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Made of Common Clay	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 10987 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Three—The Sun Chamber on a Sunday
“Do you wish your parents were still alive and told you about this?” Neville asks under his breath as they wait outside a small round door in an obscure corridor in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. It’s painted with a yellow blob that probably looks, to some minds (like the ones convinced that the wizarding world revolves around them), like a sun. “I wish mine were able to. Gran didn’t say a word. It’s because she’s not a Longbottom by blood, and my granddad died the same year my dad and mum—that happened to them.”
Harry watches as a few Sun Chamber members in glittering golden stoles walk up to the door and go through it. According to Honeywell, he and Neville will receive their stoles after they finish their second meeting. “Hmmm? Oh. Well, I wish my parents were alive, but not for this.”
There’s a shocked pause. Harry grins. He’s used to those, even from his friends. He thinks the incidence of them in his life is about to increase dramatically, given that he’s part of the Sun Chamber now.
“What? Why?”
“Think about it, Nev.” Harry lowers his voice as a few people with all the marks of deep and superior inbreeding go by. “Two possibilities. My dad either didn’t believe in all this nonsense, or else he did. If he believed in it, then I would have probably grown up believing it, too. I shudder to think of the person I’d be.”
“But he probably didn’t. I mean, since he married your mum and all—”
“Instead of getting her pregnant and leaving her?” Harry’s been reading books Honeywell sent him over the last few days, all about the history of the Sun Chamber and the “usual” conduct of Lords and Ladies. Apparently, most pure-blood men will take steps to ensure that any half-blood child of theirs stays illegitimate and therefore can’t inherit the title, and pure-blood Ladies or women in line to be Lady pregnant with one will ensure it isn’t born. “Yes, I know. That’s unusual.”
“So he probably didn’t.”
“But the other possibility,” Harry says, “is that he didn’t believe in it and would have grown up and struggled against the Sun Chamber like I plan on doing. Like Susan is doing. I think he’d believe in reform from the inside.”
“Yes?” Neville says, and his voice is cautious. Harry grins at him. Neville takes a prudent step backwards.
“It doesn’t need to be struggled against,” Harry says, watching the last of the line of pure-bloods pass inside. That means he and Neville will enter next, as the last and newest. “It doesn’t need to be reformed. It needs to be destroyed.”
And he strides forwards and ducks through the low door into the room beyond, hearing Neville swear in an unsteady voice and follow.
The inside of the Chamber hurts Harry’s eyes. Everything that possibly can be is begilded and begemmed and bejeweled and besplattered with the invisible blood of all the others who have died so the Sun Chamber can have this wealth. Mirrors on the walls bounce the light of the numerous torches and the gleaming ceiling—which shows the sun hovering in a pure blue sky—around so that Harry has to squint through it. Sapphires are stuffed into every crack between stones. Topazes stud the mirrors. The seats are draped with more cloth-of-gold, like the stoles around the members’ necks, and the steps between them are made of marble with plates of silver set into them. On the wall in front of the seats, where the most mirrors are, hovers another representation of the sun, leaping with gold and red. Harry knows from the books that it can act as a scrying mirror or a Pensieve or a means to summon portraits from their own frames, as needed.
Harry turns around and faces their audience, the way Honeywell said to, Neville beside him. The first gaze he meets is Lucius Malfoy’s, full of sneers. Harry smiles back with all his teeth, and Malfoy tries to shuffle backwards even though he’s sitting down. It’s entertaining.
“You agreed that you weren’t going to scare the life out of them right away,” Neville mutters to him.
“Can I help it if some of them are such cowards that it does happen right away?”
Neville’s mouth twitches, and he says, “No, I suppose not.”
Harry would answer, but Honeywell is standing up and spreading her arms, and beside her, a white-haired man who Harry knows is Lord Rytel Greengrass, Neville’s own sponsor. The Lords and Ladies immediately quiet. Harry folds his hands behind his back and tries to look as calm and serious as he can.
When he sees how many medallions and rings and lockets and necklaces the Lords and Ladies wear, it’s an effort. He wonders for a second if the Sun Chamber’s fashions have ever changed with the times to be less garish, but then he decides they haven’t. Of course not. Changes to tradition wouldn’t be pure-blood enough.
