Chapter 19: Form fours, right turn

DISCLAIMER: Did the Family Tree JKR published for the Blacks directly contradict material in the books as well as not making any sense on its own merits? If so, I don't own Harry Potter.

NOTE: Yes, missed last week. This started out one way, and when I had it nearly finished I had a load of better ideas. So I rewrote it. The fact that this story is proving popular means I'm actually taking some trouble over it at long last. Still not doing second drafts, mind. I'm barely bothering with spell-check. And I'm slightly late due to being ill. Not, as far as I can tell, Coronavirus (symptoms are all wrong) but I still feel like fried tripe.

CHAPTER 19

Petunia breaks it. The elocution lessons forgotten for the moment, it comes out in the hard-toned voice that only north-country matriarchs can pull off, "I'm not sure about the stack of heads," she says, "but them that killed my sister? I do dearly want them to pay."

"Moody was right about you," Sirius adds, "you're not even trying to pretend you're not ruthless."

"If you want an end, you have to want the means," I say, "and we can hope all we want that the nastier means won't be needed, I think we both know that there's a hard core of the blighters whe won't be moved by anything less."

-oOo-

"Mal?"

I'm working on my side project when Sirius sticks his head around the door to interrupt me. "Yes?" I say, keeping my eyes on the map with the drawing-pins in it. Beyond 'close to but not actually in major population centres' I'm not getting a pattern. I may have to widen the search beyond the two counties I've done so far. And, for that matter, take a look at this under a dose of ageing potion and while incorporeal. A 7-year-old's brain, even the rather good one I got out of James and Lily's genes, just isn't as capable of as much as an adult one, nor the chilly cogitation of a roaming spectre.

"Before I get to what I came in for, can I raise a small concern?"

"Raise away, Sirius, I could do with a break from this."

"Yes, well, it's about this." He waves a hand to encompass the wall full of pinned up news clippings, the map, and post-it notes. The red yarn is wholly unnecessary, I just included it for the aesthetics of the thing. "I've been catching up with the whole telly and movies thing, and every time I've seen something like this the person doing it has been at least a bit of a nutter, if not completely mental."

I grin back at him. "It's also a convenient method of organising a lot of information. Which, I admit, I've arranged to look a bit like the big wall of crazy you get in your better dramatic presentations. You've had six months to get used to my sense of humour, you really need to start learning to cope."

He snorts. "Alleged humour. Pardon my curiosity: what's it all about?"

"Tracking incidents from the last war in a way that gets around Ministry filtering. No cover-up is perfect, and, well, it's the Ministry. The Statute of Secrecy does a lot to keep this stuff out of the forefront of peoples' minds, but the supplementary work the Ministry does is, well, a bit shit to be honest. They left traces everywhere." The Statute of Secrecy is a honking big piece of magic as well as a law. The ordinary nothing-to-see-here charms were well developed magic even as early as the 17th century, and amping them up to cover all of magic all over the world - over Europe to start with, but it spread with colonialism - was mostly an exercise in power-boosting by getting hundreds of mages working in concert rather than anything novel. It still needs help, which the job of obliviators and magical clean-up crews. Who could, if I'm any judge, use a great deal more training. I'm figuring out the skills of open-source intelligence analysis as I go along and still catching them at it, it wouldn't even slightly surprise me to learn that HM Government has an office of clever buggers doing the same thing a lot more effectively.

"Oh!" Sirius is a smart chap, and gets it immediately, "you can track Death Eater attacks by shoddy cover-up stories in the muggle press?"

"Yup. From style alone I can tell you where the boundaries between the obliviator teams are. Greater Manchester favours gas explosions, all of the Cumbria teams favour freak weather, and East Lancashire likes carbon monoxide poisoning, but only as part of a broader portfolio of cover-ups. Someone on that team has a good grasp of how things actually work in the non magical world, though. Just needs to work on his reliance on stereotyped phrases, make them match the ones the journalists use themselves."

"Huh. I don't suppose I should be surprised that the Ministry don't get it right. Where's Cumbria?"

I lightly slap my forehead. "Of course, you'd not know. The old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland were merged in '74. Big reorganisation back then. Liverpool and Manchester got split off from Lancashire, and the borders of the counties were shifted about to make more sense of where people actually lived. The Magical government is still using the old county lines, which is why they think Rutland still exists. Anyway, I've done the part of the country I lived in longest, I'm going to repeat this for the rest of the country, bit by bit. When the war starts up again we'll have a complete picture of enemy tactics and standard operating procedures."

