation, no matter how tragically mutilated, and at least they didn't demand to be fed and they didn't go "hoot" at some inconvenient moment, which, at least in Millicent's eyes, was enough to make up for their failings, not that there were a small amount of these.

Keeping a careful eye on the building on the other side of the street, she flipped her watch open once more.

"Ernie Macmillan," she whispered into it, and the magical surface glowed a faint yellow, obscuring its cryptic signs for a moment.

"--skrrritzz-- Macmillan," the watch answered in what was vaguely recognisable as Ernie Macmillan's voice. Well, all right, very vaguely.

"Bulstrode here," she said. "Is he out yet?"

"--wfgstjjj-- like he's going through here --rbllurp-- him tagged. Meet me corner of Artemis and Belladonna. --criiikshtt-- said blasters on null & stun."

"Right," Millicent said, mostly to herself, as the watch returned to silence once again. She then reached into the unfathomable depths of her robes and grabbed hold of the blaster hanging from her shoulder. She carefully - and above all, discreetly - set its

Turner to "stun" and wound the blaster until it was warm and purring softly like a cat on a hearthrug. With the kind of bastards they were dealing with, Millicent would have gladly set the weapon to give them more than a zap, but the Lieutenant liked saying that they represented order, not barbarism. Millicent was Chief Sergeant, so she had to allow these little things; she believed she had a lot more fun than the Lieutenant, as at least she was allowed to be an unabashed cow in peace and quiet.

She carefully returned the blaster to its original position and started to walk slowly towards Artemis Way. She was one of the few people actually large enough to be able to conceal a Smethwyk & Waffling High Load 39 on her person; the recoil of that blaster had once sent Dennis Creevey on an impromptu and much gleefully remembered flight, but then again the things that were able to make Creevey lose his verticality could probably fill up several volumes of the Encyclopaedia Magica.

At the end of the street, she turned left and walked the length of the winding and poky Artemis Way, moving about inconspicuously until a young wizard emerged from another street and careened into her, letting a small package drop to the ground.

"I'm dreadfully sorry," he said apologetically.

"No, let me," she answered, and they both leaned down to catch the package.

"Where is he?" she whispered to the wizard, who was none other than Cpl. E. Macmillan.

"He's a way ahead," he hissed back. "Going to meet in The Red Ashwinder, I think. I'll go ahead. We need to catch all of them."

She nodded quietly and got up while Ernie muttered his apologies again and dashed along Belladonna Street once more. Millicent started walking herself, much slower, until she saw a wizard walking at a brisk pace about fifty yards ahead of her. There were plenty more people about, as this was a pretty large thoroughfare and one not known by its great gentility and discretion, at that, but her well-honed instincts zeroed in on the wizard in the dark purple robes. She couldn't see Ernie, who'd no doubt dashed into a side street. Ernie was more elusive than a tax return.

She walked along at a leisurely pace until the man disappeared into the entrails of a building that had seen better days, although judging by its outer appearance, they hadn't been all that better. She felt her blaster through the fabric of her robes, almost absent-mindedly. She personally felt that Mr Smethwyk and Mrs Waffling deserved to have their feet kissed on a daily basis by scores of grovelling worshippers (provided, of course, that she didn't have to actually be one of them) for having invented the blasters. They had only been around for five years and already Millicent considered that life without them had been comparable to that of primitive hominids before fire. She was a firm, hard copper; the kind that makes steel-toed boots feel like a duvet, so that sort of thoughts were almost perfunctory.

The building the wizard she was following had entered had a weatherworn sign proclaiming it to house a pub called The Red Ashwinder. Millicent was quite certain that the thing hanging from its hinges had not always been a sign. Decades ago, the wizarding world hadn't been a place where you mucked about with metaphors.

She approached the building confidently and stealthily, giving it a wide berth, enough to avoid suspicion but not so wide she'd miss out on any of the action. The place had a pretty derelict feel to it. Although wizarding pubs tended to close late and open early (or vice-versa, in the views of their patrons), so as to enjoy the brisk and often wobbly commerce provided by mages wandering the streets at 6am, singing tunes they'd never admit to knowing in their sober state (a worrying number of them involving sheep) and looking to have the scales of the dragon that incinerated them, and even though The Red Ashwinder was no exception, it looked like as though its clientele were the kind of urban fauna that considers gutter-dwellers to be nobs. Then again, it was situated in a part of the city where a direct strike by a meteorite would probably count as urban renewal.

