20

XXXIX. Secrecy

A bit of secrecy is a good thing- information is a weapon, and it should be controlled like one, should be an integral part of your strategies like one. Some information- locations of powerful weapons, your horcruxes, or bases- should be guarded carefully… but sometimes releasing them can be necessary, or maybe even useful. They make very good bait, after all...

The meeting was to take place in New Orleans instead of Savannah, like last time, and Harry was excited. The Mississippi may not have been capable of claiming the title of longest river in the world nor the largest watershed… but it was in a country where Harry could reliably communicate with most of the population, which made it a lot more convenient.

Of course, before Harry could trace the river into the American hinterlands, he would be going to a party. Unlike the last time Harry had gone to such a party, he was dressed to the nines- he wasn't typically one for high fashion, but he supposed he could tolerate it if it meant some good press for Doggerland Apparel.

All of the vampires insisted upon coming along this time, which made things… complicated, but at the very least the one that was focusing on alchemy, Bridget, brought along her werewolf co-conspirator, so Harry had another bloke from the island to talk to.

The magical quarter of New Orleans was interesting as well- especially with the Cajun influence. It reminded Harry of magical France, especially with a few folks who looked like they had a bit of Veela blood in them…

Magical New Orleans was in some ways, rather old fashioned, with the housing in an older seeming style. It was a stark contrast to the modern steel bridge you could catch in the distance, the smooth lines lit up by electric light as compared to the warm lanterns and faintly glowing plants of the small magical island the party took place on. Harry was slightly disappointed that the party didn't overlap with the famed Mardi Gras season, but you couldn't have everything, right?

Harry would admit that through most of the dancing and socializing he was only really looking forward to investigating magic in the area, but the vampires seemed to have some fun with it, talking to others of their… kind? Species? Were they a subspecies, since it was theoretically possible that they could produce offspring with humans? Could they even be classified as living creatures, since they were technically dead?

Well, it was rather hard to say that a vampire wasn't living- at least in the sense of enjoying themselves and living well- when you were stumbling around the dancefloor with one. They tolerated his sub-par dance skills, at least, and Margaret insisted that dancing was a critical part of the royal personnage- Harry was more curious if he could just ban balls outright in Doggerland.

He also talked with a few of the less vampire crazy blokes at the party. Quite a few of them were native to the area, and he figured if anyone could give him tips on where to look for interesting treasure- or just interesting sites more generally. If America was anywhere near as dense with magical sites and creatures as Britain was (which seemed possible) then it would take ages to explore it all.

Of course, before he began exploring the Mississippi he set up a small base of operations in the Gulf of Mexico- he did want to come back again at some point. They'd probably need it just to get all the stuff they planned on acquiring in New Orleans back home, and Harry had to wonder how many bookstores his patronage helped keep afloat.

He had to get something a bit smaller than a liberty ship to sail up the Mississippi, considering how far upriver he planned on going, but magic made travelling in an apparently small boat a lot more convenient. A single dinghy wasn't much when it came to a riverine navy, but it wasn't like he really needed one, considering the whole island thing.

The first magical site Harry bumped into was old, and not in the American sense of a vintage colonial building, but rather pre-US government. Pre-European settlement, quite possibly. Sometimes he'd get a powerful magical feeling and use his broom to track it down; sometimes it would be a warded house or something, which he stayed away from- he had heard rumors of the American passion for home defense and had no interest in experiencing it personally- but occasionally there would be something different. Great earthen mounds.

Sometimes they'd be fairly small and subtle, and if Harry was lucky he'd find the suggestion of a house or temple at the top- at least, those were his guesses for what sat on the summits. A few of them seemed reasonable for what muggles could have done at the time, with the tools available, but some of them were far too massive and far too untouched to be anything but the result of magic. Unfortunately, Harry's chances of finding written documents about the process were low: many natives didn't really do writing until the Europeans arrived- not to say they didn't do great things, like the mounds- and Harry imagined that finding translators for any such hypothetical language would be a pain.

However, they were not always subtle- they were anything but subtle, with nothing more than spellwork keeping the muggles from noticing the mounds. They formed tremendous shapes, glyphs that stretched for hundreds of meters, and they seemed to hum with magical power. Harry was almost reminded of Runes- a class he definitely didn't take- or maybe a ritual assembly in the way they were arranged, in delicate circles or in complex patterns.

