And I know that you and your friends were ultimately responsible for it.” He tilted an eye at James, as if he could see the wave of guilt that washed over him, making him shrink against the hull wall. Lowering his voice to a low rumble, the headmaster said, “Your error was not in attempting to rescue the dragon from her own persistent instincts, Mr.
Potter. Until recent years, normal magical protections would have rendered the city impenetrable to creatures such as she. Nor did you err in not telling me of your plans. I am, personally, quite content when citizens willingly delegate these tasks to themselves. It frees those such as myself to their own unique devices.”
“So…” James said, frowning a little. “We’re not in trouble?”
“Your error,” Merlin said, raising a finger, “and the error of your companions, was to trust an elf whose motives were proven to be suspect.”
James sat up in surprise. “How did you know about her? We didn’t mention her to my dad or anyone else!”
Merlin drew a deep sigh and blew it out thoughtfully. “I’d prefer to allow you to believe that I divined this information via my own mysterious and terrible machinations. But I find that trust is a more valuable commodity than awe when it comes to you, Mr. Potter.
Therefore I will admit: I spoke to Hagrid, and he wisely regaled me with the whole story. We conversed on the deck of this very ship as we awaited you and your family. He told me of the house elf, and her sabotage of your otherwise courageous, if rather foolhardy, arrangement with his giantish kin.”
James slumped in mingled relief and humiliation. “I tried to tell them that Heddlebun couldn’t be trusted. I saw what she did back at the Vandergriff’s house.”
“You saw it,” Merlin clarified, “But Hagrid did not. Nor your cousin, or Mr. Walker, or Mr. Dolohov. ”
James glanced aside at him again. “Exactly. So?”
“So the truth was clear for you to see, but cloudy for them. It was your responsibility to make it clear, by whatever means necessary.
Thus, the responsibility for the error rests heavier on your shoulders than theirs.”
This wasn’t the first time that James had encountered the headmaster’s strict, unforgiving interpretation of responsibility, but it still nettled him to no end. He crossed his arms, clutching his shoulders against the chill of the hold. “So it’s all my fault, then. Is that what you want me to hear?”
Merlin shrugged again. “If there is one thing that constantly dismays me about this age, it is the speed and ease with which good people give up. Grant me a stubborn donkey over a weak-willed saint.
At least the donkey’s kick can be aimed at the proper doors.”
“So,” James said, rolling his eyes to himself, “just to be clear, are we in trouble or not?”
“That is what we are on this journey to discover,” Merlin answered, returning his gaze to the small book in his hands. To James’ eye, the book looked completely blank, but he knew that this was surely an illusion to prevent its being read by the likes of him. “For you, Mr.
Potter, the days of trouble being meted out in house points and lines are over. Make no mistake: from here onward, trouble shall be measured in laws, years, and blood.”
James chose to view this as a good thing, in the sense that it didn’t seem to indicate that the headmaster intended to give him, Ralph, or Rose any official punishment.
Soon enough, the ship tilted upwards and seemed to accelerate.
The momentum pushed James against Millie, almost driving her off her end of the short bench. Merlin, however, remained completely planted, as if his feet were rooted to the floor. He continued to read his tiny, fat book, peering down through his spectacles, even as the ship rocked upright, seemed to hover in suspension for a long, sickening moment, and then keeled slowly forward, falling flat again onto a thudding, sloshing surface.
“Londontown, I presume,” Merlin said, finally tucking his book into his robes and standing as much as the low overhead would allow.
Footsteps sounded from above, moving quickly. Merlin climbed the stairs to the deck with James and Millie following close behind.
Cold air coursed over the deck above and whistled eerily through the rigging. By the look of the city all around, the Gertrude appeared to have surfaced in exactly the same place as last time. Fortunate, of course, since the ice of the Thames had not frozen over the original hole yet.
The adults congregated on the stern of the ship and, without a word, apparated to the shore, materializing on a long boardwalk in the shadow of a dark wharf, where they were nothing more than shadows on a darker background. Millie side-along apparated with Hermione and Ron, while Harry remained last to take James.
