Текст книги "James Potter and the Hall of the Elders' Crossing"

Автор книги: G. Norman Lippert

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 37 страниц)

        "You have to say a special phrase. Dad told me a long time ago, but I can't remember it off the top of my head. We'll give it a try some night. Right now, I don't want to think about it."

        Ralph nodded and let the subject drop. They entered the castle through the main portico and parted at the stairs leading to the cellars and the Slytherin quarters.

        It was getting late and James found himself alone in the corridors. The wintry night was cloudy and starless. It pressed against the windows and sucked at the light of the hall torches. James shivered, partly at the cold and partly at a sense of icy dread that seemed to be seeping into the corridor, filling it like a heavy fog from the floor up. He walked faster, wondering how it could be that the halls were so dark and empty. It wasn't particularly late, and yet the air had a sense of chilly stillness that felt like the dead of morning or the air of a sealed crypt. He realized he'd been walking rather farther than the corridor should have allowed. Surely he should have come to the intersection with the statue of the one-eyed witch by now, where he'd turn left into the reception hall, leading to the staircases. James stopped and glanced back the way he had come. The hall looked the same, and yet wrong somehow. It looked far too long. The shadows of it seemed to be in the wrong places, teasing his eye somehow. And then he noticed there were no torches on the walls. The light hung empty, ghostly, bleeding its color from flickering yellow to shimmery silver, fading even as he watched.

Fear leaped onto James' back, icy cold and undeniable. He spun back to the front, meaning to run, but his feet failed him when he saw what was ahead. The corridor was still there, but the pillars had become the trunks of trees. The ribs of the vaulted ceilings had turned to limbs and vines, with nothing beyond but the vast face of the night sky. Even the pattern of the tiled floor melted into a lacework of roots and dead leaves. And then, even as James watched, the illusion of the school corridor evaporated completely, leaving only forest. Cold wind barreled past him, whipping his cloak and threading the hair back from his temples with ghostly fingers. James recognized where he was, even though the last time he'd been here, the leaves had still been on the trees and the crickets had been singing their chorus. This was the wood bordering the lake, near the island of the Grotto Keep. The trees groaned, rubbing their bare branches together in the wind, and the sound was like low voices moaning in sleep, wrapped in fever dreams. James realized he was walking again, moving toward the edge of the trees, where the reeds swished and bobbed at the edge of the lake. A great, dark mass rose beyond, blotting out the view. As James approached, apparently helpless to stop his plodding feet, the moon unveiled from a bank of dense clouds. The island of the Grotto Keep revealed itself in the moonglow, and James' breath caught in his chest. The island had grown. The impression of a secret fortress was stronger than ever. It was a gothic monstrosity, decked with grim statues and leering gargoyles, all somehow grown from the vines and trees of the island. The dragon's maw of the bridge lay before him, and James forced himself to stop there, without setting a foot onto it. He remembered the gnashing wooden teeth as it had tried to devour him and Zane. In the silvery moonlight, the gates at the other end of the bridge were quite visible, as well as the words of the poem. When by the light of Sulva bright I found the Grotto Keep. The gates suddenly shuddered and flung open, revealing blackness like a throat. A voice came out of that blackness, clear and beautiful, pure as a chiming bell.

        "Keeper of the relic," said the voice. "Your duty is satisfied."

        As James stood and watched, looking across the bridge into the darkness of the open doorway, a light formed there. It condensed, solidified, and assumed a shape. It was, James recognized, the gently glowing shape of a dryad, a woman of the wood, a tree sprite. It wasn't the same one he had met before, however. That one had glowed with a green light. This one's light was pale blue. She pulsed slightly. Her hair flowed around her head as if in a current of water. A quiet, almost loving smile was on her lips and her huge, liquid eyes twinkled gently.

        "You have performed your role," the dryad said, her voice as dreamy and hypnotic as the other dryad's had been, if not more so. "You need not guard the relic. This is not your burden. Bring it to us. We are its guardians. Ours is the task, granted from the beginning. Relieve yourself of its weight. Bring us the relic."

        James looked down and saw that, without realizing it, he had taken a step onto the bridge. The dragon's maw hadn't closed on him. He glanced up and saw that it had actually pulled upwards a bit, welcoming him. The junction of the fallen trees which formed the jaw creaked slightly.

        "Bring us the relic," the dryad said again, and she lifted her arms toward James as if she meant to welcome him with an embrace. Her arms were unnaturally long, almost as if they stretched out to him over the bridge. Her fingernails were a blue so deep, it was nearly purple. They were long and surprisingly ragged. James retreated a step, backing off the bridge. The dryad's eyes changed. They brightened and hardened.

