Chapter 200: What Was Waiting in the Weed

The cold arrived first and went straight to the bone, and for a moment it was the only fact in the world.

Then the film woke and took hold. It pushed the lake back off his skin and held a thin sleeve of air against him, and what a body needs came through it as steadily as it had ever come through open air, and even the weight of the water sat off him rather than on him.

Edward straightened out, tried his arms and legs against the drag, and went down and west toward the broken ground.

The current was easier over there and the floor was a confusion of boulders and deep splits in the rock, which made it the best hiding a lake could offer. Harry had taken the weed beds to the north, Cedric the eastern edge where the merpeople lived, and Adeline the shallow southern shelf.

It was darker down there than anyone on the bank would have believed. The sun got into the first few fathoms and no further, and below that the whole world went to a dim standing blue. Deeper still there was nothing but the lights of the merpeople settlement a long way off, flickering the way marsh-fires do and throwing shapes that were not where they appeared to be.

Weed covered the bottom in dark green, lifting and falling with the water, so that the entire floor of the lake seemed to be reaching slowly for something.

Grindylows moved through it in ones and twos, frog-fingered and sharp-toothed, and they came out to look at him and even drifted close enough to taste the water around him, and not one of them offered him any harm.

Then something came off a crack in the rock ahead and to his left, a thread of worked magic with a signature he had been taught that morning to recognise.

He went for it, keeping clear of the weed where it would have wrapped him, and found it wedged in a split in a boulder gone furred with moss. Bronze, broken along one edge into a shape that would only fit one other, and across the face of it a part of the Gryffindor lion's mane. A quarter of the Hogwarts crest.

It was cold in his hand and it carried the wet of the lake and something a great deal older, a slow pulse against his fingers like a heartbeat somewhere under the metal.

He put it into the sealed pouch at his belt, and as the seam closed the small protection inside it woke and settled around the fragment so that no current would take it.

The weed moved.

It was not the lift and fall of the current. It was violent, and it went in one direction, and things were being torn out by the root as whatever it was came through.

The water around him turned confused, and the temperature fell, and something went up his spine that had nothing to do with a cold lake. It was the other cold. It came in through the film, which nothing had yet done, and reached the marrow, and everything in him wanted to be somewhere else.

His heart went hard and his hand had the wand in it before he had finished turning, and the tip came round on the place where the weed was thrashing worst.

Out of the dark, a dozen pale shapes came slowly forward.

They had the outline of men. The skin on them was the blue-white of three days dead and it gave off a faint sick light of its own down there. What flesh was left hung off the bone in ribbons and in places there was none of it left, only the bone shining wetly through. Where the eyes should have been there were two black openings and nothing behind them.

They moved wrongly, stiff at every joint and yet appallingly fast, and each stroke of an arm left a line of bubbles behind it as they came.

Inferi.

Something in Edward's chest stopped for a beat.

There could not be Inferi at the bottom of the Black Lake. Inferi were made, not found. They were corpses under a curse, obedient to whoever had raised them, with nothing inside them but the instruction to kill. Steel did nothing to them and most spells did very little. They feared light and they feared fire, and beyond that there was almost nothing that touched them.

The nearest one came out of the pack at him.

Its fingers were swollen and split, and the nails on them were long and black, and along the points of the nails lay something thick and dark that had been put there on purpose. It would not need a wound. It would only need to touch skin and it would be through and into the blood, and after that the nerves went and then a good deal else.

The hand came straight for his chest, fast enough to draw a wake behind it, and the smell of it arrived even through the film.

"Incendio!"

Edward did not spend any part of a second deciding. The orange-red came off the wand and the film held it clear of the water long enough to be a weapon, and it went out as a single narrow line and took the thing in the middle of the chest.

The sound that came back through the water was a low sizzling that was worse for being muffled. Black smoke rolled off it and spread the way ink spreads in a glass, and the flesh over the ribs went to char and fell away and left the bone standing bare.

It stopped. For perhaps half a second the heat reached whatever was left in it and it stopped, and then it came on again harder than before with its chest still burning and the black holes in its face fixed on him.

The rest were closing from every side at once into a ring that was getting smaller. They moved together, in step, without a sound between them, which meant somebody a long way off was moving them, and there was nothing uncertain about what they had been pointed at.

Sweat came up on Edward's forehead under the film and ran down and joined the lake.

Holding the film cost magic every second it was up. Casting anything cost more on top of it. He could feel the two of them together pulling the reserve out of him the way water goes out of a sluice once the gate is lifted.

"Impedimenta!"

The barrier opened across the water in front of him and three of them went into it together and stopped dead, and the whole thing rang and rippled and held.

The others simply went around the edge of it, and came at his arms and legs from both sides.

"Incarcerous!"

The silver went out and took two of them about the ankles and drew tight, and the links bit down into the rot until black ran off the chain in strings, and it made not the slightest difference to either of them. There was no pain in there to work with. They kept coming, and the chains began to slide.

There were too many, and they were still arriving.

Edward went backwards along the rock, casting as he went. Incendio, Impedimenta, Incarcerous, a Cutting Curse where a leg would take it. Every one of them had to be placed exactly, because a wide cast would have torn his own film and a stray one would have gone on into the merpeople settlement, and neither of those was survivable in a different way.

His mind worked the angles and the output as fast as he could feed it, and it made no difference to the arithmetic. He cleared what was in front of him and more came round from behind, and there was no point in the water where they stopped coming.