Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (193 page)

“Something went wrong,” Harry said. “Something that blew off the top of the Potters’ home in Godric’s Hollow, gave me the scar on my forehead, and left your burnt body behind.”

Professor Quirrell nodded. His hands had slowed in their Potions work. “The resonance in our magic,” Professor Quirrell said quietly. “When I had shaped the baby’s spirit to be like my own…”

Harry remembered the moment in Azkaban when Professor Quirrell’s Killing Curse had collided with his Patronus. The burning, tearing agony in his forehead, like his head had been about to split in half.

“I cannot count how many times I have thought of that night, rehearsing my mistake, thinking of wiser things I should have done,” said Professor Quirrell. “I later decided that I should have thrown my wand from my hand and changed into my Animagus form. But that night… that night, I instinctively tried to control the chaotic fluctuations in my magic, even as I felt myself burning up from inside. That was the wrong decision, and I failed. So my body was destroyed, even as I overwrote the infant Harry Potter’s mind;
either
of us destroying all but a remnant of the other. And then…” Professor Quirrell’s expression was controlled. “And then, when I regained consciousness inside my horcruxes, it turned out that my great creation did not work as I had hoped. I should have been able to float free of my horcruxes and possess any victim that consented to me, or that was too weak to refuse me.
That
was the part of my great creation that failed my intent. As with the original horcrux spell, I would only be able to enter a victim who contacted the physical horcrux… and I had hidden my unnumbered horcruxes in places where nobody would ever find them. Your instinct is correct, boy,
this would not be a good time to laugh.
”

Harry stayed very quiet.

The Potions-making had come to a temporary pause, a space where no ingredients were added while the cauldron simmered for a time. “I spent most of my time looking at the stars,” Professor Quirrell said, his voice quieter now. The Defense Professor had turned from the potion, staring at the white-illuminated walls of the room. “My remaining hope was the horcruxes I had hidden in the hopeless idiocy of my youth. Imbuing them into ancient lockets, instead of anonymous pebbles; guarding them beneath wells of poison in the center of a lake of Inferi, instead of portkeying them into the sea. If someone found one of those, and penetrated their ridiculous protections… but that seemed like a distant hope. I was not sure I would ever be embodied again. Yet at least I was immortal. The worst of all fates had been averted, my great creation had done that much. I had little left to hope for, and little left to fear. I decided that I would not go insane, since there seemed to be no advantage in it. Instead, I gazed out at the stars and thought, as the Sun slowly diminished behind me. I reflected on the errors of my past life; they were many, in that hindsight. In my imagination I constructed powerful new rituals I might attempt, if I was free to use my magic once more, and yet confident of my immortality. I contemplated ancient riddles at greater length than before, for all that I had once thought myself patient. I knew that if I won free, I would be more powerful by far than in my previous life; but I mostly did not expect that to happen.” Professor Quirrell turned back to the potion. “Nine years and four months after that night, a wandering adventurer named Quirinus Quirrell won past the protections guarding one of my earliest horcruxes. The rest you know. And now, boy, you may say what we both know you are thinking.”

“Um,” Harry said. “It doesn’t seem like a very smart thing to say -”

“Indeed, Mr. Potter. It is not a clever thing to say to me. Not even a little. Not in the slightest. But I
know you’re thinking it,
and you will
go on thinking it
and I will
go on knowing that
until you say it. So speak.”

“So. Um. I realise that this is something that is more obvious in hindsight than in foresight, and I’m certainly not suggesting that you try to correct the error now, but if you are a Dark Lord and you happen to hear about a child who has been prophesied to defeat you, there is a certain spell which is unblockable, unstoppable, and works every single time on anything with a brain -”

“
Yes thank you Mr. Potter that thought occurred to me several times over the next nine years.
” Professor Quirrell picked up another bellflower and began crumbling it in his bare fist. “I made that principle the centerpiece of my Battle Magic curriculum after I learned its centrality the hard way. It was
not
the first Rule on the younger Tom Riddle’s list. It is only by harsh experience that we learn which principles take priority over which other principles; as mere words they all sound equally persuasive. In retrospect it would have been better if I had sent Bellatrix to the Potters’ home in my place; but I had a Rule telling me that for such matters I must go myself and not try sending a trusted lieutenant.
Yes,
I considered the Killing Curse; but I wondered if casting the Killing Curse at an infant would somehow cause the curse to bounce off and hit me, thus fulfilling the prophecy. How was I to know?”

