Chapter 201: Gold Under Black Water

One of them came in at an angle he had not covered and the rotting palm went along his left arm.

The film shuddered the whole length of his body and put out a strained thin note, and the light went out of it by half in the space of a breath. He felt the lake come nearer through what was left, the pressure arriving where it had been held off, and his chest tightened round a breath that no longer came easily.

What had been on the nails had gone through with the disturbance, and the arm below the elbow began to go distant and stupid.

He did the arithmetic without wanting to. The film was costing him more now that it was damaged, and the casting had not slowed, and at that rate there were perhaps ten minutes in him. After that the film would go and he would be either pulled apart or drowned, and it made very little difference which.

Edward set his teeth on it. Going up now put Hogwarts on the floor of this task, and Durmstrang thirty points behind would be Durmstrang in front by the evening, and everything the first task had bought would be gone. And he did not know where Harry was. He did not know whether Cedric or Adeline had a dozen of these things closing on them in the dark at this moment, or whether they were alone with it.

But if he stayed down here -

Another came and he got clear of it, and a second took his shoulder as he went, and the claws opened a small tear in the film.

The lake came in through it and hit him like a fist and he coughed it back out, and cold water went where air belonged.

Dying here did not cost him the task. It cost him everything after it, and it handed whoever had put these things in the water precisely what they had come for.

Live. Everything else afterwards.

He stopped hesitating between the two of them and drew one long breath against the failing film, and let go of the shape he was holding.

Light came up off him in a single blow that went through the murk as though it were not there, so bright that the merpeople a quarter of a mile away turned to look at it. The black smoke tore apart in it. The Inferi went backwards from it as one body, not from the heat but from the thing itself.

It took less than three seconds. There was a sound of bone shifting, and gold ran out across his skin in feathers, and his arms drew wide and became wings, and his hands closed into talons, and the shape of his skull ran forward into a Phoenix's beak.

A Phoenix stood at the bottom of the Black Lake with its feathers throwing gold into water that had not seen the sun in a thousand years, and a tail behind it like fire in a wind.

The lake seemed to come to the boil, and it was not heat. It was the shudder that goes through everything when light arrives somewhere dark and the dark is made to move.

The Inferi stopped together. The empty sockets came round and held on the Phoenix, and something went across those ruined faces that had no business being there, and every one of them began to shake.

A thing made of light. A thing made of fire. Precisely and exactly the end of what they were.

Edward opened the wings and brought them down.

The water went out from under him in a slab. The whole floor of that stretch churned up into a turning column of silt and weed and broken rock, and the Inferi were thrown end over end through it, and two or three went into the middle of the spiral and did not come out of it.

And the Phoenix was already gone, a line of gold-red going up through fathom after fathom toward the light.

"What in the name of -"

"Merlin's beard, that is a Phoenix!"

"There is no Phoenix in that lake, there cannot be -"

The shore came apart. Not twenty minutes into an hour, the surface of the Black Lake broke upward in a column of water three times the height of a man, and the spray came off the top of it and turned the sunlight into a band of colour that stood over the whole bay.

Inside the falling water a Phoenix opened its wings, and every feather on it was carrying light, and the tail went from gold through orange into a red like the last of a sunset.

It came round once above the lake and cried out, one long clear note that went up past the towers, and there was not a person on that bank who did not feel the sound arrive somewhere under the ribs.

Then it turned and came down at the shore, and as it fell the gold ran backwards. The feathers went into the skin, the wings folded down into arms, the talons became feet, and Edward Black landed badly on the grass and went to one knee with the water running off him.

His face had no colour left in it and neither had his lips. What comes after emptying a body of magic came up through him all at once, and it was all he could do to stay upright on the one knee.

"Edward!"

Draco was across the grass before anybody else had moved, with Crabbe and Goyle at his heels. He got both hands on Edward's shoulders and felt how cold the skin was, and his face changed.

"What happened down there? You went in and you came out of the lake as a bird. What happened?"

"Inferi." Edward got it out and it cost him. Every breath went in like something tearing. "Under the weed. A dozen at least, and they kept coming."

"Inferi?" Crabbe's voice climbed most of an octave. "In the lake? Those are a Dark wizard's work, those don't just -"

"I know what they are." Edward tried to get his feet under him and his legs refused it entirely, and he went down again and Draco caught him and let him lean.

His eyes had gone back to the barrier over the water. The pale blue was still turning slowly, and once or twice the light of a spell came up through the lake from somewhere beneath it, blue and then red, and nothing about any of it could be read from here.

"Harry is still down there. Cedric. Adeline."

"The barrier will not pass a message either way." Draco's arm stayed where it was. "There is no getting word in."

Edward's hands closed until the nails were into his palms.

The Heart-Flame Crest gloves would hold the three of them and keep them breathing, and that had been the whole of the problem a fortnight ago and was not the problem now. Those things had come for him deliberately and in numbers, and if they came for Harry the same way, Harry had never seen an Inferius in his life.

For the next three quarters of an hour Edward sat on a bench at the top of the bank. Draco had a dry blanket found from somewhere and a cup of cocoa pushed into his hands, and Crabbe and Goyle stood off at either side and turned away everybody who came up wanting to ask him about the Phoenix.

He held the cup and could not feel the heat of it, and did not look away from the water once.

The sun came round and began to slant, and the gold on the lake went orange. Now and then the surface lifted in a way the wind did not account for. Now and then a light came up through it, red or blue or, once, a green he liked considerably less. Every one of them put his heart into his throat.

Nobody else came out early.

It was the only good news available and it was not entirely good, because if a dozen Inferi had been standing in the weed all morning and had gone for exactly one champion out of twelve, then they had been told which one, and somebody had spent a great deal of trouble arranging it.

Karkaroff, with a burn on his leg and a grudge he had never troubled to hide.

Or the other one. The one Dumbledore had put a name to and nobody had yet laid a hand on.