Summon the Lambs to Slaughter

Chapter Fifty-One

"Where is it?" A whisper in the shadows.

"Where is what?" The sussurating purr of tearing paper.

"The glorious artefact that will change our fortunes in this war." A gloved hand disappeared into heavy wool robes and reappeared a moment later, holding a piece of parchment. "You do remember, don't you? Indeed, you were quite insistent that I come as quickly as possible."

A muffled crunch, like gravel trod underfoot. "Ah, that. Yes, I remember, but I fear there has been a misunderstanding."

"A misunderstanding?" Sharp, the indignant hiss of a striking asp. "My time is valuable, and I do not take kindly to wasting it. If you have nothing to report, you sniveling dolt, then why, pray, did you see fit to summon me to this derelict heap of stone?" There was the furtive rustle of shifting fabric, and a silver serpent gleamed in the wan torchlight, bright as quicksilver against the whorling darkness of the room.

Hands rose in a placatory gesture. "I never said there was nothing to report. Merely that there has been a misunderstanding." The voice was amused, but freighted with the full knowledge of whom it was addressing.

An irritated snort. "Then stop this coy dithering and report, you miserable fool. You're beginning to sound like the muddled, self-righteous master you serve." The grate of expensive sole on grit and stone.

"I serve only one." Indignant.

"Indeed you do." A mirthless, tight-lipped smile. "Just like the rest of us." The silver serpent retreated into the darkness.

The other made no answer.

"Now, tell me why you've brought me here, and no more tiresome games of semantics and clever rejoinder. I don't pay you for your wit."

"Of course." A hand gestured to a decanter on a cabinet behind the threadbare sofa. "Brandy, Mr. Malfoy?"

Lucius grimaced. His stomach, accustomed to the finest life had to offer in both food and spirits, was already protesting the cheap swill he'd imbibed in Dumbledore's office. Any more bin booze, and he might find himself ensconced in one of the school's primitive lavatories, robes hitched around his waist while his bowels purged the taint from his system and his mortified mind prayed that no bumbling prefect opened the door at an inopportune moment and saw him in disarray. A Memory Charm would be the least of the unfortunate twit's woes.

"No. I've had quite enough of Hogwarts' famed hospitality," he said drily. "Now stop hedging and tell me what you know."

A shrug from the figure behind the desk. "Suit yourself," came the mild reply. A chair scraped as the figure pushed away from the desk.

Lucius watched his comrade cross to liquor cabinet in silence. Good genetics had gifted him keen eyesight, and he needed very little light in order to follow the deliberate, laconic movement of callused hands as they set a tumbler down with surprising delicacy and unstoppered a decanter fashioned of cheap glass.

"Your taste is abominable," he muttered.

His companion chuckled. "As are my wages."

"If you are referring to what I pay you," he said curtly, "you are lucky to get so much as a Knut, for all the good you've done me."

The tumbler bobbled as his companion chuckled again. "Indeed." The tumbler disappeared into the gloom, presumably on a path to unseen lips. "If your hair didn't belie your lineage, your insufferable arrogance would. You Malfoys have always thought the world revolved around you. Wouldn't be surprised if you though the Earth spun because you trod upon it." The tumbler reappeared once more, divested of more than half its contents. "I was talking about the pittance paid me to teach the wizarding world's great new hope, unenlightened and disinterested as they are."

Lucius refused to rise to the glaringly obvious barb. He had played this game of politics and gamesmanship for far too long to be distracted from his purpose by such unsophisticated and juvenile truculence, and if he did say so himself, he played it better than most. He was, after all, a Slytherin.

And a Malfoy, he thought smugly, and toyed with the clasp of his cloak, a wrought-silver serpent coiled around its mate in a sinuous, possessive embrace.

The decanter rose again.

"I should think that would hardly be advisable in your condition," he said lightly.

"So I have been told."

"As for your salary, I must confess I never saw much use for your subject as a boy."

There was a thoughtful pause, followed by another muffled crunch. "I daresay it had little use for you, Mr. Malfoy, if your marks were any indication. You couldn't bear to face the fact that all that you touch did not turn to gold, and when you realized that the numbers would by swayed by neither the family name nor its coffers, you simply blotted it from your consciousness like a dream best forgotten. If you could not master it, then it was of little importance, a discipline to be cast aside like an unwanted plaything. A Malfoy mastered all that mattered in this world."

The darkness may have hidden the sly smile, but it did nothing to conceal the bitter, leering triumph he heard in that voice, and his hand itched to lash out and strike, to wipe the smirk from a face he could not see and make blood bead on cracked lips as proof of vengeance exacted. He swallowed an oath and curled his fingers tightly around the worn armrest of his chair.