Millicent walked on slowly, eyeing the pedestrians unnoticeably. When she was sure no one was watching her, she activated her watch once more and called her superior officer.

"Chief? I'm here."

"I know," said a voice behind her.

* * *

Ginny had no difficulties in making her way back downstairs, and, like Malfoy had said, found a grand total of zero house-elves or other assorted busybodies. It was a pity to have to allow him even that tiny, unknown victory, but on the other hand, it was quite convenient for her. Apart from everything else, she found house-elves rather nauseating. When she was at Hogwarts, right before the beginning of the war, Hermione Granger had tried to convince her to join S.P.E.W. She had pointed out that house-elves had as much interest in being free as the average mage had an interest in throwing himself into a blast-furnace (although she hadn't put it quite in those terms). Hermione had not brought up the subject again, even though she continued to raise the standard of oppressed elfdom. But she had forgotten about Ginny; people generally did.

Not that Ginny had anything against house-elves qua house-elves. She practiced equal-opportunity patronising, knowing the stupidity of all, be them Dwarves, Ghosts, Hags, Misc Undead, House-Elves, Nymphs, Goblins, Sylphs, Gnomes, Dryads or, naturally, humans (she made an unflattering exception for Real Elves, who were frankly too weird and most importantly, too reclusive to be able to be characterised as stupid; or indeed as sane).

When she knocked once more on Doreen Fletcher's door, Fortune once again cast her greedy little smile upon her. Doreen was in deep conversation with two wizards, and seemed to have forgotten all about Ginny, although a more accurate way of putting it would be to say she had repressed all memories of Ginny. She also appeared to be extremely furious at being interrupted, but Ginny had no qualms with that.

"What do you want?" Doreen snapped.

"I just came to deliver something to Mr Crockford," Ginny answered calmly. The other witch's low-grade fury was drowning slowly in Lake Virginia.

"He asked me to tell you he doesn't wish to be disturbed."

"Well, yes, now go away," Doreen said, but without much enthusiasm.

"An excellent notion," Ginny said, and walked away with the sort of brazen confidence that ensures your right to go wherever you damn well please. She retraced her steps with no difficulty and soon she was back where it had all began, on the steps leading up to the building's door. She looked at her watch, which told her it was twenty past nine, the exact position of Saturn, the status of her Kneazle and the best way to wash white underwear.

She didn't consider herself a witch with a great deal of patience, since she knew that what happens in those instances is that you end up telling it to the world, which then proceeds with puppy-like eagerness to determine how far it can go. No, it was better to have very little patience and reserve a space in your schedule to "act capricious and erratic," possibly between 7:30 and 7:45. She found it saved a great deal of effort in the long run.

Nevertheless, she settled herself to wait, and it was then that she noticed Draco in the background

He was, indeed, in the background. Where exactly, she couldn't say; she found her eyes straining with the effort of being divided between common sense and what she knew was there. He wasn't in disguise; he didn't have to. He was simply using the fact that people will rarely see what they know can't possibly be there. That, much more than protective spells and wards, was the reason why Muggles had so far remained blissfully ignorant of the existence of the magical world, unless they wanted to enjoy the old canvas blazer hospitality. It was one of the pillars of magic. Well, along with nine hours of sleep and lots of regular meals.

"You can come out now, Malfoy," she said, the confident tone of her voice not betraying the fact that she wasn't quite sure whether she was talking to Draco or a cornice. The main thing was to act certain, the rest followed eventually.

And then Draco Malfoy stepped out.

He didn't exactly move forward. He didn't exactly come into focus. He didn't exactly materialise from thin air.

In a way, he chose the options "all of the above" and "none." He had also changed his appearance to brown hair and conservative dark red robes. By the little wavering at the edges, she marked it down as some Charm of Illusion. It felt somewhat different than all other Charms of Illusion she'd encountered so far and she archived this fact for future reference.

Ginny thought she was supposed to find this an astonishing example of Malfoy's stealth techniques, as worthy of gob-smacked admiration as juggling six daggers and a live cat while wearing a blindfold. A flicker behind his mask of utter indifference told her he was both flabbergasted at her discovery of him and irritated at her utter lack of amazement. She scored another point in her favour.

"Good to see you haven't run screaming into the night yet, Weasley," he drawled.

Ginny seemed to consider this for a moment.

"It's daytime, actually," she said, deadpan.

