Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Under the cover of his invisibility cloak, Harry watched the Aurors playing Exploding Snap. He'd been there for nearly twenty minutes, patiently leaning against an out-of-the-way wall. They should be about due to make their rounds soon, he thought to himself.

Almost as if he had summoned the thought, a card exploded and the game ended in good-natured chaffing. The three Aurors drew lots and set off on their rounds. Once they were gone, Harry Apparated back outside where the other two were waiting.

"They've just started on their rounds. It should only be a few more minutes before they'll be done."

"Good." Bill replied. "I really hate this part of it. Not so much for me, but for Dad."

"I'm going back inside to wait for them. If I'm not back in fifteen minutes, something's gone wrong and you two get out of here." He Apparated, leaving his friends to wait and stew impatiently.

"Gods, why didn't we think of this?" Hermione grumbled for the seventeenth time. "I should've thought about it! I should've looked for notes the first time!"

"None of us thought of it, Hermione. We're all equally at fault here."

"We assumed the jars would be labeled. It's not a bad assumption! WHY would Aberon not label the jars?"

"Aberon is a very painstaking researcher. If they're not labeled, he's got some other way of identifying them. I doubt he would depend on their position - it would be too easy to get them mixed up."

"So we hope we can find his notes. If we can, we hope he details which is who. If he doesn't, we hope we can figure it out anyway."

"One way or another, we'll know what our options are tonight."

The conversation was interrupted by a pop as Harry reappeared. "They just got back from their rounds, so we should have about thirty minutes. Let's go - same drill as before." Three minutes later, they were back in the laboratory.

"Don't forget to check for alarms and wards!" Harry hissed as Hermione started towards the cabinets. She stopped and blushed, taking out her wand and casting the requisite spells. The other two did the same. As before, there was nothing. The cabinets were locked, though, and didn't seem to respond to Alohamora. Bill tried two or three spells of his own with no success.

"So now what?"

Bill knelt and examined the lock on the cabinets. "I've never seen anything like this. It must be custom work - it's certainly not the kind of thing the Ministry uses regularly."

Harry hunkered down beside him. "I'd guess he installed that lock himself. Look at the fancy engraving. This is probably an heirloom."

"Just lovely," Hermione growled. "Let me take a look." The lock was about the size of the palm of her hand, a rectangle of silvery metal with no visible keyhole. Definitely a wizard's lock. Around the edge of the rectangle were faint lines of engraving. "Bill, do you know any spells to make these engravings more visible?"

"Sure." They traded places. A moment later, the engravings were revealed to be letters, words, but in no language he knew. He knew better than to speak an unknown spell, but wrote it down and handed it to Hermione to study. There were four words: Pedo mellon a minno.

Hermione glanced at the phrase and started laughing. "Oh my! Aberon is a genius!" She stood up and looked at the lock. "Mellon!" With a gentle click, the cabinet doors opened.

Bill gaped. "How on earth?"

"It's from a book - a muggle book," Harry explained. "It's far too complicated to go into right now."

Hermione was searching the cabinets and emerged with a stack of parchment covered in tiny crabbed writing. "There's five more stacks of notes down here. We need to hurry."

"Right." Harry began copying the notes using a Koperian Diese spell. "We brought three reams of blank parchment with us. I hope that's enough to get everything."

Bill leaned over the counter and studied the rows of Souljars where they stood in neat lines. "I think I'm an idiot," he announced.

"I'm sure some of your brothers would agree with that," Hermione answered as she handed Harry the last stack of notes. "But why say it now."

"Look at the jars - they're not identical." It was true. The jars weren't labeled as such, but each lid had a number engraved on it. Bill grabbed a piece of parchment and began diagramming the jars and numbers while Harry completed the copying of the notes.

"We've got about eight minutes," Hermione said as Bill neatly rolled up his sketch and tucked it into a pocket.

Harry grabbed their copies of the notes. "Get that cabinet locked and let's start taking down spells."

Bill began dismantling their trap and alarm detection spells quickly, while Hermione restored the original notes to their place and closed the cabinet. The lock clicked shut quietly. A minute later they retraced their steps to their entry point and Apparated out.

Again they collapsed into chairs at Hermione's house, completely drained by their activities. Harry handed Hermione the notes. "Please tell me this is what we need."

She set the parchment down on the table. "I'm not even going to look at it until I've had a cup of tea. We've worn ourselves out." She went into the kitchen, where the sound of running water told the two men that tea was in the offing.

Bill put his sketch on the table next to the Souljars. "I'm not up to another round of this tonight. If we need to go back a third time, it'll have to wait for a couple of days."

"It's two a.m.," Harry said. "I'll pass on the tea. I'm too tired to drink it. Let's pick up in the morning."

"You'll splinch if you try Apparating as tired as you are." Bill said from where he sprawled on the sofa.

"Yes, pot," the younger wizard replied.

Hermione reappeared with a mug of tea in one hand. "Neither of you is going anywhere tonight. I've plenty of room here." She propelled them into her hitherto unused guest room where they fell into bed without protesting over much. She checked on Grim and found him sound asleep in his room. He wasn't dreaming tonight. Sometimes he had nightmares, and she would find him completely tangled in the bedclothes in the morning.

She took her cup of tea and went to bed. Half an hour later, she was still wide awake. Swearing quietly, she padded back out into her living room, grabbed the stacks of notes, and returned to her bedroom and began reading. Aberon had methodically dated each entry, and she soon had them arranged in chronological order. He'd begun by defining the project as he saw it - to come up with some way to render a wizard completely harmless. Removing the ability to do magic was not sufficient, he stated. It would be far too easy for another wizard to counter the effect. There must be a control. And that is when he'd come up with the idea of enforced obedience.

Nine pages of notes were devoted to descriptions of various kinds of geas - magical compulsions - with interspersed comments about the viability of modifying a given geas to fit the situation. In the end, he'd chosen to modify the geas originally used on House Elves. He'd picked it because the effects were hereditary - once the geas was tied in with the potion (there were approximately thirty pages devoted solely to its brewing), any child with a Soulstruck parent would be a Squib at best, a mindless automaton at worst.

Hermione shuddered at the thought, but kept reading.

Two pages were covered with notes about the ethics and safeguards surrounding the use of the spell. Aberon did not want the spell to be effective on wizards and witches who weren't truly evil. He'd wanted to tie it to the presence of the Dark Mark, but had been unable to get that restriction to work. What he had done was make the spell only work on a wizard who had cast at least two different Unforgivable curses.

Hermione put down the page she was reading in dismay. She couldn't think of a single living adult witch or wizard who didn't fit that category, including herself. She riffled through the notes, looking for a list. Halfway through the third stack, she found what she was looking for.

Herein is my record of those who have been condemned to be Soulstruck. As part of the spell requires that they give up all knowledge of who they were, I shall have to come up with some mnemonic that will permit me, at least, to undo the spell, if a person should be wrongfully convicted.

36: Curious Bumblebee

Notes to possibly puzzled perusers:

1) Pedo mellon a minno - "Speak, friend, and enter!" This phrase is engraved above the Doors of Durin in J.R.R. Tolkien's immortal masterpiece "The Lord of the Rings"

2) Not all of the Death Eaters listed in Chapter Six are from Canon. I've made some assumptions about some names, and added a few of my own.

3) Koperian Diese - Mangled German for "copy these", which seems an apt name for a spell to duplicate written works.