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It was amateur band night at the Leaky Cauldron and I was listening to the live act play some old, slow song about a goblin. Nonetheless, the pub was crowded, and the barman was busily trying to serve everyone. It was depressing me, so I was listening to the conversations of the people around the bar while I waited to get my drink. There was the usual selection of uninspiring chatter – wizards trying to pull witches, witches trying to manipulate men into getting more drinks, blokes talking about slipping love potions into those drinks and then women storming away, disgusted at their attitude. One conversation did attract my attention, though.
Two elderly wizards were at the back of the pub, having a very earnest discussion about something in my usual booth. They looked conspiratorial and nervous, glancing at everyone who came past and leaning in to talk to each other closely. At its most harmless it looked like a romantic rendezvous between two consenting adults, which was still fairly fun. But there was seriousness in their eyes that suggested it was something more.
“Do you mind if I sit here? It’s packed,” I said to them, and they gestured for me to help myself. I pretended to be ignoring them while they kept talking. One had glasses and a tall pointed wizard’s hat, and another had a long white beard stained with the tobacco of the pipe he was smoking.
“There must be another way,” one of them said, his long beard quivering, “I’m terrified of that place. I swore I’d never go in again.”
“Listen, it’s fine now. The dementors aren’t allowed there anymore. You can just go in and ask about it on visiting day,” the wizard with the glasses said dismissively, taking a gulp from his pint.
“No! Azkaban is Azkaban, whether those monsters are there or not. Why can’t you do it?” said the bearded wizard, puffing anxiously on his pipe.
“One does not simply walk into Azkaban. My name is on the Ministry’s blacklist. They’d never even consider my visitation application,” said the wizard with the glasses.
“What? Visitation application?”
“It’s special arrangements for the high security wing. He’s been moved there this past month.”
“What? Bloody hell, I told that arsehole to be careful. To keep his head down and behave himself!” said the man with the beard miserably.
“It wasn’t his fault,” said the man with the glasses defensively, “It was an assassination attempt.”
“We should never have told anyone he knew where it was. This is a dangerous business we’ve got ourselves in!” whined the bearded man.
“I told you, just focus on the money. Imagine how much they’ll pay to keep us silent once we have those papers. So, at least one of us needs to go. We can’t put it off any longer,” said the man with the glasses. I suddenly found his eyes suspicious and beady.
“I’m not putting it off. Putting it off implies that it will happen, sooner or later. And I told you, I’m not ever going back to that place,” said the man with the beard, nodding at his own wisdom.
“And I told you , I can’t go either! Just stop being a scaredy-cat and fill out these Azkaban forms,” he said as he dug into a briefcase next to him.
At this point, I’d heard enough for it to be worth my time. I turned back around, ceasing to pretend to listen to the song about a wizard and a witch on a broken-down broomstick.
“Excuse me, did you say Azkaban?” I asked, with a sweet, innocent smile, even though I’d heard them name the wizard’s prison several times over the past couple of minutes.
“What? Who are you?” demanded the man with the glasses, suddenly slamming shut the briefcase.
“I’m Lucinda,” I said, reaching out to shake their hands, “I had a friend that was in Azkaban once. He said it was the worst time of his life. How long is your guy in for?”
“For life,” said the bearded man sadly.
“Woah. That’s rough. What’s he in for?”
“We probably shouldn’t discuss it with strangers,” said the man with the glasses to the man with the beard, warily.
“Oh come on. She said her own friend was in there too.”
“What’s he in for?” demanded the man with the glasses suddenly. I chose not to correct them about how my friend was no longer in prison – it was their own fault for not listening to me, after all.
“Manslaughter. Yours?” I asked, ignoring how he had forgotten my use of the past tense.
“Murder,” said the bearded man.
“Well, that’s one step up from mine,” I said, joking to the bearded wizard, winking. He laughed uncertainly.
“What’s your friend’s name?” said the man with the glasses.
“I probably shouldn’t say. He’s a bit of a controversial figure. Who’s your friend?”
“Our friend is also fairly… controversial,” said the bearded man.
“Ooh, how exciting,” I said, leaning in, widening my eyes. Some men are so easy to manipulate. “What’s his name?”
“Goyle,” whispered the bearded man, also leaning in. The man with the glasses smacked him around the back of the head angrily.
“I told you, we should keep it quiet! For all we know, she was listening when we were talking about the you-know-what.”
“The what?” said the bearded wizard. I began to suspect there was something strange and potent in that pipe of his.
“The you-know-what,” insisted the man with the glasses, supping at his drink irritably.
“Oh right! Yeah,” said the bearded wizard, and glanced at me askance, paranoid.
I couldn’t get anything out of them after that. I had to shift the topic of conversation awkwardly, but it didn’t change their suspicions, so in the end I finished my drink and headed out of the pub. But the matter wasn’t settled. Goyle was a powerfully dark wizard, loyal to Voldemort even now despite his son’s fate, insanely insisting that the inhuman monster was still not dead despite the end of the second war against him. Whatever secret Goyle was hiding in that awful place, it was valuable enough for someone to try and kill him. I didn’t get where I am today – a dealer in information, a rumour-monger and gossip-hoarder – without being proactive.
*
I quickly hopped on my broomstick and flew through the night, avoiding the sight of any muggles with difficulty. I landed at the London townhouse of my friend, a certain William Grey. He was the one I had been referring to when I spoke about someone I’d known in Azkaban.
He opened the front door grumpily but when he saw it was me, his face brightened instantly. I could smell the wine steaming off his skin as he hugged me. With his one eye, the other covered by an eye patch, he looked at me unsteadily. It seemed he had been drinking on his own, but then his house-elf peered around his legs and she looked drunk too, her big round eyes focussing with difficulty.
