Professor Austerlitz and the Dancing Magic

Scha! Schtil! Macht nicht kein Gerider!
Der Rebe geyt schoyn tanzen wieder!
Scha! Schtil! Macht nicht kein Gewalt!
Der Rebe geyt schoyn tanzen bald.
Und als der Rebe tanzt
Tanzen doch die Waend
Lomir alle plischke mit die Haend!

(traditional Yiddish song)

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Professor Dumbledore did not normally interrupt ordinary dinner times with major announcements; he preferred to leave them to the opening night, or at least to Saturday or Sunday. On this occasion, however, the event to be announced was both so unexpected, arranged at short notice, and of such importance, that he broke with his usual habits and stood up during an ordinary Wednesday dinner. This was so unusual that the students, and even some of the professors, did not at first realize that silence was being asked. It only spread in hesitant ripples, boy after boy and girl after girl, from the nearest to the furthest table, realizing that their nearest neighbours had fallen silent.

Dumbledore had of course many other means of drawing attention; but he appreciated this one. The silence produced after such a build-up was so much more attentive and dramatic. Finally, in a hush that would have heard the buzz of a fly, he dropped a few sentences.

"I am happy to announce that we will be lucky enough to welcome one of the greatest and most unusual sages of the sorcerous world to Hogwarts. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, Professor Frederick Austerlitz will give three seminars on Dancing Magic. They will take place here in the Great Hall, beginning at two o'clock. I am sure you realize what a rare privilege this, and will take full advantage of it."

The hall exploded. Austerlitz was a legend, one of the most famous magicians in the world, and the announcement of his sudden arrival was indeed a bombshell. Everywhere, those who had only heard of his performances listened enviously to those who had been present, on a life-changing occasion, when the Master had danced. Hannah Abbot and Simeon Curtin pontificated at the Hufflepuff table; Cho Chang used memory spells - a primitive version of the Pensieve - to recreate for a delighted Ravenclaw table a theatre performance in honour of Millicent Bagnold; Draco Malfoy completely lost his usual drawling pose as he enthusiastically reconstructed, with Blaise Zabini's help, one memorable healing session he had witnessed in a hospital; and Neville Longbottom was, for once, the centre of attention, quite half the Gryffindor table hanging from his lips as he described how he had seen him dance across Morecambe Bay, while the other half listened in equally ecstatic awe as Ron described a private performance delivered to the Weasleys and a few other people whom Austerlitz liked. That evening, the Hogwarts house-elves were quite put out - an event nobody remembered ever happening before - for, in spite of the hundreds of healthy young appetites present, food had come back in extraordinary quantities. They sent a delegation to ask Dumbledore whether anything had been badly done; and it took some effort to explain to them that it was mention of an ageing dancer from another country that had so excited the students that they would rather talk than eat.

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Theuderic Garshell was not only a Death Eater, he was a man who, had not Voldemort come along and stormed the eminence of dark wisdom, might have himself emerged as one of the arch-villains of the age. The only major difference between him and Voldemort was that he had not been willing to experiment on his body; and that because, unlike the former Tom Riddle, he had no reason to dislike his native identity. He did not want to unbecome Theuderic Garshell, and therefore had not opened his body to the horrors, indignities and distortions that had turned a handsome young Hogwarts scholar into a walking arsenal with the skin of a corpse and the eyes of a snake.

When Voldemort had first manifested himself, Garshell had found it natural to become his follower. It had always been his view that the wisest should rule, and he was quite willing to recognize that Voldemort was even wiser than he was. Conversely, Voldemort valued his immense knowledge of Dark Magic, indeed of magic of all kinds, and relied heavily on his advice in drafting his plans. However, Garshell did not fail to notice that this kept him back from the battlefield, and meant that the glory and the reputation among the ranks went to more action-oriented Death Eaters such as Lucius Malfoy and his cronies. Garshell had nothing but contempt for Lucius' overrated intellect, but he could not help to note that the Riddle-diary trick, which in effect had been an arrant failure, had managed to become a legend of Malfoy's craft and daring... because had successfully placed it among the belongings of Virginia Weasley. Tricking an eleven-year-old girl; that was just about Malfoy's mark.

