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A Reign of Silence	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3889 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Sixteen—Down, In the Dark

            The steps were humming beneath their feet, as Harry became aware of a few minutes later. It felt as though there was a waterfall going under the stone, and they were receiving some of the energy coming up through the stairs.

            Draco stopped ahead of him, and Harry leaned forwards until his head was right next to Draco’s ear. “You feel it, too,” he whispered.

            Draco nodded. “I don’t know what it is,” he said, without turning his head, but continuing down the stairs. “If Ernhardt has enough magic to do this, then he has more than I ever knew he did.”

            Harry nodded, in silence. From what he could tell, Ernhardt hadn’t used wand magic to fight them any time since he’d taken Macgeorge’s body. It was either necromancy or, possibly, possession, the way he had reached out to Jenkins when they were standing in the first cavern the ritual had brought them to. Harry wondered if he didn’t think wand magic powerful enough for the job, and preferred to rely on his flaws.

            Or perhaps he had been saving it all for this place, this final sanctuary. Harry didn’t think he would run again. He had to face them here, or face them nowhere.

            The stairs began to wind around in tight spirals, and Harry quit paying so much attention to the thrum under their feet and wished for a railing instead. He had his wand ready in his hand, to cushion falls if anyone should have one, but it wasn’t a pleasant thought that another swarm of bats might attack them here and kill them before they could ever get into battle with Ernhardt.

            As it happened, that didn’t happen. They reached the bottom of the staircase and stepped off into more darkness, and silence. Even the Lumos Charms didn’t reach very far into the shadows, and Harry didn’t think that had much to do with the room’s size.

            Draco winced, suddenly, and Harry saw the shadow of his right hand reaching for his left arm. “Dark magic,” Draco murmured. “As bad as that flaw on the last case, when Bainbridge would skin someone.”

            Harry opened his mouth to reply, but he didn’t get the chance. Someone was moving forwards to meet them, someone who walked through the shadows without a care for concealment, and then stopped just outside the range of Jenkins’s wand and smiled at them.

            “Welcome,” she said. “My master thought you would reach this place in time, but he didn’t expect you to reach it so quickly. His compliments on your intelligence.”

            It was Rudie. Rudie without blue eyes, but torn robes that she didn’t give a fuck about, obviously, and Rudie with a red film over her eyes, and a cocked head that made her seem to be listening for a command.

            “He would do that, the bastard,” Draco said, so softly that Harry had trouble hearing him.

            “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you said,” Rudie said, shuffling around to face them, her neck bobbing like she was a pigeon pecking up seed. “You should speak up, you know. My master listens through my ears, but he can’t reach beyond my senses to find out what you’re saying. More’s the pity, it would save him trouble.”

            Harry had never seen Draco’s face so still. He reached out for a moment as though he would take Rudie by the throat, and then let his hand drop back again. He was smiling, Harry saw, his eyes fixed on Rudie’s as though he could see the real person behind the red film. “Do you mind telling me how your master managed to take you?” Draco asked, in as sweet and coaxing a tone as he sometimes used to tell Harry to go to bed. “I thought he couldn’t touch someone’s mind without turning their eyes blue, but yours are a much prettier color than that.”

            Rudie laughed. “Silly. He made me swallow his blood. And what color is blood?”

            He fed her his blood, and activated her flaw, the same way Draco thought he’d done in the lab in Cuthbert’s Corner, Harry thought, and squeezed Draco’s hand.

            Draco showed no sign that he was upset or afraid, the way Harry had thought he would. He only nodded, his eyes calm and wide and intelligent. “Do you have any brothers or sisters who might show up here?”

            Rudie blinked at him. “I don’t have any siblings, not now. What are you talking about?”

            More servants, Harry translated without trouble. More twisted that Ernhardt enslaved by feeding them his blood.

            But Rudie didn’t seem to know about them, which meant she might not understand the reference—or Ernhardt might not. Harry wondered how much Rudie knew, and how much Ernhardt was in control of her mind and also controlling what she knew at any particular time.

            “Never mind,” Draco said, and waved his hand airily. “I’m somewhat surprised to receive your master’s welcome when until only a few minutes ago we were hunting him, but I suppose that’s his business who he wants to extend it to.”

            It was so neatly and smoothly done that it surprised even Harry, who stood so close to Draco’s right side. His wand flickered, and Rudie slid down, unconscious from the Stunner that had caught her in the chest. Draco stepped forwards and caught her in his arms so she wouldn’t fall on the floor, then laid her gently on the floor.

            “Why did you do that?” Jenkins spoke in a quiet, friendly way, but Harry had long since decided that that didn’t matter. “We could have learned more about how Ernhardt had enslaved her if we left her awake.”

