"I know," she announced suddenly, eagerly. "Let us spare someone!"
A ripple of desperate hope roiled over the crowd. Voices began to call out, volunteering. James glanced around, somewhat gratified to see that almost none of the volunteers were the government leaders, Muggle or otherwise. He suspected that this was not because they did not wish to be saved, but because they knew a mean-spirited ruse when they heard one.
"I will choose one of you to spare from the ensuing chaos," Judith announced gleefully, glancing around. "Whoever I choose will not be killed by the Morrigan Web. Neither will they be killed in the massacre that follows. Yes," she nodded, glancing back at the world leaders behind her, "yes, that part is true, I fear. None of you will leave this room alive. But still, one of you will not have to endure it." She cocked her head coyly. "Because one of you… I shall kill right now." She smiled. "Won't that be fun?"
"James," Lily whispered faintly, clinging to his arm.
"A volunteer!" Judith cried, whirling toward Lily. "And a Potter, no less! How poignant. The Boy Who Lived grows up to become the father of--" she flung out her hand, transforming it into a writhing, coiling tentacle, "the Girl Who Died!"
She cackled as the tentacle flew through the air, converging on Lily. James flung his sister behind him, crying out in mingled desperation and rage, forcing himself between her and the icy coil of the Lady of the Lake.
I'm about to die… he thought, squeezing his eyes shut, and the last thing I heard my dad say is that he's proud of me…
Instead of a spear of deadly ice, however, a splash of tepid water struck James, dousing him where he stood.
He opened his eyes. Judith stood before him, her arm extended, but ending in a dripping, faltering stump. She raised her dissolving arm and regarded it with complete, naked surprise. Turning her attention back to James, she narrowed her eyes and flung out her arm again. It extended, snaking, trailing streams of dripping water, and then dissolved away, crashing to the floor with a wet, resounding splat.
"What…" she breathed, her voice shaking with confusion, "what is this…? How can this…?"
She tried again, using both arms. The result was the same, only now her arms dissolved up to the shoulders. She boggled down at them, her mouth falling open.
Suddenly, she whirled around, turning her attention to the gigantic ball of ice that formed Petra's prison, as if she fully expected it to be shattered into pieces, Petra standing free, teasing her with a knowing grin. Seeing the ice-cocoon intact, however, Judith slumped, regrowing her arms somewhat sloppily. Softly, helplessly, she began to giggle.
James watched this with growing confusion. Lily climbed to her feet behind him, clinging to him and peering around his shoulder.
Judith's giggles increased, growing into hard, breathless gusts of laughter. And then, seamlessly, the laughter transformed into wracking sobs. She spun around again, and her eyes were wide, wild, bulging in her face, dead as marbles.
"Where!" she rasped, still giggling and sobbing uncontrollably. "I hear you! I know you're back there! NOW!"
She flailed, streaming her arms out into tentacles again. They whipped across the hall this time, fluid and spastic, aiming for nothing. Judith cackled, gasped, and suddenly, horribly, let out a blood-curdling, rafter-quaking scream.
Rechtor Grudje was blasted aside by one of the tentacles. Seeing this, the remainder of the crowd panicked. People began dashing in every direction, trying to avoid Judith's blindly writhing appendages. The student ambassadors scrambled behind their platform, screaming in terror. Judith stumbled around the centre of the floor, her head thrown back, her hair falling from its bun, her mouth screaming, cackling, sobbing, babbling nonsense beneath wide, utterly haunted eyes.
"What's wrong with her!?" Lily cried, her voice so high it was barely audible.
James glanced behind him, to his sister's frightened face, and then lower. Rose still lay crumpled against the wall, Marshall Parris' tie still compressed to her shoulder by Ralph's big hands. She glanced up at James with her eyes, then down, at the blue purse abandoned on the floor next to her. It was clearly empty. But in the shadows of its open mouth, James spied the unmistakable dregs of dried vines, broken leaf dust, and a single spiny bur.