“So use an axe, it’s hard to get a prophecy-fulfilling spell backfire out of an axe,” Harry said and then shut up.

“I decided the safest path was to try to fulfill the prophecy on my own terms,” Professor Quirrell said. “Needless to say, the next time I hear a prophecy I do not like, I will tear it apart at
every possible point of intervention
, rather than trying to play along.” Professor Quirrell was crushing a rose as though to squeeze the juice out of it, still using his bare fist. “And now everyone thinks the Boy-Who-Lived is somehow immune to the Killing Curse, even though Killing Curses do not ruin houses or leave burnt bodies behind them,
because it has not occurred to them that Lord Voldemort would ever use any other spell.
”

Harry again stayed quiet. It had occurred to Harry that there was another obvious way that Lord Voldemort could have avoided his mistake. Something that might perhaps be easier to see given a Muggle upbringing, instead of the wizarding way of looking at things.

Harry had not yet decided whether to tell Professor Quirrell about his thought; there were both pros and cons to pointing out that particular error.

After a time Professor Quirrell picked up the next Potions ingredient, a strand of what looked like unicorn hair. “I tell you this as a caution,” said Professor Quirrell. “Do not expect me to be delayed another nine years, if you somehow destroy this body of mine. I set horcruxes in better places at once, and now even that is unnecessary. Thanks to you, I learned where to find the Resurrection Stone. The Resurrection Stone does not bring back the dead, of course; but it holds a more ancient magic than my own for projecting the seeming of a spirit. And since I am one who has defeated death, Cadmus’s Hallow acknowledged me its master, and answered all my will. I have now incorporated it into my great creation.” Professor Quirrell smiled slightly. “I had many years earlier considered making that device a horcrux, but decided against it at the time, since I realized that the ring had magic of unknown nature… ah, such ironies does life play upon us. But I digress.
You
, boy, you brought that about, you freed my spirit to fly where it pleases and seduce the most opportune victim, by being too casual with your secrets. It is a catastrophe for any who oppose me, and you wrought it with one finger drawing wetness on a tea-saucer. This world will be a safer place for all, if you learn the rectitude that wizardborns absorb in childhood.
And all thiss that I have jusst said iss the truth.
”

Harry closed his eyes, and his own hand massaged his forehead; if he had seen it from the outside, it would have looked the mirror of Professor Quirrell in deep thought.

The problem of defeating Professor Quirrell was looking increasingly difficult, even by the standards of the sort of impossible problems that Harry had solved already. If communicating that difficulty was what Professor Quirrell was trying to do, he was
succeeding.
Harry was starting to seriously consider the possibility that it might be better to offer to rule Britain as Voldemort’s
nonhomicidal
delegate, if Professor Quirrell himself would just agree to
stop killing people all the time.
Even
mostly
.

But that wasn’t likely to happen.

Harry stared at his hands, from where he had sat down upon the floor, feeling sadness shading over into despair. The Lord Voldemort who’d given Harry his dark side had spent
that long
thinking things over and reflecting on his own thought processes… and had emerged as the calm, clear-headed, and still homicidal Professor Quirrell.

Professor Quirrell added a pinch of golden hair to the
potion of effulgence,
and that reminded Harry that time was continuing to move; the locks of bright hair were rarer than the bellflowers.

“I ask my second question,” Harry said. “Tell me about the Philosopher’s Stone. Does it do anything besides making Transfigurations permanent? Is it possible to make more Stones, and why is that problem hard?”

Professor Quirrell was bent over the potion, and Harry could not see his face. “Very well, I shall tell you the Stone’s story as I have inferred it. The one and only power of the Stone is the imposition of permanency, to render a temporary form into a true and lasting substance - a power absolutely beyond ordinary spells. Conjurations such as the castle Hogwarts are maintained by a constant well of magic. Even Metamorphmagi cannot manifest golden fingernails and then trim them for sale. It is theorized that the Metamorphmagus curse merely rearranges the substance of their flesh, like a Muggle smith manipulates iron with hammer and tongs; and their body contains no gold. If Merlin himself could create gold from thin air, history does not record it. So the Stone, we can guess even before research, must be a very old thing indeed. In contrast, Nicholas Flamel has been known to the world for a mere six centuries. Tell me the obvious next question to ask, boy, if you wanted to trace the Stone’s history.”

