Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (95 page)

Harry’s train of thought stumbled.

There were times when ‘Aw, crap’ just didn’t seem to cover it.

Li’s hands were sure despite the adrenaline, as he unlocked the bars on the Vanishing Cabinet that linked Azkaban to a well-guarded room in the interior of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. (A one-way Vanishing Cabinet, of course. The wards permitted a few fast ways
into
Azkaban, all of them highly restricted, and
no
fast ways out.)

Li stepped well back, pointed his wand at the Cabinet, spoke the incantation “
Harmonia Nectere Passus
”, and not a second later -

The door of the Cabinet burst open with a bang, and into the room strode a heavy-set, square-jawed witch with greyed hair cropped close around her head. She wore no rank signs as she wore no jewelry or other ornamentation, it was only an ordinary Auror’s robes that she deemed fit to grace herself: Director Amelia Bones, head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and said to be the only witch in the DMLE who could take Mad-Eye Moody in a fair fight (not that either of those two were the sort to fight fairly). Li had heard rumors that Amelia could Apparate within the bounds of the DMLE, and this was the sort of thing that gave rise to rumors like that, he’d called in the alarm not fifty seconds ago.

“Get into the air, now!” Amelia barked over her shoulder at the female Auror trio following behind her with police broomsticks, they must have all been crushed in there, waiting for Li to activate the Cabinet. “I want more aerial coverage on this place! And make sure you keep up your anti-Disillusionment Charms!” Then her head turned toward him. “Report, Auror Li! Do we know how they got in yet?”

Another Auror trio holding broomsticks materialized in the Vanishing Cabinet and strode out after them even as Li began talking.

They were followed by a trio of Hit Wizards in full battle gear.

Then another trio of Hit Wizards.

Then another broomstick team.

The emaciated form that was Bellatrix Black was resting motionless on the stairs when Harry got there, eyes closed, and when Harry asked in a cold, high whisper whether she was awake, he got no response.

A brief twitch of panic was countered by the thought that Professor Quirrell had knocked her out to prevent her from hearing the Dark Lord’s cringing servant suddenly turn into a hardened criminal and then an expert battlemage. Which was good, because she wouldn’t have heard Harry’s voice saying ‘Expecto Patronum’.

Harry drew back the hood of the Cloak, pointed his wand at Bellatrix, and whispered as gently as he could, “
Innervate.
”

From the way Bellatrix’s body jerked a little, Harry didn’t think he’d managed to get it quite gentle enough.

The sunken dark eyes opened.

“Bella dear,” Harry said in his cold, high voice, “I am afraid we’ve run into a bit of a problem. Have you recovered enough to do small magics?”

There was a pause, and then Bellatrix’s pale head nodded.

“Very good,” Harry said dryly. “I won’t ask you to walk unaided, Bella dear, but I am afraid you must walk.” He pointed his wand at her. “
Wingardium Leviosa.
”

Harry kept the flow of force down to something he could sustain for a while, and it was still probably lifting two-thirds of her current body weight. She was… thin.

Slowly, as though for the first time in years, Bellatrix Black pushed herself to her feet.

Amelia strode into the duty room, Auror Li and his silver badger following behind her. She’d spun her Time-Turner the moment she’d heard the alarm, and then spent a tense hour preparing her forces for entry. You couldn’t
loop
time within Azkaban itself, Azkaban’s future couldn’t interact with its past, so she hadn’t been able to arrive before the DMLE had gotten the message, but she should have arrived in time…

Her eyes went straight to the corpse, uncloaked and looking very dead, floating beyond the viewing window.

“Where is Bellatrix Black?” Amelia demanded, showing no fear before the creature of fear.

Even her own blood froze for an instant, as the corpse parted its lips, and gurgled, “
Do not know.
”

Harry watched, now fully invisible once more, as Bellatrix slowly leaned down, took Professor Quirrell’s wand (which Harry dared not touch), and slowly straightened again.

Then Bellatrix pointed the wand at the snake, and said, her voice precise though it was still a whisper, “
Innervate.
”

The snake did not stir.