            “We would only have heard lies,” Draco said, and stepped back, fussing with the hang of his cloak around his neck. Harry heard a few faint clinking noises, and knew Draco was adjusting the position of more than one weapon. “We know how he did it: he made her swallow his blood. Which means Rudie must have had a flaw after all, although of course we don’t know what it is.” He eyed Rudie for a moment, then turned away. “We need to explore this place and learn where he is.”

            “Do we stand a chance of rescuing her?” Warren had moved forwards and knelt down next to Rudie, running her fingers along her cheek. Harry had to look away. The expression on Warren’s face was complex and somber, her wand twitching in her grasp as though she wanted to cast a spell that could save her right now.

            “I don’t know,” Draco said, and his voice had grown firm enough that Harry blinked at him. “Be quiet and let me think for a bit.”

            There was really nothing to say to that, Harry thought. He leaned back against the wall and watched as Draco prowled in a circle, staring at the shadows that waited beyond the light of their Lumos Charms, the ones Harry had thought were too thick to be ordinary darkness.

            With Lionel, with Ron even, Harry would have prowled with him, wanting to know what was going on, wanting to plan, not trusting his partner to handle everything by himself. He wanted to be nearby, invested, implanted, interested, talked to.

            With Draco, he could trust more. The clinking in Draco’s cloak and the way he had figured out what was going on in Ernhardt’s potions lab in Cuthbert’s Corner increased Harry’s confidence. So he waited, and saw Jenkins and Warren arguing from the corner of his eye, seeming torn between imitating him and questioning Draco until he told them the truth.

            That wasn’t Harry’s problem. He fixed his eyes on Draco, and waited.

*

            The contours of this room, or cellar, or cavern—Draco had no idea what someone else would have called it, or what Ernhardt did—had seemed familiar to Draco from the instant he stepped into them. Now he prowled around them, and watched with his eyes narrowed until the sense of familiarity turned into reality.

            He paused, his breath rushing through his lungs, making his nose ache with how fast it came out of his nostrils. Could it really be—was it…?



            Yes. Draco couldn’t be fooled, not by that bulging oval shape, or the slick grey stone, streaked with brown and black, that he could see when he lifted his wand high enough and directed its light into corners. The cavern had the shape of a ritual circle Draco had seen printed in one of his parents’ books.

            Well, circle, Draco thought, calm even though his heart was going mad. If you could call something a circle when it was extending off to the side like that. He didn’t think the name mattered. What mattered was what it was used for.

            And this was used for containing dangerous magical beings. It had sometimes been used to kidnap loyal house-elves from their masters, and keep them from Apparating away, not something that many other magical devices could do.

            Draco took a step back towards Harry. He wanted to test it. There was no point in keeping their magic to themselves at this point. Ernhardt had to know they were here, even if he couldn’t see out of Rudie’s eyes the way he could have out of the eyes of someone he was possessing.

            “Try to cast a curse at the walls,” he told Harry quietly.

            “Why?” Jenkins demanded, but Draco ignored her. The way Harry’s magic worked, or didn’t work, should provide her with the answer to that question soon enough.

            Harry didn’t question Draco, as Draco had known he wouldn’t. He stepped up beside him and aimed his wand at a niche in the stone, a place that corresponded to a bulge in the circle in the design Draco remembered. His spell was nonverbal, but the magic swished past Draco’s head hard enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck, and Draco knew enough about Harry’s power to realize that the stone should have exploded just there, a hole opening to whatever lay beyond the cavern.

            It didn’t. There was a short, angry buzz from the stone, and then it tightened and settled, the streaks of brown and black creeping across what had been empty rock a moment before. Draco heard something snap into place, something more mental than physical. He nodded and turned to face Jenkins and Warren.

            “This is a trap,” Warren said, tilting her head back as though she could see a cage descending from the ceiling. “We can’t use magic to hack our way out because—why can’t we?” She turned back to Draco.

            Draco had to admit it gave him a bit of a rush, to know that two Aurors who were so skilled in Dark magic were coming to him for answers. He tried not to let the smugness infect his voice as he answered. “Because this is a version of a ritual circle. An oddly shaped one, I’ll grant you, but a powerful one.”

            “To hold magical creatures,” Jenkins said, and if she noticed the glare Draco couldn’t keep under control, she ignored it. She didn’t sound alarmed, either. She turned in a slow circle of her own, studying the walls, and then nodded. “I wondered why there were no defenses so far, but he doesn’t need to keep us out when he can simply confine us in here.”

            “As always, dear lady, you are wonderfully correct.”