One day, when you have outlived both your usefulness and my patience, you will assume your rightful place at my feet, licking my boots and writhing like the spineless wretch you are. I will have you flayed by inches and savor every scream I tear from your throat. Like my father and his father before him, I have kept an account of every slight, even unto the most flippant of jibes, and there will be a reckoning. Enjoy your forked tongue while you can.

"Your insouciance bores me," he said coldly.

His compatriot affected not to hear him. "Don't take it so badly, Mr. Malfoy," the figure clucked sympathetically. "Your casual dismissal of any discipline you could not best or bend to your will was a trait shared by your dearly departed father. And Draco, of course."

He had never considered his father's scholastic aptitude, and since the bastard was long moldering in his tomb, he could hardly find it within himself to care, but when it came to his only son and heir, he had to concede the point. While it was true that Draco was second in the school on the basis of his marks, the fact remained that he was consistently outshone in his efforts by a mewling, presumptuous Mudblood girl who thought she had the same right to walk these corridors as Purebloods of fifteen generations. He was not about to say so, however.

He withdrew his wand and walked it betwixt his fingers with nonchalant grace. "Though I am delighted that you are well-versed in the studious endeavors of both my forefathers and my progeny, I suggest we move at once to the matter at hand." His tone was one of light amusement, but the levity did not reach his eyes. They were hard and predatory and smoldered with unspoken malice.

"Of course, Mr. Malfoy." All traces of humor had vanished.

"Splendid." He gestured to the chair opposite him.

A hand reached for the decanter. Lucius' wand shot out with a flick of one fine-boned wrist. "Ah, ah. I should think not. One more sip of that abominable rotgut, and you will be mourning the loss of your fingers."

The hand made a prudent withdrawal, and his companion stepped into the wan torchlight. He was pleased to see wariness etched into their features, and vague disquiet. Not fear-cowed as they were by the prospect of untold wealth and unrivaled power, they were too hardened by a lifetime of harsh realities to cower as so many others had done-but prudence born of long experience. Eyes followed the tip of his wand as he flicked it impatiently toward the chair.

For all your bluster, you've not forgotten the old respect, have you, old...friend? No, that's not the mot juste, but it will do for now. You still remember the deeds of which a Malfoy is capable, acts so profane they are not spoken of even in hushed whispers. Good. All the better for you. Our wands are sharper and deadlier than any blade, and our knowledge of hexes and Curses extends far beyond that of even the most prominent Pureblood families. They are spells writ, not in books with crumbling pages, but in blood, in family lineages older than recorded time. What I could do to you with this wand would make war-weary veterans gibber with madness, and you know it. Only Lord Voldemort could do better.

Maybe not even he, a sibilant, triumphant voice amended. His blood may be pure, but it's not Malfoy.

A smile flitted across his face at the thought. "No need for shame," he murmured. "Better men than you have paled before this wand, and with good reason, I assure you. We Malfoys, you'll find, can be quite persuasive."

"Indeed," came the bland reply, but the figure moved no closer to the chair.

A memory arose in Lucius' mind of himself as a young man. During the summer holiday, he and his Slytherin peers would spend hours in the gardens of Malfoy Manor, practicing both Curses and manual dexterity by killing voles and chipmunks. He, Constantinius Rookwood, older brother of Augustus, and young men whose faces had blurred into insignificance with the passage of years, would stand beneath the shade of an oak tree and draw down death with cruel precision.

He did not remember everything about those afternoons, but it was funny the things he could recall. The heavy heat of high summer. The itch of wool against his shoulders. The cool prickle of sweat beneath his armpits and on the nape of his neck, drying to brine in the hair there. The poetry of ancient Latin spilling from voices that had not yet found their way to manhood, spells forgotten by even the foundation stones of Hogwarts. The throb of forbidden magic, virulent as pus beneath the skin, as it raced from throat to chest to aching fingertip, and the acrid, ozone stink of it as it exploded from his wand and arced across the grass, the righteous finger of Fate racing to dispense justice. The scorched grass it left in its wake, and the giddy, almost orgasmic rush he had always felt when the Curse struck home in a gout of blood and fur and pulverized bone. The residual magic that clung to his wand like static electricity, and the triumphant laughter of his fellows at his kill. A platinum god claiming his own tribute.

But what he remembered most were the eyes of the voles in the instant before the end came and they were reduced to so much twitching fur upon the grass, the exquisite awareness of the predator in their midst as they crouched before his wand and his pitiless, grey eyes; the terror in their eyes had been strangely human, and more than once, it had given him pause as the wand swung down and his lips prepared to deliver the terrible invocation. Not out of mercy, but curiosity. What did it think when confronted with the imminence of its mortality? Did it truly understand, or was it merely a primitive, instinctive reaction? Not that it mattered. They died all the same, and he would stand over the cooling, tattered corpse and still-quivering entrails and watch the spark of animus bleed from their eyes.