The Yuxa Baslatma plants! The ones that had come back from Durmstrang, tangled variously into Rose's robes! That's what she had stopped in her dormitory room for! That's what she had been doing hunkered down beneath the easels when they had first arrived. Rose-- who had at first refused to believe in the very existence of the Lady of the Lake-- had in the end spied her best weakness: she travels by water.
Rose had poisoned that water, filling it with twenty dreams' worth of Dream Inducers.
And now, eleven minutes after her arrival, every shred of those forced hallucinations was daggering into Judith's waking mind, driving her utterly, uncontrollably insane.
Unfortunately, Judith's insanity was propelling her into a dangerous, deadly rampage. She seemed to be growing in size, bulging, her shape rippling as it transformed into sloshing liquid, losing the ability to maintain form. She struck out in all directions, screaming, cackling, her hair flying wild and her eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed. Her tentacle arms divided into pairs, and then split again, forming an octopoid flail of thrashing tendrils, striking randomly into the scattering crowd. James watched helplessly as the horrible watery shape ravaged the Hall, terrorizing its fleeing occupants. Over her head, the Clock ticked on. There were barely three minutes left.
Judith screamed again, so loudly and violently that it shook the floor. With an apparent force of will, she withdrew her tentacles and clapped her hands to her head, as if trying to force her mad thoughts into some semblance of order. When she opened her eyes again, they glowed blue, shockingly bright. Her mouth cinched down in a frown of intense concentration. She cast around, spied James, Rose, Ralph and Lily, and hissed, distending her jaw into a horrible, cat-like maw. Her arms exploded into tentacles again, and all eight of them streamed forward, tipped with ragged, icy claws.
A lithe pink shape struck Judith in the chest like an arrow, spoiling her aim and knocking her aside. The icy claws struck the stone floor and shattered into shards. The pink shape-- a lissom, coiling snake over ten feet long-- buried itself in Judith's semi-liquid chest and burst out of her back, opening its own jaws in a vicious hiss. Judith stared down at the whipping pink tail protruding from her chest and began to giggle uncontrollably, her sense of lucidity lost once again, overwhelmed by the insanity visions of her wakingdreams. She grabbed the pink tail and yanked it. The snake withdrew from her chest violently, along with an explosion of horrible, black water.
"Nastasia," Rose said faintly, somehow audible over the din of screams and chaos, "she came back…"
"Part of her," James nodded, stunned with amazement.
In the centre of the Hall floor, the engorged, disintegrating figure of Judith continued to wrestle with Nastasia's writhing, pink snake, just as they had months ago in the midnight corridors. If not for Judith's weakened, insane state, she might have overwhelmed Nastasia. As it was, the battle was surprisingly evenly matched. Finally, with a roar of fury, Judith completely fell apart. The discorporated torrent of her body streamed across the floor, wailing with inhuman rage, and boiled down a grate, escaping into the sewers deep below. The pink snake thrashed after her, using its jaws to rip the grate from its socket and slithering swiftly down the hole beneath, intent on pursuit.
The Hall seemed suddenly, unnaturally quiet. Titus Hardcastle moaned and stirred from the debris of the broken table. Broken candles lay across the stone floor like bits of chalk, some with their flames still flickering and guttering. The remains of the Fountain of Magical Brethren lay before the dais, glinting amongst the debris of broken tables and their scattered, shattered contents.
Suddenly, a loud, splintering crack echoed around the Hall. James turned toward the sound to see Petra's icy prison suddenly laced with thick white fissures, exp
anding as he watched, crackling faintly. An instant later, the ice cocoon shattered, spraying chunks of ice across the stone floor in all directions. Where it had once stood, her hair and clothing crusted with ice, Petra climbed stiffly to her feet.
James ran to join her.
"How's Rose," Petra gasped, her voice hoarse.
"She's… I don't know!" James answered frantically. "Ralph's helping her, I think. Your detective friend as well."
Stiffly, Petra turned her head toward Rose and seemed to concentrate on her. After a moment, she said, "She'll be all right. For now, at least."
James nodded his understanding. Petra had stabilized Rose's injury somehow. It was just one of those sorceress things she knew how to do.
Petra glanced at the double doors at the rear of the hall. Another splintering crack echoed around the hall and the doors shuddered.