“That was wily of you to arrange to come along the way that you did,” he said with a wry smile. “I hope your friend Millie knows enough to make it worth it.”
James shrugged a little. “She hopes so, too.”
He took his father’s hand when he offered it. A moment later, the world vanished into a whip-crack and a whirl of cold darkness.
Within a sliver of a second, James’ feet smacked down onto the leaning planks of the boardwalk.
When he looked up, Merlin had his staff in his hand, having produced it out of thin air, as he always did when he desired it. He held it aloft over the edge of the boardwalk, pointing it toward the dark ship where it bobbed in its circle of broken ice.
“Cuddiasid,” he said, reverting to the guttural language of his ancient origins. A wave of purple light swept upwards through the runes of his staff, culminating in the tip with a brief but blinding flash. When James’ eyes cleared, the Gertrude was gone. Shards of broken ice choked the hole where it had rocked only a second before. The ship was still there, James knew, but rendered utterly hidden and invisible through whatever prehistoric enchantment the sorcerer had cast over it.
“That’s pretty handy,” Millie commented, awed. “I see why you came along.”
“My usefulness has only begun to reveal itself,” Merlin said, clacking his staff to the wooden plank next to his feet. “Assuming that your usefulness serves as well as Mr. Potter hopes.”
Millie looked uncomfortably from Merlin to James.
Hagrid spoke up, pointing to the brightly glowing shape of Tower Bridge in the near distance. “Norberta went that way. Down into th’ city, southwest from th’ south tower.”
Harry struck out, inviting the others to follow. “Then let us get into the proper vicinity. Perhaps we will get lucky and stumble upon the unmistakable stench of dragon manure.”
Ron shrugged gamely. “That’s the only time that smell’s been called ‘lucky’, I wager.”
“Wellnow,” Hagrid suggested, shrugging his coat more tightly about his shoulders, “I’ve always found dragon scat t’ ‘ave a not unpleasant odor, as a matter o’ fact. Now hippogriff guano, gor…” He shook his head violently, “noble creatures they may be, but there’s a stink to peel the varnish off yer broomstick.”
Following along behind, Hermione sniffed, “I expect there are better topics of conversation we might explore.”
From there, the troupe walked in silence as they approached the lights and sounds of the city, climbing a switchback of concrete stairs to a thoroughfare lit with brilliant orange-ish streetlamps on tall, industrial-looking posts. The street was surprisingly busy for the hour, filled with gleaming black taxis, lorries belching smoke, red double-decker buses, and endless automobiles. Dozens of traffic lights hung over cross-roads, blinking their red, amber, and green eyes at the lines of vehicles below.
In one direction, Tower Bridge loomed over low rooftops. In the other, a massive roundabout spun with vehicles, lit like a flying saucer, like a larger-than-life version of the Wocket from James’ first year.
Merlin stepped out to cross the crowded thoroughfare, completely ignoring the rushing vehicles that bore down on him, their headlamps glaring and painting his robes with brightness.
“Wait!” James called, alarmed,
but it was too late. Vehicles swooped past and around the huge man at full speed, neither swerving nor sounding their horns. Neither did Merlin pay the vehicles any attention. He merely strode across the many lanes, his staff clacking the pavement at his side. Halfway across, he paused to look back at the people watching, dumbfounded, from the curb behind.
“A little trick I learned navigating herds of stampeding Erumpents during my travels in darkest Africa,” he called in his deep, resonating voice. “Follow close behind. We have a schedule to keep.”
“Oh, bloody hell,” Ron muttered in a high voice. “He’s not serious, is he?”
Hermione said, “I think I’ll take the cross-walk, if you don’t mind.” She struck off at a trot toward the nearest traffic light some fifty yards away.
“I’m with her,” Ron nodded firmly. “We’ll catch up to ‘Mr. Red Cross-code Man’ on the other side, and schedule be damned.”