Even the dumbest brute can smell death on the air, boy, sneered his father's voice, and he blinked to silence it.

His companion reminded him of the hapless voles he had slaughtered, frozen in the dim patch of light, one foot flat on the floor and the other poised delicately on point of the toe, nostrils flaring, a rabbit kit that has fallen under the shadow of the hawk, but cannot yet see it. It was balletic and almost beautiful.

A last longing glance at the decanter, and feet shuffled toward the armchair with a desultory, cautious tread. Another crunch like falling pebbles.

"As I said, the numbers can reveal much," the informant said as they took a seat. "In this case, I believe they may have revealed an entirely new discipline of magic. It's certainly one I've never encountered before, and I've been in the field for almost forty years." Fingers threaded together over a thin chest.

"Given that wizards can live for two hundred years and work for most of them, your tenure is hardly a feat," he observed drily, but he was intrigued nonetheless. He leaned forward in his chair. "What sort of magic have you found?"

"I can't say precisely." A careless shrug. "As I told you, I've never seen its like before. What I can tell you is that it involves Runes and Cryptology and perverts the established laws of Arithmancy in ways I can't fathom. At least, the formulae I've seen did."

Lucius stared in frosty skepticism. "If I remember correctly from my own brief stint in the discipline, while the means of reaching a desired calculation are somewhat malleable, the art is subject to certain immutable absolutes. One plus one is always two, for example."

A wry smile. "Except when it isn't," came the sly retort.

Lucius scoffed. "And when, pray, would that be?" He was tempted to raise his wand again and quell his companion's renewed sense of comfort before it took root, but for the time being, it rested lazily on one knee, cradled loosely between palm and fingers.

His companion chuckled. "One plus negative one is zero. A perfect balance."

"I see," he said irritably, discomfited that he had missed such a clear exception. "Such exceptions are rare," he muttered.

"Not so rare as one might imagine. Truth be told, Mr. Malfoy, numeric value only exists because we say it does. If someone opened up their hand to show us an empty palm, and then had the temerity to tell us that he was, in fact, presenting us with less than nothing, we would call him a madman, yet we allow for negative integers and accept them as real."

"Or Albus Dumbledore," Lucius muttered, and grimaced.

The figure snorted. "Quite so."

"And the point of all this theorizing?" he prompted.

"In addition to the negative integers, which are a manmade construct, but rational numbers for all of that, we have what are known as irrational numbers-fractions and the like. These are also accepted by tacit social agreement because we have no other means by which to define that which is less than a whole, but more than none, or that which is less than nothing, but which must exist by mandate of the mathematical systems. These, too, are used in Arithmantic constructs, though much less frequently, as they are unstable." His companion was in full swing now, and excitement radiated from pores like sour sweat. Fingers drummed on the armrests of the chair, and voice had assumed the stentorian, commanding timbre of the practiced lecturer.

Lucius' eyes glazed at the uninviting prospect of a protracted lecture; when he had received the owl informing him of the secret weapon that would change their fortunes in the war against the Ministry and Dumbledore's Knights of the High Table, his mind had whirled with visions of exotic poisons and Dark spells found in rotting tomes bound in human flesh and stinking of putrefaction and untold millennia. At his most mundane, he had entertained the notion of a heretofore undiscovered version of the Imperius Curse, one not bound by Ministerial strictures. Such a spell could prove useful, especially if it could be permanently affixed to its intended target without the risk of dementia and brain damage that rendered so many amanuenses useless after prolonged exposure. He had not envisioned passing the evening with a discourse on the finer points of Arithmancy.

Your father always said you indulged in too much fancy, let your imagination run amok, sneered a voice inside his head. You, with your fantasies of secret sects and blood-bound brotherhoods and elaborate rites in labyrinths beneath the earth. How disappointed you were when you learned that once the thrill of initiation had worn off, being a soldier for the Cause was as much meetinghouse politicking as it was midnight raids on the homes of your enemies.

Yes, well, if my father had been possessed of a bit more imagination and foresight, perhaps he would not have wound up facedown in a bowl of porridge. The fool was too arrogant to consider the possibilities and forgot the lessons he so ruthlessly taught me.

His expression must have betrayed him, because his companion offered a sardonic smirk. "Am I straying too far afield from your level of expertise, Mr. Malfoy?"

They were, but he was loath to concede as much to this bottom-feeding Pureblood whose family had squandered their meager social prestige with years of unwise investments and questionable social alliances, and whose loyalty had been bought by a few hundred Galleons and the promise of more to come when victory had been assured.

He drew the ball of his thumb over the smooth, flat head of the serpent atop his cane. "Tell me," he said, "how is your sister these days? The one with the unfortunate child. Hare-lipped, wasn't he? Or was he mongoloid?" Each word was nightshade silk across his tongue, cold and scalding as liquid nitrogen. He smiled blandly, a fleeting, cruel upturn of one corner of his mouth. "I'm afraid you've not been keeping us apprised of his situation." He clucked ruefully. "Pity, that."

