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Sanctum Sanctorum	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 28254 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Sixteen—In Trouble

            “This is the best place to start?”

            Harry said nothing, but left Ron to mutter something to Malfoy about what the Steele file said. Malfoy would already know what Harry thought, anyway, thanks to the potions bond connecting them.

            He was busy moving forwards, his head bowed and his nostrils flaring, although logically he knew the signs of Emily Steele’s kidnapping would have worn away long ago. Physical traces would be eradicated.

            That didn’t mean all magical traces would be—if her kidnappers had been wizards and not Muggles, as the Ministry had tried to declare in the official report.

            They stood next to a small, swift trickle of water, not so much a proper river as a half-stream that presumably wound down to the sea somehow. The banks were rough stone, projecting up sharply enough that Harry could imagine a child clambering on them and injuring herself.

            Not that that would have mattered to the people who had kidnapped Steele and tried to use her, of course.

            Harry glanced over his shoulder at the few houses nearby, and strengthened the Muggle-Repelling Charm he’d extended around them the minute they arrived here. The last thing they needed was Muggle police arresting them because they’d had the nerve to wander around and talk about lost children while wearing funny clothes.

            “There’s nothing here,” Malfoy said, appearing at Harry’s side in that silent way he had. “Why would they have brought her here?”

            “That’s what we need to find out, isn’t it,” Harry said. He saw Malfoy stiffen beside him and turn his head slowly, as though he assumed Harry was insulting him. Harry ignored him and cast a different kind of charm this time, a tracking charm that had nothing Dark about it, so there was no reason for Malfoy to reach out for a moment as though he would restrain Harry.

            The tracking charm made a series of faint footprints light up the bank, and Harry exhaled hard. He bent down and trailed his hand through the purple-grey light, then his wand, and then cast another charm. This time, the footprints darkened like bruises, and Harry nodded. The darkening represented how old they were in terms of weeks or months, indicating this time that they had indeed been made during the period of the Steele kidnapping.

            “It doesn’t mean they were the wizards who took her,” Malfoy said quietly, crouching beside Harry and shifting his weight. “Only that wizards came here.”

            “But, as you said, there’s nothing here,” Harry said, waving his hand at the houses, the dusty road, the rocky and straggling ground. “So why come here at all?”

            Malfoy frowned, but said nothing. Harry studied the footprints again. They appeared out of nowhere on one side of the bank, led down into the water, and led up again on the other side before vanishing into nowhere. But that was hardly unusual when most of the criminals they tracked had mastered the skill of Apparition.

            “Potter?”

            Harry turned his head, wondering for a moment if Malfoy had another argument against these being the footprints of kidnappers. But Malfoy held something small and silvery in his palm, staring at it. Harry leaned forwards to look, aware of Ron coming down the other side of the stream, cursing quietly as the cold water splashed his ankles.

            So Harry was the only one close enough to react when silvery spikes snapped out of the ring and arched down towards Malfoy’s palm.

            “Protego!” Harry shouted, still one of his most powerful spells since he had been practicing it for so long, and the spikes slid to a halt as the small shield appeared around Malfoy’s hand and arm, a swirl of diminishing silver. Harry hopped back, his eyes warily on the ring, as it spun and oriented on him. It didn’t have any figure on it, only a blank stone, but that didn’t matter, he thought. He could feel it watching him anyway.

            Harry grinned back, and made sure to show his teeth. He had dealt with enough malevolent artifacts in his time to know how to handle this one.

            The ring leaped at him from Malfoy’s hand. Harry saw Malfoy’s other hand, the unshielded one, instinctively rise to follow it, but he stopped himself from what might have been a fatal snatch just in time. His nostrils flaring, he moved a step backwards, his eyes narrowed and his legs tensed beneath him.

