Jewel

VI

Staring into the flames, Harry sat on the couch, flipping a chess piece over and over in his hands. A white rook. Seventeen hours since Ginny had left, and not a word from the outside world. Sally had appeared once with a tray of food, but she'd Disapparated before they'd been able to ask her any questions.

Hermione had been talkative for the first two hours, then lapsed into silence. Now she'd started muttering to herself - a telltale sign that she hadn't gotten enough sleep. She was still working on that potion, and Harry knew better than to ask her what it was - she'd tell him when she'd tell him.

He turned around, looked at her. She was bleary-eyed and pale, but still very pretty - beautiful, even, he'd always thought so. She felt his gaze and glanced at him, smiling vaguely. He'd fancied himself in love with her for a while, he mused, but that was before the whole Ron-debacle - when those two had started dating, he'd known he never could.

If they ever did - tried, even - it'd rip their friendship apart. He'd seen it happen with her and Ron - hell, even with himself and Ron, because he couldn't just stand aside and let those rows happen, but if he did interfere Ron would accuse him of being nosey and Hermione would just look at him with her big tearful eyes and he'd known that he'd never want that, ever.

It'd torn him apart, but that was better than being friendless, he reasoned.

"Harry? Are you all right?"

He blinked, shaking himself out of his reverie. "Sorry, what?"

"I called you three times," said Hermione, a soft undertone of accusation in her voice.

"I'm sorry, I was just... I'm sorry. What do you need?"

"Can you hold the spell on this?" She gestured at an intricate, shimmering model of a sort of doll house, standing on some parchment. He squinted at it - it really looked as if it were standing up, all archways and chimneys and large windows, but at the same time it seemed to be flat - a map of a house.

"Sure," he said, nonetheless, and took over the wand from her. The spell was very heavy - beads of sweat immediately started to form on his forehead. Hermione turned around and picked up a bowl, which she dipped into the potion kettle, heedless of the hissing sounds the stuff made when it came in contact with her skin.

She put it on the table, next to the parchment, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, they were filmed with green light, and when she spoke her voice was laced with power - after some intricate commandwords and hand gestures, the potion spiralled up and threw itself at the shimmering house, which flared up and then winked out.

Harry blinked. "I don't get it," he sputtered, "I'm still holding the spell!"

Hermione grinned. "That you are," she said, taking the wand back from him, and pressing her hand on the now blank parchment. "Sub rosa," she whispered.

Immediately, inky lines began to spread under her fingers.

Harry stared. "But that looks like..."

Hermione flicked the wand up, severing the spell, and pulled the parchment towards her. "The Marauder's Map. This one is of Zabini Manor."

~*~

Feeling quite sick, she went over the list of names again. Thirty-five Death Eaters, to be divided into seven parties. She'd been trying to figure out which belonged where, and she'd encountered too many familiar names in the process.

Harry had stood stock-still for a while when he'd seen them - Terry Boot, Padma Patil - then turned around to stare into the fire, but he kept fidgeting until he'd - Quinten Blake, Hannah Naraghi - exploded, throwing chess pieces at a wall - Thomas St.James, Cedric Moon - shattering them, littering the floor with splintering wood. Luna Lovegood.

Luna.

Of all people, Luna was among the traitors.

The girl with the faraway eyes, who had joined them in breaking into the ministry so many years ago, had apparently turned away from the light.

To join the man who had killed her father... or so they had believed, a year ago. She'd disappeared, leaving the Quibbler to be run by Ann McRiley, a member of the Phoenix - and everybody had assumed she'd gone after the murderers.

Now, Hermione realized that the one casting the Avada on Mr. Lovegood might very well have been Luna herself.

"Perhaps," she ventured, voice too unsteady, "perhaps she's just infiltrated them, you know, and severed contact to avoid suspicion..."

Harry turned to look at her, then whirled around to smash a tower against the wall. "No," he snarled, "we knew there was a traitor in when we were almost caught at the Hog's Head, four months ago. Remember when you said that only a former DA member would've thought of looking there? Well, it seems they've had their pick of them."