All the color drained from the informant's face, and in the blink of an eye, a human being became a wax effigy of utter mortification. "You know damn well I don't speak to her. Haven't done since she birthed that whelp." A tremulous rasp. The upholstery creaked as fingers convulsed around the fabric.

"Of course not. No sane man would," he conceded. "But that's what happens when one consorts with Muggles."

There was a strangled snort that he took to be agreement.

"A few of us have wondered, however, why you continued to associate with her after she married." The finger on the serpent head paused in mid-stroke, and he quirked a brow in polite inquiry.

"Because she was my sister!" Spat, furious. Then more calmly. "I had hoped she would realize her folly and renounce the bastard before it went too far."

Lucius sighed. "Alas, she did not."

"No," came the snarled retort.

"Has she been erased from the family history, then?" The finger resumed its ceaseless stroking.

A brusque nod. "Yes. Mother Lucretzia saw to it herself."

That revelation surprised him not in the least. Lucretzia was surpassed in Pureblood fanaticism only by mad Juno Black, and there were those who claimed she had no rival.

"Thank Merlin for that," he murmured. "It wouldn't do for people to get the mistaken impression that you have anything to do with the blood traitor and the puling imp she spawned."

"Who's been spreading such pernicious rubbish? And what's my sister and her familial blight have to do with the matter at hand?" Shrill now, on the knife edge of panic.

Lucius offered no reassurance. He merely offered another haughty, tight-lipped smile.

So you do have a weakness. I thought as much. Your family ties will bind you to your doom, throttle you as surely as if they were but extensions of the Dark Lord's crushing fingers. I know of every letter you've sent, every parcel of food, every charitable Knut wrapped in a scrap of old robes. I made it my business to know, and what I have missed, MacNair and the elder Goyle have not. I am His eyes and His ears, and I have spared Him not the smallest detail. When the time comes, your sister and her misbegotten pup will drown in the well as they should have done from the moment she abandoned our world for that damned Muggle. Your death will be neither so merciful nor so swift, and as your ashes smolder beneath the guttering sun, I and Mother Lucretzia shall dance upon your fading, worthless memory.

He shifted in his seat. "Now, you were enlightening me as to the various mathematical systems used in Arithmancy?" he prompted. Now that he had re-established tactical superiority, he could steer the conversation into more germane waters once more. If the idiot didn't come to the point in the next few minutes, he would simply dispense a brief and exquisitely painful lesson from the end of his wand and go in likely fruitless search of suitable lodgings.

His informant gaped at him, discomfited by the abrupt change of subject. "Y-yes. Yes. So I was." A silence as thoughts and composure were gathered and reassembled with painstaking care. "If I recall, we-I-was discussing the irrational system as opposed to the rational."

"Indeed," Lucius agreed, though the answer would have been the same had his companion announced they had been discussing the weather or page three hundred and seventy-four of the Wizarding Kama Sutra. He had long since lost interest in this conversation.

"Irrational numbers, by virtue of their...irrationality are seldom used in calculations, though there are accounts of formulae being successfully written and executed by Dark wizards; most find the end results too unpredictable for their liking. But if one is willing to take the risk, the rewards are unimaginable."

"Mmm." Lucius shifted again.

"I see I've failed to capture your attention."

"Frankly, I don't see what any of this has to do with your purported unclassified magic," he said flatly, and stretched his legs. The tendons of his knees creaked and popped in protest.

"Don't you?" The informant sat forward, hands folded and elbows trapped between knees, and the wan face was alive with triumph. "The rules of Arithmancy have long been held forth as sacrosanct, inviolate lest meddling destroy all that man has wrought through the sleepless centuries. Time and time again, we have been warned of the consequences of avarice and unchecked curiosity. 'Look to the future, but do not touch. Look to the past, but change nothing, lest you change everything.'"

"The butterfly effect," he said absently.

The sharp crack of clapping hands. "Precisely! Precisely, Mr. Malfoy." A gruff cackle. "But what if it were all rubbish? What if the dire warnings and ominous predictions of doomsday were ploys designed to keep us from the truth for fear that those who discovered it would become more powerful than even the Fates in the firmament, the ruse of a jealous god determined to keep us from paradise?"

It was a reference he could not quite place, and yet it made his stomach roil, and from the deepest recesses of his mind came the hot throb of wounded kidneys and the sudden warmth on his thighs. A sound that reminded him of onrushing consequence, and the sound of wood on flesh, a gourd dropped onto paving stones. A flare of agony remembered, there and gone before it truly registered.

