Amber Dreams

Amber Dreams XI

Night rose on London, and a shabby pub tipped out its customers. Most left by the back door, stumbling into a littered backyard that could not possibly have held them all. A half dozen or so, however, left by the front entrance, over which hung a swinging inn sign bearing a cracked and leaking cauldron. With motives surreptitious or benign, those who left by the front door wore, without exception, long overcoats that hid their clothes from the outside world. One man, dressed in clerical black and scanning a piece of paper with a worried look on his face, walked off in the direction of the Thames.

The man was stopped in the middle of the bridge, where the water was deepest and the bustle of night-goers thinner. The blonde woman who greeted him had a healthy complexion, but her presence alone in the vicinity of Whitehall suggested that her profession was not entirely above board.

"Mr Prewett?" queried the woman, as she stepped from beneath the fish-shaped lamp-post.

"The Reverend Prewett, but Father Charles would be appropriate I think, Mrs Lestrange."

The woman nodded. "Come with me, Father. It's been a long time since I've been in the country, so you'll forgive me not recognising you. Indeed, I believe it must have been your predecessor who I last took counsel from." Her voice bore traces of an American accent, though it was not particularly noticeable. She led the priest down to the other side of the Thames, where a hansom cab waited beneath the glow of a gas lamp.

"These modern innovations will be the death of us, Father. Where will we hide when they burn even the night?"

"Illumination isn't necessarily a bad thing, I'll venture, Mrs Lestrange. But never mind that." The door of the carriage swung open, and little metal steps swung down. "Ladies first, Mrs Lestrange," he continued, proffering a hand to let her climb in to the carriage.

"Thank you, Father."

When they were settled comfortably in the hansom cab, and Mrs Lestrange had ordered the swaddled driver to King's Cross, the priest spoke again. "I presume this is about Boudicca?"

"You've a quick mind, Father Charles."

The priest shook his head. "A simple enough deduction. I hadn't realised you had been assigned to the case, though. Your predecessor made use of me a few times, so I will happily admit that I am no stranger to these affairs. Still, I'm surprised you haven't called upon the Spirits division instead..."

"We're treating this as an internal concern, Father. For the meantime, that is. The investigations of the past few months have thrown up a few anomalies that have all the hallmarks of the Black Affair, hence my recall from America, and it's hardly prudent to let the rest of the Ministry in on our own problems."

"Well, Mrs Lestrange, that changes things rather a lot. I had assumed it was a disgruntled Pureblood hoping to stop the Express being used, but if it's a concerted attack on Hogwarts --" He stopped short, though, for the hansom cab had pulled up in the forecourt of King's Cross Station. The door swung open without a hand being laid upon it. The chaplain stepped down and helped the Auror out.

"Well, here we are. Father Charles, if you'd like to start by taking a few readings, then you can get started properly. Lupin assured me that you would be able to make your work on this your top priority. A curate has been assigned to cover your day-to-day chaplaincy, so you need not worry about that aspect."

They walked across the filthy cobbles up to the entrance, and off in the direction of Platform 10. Nobody observed their passing, though if they had, they would have been surprised to see the couple disappear shortly after Platform 9, as if into thin air.

The Reverend Prewett had not known what to expect from Platform Nine and Three Quarters, for the station had only been in use for the past decade, and he had left school before the old carriages had been superseded by a blend of magic and Muggle technology. Whatever he expected, however, could never have been what greeted his eyes; ice coated the iron girders and the flagstones, and a cold wind buffeted him as he walked through the gap between the worlds. He pulled his overcoat tight around him, defending him against the chill.

"I would suggest you keep that dog collar of yours on display, Father. Ghosts and dark magic have a certain respect for deeper powers, and there's no harm in a little brisk weather."

The priest bowed his head, without replying, and muttered a prayer under the steam of his breath. After a minute or two, he looked up, drew a wand from beneath his robes, and bent on one knee to touch the tip to the icy ground.

"I can sense a certain reticence here, Mrs Lestrange. Impotence, almost, a freezing of the desires. In fact..."

He muttered a spell, and his wand barely spluttered.

"Normally the ice would have melted, even in this bedevilled winter -- there's no fire here, though if this is the stone of Malkuth, that's not entirely surprising. That means this is a magical attack on the place, and one that the wards should have stopped, even with blood and gnosis on the side of the wizard assaulting this place. You know, and I could be entirely wrong here, geography was never my friend, but was this not the old staging post from which the carriages departed?"

"Before the Muggles built this place for their locomotive machines, yes, this was where we made our progression to Hogwarts. I think I can trust you when I say that the ghost has been here for rather a long time."