In the meantime, of course, I have a picture of what might have happened to my old family. But not, unfortunately, any better clue as to whether it was Death Eaters or one of my siblings having a serious magical accident from the abuse. Figuring out which of these incidents are Death Eater attacks and which are Amazing Exploding Abused Children is going to be a task and a half. Some of them are certainly attacks, there's a huge drop off in incidents after Halloween '81. Not to zero though, which is concerning. Before I died I saw more than one speculation that muggleborns' first accidental magic was often also the occasion of someone arranging them a little 'accident'.

"Good work. Bloody good work. We could've used something like this last time around."

I wave a hand. "I'm not exactly an expert in this sort of thing, but knowing it's possible is half the battle. Probably be able to refine it as we go."

"Well, if you need an assistant for this, one of my old school friends got back in touch. He's just back from abroad, and he tells me he's between jobs."

"Oh?" I'm guessing he means Remus Lupin, of whom I have no high opinion based on his portrayal in the books. "Well, if he's solidly on our side then even someone to take over the more menial bits of this would help. Any talent he has past that will be a bonus."

"I'll let him know, you can interview him, see if he suits. He'll get prickly if I try and hire him, thinks I'd be giving him charity or some such nonsense."

"Familiar with the type." I notice that Sirius hasn't mentioned that Remus - I'm pretty sure it's him - is a werewolf. Doubtless it'll come up sooner or later. Along with him probably being Dumbledore's attempt to get a spy among us: his return from foreign parts is awfully conveniently timed. That's for the future. There's a loose end in our conversation, and I notice Sirius is holding a book. "You mentioned coming in here for a reason?"

"Oh, right, yes, sorry, that. You know you've got this idea of changing public opinion about James, Lily and Harry, and, what was it you called it? PR warfare?"

"You've had ideas?"

"A rather good one, which I got to by a roundabout route. Thought I'd go out in disguise, take the tenor of the clans sort of thing. Figure out what people are saying, so we know the size and shape of the job."

Translation: he can't go out drinking wearing his own face for the time being. While everyone knows he was exonerated, they're still treating him oddly. Whether he's been trying to pull despite being in self-transfigured disguise I don't know and haven't pried. He certainly hasn't brought anyone home yet, nor stayed out overnight. "What did you learn?"

"Two things. First one is that public opinion is about where we thought it was. Harry's the boy-who-lived, blah blah blah, nobody remembers James and Lily, all kinds of speculation about what Dumbledore did with Harry. The second one is more interesting. I went in some of the seamier places, Dung Fletcher clued me in last time around, he's Dumbledore's pet lowlife, and there were others that I had to learn about growing up because my family have some thoroughly disreputable people on retainer. And while they're not talking about the whole Harry thing, someone is putting out feelers among the various ruffians the Death Eaters used for their dirty work. Which is how I got a job as an assassin." He has a bright, shit-eating grin on his face as he says this last.

I've got a fairly good idea why that would be. "Let me guess, you've been hired to kill the notorious Sirius Black?"

"Aw, you guessed it." Neither of us, of course, is going to crack on that we're even slightly concerned by this. Mostly because it wouldn't do a bit of good to panic in any way, but also because we're English, damn yer eyes, and we don't unstiffen our upper lips over something as footling as an assassination plot.

We save that sort of thing for the cricket results. Or quidditch results, in Sirius's case.

I wave off the backhanded compliment for my insight, "Not too hard to figure out. If you die without issue, there's a whole lot of entailed property that will fall to your cousin Narcissa, and through her, her son Draco. Between your mother and Abraxas and Lucius Malfoy, that's a dirty great big motive. I'm guessing you didn't ask for money up front?"

"Don't know how it works in the muggle world, but magical assassins are strictly cash on delivery. Apparently I'm worth five thousand galleons dead, and anything up to two thousand for information-leading-to. We exchanged owl-post boxes for future contact, which is pretty normal."

"Should I be alarmed that you know how to negotiate a contract killing?"

"That would be my education as a scion of the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black. Part of being a well-rounded wizard." Sirius strikes a nose-in-the-air pose that is somewhat undermined by the combination of Ron Hill pants and a Whitesnake t-shirt.

