Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (90 page)

There was silence, then, for a time.

That was a price measured in a fraction of Harry’s soul.

“Without telling me yet…” said Harry. “Can you say if the need is desperate?”

“There is someone in the most terrible want of your help,” Professor Quirrell said simply, “and there is no one who can help them but you.”

There was another silence, but not a long one.

“All right,” Harry said quietly. “Tell me of the mission.”

The dark robes of the Defense Professor seemed to blur against the shadow on the wall, cast by his silhouette blocking the white light of Harry’s wand. “The ordinary Patronus Charm, Mr. Potter, wards off a Dementor’s fear. But the Dementors still see you through it, they know that you are there. Only not your Patronus Charm. It blinds them, or more than blinds them. What I saw beneath the cloak wasn’t even looking in our direction as you killed it; as though it had forgotten our existence, even as it died.”

Harry nodded. That wasn’t surprising, not when you confronted a Dementor on the level of its true existence, beyond anthropomorphism. Death might be the last enemy, but it wasn’t a sentient enemy. When humanity had wiped out smallpox, smallpox hadn’t fought back.

“Mr. Potter, the central branch of Gringotts is guarded by every spell high and low that the goblins know. Even so those vaults have been successfully robbed; for what wizardry can do, wizardry can undo. And yet no one has ever escaped from Azkaban. No one. For every Charm there is a counter-Charm, for every ward there is a bypass. How can it be that no one has ever been rescued from Azkaban?”

“Because Azkaban has something invincible,” Harry said. “Something so terrible that no one can defeat it.”

That was the keystone of their perfect security, it had to be, nothing human. It was Death that guarded Azkaban.

“The Dementors don’t like their meals being taken away from them,” Professor Quirrell said. Coldness had entered that voice, now. “They know if anyone tries. There are more than a hundred Dementors there, and they speak to the guards as well. It’s that simple, Mr. Potter. If you’re a powerful wizard then Azkaban isn’t hard to enter, and it isn’t hard to leave. So long as you don’t try to take anything out of it that belongs to the Dementors.”

“But the Dementors are
not
invincible,” said Harry. He could have cast the Patronus Charm with that thought, in that very moment. “Never believe that they are.”

Professor Quirrell’s voice was very quiet. “Do you remember what it was like when you went before the Dementor, the first time, when you failed?”

“I remember.”

And then with a sudden sickening lurch in his stomach, Harry knew where this was going; he should have seen it before.

“There is an innocent person in Azkaban,” Professor Quirrell said.

Harry nodded, there was a burning sensation in his throat, but he didn’t cry.

“The one of whom I speak was not under the Imperius Curse,” said the Defense Professor, dark robes silhouetted against a greater shadow. “There are surer ways to break wills than the Imperius, if you have the time for torture, and Legilimency, and rituals of which I will not speak. I cannot tell you how I know this, how I know any of this, cannot hint at it even to you, you will have to trust me. But there is a person in Azkaban who never once chose to serve the Dark Lord, who has spent years suffering alone in the most terrible cold and darkness imaginable, and never deserved a single minute of it.”

Harry saw it in a single leap of intuition, his mouth racing almost ahead of his thoughts.

There was no hint, no warning, we all thought -

“A person by the name of Black,” Harry said.

There was silence. Silence, while the pale blue eyes stared at him.

“Well,” said Professor Quirrell after a while. “So much for not telling you the name until after you had accepted the mission. I would ask whether you’re reading
my
mind, but that’s flatly impossible.”

Harry said nothing, but it was simple enough if you
believed
in the processes of modern democracy. The most obvious person in Azkaban to be innocent was the one who hadn’t gotten a trial -

“I am
certainly
impressed, Mr. Potter,” said Professor Quirrell. His face was grave. “But this is a serious matter, and if there is some way others could make the same deduction, I
must
know. So tell me, Mr. Potter. How in the name of Merlin, of Atlantis, and the void between the stars, did you guess that I was talking about Bellatrix?”