"Very droll, Weasley. Now come along. Snape is waiting for us with Bessie." He ushered her ahead of him towards the centre of the street. "And don't get too near because of the Charm." He realised his mistake just in time. "Of Illusion," he added, and then chided himself for being so awkward in front of this tail end Weasel.

"I wouldn't dare to walk within twenty yards of you, Mr Malfoy, let alone one," she said, as they walked along Dumbledore Road and Draco deftly avoided careening into two witches coming the opposite direction. "Although I do wonder what would happen to your Charm if people did get too close to you."

Draco glared at her haughtily down his patrician nose.

"Was that sarcasm, Weasley?"

"Um. No, I do believe that was irony. You see, you can't just go around being sarcastic at people. On occasion--"

"Shut up," he interrupted curtly. It was the sort of request that comes with hints of decapitated equines.

Ginny found it almost reassuring, like having a war finally break out after a tiresome round of continuous border incidents, and she could see Malfoy felt very much the same way.

"As you wish," she said with the calm generally associated with things with lots of teeth waiting in muddy waters.

They walked silently for a while, methodically approaching the alley where the Door was located. Draco was trying to come up with an adequate answer to this impudent Weasel, but decided, for once, to postpone the matter, although not without archiving it in the extensive Personal Grudges file. It wasn't that he couldn't think of something appropriate to say - after all, he had never before been at a loss for words before, bar some irrelevant childhood occasions, and one of the Malfoy dictums he retained was that it was never a time to pick up a bad habit, although the Malfoy definition of "bad" was often at odds with that of the unwashed masses, a term that signified "everybody else." He also believed, however, that there was a time and a place for everything, and clever and cunning retorts had a window of existence about as great as that of a tap-dancing competition in a ball-bearings factory. That was why they were called "quips," not "slowps." Now, of course, his chance had passed, because, to his surprise, the skinny, furtive Weasley he had almost completely failed to notice at Hogwarts (except when an opportunity to gloat presented itself, of course; waste not, want not was another of the Malfoy commandments) had developed into a creature with the same slowing power of extra-thick treacle. The adult Ginny made the Cold War look like a free-love feast in comparison.

However, Draco was an Assassin. Part of his gruelling training had been entirely devoted to the art of diplomacy, on the basis that, more often than not, the recipient of a contract could be found in an exalted social circle that had to be skilfully navigated. Moreover, you sometimes had to make your (preferably) non-lethal way through people whose nullification was not part of the contract, because, first of all, you didn't work for free and secondly, going around killing people extraneous to the contract was something that filled Assassins with great distaste. They were not common thugs, after all; they were gentlemen and ladies of venture. It just wouldn't be Quidditch.

"Ms Weasley," he began smoothly, "allow me to remind you that we are, by some terrible misfortune, having to spend the next few moments in each other's company. You no doubt think that you are displeased with this state of affairs, but let me assure you that your displeasure is a mere trifle compared to my own. I was, am and always will be allergic to Weasleys and their brood and frankly, I'd rather have quite unpleasant things done to me with a wire waistcoat and a very large cheese grater than having to waste precious minutes of my mortality interacting with a Weasley. I do so now not because of any underlying masochistic tendencies, but rather because I am a professional and that's what I have to do. So, please, be so kind as to avoid bothering me with your minuscule "wit" - for lack of a better word - while I am working and at least maintain a minimum degree of civility for a while. I know it's hard for a Weasley, but do, do keep on trying, yes?"

Ginny pondered this. Malfoy had evidently been taught to think and speak, which constituted a not insignificant refinement of his previous schoolyard bully persona, she considered. But for all his resoluteness in looking forward, all his icy hauteur, Ginny could see his invective had left him slightly flustered, and scored yet another point in her favour. She would be able to score points against a rock full of iguanas, so that wasn't a particularly remarkable achievement.

"Don't worry, Mr Malfoy," she said wryly. "I assure you that my feelings on the matter are exactly the same. I will not drag out our interaction further than is strictly necessary."

Draco eyed her for a moment, a fierce glint of suspicion shining in his hard eyes. She let him proceed with his dissection of her expression, until he turned his eyes aside at short notice, seemingly satisfied.

"Good," he said.

"Incidentally, Mr Malfoy," she added, "Do you like your work?"

He seemed to give this some consideration. Then the beginnings of what can only be described as "an evil grin" started creeping steadfastly onto his face. "Yes," he said. "I do. I don't think that is what you wanted to hear."

