01229 The Situation

Half an hour after they had left it, Amelia, Sirius and Alastor walked back through the tall doors of the banquet hall, and the noise and heat and perfume of the room closed over them again like warm water.

Nothing looked changed. Behind them, a few floors up, the whole shape of the night had been rearranged, and down here the same laughter went on rising to the same enchanted ceiling.

The attendant who had led them away did not reappear.

Beneath the glittering chandeliers, the delicacies laid out on the carefully dressed tables went almost untouched: terrines glazed like mirrors, towers of sugared fruit, sculpted swans of spun sugar already beginning to droop at the neck, a riot of colour too lavish for the eye to take in.

The political figures of the various Ministries wore appropriate smiles. Even immersed in this great moment of witnessing history, they never once forgot to polish their own names while they were at it and win advantages for their own wizarding communities.

It was said, by unofficial estimate, that the agreements a Minister for Magic struck in a single evening's banquet were worth a year's diplomatic labour from that country's whole Department of International Magical Cooperation.

More of the world, the cynics liked to remark, had been settled over canapés than ever had been settled at a conference table.

Sirius and Alastor wanted no part of it. They plucked two glasses of champagne from the tray of a passing waiter and drifted back to the inconspicuous window where they had stood before.

"Well? Can you see anything, Alastor?"

Sirius clinked his glass against Alastor's and, under cover of lowering his head to sip, spoke in a murmur that barely moved his lips. His chill grey eyes strolled idly over the dim garden outside the hotel, as though he were merely a bored man admiring the view.

It was a handsome garden. Costly trees and flowers had been planted in artful disorder, gravel paths wound between clipped hedges, and a stone nymph at the centre of a dark pond poured water from her jar in a thin silver thread that caught the lamplight.

Security personnel could be seen now and then patrolling the paths, their lanterns swinging in slow arcs.

Beyond them, there was nothing. No suspicious figure, no furtive shadow, nothing moving that had not been meant to move.

Alastor's magical eye spun wildly in its socket. It swept the shadows of the garden's greenery, the rooms in the hotel lobby, the floors above and the floors below, and then began again from the beginning.

"All normal, Sirius" Alastor said at last, in his rasping voice, without moving his lips. "Not so much as a cat out there."

Far from reassuring Sirius, this left him more uneasy beneath a face that showed nothing.

Unlike Alastor and Minister Bones he had never needed convincing: he put far greater faith in Bryan's judgment than in his own eyes. If Bryan believed something would happen tonight, then it would happen, and could not possibly be otherwise.

A quiet night, in that light, was exactly the thing to be afraid of.

But what would they do, that band of desperadoes, when they came?

Sirius's gaze turned toward the hall, passing over the bright and laughing heads: the jewelled collars, the silk sleeves, the gleaming bald crowns of statesmen.

Would they wipe out, in one stroke, the heads of every Ministry about to put a name to the Mutual Defence Treaty, and plunge the whole European wizarding world into disorder and chaos?

Or would they take them all hostage and use them as bargaining chips against Dumbledore and Bryan?

Neither answer brought him any comfort.

"Chairman Quahog, Minister Adenauer, Minister Nash—"

Among the great powers, there was always more to say.

Though none of the heads of the major Ministries had planned it, by the time the banquet had passed its midpoint they had drifted together of their own accord and stood in a loose circle near a marble pillar with glasses in their hands.

They were deep in conversation about what further agreements the old wizarding powers, those of deep magical heritage, ought to reach under the Mutual Defence Treaty when Minister Bones approached them at a slow pace.

"Ah, Amelia! There you are!"

Samuel greeted her with a warm smile, though something unusual flickered through his eyes; Madam Bones's expression looked a little too stiff.

"We noticed you slipped away for a while. Has something important happened?"

"Death Eaters stirring up trouble at home again, is it?"

Adenauer, the German Minister for Magic, bared his teeth in a theatrical grin, his tone laced with barbs.

"Surely not! Albus and Bryan are both holed up at Hogwarts, keeping watch, and much too busy, apparently, to attend the final preparatory meeting for the security treaty they pushed through themselves!"

"In fact, it is precisely the reason Bryan and Albus are not here that I wished to speak with you about."

Minister Bones held her whole body tense, and something in her voice was not quite right.

The three ministers, who a moment ago had been wrapped in an easy, comfortable air, narrowed their eyes in unison. Each of them had sensed that something about Minister Bones was off, and the warm hum of the hall seemed to dim and recede around their little circle.

And the reason Bryan and Albus had not come…

"But I am afraid it will have to be a word in private, gentlemen."