Get up, boy. The savage, capering devil that wore his father's patrician face.

The air caught in his throat in a sticky, choking clot, and he was certain he was going to vomit. His first instinct was to lean forward and press his burning forehead to his knees, but to do so in front of his mewling subordinate would be to show weakness, expose his belly to a man unworthy of licking his boots, and his fierce pride would not allow it. He stiffened his spine, clenched his teeth, and fumbled for his handkerchief with as much nonchalance as he could muster.

"After all, it makes sense when you consider that wizards once served Muggle kings," his companion prattled, heedless of the fact that his face was an ugly, mottled red. "Their position in the court was tenuous at the best of times. If someone were to prove better at the art of Arithmancy, the hapless wizard would soon find himself replaced and consigned to the gallows. What better way to cement one's position in the royal court than to invent a system of thou-shalts and shalt-nots that allows for effective practice of the discipline, but limits the power of the practitioner?"

"Blood traitors," he muttered thickly, and continued to fumble inside his robes for his handkerchief, which stubbornly eluded his grasp.

"Quite," his companion said dismissively. "But as distasteful as bowing and scraping to Muggle monarchs may have been, it's hardly relevant at the moment. What does matter is the possibility-dare I say, probability-that the rules are vestigial and easily exploited."

"Loyalty to blood always matters," he said weakly, and closed his eyes against a wave of vertigo.

"Naturally, Mr. Malfoy, but-," A pause. "Are you well, Mr. Malfoy? You look flushed."

"The swill in Dumbledore's office has disagreed with me, I'm afraid," he muttered. At long last his fingers closed over the elusive fabric of his handkerchief, and he withdrew it and pressed it daintily to his too-dry lips. "Do you think you might come to the point?"

"Ah. Yes." His companion cleared their throat behind loosely-fisted fingers. "The point is, Mr. Malfoy, that if the rules are little more than the archaic artifice of ancient wizards looking to protect their power and keep their necks from the royal noose, imagine what could be accomplished by someone brazen enough to disregard them."

Lucius let the hand holding the handkerchief drift dreamily to his lap. "And what might that be?"

"The possibilities are endless. Arithmancy by itself can manipulate matter to varying degrees. Indeed, the argument could be made that the whole of the universe was birthed from a Divine algorithm. Control the numbers, and the world is yours."

Lucius straightened, nausea and dizziness swept aside by dawning comprehension. He crushed the handkerchief between his fingers as his nerves thrummed with excitement and adrenaline flooded his veins. "If the numbers can be controlled, why hasn't anyone done so before? You make it sound as though a child could do it, and yet, of all the great Arithmancers of the ages, none has attempted it."

A sardonic chortle. "Because it countermands the rules, Mr. Malfoy, and we wizards are an orderly lot."

He couldn't argue with that. He had spent a lifetime watching is disgust as wizardkind muddled through its existence, looking to the dangers in their midst with a bovine contentment, ignorant or simply heedless of the wolves that waited to attack with snapping jaws. Wizards who ought to know better had traded vigilance for stupefied complacency, eager to surrender power for the illusions of unity, bucolic peace, and progress. Warnings were disregarded, and opinions were formed not by the painful lessons of history, but by the pompous bombast and rhetoric of empty-headed politicians. Each day, the world he knew and was destined to rule by virtue of his birthright withered a little more, undercut by the poisonous idealism of Mudblood inclusion and Beasts' rights, and because both larders and purses were full, no one cared.

Like Hogsmeade. It was built as a haven against the creeping Muggle threat, the only ground for a thousand miles not seeded and hallowed by the blood and ash of wizards murdered in a frenzy of pitchfork tines and licking flames, and only the wards erected by the prudent spared it from the same fate. But the lesson has been forgotten. The screams that have echoed through the centuries as grim reminders of the cost of apathy have been blotted out by the merry clink of Galleons in the till, and there has even been talk of end the segregation between Muggles and wizards, a notion that-thank Merlin- is still too radical for even the most liberal wizard. But it's only a matter of time. The old guard is dying, and the young do not understand, raised as they have been in comfort and security. Within a generation, or perhaps the next...

He pulled himself from his reverie with a discreet shudder. "I suppose you have found a way around the rules?"

"No. I haven't. I'm as hidebound and paralyzed by the potential consequences as the next wizard, but I've found someone who isn't." A triumphant, toothy smile.

His heart began to pound inside his chest, and his fingertips tingled with sudden anticipation, silk drawn briefly over the unsuspecting pads. "Who?" he demanded sharply. Then, more casually, "An ambitious Slytherin? It would prove refreshing to see that my House still turns out wizards worthy to walk beneath our honored founder's banner."

The reptilian smile faded. "I'm afraid not."

"Pity. It's been far too long since Slytherin youth have demonstrated any promise. It's enough to make one wonder just what Severus has been teaching them." A wry smile at his own sly wit.