"On the contrary, Mr Malfoy. I do believe that enjoying your work is considered to be A Good Thing."

Draco frowned ever so slightly. They were almost at the alley where their meeting point was located and this was not going according to form. Discretion and pride were fighting within him, and since pride was one of the basic components of any Assassin, it managed to quickly nullify its opponent with extreme prejudice.

"I don't see why a common thug should be proud of what he does," he answered, a little huffily.

She appeared to consider the matter gravely for a moment.

"I assume they take pride in being able to find people who pay them to do it," she said. "You must understand they are simple people. They do not possess your profession's, ah, sophistication."

Draco answered this with a frigid silence. He could do unspeakable things with an egg whisker, but there was not much in the way of killing remarks he could direct to the junior Weasel. It would be like spitting at a black hole.

Which was all wrong. She wasn't supposed to be like this; she was a Weasley, and she was a Gryffindor, and Gryffindors were keen and tended to charge at the heavily armed enemy wielding only a grapefruit and a selection of shouty words. This discrepancy between what was and what ought to be was extremely annoying, and he would have Dealt With Matters Accordingly if it weren't for Rules. Though the purpose of the latter was to see how far you could bend them, you did not break them.

"This way to Bessie, Weasley," he ended up by saying, stepping into a street that intersected the first at a slightly disconcerting angle, a common feature in wizarding architecture, a discipline generally understood to be undertaken by those whose minds are generally at a distance of several miles from their bodies.

"Who is this Bessie, anyway?" she asked. Her manner suggested - just suggested - that she knew everything there was to know about the aforementioned Bessie and was asking in this incurious tone for reasons others could only dimly suspect.

Draco knew, however, that she didn't know everything, and so it was with not an inconsiderate amount of smugness that he replied, "Here she is, Weasley."

* * *

"Merlin's beard, Chief, I could have blown you clear off!" Millicent said.

The witch standing behind her - or rather, in front of her, as Millicent had spun around like lightning (at least, most of her had; she was unexpectedly fast, but there was quite a lot of Millicent, so her outlying regions were probably still rearranging themselves) - gave her a curt smile.

"I'm not very good at stealth, Millicent," she said. "I think you heard me a mile off."

"Precisely."

"Your blaster's set to stun," she answered, and then, because she knew Millicent, added, "I hope."

Millicent gave her what is known throughout the universe as the Sheriff-Deputy-Grin, which quickly faded into something more serious. "Are we going in?"

"With blasters blazing," the other witch said, not without some humour, and as they turned to walk towards the battered door of The Red Ashwinder, she opened her own watch. "Creevey, Macmillan. Bulstrode and I are going in. I want you two to back us up," she ordered in a bossy tone. "We'll need you here as soon as we're in. Wait five minutes and then go. And... be careful." She flipped the watch shut again, indifferent to the few dirty glances she was receiving. She knew that enforcers weren't exactly received with parades and confetti here at the Four Ways. And, because she had a tidy mind, she knew that was the eighth greatest understatement she'd ever come across.

"Let's be careful," she said to Millicent before they entered the murky depths of the pub. It was something she actually meant.

"Right," Millicent muttered, and they went in.

* * *

The interior of The Red Ashwinder was in keeping with its outside. There was a rather gloomy room with the sort of tables that had probably been accumulating grease and dirt since the Pleistocene. There were a handful of patrons - the kind of committed drinkers that sit in their private little worlds of grievance and imbibe so much in order to forget they find themselves having to drink to remember again. They threw fierce, suspicious glances at the two witches as they came in, but they were, in a way, perfunctory glances. They were the kind of people who steal from orphans, but they had no personal animosity against orphans, as it were, and so they promptly returned to their drinks when Millicent glared nastily at them.

The barman watched sullenly as the two witches walked to the counter. In the manner of all barmen in Last Chance Saloons everywhere, he was using a rag to relocate dirt around a glass (this is probably the sign of some secret society). The smaller (in a very significant way) of the two witches was wearing the black and red-trimmed jerkin of the Enforcers. She took out an impeccably polished silver badge and held it up to him.

"Lieutenant Granger of the Met Enforcers," she said calmly. "And this is Chief Sergeant Bulstrode. We have reasons to believe there are wanted felons in the premises."

