Chapter 12
For once, Harry let himself sleep in before proceeding to Gringotts. Today was the day he would get to see Potter Manor, the place where his ancestors had lived, from 'before the statute' right up to his grandparents. He met Apprentice Jones and his supervisor, Wardsmaster Abbott, in the lobby of Gringotts, and they apparated to Godric's Hollow. Harry narrowly avoided vomiting on Wardmaster Abbott's shoes, and decided he didn't like side-along apparition very much. The co-ordinates on the deed seemed to make sense to Apprentice Jones, and he led them through the village at a brisk walk. Harry caught sight of a church, small picturesque cottages with gardens, a pond with ducks, a row of village shops, a post office, two pubs...
"It's nice here," he said, rather inanely. They ignored him, marching up a small, unpaved lane that seemed to disappear into a copse of trees.
"Heres stone here," Apprentice Jones announced, "Lockdown gamma protocol, bloodless. Incomplete warding, fraying, damage horizon pinpointable... late seventies?"
"1 May 1978," said Wardsmaster Abbot briskly. "It's in the notes. And you should have been able to narrow it down to 1978 from the diagnostics pattern, see how-" Their rapid-fire dialogue became even more incomprehensible. Harry picked up snatches here and there: "Get him to bleed on it, see what the gateway looks like... check for traps first, including siphons.. monitors... muggle-repelling... full diagnostics later... Fiendfyre... Nothing here... nothing there... alert ward... dismissed... second alert ward... that's nasty... partial sig here... and done. Doublecheck... triplecheck... fine."
"Mr Potter, we'll need you to bleed on this stone here. Just a drop or two should do it," said Apprentice Jones cheerfully. Wardsmaster Abbott gave him a look. "Fine, it was set up so you also had the option of touching it and pushing some magic into it, but the other way's surer. It'll make sure even the oldest of the underlying wards answer to you, and it might even help repair them. Of course, some families frown upon even the mildest of blood magic, but for practicality's sake..."
"I'll do it," said Harry. "I don't mind. Does one of you have a knife?"
"Ah yes, you probably can't make your diffinido precise enough yet, at your age," said Jones, transfiguring a pebble into a primitive-looking flint weapon. "I'd do it for you, but if the wards have any sentience left at all, they might not like me hurting their precious heir, last of the line and all that." Abbott nodded approvingly at the precaution. Harry pricked his left finger and swiped it upon the stone, which flashed red and green, before fading to a golden glow and twisting up into the air. The shape of a gateway large enough to drive a lorry through appeared in the air, and then crumbled. Two broken pillars remained, and each side of them, a tumbledown drystone wall could be seen. Some of the particularly big gaps in it were blackened at the edges, and the stones seemed to have melted. The rusted bits of metal on the ground might have been a decorative wrought-iron gate, once: Harry could just make out the letters 'O T T E'. Beyond it, all that was visible were thorny bushes, and a wide expanse of grass beyond it.
"You don't often see drystone walls this far south," said Jones meditatively. Abbott sighed.
"I've told you before about going off on tangents! Start your evaluation with the basics, then expand!"
"Dual defence, sir, stone and thorn." Abbot said promptly, chastened. "Thorn looks like a variant of the technique made famous by the Rosiers, but those aren't roses; they're sloes. Or blackthorn as some call it. I was focused on the stone because it isn't from this area at all, it's gritstone, millstone grit, but each individual one is blood-tied to the family, used to be part of a much older structure... hillfort... the Dark Peak? A daughter, last of her line, marrying in, bringing her family's defences... what a dowry... that or a Lady Potter who already had children lost the rest of her family and turned the stones of her ancestors' hillfort into defences for her children... yes, the sloes too, wizard-bred... Hmm... and quite soundly taken down. I suppose that's why they say stone-and-thorn is nigh-impenetrable, not totally so... It must have taken quite something... ah yes... somebody worked out the arithmancy to do a Herald for fiendfyre? If ever there was a spell that didn't need magnifying - and with the Chaos patterns, it's used as a textbook example of something impossible to predict - they used fractals? - oh, that makes so much sense now - what a brilliant mind they must have had, and they went and joined the Death Eaters - what a loss to academia..."
"Focus!" snapped Abbott.
"Right, so that's what it was, and that's how they brought it down. Checking for follow-up - yes, yes, that, counterable, counterable, ooh, they hid that in there, nasty... ah, insidious, so that's what did for the elves... residue... check, check, no, yes. Portkey, oh yes, that's when they brought the Ashwinders in. Then a few parting booby-traps, which were set off rather than dismantled when the owner enacted the Heres lockdown; nobody cleansed the curse damage beforehand, or tried to stabilise. Inner wardstones present, non-functional but interference-generating, recommend removal... outer ward layer still has some.. func - tio - nal... oh my. Did you feel that?" Abbott, whose demeanour had hitherto reminded Harry of nobody so much as Professor McGonagall administering a practical examination to a student who she felt was talented, but lacked application, suddenly pulled his wand out and went into sharp focus.