            Draco saw Jenkins’s wand come up before she remembered the circle and lowered it again. The voice was coming from beyond the niche Harry had cast at. Draco could see a crack there now, but he doubted Harry’s spell had opened it. Nor did he doubt that something protected it. Indeed, when he moved a slow, sliding step closer, to see exactly how near he could get before Ernhardt did something to keep him back, there was a flickering glaze lining the crack.

            “I grow tired of this chase.” Ernhardt swayed for a moment as though he would move his face, Macgeorge’s face, into sight, but pulled back at the last minute. Draco noted that with his heart hammering and all his senses alert and straining. There had to be a reason for that. Why not that he wasn’t as confident in the strength of his circle as he seemed to be? “You must be as well. And why can you not depart and leave me in peace? I hold no resentment even for the attempt to deprive me of my soul. I gave Rudie what she wanted, reunion with her partner.”

            “You turned her into a slave,” Harry said. Draco grimaced a little—trust Harry to leap straight to the most obvious conclusion, and one that might make Ernhardt angry—but he also had to admit that he couldn’t see much wrong with the tactic in this particular case. It kept Ernhardt distracted while Draco studied him.

            “Yes, I did,” Ernhardt said. “But she’s with her partner, and they both serve the same master now.” There was a little hiss on the last words, a sound of pain. Draco imagined a spirit held alive in Ernhardt’s brain, able to hear what was going on and insert herself into the conversation at any point she wanted. He hoped for it. “She has what she wanted. You have what you wanted, the assurance that I won’t ever trouble the Ministry again. I don’t have the strength for it. I don’t want it. Why not back off now and let me keep this last sanctuary?”

            “He thinks it was for the Ministry that we came here,” Jenkins said, and shook her head a little. “That just shows that he’s insane in the manner of the classic twisted.”

            Ernhardt said nothing for a long second. He would have attacked before, Draco knew. Just as he wouldn’t have said some of the things he’d just said before, or at least he would have spoken in a different way.

            Something had changed.

            And thinking through what had occurred in the battle in the clearing, Draco was most inclined to attribute it to his soul-wrenching spell—the one tactic they’d used there that Ernhardt hadn’t encountered before.

            What would happen if one soul was almost taken out of a body shared by two?

            Draco edged to the side. He thought he might be out of Ernhardt’s line of sight, since it came through that narrow crack in the stone. He caught Harry’s eye, and Harry nodded without seeming to, a ripple of motion that passed through his jaw muscles and up and around his ears without much troubling his face. Then Harry said aloud, “Why did you want slaves in the first place? Aren’t the people you can possess enough for you?”

            Draco drew his wand, but kept it down by his side. His fingers trembled on it. He stilled them. If Ernhardt could change, he thought he could, as well. He was very calm, very cool at the moment, forcing himself not to worry about Harry or the prospect that he would get hurt. He edged around to the side, and closed his eyes, forcing his memory forwards.

            Harry was bantering with Ernhardt, and Jenkins had joined in, sharp cracks of sound that Draco at least knew weren’t directed at him. If she suspected what he was doing, good. If not, she knew she was part of a distraction, and that was good enough.

            Draco mouthed the words of the incantation to himself, not daring to speak aloud. He would only get one chance at this, and that was assuming he was right in the first place about what had happened to Ernhardt. The words ran through his head and seemed to dance on his tongue. He breathed in and out, and then he was ready, as ready as he would ever be, a great cool power rising in his head and hands.

            He began to incant the spell that would pull Ernhardt’s soul free of his stolen body again, but this time, he specified it as the soul of a man with an extra Latin word. The book he’d read the spell in had said the magic might be modified that way, as long as care was taken not to disrupt the functioning of the spell unduly. Draco didn’t know exactly what that meant. He only knew that he had sometimes modified spells like this in the past, and that he had escaped whole with his skin and his own soul.

            He had to do this. It was the only chance, or the best chance, they would get to defeat Ernhardt. He whispered the spell over and over, rising towards a pitch of power.

            And at the moment when he most needed distraction, Harry provided it for him.

*

            Harry didn’t know exactly what Draco had planned, but he reckoned he didn’t have to. His role was plain enough. He was to distract Ernhardt.

            His words had been enough to do that up until now, as Ernhardt wearily tried to justify himself, an immortal power bound to answer the questions of stupid mortals. But his answers had got shorter, and Harry could see a flicker or two of movement through the crack, as though he was trying to position himself to see the whole room.

            Draco couldn’t risk that. Which meant Harry couldn’t, either.