Ah, but that question will be answered soon, will it not? That is, after all, why you have come. To see where Severus' loyalties lie. That he still resides within these walls and not within the moldering, timeless confines of Azkaban is an unexpected boon. It will make your investigation all the easier. If the cunning bastard did poison Potter as your starry-eyed son insists, he will live, and Cornelius Fudge, that bumbling lackwit that has troubled you for so long, will suddenly find his life exceedingly unpleasant, but if, as you suspect in the fertile ground where all your basest and most dreadful suppositions lie, that he has truly become Dumbledore's puppet, he will meet a worse end than even the Dementors could offer. Oh, he will die just as slowly, it's true, but neither your wand nor your blade will offer the blissful, narcotized numbness of a soulless existence. They will flay him by inches, and he will feel every last cut.

The more pragmatic part of him hoped it wouldn't come to that. Severus was among the last of the old Slytherin guard, the last generation nurtured in the ways of propriety and good conduct. He knew how to treat both his betters and the simpering inferiors that cowered at his feet, undisciplined curs licking the boots of their master. His knowledge of Hogwarts and the tedium of school administration would make the transition from Dumbledorian enclave to preeminent Pureblooded wizarding school in the world all the easier, and for all his swagger and sneering arrogance, he would be more easily controlled than an ambitious young upstart with delusions of grandeur. All one had to do was show a little appreciation.

A wistful pipedream. The same qualities that made Severus an outstanding Slytherin also made him a liability and a threat to his designs. The man may have been unkempt, sullen, and boorish, but he was possessed of an unrepentant pride and a cunning Salazar Slytherin himself would have envied. He had a knack for overhearing conversations best left undiscovered and unreported, and those merciless, unreadable black eyes saw through the cleverest of pretenses with disturbing acuity. And for all his protestations of living only to serve the Cause and His Lordship, Lucius knew that Severus would like nothing better than to stand astride the world and crush his enemies beneath his heels. It was the dream of every Slytherin ever passed through the House's frozen, stone womb, and the fire for conquest and retribution burned in every belly. A Slytherin child's first breath was little more than a war cry, and Lucius could hardly begrudge Severus his dreams.

They were his dreams, too.

He could, however, begrudge him his decision to sell his soul and his House to Dumbledore, that silver-bearded Svengali who hypnotized the unwary with his jovial blue eyes and his proffered bowl of sweets stretched forth like temptation. Father Christmas with a strychnine smile and the empty platitude of salvation through acceptance. He had tried to lure them all, but almost to a man, the sons and daughters of House Slytherin had resisted with stiff-necked obstinacy. They had stood resolute even as Gryffindor and Hufflepuff and even Ravenclaw, that House of geniuses, had capitulated to the siren song of laissez faire.

Even Severus had withstood the first sly overtures, a grimy, dirty-necked boy who smelled deceit in the air like woodsmoke and tasted it on his tongue like copper and blood, and Lucius, seven years his senior, had stood in awe of him, but he had fallen in the end, weakened by the predations of Azkaban and Ministry officials and seduced by the scraps of praise tossed him by his doddering puppetmaster.

Of course he fell. Dumbledore told him everything he wanted to hear, made him think he was worth more than his tarnished family name and his tatty clothes made of the cheapest wool. He soothed all the deep, festering wounds with the balm of useless absolution. He made Severus believe that his was the only way to absolution, that the blood on his hands and drying beneath his ragged fingernails could be washed away by betraying us all. And Severus, whose cheeks have never stopped burning with the secret shame of not good enough, took the bait, just like he did when I offered him my hand twenty years ago.

Severus wasn't the old man's only quarry. He tried for you all those years ago, laying his snare as he had for so many others. He thought he could tempt you with promises of leadership and the fulfillment of leading a life well lived. He underestimated your resolve, your loyalty to your blood, and your palm still prickles with the memory of the slap you laid across his cheek for daring to suggest that being a man of eminence among the diseased rabble of Mudbloods, Squibs, and Muggles was a laudable end. He still remembers it, too, which is why those eyes dim and those lips thin whenever you cross his threshold. He remembers, and the defeat is bitter in a mouth accustomed to only victory.

Unexpected warmth tickled his palm, and he squeezed his handkerchief to banish it. "Who, then?" he asked.

There was an uncomfortable, sullen silence as his companion shifted in the chair. "A Gryffindor." The silence resumed, heavier than before, as though the word uttered had been heretical and profane.

He scoffed. "Only that? Useful Gryffindors are rare, I concede, but not unknown. Need I remind you of Pettigrew?" He grimaced. Pettigrew always made his stomach roil, and the moment it was no longer a lethal blunder to do so, he would begin lobbying for his quiet elimination.