Swearing, he pulled out the wand he'd gotten from Ginny and swept it over the pieces of wood lying on the floor, urging them to take their former shapes. His head was elsewhere, though - the chess pieces standing up out of the debris were made of mixed-up splinters, making them look oddly disfigured.

He bent down and picked up a pawn with a castle's turret growing out of its head. "So how many Death Eaters are not loyal to Voldemort?"

Hermione swallowed and scanned the parchment. "At least six, but I only know the names of three; Zabini, Nott and Malfoy." She indicated three spots on the map. "Both Zabini and Nott are in charge of a party - Malfoy's in a separate one, but since he's the only senior among them, it's a safe bet that he's leading that one, too. That leaves two."

"Still. Fourteen Death Eaters is about three times as much as I can handle at once. We have nothing."

"Wait." Hermione held up her hand. "Blaise is coming this way."

Harry's face cracked into a grin. "Can I scare him?"

She sighed. "Harry. He knows these tunnels better than the back of his hand. I doubt you'd manage."

Still, it was fun to be bent over the map when the door opened, and not look up even when it clicked shut again. "It's me..." Blaise said, a little hesitantly.

"Oh, hi there, Zabini. You still in one piece?"

"What's going on here?" Blaise crossed the room swiftly, and peered over Hermione's shoulder. "That's the Manor!"

"Yeah. And everybody in it," Harry said grimly. "Tell me, when did Luna Lovegood join your merry gang?"

Blaise looked at him solemnly. "Not my gang, or at least not anymore. And three years ago. She's been priceless to Voldemort, especially when you set up the Resistance. Lucky for you, you keep a tight rein on that list of members of yours, Hermione."

"Has she sold people out?"

Blaise pursed his lips and looked away.

"I'll kill her," growled Harry.

"Let's concentrate on staying alive first, shall we?" snapped Hermione.

Blaise nodded. "That's what I came down to discuss for - there's no surveillance near the Apparition pentacle. If you can get down there, I can get you out unnoticed."

"What about the search? Has Ginny gotten out?"

Blaise grinned. "Piece of cake. She chatted happily for about half an hour with Javier Han - that's the leader of the fourth party - and then she just walked away. Pansy's contacted me about three hours ago, saying that Ginny'd found Weasley, and had gone underground with him. That's the last anyone knows."

"She didn't add anything else?"

"Well, Pansy added that they were 'chasing the black dragon', but that seemed to refer to the Muggle way of saying that one is on drugs - or do any of you understand that?"

Harry had started grinning, and was now leaning back. "It means they've gone to Hungary. The black dragon is the Hungarian Horntail I outflew back in fourth year."

Blaise snorted. "Are all of your codewords referring to Hogwarts?"

Hermione elbowed him in the ribs. "Can it. It's better than just using Latin. Everybody with some sort of an education can follow that."

"Hey!" Harry looked injured. "Are you saying I didn't have an education?"

Hermione sniffed. "Of course not. You and Ron copied everything from me."

"And the mystery of Potter and Weasley passing their OWLs is finally solved..." Blaise spread his arms dramatically. "Finally it has been confirmed that the Golden Trio only has one brain amongst them! A brilliant one, might I add," he said, catching Hermione's expression.

Blushing, she turned away and cleared her throat. "So, we get out, we go to Hungary. What will you do?"

"We'll try and find Weasley, of course. My good friend Rudolph Pean has recently been able to tell us he was near Milan, so we're hot on his heels." Blaise grinned. "Three search parties are dispatching as we speak."

Harry clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't know how you manage it, mate."

"House-elves can be quite useful, especially if they use the wand Weasley so conveniently left behind halfway through Italy. Nice, isn't it, the way vampires don't use wands... and none of those idiots in there," he said, gesturing at the wall behind him, "seems to realize."

"Still, it's not a good idea for you two to leave the Corridors - the taint is masking your signature, but as soon as you exit them, we'll be able to track you again. So, you'll have to take another route downstairs - but now that you have a map, I see I don't have to teach it to you."