“Shall I try again, my Lord?” she whispered.

“No,” Harry said. He swallowed the sick feeling. Harry had decided to say the hell with it and try to revive Professor Quirrell after he’d realized that the Dementors had probably alerted the Aurors by now. His high, cold voice went on, unperturbed, “Do you think you are able to perform a Memory Charm, dear Bella?”

Bellatrix paused, and then said, hesitantly, “I think so, my Lord.”

“Eliminate that Auror’s last half-hour of memory,” Harry commanded. He’d thought a bit about whether he wanted to provide any justification for that, what he would say if Bellatrix asked why they weren’t just killing him, in which case Harry would explain that they were pretending to be a different power group and then tell her to shut up -

But Bellatrix simply pointed her wand at the Auror, stood silently for a time, and finally whispered, “
Obliviate.
”

She swayed, then, but did not fall.

“Very good, my dear Bella,” Harry said, and chuckled thinly. “And I will ask you to carry that snake.”

Again, the woman said nothing, demanded no explanations, didn’t ask why Harry or the apparently-invisible Patronus caster couldn’t do it. She only staggered to where the long snake lay, slowly bent over, picked it up, draped it over her shoulder.

(A tiny little part of Harry observed that it was very
relaxing
to have a minion that would just follow orders so unquestioningly, and even got as far as thinking that he could totally get used to having a minion like Bellatrix, before that mind-fraction was screamed into silence by his mortally offended remainder.)

“Follow,” the boy commanded his minion, and began to walk.

It was starting to get crowded in the duty room, almost too crowded to breathe, though there was still space around Amelia herself; if needing to breathe meant that you had to crowd Director Bones, it was better not to breathe.

Amelia looked at where Ora was fiddling with Auror McCusker’s mirror. “Specialist Weinbach,” she barked, causing the young witch to start. “Any response from One-Hand’s mirror?”

“None,” Ora said nervously, “it’s… I mean it has to be jammed, not dead, carefully jammed because it didn’t set off the alarms, but the line is so blank the mirror might as well be broken…”

Amelia didn’t let her expression change, though the part of her that was already mourning One-Hand got a little sadder and a lot more angry. Seven months, he’d had seven months left until his retirement after a full century of service. She remembered him as an eager young Auror, so very long ago, and his whole career he’d served the DMLE with perfect loyalty, at least when it came to anything really important…

Someone would
burn
for this.

The Dementor still hovered outside the window, casting its useless shadow of dread over their operations; all the creature could do was gurgle its lack of knowledge or fail to reply at all, when asked questions like ‘Did Bellatrix Black escape?’ and ‘Why can’t you find her?’ and ‘How is she being hidden?’ Amelia was starting to worry that the criminals were already gone, when -

“We found a hole in the roof over C spiral!” someone shouted from the doorway. “Still open, ward circumventions still active!”

Amelia’s lips peeled back in a smile like a wolf opening its jaws to eat.

Bellatrix Black was still in Azkaban.

And in Azkaban, Bellatrix Black would remain forever.

She took a stride toward the window, ignoring the Dementor now, and looked up at the sky above, to check with her own eyes the patrolling broomsticks. She couldn’t see the whole sky from here, but she saw ten brooms go past on a patrol pattern and that already ought to be enough to catch anyone, though she fully meant to put every broom she could in the air. Her Aurors were equipped with the fastest racing broom currently on the market, the Nimbus 2000; no unsuccessful chases for
her
people.

Amelia turned back from the window, and frowned. The room was getting ridiculously crowded, and two thirds of these people didn’t
need
to be here, they just
wanted
to be close to the center of the action. If there was one thing Amelia couldn’t tolerate, it was people who did what they wanted instead of what was needed.

“All right, you lot!” Amelia bellowed at them. “Stop hanging around here and start securing the top level of each spiral! That’s right,” she said to the looks of surprise, “all three! They could tunnel through a floor or a ceiling to go between them, in case you hadn’t worked that out! We’re going down level by level until we catch them! I’ll take C spiral, Scrimgeour, you’re on B…” She paused, then, remembering that Mad-Eye had retired last year, who could she… “Shacklebolt, you’re on the A spiral, take with the strongest other fighters! Check every set of cells you pass, look under blankets, do the full set of detection Charms in every corridor! Nobody leaves Azkaban until the criminals are caught, nobody! And…” People looked at Amelia in surprise as her voice trailed off.