"Go," she said dully, nodding toward the doors. "They're unsealed. Get everyone out of here."
Lucinda Lyon gave the doors a hard pull. With a grind of ice, they wrenched partway open. People began to mill forward, forming a panicked bottleneck in their hurry to escape.
"Petra!" James exclaimed, grabbing Petra's shoulders. "It's too late! The Clock! It's going to go off in barely a minute! We can't empty the Hall in time! We have to stop the Morrigan Web!"
"It can't be stopped," Petra sighed deeply, hopelessly. "We can't move it. We can't take the cane out of it. Judith won."
James shook his head in desperate impatience. "It can be stopped! We just have to switch out the thing inside it! If only we can find something just as powerful as Magnussen's cane, and connected to him somehow, but good!"
Petra laughed hollowly, shaking her head. "Oh, is that all?" She pushed him weakly toward the doors. "Go on, James. Escape if you can. I'm too drained to help. If we were in the city, it might be different. But out here…" she shrugged and stumbled. James grabbed her, threw an arm around her to support her.
Ralph's voice called over the clamouring crowd. "James! What about your dream!" he said, craning to look back at James over his shoulder even as he continued to compress Rose's wound. "It was supposed to be the answer to our most vexing question! This has got to be it, hasn't it? How to stop the Morrigan Web! What to replace it with! Think back on your dream!"
James shook his head in frustration. "I can't! There's no time!" He glanced up at the Clock again. The minute hand ticked forward, edging toward the number twelve. There was less than a minute left. And then, as he stared at the Clock, something Marshall Parris had said flitted into his mind--
Saw enough injury reports at the old man's law office to learn a few things…
"Quinn wins," James whispered, his eyes widening. He glanced back toward Ralph. Marshall Parris was still squatted next to him, supporting Rose with one arm behind her shoulders. "Hey Mr. Parris," James called, "Tell me, does the phrase 'Quinn wins' mean anything to you?"
Parris blinked at him in confused surprise. "How…?" he began, then cocked his head and frowned. "It was my old man's slogan. Not my dad, but the guy whose house I grew up in. He had it on billboards all over town, advertising his law firm. 'Quinn wins'. Stupid but catchy. But… how could you know that?"
"Because," James said, hopping with excitement, "it's the answer to our most vexing question!"
Petra shook her head in confusion. "What are you talking about, James?"
"The alley where his mother was killed," James said quickly, replaying the dream in his head. "She had the gun-- the gun that killed Professor Magnussen all those years earlier! The same gun you had," James declared, his voice rising as he turned back to Parris, "when you ran into her killer, years later! It saved you then! It's… it's sort of a good luck charm, isn't it? It keeps you safe! That's why you're such a good detective, even in the wizarding world! The gun that killed Magnussen took his power, just like a wand would!"
Petra straightened and tilted her head at Parris. "The talisman," she said wonderingly, almost laughingly, "is that ancient pistol of yours? Seriously?"
Parris rolled his eyes. Gently, he disengaged from Rose and stood up. He reached into his trench coat and produced a very old, grimy pistol. James recognized it immediately.
"That's it!" he cried, dashing toward the detective, his hand out. "It's the key to stopping the Morrigan Web! It's as powerful as the cane-- more powerful, because it defeated it! And it's connected to Magnussen in the most important way of all! It ended him!"
"Hold on, skippy," Parris said, withholding the ancient weapon from James' reaching hand. "I don't know who you are, and I sure don't know what you're talking about. This thing belonged to my mother. It's important to me, and it's dangerous. Just because you know the slogan for my old man's billboards, I'm not about to just hand it over to you--"
"Give it to him, Parris," Petra said.
"No chance, doll," Parris replied firmly.
Petra sighed impatiently. "I'll pay you one thousand galleons for it."
"Here ya go, kid," Parris nodded, dropping the old weapon into James' open hand.
Behind them, obliviously, people mobbed at the partly open doors, pushing through with horrible sluggishness.
"Petra!" James exclaimed, holding the weapon awkwardly by the handle. He'd never handled such a thing before. "Lift me up!"
