The Serpent Of Lord Voldemort

— CHAPTER ONE —

Serpent in a Tank

'Mrs Figg?' Harry called down the hall. 'I'm going to number four, OK?'

'Say hello to your aunt and uncle for me,' Mrs Figg's voice floated back from the kitchen.

'Er,' said Harry.

That would be difficult. Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia were not currently in residence at number four. Harry was staying with Mrs Figg; her back had started playing her up earlier in the year and the Dursleys had volunteered him to live in over the holidays and keep an eye on her.

Uncle Vernon had informed Harry of this as they were driving away from King's Cross at the beginning of summer. Then, rather than taking Harry back to Privet Drive, Uncle Vernon let him off in Paddington station and handed him a train ticket to Little Whinging.

'... and I shall expect you to look in on the house and garden every day,' Uncle Vernon growled. 'If they're not in perfect condition when we get back, you'll be very sorry indeed.'

'Get back?' Harry asked, slightly stunned at this sudden turn of events. 'Where are you going?'

'Majorca,' said Uncle Vernon curtly. He slammed the car door shut and drove off at top speed.

Harry arrived at Mrs Figg's house late that night and had been sleeping in her spare room ever since. Once he got over his surprise, he was quite relieved he wouldn't have to put up with his relations that summer, particularly in light of everything that had happened last year at Hogwarts. Old and boring Mrs Figg might be, but living with her was still infinitely preferable to living with the Dursleys.

Her cat stories were as deadly dull as ever, but Harry had worked out a routine to avoid the worst of them. He spent his mornings doing whatever work he could find around Mrs Figg's house and garden that he judged might strain her back. After lunch he made the excuse of going to visit the Dursleys' house, taking care to remain outdoors until nearly dark. Of evening he kept to his room, ostensibly doing homework.

Harry had been at Mrs Figg's for almost a week before he noticed that she didn't seem to realise the Dursleys were away. At first Harry was somewhat concerned, but a few days close observation revealed nothing else apparently amiss with her mind, memory or hearing. He supposed his aunt and uncle had simply neglected to mention their trip to her.

Harry hadn't been sure what to do about this. The Dursleys had left him with Mrs Figg on previous occasions, but not without telling her, and not when she was in poor health -- although come to think of it, her back hadn't appeared to be hurting her all that much lately either. Even so, Mrs Figg wasn't likely to be pleased when she found out the truth, and the longer Harry waited to tell her, the less pleased she'd be.

It was possible the Dursleys might return before Mrs Figg discovered they were gone, but Harry had no idea how long they'd be in Majorca, or for that matter where they were staying. This was another problem -- he'd have a job explaining his magic things to social services if Mrs Figg reported him as an abandoned child.

Harry finally decided to write and tell his friend Ron Weasley. Ron's mother had spoken of inviting Harry to stay with them later in the summer. It would give him a place to go if Mrs Figg felt she couldn't keep him on, and Mr Weasley would no doubt be able to smooth over any troubles with the Muggle authorities. Hedwig had soared off yesterday evening, carrying his letter to The Burrow.

Blazing sunlight poured down on Privet Drive, and all appeared as it should be in the front garden as Harry approached number four. Going round the back, he saw that the rose bushes needed watering. He had just begun dragging the hose towards them when a blinding pain seared across his scar.

It felt as though someone had driven a red-hot nail through his skull. Harry staggered, tripped over the coils of the hose and fell to the ground. The burning in his forehead grew steadily worse, along the terrifying realisation of what it must mean -- that somehow, impossibly, Lord Voldemort was nearby.

Now Harry could hear someone moving around inside the house. He had to run, to hide, but his scar was hurting so badly he couldn't stand up. If he could get to the greenhouse ... if he could crawl there ... Using every last ounce of strength, he fought to drag himself across the ground, but even that seemed to require more of an effort than he was capable of.

Suddenly the pain in Harry's scar faded to a dull ache and crawling became miraculously easier, in spite of the fact that his arms and legs had vanished. The grass had grown enormously high about him and the scent of the flowers had increased tenfold. The greenhouse towered in the distance, larger even than Hogwarts castle, but now Harry was making speedy progress towards it -- now that he had transformed into a serpent.