“Mistress Baker!” exclaimed the house-elf, Hoppy, in her thick French accent. “Come in, come in. Would you care for a drink?”
“What’s happening?” I asked.
“The master has been a bit down in the dumps lately, ever since that Russian woman dumped him.”
“She got really upset when she found out how little I actually contributed to the book I published,” William slurred. “But I could never love a woman who thought Lumbar’s work on material transmutation was the only thing anyone ever needed to know about transfiguration. What a bunch of bollocks!”
“It was a very… loud argument,” Hoppy told me in a conspiratorial whisper that William could plainly hear. We went through into his living room, the walls lined with bookshelves. Even those walls without shelves were obscured by tall stacks, leaning perilously against one another. There was a mess in the middle of the room, like a sort of nest of misery. His pipe and the box of his tobacco, a quill and dozens of crumpled paper balls lying around, all indicated where he’d been spending his time. There were also several empty wine bottles, and one half-full one. There were two wine glasses, one normal-sized and one scaled-down for an elfish hand.
“I can’t stay long, I’ve got a very busy night ahead of me,” I insisted, “But I promise I’ll come by tomorrow. In the afternoon, eh?”
“How’s that new wand working out for you?” William said, seeming to ignore me.
“It’s fine. Thank you, again. The last one was good, and this one is even better. But listen, I need to talk to you, and you’re not going to like it.”
“What sort of busy night?” he asked. Apparently his brain was on some sort of time-delay. It seemed like I was the only person in the whole city tonight that wasn’t drunk, and it made me feel both left out and slightly smug.
“I’m about my own business tonight,” I said, darkly.
“Ooh, something mysterious and dangerous?” he said, dizzy and facetious.
“I need to know about Azkaban,” I said, cutting him off. He looked at me in disbelief, the words cutting straight through his drunken fog. He seemed to sober up suddenly, and sat down heavily in the armchair. Hoppy was looking at me sternly but I ignored her. He looked up, his face pale and his one eye becoming red.
“Why?”
“There’s someone inside who I need to talk to,” I said, vague on purpose.
“Who?”
“They’re in the maximum security section, apparently.”
“What? Well, from what I’ve heard, you’ll need to apply for permission to visit, or something. Since the dementors left they protect the prison with bureaucracy more than anything else.”
“So, it’ll be less dangerous?” I asked.
“Good grief no,” said William sadly. “Everything is dark. There are so many traps, and so many monsters. There are werewolves, vampires, dark wizards of the worst kind, especially in maximum security. I’ve heard there are selkies living in the waters around the island now, helping to guard it,” he said, staring out at the dark night through the tall window. “I’ve heard the dementors have taken to lurking high above, in the air, where the wizards have no jurisdiction. The stones can smell your blood, and the misery seeps out of the corners. People have carved things into the bricks of the walls, over long years, over long centuries. Languages I doubt even you would know. Curses, swearing, messages of revenge, pornography, life stories, letters to their loved ones…” he said, growing quiet, “In the night, there was the longest of screams… The screams of Azkaban are not magic…”
“Would you care for any wine?” Hoppy asked me suddenly, summoning a second human-sized glass. She broke the tense atmosphere but seemed not to disturb William’s maudlin reflections. His trembling finger was tracing the outline of his eye patch absent-mindedly.
“No thank you, I have my broom,” I explained, motioning to where I’d propped it against the wall. “So, traps, eh? Well, no wonder no one ever escapes?” I hinted, trying to steer William back towards some useful information. I was starting to feel slightly awful about making him remember this when he was clearly already quite miserable. I waited for him to hear me. After a while I coughed gently.
“You’re on about Sirius Black, aren’t you?” he said, shaking his head and seeming to snap out of it. Hoppy was still watching him carefully.
“Well, I was just wondering how he got out.”
“You think you can use the same path to get in?” William snapped at me, picking up his wine glass and finishing it in one gulp. “There’s no way in or out of Azkaban. That place is a fortress. That place is…” he trailed off again, but recovered in a second, “If you ask me, Sirius had some outside help or something.”
“There are some people who say he was an animagus. That he shape-shifted into a dog and the dementors couldn’t detect him,” I said, probing without giving away that I knew these things for a fact.
“Well, it’s possible, certainly. But then why would he wait so long in that place? I still say that it was someone else who broke him out.”
“So, you don’t know about any secret entrances?” I pressed.
“If I’d have known, I’d have gotten the fuck out of that terrible place! Do you think I stayed in there for fun?!” he demanded loudly, his face growing red. He poured himself another glass.
“Master Grey, sir, please don’t dwell on it. What’s passed is the past, as they say,” Hoppy said, her French accent contributing to her slurred words.
“I know, Hoppy. I know. You’re a good girl,” William said sadly, distracted by the elf. She beamed happily.
“Do you know anyone who might know?” I asked him, and he looked up at me like he’d forgotten his anger completely. He picked up a piece of fresh paper and a quill and drew a quick sketch.
“Here. There’s some nonsense about the enchantments and charms that form the outer layer. They had to change them since the war obviously, but the enchanter was once a student of mine,” he said, finishing the arithmancy doodles and handing it to me. “Lucinda,” he continued, “Did Emma only like me because she thought I was a genius?”
“I thought her name was Yana. And you are a genius,” I said, taking pity on him finally.
“Not enough of a genius for her, obviously,” he muttered angrily.