The adrenaline was already flowing in Harry’s veins, his heart already hammering in his chest, there in that darkened and bankrupt store. Professor Quirrell had finished explaining, and in one hand, Harry held a tiny wooden twig that would be the key. This was it, this was the day and the moment when Harry started acting the part. His first true adventure, a dungeon to be pierced, an evil government to be defied, a maiden in distress to be rescued. Harry should have been more frightened, more reluctant, but instead he felt only that it was time and past time to start becoming the people he had read about in his books; to begin his journey toward what he had always known he was meant to be, a hero. To take the first step on the road that led to Kimball Kinnison and Captain Picard and Liono of Thundera and definitely
not
Raistlin Majere. So far as Harry’s brain knew from watching early morning cartoons, when you grew up you were supposed to gain amazing powers and save the universe, that was what Harry’s brain had seen adults doing and adopted as its role model for the maturation process, and Harry very much wanted to start growing up.

And if the pattern of the story called for the hero to lose some part of his innocence, as the result of his first adventure; then for now, at least, in this still-innocent moment, it seemed time and past time for him to experience that pain. Like casting off clothes too small for him; or like finally advancing to the next stage of the game, after being stuck for eleven years on world 3, level 2 of Super Mario Brothers.

Harry had read enough novels to suspect that he wouldn’t feel this enthusiastic afterward, so he was enjoying it while it lasted.

There was a popping sound as something near Harry disappeared, and then there was no more time for heroic brooding.

Harry’s hand snapped the small wooden twig.

A hook yanked motionlessly at Harry’s abdomen as the portkey activated, feeling like a much harder pull this time than the smaller transports between the Hogwarts grounds and Diagon Alley -

- and dropped him into the middle of a huge roll of thunder dying away, and a lash of cold rain whipping him across the face, the water coating Harry’s glasses and blinding him in an instant, turning the world into a blur even as he began to fall toward the raging ocean waves far below.

He had arrived high, high, high above the empty North Sea.

The shock of the blasting storm almost made Harry let go of the broomstick that Professor Quirrell had given him, which would not have been a good idea. It took nearly a full second for Harry to get his wits together and bring his broomstick back up in an easy swoop.

“I’m here,” said an unfamiliar voice from a patch of empty air above him; low and gravelly, the voice of the sallow lanky bearded man Professor Quirrell had Polyjuiced into before Disillusioning himself and his broomstick.

“I’m here,” Harry said from beneath the Cloak of Invisibility. He hadn’t used Polyjuice himself. Wearing a different body hindered your magic, and Harry might need all of his little magic about him; thus the plan called for Harry to stay invisible at nearly all times, instead of Polyjuicing.

(Neither of them had spoken the other’s name. You simply didn’t use your names at any point during an illegal mission, even invisibly hovering over an anonymous patch of water in the North Sea. You simply didn’t. It would be stupid.)

Carefully keeping a grip on the broomstick with one hand, while the rain and wind howled around him, Harry raised his wand in an equally careful grip and Imperviused his glasses.

Then, with the lenses clear, Harry looked around.

He was surrounded by wind and rain, it might have been five degrees Celsius if he was lucky; he’d already had a Warming Charm cast on himself just from being outside in February, but it wasn’t standing up to the driving cold droplets. Worse than snow, the rain soaked into every exposed surface. The Cloak of Invisibility turned all of you invisible, but it didn’t
cover
all of you, and that meant it didn’t protect all of you from rain. Harry’s face was exposed to the full force of the driven water, and it was driving straight into his neck and soaking down into his shirt, also the sleeves of his robes and the cuffs of his pants and his shoes, the water took every bit of cloth as an avenue to sneak in.

“This way,” said the Polyjuiced voice, and a spark of green light lit up in front of Harry’s broomstick, and then darted away in a direction that seemed to Harry like every other direction.

Through the blinding rain, Harry followed. He lost it sometimes, that small green spark, and each time he did, Harry called out, and the spark would reappear in front of him a few seconds later.