Hagrid wrung his huge hands in miserable indecision, glancing back and forth between the headmaster’s retreating back and the hurrying Weasleys. “I’ll jus’…” He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, beginning to back away, “keep an eye on ‘em, then. Erm.” Turning, he hastened to join Ron and Hermione, his long coat flapping behind him.
“I’m going to try it,” Millie said, watching the headmaster with a twinkle in her eye.
“What!?” James began, “Millie, we can’t just—” but she had already stepped off the curb. Walking purposefully, without a glance back, she began to stride across the first lane. Headlamps painted her side with increasing luminance as vehicles bore down on her.
“Millie!” he called, and took one step down from the curb. A bus swept past her, buffeting her hair with the zooming blast of its passage. She didn’t even glance at it.
“Dad!” James exclaimed, turning aside to his father, but his father wasn’t there anymore, either. The elder Potter was also striding out onto the busy street, neither hurrying nor hesitating, keeping his gaze straight ahead as vehicles blurred past in both directions, whipping at his pant-legs and unruly hair.
James hovered a moment longer, completely stymied with uncertainty. And then, with a gulp and a steeling of his already frayed nerve, he stepped out onto the pavement of the thoroughfare himself.
The key, it appeared, was not to watch, not to pay the slightest attention to the rushing lanes of vehicles on either side. He kept his eyes firmly on his father’s back as he trod ahead of him, even as his father seemed to watch Millie ahead of him. Merlin had reached the other side now, having crossed no less than six lanes of busy nighttime traffic.
Without warning, a load of vehicles blared past in both directions, flickering between James and his father, momentarily obscuring his view. His eyes strained, reflexively trying to follow the flashing metal and glass of the vehicles, to look both ways to assure that his next step wouldn’t place him into the path of a speeding lorry. And yet, just barely, James resisted, keeping his gaze locked dead ahead. And each step, amazingly, carried him forward between roaring cars and taxis, buses and vans, threading through them in a sort of suicidal dance. The passing drivers, for their part, seemed completely oblivious to the line of magical pedestrians crossing between them. James could feel the hot blat of exhausts on his face, the sooty grit of road grime peppering his cheeks and hair. And yet, almost before he thought it possible, he found himself stepping up onto the curb of the other side of the boulevard, leaving the deafening drone of traffic behind him.
“That was brilliant!” Millie exclaimed, grabbing James’ hands and pulling him forward, into a narrow alley. “Wasn’t it a complete blast?”
“How could you do that?” James gasped, his heart still slamming in his throat. “Either of you?!”
Harry shrugged with one shoulder, glancing into the mouth of the alley, where Merlin was still striding away, a mere silhouette against the security lights beyond. “If Merlin said it was safe, I’ve come to trust him,” he said. “But don’t you dare ever try that on your own. Either of you.”
“No worries there!” James said, still struggling to catch his breath over the thunder of his heart. He glanced around the street outside the alley. “Where’s Aunt Hermione and Uncle Ron?”
“They’ll catch up to us,” his father answered, “come on. It would seem that the Headmaster is in the teeth of the hunt.”
James found himself running along behind his father into the shadows and stink of the alley. Darkness choked the space, interrupted only by glaring security lights that didn’t seem to illuminate anything other than slushy puddles and hulking trash bins.
The alley ended in a narrow cobbled road bordered by a long chain-link fence. Beyond the fence was a dark open space, crowded with low weeds and bushes, that James vaguely recognized as a railway switchyard.
Merlin had stopped before the fence, the runes of his staff pulsing a pale blue. “In there,” he said, nodding his bearded chin. He stepped forward and the chain-link rattled and rang before him as if buffeted by a sudden, silent gale. The mesh of metal unfurled and unraveled, spiraling out from a centre point and forming a gaping opening just as the headmaster stepped through it, not even bowing his head. James and Millie clambered to follow him through, now with James’ father in the rear, his wand held at the ready, his eyes alert behind his spectacles.
“What about the others?” Millie said, her voice unconsciously hushed beneath the steady thrum of the city all around.