“If you will look upon the new Lords, and welcome them into the Chamber,” Greengrass chants.
“Three Lords, although two men.” They must have rehearsed this, but Honeywell sounds a little more graceful than Greengrass. “Lord Longbottom has returned to us after a period of twenty-nine years.”
There is some delicate, raspy touching of fingertips, which Harry supposes is the pure-blood version of applause, and which he can only hear because the acoustics in the Sun Chamber are great. Neville ducks his head and flushes a little. Harry knows his disguise is complete. No one will ever think that Neville is plotting against the rest of them when he acts like that.
“Lord Potter has returned to us,” Greengrass says then, “after a period of twenty-nine years.”
There isn’t as much applause for Harry as for Neville. Malfoy, for instance, keeps his hands in his lap. Harry looks around in interest. It looks—yes, it probably is exactly half as much applause, with exactly half the members applauding. Because he’s a half-blood.
Harry feels like laughing at the sheer ridiculousness, and at the same time, it makes his head ring with elation. They’re still underestimating him, even after the article that Skeeter published outlining what the Sun Chamber is. They still think he’s naïve and a little boy, exactly as he told Susan they would.
This is going to hit them so hard.
“Lord Black has returned to us,” Honeywell says, and lowers her arms as she bows, “after a period of twenty-five years.”
Why twenty-five? Harry wonders, but the answer comes to him immediately. 1985 is when Walburga Black died, and Sirius was already in Azkaban by then and Regulus dead, so there would have been no Lord or Lady Black to take her place.
This time, there’s less applause than before. That might be for Harry’s blood status again, or the fact that the Black reputation is less than stellar. Harry just bows his head and lets them assume he’s smiling.
“Please, take your seats,” Greengrass says, and he and Honeywell escort Harry and Neville to seats in the back of the room, on the highest tier.
“Why are they having us sit up here, do you think?” Neville manages to murmur to Harry as they sink onto the incredibly uncomfortable seats—cushions are probably a Muggleborn luxury—and Greengrass and Honeywell head back down to their own chairs. “It seems like they’re doing us an honor—”
Harry inclines his head at the garish sun shining on the front wall of the Chamber. “We’re most distant from the light. And the power, and the government the sun represents.”
“Oh,” Neville says, and his hands fidget for a minute with the Longbottom Lordship ring, which is plainer and heavier than either of Harry’s. “You’re so good at this, Harry. I think I’m going to be horrible at our plan.”
“You sound like you did at the beginning of Hogwarts,” Harry says, and catches Neville’s eye in a firm stare. “Only there’s no Snape to bully you this time. Not that these Lords and Ladies aren’t bullies—I think they are—but there’s no excuse to think you’ll do badly. We’re bloody adults, with principles. We’re going to beat them hollow.”
It takes a second, but Neville’s smile comes out, shy and uncertain. Harry grins back and faces the front again just as Malfoy stands up and walks to stand in front of the sun. He spreads his arms in some other gesture Harry supposes is symbolic and beautiful, but only makes Malfoy look like a Muggle crucifix to him.
Harry feels eyes on him from the side, and glances over. There are younger men and women over there; he supposes they’re the “heirs and heiresses” that one of those books Honeywell sent him talked about. It’s Draco Malfoy who’s glaring, of course. Harry grins back and sticks out his tongue.
Draco jerks as if Harry’s slapped him. Harry retains his grin and turns back to the Malfoy on the floor.
“I have called you here to discuss the case of Ifandel Selis,” Malfoy begins. His voice is smooth and precise and insinuating, rather like the slugs that Harry killed in his garden yesterday. “I know his name does not betray it, but he is a descendant of Selwyn by blood. His parents left the British Isles during the first war with the Dark Lord.”
Harry says nothing, but he begins to make notes in his mind. Selis is in front of the Wizengamot right now on a charge of selling “dragon dust,” a Potions ingredient supposedly made from the ground-up shells of dragon eggs. It turned out, when the Aurors arrested him, that some of it really was dragon dust, instead of the fake they’d thought it was. Once they investigated, they managed to link Selis to the murder of three Dragon-Keepers in the sanctuaries he’d sneaked into to steal the eggs from.