He pointed at some thin black lines, in the middle of the map. "If you follow these, you'll get to a stairwell. Be sure to leave it at the right floor, mind - the amount of catacombs down here would amaze you. I'll try and make sure to be in the wine cellar in -" He glanced at his watch. " - say about ninety minutes, at six. Don't come out until you see me enter the wine cellar. Password is the same."

Taking a deep breath, he cracked his knuckles and turned to go back through the door. "Ingenious, by the way, that map. I'd like to take a better look at it, later."

And then he was gone.

Hermione let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. He'd been standing very close. Harry smirked at her. "What was that all about?"

"Nothing," she said hurriedly, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and brushing the papers together.

"Riight," said Harry, and proceeded to hum under his breath. "Blaise and Hermione, sitting in a tree..."

"Shut up!"

~*~

Grinning behind his mask and humming inwardly, Blaise descended the arched marble stairway leading to the main hall. He'd just conveyed his plans to his search party, and they'd leave to do a wide search of the Po valley in an hour - giving him enough time to send their quarry safely away to Hungary.

Malfoy's and Nott's divisions, he knew, were out in the field, hunting a trail laid by Colleen, one of his brighter house-elves. Everything was going fine.

Then, as he was mid-step, still a little way from the bottom -

Harry clapped his hand to his forehead and sank down into a crouch. Hermione, who'd been lighting the way down the stairs, whipped around -

An excruciating pain shot through his forearm, up, all the way up to his neck, where it gripped him like an icy fire -

Harry grunted, face white, sweat beading on his forehead -

The double oaken doors of the hall thundered open as Blaise was picked up bodily and thrown down in the middle of the Hall, at the feet of Lord Voldemort.

"Rise."

Blaise grunted, then hauled himself up to his knees. "Milord," he managed to croak, "to what owe I this pleasure?"

"I wished to inspect the progress. Give me your arm."

Obediently, Blaise raised his left arm. A clawlike hand gripped his wrist, a nail pressed down hard on the skin blackened by the Dark Mark. "Searchers. I summon thee."

Voldemort stepped back, gesturing Blaise to stand up. He got to his feet and took his place in the assembling circle of Death Eaters, suppressing the feeling of dread that started to grow in the pit of his stomach.

When the full party had arrived, the Dark Lord held up a hand. Silence fell. "Leaders, report," he hissed.

As leader of the first party, Blaise stepped forward. "By your leave, my Lord, we will depart in one hour and conduct a wide-spread search of the Po Valley, since earlier reports indicated tracks in that direction."

He stepped back, to be replaced by Draco, who spoke on behalf of the second party. "Indeed, my Lord - we have just returned from Firenze, where we found traces of the use of Weasley's wand. If those readings are correct, a search of the Po Valley would lead us directly to him."

Moon stepped forward. "Siena and the outlying hills did not bear any trace of English wand-use; with the first division north, and the second south, Weasley will be like a rat in a trap in Siena."

Voldemort gestured for silence once more. "Very well, my servants. Impressively done."

"I am afraid, however, that the proverbial wool has been pulled over your eyes. It is rather intriguing that none of you seem to have realized this. Boot! Step forward!"

A figure, standing somewhere in the middle of the line, stepped smartly out of it, back straight. You can hear him trembling, thought Blaise. "My lord!"

"You've read a lot about vampires, haven't you?"

"Yes, my lord!"

"Tell me, Boot. How do vampires use magic?"

"They draw power directly from their surroundings, lord, and combine it with the magic in their blood, sending magical waves... forth from their... hands..."

In the hush that fell after Terry's voice had trailed off, the Dark Lord didn't raise his voice above a whisper. "So tell me, Boot. Do vampires need wands?"

Boot swallowed, clearly audible in the thunderous silence.

"DO THEY?" the Dark Lord roared suddenly, slashing the air with an arm - the wave of force pushed the entire circle to their knees.

Pressing his masked face to the marble, Blaise felt rather than heard Voldemort stride along the circle.

"An interesting thing has occurred. As you all have been chasing this - ghost - I myself have been following another trail. A trail of little oddities, hints - breadcrumbs, if you will. Small details, that have been nagging me for quite some time. And do you know where this trail led?"