            Harry slammed another Shield Charm into place in front of the ring. It hit it and darted to the side, trying to come around the curve of the shield. Harry added another shield, and a second, and a third, and by the time the ring looked as if it would fly off to the side and it wished it had never started this attack in the first place, there was a circle of shields all around it. Harry added another one, a flat one, stretched lengthwise along the ground when the ring started to drop and act as if it would bury itself in the mud.

            Harry stepped closer, and let his breath rustle out between his teeth. The ring, hovering above that last charm he’d laid, didn’t react. It stayed in place, and Harry got a better look at it.

            It was a strange metal, dull like iron but with the silvery shine that must have drawn Malfoy’s attention to it in the first place; he didn’t have Auror-trained eyes, and Harry could imagine missing him something as small and dull as it would have looked without that. The stone was small and unfamiliar as well, oval and without reflections. Harry wondered for a moment if it was onyx, but no, that would at least be black. This was no color at all, as though someone had fastened a small piece of oblivion between the iron prongs on the top of the ring.

            “Potter.”

            Harry nodded. He knew that tone. Ron was wise enough to wait patiently and use whatever information might come out of it when Harry was examining something new like this, but he knew Malfoy would get impatient and want the explanation now.

            When he glanced up, Malfoy had the same narrow eyes and flared nostrils fixed on him. Perhaps he had heard some of Harry’s thoughts through the potion that connected them. Harry rolled one shoulder back in a shrug and answered.

            “The spikes looked thin and hollow enough to drain blood from you to me. Why would they want blood in a ring? That’s the question.” He faced it again, and cast the first of several spells that ought to identify charms on the ring, as well as tell him whether someone was using it as a spy artifact right now.

*

            Draco saw Weasley’s face tighten. He didn’t know for certain why this time, however. Potter hadn’t given the best explanation that he could have, but he had given an explanation, and he hadn’t touched the ring himself. He walked around it in its cage of shields, his mouth wrinkled into a frown, and now and then cast another charm. The charms had no utility that Draco could see, but the ring hadn’t yet broken free.

            He moved to the side in response, while Weasley drew his wand to cast a few spells of his own. Draco had an idea, which he held contained and cool in his mind for a moment. He would not know he was right until he saw the side of the ring.

            The silvery metal continued to have a dull sheen which puzzled him. He knew a few materials that might have that look, but none of them would have been used to construct a ring. They would remain molten, in specially protected and highly expensive jars, until the Potions masters had need of them.

            Then Draco paused and smiled.

            Unless, by being made into a ring, they had the ability to obtain something more valuable than the metal itself.

            He stepped to the side, and now he could see it. The stone lay lightly on top of the ring. The prongs that held it looked cheap, more like Muggle craft than wizard. But they would serve for what was needed: to hold the stone firmly by one side, and let it swing to the other when someone pressed a mechanism Draco hadn’t found yet.

            “Potter.”

            He seemed to have interrupted in the middle of a spell, but Potter said nothing about that, simply turned his head and came with light steps to Draco’s side. He saw at once what Draco pointed out, but only waited, his head tilted slightly to the right. Draco wondered if he didn’t know, or was letting him explain. The impulses that murmured and sang in the back of his head were quiet at the moment, perhaps because Potter had to concentrate on the magic and it left him less room to come up with sudden actions.

            “The ring has a hollow container beneath the stone,” Draco said quietly. “Useful for storing a skin-contact poison.”

            “Or the blood it would have taken from you.” Potter caressed his wand, nodding. “Yes, I see.”

            “Or something else,” Draco said, although he was virtually sure Potter was right and the ring would have ended by taking blood from him. Those hollow spikes were too convenient for that, too slender for much else. “A Potions master made this ring, or knew where to buy it.”

            “So we have one to look for among our enemies.” Potter sucked his teeth, a disgusting noise, and the impulses chattered again. Hunt. Kill. Find. “Do you see anything on the ring that might identify who we’re looking for?”