"In that case, we're looking at somebody who's got a strong grip not only of Hebrew, but the old languages as well -- Latin would never be a problem, of course."

"Of course. Which, I must say, we had all considered, and we've narrowed the list of suspects down in consequence. We have fully covered the possibilities as regards the means, and we're sure we can pin a motive on the five people that leads to. The Blacks, of course, my cousin, and I'm sure the bloody Potters could have been involved -- Lupin's always warned us about Thomas Potter's grandson. Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel are the other couple, but you can imagine what people would say if we tried to finger them, and they'd be right. No, you can leave catching Dark Wizards to us, Father. You're our Chaplain, you should know that."

"Very well," interjected the Reverend Prewett mildly. "Then that little performance there was rather pointless."

"I wanted you to know what you were dealing with. Now, what we want you to work out, Father, is a way of getting our station back..."

* * *

At the same time, several hundred miles to the north of where the chaplain and the Auror stood talking, a young boy with auburn hair sat in the library of Hogwarts, reading a thick tome that the Librarian had suggested to him. Albus did not know that the book he was reading was more usually reserved for the Upper Years, but Madame de Worde did, and she was rather regretting the flight of fancy that had prompted her to suggest it to the young boy.

The Christmas holidays had been and gone. Albus had travelled home to Beeston Hall, where his mother had made a terrible fuss of him, and his father had watched in delight as he saw his son charm partridges out of thin air, and light up a roaring fire with a flick of the wand. Every time Albus did so, his father would explain to Beatrice that "Isn't that just dandy!" and would ask her why she didn't make their lives easier with her own magic, whereupon she would change the subject. After a while, Albus stopped showing off. Albus had intended to ask his mother a variety of different questions, on everything about the school and the professors, but between essays, the Christmas celebrations, both in the village and at the Hall, and her deft guidance of topics of conversation, he never really got the chance to ask anything important.

Geoffrey, on the other hand, had little interest in asking questions. At home, the three months that had passed since he left had proved particularly productive. Now that most of the ingredients had been through the first stages of preparation, and were stacked high in bottles, philtres, barrels and boxes, it would have seemed to the outsider that there was little left to do but pour ingredients into wands and experiment. That impression would have been false, as Geoffrey found to his dismay. His family had put him back to work on preparing tables of ingredients and solving equations the day after he had arrived home on the Hogwarts Express, telling him that it would do his grades a world of good.

With the theoretical knowledge from Potions now beginning to take a hold in his mind, he did indeed begin to understand exactly how the combinations worked, even suggesting one or two improvements, although they proved to be failures after a few basic experiments with old wands, and his father told him that there was undoubtedly a mistake in his workings. Never once, however, was he allowed to use his own wand, the one created from the guardians of the wand trees, and Geoffrey suspected that this was on purpose, so as not to offend the other wands in the place at such a delicate time.

In that manner, the Christmas holidays passed in the wand shop, with only one or two customers calling each day to have their wands repaired or fine-tuned, and Geoffrey would be called down each time to deal with the simpler requests. Christmas Day, however, was spent in leisure, and, at last, entirely unprompted, Mr Ollivander strode through the snow to Eeylop's Owl Emporium, returning with a barn owl, though there was no apology for the immense lateness of his gift. Geoffrey spent little time in naming her, and sent off short missives to Albus and Lizzie.

Lizzie had decided to stay on at Hogwarts, rather than return to London. "I get meals here, don't I?" she explained, although Albus suspected that there was another explanation, for she sent several letters complaining of boredom and how she wished she could have been in London with her old friends. Since all but a few of the upper years had left for their own homes, it was not perhaps surprising that the castle had become a dull place, though Professor Maudlin had seized upon the opportunity to continue her Latin lessons uninterrupted, except when she managed to escape to the fields to play in the snow, which she had never seen before so untouched by the refuse of London's streets.

On their return to Hogwarts, their teachers did not hold back from loading them high with work. On this particular Thursday afternoon, Ollivander was off with the Gobstones Club, having finished his Potions essay in record time, and Lizzie had disappeared to her room, where she had settled into an uneasy truce with the other girls. Geoffrey had heard what had happened down on the field, and after a fierce and ungentlemanly hexing match, had convinced them not to try anything too obvious against her.

After a few pages of Hogwarts professors debating the use and abuse of the Astronomy Tower in the 17^th century, Albus skipped and skimmed through the rest of the chapter, prep work mostly forgotten. A word caught his eye, too late for him to stop and read closer, and so he scanned down the page until he saw it again. There it was, yesod, the same as on the flagstone in the courtyard. Albus reread the page around it.