The back door opened. A foot hit the ground, sending vibrations through Harry's entire body, and a most peculiar odour reached his tongue. Harry shot under the nearest rose bush and froze, heart pounding rapidly. He watched as a tall, cloaked figure strolled out into the garden, doing his best to remain still and calm. Even if Voldemort had seen the snake, he couldn't possibly realise it was Harry. All Harry had to do was stay quiet and keep out of sight ...

Voldemort looked around him. His snake-like nostrils dilated and his red, slitted eyes fixed upon Harry's hiding place.

'You! Under the rose bush! Come here!' he said sharply.

Something about the cold, hissing voice made Harry obey it unthinkingly. With a flick of his tail he sent himself slithering across the grass towards the speaker, coming to a stop a few feet away and raising his head attentively.

When Harry gazed up into the livid scarlet eyes of Lord Voldemort, his trance was shattered. Terror clogged his brain and snake instinct took over. In a weird, all-over, twisting-inside-out motion, he flopped on to his back and went limp.

'It's no good, I know you're not really dead,' said Voldemort, now sounding quite amused. 'I'm not going to hurt you -- I only want to ask you some questions.'

Harry reluctantly unflopped himself. Voldemort went down on one knee and held out his left arm. Harry slowly and awkwardly wrapped himself around it. In addition to being scared out of his wits, he'd not spent enough time as a snake to be entirely at ease with its body's movements. Voldemort stood up and Harry tightened his coils convulsively to avoid slipping off.

'The people who live here, where are they?' asked Voldemort.

With some difficulty, Harry stopped himself blurting out 'Majorca'. He didn't think that even the Dursleys deserved to have Voldemort set on them.

'They -- they're gone,' Harry said, trying hard to keep his voice from shaking. 'Been gone for days.'

'Did you see them leave?'

'Yeah,' Harry forced himself to lie. 'They carried a bunch of boxes to the car and drove away.'

This last was probably true; he'd had to put his trunk in the back seat of Uncle Vernon's car as there was luggage in the boot. Aunt Petunia and Dudley hadn't been with him -- Harry assumed Uncle Vernon had left them off shopping or something.

'What kind of boxes?' demanded Voldemort.

'Brown -- squarish -- leather,' said Harry vaguely. He wasn't sure a snake would know what a suitcase was.

Voldemort paced up and down the garden, obviously thinking hard. 'The smaller boy --'

'He wasn't with them,' Harry said before he could stop himself. After a brief internal struggle, he added, 'He hasn't been here since last summer.'

'But you'd recognise him, if he came back,' said Voldemort.

'I reckon so,' said Harry. 'He used to do a lot of the gardening in the summer.'

Harry was starting to feel a bit less apprehensive. If Voldemort thought the snake could be useful as a spy, to keep a watch for Harry's return, he wasn't likely to do anything horrible to it.

'Excellent,' said Voldemort.

He walked round to the front garden, Harry still clinging on to his arm, and turned to face the house. His lipless mouth curled into a most unpleasant smile.

'As no one seems to be in, I shall have to leave a calling card,' he said. He pointed his wand at number four and snapped, 'Reducto!'

CRACK!

With tremendous thundering roar, the whole front half of the Dursleys' house collapsed into rubble. Voldemort stepped over the garden wall on to the pavement and waved his wand again. Grass and flowers shrivelled and blackened in the shape of a Dark Mark covering a better part of the front garden.

Remembering his uncle's last words to him in Paddington station, Harry surveyed the destruction with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach (which now took up most of his body). If Voldemort didn't kill him, Uncle Vernon certainly would.

Harry began to hear shouts and screams from neighbours who were hurrying out to see what had made the great racket. Then his vision blurred, and the sounds and smells of Privet Drive grew fainter and vanished.

When Harry's eyes cleared again, he was inside a large stone room. The fear he had initially felt upon being caught by Voldemort returned in full force. Where had Voldemort taken him? And, more importantly, why?

Harry flicked out his tongue. Wood, stone, dust, books -- the smells reminded him strongly of the Hogwarts classroom in which he was first transformed into a snake. He swung his head from one side to the other, taking stock of his new surroundings.