"Well, forewarned is forearmed. Means we're going to have to be on alert if you're out with Harry at all." I'm not terribly worried about Harry's safety, of course. He has the full weight of the magical Defence of the Realm keeping him hale and sound. Sirius having to fight for his life would be an upsetting sight for the little man, though. "You have been careful about keeping this address out of wizard hands, right?"

"Oh, certainly. My address of record is a box in Diagon Alley. Keeping one's home off Ministry records is a time-honoured tradition. And the only wizard other than you who's seen me undisguised since I came to visit you that day is my grandfather. Who, by the way, has finally come around to re-settling the entails general magique rather than pur et magique. That briefing paper you wrote on magical genetics has convinced him that we need to be open to letting a few half-bloods into the fold. Nothing else, I'm the only live Blacks of breeding age who aren't in jail or disowned are Narcissa and yours truly. He's accepted that he can't afford to be picky. He clammed up on the subject of the Malfoys, there's a story there I'm sure. No idea what, but he seems keen to keep the estate out of that family's hands. Andromeda, well, she has made it quite clear she's not coming back in the fold, but is making noises about having us over for dinner."

The paper he's talking about is complete bollocks of course. I took some basic medical textbook stuff about the dangers of inbreeding and rewrote it in my best approximation of magical-theory gibberish, together with a few paragraphs on squibhood through a child's innate magic devoting itself to keep the child alive rather than dying of hereditary disease, leaving nothing left over for spellcasting. If there was any actual magical genetics in what I wrote, it was purely by accident. "Glad to be of help, and tell Andromeda I'd love to come, whenever's convenient. You know what my schedule is like." I've actually met the Tonks family: extraordinarily nice people. And the schedule is a bit full over the upcoming Easter holidays, since Marge is coming to stay. Which means both boys want to spend as much time as possible at our house. She might have cleaned up her act, but she's still a complete horrorshow, especially to little boys. Taking them for dinner with Harry's magical cousins might be a good change of pace for them. "And yes, I too am curious about what your grandfather's beef with the Malfoys might be, let's make a note to look into that. What's the book?"

"This is how we're going to shift public opinion." He holds up the book. It's got a smiling, winking, blond-haired wizard on the cover, and the title Gadding With Ghouls printed in considerably smaller type than the author's name. Gilderoy Lockhart.

I'd not forgotten about him, I saw a big display of Break With A Banshee on the shelves at Flourish and Blotts last year. There are, however, limits to what I can do about the infamies and injustices of magical Britain and stopping a con artist is beyond them. Still, if Sirius has an idea for how to get some use out of the blighter? "Let's hear it, then?"

"While I was out negotiating my own contract killing, I happened to pass Flourish and Blotts while there was an event on featuring this chap, and this, his second book. Man's a raging self-publicist, and a big hit with the witches. Which, fair enough, he's got it, let him flaunt it. And he is good at the promotional side of things, he drew a big crowd for the signing he was doing. Anyway, I got a copy - signed, naturally - out of sheer curiosity. It's bollocks from start to finish, but well written bollocks that sells like hot cakes, so old Blott tells me. My plan is that we offer him a nice fat bag of galleons to publish some of that rhetorical vitriol you come out with and get it into every home in the country. Hopefully we don't have to sweeten the pot by letting him interview Harry -"

"Nah," I say, seeing where Sirius is going with this and thinking up a few refinements off the cuff. "The nearest we'll let him have is a full statement on behalf of Harry's guardians, conditions of anonymity due to the risk of rogue followers of You-Know-Who or some such flim-flam. I can polyjuice as Petunia and give him an interview with Lily's sister." Petunia slinging off about Dumbledore would be kind of fun, but we've got a specific narrative to sell and I think I might do a better job than the Gossip Queen Of Little Whinging. A more focussed one, at any rate. "Tell him that boosting Lily's part in the whole thing is something he can sell as righting an injustice done to witches everywhere, and we leave it to him how much action he uses that to get."

"That is a good selling point, if I'm any judge. The man I saw was in it for the attention from the witches first, the fame second, and the money third. Paying him to publish an entire book of pick-up line material? He'll take our hand off. Here, I'll leave this for you, get an idea of his style, I'll send him an owl to set up a meeting."

"Make sure you tell him he's getting Sirius Black's first interview since getting out of Azkaban, too."

-oOo-

It has been more than six months, and the sense of horror about the old house hasn't faded, as far as I can remember. There are definite signs of memory tampering on all of the neighbours who were living here back in '81, but then I knew to expect that.

