Chapter 216: Inside the Thorns

The hedges at the entrance drew back without a sound and left a black opening in the wall of thorn, and the noise of the stands cut off as though somebody had shut a door on it.

Elodie went in first and the purple leaves took her inside three steps. Volodya and Krum walked forward one after the other with a sameness that made the front row of the Hogwarts stand go quiet. Cedric followed, then Lena, then the rest, and Harry looked back once before the passage closed over him.

When it came to Edward he brought the gloves up and put his magic through them, and a web of fine gold-red lines ran off his fingers and out across the ground ahead in every direction, spreading and thinning until it faded out at about thirty paces. Then he stepped through the gap after it.

Inside, the light went.

The evening did not reach into the maze. What lit the passages was a scattering of magical orbs giving out something thin and cold that bent as it travelled, so that the shadow of every hedge lay across the path at four times its proper length. The effect was of a corridor lined with things leaning over to watch.

The thorn moved, not much, and not in any wind he could feel, and it was impossible to tell whether the rustling along the walls was the plant or something inside it.

Edward went slowly and kept the web out ahead of him, and the gold lines flickered wherever they crossed magic.

Ten paces in, they flickered hard.

He stopped with his weight still on his back foot, and the flagstone in front of him softened, sagged, and turned into a slow green swamp that gave off a faint sick light. It had been solid stone a second before and it would have taken him to the chest.

"Fire Path."

He set the tip of his wand against the ground and the gold-red went out from it in a single narrow line across the surface of the swamp, hardening as it went until there was a footway there four inches wide. It gave off almost no heat. It held his weight exactly, and no more.

He crossed at an even pace without looking down, and behind him the flame went out and the swamp closed over into flagstone again with nothing to show for itself.

The screaming started before he had gone another fifty yards.

They came round the corner of the hedge in a mass, thirty or forty of them, none higher than his knee: thorn sprites, the small dry brown creatures that live inside a stand of this stuff and are ordinarily too shy to be seen. Their eyes were red through and they had torn branches off their own hedge to hold, and they came at him with a noise like a kettle.

They could not have killed him, and they could easily have held him there ten minutes and taken the skin off both arms.

"Incarcerous."

The silver went out and took the front rank round the middle. Then he turned his wrist over and laid a Flame Net across the whole passage in front of them, low and loose and gold, and the rest ran into it and stayed there. It did not burn them. It simply would not let them through, and they hung in it kicking and shrieking and entirely unharmed.

Edward went round the edge of his own net and left them to it. Thirty yards further on the net thinned out and went, and behind him the shrieking stopped by degrees as whatever had been done to them wore off and thirty small creatures remembered they were frightened of people.

At the next fork he found the footprints.

Durmstrang boots, and the tread on the sole was unmistakable, and the length of the stride said Krum. What stopped him was the depth. The left print was ordinary. The right print was shallow, and the toe of it had not rolled through; it had been set down flat and lifted flat, the way a man walks when the leg is doing what it is told rather than what he wants.

Edward crouched and put two fingers into the mud at the edge of the print, and the web running off his gloves shivered against something that was not the maze.

It was thin, and it was old, and it was cold in a way he had met exactly twice before: under the Black Lake in the weed, and in the doorway of the Shrieking Shack.

Then Harry shouted, two passages to the left, and there were spells going off underneath it.

Edward came up and ran, throwing the web out ahead of him as he went, and it came back with something large.

He turned the corner into it. The spider was the size of a cart horse and there was nothing natural about it: the ordinary article out of the Forbidden Forest is bad enough and this one had been fed on something. Its shell had gone black and glassy, and Harry's Expelliarmus struck it across the front and slid away without leaving a mark.

The thing gathered itself and came forward, and Harry threw himself sideways and got an Impedimenta up in the same movement, and the impact broke against it and the barrier held.

"I have the front of it." Edward came in on the flank with his wand already up. "Take it underneath, where the legs meet the body. The shell does not go round that far."

"I am all right." Harry was breathing hard and his glasses had gone sideways and he did not stop to fix them. "Edward, listen. Krum was at that corner about four minutes ago and he stopped and looked straight at me. He was fighting it. His mouth was moving and nothing came out and he was fighting something, and then he turned round and ran for the middle."

"Was he limping?"

"His right leg was going down like a plank." Harry got his wand up as the spider came again. "He could hardly run on it and he ran anyway."

They took the thing between them in under a minute once they had the angle, and it went over sideways with its legs folding and lay still, and neither of them looked at it for long.

They looked up instead, because the light had changed.

Above the hedges, twenty feet over their heads, a dark green glow had come up. It resolved as they watched into a line of runes turning slowly, hanging over the passage and going away over the maze in both directions as far as either of them could see.

There was nothing hostile in them. That was the part Edward disliked. They put out a long slow pull, like the drag on the inside of a bend in a river, and it was aimed one way.

"They are not a trap," he said quietly. "They are a funnel. Every passage in this maze is being pulled toward the centre and every champion in it is being walked there without knowing that is what they are doing."

Harry's hand tightened round his wand.

"Why? Is there something waiting in the middle?"

"There is somebody waiting in the middle." Edward looked along the line of turning green and felt the whole shape of it arrive at once. "Whoever has been holding those four since before Christmas has spent the entire tournament arranging tonight. He does not want to chase twelve champions round eleven acres of hedge in the dark. He wants all of us in one place, at one time, with a Cup in the middle of it and no professor able to see past the walls."

Somewhere off to their right, a girl screamed.