It looked as though he was in some sort of study. Bookshelves and cabinets lined the walls. Directly in front of him was a desk made of dark, highly polished wood, carved into an elaborate design of entwined serpents, their eyes set with tiny green and yellow jewels.

On the desk was a roll of parchment weighted open by a fat, warty bronze toad and an enormous faceted emerald nearly the size of a man's fist. A stack of books had been pushed aside to the far corner. Lying beside them was a knife with a black metal blade and a plain wooden hilt.

All in all, the room had an only recently occupied look to it. There were many empty spaces amongst the books on the shelves, and bare spots on the walls where pictures should have hung.

'Where are we?' Harry asked nervously.

'Your new home,' Voldemort replied.

He walked past the desk towards a door in the wall that it faced. Harry, wrapped about his arm, perforce went with him. They came out into a much smaller room, empty except for several chairs. Although of the same style as the desk in Voldemort's study, these chairs were rather shabby -- wood scratched, velvet padding stained and worn, jewelled eyes missing from some of the carved snakes.

Voldemort waved his wand, and the chairs rose into the air and floated to the left side of the room. All along the right-hand wall he conjured up a kind of stone enclosure, roughly four feet high, with a round stone basin in the middle of it.

The basin filled itself with water and the area around it filled with dirt. A patch of tall grass sprang up on one side of the basin and some shorter grass, a rose bush and a large rock appeared on the other. The rose bush bore a suspicious resemblance to the one Harry had hidden under in the Dursleys' back garden.

Voldemort looked down at Harry and said, 'In a few weeks, I will have a very important job for you to do ... what is your name?'

It was very hard for Harry to lie to Voldemort as a snake, but sheer self-preservation prevented him from saying 'Harry Potter'. He had to tell Voldemort something, though, and he hadn't the foggiest notion what kind of names real snakes gave themselves.

'I -- I don't think I have one,' Harry replied after some moments of frantic thought.

If challenged, he planned to say he'd been hatched out in a pet shop and never known his mother, but Voldemort didn't seem made unduly suspicious.

'Then I shall call you Seeker,' he said with a twisted smile. Harry tensed at the mention of his Quidditch position. Luckily Voldemort didn't appear to notice. 'For now, you'll be living in here,' he continued. 'What sort of things do you like to eat?'

Harry wasn't certain what snakes ate, either. He suspected it would be an extremely bad idea to ask for steak-and-kidney pudding ... and the thought of eating it was actually quite revolting to him. Nasty brown sludge -- what he really fancied was a plump, green, juicy --

'Frogs,' said Harry. 'I eat frogs.'

Voldemort set his hand on the grass near the rose bush so Harry could slide off his arm. With one last wave of his wand, he conjured a glass front for the enclosure, sealing it into a tank.

That done, Voldemort disappeared into his study. Harry stared out at the empty room in shock for several long moments. Then a new feeling came over him, a feeling of being horribly exposed and vulnerable. At the fastest slither he could manage, Harry made his way past the stone-lined pond and headed into the tall grass to take cover.

Halfway to the back wall of the tank, he came across what looked like an abandoned rabbit-hole. He crawled inside, curled up and simply lay there, shaking from head to tail, scarcely able to believe he was still alive.

Alive -- but a prisoner of Voldemort, who thought he was a real snake and had a job for him to do. Something foul, no doubt. Harry recalled with a shudder the wizard quoted in Rita Skeeter's last article, who'd said that snakes were used for Dark Magic of the very worst sort.

He had to get away from here, as quickly as possible ... but how? Harry could see no way of escaping from his tank, not with Voldemort in the next room. His wand was in his trunk at Mrs Figg's, along with his Invisibility Cloak, his Firebolt, his penknife from Sirius -- anything, in fact, that could be of any use to him.

Mrs Figg ... it felt like years since he'd left her house. What would she think when he didn't show up for dinner? Of course she'd hear about number four being blown up long before then. She didn't know the Dursleys were in Majorca -- she'd think the whole family had been murdered!