The case has been proceeding well, but the Wizengamot abruptly called a halt on Friday. Harry knows why, now.
“The boy in himself is not important, but the precedent he will set is. Can we have our own blood, the blood of the Lords and Ladies, tried in front of the Wizengamot as if he was a common criminal? I create the idea that we petition the Wizengamot to drop the case.”
Harry speaks up before anyone else can say anything. The books said it was okay, once someone else has “created an idea.” “What about his murders?”
“What?” Malfoy frowns at him. So does the younger Malfoy, from the other side. Harry wants to explain to them why their scowls are low-grade, since he’s been frowned at by masters, but he refrains.
“He murdered three Dragon-Keepers to get the ground-up eggshells he was selling,” Harry says, slow and precise. “I looked into the victims’ family connections. Two of them were pure-bloods from prestigious families in Russia. The third was a descendant—although, again, the connection wasn’t obvious from the family name—of the Shafiq family.”
He feels Lady Shafiq stir off to the side. “Are you certain of this?” she demands, and her voice is very low.
Harry turns and bows to her. “I’m certain, Lady. A great-grandson of your grandmother’s sister. The name was changed to Shawne, but the genealogical lines are clear.”
They aren’t, in fact. Harry is creating this out of whole cloth. But he also knows that everyone is forbidden to check books and family tapestries and the like while they’re in the Sun Chamber.
And he knows one other thing.
“Why was this not told to me before?” Shafiq says, and her voice is cold enough that Lucius Malfoy has to pause and look at her. Harry knows nothing about the various hierarchies between the Lords and Ladies, although Malfoy was sitting closer to the front than Shafiq is right now, but he can see the way Malfoy swallows. Good. That means he’s nervous around her.
That will serve Harry’s wish to set the Kneazle among the pigeons.
“We had not done enough research.” Malfoy looks as if he’s a moment from pulling his collar away from his throat, but in the end, it’s probably not a dignified enough gesture for a Lord, because he doesn’t do it. “That—changes the matter, of course. But it does not change the matter that Selis is still of a pure-blood family.”
“And that outweighs the three pure-blood heirs he killed?” Harry asks with intense interest. “Thank you, Lord Malfoy. I didn’t know about the various ways that the living and the dead were considered in the Sun Chamber.”
“Of course it doesn’t outweigh them,” Malfoy says, and turns to snap a glare at Harry. “But his blood means that young Selis should continue to be free so that he can serve the goals of his line in the future. A political slap on the wrist would be of much more use to our goals in the future than a stint in Azkaban.”
“Of use to the goals of your family, Lord Malfoy,” Shafiq snaps, her fine dark eyes narrowing. “And your ally, Lord Selwyn!”
“We did not know that young Shawne was an heir of your family—”
“And now you do. What do you hope to gain from continuing to deny it?”
“It only remains to be seen that—well, to be frank, the heir of your family line is dead, Lady Shafiq. Young Selis is still alive. There is the hope that he can help us in the future, which is not the case with—”
“Oh, but I can exact vengeance. And by the laws of the Sun Chamber, I can bring it against anyone who contests my own responses or my right to do so. Are you going to do that, Lord Malfoy?”
Shafiq has her hand on her wand. Harry keeps his eyes wide and looks from face to face. In fact, he doesn’t have much trouble doing that. In some ways, this is as good as a play.
And even better is the fact that it only took a word from him to start trapping them in the lines of their rituals and tangling the knots of their alliances. It’s still going to be a long, complicated process to destroy the Sun Chamber, but the first steps are as easy as a dance.
“No one questions your right to seek vengeance, Lady Shafiq.” Malfoy has his hands spread as if he’s trying to press down rising waters. “But I do want to know why we weren’t aware of this information about the Shawne Dragon-Keeper before, and how Lord Potter came to be aware of it—”
“I am an Auror working on the case,” Harry says, and draws himself upwards while doing his best flounce-in-a-chair. “And are you questioning my word? Lady Honeywell told me that the word of a Lord is considered sacred. So did the books she sent me. Were they wrong? Am I going to be questioned because of the old grudge that you hold against me?”