By the time of the debacle in the Ministry, when not even the most elaborate web of lies had been able to prevent hundreds of wizards and witches seeing Voldemort's living face, Garshell had reached the limits of exasperation. Though deeply involved in the weaving of the plan, he felt that it was the warriors, especially Bellatrix Lestrange, who bungled it; blinded by blood lust, they had neglected the one essential matter - not to kill any of the enemy, but to get the prophecy. The fact that everyone involved - except Lucius Malfoy and a few others, who ended up in Azkaban - had to lie low after that, meant that the contact between the followers of the Dark Lord diminished; and Garshell was left largely alone - to seethe at the ruination of his plans, and to cultivate grudges that, increasingly, did not exclude the Dark Lord himself.

It was therefore less surprising than it would have otherwise been that, when he discovered a fatal flaw in the defences of Hogwarts, he should decide not to pass it on to others, but to act upon it himself.

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In person, Frederick Austerlitz was apt to disappoint those who expected that a dancing genius should also be handsome and romantic-looking. His face was clownish, more pointed even than Draco's, moving from a long thin chin, through a big nose and flapping ears, to a balding forehead, leaving the exact impression of a V. His eyes were twinkling and vaguely roguish. He dressed impeccably in an old-fashioned manner, and moved with an unhurried dispatch that hinted at the grace of his dancing. Nobody could have told by the elegance of his manner - and even Draco was surprised to hear - that he was Muggle-born, and had known hunger, until he discovered, by dint of hard work, his own particular brand of magic.

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In the depths of the Forbidden Forest, Theuderic Garshell was gathering his forces. The trees were gory with the remains of slaughtered Acromantula, whose blood was needed for the sacrifice Garshell envisaged, and that were in any case too uncontrollable to be allowed to live. Another purpose of the butchery was to impress his troops: they were too apt to consider him a mere thinker with no propensity to action, and nothing could better offset that prejudice than the view of the bleeding remains of one of the most dreaded of magical creatures. To be perfectly honest, he had enjoyed it, too.

Garshell called out to ten of his strongest troopers, and pointed his wand at them. Under the effect of a magic not far short of that of Dumbledore or Voldemort, they had no choice: they changed. They changed into the very monsters that had been just butchered in these noisome forest depths: into Acromantula, gigantic and greedy spiders with legs the size of pillars. Wihout a word, he pointed at the ground; and the ten gigantic creatures bowed down and started burrowing like moles.

The creatures of the Forbidden Forest, thought Garhell. They come and go through Hogwarts' enchantments as they please, ignoring wards and protective spells. We need their power; we need their ability to move unheeded across the Hogwarts wards and go where they please, so long as they do not disturb the locals. That's all right, he laughed to himself; he had no intention of disturbing them, just of massacring every last one. But just to be sure, he was going to attack the school from below, making his ersatz Acromantula burrow under the spell-ridden surroundings - something spiders did not normally do, but that Acromantula were perfectly able to do if they wished. He would be under Hogwarts without Dumbledore ever noticing.

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Austerlitz intended his lectures to be an overview of Dancing Magic throughout the world, but he knew what was expected of him; and, what is more, he valued showbiz methods of getting an audience's attention. So it was that when all the students and staff were gathered in the Great Hall, the lights suddenly went out, a violin struck up - and out came Austerlitz in his trademark old-fashioned dancing outfit, top hat, white tie, and tails, moving almost at a running pace with perfect balance and wonderful precision.

He immediately fell over.