When Harry had caught the trick of following the spark, it accelerated, and Harry kicked the broomstick into high gear and followed. The rain whipped him harder, feeling like Harry imagined it must feel to get a faceful of shotgun pellets, but his glasses stayed clear and protected his eyes.

It was only a few minutes later, at the broomstick’s full speed, that Harry caught a glimpse of a huge shadow through the rain, towering far across the waters.

And felt a distant, hollow echo of emptiness radiating from where Death waited, washing over Harry’s mind and parting around it, like a wave breaking on stone. Harry knew his enemy this time, and his will was steel and all of the light.

“I can already feel the Dementors,” said the gravelly voice of the Polyjuiced Quirrell. “I did not expect that, not this soon.”

“Think of the stars,” Harry said, over a distant rumble of thunder. “Don’t allow any anger in you, nothing negative, just think of the stars, what it feels like to forget yourself and fall bodilessly through space. Hold to that thought like an Occlumency barrier across your entire mind. The Dementors will have some trouble reaching past that.”

There was silence for a moment, then, “Interesting.”

The green spark lifted, and Harry inclined his broomstick slightly upward to follow, even as it steered them into a fogbank, a cloud hovering low on the waters.

Soon they were hovering above and slightly oblique of the huge three-sided metal building, as it loomed far below. The triangle of steel was hollow, not solid, it was a building of three thick solid walls and no center. The Aurors on guard roomed in the top level and southern side of the building, Professor Quirrell had said, protected by their Patronus Charms. The legal entrance into Azkaban was on the roof of the southwest corner of the building. Which the two of them wouldn’t use, of course. Instead they would use a corridor that ran directly beneath the northern corner of the building. Professor Quirrell would go down first, and puncture a hole in the roof and its wards right at the northern tip, leaving behind an illusion to cover the gap.

The prisoners were kept in the side of the building, in levels corresponding to their crimes. And at the bottom, in the uttermost center and depth of Azkaban, lay a nest of more than a hundred Dementors. Loads of dirt were occasionally dropped in to keep up the level, as the matter directly exposed to the Dementors broke down into mud and nothingness…

“Wait one minute,” said the rough voice, “follow me at speed, and pass through with care.”

“Got it,” Harry said lowly.

The spark winked out, and Harry began to count,
one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand…

…sixty one thousand,
and Harry dived, the wind shrieking around him as he dived, down toward the vast metal structure, down toward where he could feel the shadows of Death waiting for him, draining light and radiating emptiness, as the metal structure grew larger and larger. Plain and featureless loomed the vast grey shape, but for a single raised boxlike structure in the southwest corner. The north corner was simply blank, Professor Quirrell’s hole undetectable.

Harry pulled up sharply as he approached the north corner, giving himself more safety margin than he would have bothered with in flying classes, but not too much. As soon as he’d come to a halt, he began to slowly lower his broomstick again, toward what looked like the solid roof of the tip of the north corner.

Descending through the illusory roof while invisible was a strange experience, and then Harry found himself in a metal corridor lighted with a dim orange light - which, Harry realized after a startled glance, was coming from an old-fashioned mantled gas lamp…

…for magic would fail, be drained away after a time, in the presence of Dementors.

Harry dismounted his broom.

The pull of the emptiness was stronger now, as it parted and flowed around Harry without touching him. They were distant but they were many, the wounds in the world; Harry could have pointed to them with his eyes closed.

“
Casst your Patronuss,
” hissed a snake from the floor, looking more discolored than green in the dim orange light.

The note of stress came through even in Parseltongue. Harry was surprised; Professor Quirrell had said that Animagi in their Animagus forms were much less vulnerable to Dementors. (For the same reason the Patronuses were animals, Harry assumed.) If Professor Quirrell was in this much trouble in his snake form, what had been happening to him while he was in the human form that let him use his magic…?

Harry’s wand was already rising in his hand.

This would be the beginning.