Harry wondered what the neighbours would make of the Dark Mark burnt into the Dursleys' lawn, not to mention the Muggle police. He assumed the Ministry of Magic would eventually wipe everyone's memory. A brief hope that they might somehow manage to track Voldemort to his hideout flickered and died.

Voldemort wouldn't be stopping here if this place was easy to find, and it wasn't a sure bet that the Ministry would even be looking. Would the wreckage of the Dursleys' house be enough to convince Fudge that Voldemort truly had returned? Harry didn't have high hopes -- Fudge would be desperate to believe anything rather than that. He'd probably reckon Harry had gone mad and done it himself.

Dumbledore would know Harry was innocent, but he'd have no reason to suppose that Harry had survived. Only Ron and Hermione were aware that Harry could turn into a snake, and it would hardly occur to either of them that he had somehow become Voldemort's pet -- the notion was simply too far-fetched.

He could count on no rescue from outside. Harry drew his coils tighter in despair. He had always known in the back of his mind that he would have to face Lord Voldemort again, but not so soon or so unexpectedly or so alone. The only bright spot to his situation was that he had a little time to come up with a good plan.

Harry settled himself into a more comfortable position and started thinking.

*

Harry emerged from his burrow the next morning in immensely low spirits. He had slept quite badly the night before, dreaming that he was once more in the graveyard where scarcely two weeks ago Lord Voldemort had risen again. Only this time, Voldemort had somehow got Cedric Diggory's body back and was wanting Harry to wriggle down Cedric's throat and fetch a bezoar from his stomach.

In the cold light of dawn, the memory of Cedric's blank dead grey eyes was still very much with Harry, and his prospects for escape looked exceedingly dim. All his thinking and planning of the previous day had served only to run into one snag after another.

Getting out of the tank would involve, necessarily, breaking its glass front, which was certain to attract the attention of anyone within earshot. At that very moment Harry could feel the reverberations of Voldemort's footsteps in the study, and there might well be other people about that he'd not seen yet.

Then he'd have to find his way out of the -- house? Building? Castle? Harry could be inside Gringotts or Azkaban for all he knew. To do this would require his becoming human again; he was far too small a snake to reach doorknobs.

If Harry was caught wandering around as himself, he was dead. If he was caught wandering around as a snake, he'd have a lot of explaining to do. Should Voldemort become suspicious, or decide the snake wasn't reliable enough for whatever work he had in mind, he'd probably have it chopped up for potion ingredients.

Once outdoors, Harry would have no way to travel except on foot -- or rather on stomach; he'd be too easily spotted as a human being. He had no idea which direction he should head in or how far he'd have to go to reach a place of safety. He might not even be in England any more -- if Voldemort had gone to ground in Durmstrang, for example.

Harry crawled disconsolately to the pond to have a drink. There were several tiny green frogs swimming around in it. They gave off a wonderful smell, warm and rich and meaty. Harry caught one in his mouth and swallowed it whole. This took some time, but after he'd eaten Harry felt a little less worse.

He saw that a patch of light from a small round window at the top of the tank had fallen on the rock near the rose bush. It looked invitingly warm and sunny. Harry slithered over to it and, after some trial and error owing to his unaccustomed lack of arms and legs, clambered on.

As he basked on the rock, more optimistic thoughts began to fill Harry's mind. Maybe he'd be able to vanish the glass as he had at the zoo on Dudley's birthday. If he had to smash it, he could wait until Voldemort went away. This was bound to happen at some point; Voldemort wasn't likely to stop in his study day and night for weeks on end. There might be Floo powder left lying about, or a broomstick ...

The situation, Harry told himself firmly, was far from hopeless.

*

He had to remind himself of this fact fairly often in the days that followed. Harry decided to hold off on an escape attempt, partly to give himself a chance to get the lie of the land, and partly because if at all possible he wanted Voldemort gone when he finally did make a break for it.

None of what he discovered was particularly encouraging. His tank was in a sort of waiting room, into which masked, hooded Death Eaters would Apparate, to sit in the dilapidated chairs until Voldemort summoned them into his study. Harry initially had hopes of overhearing some scrap of useful information to take back to Dumbledore, but that turned out to be a non-starter.