            Draco turned his head, slowly, ready to open his mouth and give Potter the full blast of freezing air that question deserved, but Weasley spoke up. “I can. There’s a pattern around the stone. Looks like thorns twined together. I don’t know if it means much, but I can see it.”

            Draco turned around. Weasley was holding his wand at a strange angle, and a thin beam of light came from it that seemed to fade a few inches from the wand. Obviously, it lit the ring in a way not immediately obvious to Draco, and brought the inscription within his sight. Draco gave a stiff nod in return.

            Potter clapped Weasley on the back. “And once again, you think to use the spells that no one else does,” he said. “Does that sound like something you would recognize, Malfoy?”

            Draco sighed. “Perhaps. I would need to see it myself. Can you strengthen the spell that allows you to see, Weasley?”

            Weasley responded with a quick glide of his wand back and forth, and the beam of light grew until it flooded the air around the ring with pale blue light, and made the shields glitter like prisms. The ring twisted in midair as though trying to escape their gazes, but Draco could see what Weasley meant now. He would have described it as a pattern of branches rather than thorns himself, slender lines that broke into countless points and then stretched off in new directions, deeply impressed into the metal.

            Draco frowned. He had indeed seen something like that before, buried years back in the books he had read to attain his Potions mastery…

            When he remembered it, he shook his head. “Well, that at least confirms that Moonstone and Schroeder are choosing to do mad things,” he murmured.

            “What?” Potter was at his side in instants, closer than he had been before, green eyes savage with need, while the stream in the back of his head sang, Give, give, know, strangle, take. “Tell me.”

            Draco reached out and let his hand rest along Potter’s ribs for a moment. Potter looked at him, neither moving nor stirring, and Draco let it stay. Potter trusted him enough to let him do this, to let Draco—although, without a mind-reading potion of his own, Potter would have no reason to know this—feel the contrast between his calm body and that racing mind.

            “The patterns were inscribed on the beakers and cauldrons and vials of a Potions master named Galen in the sixteenth century,” Draco said. “He had a last name once, but no one knows what it was. His family cast him out and burned him from the tapestry.”

            “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Weasley said. “We knew people during the war who had been burned off their family tapestries for no worse crime than opposing Muggle-baiting.”

            “Galen was no Sirius Black,” Draco said, wondering for a moment at the Gryffindor tendency to want to see the best in everyone. Do they sit Dark wizards down for a nice cup of tea first and ask them if they’d like to reconsider their actions and come along to this cool, comfortable cell?

            Kill. Destroy. Hold back. Take. Listen. Learn.

            Draco had to smile. No, Weasley might ask Dark wizards and even former Death Eaters about the cup of tea and coming along quietly to the cell, but he was fairly sure Potter never would.

            Strange to feel so much comfort in the presence of an Auror whom he was sure that he would have feared had Potter been trained and active during his trial.

            “What exactly did he do then?” Weasley asked, extending a hand and waving it up and down between Potter and Draco.

            Draco blinked and nodded to Weasley, thanking him for disrupting a silent communion that had gone on too long. He could grow addicted to being near Potter, and it was better to back away while he still had a chance. “He hated Muggles. He thought it would be best if the world changed so that he never had to be around them again. But instead of building a lab in a secluded location and staying there like your usual mad isolationist wizard, he decided to develop a potion that would change them.”

            “Into animals?” Weasley asked, his voice hushed. “Well, I reckon I’ve known people who think the world would be better off if all the non-magical people were rabbits or birds instead of humans—”

            “No,” Potter said, and his voice was an echo from faint and far away. “That’s not what Galen wanted, is it? He wanted to turn the Muggles into wizards. So that he would never have to see anyone who didn’t have magic again, so that no one could ever claim to be different from him, so that he wouldn’t have to understand anyone who didn’t have the same experiences he did.”

            Draco nodded to Potter. He would not have put it exactly like that, but then, Potter wasn’t pure-blood. And from the look in his eyes, and the wordless clash of waves that the stream of impulses had gone into, he was once again hearing the cries of the girl whose death he had listened to with the Retrovoyance curse. The Muggle girl whom they had killed when they could not make her into a witch.