Standing in the centers of those circles, he could feel the magic humming around him, the air thick with a energy that felt a bit like a Pepper-Up Charm… and a bit like he was standing two inches away from the Rainbow serpent, its power overwhelming.

He started to record the sites- especially the one that seemed to have ritual power- on maps, possibly for later reference. Was there anyone he could reasonably ask for permission to use these things? Probably… he really didn't want to screw over some tribe's important ritual ceremony because he didn't know any better. Perhaps he could compare notes with them, the next time they met at the ICW?

Further up the Mississippi, Harry found himself in the Great Plains. He quite like those sprawling plains of grass- when the land wasn't swallowed up by farming- and he wanted to see some buffalo thunder across them. That was if they still actually gathered in the numbers that Harry imagined…

Unfortunately, it seemed that a lot of the buffalo were part of privately owned herds, destined for American plates instead of American plains. He supposed that was business, and it was slightly better than the buffalo going the way of the aurochs or any other extinct species, but it still left a sour taste in his mouth. He wanted to see wild buffalo, stampeding across the great plains, kicking up the grass behind them and practically making the earth rumble!

With magic, he could have probably started up a decent stampede, possibly even freeing the herds of buffalo in ranches, but while that sounded nice, it was A. Basically destruction of property (or theft? Would the bison be stealing themselves?) and B. Had a non zero chance of getting him in trouble with the American magical authorities. He didn't want to make enemies of them, now that he was a politician and all that nonsense, and he didn't want to get arrested, either.

It was while observing one of these herds that Harry noticed an unexpectedly rapid change in weather- one that wasn't caused by him, unless his disappointment in not seeing wild bison shook him a lot more deeply than he thought… And it was no small storm either- the rain began to pour quickly, the thunder echoing in the distance, and Harry figured that was no big deal, at least until his attempts to control said weather met with resistance.

He wouldn't go out and say that he was the greatest weather mage ever or anything like that, but Harry was fairly used to the weather bending to his whims, and he certainly didn't like that it was putting up resistance. Of course, he wasn't particularly inclined to meet the mysterious cause of this phenomena, so he turned on his night vision in hopes of seeing and avoiding them.

The odd thing was that Harry heard quite a bit of thunder- but saw no lightning bolts, which were supposed to be the cause of said thunder. Looking in the direction of the thunder, Harry didn't see much- at least until he looked up. A great silhouette plowed through the clouds above, a bird easily the size of a plane, every flap of the wings bringing a tremendous thunderclap. Thankfully for Harry's ears, the thunderbird- because that was what it had to be- liked to glide instead of constantly flapping its wings… before it dove.

Two giant claws sunk into the flanks of two of the bison, before it flew back into the air with dozens of flaps- and therefore thunderclaps- in rapid succession. And in an admittedly foolish move, Harry shifted into crow form and began to pursue, trying his best to not get sent tumbling to the ground by the wild winds.

Eventually, after the most exhausting flight of his life, Harry found some rest in an isolated corner of the thunderbird's nest, where it was far too busy feeding its young some delicious bison offal to notice a crow poking around quietly. Harry made sure to get a very good idea of where he was- he would probably want to come back at some point… all the shed feathers wouldn't steal themselves, after all. What sorts of wands would those make…?

Harry couldn't help but return to Kumari Kandam, to investigate those statues more intensely. A bit of brainstorming led to a few possible conclusions, and Harry was inclined towards it being some sort of security system- or at the very least, something to keep an eye on any foreigners poking around. It hadn't tried to kill him (although how it would have done that was questionable… were Naga with human upper halves capable of biting with venom?) so it seemed like he was being tolerated, for now.

It felt like he must have looked insane, just sitting in front of a naga statue after greeting it and hoping for any sort of reaction… Harry was starting to believe that the Naga were more than just the carvings, and maybe they only looked through the statue's eyes every so often. Like… not realizing someone was Floo calling you until you stepped into the room or something.

Either that or they were screwing with him.

Perhaps it was a touch depressing that Harry thought it wasn't too bad of a way to spend an evening… but he didn't really have a name for it until someone came and sat down next to him, basically doing the same thing. Harry suddenly realized that he might have just been duped into learning how to meditate by snake people.

Well, that actually wasn't half bad, all things considered. While he didn't really have hard numbers or anything like that, it felt like he was a bit more magically capable after a good meditation session, capable of whipping up slightly bigger storms or doing more work than usual on the island. Of course, that wasn't considering the other benefits: he actually learned something which could possibly help his mental health and maybe even his Occlumency, and that was a massive step above the tutelage provided by… some people.