Never was there more than one Death Eater in the room at the same time, nor was the entrance to the study ever left open. The door itself was too thick and heavy for Harry to eavesdrop on conversations inside, but when Voldemort got upset with one of the unfortunate Death Eaters, the shrieks of agony carried through it all too well.

Harry had terrible nightmares whenever this happened and became quite afraid he might accidentally change back to human in his sleep. Although Wormtail had never done so whilst pretending to be Ron's pet rat Scabbers, Harry was not a normal Animagus.

Transfiguration reversal spells didn't work on him if he chose to fight them and even when a snake he could speak English as well as Parseltongue. (That he might do so whilst asleep was another serious worry.) Nor had he gone through the long and arduous training process that Hermione assured him was necessary to becoming an Animagus.

He had been Transfigured into a snake last year in Potions by Draco Malfoy and from then on could transform himself back and forth at will. Hermione hadn't been able to determine why, and Harry hadn't dared ask anybody else for fear of being expelled from Hogwarts as an illegal Animagus. For the same reason, he had made practically no use of this power since first discovering it.

He was now deeply regretting that. There might be other peculiarities to his condition, and this was not a good time to learn of them the hard way. Worse, he had almost no experience of moving about as a snake. Except when acting on pure instinct, he was extremely slow and clumsy. As Harry intended to change back only when absolutely necessary during the course of his flight, this would present a real problem.

Even so, after a few days in the tank Harry had grown sufficiently apprehensive that he resolved to have a go at vanishing the glass and making his getaway late at night while Voldemort was sleeping. Instead of retiring to the burrow when evening fell, he lay awake waiting for the feelings of movement in Voldemort's study to subside.

One of the major advantages to being a snake was his ability to sense vibrations through the ground. Harry could always tell when someone was moving around, not just in the waiting room but in Voldemort's study and the unknown rooms that adjoined it. Harry suspected there were living quarters connected to the study -- rarely had any significant length of time gone by without his receiving some indication of Voldemort's presence.

Unfortunately, he realised as the first rays of sunshine began to brighten the room, this was as much the case in the night as in the day. After staying up two more nights with much the same results, Harry was forced to conclude that either Voldemort was an exceptionally restless sleeper or he didn't sleep much at all. Clearly, a midnight defection was right out.

Tired and dispirited, Harry crawled into his burrow to get some rest. When he woke, late in the afternoon, he cheered himself with the thought that if Voldemort ever did stay still for very long, it would be a good bet he really had left the area.

When he did, Harry would know, and when sneaking through the house he'd be forewarned of anyone else approaching from rooms away. Although he was beginning to doubt there was anyone else -- apart from the times when one of the Death Eaters had come to call, he had never noticed more than a single set of footsteps.

While Harry waited for Voldemort to leave for a bit, he passed the time learning to get around properly as a snake -- slithering laps of the tank, climbing over the rock and swimming and diving in the pond. He also practised sneaking and hiding -- darting behind the rose bush and lying perfectly still, or creeping through the tall grass as slowly and silently as he could, trying to reach the burrow without causing a visible disturbance.

Despite the obstacles facing him, Harry reckoned he stood a fair chance of getting out of this one alive ... and then Nagini came slithering by.

*

Harry was sunning himself on his rock when he heard the door to Voldemort's study open. That was funny, there was no Death Eater in the waiting room. Harry hadn't felt any footsteps, either, just a steady sort of dragging. He glanced up, saw Nagini's great ugly head peering down at him and got some unexpected practice in ducking and covering.

Nagini banged her nose imperiously against the glass.

'Come and play, little boy,' she hissed mockingly at Harry, who had dived behind the rock.

Harry stayed where he was. He didn't think Nagini could get into the tank, but she had given him a nasty shock.

'Nagini,' Voldemort called out reprovingly. 'I said you were not to tease him.'

Nagini gave Harry a last sibilant sneer and glided back into the study. Harry crept out from behind the rock and slipped into the tall grass to ponder this most unpleasant development.