“Um,” Harry said. He rubbed his forehead, concentrating. If the Stone was old, but the world had only known Nicholas Flamel for six centuries… “Was there some other very long-lived wizard who disappeared at around the same time Nicholas Flamel showed up?”

“Close,” said Professor Quirrell. “You recall that six centuries ago there was a Dark Lady called undying, the sorceress Baba Yaga? She was said to be able to heal any wound in herself, to change shape into any form she pleased… she held the Stone of Permanency, obviously. And then one year Baba Yaga agreed to teach Battle Magic at Hogwarts, under an old and respected truce.” Professor Quirrell looked…
angry,
a look such as Harry had rarely seen on him. “But she was not trusted, and so there was invoked a curse. Some curses are easier to cast when they bind yourself and others alike; Slytherin’s Parselmouth curse is an example of such. In this case, Baba Yaga’s signature, and signatures from every student and teacher of Hogwarts, were placed within an ancient device known as the Goblet of Fire. Baba Yaga swore not to shed a drop of students’ blood, nor take from the students anything that was theirs. In return, the students swore not to shed a drop of Baba Yaga’s blood, nor take from her anything that was hers. So they all signed, with the Goblet of Fire to witness it and punish the transgressor.”

Professor Quirrell picked up a new ingredient, a loose thread of gold wrapped around a pinch of foul-looking substance. “Entering her sixth year at Hogwarts, then, was a witch named Perenelle. And although Perenelle was new-come into the beauty of her youth, her heart was already blacker than Baba Yaga’s own -”

“
You’re
calling her evil?” Harry said, then realized he had just committed the fallacy of
ad hominem tu quoque.

“Hush, boy, I am telling the story. Where was I? Ah, yes, Perenelle, the beautiful and covetous. Perenelle seduced the Dark Lady over the months, with gentle touches and flirtations and the shy pretense of innocence. The Dark Lady’s heart was captured, and they became lovers. And then one night Perenelle whispered how she had heard of Baba Yaga’s shape-changing power and how this thought had enflamed her desires; thus Perenelle swayed Baba Yaga to come to her with the Stone in hand, to assume many guises in a single night, for their pleasures. Among other forms Perenelle bid Baba Yaga take the form of a man; and they lay together in the fashion of a man and a woman. But Perenelle had been a virgin until that night. And since they were all rather old-fashioned in those days, the Goblet of Fire accounted that as the shedding of Perenelle’s blood, and the taking of what was hers; thus Baba Yaga was tricked into being forsworn, and the Goblet rendered her defenseless. Then Perenelle killed the unsuspecting Baba Yaga as she slept in Perenelle’s bed, killed the Dark Lady who had loved her and come peacefully to Hogwarts under truce; and that was the end of the pact by which Dark Wizards and Witches taught Battle Magic at Hogwarts. For the next few centuries the Goblet of Fire was used to oversee pointless inter-school tournaments, and then it resided in a disused chamber at Beauxbatons, until I finally stole it.” Professor Quirrell dropped a pale beige-pink twig into the cauldron, and its color changed to white just as it touched the surface. “But I digress. Perenelle took the Stone from Baba Yaga, and assumed the guise and name of Nicholas Flamel. She also kept her identity as Perenelle, calling herself Flamel’s wife. The two have appeared together in public, but that might be done by any number of obvious methods.”

“And the Stone’s manufacture?” said Harry, his brain working to process all this. “I saw an alchemical recipe for it, in a book -”

“Another lie. Perenelle was making it appear as though ‘Nicholas Flamel’ had earned the right to live forever by completing a great magic that any could attempt. And she was giving others a false path to pursue, instead of seeking the one true Stone as Perenelle had sought Baba Yaga’s.” Professor Quirrell looked rather sour. “It should come as no surprise that I spent years trying to master that false recipe. Next you will ask why I did not kidnap, torture, and kill Perenelle after I learned the truth.”