Even if it was only one person, just one person that he could save from the darkness, even if he wasn’t powerful enough yet to teleport
all
of Azkaban’s prisoners to safety and burn the triangular hell down to bedrock…

Even so it was a start, it was a beginning, it was a down payment on everything that Harry meant to accomplish with his life. No more waiting, no more hoping, no more mere promising, it would all begin here. Here and
now.

Harry’s wand slashed down to point at where the Dementors waited far below.

“
Expecto Patronum!
”

The glowing humanoid figure blazed up into existence. It wasn’t the sun-bright thing that it had been before… probably because Harry hadn’t quite been able to stop himself from thinking about all the
other
prisoners in their cells, the ones that he
wasn’t
here to save.

It might be for the best, though. Harry would need to keep this Patronus going for a while, and it might be better if it wasn’t quite so bright.

The Patronus dimmed a little further, at that thought; and then further again, as Harry tried to put a little less of his strength into it, until finally the brilliant humanoid figure was glowing only slightly brighter than the brightest animal Patronus, and Harry felt that he could dim it no further without risking losing it entirely.

And then, “
It iss sstable,
” Harry hissed, and began feeding his broomstick into his pouch. His wand stayed in his hand, and a slight, sustainable flow from him replaced the slight losses from his Patronus.

The snake blurred into the form of a lanky, sallow man, holding Professor Quirrell’s wand in one hand and a broomstick in the other. The lanky man staggered as he came back into existence, and went to lean against the wall for a moment.

“Well done, if perhaps a trifle slow,” murmured the gravelly voice. Professor Quirrell’s dryness was in it, even though it didn’t fit the voice, nor did the grave look on the thickly bearded face. “I cannot feel them at all, now.”

A moment later, the broomstick went into the man’s robes and vanished. Then the man’s wand rose and tapped on his head, and with a sound like a cracking eggshell he disappeared once more.

Within the air blossomed a faint green spark, and Harry, still enshrouded in the Cloak of Invisibility, followed after.

If you had been watching from outside, you would have seen nothing but a small green spark drifting through the air, and a brilliantly silver humanoid walking after it.

They went down, and down, and down, passing gas lamp after gas lamp, and the occasional huge metal door, descending into Azkaban within what seemed like utter silence. Professor Quirrell had set up some type of barrier by which
he
could hear what went on nearby, but no sounds could pass outward, and no sounds could reach Harry.

Harry hadn’t quite been able to stop his mind from wondering
why
the silence, or stop his mind from giving the answer. The answer he’d already known on some wordless level of anticipation that had prompted him to futilely try not to think about it.

Somewhere behind those huge metal doors, people were screaming.

The silver humanoid figure wavered, brightening and dimming, every time Harry thought about it.

Harry had been told to cast a Bubble-Head Charm on himself. To prevent himself from smelling anything.

All the enthusiasm and heroism had worn off already, as Harry had known it would, it hadn’t taken long even by his standards, the process had completed itself the very first time they passed one of those metal doors. Every metal door was locked with a huge lock, a lock of simple unmagical metal that wouldn’t have stopped a first-year Hogwarts student - if you still had a wand, if you still had your magic, which the prisoners didn’t. Those metal doors were not the doors of individual cells, Professor Quirrell had said, each one opened into a corridor in which there would be a group of cells. Somehow that helped a little, not thinking that each door corresponded directly to a prisoner who was waiting right behind it. Instead there might be
more
than one prisoner, which diminished the emotional impact; just like the study showing that people contributed more when they were told that a given amount of money was required to save one child’s life, than when told the same total amount was needed to save eight children…

Harry was finding it increasingly hard not to think about it, and every time he did, the light of his Patronus fluctuated.

They came to the place where the passageway turned left, at the corner of the triangular building. Once again there were descending metal steps, another flight of stairs; once again they went down.

Mere murderers were not put into the lowest of cells. There was always a lower place you could go, an even worse punishment to fear. No matter how low you had already sunk, the government of magical Britain had some threat remaining against you if you did even worse.