            His glance crossed Jenkins’s like a sword, and he nodded, no longer caring if Ernhardt saw the movement. He knew something was happening, anyway. Jenkins nodded back, and moved up to stand at Harry’s shoulder, her hand briefly squeezing his arm. Harry spied Warren pacing towards one of the walls. She was setting up another distraction, maybe, or looking for a way out of the ritual circle.

            Will whatever Draco’s doing be powerful enough to break through the circle?

            Maybe it wasn’t a spell aimed at breaking the circle, so it could pass the boundaries. Harry hoped so.

            Ernhardt said, “I grow tired of this. I think I will begin to crush—”

            Jenkins cast an instant before Harry did, a rushing white light that filled the room in front of the crack but narrowed to an intense point behind. Harry half-closed his eyes to avoid looking at that point, hearing Ernhardt snarl as he went blind. He cast himself, the only spell he could think of that might distract Ernhardt sufficiently.

            The spell rose and then shook itself apart near the roof, a firework that roared and filled the cavern with fiery bursts of light. It wouldn’t blind Ernhardt any more than Jenkins’s spell already had, but it was sure as hell distracting.

            And the noise should cover any sound Draco might make in his chanting.

            Ernhardt roared again, and Harry heard him break off something that might have been a spell. The crack in the stone widened, and Ernhardt lurched into the middle of the circle, turning his head rapidly back and forth.

            Draco’s spell took effect at the same time, and Ernhardt screamed and cowered towards the floor.

            Harry edged closer. It was hard, watching Macgeorge’s body flinch like that. It was her hands that Ernhardt raised to cover his face, her voice he screamed with.

            But that only made it all the more obscene, and Harry all the more determined to destroy him forever. He raised his wand and cast another spell that filled the room with light and fire. It might distract Ernhardt as he tried to get back to his feet or back to consciousness, and it couldn’t do anything bad to Draco now that he had cast his spell.

            Draco turned towards him in the glare of the falling sparks, his face shining so much that Harry blushed and ducked his head. Then the moment was past, and Draco was running towards Ernhardt, casting something else. Ernhardt, who had been clawing at his hair as if he would tug it out, suddenly jerked and straightened, his hands pulled out to the side.

            Harry wondered why for a moment, then remembered that Macgeorge might want her hair if she ever got her own body back. He nodded.

            Warren and Jenkins were coming in from the opposite side, and once again they had silently communicated with each other—or maybe Harry had just missed it in all the excitement—and made a plan. Warren stopped short of Ernhardt and chanted, another spell that Harry didn’t know, and Jenkins whirled in a circle around him, wand downwards. As Harry watched, an invisible blade began to carve a ring in the stone, surrounding Ernhardt with it, locking him into place with a shiver and a bang.

            Warren’s spell took effect at the same moment as the circle closed, answering Harry’s question about how her magic would reach him if the circle kept spells confined. Ernhardt screamed and banged his head back and forth, and then an invisible clamp held his neck still, echoing the spell holding his wrists.

            Then they waited, in silence. Jenkins walked back to check on Rudie, but none of the rest of them could take their eyes off Ernhardt, the writhing, screaming figure in the center of the circle. Harry discovered he was clenching his jaw so hard that his teeth felt as if they would crack. He loosened the tension carefully and moved towards Draco.

            “What did you use?” he whispered.

            “The same spell that pulled the soul from his body,” Draco murmured. “But modified so it would attack a specifically masculine soul this time.” He looked at Harry, and smiled. Harry reckoned his face must have been a study. “Didn’t you notice how differently he was acting? That made me wonder if the first time I did this spell had had more effect on him than I realized. Maybe Macgeorge’s soul was starting to fight its way out from under his dominance when his soul slammed back into his body.” A slight tremble of Draco’s jaw was the only sign that he was thinking of Elder; then he passed smoothly on. “I didn’t know it would work until it—well, until it began to work. But I think I might have been right.”

            Jenkins came back to them then, leading Rudie on her arm. Her eyes were still streaked with red around the edges, but Harry thought he could read that as a more ordinary bloodshot look, not the one caused by Ernhardt enslaving her with his blood.

            And when she stared at the figure in the middle of the circle, and checked a sudden exclamation, it was clear she had recovered enough to recognize her partner and want her back. Harry made a place for her at the edge of their ring, though he noticed Jenkins watched her, not Ernhardt, and had her hand on her wand.

            So they waited, through the screaming and the thrashing, to see if it would be life or death.

*

            Seiren: Thanks! I appreciate it.

            SP777: He might be. But they don’t have any choice now. If they’d waited, Ernhardt could have run further away, or killed Rudie.

            It feels that way to me, too.
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A Reign of Silence