        "Bring us the relic," she said once more, and her voice changed as well. The song had leaked out of it. "It isn't yours. Its power is greater than you, greater than all of you. Bring it to us before it unmakes you. The relic destroys those whom it does not need, and it no longer needs you. Bring it to us before it decides to use someone else. Bring us the relic while you still can."

        Her long arms reached across the bridge and James felt sure he could touch them if he reached out. He backed away further, hooking his heel on a root and stumbling. He turned, pinwheeling his arms for a handhold, and fell against something broad and hard. He pressed his hands against it and pushed backwards, righting himself. It was the stone of a wall. Five feet away, a torch crackled in its sconce. James glanced around. The corridor of Hogwarts stretched away, warm and mundane, as if he'd never left. Perhaps he never had. He looked the other direction. There was the intersection with the statue of the one-eyed witch. The sense of dread was gone, and yet James felt certain that what had happened hadn't just been a vision of some kind. He could still feel the chill of the night wind in the folds of his cloak. When he looked down, there was a crumble of dry river mud on the end of his shoe. He shivered, then gathered himself and ran the rest of the way to the stairs, where he took two at a time climbing to the common room.

The only thing James was sure of was that something wanted him to give up the Merlin robe. He just wasn't sure it was the right something. Fortunately, the robe was still locked away in Jackson's bag in James' trunk. After his experience with touching the robe, James had no plans to take the robe out of the trunk again until he handed it over to his dad and the Auror Department when the time was right. The time wasn't right yet, but it would be. Soon. Either way, he wasn't about to hand it over to some mysterious entity, tree sprite or not. Confident of this, James reached the Gryffindor common room and prepared for bed. Still, long after he had settled under his blankets, he thought he could hear the whispering voice in the wind beyond the window, pleading with him endlessly, monotonously: Bring us the relic… Bring us the relic while you still can…It chilled him, and when he did sleep, he dreamed of those haunting, beautiful eyes and those long, long arms with the thin hands and ragged, purple fingernails.

        The following Friday, in Herbology class, James was amused to see that Neville Longbottom had moved Ralph's transfigured peach tree out of the Transfiguration classroom, where it had become rather cumbersome, and into one of the greenhouses.

        "All this from a banana." Neville confirmed to James after class.

        "Yeah. I bet Ralph was more surprised than anybody. He's amazing, but I don't think he knows his own power, really. Some of the other Slytherins think he's got some powerful old magical family in his bloodline. Could be, I suppose, since he never knew his mum."

        "That's the sort of thing they'd think," Neville said with unusual candor. "Muggle-borns can be just as powerful as anyone born of an old pureblood family. Some prejudices never change, though."

        James looked up at the peach tree, which had become rather large despite the fact that its roots were still twined hopelessly around one of the Transfiguration room tables. He knew Neville was right, but he couldn't help thinking about the look on Ralph's face the day he'd transfigured the banana. Ralph had never said so, but James had a sense that Ralph's power frightened him just a little.

        The next day, the Gryffindor Quidditch team was slated in a match against the Slytherins. James sat in the Gryffindor stands with Zane and Sabrina Hildegard. Ralph, for purposes of maintaining his few Slytherin friends, sat in the green-decked grandstand across the pitch. James made eye contact with Ralph once and waved. Ralph waved back, but carefully, being sure not to be seen by his older housemates.

Below, on the field, the team captains strode out to the centerline to meet with Cabe Ridcully for the declaration of rules and a handshake, a tradition that nobody really paid any attention to anymore. James watched Justin Kennely shake Tabitha Corsica's hand perfunctorily. Even from his vantage point high in the grandstand, James could see the smarmy, polite smile on Tabitha's admittedly beautiful face. Then both turned and walked in opposite directions back to their holding pens beneath the stands, leaving Ridcully alone with the Quidditch trunk.

        Zane happily munched a bag of popcorn he'd brought with him, having somehow convinced one of the kitchen house-elves to prepare it. "This should be an excellent match," he observed, taking in the highspirited crowd.

        "Gryffindor against Slytherin is always a crowd-stopper," Sabrina said, raising her voice over the noise. "Back in my mum's day, everybody hated Slytherin because they were dirty players. A guy named Miles Bletchley was the team captain back then, and he went on to play for the Thundelarra Thunderers for a couple of years until he was booted from the league for using a corked broom."

        "A what?" Zane interjected. "How do you cork a broom?"

        James explained, "It's a kind of cheating where a hole is drilled down the center of the broom and something magical is threaded into it, like a dragon's rib or a basilisk fang. Basically turns the whole broom into a magic wand. He was using it to cast Repelling Spells and modified Expelliarmus spells, making the opposing team fumble the Quaffle. Really crooked old bugger, he was."