He got up, sketched a few steps, and fell over again - in an even more dramatic, exaggerated, and hilarious manner. By the time he had done it for the third time, his audience had understood that this was part of the dance, a self-mocking series of pictures about everything that a dancer could do wrong. To the strains of The Beautiful Blue Danube, he proceeded to perform, with the timing of a great comedian, every pratfall known to man. Three times his hat flew off; three times he picked it up at the last second, as the public were sure that it was going to get trampled. Finally, he sat down - and got up, with a perfectly delightful disgusted expression, to discover he has sat on the hat. The public were roaring with laughter, clapping hands in time, whistling, stamping their feet, and bellowing: a colossal success. Dumbledore was laughing almost to tears, and Minerva McGonagall had stuffed her knuckles in her mouth to prevent herself howling with laughter. Professor Austerlitz straightened his hat, set it aside, and approached the lectern, as the lights came back in the Great Hall.

He spoke in a fluent but slightly hesitant manner, with simplicity and insight. Dance magic, he said, was an umbrella term that covered many separate traditions and different techniques. It could be aimed at altering the balance of the individual with his environment, to hypnotize opponents, to bring about specific changes in body or mind, or even to affect the whole environment. Altering the balance between individual and environment could result, for instance, in persons flying or managing to alter their position - move faster than walking or running could allow. Certain particularly powerful dances could make the dancers taller or shorter, reduce them to dwarves or raise them to the height of giants, even change them into certain animals. These counted as Dark Magic and most of their manifestations were forbidden. Even more forbidden were the Siberian variants in which a dancing shaman danced him- or herself into the skin of an animal or of another human, taking control of them utterly. But the most powerful kind of dance was the land dance, which was capable of altering the whole environment. It had never been forbidden, because its potential was mostly for defence - it could interdict any area to any power, however great - and because it required such advanced power that, if a Dark Wizard wished to practice it, he or she would already be so powerful that they would do it whether the law allowed or not.

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The ten false Acromantula bit and tore furiously at the ground, as if venting on the unresisting bulk of rock and earth some fury that they could neither express nor follow otherwise. And indeed, it was a terrible thing that their master had ordered them. Anything, however wicked, that was born human, could not possibly be put into the cruel enchanted form of the Acromantula without suffering terribly, no matter the power that had given it shape. The two forms of existence were incompatible; and the human minds trapped in those horrible bodies had no other escape for their pain than to batter and flail at the soil beneath them, driving avalanches of boulders and dust behind them.

Powerful shielding spells drove the storm of dirt away from the body of Theuderic Garshell as he stood calm and undisturbed in the middle of the storm. His spells turned the hole furiously gouged by his enchanted human beasts into a well-supported mine shaft, and his other troops followed at a cautious distance. Already the enchanted map he had made for himself showed that the shaft had passed the outer limits of Hogwarts' wards, where most Muggles would have turned back, suddenly remembering some important appointment elsewhere; and nothing had been noticed. In two days' time, he would be directly beneath the castle. All was well.

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Obviously, it was the land dance that aroused most curiosity; but Austerlitz, in spite of loud groans, postponed the discussion and - more painfully still - the demonstration of the mightiest of all dances, until the final day. Meanwhile, they had to make do with the lesser grades, as he mildly joked: dances that hypnotized and dances that gave strength, dances that grew you to the size of an elephant and dances that would make all the elephants in Africa dance. Each of these was illustrated by an example, danced with astonishing artistry and often producing such odd and comical effects that the whole great hall laughed. One dance filled the room with strange, minuscule men, dressed in green and speaking in high, falsetto voices; this one, for some reason, was ascribed to a wizard none of them had ever heard of - one Frank Baum. Another suddenly upended Dumbledore, who spent the rest of the afternoon following the lesson upside down, with his beard and moustache hanging down either side of his head. A third drained the colour from the whole Hall, turning everything black and white and shades of grey; curiously, they did not feel scared by this really quite unsettling experience, but rather excited by the sleek and dramatic look it gave everything. This was followed by the Technicolor Dance, which returned the colour to everything - only about five times as bright as it normally is, as if it wanted to catch up with its enforced banishment. The effect this had on the red Weasley heads was quite beyond description.