Unlike a certain Potions professor, the people of Kumari Kandam taught him things in a reasonable, efficient manner- oh, and what things they taught him! They were more than happy to share all sorts of delightful spells and rituals for speeding the growth of plants and livestock in exchange for the broad range of magical subjects he (or his subjects) had picked up.

That wasn't the only thing they exchanged either- some of the people of Kumari Kandam were interested in seeing the outside world. And Harry served to introduce them to it. In the end, a few of Harry's citizens really like the whole pastoral fantasy thing going on there- it was a good place to get away from everything, even if the werewolves did occasionally give the sheep funny looks.

On the bright side, stigma against werewolves in Kumari Kandam was practically non-existent down there, mostly because they didn't seem to have them. Perfectly possible if they isolated themselves (or were isolated by a means beyond their control) without a werewolf. Or if they had been separated from the world before werewolves…

Whatever the case, the various elders didn't really realize how dangerous werewolves were until one of them volunteered to demonstrate- safely inside a cage, of course. The villagers were unusually horrified- Harry realized that by this point they had likely hunted any major predators that had come with them to extinction, making it quite possibly the first large predator they had ever seen- but Harry did manage to portray it as something controllable.

This did lead to a minor concern- Harry would never be able to dig up perfectly untouched Kumari Kandam culture (Kumari? Kandamese?) in anything but their memories, just because he caused such a scene when he showed up. He had started a new chapter in their history, whether he meant to or not.

Oh dammit, he'd need to call the ICW wouldn't he?

There was a lot to do to the west of India as well- Persia, Arabia, and of course, Africa. All of them sounded supremely interesting (Harry needed to take a stop by Uagadou and poke around there a bit) but Harry was on something of a history kick, so he figured he'd head down and investigate the first.

So that was how they ended up in the Persian gulf, preparing for an expedition down the Tigris and Euphrates- into the depths of history. Into Mesopotamia.

The reason behind his exploration was fairly obvious: the Fertile Crescent was home to some of the oldest civilizations in history- at least according to muggle histories- and Harry wanted to see their magic. He knew that magic was older than that, and that it was present in tribal societies… but Harry couldn't help but wonder about the magic of the first cities, the magic of the first empire in Akkad.

He did poke around in Baghdad and thereabouts, including a brief brush with magical authorities in the region- who actually caught up to him on a flying carpet!- but his intent was always archaeology. Of course, the problem with that was the same thing that drew him here in the first place: all the history.

The Akkadians and Sumerians and all their ilk had long since departed into the mists of antiquity… but other people had moved in and settled on top of them, who fought their own battles and were conquered and then those conquered were themselves conquered…

Suffice it to say that the region was archaeologically rich- perhaps a touch too rich. He'd chase a promising magical lead only to bump into a warded Roman fort or something. There was just so much magic in the region, so much history stacked in layer after layer, that attempting to find Akkad was like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

"You know what? Screw it…" Harry mumbled, before heading back to Doggerland to grab something real quick…

XXXX. Appeal

You may find the idea of appealing to others for help kind of galling, especially if they're not part of your organization, but sometimes it's something you have to do. Swallowing your pride and asking for help is always a bitter pill- but if it makes you feel better, you can make it a trade instead… Just realize that you can't know anything, unless you've found some really crazy magic.

Holding the Resurrection stone in his hand, Harry used it for the first time in quite a while, and a figure appeared before him, proud and broad chested, his beard in an odd sort of plaited style… Of course, he seemed rather upset with the whole being dragged back from his presumably peaceful rest thing.

"Who dares summon me from Kigal?" Huh. He could speak English. Either that was courtesy of the Resurrection stone, or he had just picked up English in the afterlife.

"I'm Harry Potter, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little about your city."

"My city?"

"Akkad, yeah." Harry figured that if anyone would know the location of the (currently lost) city of Akkad, it would be Sargon of Akkad- that was if his knowledge still applied after millenia of the rivers carving their courses through the land, potentially being rerouted…

"And why should I help you, Potter-boy?"

"Wouldn't it be better if people knew about your city? If men and women from all over the world could marvel at your splendid capital?" Harry shrugged. "Of course, if you just want it to stay safely under the mud and muck I can't stop you…"

The ghost grumbled, but agreed- Harry didn't even need to try pestering him with the Resurrection stone first!