The lord had stopped, midstride - back in the centre of the circle. "To an illegitimate apparition, three days ago - the apparition of a member of the Golden Trio, to a manor of one of my very own followers. I wonder if you can guess whose manor this was?"

Lifting his head from the ground to look at the black-robed figure dominating the centre of the hall, Blaise could hear the guillotine fall.

"In any case, I looked further, now taking into account the resources of this - individual. And see what I found," the Dark Lord snarled, bringing up his hand in a gesture of command.

A small, green shape thudded into the circle, motionless - a broken wand cluttering beside her.

Colleen.

"A house-elf, laying tracks all over Italy."

Another gesture, and Blaise was torn from the ground by the scruff of his neck and dragged to the feet of the Dark Lord.

"Tell me, my loyal Death Eater," hissed Voldemort. "Who is the Master of this house-elf?"

Insides like ice, he pushed himself up and stood. He pulled his mask off his face and tossed it away. "I am," he said in a clear voice.

"Traitor," snarled a voice behind him, "traitor, traitor.."

Other Death Eaters picked the chant up, louder and louder - "traitor, traitor" -

Voldemort looked at him through slitted eyes as the chant rang around the hall, then lifted a hand. Silence fell like an axe blow. "So tell me, traitor," he spat. "What have you to say against this accusation?"

Blaise bowed his head, then lifted it sharply, the light of all his burning boats in his eyes. "Just one thing," he said.

The Dark Lord tilted his head inquiringly.

"I am still Master of Zabini Manor."

He brought his arms up.

~*~

Gasping for breath, Blaise scrabbled at the floor of the wine cellar, clawing out the orbs marking the Apparition Pentacle. "Sally," he wheezed and heard a pop behind him.

"Master?"

"Round up all the Manor's elves and go to my uncle's old safehouse. Take the two ebony chests in my study. Go!"

Another pop indicated the elf's departure, just as he heard a panel slide away from behind him.

"Blaise! Thank Ciàran you're all right, the map went blank just now - " Hermione rushed to his side, a limping Harry in her wake. "Voldemort's here, how do we get out?"

"I've been found out," he panted, "and we run. Run!"

He bounded to his feet, headed straight to a wall - a hand gesture made it fade away - and bolted inside a narrow tunnel. He heard the stone scraping back into position as Harry passed the entrance. "Tunnel goes straight ahead," he managed to say, "keep running, no matter what you hear. Wait for me at the end, and if I'm not there in ten minutes, use this to get as far away as possible."

He pushed the glowing orbs into her arms and, as she opened her mouth to argue, almost screamed, "Just do it!"

Fear in her eyes, she nodded and, supporting Harry, scrabbled away. Blaise stared at their retreating backs for a few precious seconds, then turned back to the arched end of the tunnel. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

When he opened them, they were completely black.

"Ishva," he spoke, the dark command whipping coils of shadow around his body, "Nai andole kharad gheuldum..."

The shadows got deeper, went to black, surpassed black as he chanted and kept chanting, as the arch in front of him shimmered. He stepped back, still chanting - a black halo surrounding him - stepped further back - the entire part of the tunnel in front of him shimmered - still further, and then, when he'd reached and passed a mark chalked onto the damp stone of the tunnel walls, stopped.

He took another deep breath and spoke a command so laced with power that it made his own ears ring - "Khzad Nakch."

With an ear-splitting howl, the spell on the tunnel before him collapsed - it shot away, seemingly stretching to infinity, then thundered and crashed its way back into the earthly world - his eardrums seemed to crack, he couldn't see -

And then he found himself on the floor, coughing, next to a very solid stone fundament where the chalk mark had been.

Still coughing, he got to his feet, drunk from the dark magic roaring to leave his body, heavily leaning on the wall, and started making his limping way to the faint light at the other end of the tunnel.

~*~

Hermione poised both the wand she'd borrowed from Ginny and her own to the black tunnel mouth as she heard the scraping. Harry rose from where he'd sat, next to their backpacks, on one of the wooden steps leading up to the latch in the roof.

"Easy, easy, it's me," said Blaise gruffly, stepping into the circle of light.