The criminals had invented some way to prevent the Dementors from finding Bellatrix Black.

That ought to have been
impossible.

It chilled her blood, contemplating that. It was like…

Amelia took a deep breath, and spoke once more, in a voice of steel command. “And when you catch them, make bloody sure they’re the real criminals and not our own people forced to take Polyjuice. Anyone behaves oddly, check them for the Imperius Curse. Keep each other in sight at all times. Don’t assume an Auror uniform is friendly if you don’t recognize the face.” She turned to the communications specialist. “Tell the broomsticks. If one of the brooms peels off for no reason,
half
of them are to hunt it down while the
rest
keep patrolling. And change the harmonics on everything changeable, they may have stolen our keys.” Then back to the rest of the room. “No Auror is above suspicion unless they have no family left to threaten.”

She saw it, the cold looks that came over the older faces, saw some of the younger Aurors flinch, and knew that they understood.

But she said it out loud, just to be sure.

“We’re fighting the old Wizarding War today, everyone. Just because You-Know-Who is dead doesn’t mean the Death Eaters have forgotten his tricks. Now
go!
”

Harry walked in silence through the gas-lit grey corridor, invisible beside Bellatrix and the silver shape following them, trying to think of a better plan.

At first, when he’d realized that the Aurors probably knew already, and that moreover, Professor Quirrell wasn’t waking up…

His thoughts
had
frozen up there, for a second.

And then stayed frozen, even as he’d gotten himself and Bellatrix heading downward, to buy as much time as possible; the Aurors, Harry figured, would start at the top and move down level by level. The Aurors could afford to move slowly and securely; they knew their prey had no way out.

Harry hadn’t been able to think of any way out.

Until Harry had said to himself,
well, if it was just a war game, what would General Chaos do?

From which an answer had followed instantly.

And then Harry had thought,
but if it’s
that
easy, why hasn’t anyone broken out of Azkaban before?

And after he’d realized the possible problem:
Fine, what would General Chaos do about
that?

Whereupon General Chaos had come up with an amendment to his first plan.

It was…

It was the most insanely
Gryffindor
thing Harry had ever…

So now he was trying to think of a
better
plan, and not having much luck.

Picky picky picky,
said Gryffindor.
Who was complaining about not having
any
plan one minute earlier? You should be glad we came up with anything at all, Mister Now-We’re-Doomed.

“My Lord,” Bellatrix whispered haltingly, as she navigated the next flight of stairs downward, “am I going back to my cell, my Lord?”

Harry’s brain was distracted, so it took him that long to process the words, and then another moment to process the horror, while Bellatrix continued speaking.

“I would… please, my Lord, I would very much rather die,” her voice said. And then, in a smaller voice, a whisper that was barely there, “but I will go back if you ask it of me, my Lord…”

“We are not going back to your cell,” hissed Harry’s voice, on automatic. Nothing of what he felt was allowed to reach his face.

Um…
said Hufflepuff.
Did you seriously just think, ‘You ought to work for me,
I
would appreciate you?’

A stone would respond to that kind of loyalty,
Harry thought.
Even if I’m only getting it by mistake, I can’t help but -

She’s the Dark Lord’s loyal killer and torturer, and the supposed reason she’s loyal is because an innocent girl was broken into pieces and used as raw material to make her,
said Hufflepuff.
Did you forget?

If someone shows me that much loyalty, even by mistake, there’s a part of me that can’t help but feel something. The Dark Lord must have been…
evil
doesn’t seem like a strong enough word, he must have been
empty
… to not appreciate her loyalty, artificial or not.

The better parts of Harry didn’t have much to say to that.

And that was when Harry heard it.

It was faint, and it grew louder with every step they took forward.

A woman’s voice, distant, indistinct.