Harry Potter: Beyond Good and Evil in the Wizarding World-Chapter 30 - 27. Passage to the Basilisk

Chapter 27

Slughorn held the sheet of parchment in both hands and read it through twice.

"I genuinely don’t know what to tell you." He set it down. "I can’t say for certain whether it’s possible. What I can say is that proper research would take a great deal of time and a great deal of money, not a thousand Galleons but tens of thousands, and even that’s before we talk about Ministry permissions, which would be their own battle, and then there are these three unidentified ingredients." He pressed his fingers against his temples. "Severus, I’d be doing you a disservice if I told you this was manageable. Even I wouldn’t know where to start with something like this."

"I understand all of that. I’m still asking you to help me find the ingredients, and the money isn’t a problem. I’ve recently opened a small shop and I can cover the cost." He paused. "Unofficially," he added, and Slughorn closed his eyes briefly in something between resignation and despair.

"Why is it that almost everyone I actually take an interest in ends up on a path like this? First Tom, and now you."

"Who’s Tom?"

"Tom? What Tom? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You must have misheard." Slughorn said it just slightly too quickly.

Severus’s right eye twitched once.

"Professor, you’re a genuinely terrible liar." He looked away, giving his full and deeply sincere attention to the nearest cauldron. "I’m not going to press you. Some stories belong to the person who lived them, and when you’re ready to tell me, you will. I’ll head off for now."

"Wait. Ah." Slughorn rubbed his face, picked up his wand, and waved it with the slightly guilty air of someone doing something they’ve already decided to do. A small pouch appeared in his palm. "If this were found, I couldn’t do anything about it, you understand." Seven glass vials materialised on the desk: herbs, powders, and at the back, two vials containing what looked unmistakably like eyes and a heart, still faintly beating.

"Didn’t you just say something about law-abiding citizens?" 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

"I am a master potion-maker and I have every professional right to carry those ingredients," Slughorn said, lifting his chin. Severus couldn’t stop himself laughing, which embarrassed the professor slightly.

"Thank you, Professor. I won’t forget this, and I swear on my magic: these go toward nothing dark. Nothing cursed. Only something that actually helps."

He stowed everything in the wallet, and Slughorn watched the spatial storage with puzzled interest. Then Severus brought out four different potions, two of each, and set them on the desk.

"And those are?"

"I worked on them over the summer. I wanted your opinion."

A knock at the door, and a young voice from the other side.

"Professor, will there be a lesson today?"

"Yes, just a moment!" Slughorn was already moving. "Keep those with you. Come by this evening and we’ll talk properly. I want to discuss every one of them." He was gesturing toward the potions, already halfway to the door. "See you later, Mr. Snape."

"This evening, then. See you, Professor." Severus was out the door before the first-years had finished filing in behind him.

He didn’t hurry to the Runes lesson because the teacher wasn’t there yet. According to the map she was in the Headmaster’s office.

"I thought you wouldn’t tell anyone about me."

"I wouldn’t. But I need his support, and I trust him more than anyone else in this building."

"And the Headmaster, he seems..." Nagini considered. "Decent. On the surface."

"He may well be. But something about the way he looks at things puts me on edge. Too warm. Too open. I don’t know what’s underneath it, and I find I’d rather not guess."

"I feel the same way," Nagini said. "From the first moment I saw him, something in me said to keep my distance. Perhaps just instinct."

"Possibly. He’s one of the most powerful wizards in this country, and some wariness around that is rational." He didn’t add the rest of what he thought. That could wait.

A few minutes later they reached the sixth floor, after a journey that involved the staircases expressing their usual architectural opinions and delivering them to three different floors before the right one. Hogwarts had moving staircases that could redirect themselves at will within the castle’s structure, which was why the prefects made a point of walking first-years to their common rooms on the first night and explaining how to navigate them.

Outside the Runes classroom, two groups of students stood a few metres apart, the gap between them carrying a specific quality of mutual awareness.

Slytherin and Gryffindor, in the same study group. Whoever arranged that must have tremendous faith in human nature.