It's possible to recover obliviated memories, as memory charms don't alter the underlying brain structures in which the memories are laid down. Giving the subject access to the original memories - which won't have been altered by the natural process of recall, and so may well be more reliable than untampered memories - is done by breaking the charm that hides them from the conscious mind. However, the only method I know from Tom is the horribly destructive emergencies-only technique. Tom's corpus of magical knowledge is full of gaps like that: he'd prioritise the nastiest, most brute-force method as a point of principle and get around to the elegant stuff later only if he had a pressing need. Which is to say, generally not at all. He was an absolute master of penny-wise-pound-foolish decision-making of that sort.

(Unexpected bonus: while spooking about reading minds, I find out exactly who it was who set fire to the for-sale board at Number 3 when word got out that the "Sold" sticker had gone up because an asian family had bought it. I'd never have figured the mild-mannered accountant from number 8 for an arson-minded racist.)

Crossing the property line again, I reprise the sense of malignity that clings to the old place. However the occupants of this place died - I'm trying to maintain a sense of emotional distance from the deaths of my cross-dimensional siblings and it's not working - they did not go easy.

Or painlessly. I'm used to being numb to touch and scent and temperature when I'm incorporeal. Being numb generally: out of my sleeve I'm pure mind. The closer I get to the front door, the more I can taste blood in my mouth, feel the chill in the night air and shiver, as from hearing nails down a blackboard.

I've picked an approach to the front door because that is the polite approach. If there's something haunting this place, I mean to treat it with respect. The power's off so the doorbell doesn't work, and knocking with a bit of broken flagstone produces no response. I have observed the proprieties, though, so I ghost through the front door.

Inside, the place is a mess. The carpet is scorched and shredded mounded here and there with plasterboard fallen from the ceiling. All of the internal doors are hanging on one hinge at most where they're not shattered entirely. The wallpaper is peeled off in stiff, angular loops and mottled with mildew. I've picked a full moon to return on, and the grey, sad light that makes it through the dirt on the shattered double-glazing just about lets me pick out that everything has a fine layer of soot on it.

It really does look like everything got burned and then put out by fire-engine hoses. Is this the actual damage that was done as part of the incident or by the cover-up? The sense of malignity says that this isn't set-dressing: this is how everyone died. I get no sense of anything lurking to pounce, but then I wouldn't, would I? I have a series of apparation jumps mapped out in my mind, starting with an emergency jump a thousand feet straight up and thence to the Churchyard of St. Eadmer - home to one of Skriker's kin - before drunkard's-walking across the country to throw off any pursuit that the spectral hound doesn't deter.

I know very little about examining a scene-of-crime beyond what I've picked up from having a kid reading for a Forensic science degree. What is apparent, however, is that all the doors on the ground floor are blown out in the same direction. This particular standard-pattern estate house had a two-flight staircase rather than the more usual single-flight pattern, which meant it had a much bigger under-stairs cupboard than most. And that seems to have been the epicentre of the blast: the door is entirely off and thrown clear across the hall to be partly embedded in the living-room door. The cracks in the ceiling radiate out from there, too, like whatever it was was powerful enough to flex the joists of the first floor up enough to crack the artexed plasterboard of the ceiling.

I think for a moment about exploring the rest of the building before looking in to what is surely the centre of the destruction. I should. It is, after all, the sensible thing to do: time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted as the proverb has it. Trouble is, even with all the emotion-having bits of me left sleeping down in Surrey, I'm not sure I can stand to do it. This house may have been the scene of years of childhood misery, but it's still home and seeing it wrecked like this hurts.

I steel myself, though. Upstairs is more-or-less untouched as to fire and water damage, although everything is knocked over by whatever exploded downstairs and it's all covered in mildew. I check the bedroom that, at the date this happened, I was still sharing with my little brother. My collection of 2000ADs is still present and correct, although it's probably going to need some restoring attention.

Downstairs, the kitchen is just water-damaged with everything knocked over or spilt. The dining room likewise. The living room is another focus of devastation. And, burnt into the wallpaper next to the fireplace, a silhouette. Like someone was stuck to the wall and then burnt. I had decades of beef with the likely victim there - either of them, really - but there are some things you just don't wish on anyone.

In the cupboard under the stairs the gas meter is capped off with big warning labels, all of the stuff that was stored there seems to have been removed and heaped in the hallway to let the bloke from the Gas Board in. And the shadows are moving.

"Hello?" I venture, hovering at the doorway.

There's a hiss and a snarl.