        As he spoke, the Slytherin team streaked out from their holding pen to the sound of cheers from their grandstand. Damien, seated in the broadcast booth with his wand to his throat, announced the team, his voice echoing in the crisp January air.

        "So," Zane called over the cheers, "doesn't seem like everybody hates the Slytherins anymore."

        Sure enough, there was scattered applause throughout the rest of the grandstands. Only the

        Gryffindor stands booed and hissed. James shrugged. "They don't seem to play as dirty as they used to. But they still field unusually strong teams. There's something dodgy about them, it's just not as obvious as it used to be."

        "I'll say," Zane agreed. "When we played Slytherin before the break, it was as clean a match as I've played all year. Ridcully barely called a single foul on 'em. Still, there was something just a little too slick about them. They're either the luckiest bunch of skunks ever to mount brooms or they've made a deal with the devil himself."

        James gritted his teeth.

Across the pitch, Horace Slughorn, red-cheeked and bundled in a fur-collared coat and matching hat, waved a small Slytherin flag on a stick and yelled encouragements to his House team. Ralph, seated two rows below him, applauded dutifully. James knew that Ralph wasn't much of a Quidditch fan, despite the almost studious attention he paid to the matches, and James guessed that it was because Ralph couldn't really choose a team to be loyal to. His friends, including Rufus Burton, cheered and hooted wildly.

        The Gryffindor team took to the pitch next, streaming from the holding pen beneath their grandstand, and the spectators around James erupted, leaping to their feet as one. James shouted right alongside them, grinning and ecstatic, certain that the Gryffindors would win. He stomped his feet and yelled himself hoarse as the team circled the pitch, waving and grinning.

        The teams flew into position. After instructing the teams to play a clean match and assuring everyone was in position, Ridcully released the Bludgers and Snitch and tossed the Quaffle into the air. The players collapsed into a swarm, chasing the Bludgers and wrestling over the Quaffle. Noah and Tom Squallus, the two Seekers, streaked off after the Snitch, which darted around the Ravenclaw banners and vanished.

        Almost immediately, the difference between the teams became apparent. Gryffindor fought a textbook match, based entirely on carefully practiced drills. Justin Kennely could be heard shouting plays and formations over the cheering crowd, pointing and giving signs. The Slytherins, on the other hand, seemed to have a graceful, almost eerie playing style that moved them over the pitch like a school of fish. Tabitha Corsica called no directions from her broom, and yet her players peeled off and regrouped with dancelike precision. Once, while in possession, Tabitha ducked under a Bludger and simultaneously tossed the Quaffle over her shoulder. The ball arced through the air and was deftly caught by a teammate who had flown a perpendicular course directly underneath her. The teammate underhanded the Quaffle through the center goal before the Gryffindor Keeper even realized Tabitha didn't have it anymore. James groaned while the Slytherins stood and cheered. Justin Kennely looked as if he wanted to jump up and down on his broom in frustration. Still, an hour into the match, the score was one hundred and thirty to one hundred and forty in favor of Gryffindor, close enough that the lead had changed five times.

        "It's all about the Seekers in a match like this," Sabrina yelled exuberantly, not taking her eyes from the players. "And Squallus is new to that position since Gnoffton finished last year. Noah should be able to nail him to the wall with his own broom."

Sure enough, a sudden roar went up from the crowd and James saw that Noah was in pursuit of the Snitch. Across the pitch, Tom Squallus was bent over his broom, baring his teeth into the cold wind and rushing to cut Noah off. He banked through the throng of players, barely missed by Justin Kennely's swatted Bludger. Despite his speed, James was confident there was no way Squallus would beat Noah to the prize. A golden streak and a whir of tiny wings buzzed by the Gryffindor grandstand, followed a split second later by Noah. Those in the front rows ducked, then leapt to their feet cheering as Noah banked hard, barely missing the grandstand and lunging forward on his broom, arm outstretched. There was a long, breathless moment when Noah appeared to be in the tow of the tiny golden ball, the distance shrinking, shrinking, Noah's hand trembling as he reached. Then, in a flurry of cloaks and brooms, something changed. Noah was forced to yank up on his broom, grinding to a slewing stop that destroyed his control. A cloud of Slytherins, led by Tabitha Corsica, had swept in front of him from all directions, stitching a virtual wall in midair. Noah ran into a burly Slytherin and bounced off, losing his grip on his broom. He tumbled sideways, grabbing on with one hand and swinging beneath it. The crowd roared.