            “Yes,” Draco said. “Galen didn’t care about the level of power. He didn’t care if he was surrounded by weak wizards and witches—and the history books say that he was strong himself, so he might have preferred it. Thus, he made devices, and put this pattern on them, which were meant to take magic from wizards and transfer it into Muggles’ bodies. It would leave the wizards weak, with lowered levels of magic, and it wouldn’t give the Muggles much, but it would make everyone the same.”

            “That’s impossible,” Weasley said. “I mean, if someone could really do that, we would have heard about it before now. Instead, we have all these sorts of people who perform rituals to argument their power and find out that they can’t take magic permanently from someone else.”

            Kill, Potter’s mind said, the many voices for once joined into a single word, and Draco reached out to touch his arm and feel the state of the clenched muscles. Potter stood there, hearing them, but not seeing them.

            “The mistakes they have made in the past,” Draco said, “were to try and take all the magic from someone, instead of only a part, like Galen tried to. Like the kidnappers who took the Steele girl may have removed from her. And I do not believe that most people would have tried to give it to a Muggle. They tried to take it themselves, and their own magic would fight that as well as the system of the wizard they were stealing from. A Muggle would have none of that natural resistance.”

            “They kill their mistakes,” Potter said dreamily. “There is no reason for that. They could have Obliviated her and restored her to her family.”

            Draco moved closer to him. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, said the same clear voice over and over in the back of his mind, and he worried for what Potter might do if Draco himself did not do something.

            “Yes,” Draco said. “They may be doing something else, something they do not feel they can risk. Galen did not discover how to take magic from wizards and give it to Muggles, although he thought he had. Moonstone and Schroeder may have been guarding their secret, and fearing that, if a wizard noticed Muggle children were wandering about in large numbers with Memory Charms on them, that person could break them and understand what had happened, whether or not the children did.”

            “They treated them like sacrifices,” Potter whispered. “Like animals. Confined them. Tortured them. Made them feel like freaks.”

            Draco opened his mouth to answer at the same time as Weasley stepped forwards, but the sound of twisting metal overrode what Draco would have said. He whipped around and watched the bottom part of the ring, distant from the stone, parting and bending inwards towards it. The ring fought, given life by the Dark magic left buried in it, but Potter’s merciless power gave it no chance.

            “Harry, that’s our evidence!” Weasley yelled.

            Draco opened his mouth to tell Weasley what an idiot he was being, thinking words like those would restrain Potter, but Potter shut his eyes, and the ring stopped bending. For a moment, Draco heard nothing but wordless noise from the back of his head, and thought that Potter would simply explode from the tension and contradictions next to him.

            And then Potter opened his eyes and nodded, accepting Weasley’s words as he meant them. Perhaps that was the only thing that could bring him back when he was in one of those moods, Draco thought, a reference to the case. “All right. So that’s what you think happened, Malfoy? Would you be willing to swear to that and place your memories in a Pensieve?”

            “We have no important memories for a Pensieve yet, only my best guess as to what happened,” Draco said. He slowly took his hand off Potter’s arm. It said something that he hadn’t removed it even when he thought Potter was going to gut someone, but, he feared, nothing good—only that he was an idiot.

            “But we have something we may have figured out,” Potter said. “Until we come up with a better theory, we should treat that as what Moonstone and Schroeder are doing. I’m sure of it.”

            “You might be,” Weasley said, leaning in as if he dared Potter to ignore that smattering of freckles across his face. “I’m not.”

            “But we don’t have another theory,” Potter said. Draco heard the chatter of impulses in the back of his mind again—Listen, run, take, think—and let his muscles relax one by one.