Not that it particularly concerned him. He had more pressing things: the basilisk, which needed to be dealt with quickly, and then Nagini, and the first was a prerequisite for the second. Timing was the real constraint. He needed Dumbledore off the grounds, because the man had an unnerving quality of simply appearing at inconvenient moments, and if the information was right, he left the school for exactly one day at the end of the first week of term, which this year meant Saturday. He had two days. He could open the entrance in that time. Or, a pleasant contingency, he could simply blow the entrance open and cover it with a Silencing Charm. Even the basilisk wouldn’t be heard through that.

He surfaced from his thoughts and found several of his classmates staring at him. The boys looked curious. The girls looked at him in a way that suggested they were thinking about something other than Ancient Runes.

This is going to be more complicated than the basilisk.

"Oh! So sorry I’m late, you really didn’t need to wait outside, you could have come straight in!" A cheerful-looking elderly woman in thick-lensed glasses came up the corridor at a brisk walk. "In, in, quickly now, we’ve got a great deal to cover!"

The next forty-five minutes passed quickly. The professor had the gift of making an inherently dry subject feel alive, and every student in the room was paying attention without apparent effort. Severus found it genuinely interesting.

The runes they were teaching here were simple: a portion of the Elder Futhark, enough to give students a sense of the subject and help them decide whether to pursue it further. In terms of raw power, they were close to nothing. But that was appropriate, because Runology in its actual depth was dangerous in proportion to its strength: runes let a practitioner interact with primal magical forces and were foundational to the creation of ancient artefacts and complex spells. One miswritten character could have results that were difficult to predict and impossible to undo. A genuine master of the field was rare enough to be welcomed anywhere in the world, because they were rare enough that the world couldn’t afford to have them elsewhere.

Severus wasn’t planning to become one. But understanding local runes meant understanding the artefacts he’d encounter, and that was reason enough.

After the lesson, he headed downstairs toward the first floor and a certain familiar door.

The sign still read Out of Order. He opened it and raised an eyebrow. He couldn’t sense anyone.

"Why are we going into the girls’ bathroom?" Nagini’s voice came from under his shirt, with the particular tone of someone asking a question they’re not entirely sure they want answered.

"My friend lives here."

"In the girls’ bathroom."

"She’s not exactly living in the conventional sense," he said, crossing to the sinks. "Come on, stop sulking and make yourself useful. I need to find the entrance." He poked her gently on the nose. She hissed in indignation but began examining the taps, while Severus crouched and checked the space beneath the sink bank.

A few minutes later he looked up. Nagini had stopped at one tap and was studying it, slowly turning it with her tail.

"Every other tap leaks. This one makes noise but nothing comes out. And there’s a marking on it that the others don’t have." She indicated a small snake motif on the right side of the tap.

"You’re right." He smiled and stroked her head. "Good girl." She disappeared back up his sleeve. "Right. Now I need to work out how this mechanism actually opens."

"Maybe I should just say ’open’?" Nagini suggested, in the tone of someone making a joke.

The room shook.

They both went very still.

The large slab above the sinks began to rise. The sinks themselves slid forward, and where they had been, a large circular passage opened into darkness below. The tap with the snake motif sank into the floor as if acknowledging its work was done.

Severus stepped to the edge and looked down into the dark.

"Nagini." He turned to her with a wide, genuine smile. "Did I ever tell you that I adore you?"

"No," she said, and the embarrassment was perfectly clear even in a snake’s voice. "I said it as a joke."

"Then consider it said in all seriousness. And now we don’t need to blow anything up, which is probably better for everyone." He glanced toward the ceiling. "Tail. Anything nearby?"

"No one within range, sir. Nothing approaching. The Headmaster is in his office."

He nodded and looked back at Nagini.

"Close it."

"How?"

"The same way you opened it. Try ’close.’"

"All right." A pause. "Close."

The room shook again, and the sinks returned to their places.

Not a bad design at all, Severus thought, watching the last sink slide back into position. No one would have guessed from the outside. And even if they found the tap, they’d still need Parseltongue to do anything with it. The odds of a Parselmouth stumbling across this particular bathroom are approximately zero.

"You again?"

He turned.

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