Malfoy’s cheeks turn red. “Forgive me, Lord Potter,” he says, between gritted teeth. “I only meant that we don’t have all the evidence yet.”
“We have his word.” Shafiq is on her feet, her wand dangling in her hand, her eyes hard and clear. “And my challenge. Where shall we meet, Lord Malfoy, Lord Selwyn? The dueling ground is up to you, as choice of outcomes is up to me. I shall tell you, it is going to be to the death.”
Malfoy looks around the room as if asking for help. Selwyn has turned his head to pin Lady Shafiq with his eyes, but she doesn’t look as if she minds. Unlike the wall in Harry’s office, she’s just not that into him.
“I—I ask for forgiveness, then.” Malfoy looks as if he’d rather eat every lemon in Britain. “The light of the sun must pierce everywhere, and shine even into the hearts of those who serve it. I withdraw my petition for forgiveness for young Selis. And I agree that we should stop trying to influence the Wizengamot in his direction.”
Shafiq takes a moment to think about that. Then she turns to Selwyn.
Selwyn stands up and continues glaring. Then he says, “My honor was impugned. I will meet you on the field in front of my secondary manor house, Lady Shafiq, at dawn tomorrow.”
“It shall be so,” Shafiq says, and twirls her wand. The sun pictured on the chamber wall throbs and sends out a blur of light. Harry would be impressed by this if he hadn’t seen it before. It’s just a modification of a charm that’s meant to brighten a Lumos so Aurors can use it to search underground caverns.
The two of them sit down, still glaring at each other. Harry glances off to the side and tries to locate a Selwyn or Shafiq heir among the younger witches and wizards over there. He doesn’t see anyone with Selwyn’s unique pickled look, but he does see a young woman peering anxiously at Lady Shafiq. No way is she thirty.
Which means there could be a seat left empty in the Sun Chamber, no matter how the duel falls out.
The rest of the business in their meeting is unimportant, mostly involving medallions awarded to some Lord for the length of his service and a resolution to “increase the shine of the Sun Chamber in the affairs of the Wizengamot,” whatever that means. A few people do try to discuss the newspaper article, but no one seems concerned. It will blow over, say their responses. They don’t need to worry because people will forget about it since there’s no scandal involved.
Harry has to grin and duck his head again. That’s what they think.
“What’s going to happen when it turns out that Shawne isn’t a descendant of the Shafiq line?” Neville asks him quietly under the noise of people getting up to go.
“Why would they find that out?” Harry asks him.
“Well, I mean, when they do their own investigation, and figure out that you invented—”
“They can’t do an investigation.” Harry really will have to stop grinning before they walk in front of someone who will be suspicious, like Malfoy. “They can’t doubt my word. It’s sacred, Neville. They have to believe whatever another Lord or Lady says about someone who’s not another Lord or Lady.”
Neville stares at him. “That’s daft.”
“But useful.”
Neville shakes his head, looking as if he’s on the verge of laughing, but someone else interrupts before he can say anything. Draco Malfoy has stomped up to stand in front of them and is standing there with his arms folded.
“You finally took over your titles and you think that you can just embarrass my father like that, Potter? You think that you’re worthy of being here? You’re less than your Mudblood friend.”
Neville’s hand flashes down to his wand, but Harry stops him with his hand on his wrist. “Goodness,” he says gently, “I think someone is jealous that he’s thirty but his father is still alive, which prevents him from claiming the Lord title. And I see someone is also a greater embarrassment to his father than I could ever be.”
Draco’s brow wrinkles. “What—”
“Not using my title when you know it exists, Heir Malfoy.”
Draco turns so pink that he looks like he’s about to boil over. “I—I apologize, Lord Potter.” And he steps back and keeps his gaze on the floor as Harry and Neville sweep past him and towards the door.
Neville waits until they’re outside and alone in a lift before speaking this time. “You’re terrifying.”
Harry smiles beatifically back at him. “They should never have given me this weapon.”
*
SickPuppy: Thanks! Harry does have a lot of ways to mess with them.
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Made of Common Clay