"I'm here to help, if I can," I say, going for my most soothing voice. I and all my siblings were utter powder-kegs until we got old enough to get help: anything spawned out of their magic is going to be on a hair trigger.

Getoutfemoralarteryleaveusalonewipethatlookoffyourfacebackoff.

Okay, not coherent.

Except I can hear shushing.

"Are you a policeman?" I recognise the voice. It's my little sister. The older of the two, and the sanest of the four of us. It's got a hollow, echoey tone to it that I know from Tom's experience with ghosts.

"No, but I'm here to help. Who's in there with you, Kate?"

"Mary. And the boys, but they're all angry." This is going to be difficult. In '81 Kate was about four. And Mary was a baby. My brother and I were eleven and eight. And if they - or their ghosts, since that's what I'm talking to - have gone monsters-from-the-id then there's nobody to talk to who's going to make any sense. Kate will try her best, but the ghost of a pre-school child isn't up to much.

Hell, if I was here in the flesh, I wouldn't be making any sense. Whatever happened here, it killed children. It's a toss-up between insensate grief and berzerk fury.

Tom never tried it, but it is possible to establish legilimentic contact with ghosts. "Kate, can you look into my eyes, please? I want to see that you're OK."

There's more growling, and whispers to calm her brothers down. I'm making sure to not cross the threshold into the cupboard, lest I get ripped apart. Dismembered by one's own mad ghost transdimensional twin is probably an end of enough dramatic irony to implode the universe, I reckon.

Kate emerges from the shadows. I'd forgotten what a cute kid she was. The burns - still fresh and weeping silvery ghost-stuff - detract from that a bit. Her hair is mostly gone along one side, but she still has both her eyes.

Bad men. Skellington faces. Black coats. The boys, all angry. Mummy screaming. Daddy shouting. Mummy and Daddy both screaming. Hiding under the stairs, the boys won't say why. The boys get really cross. They hurt one of the bad men. Fire. And then it's quiet. If we hide, they'll all go away.

Kate didn't see much, and the scum wore masks. The whole point of the Death Eater regalia was to thwart identification evidence. I reckon I'm just going to have to go after all the bastards. While I'm in Kate's mind I do a little psychic surgery, removing the worst of it. Not just the pain of dying, but the sight of her brothers warping into eldritch monstrosities. If there is a 'Next Great Adventure' she'll enjoy it more without carrying that burden.

When I'm done, I call out "Skriker!"

"Who's Skriker?"

"He's my dog," I say, as the Good Boy himself fades into being from the shadows, tail wagging. He comes when called, and I simply can't tell him he's a Good Boy enough. "I'd like you and Mary and the boys to go for a walk with Skriker. He'll take you where you need to go. He's the best doggy every, and he likes to go for walks with children."

Nobody needs convincing: they weren't ghosts through unfinished business, but because they were frightened to leave their hiding place. With a great big hound herding them along, they're a lot more confident.

Where is the line between justice and vengeance, anyway?

-oOo-

"Well, fuck."

"Problem?" Sirius looks up from the correspondence he'd been working on. I'm assuming it's correspondence, he could be writing the next great magical novel for all I've been paying attention.

I, for my part, had just come up from my first foray into my shiny new Pensieve. "Yeah," I say, wiping at the purely psychosomatic feeling of wetness I have on my face. For some reason my subconscious thinks that having immersed my face in a bowl of fluid, it should be wet when it comes out. "Turns out that the theory that a Pensieve is actually Divination magic has a lot more to it than anyone thought. And that divination has a range, blast it."

"Oh? Going to have to unpack that one for me."

"Yeah, well, it goes like this: you use a Pensieve to examine memories, and you always see more detail in the Pensieve than the donor of the memory did at the time. Theory one is that this is because human perception is woolly and human recall even woollier, so what you perceive and recall is a lot less than what you saw and remembered, and the pensieve remedies the defects. Which, maybe. It's got problems based around the very real science of how memories are stored and recalled in human brains. Supporters of the theory just say that clearly our brains and senses are better at this sort of thing than our conscious memory-recalling minds."

"And that's not the case?"

"I'm pretty sure that I've just entirely falsified that hypothesis. Which leaves the other theory. You know I've mentioned spending part of my existence outside time, yeah?"

"I recall, yes. Got to admit, thought it was just the usual seer showmanship."