Petra nodded. She closed her eyes and extended a hand toward James. Instantly, he felt gravity fall away, releasing him into the air. Gently, he lofted over the broken statues, the decimated fountain, and into the icy chill of the frosted rose window. The ugly five-faced clock hung before him, its guts ratcheting faintly, pushing the minute hand inexorably, gradually forward. Hovering before it, James studied the clock, looking for any hidden compartment or alcove.
There were only seconds left.
Desperately, James reached forward and grabbed the gigantic central white face with his free hand. He tugged at it, meaning to wrench the face off completely. With a brief screech, however, the face hinged open, swinging like a door and revealing the Clock's ticking, gear-choked innards.
A small compartment occupied the lower third. Inside it, glinting wickedly, was the familiar gargoyle-faced cane head.
"Don't just grab it out!" Rose called, struggling to raise her voice over the clambering crowd. "Switch them, James!"
Ralph added, "But be quick about it!"
James held the old pistol next to the glinting cane, bringing them as close together as he could. Like opposing magnets, they seemed to resist each other. James steeled himself, wrapped his free hand around the cane (which was hot to the touch, as if it had been sitting for months in blazing desert sun) and held his breath.
He tugged. The cane didn't want to move. He tugged harder, straining and pushing the pistol forward, trying to force them to switch places. It wasn't working. Something forced them apart, a sort of tiny but undeniable gravity, a force field of destiny, insisting that what was meant to happen had to happen.
And then, suddenly, the force field broke. The cane flew from the compartment at the precise moment that the pistol slammed into it. James recoiled backward, cane in hand, caught in mid-air by Petra's careful levitation.
The clock struck the hour. Brilliant light exploded from it, blinding James. He shielded his eyes and cringed away. Tendrils of magic arced from the clock, white-gold in the expanse of the Hall. The tendrils connected like lightning to every wizard and witch in the hall-- Titus Hardcastle, who had finally regained his feet, along with the other Aurors; Lily and the other student ambassadors; every diplomat and Ministry official in the clamouring crowd-- all were suddenly connected in a sparkling, flashing Web of magical energy. The Web's intensity built, became blinding, and then, with an explosive crescendo of perfect finality, burst into a mass of inexplicable red, purple and yellow shapes, filling the Hall entirely.
James felt himself lowered suddenly to the floor, clumsily, as Petra glanced around, her eyes wild, worried, examining the flittering, colourful cloud. A scent filled the Hall, soft
but pervasive, smelling incongruously of spring breezes and sunlight. It was, in fact, the unmistakable perfume of spring flowers, and with it, James recognized the fluttering veil of objects. They were petals, descending like confetti, covering the floor, the broken tables, the smashed statues, and every person in the Hall, transforming the chaotic scene into a softly magical wonderland.
Every eye in the room cast about in stunned silence, watching the gentle snowfall of colour.
Slowly, cautiously, Petra relaxed. She turned to look back at James over her shoulder, a fragile smile rising on her face like a sunrise.
James returned the smile. Helplessly, he fell to a seat on the floor, releasing the ugly cane head, weak with relief.
Behind him, suddenly, the door beneath the Rose window shuddered. Something banged against it from the inside, then blasted it open. From his seat on the floor, covered with fluttering petals and smelling of summer rose gardens, James turned. His father, uncle and aunt burst through the antechamber door, wands raised alertly, shoulders hunched for battle. Spying the gently falling curtain of petals, they stopped, looks of comical confusion dawning on their faces.
Harry spotted his son seated amidst a drift of petals and lowered his wand.
"James," he asked, his voice strained with wonder and confusion, "What… exactly… did we miss?"
25. THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
The moment the crowd of ambassadors, diplomats and government officials drained from the Hall, carefully guarded by the Aurors, Albus and Scorpius appeared, as well as Zane and, unexpectedly, Professor Flitwick.
"Whoa," Zane said, his eyes going wide as he pushed through the double doors and spied the destruction and bizarre floral decoration of the room. "This must have been some party!"
"Albus," Harry called his son, beckoning him forward urgently. "Help us! Rose has been hurt!"
James Potter and the Morrigan Web Page 76