“Well, genius is subjective. Listen, I have to get going,” I said, standing up, “There’s a very real chance I could be working against the clock. I’m really sorry. I’ll come over tomorrow, alright? We can talk about it all properly, when you’re feeling… better. Have a safe night, William. Don’t let him touch his wand,” I told Hoppy.
“I shall look after him, madam,” she said.
“You’re both such good friends to me,” William said sleepily, fiddling with his eye patch again, tears shining in his other eye. Hoppy was beaming a gigantic, proud grin once more.
“I know,” I said with a sympathetic tone, picking up my broomstick. He smiled back, but as I left I saw that far-away look return to his eye, and I wondered what dark, terrible memories I had encouraged him to revisit. Hoppy shut the door behind me quietly.
*
There was one place I could go without too much difficulty where I might discover how Sirius Black escaped Azkaban. Without much difficulty, I say, but it would be very dangerous. I pointed my broom to the northwest and flew swiftly through the cold night air until I was over the coast. There was no light but the light of a half-moon shining in the sky, and the sparkling stars. It was lucky I had a warm cloak, because the island I was seeking would be colder and more miserable still.
When Voldemort had risen from the grave, the dementors had sided with him. And when Voldemort had been struck down for the final time, the question of what to do with them had been a puzzling one. Most of the dark lord’s other followers had been locked up in Azkaban, those who weren’t killed in the fighting. But that would clearly be counter-productive with the dementors. The prison had always been their vision of paradise. Instead, they were banished far away into the sea, magically bound to a tiny spike of rock sticking out of the water, far away from any living creature on which to prey. A dementor won’t die of malnutrition, but they feel hunger nonetheless. And out here in the sea, they were starving.
I approached slowly, my shiny new wand out in front of me, lit up like a lighthouse. It wasn’t long before I could see dark, shadowy shapes swirling in the air around me. I could feel that creeping feeling that they always inspire; a strange, alien feeling of bone-deep chill and aching despair. This is not the first time I’ve had dealings with these monsters, and I know how to handle them. They have trouble attacking things in the air, and with the night sea below me I expected them to wait until I landed. After all, a drowned victim feels no sadness. But I realised I had underestimated their desperation.
One of them swept at me from the side, above and to my right. Its hollow moan filled me with dread as it tried to suck at the very essence of my life. I started casting a patronus shield around me, wobbling uncertainly on my broom as I did so. Suddenly the air was full of dark, swirling shapes, obscuring my vision. I had to keep muttering the incantation to maintain the strength of my shield as they flung themselves against it, again and again. When I was completely surrounded, and the spell was weakening despite my continued efforts, I figured it was a good time to start trying to talk to them.
There are very few complete collections of knowledge about dementors, but I had the good fortune to read one once. With such a deadly predator, ancient wizardkind had been clever in their enchantments. Patronus is a weapon against them, but there are other spells. I said a word to calm them, flicking my wand in the air. The battering against my patronus shield ceased, but there wouldn’t be much time before they started to try and prey on me once more. I said a powerful spell to make them obey my will. This may sound like one of the unforgivable curses, but it isn’t. I’ve never even tried to cast one of those. But this particular spell is certainly frowned upon because of the issues of free will, even when it only works dementors. I cast it out and several of them evaded it. The rest were magically docile. Nonetheless there was a slow anger building within them as they tried to resist this further indignation.
I ordered my new dementor puppets to escort me to the island, protecting me from the occasional darting attack of others as they grew increasingly enraged, like a nest of miserable bees. The dementors under my control shielded me skilfully, spiralling around me in flight. Finally I landed on the tiny mound of rocks sticking out of the angry surf, dismounted my broomstick and stood clumsily on one of the large boulders. With my wand I shone bright light into the sky, watching the dementors swirl angrily above me. Their empty, damp hoods were turned towards me and each one was looking for a gap in my defences as they spiralled.
“I need to know how Sirius Black escaped Azkaban,” I told them all. One of my controlled dementors flew off instantly, drifting lazily through the vortex of shapes above me. He returned flying alongside another. They hovered before me in the centre of the growing maelstrom, bobbing in the cold night air.
“How did Sirius Black escape?” I demanded of this new spook. My breath was fogging in the air in front of me, and I wrapped my cloak around me with a shudder. The dementor shook its head, refusing my request.
“What, you want to keep it a secret? Why? The wizards of Azkaban threw you out, they chained you to this desolate rock. It’s not your job to protect the secrets of that place anymore.”
The dementor looked up at those above it, at the storm of angry black shapes. They slowed down, looking at me with an air of interest rather than hunger. They stopped circling like vultures, and came to a stop. They were all staring down at me, their deep hoods occasionally looking at each other almost uncertainly. Their long miserable robes waved in the strong wind like rotten flags. There seemed to be some sort of conference going on in a way I didn’t understand. It was another minute before I said anything else,
“You think you’re protecting your pride?” I guessed, “There’s no pride left for you creatures. You failed to guard the prison, your Dark Lord failed in his ambitions and you failed to escape the wrath of the wizards. Others of your kind still fly free. They haven’t even come to try and help you. You have nothing to lose now,” I said. Not my usual diplomatic standard but the misery was starting to irk me.
They had stopped looking at each other now, and were staring down at me solidly. I think I may have angered them. They were all slowly drifting closer, as if by consensus, still floating upright, while the dementors under my control still spiralled around me. There was a definite air of menace in the freezing sea wind.
“You owe the wizards nothing. They did this to you. Why defend the sense of order that bound you here? Let’s embrace a little chaos, eh? Tell me how to break into Azkaban, and take your revenge on the ones who did this!” I shouted into the night.
