Chapter 209: What Moody Was Running Out Of

They did not stay to be congratulated. Edward put the certificate inside his robes, Lupin gathered the scrolls, and the two of them were in the lift before the Department of Mysteries had finished packing away instruments they had not been allowed to use.

The telephone box put them back onto a London pavement in the middle of the afternoon, and they had gone perhaps two hundred yards before Lupin's hand closed on Edward's sleeve.

Two men in Ministry robes had come up out of the same box and were walking at exactly their pace. There was nothing wrong with their faces. There was a great deal wrong with the fact that they had not once looked at a shop window.

The alley was a mistake and Edward knew it as they turned in, and by then both wands were already up behind them.

Two spells came down the brickwork together, and there was nothing in the shape of either that belonged to law enforcement. They were not meant to hurt him. They were meant to take the top off his mind and walk him out of the city on his own legs.

"Imperio!"

The Heart-Flame Crest gloves went off before Edward had finished turning. Gold-red came up out of the Mithril in a sheet and built itself into a shield across the mouth of the alley, and the pattern that stood in it as it set was the shape of two wings.

The two curses went into it and stopped, and the collision put out a light that filled the whole passage. The bins along the left-hand wall went over and slid twenty feet, and grit came off the brick and rattled down.

Edward turned his wrist and let the fire out along the ground.

"Flame Whip."

It went out low and fast like something alive, took the residue of the dark magic still hanging between them and swallowed it whole, and then came up and closed round two forearms at once. The men screamed together. What burned was not only the sleeve; something worked into the cloth underneath went up with it, and the smell of that was quite distinct.

They tore at their own uniforms getting clear, and as the fabric came away from the left shoulder of the nearer one Edward saw it.

A Dark Mark. Small, and thin, and not finished, the way a print comes up on paper before it is fully developed.

Neither of them stayed for a second look. They cracked out of the alley almost together and the street was empty again except for the bins.

"Death Eaters." Lupin had his wand still up and was watching the far end of the passage. "Or what they are making of them now. That mark was new and it had not set." He turned. "They followed us out of the building, Edward. Which means somebody inside it told them when to expect us. You are not merely being watched any more. You have been put on a list."

Edward stood with the certificate against his ribs, and the parchment was cool through the cloth.

Inferi under the lake. A department of the Ministry attempting to take him apart in a locked room. Two men with unfinished marks waiting for him on a public street within an hour of the registration. Three different rooms, three different methods, and one hand somewhere behind all of them.

They found a Floo and went back, and did not go up to the school. They went to the Shrieking Shack.

Sirius had worn a path across the boards by the time they came through the door, and the whole of him came down an inch when he saw them both upright.

"Well." He got hold of Edward by both shoulders and looked at him properly before he let go. "Then it is done, and you are here."

Before either of them could give him the afternoon, he was already going the other way with it.

"Karkaroff has stopped being careful. Twice in two days he has come out of that camp alone, and both times he waited until his own students were elsewhere and went round the guards rather than past them. He goes to the edge of the Forbidden Forest and he does not take a lamp." His jaw set. "He comes back grey, and the second time his hands were shaking so badly I could see it from a hundred yards."

"Then he is not giving orders out there. He is taking them." Lupin put his bag down on the table. "We were followed out of the Ministry this afternoon and put in an alley by two men wearing marks that had not finished setting. I have already written to Dumbledore asking leave to stay at the school. Whatever this is, it is moving faster than we assumed a month ago, and you and I watching the same man from two sides is worth more than either of us doing it alone."

They agreed how word would pass between the three of them and did not draw it out, because three people in the Shrieking Shack for an hour is precisely the sort of thing that gets noticed.

The common room had a delegation waiting. Draco came off the sofa the moment the wall opened, with Crabbe and Goyle a step behind and all three of them wearing the same expression.

"Well? Did it go through? Did that woman try anything? My father's man sent word this morning that the Ministry had already felt the family leaning on it."

"It went through. The registration is complete and the certificate is in my bag," Edward said evenly, and left out the two security officers, the camera, the eleven people in the verification room, and the alley. There was nothing in any of it that Draco could have done anything about at four hundred miles' distance, and worrying him would only have produced letters. "It was tedious. That is all it was."

He let them fuss for a few minutes because it was easier than not letting them, and then went up to the dormitory.

The castle emptied itself of noise by degrees, and the lights went out floor by floor, and somewhere past one in the morning Edward got up without lighting anything and went west.

Moody's behaviour on the shore had been sitting in him for a fortnight like a splinter under a nail. The hand that had stayed too long. The eye going over his cuffs. The advice about clever equipment, delivered four minutes before something came out of the weed that his fire could barely touch.

The office was at the top of the west tower, and the door and both windows carried enough warding against listening and against entry to make the point that the occupant expected people to try. Edward did not touch any of it. He put his back to the cold stone beside the frame, brought his own magic down until there was nothing to sense, and put his ear to the gap at the hinge.

Inside, somebody was swearing under his breath in a voice like a rasp on wood, and there was real fear underneath the irritation.

"Empty. It is empty again, and that is the last of it." Glass touched glass, and something was set down harder than it needed to be. "This will not carry me to the final task. Not at this rate. Severus had better have more of it, and he had better not start asking me why - not now, not this close, not with everything else standing where it is."

The words came apart after that into muttering. Then a chair went back and there were footsteps.

Edward was six paces down the passage and inside a doorway before the latch turned. He held everything in him perfectly still and watched Moody come out and set off down the corridor, and the wooden leg struck the flags with that flat double sound, once and then again and again, all the way to the stairhead, and then it was gone.

He stayed where he was for a while afterwards.

Whatever was in those bottles, Moody was running out of it, Moody was frightened of running out of it, and Snape was where it came from. That was three facts and no thread between them, and he did not have enough to go into a warded office and start opening cupboards. He went back the way he had come.

Potions the following morning ran exactly as it always ran, with Snape moving between the benches in black and finding fault at intervals with a precision that suggested he had planned it in advance. When the bell went, Edward took his time over his things until the room had emptied and there were two people in it.

He turned round.

"Professor. Has anything gone missing from your stores lately? Or has anything been running short faster than it ought to?"

Snape came about so quickly that his robes had to catch up with him, and what was in his face arrived before he had decided to let it.

His wand moved, and something struck the flagstones a foot from Edward's boots and put a fan of hairline cracks through the stone. He did not raise his voice. He never needed to.

"Black. You have had a great deal of attention this term, and I see it has given you ideas about what you are entitled to ask." Every word came out separately. "You will not go near my stores. You will not take anything from them, and you will not send anybody else to take anything from them, and you will stop this conversation now."

"Professor -"

"Dumbledore's favourite champion." The black eyes did not blink. "I could make the rest of your time in this castle considerably less comfortable than it currently is, and I would not have to break a single rule to do it. Consider that carefully."

He turned back to the bench and began clearing it, and the set of his shoulders made it perfectly clear that nothing further would be said.

Edward picked up his bag and left without another word. He had gone in to give the man a warning and had come out with a threat, which was a poor exchange by most measures.

But Snape had not asked what he meant. A man with a full storeroom asks what you mean.