"... an unfortunate precedent. By the year 1712, the split between the Muggle world and our own, though codified in 1692 by the International Confederation of Wizards, as mentioned in Chapter XX, became a practical reality in Britain with the magical sealing and protection of Hogwarts, the first project of the Department of Misinformation. A team of artificers and alchemists led by John Cross, Professor of Alchemy, created a series of magical defences beyond those of the common wards and illusions that had been in place, largely unmodified, since the original charms on the Hoggesmed crannog. The defences, a series of stones, plaques and parchments embedded in the fabric of Hogwarts itself, were based on the ten sephiroth of G-d, popular as a basis of magical theory of the time. Only one is of common knowledge to the school, that being the Stone of יסוד, or yesod, that is Foundation. This led to the creation of the Foundation Courtyard, used as the Grand Entrance to the school until the reconstruction of the Gatekeep after the attacks during the Goblin Rebellion. The ceremony is repeated every year in the summer according to the rites laid down by Professor Cross, and carried out by the school chaplain and the Headmaster.

The Hogwarts Headmaster and the Keeper of the Keys are the sole members of the Hogwarts staff in full possession of the locations of the quabbalistic wards."

So that's what it was, thought Albus to himself, jotting the details down on a piece of spare parchment, before running off to the Foundation Courtyard. It wasn't until he passed the staircase leading to Gryffindor Tower that he decided to seek out Lizzie's attention. Now that she had caught up with the rest of the class in Latin, she had proved rather adept at the most basic magic, although she couldn't reach the raw power that Geoffrey possessed, or the intuition that Albus so frequently displayed in class.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but would there be a first year called Lizzie in there, by any chance?" he asked politely but firmly to two sixth year girls walking down the stairs from the girls dorms.

The taller girl, with tightly knotted, mousy hair snorted with amusement. "It's hardly polite to ask as to the location of a young girl, firstie. Here, Nancy, this young 'un wants to know if there's a first year up there."

Nancy turned out to be the Gryffindor prefect that Albus had met before, and she smiled as she replied to him. "The young lady is just making herself ready."

"Oh, yes, thank you. Could you tell her I've found out about the stone?"

After an awkward minute standing at the foot of the stairs, Albus could see Lizzie descend the stairs.

"She had to clean her up a little bit, but it doesn't seem to take. Well, now, Lizzie, here's your young man."

Albus felt a little worried to be described as Lizzie's 'young man', but he smiled at her anyway, and thanked the two older girls for their help, before leading Lizzie by the hand down the corridor, to the doorway of the courtyard.

The courtyard was ill-tended, a single track running through mud and undergrowth from the doorway to the gate being the only evidence of recent use. The brambles and orchids that had been kept neatly cut back in the flower-beds had grown rapidly from the start of the year, whilst ivy had spread down from the walls that towered above them, like an invading army hurtling across the border walls.

The foundation stone, however, seemed to provide a protection against the wild. The undergrowth maintained a steady distance from it, and Albus walked across to it and knelt down before it. Peering closely at the scrap of parchment he had written his notes on, he began tracing the engraved letters with his long forefinger. "Fundament cognosci et magicus yesod intercedunt..."

Two months ago, this had been far beyond both of their talents, but now it was hardly a problem at all for Albus. "'This, Yesod, is the foundation between magic and learning.' Then it is one of the magical defences. Lizzie, I've worked it out!" He turned to her to see her response.

Lizzie had not been listening, though, for a clump of red flowers had caught her attention. Bright red, with heads like bells, they swayed a little, and Albus fancied he could almost hear them chime. Lizzie was clutching them in both hands, bent over them as if praying, and, as Albus leant down to shake her shoulder, he saw that her hands were bleeding, little drops of blood rolling into the soil, and she toppled forwards, fainting onto the bed of thorns.

"Lizzie!" cried out Albus, as he tried to pull her out of the bed of thorns, which had already grasped at his hands and her face, leaving welts and scratches. His hands grew numb, but his grip was strong enough to pull her away and onto the path. Drawing his wand, he muttered a few words, fending off the plant, and levitated Lizzie away through the door, into the school.

***

Later that day, when Albus had told him all about what had happened, Geoffrey went down to the courtyard, and destroyed every plant there with fire and magic, until all that was left were ashes. Later still, with Lizzie recovering in the infirmary, Albus and Geoffrey were summoned to the Headmaster's office. The silver-clad snake statue rotated down to provide a staircase as they approached, Albus leading the way.

As they entered the room, they noticed that not only the Headmaster was there, but the Groundsman too. Smiling, Phineas Nigellus began to speak.

"Well, boys. I see we're going to have to have a nice little talk..."