The dementor in front of me looked up once more and then back at me, and as the swirling vortex restarted it seemed as though they’d come to a decision. It reached down to the rock in front of me and started dragging one mouldy, ghoulish finger along the flat surface of one of the rocks. Where his finger touched, frost sprang up in delicate crystals that quickly started to melt in the salty sea air and strong wind. Nonetheless, there was time enough that I could copy the drawing. Sure enough, Sirius’s dog form had been useful in eluding the dementors when he’d escaped, but the dementors weren’t there anymore and I was more interested in the route and techniques the frost-drawing described.
The dementors appeared willing to let me leave the island in peace. I mounted my broomstick and sped away, releasing the monsters from my spell as I left. Many of them flew alongside me as I left, spinning around me in a complex, chaotic pattern but coming nowhere near me. Eventually they fell behind, bound to their exile, but they floated in the air, watching me disappear with cold, miserable silence in the wind. I pondered on their inscrutable ways, wondering how bitter they would grow after long years banished to the sea. I was very glad when I could see the coast below me again in the dim moonlight, and felt reassured by the presence of land. The reassurance didn’t last long though.
*
Later that night I was still hovering over the naked sea, flying my broomstick upside down, with my head and shoulders in the water. I had a bubble-charm on my head, acting as a diving helmet, but the water was still freezing cold and terrifyingly dark. Shining my wand into the murky seawater, using it like a torch once more, I was searching for a selkie. I was hovering quite some distance from Azkaban, just short of the region where a broomstick’s enchantments would falter and fail. The prison’s lights were visible on the far horizon – several spotlights scanning the air for any lingering dementors, misguided wizards or hopelessly lost muggle planes.
There are ways to summon the attention of a selkie, but I wanted to keep this as quiet as possible. If the water-dwellers had been given kill-on-sight orders, it would be another matter entirely. It should say something about my profession, and my life, that this upside-down half-submerged situation isn’t the weirdest place I’ve ever found myself. However it’s in the top ten.
There was movement in the water below me, and for a second I was terrified that a dementor had followed me, and would rise out of the sea like a shark. Of course, at the same instant I thought this I was terrified of sharks, despite their not being native to the North Sea. And then, of course, there was the actual terrifying reality that it was one of the selkie guards swimming beneath me, who would dash towards me out of the black depths of the water and pierce me with a trident before I even knew what was going on.
Instead, it appeared he was approaching me slowly with what looked like an old, rusted cutlass. He was blinking up at me, his pale yellow eyes unaccustomed to the light from my wand. His long green hair was floating out in the water, and around his neck there was a long necklace of bones. They looked like short, thin finger bones, but the centre was flanked by fish skulls with a distressingly small human-like skull in the middle. He was reaching to the belt around his waist where he kept some sort of horn carved from bone.
“Wait,” I said in Mermish. I had learned to speak it while I was in school, back when I was in Slytherin, even though it wasn’t on the syllabus. Though I’d been in Slytherin, I wasn’t like the rest of them. I wasn’t very good at most of the subjects they actually taught, the purebloods hated me for being muggle-born, and talking to the selkies in the great lake kept me out of the common room. The irony wasn’t lost on me – I had spent my whole childhood avoiding the likes of Goyle, and now I was doing my best to get close to him.
“You speak Mermish?” said the selkie guard in Mermish, surprised.
“I do. I’ve come to talk to you.”
“You shouldn’t be here, whoever you are. This place is forbidden.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” I said clumsily, my syntax faltering. He frowned at me, his scaly skin folding over his eyes in suspicion. “I’m from the Ministry. I’d like you to give me the tour of the underwater layout around the prison,” I said, lying.
“Let me see some identification,” he said. Damn. I was hoping he wouldn’t ask that. Ministry identification is notoriously hard to fake, obviously. I had a fake ID on me, but it wouldn’t pass the special checks that verify it as official.
“Hold on a second,” I said, as I swung up out of the water. The bubble charm popped, but after I dug into my pocket for the identity parchment I recast it and then swung back into the water, upside down once more. I handed it to him, my arm freezing in the water. The parchment wasn’t waterproof. He peered at it closely with narrowed eyes and then thrust it aside where it floated.
“It’s a fake!” he exclaimed, reaching once more for the horn at his side.
“Wait!” I said again, “I can see you’re not stupid, I’m sorry for trying to trick you. There must be something I can do to get you to take me safely to the prison.”
Honesty is very important in mermish culture – although most selkie tribes are peaceful nowadays, there is still a strong set of warrior-like priorities, such as honour and truth.
“Are you offering yourself to me?” he said, and I could hear the Mermish equivalent of disgust in his voice.
“Not myself, no,” I said, reaching up out of the water and tugging a dagger from my high-heeled boot. “What about this shiny knife?” I said, offering it to him hilt-first. Shiny may sound like a silly word but its equivalent in Mermish is much more dignified. He took it and looked at it appreciatively, turning it over in his webbed hands, pushing his rusted old cutlass into the sharkskin sheath on his belt. He frowned as he evaluated it. I was beginning to feel the blood building up in my head from being upside down too long. “What do you think?” I urged him.
“It’s a nice knife,” he said, “But I’d lose my job with the Ministry.”
“What do you care about the Ministry?” I said, “They don’t care about you. They’re only being kind to your people because they need you to guard their criminals.”
“And you? Do you care about my people?” he said, blowing a bubble of derision.
“Well, yes. I don’t pretend that,” I said.
“You lied about being from the Ministry.”
“I believe your people have an old saying. ‘A lie about liars is no lie at all’, isn’t that right?” I said, smirking to myself. It sounds snappy in English but for selkies it’s a proper tongue-twister, which is saying a lot.