Nagini ... Harry had forgotten all about her. He'd definitely not bargained on having a real serpent hanging around. This was bad, very bad ... Harry had managed to hoodwink Lord Voldemort, but he wasn't sure he could fool another snake ... and if she had the run of the house, it would make his escape a thousand times more difficult than any number of other wizards in the vicinity.

Nagini would be able to feel him when he was moving and smell him when he was hiding. Probably track him too, Harry could easily follow the trails he himself left on the floor of the tank. Even when he was human, Nagini was a lot bigger than him, and Voldemort had said she was venomous. He'd be no match for her ... no match for her, unarmed.

Harry remembered the dagger he'd seen on Voldemort's desk. He'd have to remain human to carry it, which would mean losing his snake senses, but if it was still there, if he could get his hands on it, it would give him some chance against Nagini. Still, Harry didn't relish the notion of taking her on. It reminded him strongly of his fight with the Basilisk, which he wouldn't have survived without Fawkes the phoenix, who wasn't likely to be showing up here.

*

Harry spent the rest of the week in a thoroughly depressed mood, which wasn't helped by the fact that Nagini made a point of crawling past his tank nearly every day. Sometimes she merely looked in on him for a few seconds before sloping off. Occasionally, however, she draped her massive diamond-patterned body over one of the chairs and sat leering into the tank for hours on end, only to hurry away upon feeling some distant tremor through the floor.

Harry could no longer claim, even to himself, that the situation was far from hopeless. Really, it was quite near. But he'd not believed it had actually got there until the third time Nagini came into the waiting room to keep a watch.

As soon as he saw she'd be stopping for a while, Harry retreated into his burrow, followed by the sound of her low, spitting laughter. He wasn't actually afraid of Nagini, not so long as he was inside the tank, but he couldn't run the risk of her catching him in some obviously unsnakelike behaviour.

Nonetheless, it was most annoying to have to hide underground all day. Harry shifted his coils restlessly. How much longer was she planning to wait here? She'd arrived late morning and now it was starting to get dark. Nagini had never stayed this long before. She usually went scurrying off at the first sign of movement in the study. And what was up with Voldemort? It wasn't like him to be so quiet for such a length of time, either ...

Harry felt as though his insides had suddenly frozen solid. What if -- what if Nagini was coming in to guard his tank when Voldemort was away from the house? Perhaps Voldemort had told her to keep an eye on Harry, or perhaps she had simply seen an opportunity to disobey his injunction not to taunt the new snake ... it hardly mattered.

Trying to escape with Nagini in the house would be dangerous. Trying to escape with Nagini in the same room, staring right at him, would be sheer suicide. He wouldn't make it to the study to search for a weapon.

He was going to die, Harry thought numbly. Either Nagini would kill him when he broke out of the tank, or Voldemort would kill him when he refused to perform the task Voldemort set him. And he would refuse -- he'd rather die than help Voldemort in any way.

The next several days left Harry feeling rather as though a Dementor had moved into the tank with him. He kept to the burrow mostly; he could no longer see much point to practising being a serpent. Even lying on the sunlit rock Harry felt cold and miserable, and he'd given up eating altogether. He didn't appear to experience hunger pains when a snake and catching frogs seemed entirely too much bother.

Although Harry had faced death on a number of occasions, it always had been imminent death, turning up with barely any warning and pushing off again just as quickly. Never before had he had such an endless amount of time, to wait and to worry and to dwell on what dying would actually mean.

'To the well organised mind, death is but the next great adventure', Dumbledore had once told him. Too bad Dumbledore hadn't mentioned anything about minds that weren't well organised. The only thing Harry seemed able to do with his at present was brood on all the things he'd ever wanted to do and now never would -- play Quidditch for England, become an Auror, take Cho to a ball ...

The next great adventure was little consolation when his first one was about to be over before it had properly begun. And how good could any adventure be, with none of his friends on it with him? He'd never see Ron and Hermione again ... at least not for an extremely long time ... or Sirius, or Hagrid, or anyone from Hogwarts.

Well, Cedric Diggory would be there, Harry supposed. Cedric wouldn't be doing any of that stuff either, and it was all Harry's fault. Would Cedric be very angry with him? At least Harry had returned Cedric's body to his parents. There would be no one to bring Harry's body back to -- to who? The Dursleys certainly wouldn't want it, and most of the wizarding world believed Harry's godfather a mass murderer.