"I'll take point now," he snapped. "This is no longer routine. The stones are... they're... I think they're actually trying to regenerate! And the sloes, something's happening to the sloes, their auras are darkening, to the point where they'd be illegal if they were a new creation. They're trying to change, but they don't have enough energy, they're not quite stable. I think I know how... but this is all very irregular... Shafiq-style stasis, now! You take seven, I'll take three and thirteen." Both wands were out, and weaving intricate patterns, both men were panting. Finally, the air seemed to freeze, shimmering silver, and the two men put their wands away, and each gulped some potion or other from a flask.
"Right, that's bought us a few hours," announced Abbott. "Apparate to Gringotts, get a second copy of the Unusually High Expenses form, the Emergency Renegotiation form, and a Warding Patchjob Calculation table; temporary sign-out of a Wardstone Sampler; and some blood-replenishing and energy potions. Send an alert to Gornuk. I expect you back in twenty minutes." Jones nodded and disappeared with a crack. "Right, Mr Potter," said Abbott. "As you probably guessed, that wasn't supposed to happen. The good news is, the wards on your property are more formidable and in better condition than we had supposed - more capable of independent action. The bad news is, they're trying to take independent action, trying to get better to protect you, but they've had too much bad stuff done to them to get better on their own, and now they've started it, we can't just do an analysis and then leave them alone while you decide what you want to happen next; we have to watch over the process and help it along, make sure it doesn't founder, or bad things might happen. We don't want to be responsible for blowing up half of Somerset." Harry gulped. "But fixing wards is much more expensive than just evaluating them, so we need to reassess how much you'll be charged for our work. Your account manager will be in the loop, so he won't let us take advantage of you, even if we were the kind of people who would. The good news, we get an exciting study opportunity, and - if all goes well - you get a property with well-functioning wards."
"And the bad news?" Harry asked, warily.
"Well, we still don't know what, exactly, kicked that little light-show off, or how we get it under control, and we've only got a limited timeframe." He paused. "Might as well get things going now. You don't have any creature inheritance?"
"I don't know."
"Special abilities generally? Regeneration? Anything that might be considered a bit Dark?"
"I used to heal quite fast when I got hurt as a kid," said Harry slowly. "One of the kids in my class broke his arm and had to wear a cast for months, but whenever I broke bones, they were better within days, maybe a week? I think other people's bruises lasted longer than mine, too. Is that the kind of thing you mean?"
"Maybe," Abbott said. "And we'll come back to the multiple broken bones later. Did you ever make anyone ill, by getting angry with them or by contact with your bodily fluids?"
"No," said Harry. "The only Dark thing I can think of is... umm... I'm a parselmouth, and I have younger cousins who are, too. But they're cousins on my mum's side, so that won't be a Potter thing."
"Squib lineage, I suppose," Abbott said. "That's not really the kind of Dark I meant, though. Okay. Next question. Have you had any powerful magical substances injected into your bloodstream in the last year or so?"
"I was bitten by a basilisk," said Harry, relieved to be able to give a proper answer, "and then a phoenix cried on the wound and healed me. Last month." Abbott gasped, and flailed a little with his hand.
"Okay, okay, okay," he said. "Level head. Right. Firstly, just so you know, young man, once the clock isn't running out any more, we are discussing this. Secondly, yes, that combination would explain a lot. Something as deadly and Dark as basilisk venom, and the regenerative powers of phoenix tears - that might well make the stones regenerate themselves, and the thorns get more lethal. It would be illegal to imbue a defensive plant with basilisk venom for home protection purposes, but adding some of the owner's blood is standard and normal, traditional. And that'll be why it was buckling, too. The drop of blood you gave the gateway stone initially wasn't enough for a full revitalisation. Okay. I think we have a plan." He pulled a wax tablet out of his pocket and scratched away at it. "There. Got to check if you're allergic to blood-replenishing potions, and then you'll need to replace the fluids as well. And once I've done my job as a Gringotts wardmaster, fair warning, I'll revert to being a concerned adult, and we can talk about your health, and how exactly you were bitten by a basilisk in the first place, and what happened to it, and who on earth was negligent enough to let a twelve-year-old anywhere near one. Oh, and perhaps later, you might want to think about working with us on a journal article - anonymous of course. There's a long debate about whether phoenix tears and basilisk venom would cancel each other out, or whether one or the other would prevail, and up until now it's been wholly theoretical." Before Harry could reply to any of this, Apprentice Jones returned. The two of them engaged in an intense conversation, during which Jones shot several horrified looks at Harry.
Nine hours, five complicated forms, three pints of blood and two thousand galleons later, it was done. The outer wards of Potter Manor had been fully restored and re-activated, with an extra anti-Herald layer in to prevent a re-occurrence of what had happened before, a reflective trap that would turn brute-force attacks back on the caster if they were in certain known styles, and a verification loop that should largely prevent the kind of attacks that try to insinuate themselves in, posing as part of the family or the defences themselves. The drystone walls had rebuilt themselves; the sloes had regrown; the entrance archway had reformed itself, though the metal gate was unaffected. The defunct - and interference-causing - wardstones for the former inner wards had been removed, and hooks had been left to attach the inner wards to, once an actual building with inner wards existed; the physical anchors for the hooks were behind trapdoors set in the ground, trapdoors which, unless and until opened, would be invisible and intangible to anyone other than Harry; the same had been done for the wardhooks which would connect the outer wards to the new gate, once Harry obtained one.