“Who are you, witch, knowing so much of my people?” he asked, swimming closer to me and looking at me curiously.
“Lucinda Baker. Your name?”
“I’m called Octopus-Breath,” he said, “I recognise your name.”
It wasn’t unlikely he’d have heard my name. So few wizards speak Mermish that I can count them on one hand. I should also explain, Octopus-Breath is a fairly good name for a selkie. It’s flattering because it refers to the powerful jets of water that some octopi use for quick propulsion, to escape danger or hunt down prey. It’s a name that speaks of speed, spontaneity and invisible, deadly accuracy. Phonetically it’s pronounced roughly like ‘Keesh-Makasheesh’. Unfortunately, absolutely none of this stops it being funny.
Luckily selkies have no analogue for a smile, and it’s difficult to laugh when you’re upside down and freezing underwater.
“Where do you recognise my name from?” I asked.
“Did you live in that place up north for a while? The place near Leek-Shureen where they teach your hatchlings? Hogwarts, is it?” he asked, doing his best to express the unfamiliar rounded sounds of the school’s name but getting it horribly wrong.
“I did, yes. I found the people there very friendly,” I said, referring of course to the selkies and not the bullies of Slytherin.
“Did you know Seaweed-Hair? I remember her saying something about a Lucinda Baker,” he said, stroking the gills on his neck thoughtfully.
“Know her?!” I exclaimed, “I was the spear-bearer at her sisterhood ceremony! It was a great honour. How do you know her?”
“Seaweed-Hair is my uncle’s wife’s second cousin!” he exclaimed happily. Family is very important for the selkies.
“That’s incredible!” I said, genuinely pleased. I had missed Seaweed-Hair ever since I’d left school. We’d fallen out of touch, what with there being no way to send her a letter and indeed very little written language amongst her people. “I regret not staying in contact with her. How is she now?”
“She married Pike-Face last year! They have entered their second brood of eggs!”
“Second already? I do not know Pike-Face. Is he a strong man?”
“Well, strong in certain ways. His seed on their first brood produced sixty hatchlings!”
“Sixty! So many?”
“Some say he was cuckolded by drift-seed,” said Octopus-Breath, in something equivalent to a conspiratorial tone. I understood then that he was lonely out here in the dark sea, so far from his people, patrolling a nearly-incomprehensible air-breather construction.
“Seaweed-Hair was a strong woman. Her ways will be the strongest. What makes you think of drift-seed?” I asked.
“Pike-Face is thrifty. The rumour is that he saved some money by hiring an inferior builder to construct the hatchery. Cracks in the walls, you see? Then half of the hatchlings turn out green-blue, the other half blue-green. What do you think?” he asked, and it turned out that selkies can shrug.
“The seas are cruel,” I said, using another Mermish phrase then continued, “But even the most desperate cuckold would have a hard time getting his seed through the cracks in a wall. It must have been a very inferior builder!” I said reassuringly before he understood my inference that the mother might have encouraged the infidelity. “How did Seaweed-Hair take it?”
“Oh, as can be expected. She ate the tail of Pike-Face and now he cannot swim, so he guards their new hatchery. You know how it goes. As you say, her ways will be the strongest. I suspect that strong women attract each other,” he said, giving me a long, alien stare. “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked, handing me back my dagger and the fake ID that had floated some distance away.
“You shouldn’t compromise on hatcheries, food or a funeral,” I said, quoting another old phrase. I thought it would be good to emphasise that connection. “I need to get into Azkaban and have someone tell me a secret.”
“Wait, you’re not breaking anyone out?”
“Not at all,” I assured him.
“The wizards want you to write your name on things,” he said uncertainly, expressing a profound truth about bureaucracy.
“I don’t have time for them to read my name,” I said.
“I dislike this. But the tide will flow,” he said, shrugging again, “I’ll escort you. Come all the way into the water, and we may get there safely,” he said.
I swam after him through the water, having shrunk my broom down and put it carefully in my pocket. I’d added a warmth charm to my bubble charm so that I didn’t develop terrible hypothermia in the dark, freezing water. We took a circuitous route full of pauses as we avoided the other unseen, patrolling selkies whose routes and timings he appeared to know intimately. The whole time we spoke in irritatingly quiet voices because selkies have amazingly good hearing, but we exchanged stories about his distant family in the lake next to Hogwarts. He said it was very strange to talk with a human so naturally and I changed the subject, giving him some news to take back to his uncle’s wife’s second cousin.
*
Breaking into Azkaban was a nerve-wracking, precise and intricate ordeal once I had magically dried myself from the sea. William had been right about the misery seeping out of the corners. The depressing air of the dementors had somehow infused itself into the soul of the building itself. All I’ll say is that it involves lots of journeys through deep sea-caves and storage cellars. Most of the traps could be avoided by stepping on the correct pattern of flagstones, and then I was into the prison building itself.
My first stop was the guardrooms. There were only four of them for the night shift, all sitting in the break room playing cards. They would be easy to avoid – apparently they relied on the selkie patrols and the broomstick-forbiddance zone for security, and were complacent. I snuck into the locker room and stole a spare uniform. It was a dark blue tunic, trousers and short-pointed hat with silver highlights and an ornate silver badge covering the left half of the chest. I put it on over my clothes. I figured it couldn’t hurt to pack the pockets with a set or two of magical handcuffs and several of the crowd-suppressant potion-bombs. If everything went to plan I wouldn’t need to use them, and I’d have some exciting souvenirs.