He looked terrible. Blood was seeping out of a large gash that ran all along the side of his head. He was clutching his left forearm. Swiftly, she stepped toward him, healing spell on her lips - "No," he said urgently, "no magic. None."

Blanching, she obeyed and stepped aside to let him pass. He limped up the steps and unlocked the latch. Glancing back at them both, he said, "I invite you to the orchard," then pushed the latch open and pulled himself up.

Sharing a look with Harry, she urged him up first, pushing the backpacks up with him. Then, with a last wary look back into the tunnel, she clambered up herself.

Blaise was sitting in the corner of a small, bare room with an earthen floor and a thatched roof. Wooden panels hung crooked in their hinges, half-revealing a couple of panelled-glass windows - a heavy door, securely locked with several bars and bolts, supposedly led outside.

"My father used to teach me magic here," Blaise said softly. "The common spells first, but larger incantations later. Black magic after I was fifteen. No-one knows this place exists - not Draco, hell, not even my sister. It's quite invisible - I've unplotted it myself - but I think we shouldn't use magic, at least for a while - better safe than sorry."

Harry nodded sharply as Hermione crouched down beside him. "What happened?"

"The Dark Lord came."

Letting out a quiet guffaw, Harry slid down a wall to sit heavily on the floor. "That I noticed. Nearly fell three flights of stairs from it."

Hermione sat down, carefully folding her legs in front of her. "After Harry felt him approach, we got down to basement level as fast as we could, and we checked the map to look. First we saw all the Death Eaters return, standing in a circle, then you joined Voldemort in the circle's centre, then - nothing."

Blaise nodded. "He told us he'd been following a trail of breadcrumbs..." He shook his head, seeming to try and clear it. "Clues, things that didn't add up. A vampire using a wand, for one. Then he apparently found out about your Apparition here, with Ron and Harry, a few days ago - I should've thought about that, why didn't I think - "

"It doesn't matter," Harry cut over him sharply, "what's done is done. Go on."

Blaise closed his eyes for a moment, then gathered his breath and went on. "Then he summoned the body of Colleen - she'd been laying false tracks with Weasley's wand - and then he asked who the master of this house elf was. And that was it for me, really - I was dragged to the centre of the circle and branded a traitor, there was no way I could've talked my way out of that situation."

"But?" Hermione urged him on. "How did you get out?"

Blaise grinned. "Because Voldemort made a mistake. He doesn't make them often, but dramatics seem to be rather a weakness for him. Instead of summoning me and all the Death Eaters to his Sanctum, where he could have done me in without any trouble, he chose to come here - perhaps to ensure you wouldn't slip away when everybody had their back turned, but more likely because he could then denounce me in my own house."

"He could have known - should have known that stuff like that doesn't win a war. My own house, my own territory - that means a lot, even when it's a house where you haven't lived for a long time. Take your own parents, Potter - do you really think that spell your mother used to save you would have worked so exquisitely well if she hadn't been standing on her own soil?"

"Now take a manor, a house where wizards have lived for generations, passing the responsibility for the family down, generation after generation, riddling the hallways with magic for a thousand years or more - well, a manor has a set of rules of its own. The Master of the Manor controls those rules."

"And you are Master of Zabini Manor," Hermione breathed.

"Precisely. I used Voldemort's strategy against him - instead of catching a traitor unawares, and defiling his name in front of his entire rank, he played into my hand and had to stand by and watch me getting away with it."

"I turned all the spellpower inside the house - every safeguard, shield and ward - to holding the Death Eaters locked in their positions. They couldn't move a finger. Even that almost wasn't enough - if the wards on Weasley's room hadn't been so slow to dissipate, they would've broken free. As it was, they couldn't do anything about me leaving - they couldn't even see where I was going."

"Such a transformation doesn't hold for long, though - especially not when one of the captives is the Dark Lord - I could feel them starting to slip through as I reached the wine cellar. That meant that I wouldn't have enough time to scatter my apparition trail, not with thirty-five Death Eaters hot on my tail, and the alternative was letting them find the apparition pentacle - thus condemning another two to the traitor's fate."