The barman looked at Lt. Granger with beady eyes. She was a trim young witch, not remarkably tall or well built, and modestly attractive in a good light and in a brisk, efficient sort of way. She also possessed a cloud of brown hair of the sort that lives a life of its own and feeds on combs; it had been cropped short for reasons of practicality, and now it made her look as though a rather messy bird had made its nest upon her head. She looked more like a scholar than a copper, and in a way that was entirely true. Hermione Granger, unlike Sgt. Bulstrode, who had put a Headlock curse on her when they had been second-years, and despite her own training, wasn't particularly adept at combat, either magical or of the hand-to-hand (and, indeed, knee-to-groin) kind. However, she had soon realised that the real police work was not done with wands nor fists, but rather with brains. In a way, it was very much like research - only the streets and their denizens were your dirty, sprawling, unpredictable library. Most crimes were simple, because most people were simple. But sometimes you had to have a certain kind of mind to find the crack in them, and that was how Hermione had risen through the ranks. You didn't have to be spectacularly good at fighting if you knew how to avoid it in the first place. And she had always been like that, even in those heady, long-lost days of Hogwarts. The brainy one; the searching one; the one who dug and dug, plodding onwards doggedly. Even when it seemed that the whole world had become the grass underneath the great lawnmower of the gods, still Hermione went on womanfully, like when she had figured out that a basilisk was strolling around Hogwarts and turning assorted students into lawn ornaments, or when, moments before an exam, she had uncovered the last shred of evidence in the Rita Skeeter affair. Hermione had the kind of mind to which stubbornness is a way of life; asking her to let go was like asking the sun to set in the East, if it could be so kind and was not too much bother.

The barman, of course, did not know any of this. Hermione had been quite a famous figure in the war, but that had been years ago, and she had shunned publicity. In any case, people in general and this man in particular had the memory of a dead parakeet. That turned out to be rather unlucky for him.

"You do understand," said Hermione, pinning the badge to her jerkin, "that we intend to search this establishment?"

The barman set the glass down and, rather unwisely, let his knee-jerk mockery take over.

"Look here, Miss, we're in the Four Ways," he said derisively.

A word of explanation about what is euphemistically known as "Four Ways" in the wizarding world (the region is known by many names, the majority of which are, alas, unprintable): located at the Western edge of wizarding London-going-into-Southwark, it is a neighbourhood best known by its persistent and far-reaching similarities to a dunghill, fauna included. The magical society having, like all other societies, its dregs, those at least have the consolation of being able to sneer in superiority at the denizens (in the full sense of the word) of the Four Ways, not that the latter mind much about it, or in fact about anything not pertaining to the next drink/shag/probably illegal activity. In recognition to the fact that the only significant intervention in the area would have to be performed with an enraged dragon, public policy towards the Four Ways has largely consisted of leaving it to its own shady devices. The barman's ill-measured reply stems from the fact that, not to put too fine a point about it, "dweller of the Four Ways" and "wanted felon" are, quite frankly, interchangeable.

"I see," Hermione said, almost mournfully. She appeared to be genuinely disappointed. "I'd like to have your co-operation--"

It was then that one of the customers did something that turned out to be, at least as far as he was concerned, extremely stupid. He had been eyeing the two enforcers with more than his share of suspicion since they had come in, and anxiety was gnawing at him like a rabid dog. He was young and foolish and self-centred, and they had told him that no one would be able to trace the Bashir job back to them. And he had drunk too much and had a blaster with him, and the smaller witch was so collected, so composed, and that somehow made it all worse. He held the blaster underneath the table he was sitting at, and then panic took over.

Millicent heard him flipping up the table in a desperate and possibly lethal bid for freedom, and so she whirled around and in the time it takes for a cab to honk after the traffic lights have turned green, she took out her blaster and pointed it straight at him.

"Hold it right there!" she bellowed. In a moment of pant-wetting despair, the young man raised his blaster to the witch that was bearing down on him like an extremely furious elephant, and was received with a noisy dose of blaster-fire that sent him a few yards back and made him collapse over a table, amidst a faint cloud of bluish smoke, and in a very definitely unconscious state.

"Will any more of you bastards be requiring my attention?" she asked menacingly.

Silence ensued.

It was the kind of silence that you can hear prefacing a riot, just at the moment immediately before someone throws the first brick. It wasn't defined by absence of sound; rather, it had a noisy quality to it, as though it was noticed by virtue of being so loud that it drowned out all sound. It belonged to that kind of silences that allow you to hear a mosquito hiccupping but which, simultaneously, can drown out a full symphony for pneumatic drill and digger in major nuisance key.