Azkaban is a hollow shell, with several spiral staircases criss-crossing their way up the inside walls. These inside walls are lined with most of the cells, and it was the top of this chamber that I needed to reach. There was almost no light, just the second-hand illumination filtering out of the cells that faced the dim half-moon. The stones were grey slate, but they were chalky and crumbling from the long centuries. There were young, unhealthy weeds sprouting up since the dementors had left, growing from between the cracks. The centre of the internal courtyard had a deep amphitheatre, littered with the equipment for quidditch without a broomstick.
William had been wrong about the screams. I went past lots of cells and each one had different sounds coming from the darkness within, but they were quiet and subdued. Most were just heavy snoring of men and women. In others there was sometimes quiet babbling. Some cells were full of a miserable, lonely whimpering, or the nearly-unheard sobs of someone in the depths of misery. There was the quick shuffling and grunting of masturbation in the darkness.
The noises were worse nearer the top, where the prisoners with longer sentences were kept. I could hear someone whining softly like a wolf, but it was definitely a human voice. From a pitch black cell that should have at least had some moonlight there was an angry hissing. I heard fewer cells with quiet sobbing and more with the steady, dedicated sound of stone being chiselled and scratched at. One cell held a woman, cloaked in shadow but outlined in moonlight, who was whispering out loud as she counted upwards. She was at two million, ten thousand and three hundred.
The maximum security corridor was behind a door made of thick steel bars that I had to spend several minutes trying to magically unlock. The corridor was lit with a series of glowing balls on the ceiling and lined on each side with heavy metal doors, all rivets and reinforcing bars. Each one had a small sliding hatch on it, with a metal grill and bars the width of my finger behind that. The dementors hadn’t known which cell Goyle was in, so I had to check each one. I was lucky that I remembered roughly what Goyle looked like from his photo in the papers, and that there was enough light to make out the features of the occupants. The first two were women, snoring gently. I opened the third and was nearly startled by how the occupant was right up against the door, staring out of the tiny window with wild blue eyes and thick black eyebrows. I stared at him with my own dry, unimpressed gaze until he blinked and ducked down from the hatch. I slammed the hatch triumphantly and continued checking the other cells.
Goyle was in the fifth one I checked. He was sleeping face-up on his cot, the moonlight shining off his dirty skin and thin, feathery beard. I shot a spell between the barriers in the door’s small window, summoning ropes that bound him to his bed. He awoke with a start, struggling and trying to scream, but the ropes had gagged his mouth as well. The lock on his door was similarly hard to pick with magic while I listened to Goyle struggling against his bindings and try to shout for help.
Amongst the miserable snufflings coming from the main well of the building, I could hear footsteps coming up the slow slopes of the spiral walkways. One of the guards must have been patrolling. I muttered various unlocking spells in different combinations, more and more desperately. I must have moved my wand slightly incorrectly, because one of the spells misfired completely, throwing me off. I swore silently, sweating nervously as the echoing footsteps grew closer. Finally I cracked the lock and pushed open the door, closing it behind me without a whisper or a creak.
Goyle was staring at me with wide eyes, the terror and surprise having faded away leaving only an alert wariness. I stood over him with my wand in one hand and the dagger from my boot in the other.
“I’ll take the ropes off your mouth, and if you scream I’ll cut out your tongue. Do you understand?” I said softly. He nodded, his eyes flicking from me to the knife. I removed the ropes and he took a deep, shuddering breath.
“You ain’t come to kill me,” he said. His voice was hoarse and whispery, thick with a cockney accent.
“That’s right. I’ve come to find something,” I told him.
“I’ll never tell you where it is.”
“Yes you will. See, I know you, George Goyle.”
“Big fucking deal. So you know my name,” he said, an attitude suddenly sprouting from him.
“Oh but I know more than that. You don’t remember me, do you.”
“Should I?” he said.
“My name is Lucinda Baker. I was in Slytherin with you. The same year, even.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t recall,” he said, suddenly polite, his accent becoming more refined and polished. “Were we in many classes together?”
“Not many. Potions, history of magic, and astrology. Oh, and transfiguration. And defence against the dark arts, which was useful, wasn’t it?” I said. He laughed dryly.
“Quite a few, then. Are you sure you’re thinking of me?”
“Oh yes. I remember you very well.”
“I do apologise, I’m sure I’d remember a witch as pretty as you. Are… you here to free me? Is the Dark Lord rising once more?”
“He needs something from you,” I said, thinking quickly. “But he hasn’t told me what it is, only that you know where it’s hidden. There are two other wizards who want it as well, one with glasses and one with a long white beard. Who are they?”
“What? He really is alive? He doesn’t have more of a message for me? Why does he want the MBRC Files?” Goyle said, trying to sit up having forgotten about the ropes holding him down. He looked at them in confusion.
“Baby steps,” I said. “Now, where is it hidden?”
I was pleased. This was good news. During Voldemort’s reign, the Ministry had set up the Muggle-Born Registration Commission. It was a bureaucratic way of bullying the muggle-born wizards and witches. They were humiliated, their assets seized and their wands broken, and a great many of them were sent here, to Azkaban, to feed the dementors with misery. The MBRC had kept rigorous documents about everything, from the money and possessions seized by the commission to the sentences of its victims. The files had been pivotal in the ongoing near-restoration of everyone’s lives when Voldemort had finally been defeated.
Myself, I was savvy enough to have seen the persecution coming from a mile off, and I’d had no difficulty going underground. Quite literally on some days, when the Snatchers were on my trail.