"Sort of, a bit. Mostly to avoid difficult questions about just what I actually am capable of, which there's good reason to keep schtum about. It is true, though, in as much as I've spent time in another universe entirely. Where, it turns out, Pensieves can't reach. The wretched thing doesn't let me view a memory, it lets me scry a time and place defined by a memory. And it can't reach outside the universe. Basically, if I can't recall it the normal way, any information I got while I was there is gone. Or subject to the fuzziness of normal memory, which is a pain in the arse. I can examine memories from those times and places, but they're just like regular recall, just stabilised a bit by the pensieve." Which is useful in its own way: buggering up one's own memories by repeated recall is a documented phenomenon.

It has some interesting implications for the difference in magical and normal recollection, too. I've observed before that going into a memory in dreams is a lot sharper and less surreal if you've got magic than it is otherwise, and at this point I'm starting to think that that's not a function of the memory so much as it is the magic boosting one's ability to visualise. Just like transfiguration lets you shape the outside world, mind magics let you shape the inner world. Or so runs my off-the-cuff theorising, at any rate. No idea how I'd control for it if I ever get time to run experiments.

"The other problem," I go on, "is that I can't seem to go examine a memory of a memory. The link at one remove isn't strong enough, unfortunately."

Sirius looks baffled.

"You remember me telling you I had cause to fight one of Tom's shades?"

"The one that was attached to Harry? Yeah, I recall. You got some of his memories out of that?"

"Most of his life up to October '81, although I've been being careful about integrating those into my own mind. The fraction I've taken aboard is bad enough. I thought I might be able to use the Pensieve to look at the memories without being personally contaminated, but no go. Same for trying to use the memories I have integrated in the Pensieve. I get nothing better than Tom's own direct recollection." I've also got nothing better than little Kate's direct recollection, which is a problem. There are probably all kinds of identifying clues if you can examine a memory of masked mages closely enough. And I want to prioritise. Can't say that out loud, though.

"Do you really need those?"

"No idea until I look at them. I mean, I'm probably never going to need the last moments of Murder Victim Number Forty-Seven, whoever it was, but until I've seen it I don't know. On the one hand I want to go through that whole big pile of memory to ensure I'm as effective as I can be. On the other, I don't want to take the risk of becoming more like Tom because I've edited my own personal past to include so much dark magic and arsehole behaviour."

"You think that's a risk?"

I shrug. "We are the sum of our memories to date, are we not? As things stand, I've got two lots of childhood memories, and it's easy enough to keep 'em separate: I was never an orphan in 1930s London. After that, things get a bit ... fuzzier. You've noticed that I'm at least talking a ruthless game, and sure, some of that is purely me. I was a somewhat damaged individual for most of my first life, and only really started recovering properly in the last ten years of it. Thing is, a lot of the foul temper I had, that people like me generally have, comes from the changes in your brain that bad experiences cause. I don't have that brain any more, so where is the nastiness coming from?"

"What's that phrase you use? The 'purview of the conundrums of philosophy?'"

"Yeah. Philosophy of Identity is an absolute bugger, not least because of the existential doubt you get into when you really start thinking about it. And can I afford existential doubt while I'm trying to integrate the personality of a magical serial killer? I think not."

Sirius gives an over-dramatic shudder. "I'm leaving that one to you, then. But, look, I don't want to shut you out. Therapists aren't a thing for wizards, although from what you've told me they're useful. So, you know, if you want me to sit down and make encouraging noises while you talk about the problem, let me know. I wouldn't know where to start actually helping, but as long as you're willing to listen to me complain about my family, it seems only fair I help in return."

"Works," I agree. "For now, though, I've got to let Perenelle know what I just learned, and that we're stuck with brute recall and arithmantic prognostication for the investment planning seminar we've got coming up. What're you working on?"

Sirius lays his quill down and leans back in the classic too-long-at-a-desk stretch and neck-crick. "Keeping up with some of my old contacts from the war. It, well, it cut across the traditional light-and-dark lines. And not everyone on the dark side was that bothered about muggles and muggleborns, to put it in their terms. Some of them actually knew and liked people like that, on the fringes of the magical world there's a lot more integration goes on than is officially recognised. The Statute of Secrecy is more like the Statute of Polite Discretion in some neighbourhoods. So they want to help, but they still couldn't be seen to be helping any cause Dumbledore was leader of. So they'd pass word to me, because whatever else I was, I was a Black."