Leaning against the window, Sirius and Alastor watched Minister Bones murmur a few words to the three ministers.

A moment later the four walked out of the banquet hall one after another, but this time the two of them did not follow.

Twenty minutes later, the four returned to the hall by the way they had gone.

On an occasion this important, four heavyweights leaving at once could hardly have escaped notice, and few of the politicians present, skilled as they were at watching in every direction and listening in all quarters, had missed it.

The four rejoined the banquet as though nothing had happened, wearing the same refined smiles as before, and people pressed in toward them, probing with careful words.

Not a few turned questioning looks toward Vice-Chairman Dreghorn, who, there in the middle of the hall, seemed oblivious to it all and went on genially refilling his neighbour's glass.

Then another group was led away by the four, and returned afterward. And then another.

Within an hour and a half, nearly every politician who had come to the banquet ahead of the preparatory meeting had gone out for a little stroll.

And all of it was being watched the entire time by the Monitoring Omnioculars that drifted around the hotel building.

Many of the guests had noticed them. The hotel had told those who asked that they were newly added security measures, and that was perfectly true.

The trouble was that not every one of those belonged to the goblins who ran the hotel.

"Everything is under control, Mr. Vogel."

On the gale-lashed summit of the tower, a man who had been hurriedly summoned leaned in toward Vogel and shouted to be heard above the roaring wind.

Vogel wore a taro-purple suit that looked made for some grand banquet, with a silver-white bow tie at his throat, and the wind whipped his lapels.

"The Anti-Apparition Jinx is already in effect, sir. The barrier can go up the moment you say the word, and we hold control of the Floo Network. Nobody can leave by fireplace."

If that was so, then what sort of game were these great and important people playing?

Adam stared thoughtfully at the "slate" in his hand, its flickering light and shadow shifting across his face.

On its screen, group after group of politicians rode the elevator up to some room on the top floor, talked there for a while, then came back down to the hall the way they had gone up, again and again.

However he looked at it, there was something suspicious in it.

After a long moment, he tore his gaze free of the flickering images and turned instead to examine the 'slate' itself.

It was a product of the new workshop that the British International Trade Division had set up last month in the Diagon Alley industrial district.

The British Ministry held the controlling stake, though the goblins and a few pure-blood families had taken a cut as well. And long before that, the Monitoring Omnioculars invented by Bryan Watson had been famous throughout the wizarding world.

Ministries, companies and workshops had all begged to buy them, and Bryan Watson, unfortunately, had always kept them off the market.

Now that he had at last lifted the ban, orders fell like snowflakes upon the two new workshops built at once in Diagon Alley and in the American wizarding world, and no production line could keep pace with the demand.

The boom was so great that the workshops were desperate for hands, and turned away almost no one who came asking for work.

"Hmph."

Atop the wind-ravaged spire, a cold smile tilted the corner of Adam Vogel's mouth.

Beyond any doubt, this was one more shrewd stroke from Bryan Watson, meant to steady hearts and keep society in good order.

Only the Dark Lord had failed to see through it; he was even pleased that Bryan Watson should spend more of his energy making money.

Vogel knew, too, that some of his own colleagues had long been quietly cozying up to the International Trade Division, or, to put it more precisely, to Bryan Watson himself.

It had never crossed his mind to report any of this to the Dark Lord.

For one thing, the Dark Lord took no interest in such matters. For another, if his followers were forbidden even to make money, the Dark Lord's rule of blood would very likely crumble all the faster.

But none of that mattered now!

"Hah!"

A scalding breath surged from Adam Vogel's nostrils as he exhaled.

A sickly, fervent smile broke across his wrinkled face, and he twisted round to look at the woman standing on another steel girder, her green hair lashing wildly in the wind.

"And what do you suppose they are scheming in there, all these great men, Lady Cliodna?"

At her insistence, cordons had been strung around the tower and the plaza on which it stood, and the sightseeing tourists had been left to swallow their annoyance and gaze up at the tower from a distance, grumbling beneath the strings of lamps.

She had wanted the Muggles kept well out of the way.

But tonight, many lives would be lost all the same.

And the passing of a life always saddened her.

"I do not care, Vogel."

Cliodna drew the pity back out of her emerald eyes, and when she turned to look at Adam, her gaze was coldly clear.

"My task is only Sirius Black."

"Then—"

Adam bowed to Cliodna like a gentleman, with a flourish fit for a ballroom, then turned his head to look out at the goblin hotel across the Seine, whose windows glowed warm and yellow in the dark.

He threw his arms wide into the howling wind and roared with a savage grin:

"Come, then—let this night burn!"

Boom! Boom! Boom!

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