Hermione knew these silences very well, and she was of the opinion that moments like these should definitely be reflected on the Enforcers' pay scale. Millicent was of the opinion that you should ensure that, when they occurred, the greasy spot on the wall by the end of everything should definitely not be you.

"Chief Sergeant Bulstrode is a very handy witch with a blaster," Hermione said very calmly. She had patiently taken out her own blaster, a small Six-and-a-Half, and was holding it with her usual painstaking dedication. "I think that, between the two of us, we can take down a reasonable number of you. You may take us down, but then again you may not. And we may be on our own, but then again we may not. Now, we have a job to do. We have no quarrel with any of you, apart from the gentleman currently on the floor. We just want to search the premises and believe me when I say that we will search the premises. Now, what is it going to be, the hard way or the easy way?"

The assembled patrons stole a few glances at each other. They were the kind of people who believed Enforcers' heads would make superb decoration, and this situation would have already degenerated into flying curses and dirty fights if it weren't for two things: firstly, no one had much of a will to actually, personally do anything to find out whether the impressively-massed Chief. Sgt. Bulstrode was really that good with a blaster; she was holding a High Yield 39, which instantly made her the Wyatt Earp of the magical world. Secondly, there was the matter of Ltn. Granger.

Hermione was neither charismatic nor threatening. She wasn't the kind of mage who could convince people to storm the Winter Palace on no other grounds than some personal and inexplicable appeal, nor was she kind of mage whom you obey because you fear what might happen otherwise. She had the manner of a schoolmarm, and sounded like the sort of person who would adjust the pictures in somebody else's living room.

And that was what was so persuasive about her, really. Hermione gave off the impression of being someone who would walk through ten miles of shelves just to verify a footnote, and that impression was entirely accurate. They could all see very well that she was the sort of witch who, when given a mission, would not stop until it was completed to her entire and thorough satisfaction. You could hit her with a 10-ton weight, drop the remains in a vat of acid and then incinerate what was left, and still her ashes would continue to move onwards in pursuit of their goal. And you got the feeling they would tell you all about it, too. Faced with the prospect of Hermione, even glaciers would give up and go away in desperation.

The assorted drinkers were no glaciers, except perhaps in a purely intellectual sense. A good mage would blast you without a word; an evil one would gloat; and a pragmatist would not even give you the chance to find out about it - but Hermione would lecture you on the history, manufacture and characteristics of blasters before pulling the trigger. It was by far the most terrifying prospect of them all.

They all returned to their own embarrassed silence.

"Anyone? No one?" she asked, satisfied. "No? Well done. Because..."

At that moment, as though on cue, two other Enforcers barged in through the front door, blasters already up, or, in the case of one of them, pointed in a more or less upwards direction.

Millicent grinned like a cat who'd got the cream. Hermione smiled too, but only with her lips.

"Macmillan, Creevey," she said. "Right on time. Corporal Macmillan - that wizard on the floor got upset by our enquiries. Attend to him, please. Bulstrode, you and I take the basement; Creevey, check the other rooms." She threw a glance around the pub. "Let me assure you that Corporal Macmillan can fire a blaster with almost indecent haste. Isn't that so, Macmillan?"

"Winner of the Quickest Enforcers Draw three years running," he said cheerfully. "The last time they had to remove one of the judges from a tree. Not the best aim in the world, alas," he added, moving the muzzle of his blaster around with worrying carelessness. "It should be a pity if I blasted someone by mistake. Or two someones. Or half a dozen of someones."

"I'm sure that won't happen," Hermione said. "We have your permission, after all, don't we?" She turned to the barman (who, in accordance to the Universal Barman of the Last-Chance Saloon Code of Conduct, still had the glass and the rag in his hands) with a satisfied expression.

"Uh? Oh. Yes. Yes, of course," he said grudgingly.

Hermione nodded. "I am very pleased to hear that. Now, which way to the basement?"

The barman nodded lazily to a half-hidden door next to the stacks of drinks.

"Corporal Creevey, Sergeant Bulstrode..." she said, turning to the other Enforcers.

Millicent rose her blaster once more, and as the three Enforcers prepared to explore the building, she was wearing an expression that said that, sooner or later, someone would find out that their worst nightmare was, rather than their underpants coming alive, a Muggle-born Slytherin.

With a badge.

TBC...