“Coming,” Hermione’s voice called, approaching from behind.
James turned to see his aunt run lightly out of the darkness, her bushy hair bouncing about her face. “I’m right here. And Ron is…” She turned to look back. “Well. On his way, it would seem.”
“Save yourselves!” a man’s voice wheezed from the vicinity of the chain-link fence. “I’ll just lie down here and die.”
“Come on, Ron,” Harry called back. “Think of it as exercise.”
Ron approached at a shamble, breathing hard. “You mean she’s not the only one what does this running thing just for fun? That’s a masochist streak, you ask me.”
Millie asked, “What about Hagrid?”
“I thought it might be a good idea to have him ask around at some of the wizarding establishments near Diagon Alley,” Hermione said. “There are loads of pubs and pawn shops and the like, secretly run by witches and wizards for Muggle patronage. Some of them might have seen or heard something about where Norberta has holed up.”
“He didn’t want to go,” Ron said, glancing aside at Harry. “But we thought… er… he might be more useful in that capacity.”
Harry nodded once, meaningfully. Tonight’s plan relied largely on subtlety and finesse, James knew, and neither of those things exactly sprang to mind when one thought of Hagrid.
The troupe began to move into the darkness of the switchyard again. Harry nodded toward Merlin and explained, “The old man seems to have caught a hint of a trail or something.”
“Not a trail as such,” Merlin said as he walked. “There may not be much wild left in the City, but what there is of it, the weed-grasses and brush, the beetles and rats, they remember the scent of a powerful beast near here, too vague to pinpoint exactly.”
Moving swiftly, James followed his dad and the others into the darkness. Soon, they were stepping up over humps of railroad tracks, their footsteps grinding on gravel.
“Miss Vandergriff,” Merlin announced from the lead, “what shall we be looking for from this point? I understand that you are our resident expert on the sorts of Norwegian structures that might attract a particular dragonish heritage.”
“I’m nobody’s expert,” Millie said, “I told James, I barely know anything—”
Merlin stopped and turned, more suddenly and gracefully than seemed possible for a man of his size. In the darkness, he was like a faceless totem rising out of the rail-beds.
“Miss Vandergriff,” he said, his voice soft and deep, yet strangely penetrating. “While humility is widely conside
red a virtue, it is not one that I myself prize under even normal circumstances. I believe that you do indeed have the requisite knowledge to accomplish our mission this night. Therefore, pray, do not allow your own understandable insecurities to be an impediment. Call upon what your interests have cultivated. What are we seeking? More accurately, what may have attracted a creature of some limited intellect seeking a reminder of her ancestral Norwegian homeland?”
Millie opened her mouth to object, paused, and then, after a thoughtful moment, closed it again. James recognized Merlin’s subtle powers at work. The ancient sorcerer did not control people magically, exactly. But he did exert a sort of calming, focusing influence on them at certain important times.
James turned to look more closely at Millie. Her eyes were open wide, not in shock, but in thought. Her pupils flicked rhythmically back and forth, as if she was scanning a file cabinet in her own mind.
“There was no such thing as architecture in Norway for centuries,” she said in a musing voice, blinking rapidly. “They built huts and houses out of whatever was at hand, with no thought to design.
Except for the churches. Those they built with things called staves, tall posts that allowed them to build very tall and narrow, with sharp, sloping roofs. The magical varieties were built with Redwood staves, allowing them to be massively tall. Most of them were built with a sort of vertical diminishing redundancy.”
“Vertical…? Now she’s just not making any sense,” James muttered aside to his uncle Ron, who shrugged and shook his head.
Millie glanced at James. “I’m standing right here, you know,” she said. “I can hear everything you say.”
James gave a shrug, half apologetic, half impatient.
Hermione urged gently, “Go on, Millie, you’re doing well.”
Millie narrowed her eyes again in thought. “Vertical diminishing redundancy just means that the church structure is repeated atop itself in smaller and smaller versions, up and up, sort of like a Chinese pagoda.”
James Potter and the Crimson Thread Page 44