Still the silence persisted. The shift of heavy winter robes. The hiss of tearing paper. A grating, muffled crunch. "Erm, it's not just any Gryffindor, you see." The creak of a chair.

"Any Gryffindor?" he spat contemptuously. "You act as if they come in assorted varieties, like sweets or Bertie Botts' beans. Don't be a fool. There hasn't been a Gryffindor worthy of the name since accursed Godric took it with him to the dust. Unless, of course, you've succumbed to the feverish delusion of P-,"

He stopped in horror. A terrible supposition was forming in his mind, rising to the surface of his consciousness, scum on the surface of a noisome bog. He brought the handkerchief to his lips to stifle an acidic burp. His stomach, which had begun to settle, began to churn with renewed unease.

"You don't mean Potter, do you? If you've brought me here to tell me that puling brat is the key to our utter victory, so help me, I'll remove your intestines through your nostrils." His wand, dormant and unassuming when it had lain carelessly in his palm, now bristled with potent menace as he pointed it at the unmoving figure in the opposite chair.

The idea had a nauseating probability the longer he considered it. The boy had been nothing but trouble since the day he'd emerged from between his mother's trembling, blood-smeared thighs. The Dark Lord had invested all of his resources in finding the princeling that could so easily depose him, and when the infant Messiah had been found, he had reduced the most powerful wizard in the world to an impotent revenant bereft of purpose or authority, left to wander the forests of Albania and draw sustenance from the dead and dying. With neither wand nor blade, he had felled the dark and terrible god and scattered His foot soldiers to the wind. He was anathema to all who served the Cause, and his name was an epithet cast at the feet of dogs and traitors.

His school years had done nothing to ease the antipathy. From the moment he had set foot upon the Hogwarts grounds, his infamy had overshadowed all else. The accomplishments of Slytherin had been swept aside in a tide of Gryffindor euphoria, smothered by the reverent whisper of his hallowed name in the corridors. Not a month went by when his name did not appear in The Daily Prophet, and the peace of his hearth had been shattered by the incessant whinging of his useless son and the increasingly frequent summons of the Dark Lord. Potter was an unceasing thorn in his side, and the notion that his machinations were unattainable without the complicity of his nemesis was an irony only a Slytherin could appreciate.

"No, no, not Potter," came the quick reply, and hands rose in a placatory gesture. "Thank Merlin. Even if it were, you'd be getting no help from him now."

"He's that grave, then?" The idea that the pubescent menace might expire beneath the bed linens of the Hogwarts infirmary filled him with perverse glee. The situation would have to be spun in the Dark Lord's favor, of course. It wouldn't do for the greatest conflict of the age to have such an anti-climactic and ignominious conclusion as murder by underling, but that could be arranged.

"That grave. So grave that Dumbledore has resorted to looking to the United States for a bezoar. So far, his efforts have come to naught."

"Excellent." He allowed himself to relax. "That Granger child, then?"

"An understandable guess, but no." A polite cough. "No, it's rather worse, I'm afraid. It's the transfer pupil."

"Transfer pupil?" he repeated blankly, and then it came to him. His features contorted in an involuntary spasm of revulsion. "Not that diseased wretch Draco has been banging on about?" His mind reeled.

"That's the one."

"But she's a defective," he insisted. "And a Muggleborn. To hear my son tell, it, she's a mangled Medusa in a wheeled chariot."

"He's not far wrong," his companion conceded. "But aesthetics and pedigree aside, she's possessed of a magic I've never seen before, and I'm telling you, if it can be harnessed, it could bring our enemies to their knees."

"I don't believe it," he insisted mulishly, and thumped his cane on the floor. "How do you know it's not simply the scrawlings of an unbalanced mind, normal magic viewed through a lunatic's lens?"

"Because it's too ordered, too precise in its arrangement to be the work of madness. There is thought in every quillstroke. Everything is placed with an almost obsessive care, as if she were aware of the power she wields. No recklessness, no hesitancy, just a methodical mélange of disciplines. It's like she's setting the pieces on a chessboard for a game only she knows how to play."

"Bollocks," he said flatly.

"No." Infinite patience. "It isn't. If she were deranged, there would be evidence in her homework, and there isn't. It's impeccable. Nor has she stood up in the middle of the Great Hall and announced she was the queen of Siam."

"I was under the impression she couldn't stand at all." When in doubt, resort to wit.

"Well, no, she can't, but that isn't the point. The point is that, however she came by it, the magic is real."

He gave an incredulous snort and sat back abruptly in his chair. He was seized with the infantile urge to grab the nearest object and hurl it at the far wall, but he wouldn't give his leering companion the satisfaction. He fisted his hands around his wand and handkerchief until his fingers ached. He would not believe this. Could not. It flouted every belief he had ever held, and to even entertain the notion that a child inferior by even Muggle standards held dominion over an undiscovered magic shifted the heretofore steadfast fulcrum of his world. The room gave a vertiginous lurch, and he closed his eyes against a wave of dizziness.