Harry would be rejoining own parents, which was something, but he'd be bringing them such terrible news. He'd have to tell his father that his best friend had spent thirteen years in Azkaban for a crime he'd not committed and was still on the run, with one less witness to argue for his innocence. He'd have to tell his mother that everything her sacrifice had won them had been lost again -- Harry was dead and Lord Voldemort was back.

That was the worst of it, really. Harry could have just about resigned himself to dying, if only he could have been certain his friends would be all right after he was gone. But they wouldn't be, of course. A dark and difficult time was coming, and Harry wouldn't be there to meet it alongside them.

*

It was this thought that finally pulled Harry out of his funk. A determination slowly grew within him -- Voldemort might be going to murder him, but Harry intended to do as much damage as he could to the rising Dark side before he died.

Exactly how to go about this, however, proved an even thornier problem than escaping. Harry hadn't previously given all that much consideration to what Voldemort might be getting up to. Obviously, he had gone to number four with the intention of doing Harry in. Which was strange, now that Harry came to think of it. Hadn't Voldemort said something about not being able to get at him when he was in Privet Drive last summer?

In any case, Voldemort had evidently given up on that scheme once he found out the Dursleys were on holiday. He'd mostly remained here in his study since capturing Harry, doing whatever he did behind closed doors, receiving visits from Death Eaters. He'd been quite furious with some of them right after Harry first arrived. There had been a spate of tortures, which thankfully had tapered off after a couple of weeks. Had Voldemort sent the Death Eaters out to search for Harry and become enraged when they didn't find him?

Apart from wanting Harry dead, it seemed likely that Voldemort would try and pick up where he'd left off prior to his downfall thirteen years ago. Taking over everywhere, Hagrid had said. Dumbledore meant to stop him before he got a good hold and thought Voldemort would attempt to enlist giants and Dementors in his cause. There'd been none of that lot coming round here, though, no one but the Death Eaters.

If Harry was to sabotage Voldemort's plans, he'd have to start by figuring out what they were. Harry concentrated harder than ever on the outside of the tank, but with no greater success than during his initial stab at being a spy. The waiting Death Eaters were as silent and uninformative as before, and if there was a pattern to their comings and goings, Harry couldn't see it.

They sometimes carried brown paper packages, but none of these were ever unwrapped in his sight. His sense of smell could only give him a general idea of what the objects inside were made of -- paper, wood, metal, cloth, glass, dead animals or plants, a number of the substances he couldn't even identify ...

During his first week in the waiting room Harry had learnt to judge how well or badly the Death Eaters' interviews with Voldemort had gone. There was a particular odour to their sweat that grew more intense the longer they were made to wait. Those who stumbled out of the study after being tortured positively reeked of it. Harry suspected that this smell was caused by fear.

This knowledge was of limited usefulness, however, as he never did become able to distinguish the scents of individual Death Eaters. He could pick out which of them used the same brand of soap, and two of the smaller ones had a smell which was subtly different from that of the others. Harry reckoned those ones might be women.

Voldemort also had a somewhat unusual scent. Harry thought he smelled a bit like a snake as well as looking like one. It was hard to be sure, though. Harry got brief whiffs of him whenever the door to the study opened, but Voldemort himself never came into the waiting room. In fact, aside from calling off Nagini, Voldemort had completely ignored Harry since putting him in the tank.

For the first time ever, Harry was beginning to regret this, because all the bits of information he'd managed to gather so far added up to absolutely nothing. After over a week of straining his powers of observation to their utmost, he was no closer to discovering what was afoot here than on his first day in the tank.

*

Then one morning as Harry was slithering along his obstacle course (he'd restarted his training programme, more out of frustration than anything else), the study door opened and Voldemort stepped out.

Harry stopped short in front of the rock.

Voldemort strode over to the tank and rapped on its front, calling out, 'Seeker ... breakfast!'

He stuck his other hand through the glass, which parted like water around his arm, and deposited a fat, grey and all too familiar-looking rat directly in front of Harry.

It was Wormtail.