On the evening of the second day, the whole school could talk of nothing but the final lecture; and Dumbledore complimented himself on the luck or judgement that had allowed him to schedule this extraordinary event towards the week-end. Surely, if this had been a weekday, no teacher could have got any teaching done, given the level of excitement. And goodness knows what that would have done to Severus Snape's temper. Not that Snape himself was unaffected by the general excitement: his usual moody expression was gone, and he had been seen having a pleasant technical discussion on Motion Potions with, of all people, Hermione Granger. And if Severus kept pestering him with his misgivings about the continued silence from the Voldemort forces, and in particular on the ill-omened significance of the mood and views of one Theuderic Garshell, that was a small price to pay for this unusual period of harmony.

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Night had fallen for the second time over Garshell's forces, crowded from one end to the other of the cramped tunnel. For the second time, Garshell had placed them all under a spell of sleep; not because he felt any particular obligation to them in the matter of rest or comfort, but because he had no intention of being at rest himself while one of his subjects was awake. That was the way to get a dagger in the back. Garshell did not trust his forces, and with good reason; and while a stab in the back would have given a sorcerer of his power little more than an itch, he did not want his robes rent either.

He himself stood in the middle of his sleeping slaves, upright as a pillar, wide awake, in the mystical trance that served him in place of sleep. He was not only aware, attuned to his surroundings, attentive to the least shifting of mystical forces, conscious that he was working to destroy the mightiest and most alert sorcerer alive; but he was, at the same time, storing the enormous reserves of magical power that would serve him to blast upwards in one enormous explosion of Avada Kedavra, killing everything that lay in his path. Time moved quietly and evenly on, and Theuderic Gershell waited without impatience. The time, after all, was his.

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As the Sunday sun grew in strength and heat, it witnessed some curious scenes. Everywhere in Hogwarts there were groups of eager students, rehearsing steps, reading books, or simply discussing in awed whispers the previous afternoon's performance. Twenty times over, the librarian Madam Pince had to turn down requests from latecomers: every last book and article on Dancing Magic, or on Frederick Austerlitz, was gone. Once or twice, the students even became angry at this; only after heated debates they could be convinced to go off and find some friend possessed of one of the precious copies. Everyone cursed Dumbledore for scheduling the lecture in the early afternoon; and everyone consulted clocks and timepieces impatiently, wishing the time would go faster.

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The hour had finally come. The exhausted Acromantulas, worked to the bloody stumps of their legs for three days without any food, fell back; and as all the gathered forces retired to a respectful distance, as Garshell, shining with a ghastly purple-green light, strode towards the centre of the cave his slaves had dug out. He knew that he stood directly underneath the core of Hogwarts' power, of Dumbledore's power, the centre of everything he hated in the world; even had his enchanted map not told him, he would know quite simply by the feel. He began to draw his breaths in himself, focusing his mystic energies on the layered scheme of the spells in his mind, preparing not for battle, but for targeted, immediate, utter destruction.

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Professor Austerlitz did not open his class, as he had on the two previous occasions, with a dance; instead, he walked quietly to the front of the stage and addressed his audience.

"I know," he said, "that you have been waiting to see the land dance; but I am afraid that I do not regard my skills, alone, as able to perform it in a satisfactory manner before such a distinguished audience." He aimed a bow at Dumbledore and at an increasingly worried-looking Snape, while the audience, frightened that he would not perform, let out a loud groan. "For this reason," he went on, "I have asked a better dancer than myself" - the audience gasped - "to come and partner me on this special occasion." He fell silent, and a murmur of questions rose instantly. Who was better than Frederick Austerlitz? Hermione was only one of several voices that rose almost at once, as several people fixated on one name - and one name alone -

"Frances Gumm!"

And the music rose to a crescendo as, hidden at first by Austerlitz's body, a tiny figure moved elegantly to centre stage and bowed. An enormous applause shook the enchanted ceiling.