I've learned since Sirius moved in that Dark Magic isn't as simple as Maleficium - which is your classic dark-side-of-the-Force stuff, shortcuts for second-raters - and what I've been calling Transgressive Magic, the stuff that requires criminal and unethical acts to work. There's also a whole corpus of magic that is considered dark for the same reason that, in the muggle world, some perfectly innocent practices are treated as anathema because they stem from the wrong religion, culture, or brand of politics. Magic termed 'dark' in the same way that Vernon terms entire branches of food 'foreign muck'.

And, in a country like Britain, there is a lot of that sort of thing going on. Successive waves of invaders and cultures constantly put down their predecessors as dark, savage, barbaric. The Romans turned up and slaughtered the Druids (who almost certainly had done the same in turn to the magicians of the Beaker People) and called their magecraft barbarism, including what might be a blood libel of human sacrifice (but probably isn't, the archaeologists keep finding remains that match the descriptions).

The Anglo-Saxons rooted out the magic of the Britons left high-and-dry by the departure of the Romans, condemning the last vestiges of it in the magical codicils to the Synod of Whitby. Their Viking and Dane cousins, who came along later, came in for much of the same condemnation. The Normans turned up just after Hogwarts was founded and made their changes to what was considered acceptable magic. (Since they affected more than half of the population in Hogwarts' catchment area, my money is on this for the real reason Salazar Slytherin flounced).

The next big change was the Reformation, condemning the medieval practises of the rural recusants as heathen at best and diabolism at worst (and a big motivation for letting the non-magical authorities hang the Lancashire Witches). Finally, the Victorian era saw a big condemnation of non-European magic as barbarism. Got to justify that colonialism somehow, and they had the example of Rome and the druids to draw on: if they're mired in the Dark, the poor dears, the conquest is for their own good.

"And they're still willing to talk to you after you got outed at your trial as working for Dumbledore?" I'm honestly curious. Dumbledore is very much a product of his time, which gave the world Jingoism, Muscular Christianity and the absolute high-water mark of Colonialism. It might be that he's completely fine with the older magics, but the kind of people who practise that sort of thing have experience with such men and wouldn't want to find out the hard way.

"I was always pretty clear that I was more against the Death Eaters than for Dumbledore. Which was a necessary fiction at the time, but a lot nearer the truth after the old git dropped me in the cacky," Sirius shrugs, "and while I've got a definite motive for rebuilding my old network, what with the whole assassination thing, I want it for when the fighting starts again. What was it you said the other day? 'The best time to get paranoid is before they start plotting against you."

It does sound like something I'd say, but I don't recall the precise wording I used. However, Sirius has a fairly sizeable stack of letters, most of it quite surprisingly on non-parchment stationery. "Anything in particular turned up?"

"Not really," he says, "since there are a limited number of brokers for this sort of deal there's no way to tell who actually wants me dead from that alone. All of the people we suspect would go through the same brokers, and they won't talk."

"And getting hold of one of the assassins won't give us more of a clue?" From the sounds, magical assassination is well served for cut-outs and anonymity. This seems altogether less well-policed than the non-magical world, where every instance I ever heard of had the would-be hirer talking to an undercover detective constable in fairly short order.

Sirius shrugs, rocks a hand. "A pure freelancer who's after the basic reward? No. On the other hand, if someone spots me and claims the information reward, that might see them send someone they have on retainer. Interrogating them probably won't be easy, of course, but it'd be a start."

I have some advantages vis a vis extracting information from unwilling subjects. Anyone willing to murder for hire, I reckon, will deserve me giving them the full Tom Riddle. Which means that what Sirius is suggesting is a better idea than he appears to think. "So, say your undercover identity grasses you up and we set an ambush? How likely are they to send a team?" Capturing one guy when there's two of us should be easy enough, but what little I know of assassination it's a team sport.

"Unlikely. Most hitters have this whole lone wolf thing going on. They're not a community of trusting and cooperative sorts. Not, you might say, on board with the whole Hufflepuff ethos."

"For which we should be truly thankful. Hard-working, team-oriented contract killers? We'd be proper fucked."

Sirius laughs out loud at that one. "We should have a think about what kind of ambush we want to set, and how I can plausibly inform on it. And how many other people we can recruit to help?"

"Two of us against one guy, though. Are we going to need anyone else? We're going to make someone softly and suddenly vanish away, the fewer witnesses the better."

"Even so. Capture is harder than killing, having help to prevent an escape could make the difference."