        Tabitha Corsica shot through the wall of Slytherins, which opened for her like an iris. Her cloak whipped behind her and James was amazed to see the Snitch flying behind her, in the shadow of her cloak. It dipped upwards and Tabitha followed almost instantaneously, bent low over her broom. Somehow, without even looking, she was shadowing the Snitch, marking it for Tom Squallus. He saw her, banked hard, and swooped past her. When he came out on the other side, his hand was raised and the Snitch glittered within it. The Slytherin grandstands cheered uproariously. The game was over.

        Noah swung himself from beneath his broom, hooking one foot over it. He struggled upright just as Ted and Justin Kennely swooped in next to him, talking and gesturing. James understood the nature of what they were saying even if he couldn't hear the words through the cheers and boos. Something extremely odd had happened, and yet the Slytherins hadn't actually committed any fouls. On the grass of the pitch, Petra Morganstern, who played Chaser, had cornered Cabe Ridcully and was animatedly pointing at Tabitha Corsica, who was still on her broom, being congratulated by her teammates alongside Tom Squallus. Ridcully shook his head, unable or unwilling to agree with Petra's allegations. There didn't seem to be any recourse for the Gryffindors, since they couldn't prove that anything illegal had actually occurred.

        "What in the name of Voldy's pasty-white rear end was that?" Damien Damascus demanded, having quit the broadcast booth and joined James, Zane, and Sabrina.

        Sabrina shook her head. "That was right creepy. Did you see what I saw? Corsica blocked the Snitch! She never touched it, but she flew right next to it, marking it until Squallus could get his broom in gear."

        "There's no rule against that?" Zane asked as they all joined the throng leaving the stands.

        "No point making rules against things that are impossible," Damien said crossly. "As long as she didn't touch it, she's in the clear. She wasn't even watching the Snitch. I'd swear it."

        Ralph was trotting across the pitch when James and Zane tromped down the last few steps. Panting, he angled them away from Sabrina and Damien, whose moods were getting fouler.

        "Did you see that?" Ralph asked, struggling to catch his breath. He seemed extremely agitated.

        "We saw something," James said, "although I'm not sure I believe my eyes."

        Zane was less diplomatic. "The Gryffindors think your buddies cheated somehow. It's going to throw off the final standings, too. Now it looks like Ravenclaw will be playing Slytherin for the tournament. I was hoping for a Gryffindor and Ravenclaw match."

        "Will you two forget about the bloody Quidditch tournament for a minute?" Ralph said, turning to face the two of them at the base of the grandstands. "In case you've forgotten, we have more important things to think about."

"All right, then spill it, Ralph," James said, trying not to be annoyed.

        Ralph took a deep breath. "You told me I was your man on the inside, didn't you? So I've been watching closely, looking for hints and clues about who might be involved with the whole Merlin plot, right?"

        "And you think now is the time to discuss this?" Zane asked, raising his eyebrows.

        "No, no, it's fine," James interjected. "What'd you see, Ralph? Something going on back at Slytherin Central?"

        "No!" Ralph said impatiently. "Not back at the common room or anything. Right here, just a few minutes ago! Remember what we're supposed to be looking for?"

        "Yeah," Zane said, becoming interested, "the Merlin staff."

        Ralph nodded meaningfully. There was a cheer nearby. The three boys turned as the Slytherins left the pitch, surrounded by a crowd of students in green scarves. Tabitha walked at the head of the group, her broom held triumphantly over her shoulder.

        "Six feet or so of unusually magical wood," Ralph said in a low voice, still watching Tabitha leave the pitch. "Origins unknown."

        "That's right!" James replied, understanding dawning on him. "Tabitha said her broom was a custom design, crafted by some Muggle artist or something! She registered it as a Muggle artifact, since it wasn't a standard model!"

        "And there's no question that there's something pretty unusually magical about it," Ralph added. James nodded.

        "Are you saying what I think you're saying?" Zane asked incredulously.

        Ralph glanced back at him. "Makes sense, doesn't it? It's the perfect hiding place! That's why I came running over here right after the match. I wanted you both to see it, too, and see if it fits."

        Zane whistled in awe. "Talk about your corked brooms! Here, all this time Corsica's been flying around on Merlin's flippin' staff!"

        James couldn't take his eyes off it as Tabitha crested the hill heading back to the castle. The wintry sunlight glinted off the bristly tail of the broom. It was indeed the perfect disguise for a six-foot length of highly magical wood. And now they knew for sure who was the third co-conspirator in the Merlin plot, the Slytherin who went by the profile name of Austramaddux. James' heart pounded with excitement and anticipation.

"So," he said as the three of them began to follow the Slytherins at a careful distance, wending their way back to the castle, "how are we going to get the Merlin staff away from Tabitha Corsica?"