Unfortunately, it seemed that Harry's mud and muck comment rung true, as the area that Sargon swore up and down was the location of 'fair Agade' was, at the moment, covered by farmland. Sargon was quite understandably upset by that particular revelation…

Admittedly, the fact that he was basically in some farmer's back yard changed Harry's plans a little. As long as the place wasn't like, absolutely soaked in magic, he figured he could just… repay the farmer by letting him 'chance upon' the archaeological find if a lifetime, as long as it wouldn't turn him into a goat or something.

The city- or what was left if it- was some ways underground, buried in thick layers of compressed sediment. Harry got the impression that the city had been… ah, evacuated by a river at some point in the past. It wasn't that far from a riverbank, after all. It did make Harry wonder if the flood was completely natural or a bit more magician made, so to speak.

Sargon was of course rather miffed to see his city covered in silt… eventually he grew so disgusted he just left, returning to the afterlife. Harry didn't really mind, other than loosing a potential cuneiform translator. Some part of him wondered if the first Emperor in all of history really deserved a happy afterlife, but whatever.

There was, of course, a bit of a problem with the whole cuneiform thing, in that Harry couldn't read it. On the one hand, he'd be doing muggle historians a big favor if he left more of the clay tablets behind, but if any of them described magical rituals they'd be useless to them at best and a possible risk to the Statute at worst.

The real motherlode (so to speak) came when he worked his way to the ruins of a temple. It seemed that the priestly class, in addition to their religious role, also performed magic; although it was possible, at least in Harry's mind, that they might have been seen as two parts of the same job back in the day.

Whatever the case, the rooms of the temple that hadn't caved in on themselves were full of the good stuff. Piles of baked cuneiform tablets, writings in cuneiform on the walls, and even the odd drawing, etched in clay.

The tablets were completely useless to Harry at this point in time, unless he needed paperweights...

It was a fairly normal day in magical Baghdad. The Djinn hadn't been getting up to any trouble recently, and the wizards were keeping their heads down. If it wasn't so boring, it might have been kind of soothing. Everything was running as planned.

The clerk on duty perked up a bit when someone walked in, and even the fact that it was a magical foreigner couldn't quite dampen his mood. He decided to open with English- the man looked like that sort. "Greetings sir, can I help you?"

"You can, actually." The man was foreign, obviously, with messy black hair and a comfortable smile. He pulled out a little box from his pocket and tapped it with his wand.

It grew into a larger box. Unsurprisingly. The man opened the box and the clerk flinched back for a moment before he pulled out a clay tablet. A clay tablet in cuneiform.

"Where did you get this? … sir." They could have been fakes, but they seemed old- very old.

"I got all of these-" the man lifted even more tablets from the box, "-from Akkad."

Akkad. He had found Akkad. Some random British tourist had found Akkad. It took a few moments for the clerk to gather his wits, and he had just enough time to ask the man for his name before he left.

"Oh. My name? Harry Potter."

This was way above the clerk's paygrade… he needed to call his boss. Or his boss's boss. Doggerland had just done them a tremendous favor.

Of course, Harry made no mention of the fact that he took a rubbing of the tablets before turning them into the Iraqi authorities. Paper would be much easier to store in the library than clay tablets, after all…

Around this point the Quibbler began running its rather infamous 'Cuneiform Column'. Whether or not it was nonsense or if Lovegoods actually knew the language was the subject of some debate- or maybe Lovegood had just gotten his hands on a really weird printing press and wanted to test it out...

Really, it only served to evoke a minor chuckle or brief moment of confusion from the reader before they got back to reading. Although rare, Potter's columns wouldn't read themselves!

In Muggle news, the recent rediscovery of the ruins of Akkad filled headlines around the world. The farmer got famous, archaeologists started circling the place, and suitably censored cuneiform tablets were planted.

The muggles would have probably been rather shocked if they were informed what percentage of their previous historical artifacts were actual magical dupes, and how many 'incomplete' documents were only as such as part of a rushed censorship job. There were all these deadlines, you know, and you can't exactly go back and turn in a missing part of a manuscript later once you whipped up a sufficiently convincing load of bull…

After making some Iraqi historian's day- or month, depending on how long the translations took- Harry began to work his way towards the coast of Africa. He supposed that he could have taken the quick route and hopped through the Suez to look around the eastern Mediterranean and maybe check in with the Delacours… but Harry did want to see the one school of African magic he had heard about, Uagadou.