Austerlitz was not a large man; but Frances Gumm was such a small woman that it was quite easy to believe that he could have simply hidden her behind him. Barely five foot in her heels, she had a rich crop of sleek brown hair, a hear-shaped yet curiously disjointed face with bright, excitable eyes set wide apart, a snub nose, and a small rosebud mouth. Her motions were as graceful as his, but, while he never moved without a sense of ease and happiness with himself, she bore a more excitable and troubled air, as if lacking that wonderful poise - replaced, in her case, by a burning and blazing sense of energy.

The applause was so loud that most of the spectators did not realize that, while they were still clapping, the land dance had begun.

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Not one member of the mob of violent beings whom Garshell had drawn to himself by violence and hate failed to hear its heart beat faster, its hair rise in fear, its attention fascinated and horrified. The power was issuing from him in regular waves, making hideous designs on the wall, quivering the earth as it rose upwards; and yet they knew that this was only the beginning.

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It would be quite impossible, and above all useless, to try to describe the great dance that the two greatest dancing magicians in the world danced that day in the Great Hall. You must look at the best dancers you know, and imagine how they would dance if, instead of dancing for their pleasure and yours, they were dancing for the life and soul of everything they loved. For this was the Land Dance: a dance that moved with the eternal inner rhythm of things, that reached across the surface of time to the soul itself of it, that placed the rhythm of the world in places where there was no corruption and no decay. It looked deceptively simple, deceptively easy, sometimes danced almost in slow motion, rarely fast; but its beauty was enough to bring tears to the eyes, and at the same time to rise invigorated and fresh in strength, with one's heart pulsating with the joy of the stars, with a sense that even a second of existence was something to be more than thankful for.

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The power had been expended; the army had drank the cup of terror to the dregs; and nothing had happened. Incredibly, unbelievably, the burst of power that could have depopulated a continent had dispersed harmlessly; and Hogwarts still stood, unharmed, serene. Garshell sank to his knees, in horror at his dismal failure; but every thought of working out what had gone wrong and trying again died in him when he caught a sight of his army. Every eye was disappointed, every brow furious. They were slowly moving in, the Acromantula in the van.

Garshell acted fast. He immediately disenchanted the Acromantula, returning them to their human forms - still bloodied and exhausted by their exertions; and he stood up, facing his once slaves, now very nearly enemies, with blazing eyes. They drew back; he was still one of the mightiest sorcerers in the world. Calmly, as if he had noticed nothing, he said "Dismissed! You can all go home. Meet me again in a week, at the same gathering point; by then I will have found out what went wrong. We will mount the final assault."

Even as his army slunk away, he knew that he had been whistling in the dark; and he knew that they knew. Even if there was any hope that his horrible and inexplicable failure could be understood in a week, news of the events would reach Voldemort, not in a week, but in a day; and Voldemort did not forgive those who presumed to work on their own initiative - especially if they failed.

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And so it was that, one grey Monday morning, a solitary man, still with the emanation of immense power around him, knocked on the gates of Hogwarts for refuge. Dumbledore in person came to answer, and it was only after a long and careful interrogation in the early morning cold that the man was allowed to cross the gates. He knew that his only hope lay in his enemies, and that he could not count on their protection unless his accounts were full and frank; and so he began a long cycle of confessions that were to do Voldemort's cause enormous damage, and so infuriate the villain that he would commit himself to the rash course of action that was to end in his death at Harry Potter's hands. Wandless, and with the burden of utter personal failure, he sat surrounded by all his enemies; and he knew that from this, there was no going back.

One question still haunted him. He knew, he was certain, that Dumbledore was quite unaware of his assault; he had felt no extraordinary measures in place; until the very last second, Hogwarts had lain defenceless. What was it, then, that had so effectively dealt with his curse that he, one of the world's greatest practitioners of the Dark Arts, had not been able to feel it, let alone overcome it?

His question remained unspoken, but the answer was not long in coming. He raised his eyes; and he saw, among the crowd of his interrogators, two faces he knew. He rose, his features twisted in a bitter smile, took off his hat, and performed a sweeping bow. "Congratulations, Professor Austerlitz, Professor Gumm," he said; "your act has quite beaten mine."