"I couldn't let that happen, so I had to bring you outside the Manor another way - the mouth of the tunnel was a hole in the outer wards of the manor, and by taking out the spells holding it, I've collapsed it. From either side, it looks as if it has never been there - even the magic I used is fully integrated into the wards by now."

"And so, Voldemort has no choice than to believe that either we're still inside, or that we have vanished," said Hermione. "As it is, he'll tear your house apart."

Blaise shook his head. "As soon as I stepped outside the boundaries of the wards, the lock holding them must have disappeared. A Master must be inside his walls for his will to reign fully. He knows I'm no longer in there, and therefore that you must have gone as well."

Harry whistled between his teeth. "He's probably not going to like that."

"No, he's not," agreed Blaise, "and I wonder - that map of yours, Hermione, does it still work?"

Wordlessly, she pulled it out of her pocket and unfolded it. "Sub rosa," she whispered. Blaise shot her a strange look, then shifted to look at the map - he was still clutching his forearm.

"They're still standing there," he said, frowning. "Why are they still standing there?"

Harry counted under his breath. "Thirty-one, thirty-two..." His gaze shot up to meet Blaise's. "There's only thirty-three Death Eaters left in the circle."

As they watched, horrified, another small dot suddenly jerked to the centre of the circle. Rudolph Pean.

"One of yours?" Hermione inquired softly.

Blaise shook his head. "Just some fool who meddled in the wrong affairs."

The dot flared black, then disappeared. Hermione shuddered.

Blaise was running his eyes along the names. "Morag is dead," he said grimly. "Bastards. He'd only just given up hope in Voldemort's cause. He didn't deserve such a death."

Harry looked up slowly, a cold fire in his eyes - Hermione gestured him to keep silent. Not now. Not yet.

Suddenly, Blaise gasped. "Goddamnit!"

"What?" she said startled, whipping her gaze back to the map - the dot inside the circle, next to Voldemort, was labelled Theodore Nott.

Blaise clenched his jaw and averted his face as the dot flared. "Goddamnit," he whispered harshly. Hermione laid a hand on his arm. He jerked away, as if she'd stung him, but not before she'd gotten a glimpse of what his right hand covered.

"Let me see that," she demanded, pulling his hand away when he tried to avert her.

What was revealed nearly made her throw up.

The entire underarm flamed red, but a terrifying gap in the skin marred the place where the Dark Mark had been. Angry red blotches surrounded it, but it's centre was black and brittle - the skin had been burnt away, leaving the flesh underneath charred. Blood was seeping along the edges of the mark, but a greenish-white ooze was trickling through its cracks.

"Harry," Hermione commanded hoarsely, "get my backpack, please?"

"I had to," said Blaise helplessly. "He would've been able to track me if I hadn't, I didn't have time for another way. I had to."

Wordlessly, Harry handed her the small sack of medical supplies she always carried - sometimes, she knew, it was better to let wounds heal naturally - and she pulled open the chord, almost snapping it.

Without taking her eyes off the wound, she picked two pouches and a covered pot out of the bag. One of the pouches turned out to contain dried herbs, the other some Muggle first aid things; bandages, disinfectants, cotton swabs. The pot held a foul-smelling salve.

"This is going to hurt," she said, but it was her who grimaced in pain when she set to work, first cleaning the wound, then carefully applying a thick layer of salve. She crushed some of the herbs between her fingers, covered the wound with a thin square of sterilized cloth, and carefully bandaged the arm. "I'll change it in a couple of hours," she said with a thick voice, then proceeded to clean and bind the gash on his face.

Harry, meanwhile, had remained bent over the map. "No more casualties," he said evenly, "Ferret Boy is still in one piece. The party's breaking up."

"Are they leaving?" Blaise asked, voice just a hint unsteady.

"Not... immediately, it seems..."

Through the cracks of the window panels, a green light seeped - but also a wicked, flickering orange-red.

Blaise closed his eyes and leaned against the wall. "That's what I was afraid of," he said, voice finally cracking.

Outside, with the Dark Mark overhead, Zabini Manor burned.