Several of the most important of the MBRC files had been lost when Voldemort was finally defeated. These were mostly documents that detailed who had informed on who. It was rumoured that some big, still-important names were in those files. Of course the contents probably wouldn’t be grounds for any sort of legal prosecution, but they were certainly a bad reflection on someone’s character. They were probably good reason for a vendetta or two to be settled, unofficially. If Goyle had somehow hidden these files before he was captured by the restored Aurors, and someone was now trying to kill him and his knowledge, there must be some big names indeed. I have a lot of experience with blackmail, and I know how to do it without putting myself in harm’s way. In my mind I could sense the approach of a lot of money.
“If you’re from the Dark Lord, why am I tied up?” he demanded. Shit.
“You might be a fake,” I said, but I’m sure he could hear the hesitation in my voice because his eyes narrowed with suspicion.
“Bollocks,” he said, returning to his cockney accent and trying to spit at me, “You just want what they want. You’re not from the Dark Lord! You’re taking his name in vain! When he returns, he will make you pay!” he shouted, starting to rant angrily. I knelt down quickly, holding my knife against his cheek, pressing it against his dirty skin.
“Where have you hidden the MBRC files?” I hissed at him.
“I’ll never tell.”
“I told you, I remembered you from school. As far as I remember, you used to do a lot of telling. You grassed on me dozens of times, even when I hadn’t actually done what you accused me of,” I hissed into his dirty, hairy ear.
“Wait… Lucinda? You’re Loose Lucy?”
“Yeah, that’s what you used to call me,” I said, pushing the knife down harder onto his cheek, drawing a drop of blood that dribbled down his face. “You and the rest of the army of arseholes. Crabbe, Malfoy, Nott, Dolohov. And that Bellatrix Black bitch. I was so pleased when her and her husband died. And when Voldemort finally died, killed by his own incompetence and stupidity, I laughed.”
“It’s more than you deserve, you mudblood slut whore!” he shouted, and I took the knife from his cheek and pushed it into his mouth. He looked at me with terrified, furious eyes that were red with anger. The knife blade was cutting into his lips, but for now he looked too angry to feel the pain. His blood was dripping all over his face now.
I looked up, alarmed, as the walls shifted slightly, throwing out masonry dust and crumbled stone. I remembered William’s words, that the stones could smell blood. I had thought he was just being melodramatic, or poetic, but now I started to worry that I should have asked more about it.
“Slytherin is famous for a lot of things, you know,” I said to him, trying to ignore the grinding noise. “It has a long history of being the most creative and subtle of the houses, until your lot came along and turned it into a place of darkness and evil. Myself, I’m quite proud of my subtlety. I think that’s why I was put in Slytherin to begin with. Like Legilimency, for example. Your Volde-man was good at it, Snape was good at it, and I’m very good at it myself. So, you will tell me where it’s hidden, even though you don’t want to,” I said.
I was deliberately trying to wind him up, to make him angry. The noise of the stones around him was helping his heightened emotion too. I was pretty sure that they would just harmlessly grind against each other in frustration – either way, I couldn’t afford to be nervous, scared or doubtful at a time like this.
Legilimency is as subtle a magic as they come. Learning it was a long, arduous process that I started only after I left school and became a professional information exchange. It depends very much on the balance of emotion, and the state of both of the minds involved. I had taken care of that, making him highly emotional and controlling my own. In an ideal world I wouldn’t be doing this in a locked prison cell whose walls I’d apparently awakened, but the stones seemed calmer now at least.
I held Goyle’s eyes as I cast the spell, and delved into his memories. At first it was a random deluge, and I had a dozen visions of brushing his teeth, wiping his arse, fiddling with his cock. It was like I was standing over his shoulder the whole time. Then there were all the times he’d slept with his wife, and the other women he’d seen behind his wife’s back, all flashing past in quick moments. Here was his virginity, and there was the first time he ever killed a muggle. Through his memories I saw him attacked and ambushed by Aurors. I saw him shudder when he first saw Voldemort’s reincarnated face. I saw him sitting on his father’s knee as he was told stories about the terrible muggles, and the horror stories of the witch-burnings, and the tales of Beadle the Bard.
I saw him chasing a young schoolgirl, making her cry, when he was just a boy himself. He was followed by his thuggish friends, calling her ‘Loose Lucy’. They shot spells after her as she ran. As she rounded a corner and looked over her shoulder, he could see its success. Her nose had been transformed into the bristly, slimy snout of a pig. But when they followed her, there was a young boy with long dark hair standing in the corridor, firing back at them. It was Bellatrix’s cousin, Sirius Black, defending a muggle-born like the traitorous Gryffindor that Goyle always knew he would be.
I remembered that day. Sirius had been in the year above me, and was always a more skilled wizard than Goyle. He had defended me while I could do nothing but weep like a weak little child. I had blushed as he inspected my face carefully, tilting my head left and right then skilfully removing the enchantment on my nose. He had said I had a pretty nose, and that he hoped he’d put it back correctly, like he remembered. I had actually giggled.
It was a brief distraction, a sort of feedback shock from the emotion of seeing myself tormented in Goyle’s own mind. I wondered briefly if Goyle had seen it too, but then I finally found the memory of where he’d hidden the files. In the memory, the Ministry was riddled with fighting and many of the offices were on fire or worse. Everything was going badly for Voldemort’s government. Dementors were running rampant through the corridors, and in the distance there was the bellowing, glass-shattering roar of a giant. In the middle of it all, Goyle once more felt like a small, sweaty, terrified little boy, snuggling up to Tom Riddle for protection and then finding that protection whisked away. He looted and pillaged select papers out of the commission’s filing cabinets – the important ones, the ones he knew would be worth something. He stuffed them into a thick envelope, stuffing it full to bursting. Then he escaped into the streets of London. He apparated away as soon as he could, then hid the documents in a transmogrified box that he buried beneath a field outside of Edinburgh.