It is not so, hissed the voice of his father. It cannot be. All magic is imparted from the blood of the pure, a right gifted to them by the Fates before they were set upon these shores to rule over all who followed. There is no magic beneath sun or sea that was not first seeded in the Pureblooded heart. No one comes unto magic save by dint of the Pure, and none of mongrel blood can breathe life into the magic of the earth and give it form and voice. It is deceit and blasphemy, and he should be killed where he sits for daring to utter it.

He thought to do just that, but it seemed too much effort to raise his arm, which lay numbly in his lap, night and marble in the torchlight.

"Even if you were right and she were mad, the possibility still exists that the magic is untainted. Think of it as unintentional castoff, or magical photosynthesis. Madness in, useful magic out."

He uttered an unintelligible croak. It was all he could manage.

Freaks do not create magic. The thought was a mantra inside his school, mooring him to fragile reality.

"How do you know about this?" he asked when he could trust himself to speak.

"I saw a letter she had written to one of her friends in Dumbledore's office."

"She has friends?"

"Others like her from that school. She seemed to be soliciting advice."

"I thought you said that it was a game only she knew how to play," he said shrewdly.

A shrug. "Perhaps they all know how to do it." Glib, dismissive.

He didn't need to ask to whom they referred. The other mongrels, of course, and this time, the vertigo threatened to swallow him whole. "I want to see it," he demanded through clenched teeth. His palms were sticky with a sheen of feverish sweat.

"See what?"

"The letter, you slack-jawed lackwit," he snarled. "I want to see the letter."

"Ah. I'm afraid that won't be possible."

"And why bloody not?" His composure was badly shaken, and he suddenly wanted nothing more than to be at home in his study with a glass of fine port in one hand and the world firmly beneath his leather-slippered feet. If he could only find himself within the snug confines of Malfoy Manor, then everything would make sense again.

"Because I'm certain Dumbledore has owled it to its intended recipient. The Headmaster's communications are as yet exempt from Ministry scrutiny."

Lucius snorted. "And why would he care if the letter fell into Ministry hands? Even if it were proof of new magic, the peons working under Fudge's auspices would be slow to notice, if at all. That many of them can walk and breathe at the same is a feat beyond understanding."

"He thinks she can help him exonerate Severus."

Lucius hid his squawk of surprise behind a sudden cough. "Exonerate Severus?" he repeated.

The hand holding the handkerchief gripped the arm of his chair between white-knuckled fingers, and as the interminable seconds passed, he wasn't sure if the cramp massing in his chest was laughter or despair. The axis of the world trembled beneath his feet.

Dancing bears and unicycles, that's what I'll see next. I've slipped through a crack in the world and ended up here, little Pureblood lost. The Severus I knew and recruited would sooner have roasted on a spit than accept the help of a Mudblood child. His fierce pride and his Potions-maker's hands were all he had to his name, and he guarded them both with bared fang and a murder's dispassionate eye. Have you fallen so far, old friend?

Curdled sympathy bloomed inside his chest for a fleeting instant before being crushed by the iron grip of self-serving pragmatism. There was little room for maudlin sentimentality in a Death Eater's heart, and he had every intention of being the last man standing when the dust settled. He rose with a grimace.

"What will you do now?"

"That's none of your concern," he snapped, and tugged on his robes to smooth them. "Where is the girl?"

"In her dormitory, I suppose. Either that, or in the infirmary. She had a fainting spell in the owlery, and Pomfrey treats her like glass. Are you going to see her? Wouldn't that be rather odd, Mr. Malfoy? A preeminent Pureblood calling on a Muggleborn child?"

"I don't recall asking for your assessment. One more word, and you can forego your monthly stipend," he said sharply. Then, more softly as he stowed his handkerchief, "And we wouldn't want that, would we? Without that money, your sister's crying shame might starve."

"I told you I've never-"

"I know."

"Mr. Malfoy-Lucius, please..."

"Spare me your useless wheedling. It will do you no good." He inspected the tip of his wand for dust. This hovel was filthy. He offered a reassuring smile. "I shouldn't worry yet. You're still of use to me." He turned and strode toward the door.

Would he see the girl? Oh, yes, he would. He would look upon her with his own eyes and establish the truth of his informant's ravings, and if they were true, if she and her kind were the secret lodestones of powerful magic, he would find a way to harness it. It would be his ere the end, and he would be a god, in position to depose the Dark Lord and claim the throne and the diadem as his own.

And he would see Severus. For old times' sake.

A flash of silver on his boot caught his eye as he opened the door. Aluminum paper. He scraped it off with a moue of disdain and closed the door behind him.