            “We can come up with one,” Weasley said. “And I agree that it’s an attractive idea—in some ways,” he added, voice faint with what sounded like nausea to Draco. “But we can’t act as though we know they’re murderers. Not yet. The worst they’ve done so far is to arrest Malfoy and try to put you in prison. And you know you have plenty of enemies out there who’ve done worse.”

            “That’s true,” Potter said, his head cocked, his eyes wide with what might have been contemplation. Listen, said the back of his mind, which wasn’t much help. “But if we find out that they have killed children, and scraped their faces off, and tried to hurt them? Then are you going to stand in my way, Ron?”

            It was gently said, but Draco knew better than to be fooled. A winter storm might speak in those tones, and unleash its full fury on anyone who denied it what it wanted. Weasley’s face grew pale, but he shook his head.

            “No, mate,” he said. “If we get proof that they did something that stupid, then we need to take them down and take vengeance for those children.”

            Potter nodded, but he scarcely seemed to be listening. His eyes were focused on the ring again. “Can you still read the inscriptions Galen may have made, even with the ring bent the way it is?” he asked Draco, and gestured with his wand. The ring floated towards the side of the shield circle nearest Potter. It didn’t fight this time. Perhaps having its circle bent had knocked the spirit out of it.

            “Yes,” Draco said. “Those kinds of inscriptions aren’t destroyed as easily as most others.”

            “It was still stupid of me to try and damage them,” Potter murmured, reaching up with one hand and murmuring a Finite that banished the shields. “We’ll need our evidence intact to bring charges against Moonstone and Schroeder.” The ring landed flat on his palm, and he cradled it, gazing at it.

            Draco moved a step nearer. Yes, the patterns were what Weasley had said they were, writhing and reaching, the symbols Galen had chosen because he dreamed of extending magic to everyone. Or so he said. Draco had always seen it as an “altruistic” motive that in reality would surround the caster with weak wizards and thus strip the world of rivals that might challenge him.

            “I never thought that someone would take up his research again,” Draco murmured. “He died in agony.”

            “Trying to give his magic to someone else?” Potter glanced at him. Draco looked into those deep eyes and shook his head.

            “No. He drank an improperly-brewed potion that he believed would, for a few moments, give him the magic he had taken from someone else and stored. He couldn’t use it, but he wanted the experience of being that powerful, even for so short a length of time.”

            Potter’s face closed on his thoughts as effectively as though someone had slammed a door shut. “It sucks,” he said, and then handed the ring to Draco and turned to search the small river again, as if he thought he would find another sign of the Steele girl’s kidnapping there.

            “You can’t know that,” Draco said.

            Potter cocked his head back and uttered a little, high-pitched bark of laughter. “Yes, I can in fact know that being powerful sucks sometimes, Malfoy,” he said. Weasley was moving along beside them, scanning the mud as Potter was. He gave them nothing but a single warning glance—as though Draco was the one causing the problems—and then went back to the search.

            “I meant,” Draco said, thinking all the while that he deserved commendation for his iron will, “that you can’t know you’re exactly as powerful as Galen invented that potion trying to be. You know your level of magic, and nothing higher. That may or may not have been what he was aiming for.”

            Potter paused and turned his head to stare at Draco. Draco stared back. The day he backed down from the darkness in Potter’s eyes was the day he killed himself. He had used that mind-reading potion in the first place to connect himself with Potter, and so he had to stand in the way.

            “You’re right,” Potter said, and then turned his head and began passing his wand over the riverbank again, murmuring to himself.

            Draco closed his eyes, not sure what shook him more: the contact with a moment when Potter was possibly willing to lash out and fuck the consequences, or Potter’s acknowledgment that Draco was right.

*

            ChaosLady: Thank you!

            unneeded: I think Harry and Draco are steadily impressing each other, although it sometimes takes a while for that emotion to predominate among all the others they’ve got going on.

            AlterEquis: Probably. Although even then, Draco might be a bit uneasy about how Harry would probably put parts of Dark spells in his own.
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