Actually learning a little bit more about the continent in general sounded pretty good, actually- there was no way in hell that a single school, in one particular region of Africa, taught every single magician from the Cape to Casablanca. It would be like trying to send every wizard or witch in Europe to Hogwarts and expecting that to work out smoothly- insanity.

He didn't even know there was a magical school in Baghdad until he basically bumped into the House of Wisdom! Even if he was considerably more well travelled than he was a few years ago, it still felt like he didn't know much of anything. So he planned on looking around the African coast, at least to start with- he figured that he'd get a little sampling of everything the world had to offer.

And if there was any place to get a little sample of everything, he figured that a good place to start would be something of a trade hub. Admittedly, he wasn't entirely sure if magicians even used the same methods to move goods around as muggles did… but it seemed like wizards seemed to gather in big metropolitan areas, so it was probably worth a shot.

Once again, Harry found himself searching for a location that was quasi-mythical- the Mountains of the Moon- although he had some reassurance that Uagadou was a school that actually existed considering that the Chief Mugwump of the ICW was a graduate of the school… If it didn't exist that would raise a lot of questions…

He figured that the best way to get to it would probably be following the Nile, considering that the mountains were the alleged source. So he dipped into Sudan real quick and began to follow the White Nile, which would (hopefully) take him to the location of Uagadou. If he was remembering correctly, the source of the Nile was Lake Victoria… but he knew there had to be some magic shenanigans going on.

Sure enough, enough hunting did eventually reveal a certain tributary of Lake Victoria which wasn't on any muggle maps as far as Harry could tell, and that wound through some unusually unsettled hills. Harry followed the river by broom until he lost it in a particularly thick patch of fog, but by that point, Harry could see the school- in fact, it was rather hard not to.

It almost reminded him of home, in some ways, the great precipice, partially carved out of a mountain towering out of a sea of thick fog… Harry's island wasn't surrounded by other mountains and wasn't landlocked, so there were differences, but he found that he liked the place, maybe because he didn't have any bad memories to associate with it… yet.

As he approached, he was cautious- there was no way that the school didn't have some sort of ward scheme surrounding it, and Harry didn't particularly feel like being knocked out of the sky during this particular adventure. So he kind of looped around the place in a purposefully conspicuous manner- hoping to catch the attention of a guard or groundskeeper or whatever- before eventually finding the river again, which passed through a sort of fortified gate on the way to the castle proper.

Of course, he stopped before the gate, which was closed. Harry spent the wait observing the mountains, which loomed from the thick banks of fog… a similarly towering figure eventually emerged from said fog.

"Do you speak English?" Harry shouted up at the person, who had to be one of the tallest he had ever seen…

"A bit, but I'm sorry to say we're not taking late enrollments!"

"I'm sorry to hear about that." Harry chuckled. "But would I be allowed to visit?"

Yes, it turned out that Harry would be allowed to visit, once he had introduced himself- Harry thought he saw some reaction on the towering witch's face, but she didn't make a big deal of it, thankfully- and made a few fairly expected oaths: don't harm the student body, teachers, or school property, etc. etc. Of course, Harry would have done these things without needing to promise, but he could understand security.

Getting a brief dunk in Uagadou's version of the Thief's Downfall was not very fun, but it was still understandable, given the threat of someone attempting to use Polyjuice or the Imperius to smuggle a kid out under the guise of a parental visit. Admittedly, once the shock of the cold water had worn off, he would admit it was kind of funny- maybe he could get a version of his own? Or maybe a more tame… spritzer or something. The Thief's Aerosol, or something.

Once he got into the school proper, one thing that struck him was all the adjustments made for their many, many Animagus students. High roofs and open windows- charmed to keep the weather out, obviously- for any flying Animagus, little tunnels and burrows for those of a smaller persuasion, lots of open space (despite being on a mountain, as Harry remembered) for any number of creatures to stretch their legs.

Of course, that wasn't their specialty, and wasn't really the reason for his visit this time around, considering that he knew how to do transformations already. Two, even. However, there was something else the school specialized in that he hoped to pick up: wandless magic, which Harry wanted to learn if at all possible… He wasn't sure if he really had the time for going to classes, especially considering how awkward it would feel sitting in class with a bunch of little firsties- or whatever their equivalent was- learning the basics, but he figured that he could probably get some books on the subject, or at least a few pointers, in exchange for a few copies of books from his own library.

Schools were supposed to dispense knowledge, after all.

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