I’d found what I had been looking for. I broke the spell and left his mind. He was staring at the ceiling, his eyes lost and far away. The old bricks had stopped shifting and grinding and throwing out crumbs of stone. There was a cold wind blowing in through the bars of the window of his cell. I took the knife away from his lips, wiping the blood on his bedsheets. From the amount, it must only have been a few tiny seconds since I had delved into his mind, but it felt like a lifetime. His lifetime, indeed.
The stones shuddered again as I wiped the blade on the sheets. Chips of stone pinged off the far wall. I had a sudden, ominous feeling. I can tell when trouble is brewing, and a building that responds to blood is definitely trouble. For a brief fraction of a second I wondered why any building would need to do that, and the answer arrived in my suspicious brain immediately – not any building, but a prison. It was a suicide alarm.
The guards wouldn’t hurry so much for someone like Goyle, but I still didn’t have much time. I span around, staring at the heavy door and calculating how long it would take me to enchant the lock then find a way to hide in the plain, featureless corridor outside. My best bet would probably be to try and open one of the other doors and hide inside, but that would also take time and there’d be another maximum-security inmate to worry about.
It might have been the schoolyard memories but I had a sudden inspiration to hide beneath his bed. It was a shuffle, but I managed it.
“Don’t tell them I’m down here,” I told him, as I pushed the knife into the small of his back.
“Thank you,” he whispered, and I felt one of his salty tears fall on my face. I suppose he must have been grateful about having such vivid visions of his life given to him in this bleak and terrible place.
I remembered quickly that he was still tied to his bed, so I dispelled the ropes just in time for the hatch on the metal cell door to be thrown back.
“Well? Is he alive?” said a rough voice outside.
“He looks alright. Cover me while I open the door,” said another. The metal door creaked open and a wand-light shone across the room.
“Stay where you are, Goyle,” said someone.
“Is he bleeding?”
“Only on the face. He must have bit himself or something.”
“One of us should go and check.”
“Fuck that.”
“You know they’ll ask if we did.”
“And we’ll lie.”
“What if he’s really bleeding, beneath his sheets or something?”
One of the wizards cast a petrifying charm on Goyle as he lay in the bed. I’d preferred to leave him speaking, obviously. I heard their footsteps as they strode across the room and whisked back the bed sheets, checking his body for wounds. I was terrified they’d look under the bed.
They didn’t.
“He looks right enough to me.”
“Come on then. Let’s get back before those cheating bastards switch my cards around.”
They shut the door behind them, and I heard the metallic clanking of the lock. I waited for several minutes, no longer pushing my knife into his back, and then I struggled out from under the bed to stand upright once more. In the back of my mind, I was laughing that such a simple, childish ploy had worked, and I was once more undiscovered in Azkaban and free to make my escape.
I picked the lock and opened the door silently. I considered killing Goyle, or removing his memories of me while he lay paralysed and growing cold on the bed, his sheets on the floor. But I had seen a great deal of his life, and there was some charm and romance that I felt like leaving to him. On my way out, halfway through the doorway, I glanced back at him. I remembered the horror and cruelty but as I stepped through the door, he looked like a victim too.
I was descending through the prison, walking silently, when I met a man who wasn’t there. Invisibility cloaks are exceedingly rare, but there are other, less perfect ways to hide. He was in the shadows of one of the metallic pillars, dressed in a black wetsuit, his face hidden by the rubber and his wand pointed at me. He had clearly counted the guards and known they were all in the break room. I was dressed in the uniform so he had mistaken me for a fifth, surprise guard.
“You here for Goyle?” I whispered, trying to conceal my femininity. The shadowy figure nodded.
“Go on ahead, then,” I said, and he lowered his wand as I continued down the spiral walkway.
“By the way,” I whispered after him, “A piece of friendly advice. The walls can smell blood.”
I hurried back to the way I’d come in, leaving the mysterious assassin to make his own way up to Goyle’s cell. Before I left, the deed must have been done, because I heard sudden alarms going off high above me. And then I learned about the screams in Azkaban.
With the alarms going off and the guards all hurrying up to Goyle’s cell once more, the inmates were all awake and the stones were grumbling like they were hungry. There were swear-words being angrily yelled across the tall space, there were threats and blood-curdling shouts. There was a wolf-like howling, and someone was shouting religious dogma out of his cell. Women were screaming with insanity, babbling and laughing hysterically. Some people were pleading, others were just screaming in fear as if nothing was between them and the terrors they imagined. The sounds of it echoed noisily through the stony space. I imagined living with these sounds and these people for even one day, and realised the truth of the saying that Azkaban does strange things to a man.
When I rejoined Octopus-Breath in the water far below Azkaban, he looked furious.
“You said you just wanted to find something out!” he said accusingly, “Not kill someone!”
“That was someone else. Let’s get out of here quickly. I didn’t leave a trace, you don’t need to worry.”
Alright, I was lying, but it was only slightly.
*
The newspapers all said that Goyle had been killed by an assassin who had in turn been killed by the diligent and watchful guards. I wondered about the truth of that as I stood in the warm afternoon sun, in the middle of a Scottish field, drinking in the smell of damp earth and split roots that floated out of the deep hole in front of me. The air was unseasonably warm. The trees around the field were a bright, glorious, autumnal orange, and the birds were singing joyfully. At my feet there was an open metal box, the lock easy to magic open. And in my hand there was a thick envelope, stuffed to bursting with all sorts of juicy, incriminating documents.
It had been a productive weekend.