I shrug. "I was thinking in terms of an invisibility cloak and a blunt instrument. Get the target focussed on what he thinks is his prey and - wallop!" I slap my fist into a cupped hand.

Sirius gives me a Hard Stare.

I sigh. "Look, if this gives us a lead back to whoever wants you dead, we're probably going to have to do something we don't want witnesses for, even if it's just informing them that we can afford the kind of bounty that will have every hitter from the Urals to the Yukon looking for a piece of the action," Sirius's dealings with his grandfather to settle the Black estate has given me an idea of what constitutes wizarding wealth, and Tom Riddle could have straight up bought the Ministry if he hadn't had a psychotic attachment to his kill-trophy bank account, "Especially not the kind of witness who'll allow words like 'premeditated' to be thrown around the courtroom. A courtroom, I might remind you, that is stacked in favour of the kind of people we're dealing with here."

"Point."

AUTHOR NOTES

English Counties and the reforms of 1974: county boundaries were set by a lot of historical accidents and within the counties local government wasn't so much instituted as evolved. There were reforms in the 19th century that divided the counties into boroughs (as a standard thing, most of them already worked that way) and then in 1974 there was a big reform that merged a few counties - losing Westmorland and Cumberland to make Cumbria, and Rutland into Leicestershire - and separated five conurbations from their surrounding counties to make metropolitan counties on the same model Greater London had been using for decades. Over forty years later people are still complaining about the results (Southport really don't like being part of Merseyside) and there were some tweaks in '97 that resulted in Rutland becoming a thing again.

Entails pur et magique. Entailed property is property that passes without need for a probated will by operation of law, and other than titles of nobility has to be resettled each generation. (More explanation than that requires a textbook, it's a lawyers' specialty all of its own.) The formal name for the title - and it's really old law, so the jargon is still in Norman French - is estate in fee tail. Fee tail male used to be the standard, limiting the entail to male heirs 'of the body' ie not adopted sons. Fee tail general was possible and sometimes used. The magical world never uses fee tail male - necromancy being a thing means that angry witches can punish your chauvinism post mortem - but uses tail general magique and tail general pur et magique, the latter limiting the entail to magical heirs with four magical grandparents.

I've got a whole thing of how that meant that Harry couldn't inherit any more than the unentailed 12 Grimmauld Place and the contents of the vault (Regulus died and Sirius was estranged, both too young to re-settle anything else, and Walburga was too mad to sign anything by the end) but all the rest of the property was re-settled elsewhere in the family while Sirius was in Azkaban. It's how I'd've done it if I'd had the Blacks as clients.

The arson-minded racist at number 8: based on a true story, alas. (Apart from finding out who did it, of course.) Note for foreigners: Asian in a British context generally means the subcontinent, not the far east, which community in Britain is overwhelmingly Chinese. Anyway, burning the estate agent's board was about the limit of the harassment that I saw, and their daughter played with my little sisters since they were of like age.

2000AD: the comic principally famous for Judge Dredd, although it contained a lot more than that. Strontium Dog, the ABC Warriors, Rogue Trooper, Nemesis the Warlock, Slàine … brb off to weep for the nostalgia of it all.

Pensieves being divination devices that let you scry past events turns up in two fanfics that I know of - Potter Who and the Wossname's Thingummy (previously recommended) and Enter The Dragon by Dunkelzahn on Questionable Questing. No idea which it's original to if either, but both stories are recommendations of mine.

I put in the bit about the Druids not just because of their place in a long chain of cultures that have been designated barbaric and suppressed - they may well have been, archaeologists do keep finding ritually-killed corpses in peat bogs from the right times and places to be Druidic sacrifices - but also because of all the horseshit one sees in Harry Potter fanfics about Druids surviving into modern times (the Roman Empire was thorough: modern druidism was made up out of whole cloth in the early 19th century).

As for dominant cultures demonising subordinate cultures and their practises, that has happened so many times it's not even funny. Just about every culture has done it when they've had the chance. Jingoism is a remarkably popular response to outsiders, especially when you want to kill them and take their stuff. Upper class wizards condemning the practices of poor, backwoods-rural mages as 'dark arts'? It'd be more surprising if it didn't happen. The Blacks being the rare exception and acquiring loyal retainers as a result isn't too much of a stretch. Neither is them getting a bad name because they associate with those people…

Fanfic Recommendation: Wish Carefully by Ten Toes. In which we see what happens when a revolutionary movement by and for the one per cent actually wins. Which is to say, Nothing Good.