Jewel Of The Nile

Chapter Forty-Six

Sybil had been right. He’d needed a vacation.

Merely the fact that he wasn’t on hall duty back at Hogwarts, dodging pre-Halloween Dungbombs and warily waiting to discover what fresh hell on earth had been unleashed and offered on sale at Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes – honestly, those twins were bigger troublemakers as alumni than they’d ever been as students, and that was saying something – that was gift enough. To be here instead, in this quiet comfortable book-lined place, far away from the grasping neediness of academe and wearing the scholar’s hat he’d always felt himself destined for … well, that was sweet indeed.

He lifted the mug at his elbow, tipped a swallow of cardamom-fragrant coffee into his mouth, and let it linger on his tongue, a rarely-indulged luxury both acrid and caressing – velvety with cream but smoky and bitter in his mouth afterwards, like a vengeful ghost of its corporeal self. A perfect 10, declared his taste buds, and reminded his brain of something it already knew: whatever else their virtues, British house-elves just couldn’t get the hang of brewing decent java.

Setting the mug back on its rosewood coaster, he reached for his wand. It had been Transfigured into a knife edge, chisel-pointed and thin as onionskin parchment; now, he took a deep breath, steadied his hand, and poised the narrow end at the edge of the paper in front of him, a page he’d Replicated from Duathor bint-Hussein’s encrypted journal.

"Levare," he murmured, and grasped his wand wrist with his other hand to keep its motion perfectly even as slowly, painstakingly he began to peel the shifting runes from the page. It was a process not unlike peeling an apple with a paring knife; the written characters clung together in a long, lazily twisting light-brown stream of dried ink, then dropped into a tangle in the petri dish he proffered and began to crawl around its perimeter like sluggish ants.

Two paragraphs’ worth – enough to get a sample, Severus decided, and besides, the psychic effort involved in the charm already had his breath coming fast and shallow. "Finite Incantatem," he muttered, and flicked his wand, now returned to its original cylindrical shape, to send a trickle of purified, deionised water dribbling out of its tip and into the petri dish. Not much – just enough to cover the coil of words – all right, fine … and thankfully, the ink seemed happy to cooperate; as he watched, the letters began to disintegrate and lose their definition. In less than a minute, the dish was half-full of a thin brown tobacco-coloured liquid, gently roiling against the glass and giving off a faint odour of peppercorns.

Excellent.

It wasn’t until Severus had dropped his wand and sat back, flexing his stiffened, aching fingers, that he realised Hermione Granger had been watching him. "Hallo," he said over his shoulder, too out of breath from his recent exertions to summon anything snarkier, and watched her cross from the library door to the chair opposite him in a sweep of bare feet and white cotton nightie, out of the corner of his eye.

"Hallo," she returned. Her eyes were bloodshot, their lids slightly puffy – Severus couldn’t tell if this was from tears, or merely from sleeplessness, but he had his suspicions. Certainly she looked composed enough now, however, as she raised an enquiring eyebrow, then drew the petri dish across the table toward her with a careful forefinger and peered curiously down at the contents.

"What charm did you use?" she queried, not looking at him, and Severus felt a shameful rush of relief flood through him. Talking shop, at this particular moment, was an exchange much more to his taste and comfort level than finding out why she’d been crying.

See? You really are a selfish bastard, Severus.

"It’s a variant on a Severing Charm," he said aloud, and began to siphon a small amount of the ink into a pipette. "Particularly good for lifting stubborn stains and reading other people’s mail. If you’ve steady enough hands, that is." He held the pipette to the light and twirled it slowly. "Darker flecks in this," he noted. "Uniform in size. I’d say about half a millimeter across. And at the right angle, there’s just the faintest bit of shimmer."

He looked around for his notebook and quill, but she’d already commandeered them and was writing down his observations in her neat copperplate. She looked up when she was finished, reloaded the quill, and raised her eyebrows expectantly.

"What else?"

Severus studied her determinedly cheerful expression, belied by the fever-bright gleam in her eyes and a giveaway tic at the corner of her mouth, and inwardly applauded. Suffering – but stoic. And not a hint of intentional martyrdom.

He had to hand it to her – she was one tough cookie. He hadn’t given her enough credit back in September, it seemed … and now, he wasn’t sure whether he should congratulate her or run for the hills. Instead, he met that steady wet-eyed gaze, and let one corner of his mouth curve up in unspoken approval.

"There’s a standard series of reaction tests," he said. "Those phials in the trunk over there – if you’d be good enough to hand them to me one by one? Mind your fingers … some of them are corrosive."

She was already out of her chair and on her way over to the trunk. "I’m always careful."

That, Severus thought, was a bald-faced lie. But if she believed it, he wasn’t going to enlighten her … at least not tonight.

Turning away, he started to clear the table.

**

It had taken them nearly all afternoon to get back to the castle.

Visiting the Wheezes hadn’t helped … they’d spent almost three hours in the joke shop, catching up on Weasley family news and gamely testing Fred and George’s latest brain children – singing soap-bubbles, a new-and-improved version of the by-now-famous Trick Wand, some innocuous-looking chewing gum that caused the chewer to sprout a braided goatee and speak in haiku for the better part of twenty minutes. By the time they’d gotten back, it had been dinnertime. Now it was late, and they’d finally all found their way to Elysium, where Draco was filling them in on what Hermione had been up to in Egypt.

Kidnappings. Multimillion-dollar patent deals. Assassination attempts. It was all very impressive – and sort of unsettling; Harry didn’t like to think that he’d slept peacefully through the night, blissfully unaware of any trouble in the universe, while one of his best chums had been up against the Avada Kedavra. After all, she’d played a major role in ridding him of his nemesis – what kind of payback was it to sleep through hers?

And then there was this Jade Priestess thing, which he didn’t like one bit. If anything, however, Ginny was more troubled by it than any of the rest of them.

"It’s just like Riddle’s diary," she said, and they all looked at her in surprise – she never talked about that, or indeed about anything that had happened in her first year. She was grim and white-faced. "The longer it goes on, the worse it gets. It’s probably feeding on her."

Ron covered her hand with his. "If it was doing that," he said, "they wouldn’t be letting her wear it still. You know Mione – she’s always been our Voice of Caution. She’ll be okay."

It was bullshit, of course, but it had a comforting ring to it. Ginny managed a halfhearted nod.

"Right."

"What I’d like to know," Draco said thoughtfully, "is where my father fits into all of this."

Harry frowned at him. "Beg pardon?"

"Well, it’s already established that he’s the one behind the assassination attempt, right?" Draco pointed out. "And then there’s that business with the book – Gabrielle heard Black and Lupin talking about it the night she went exploring in the Manor."

"Right," Gabrielle said. "They said he’d passed counterfeit Galleons to a rare-book dealer for the book about the jade amulet – that’s the book they were looking for, the one they couldn’t find. Seems it was the first thing he did when he got out of Azkaban."

"Huh." Ron frowned over this. "That’s odd, isn’t it?" he said. "I mean, you’re an escaped convict on the loose, the whole wizarding world’s looking for you – wouldn’t you just find yourself a foxhole and lie low for a while? Why on earth would you go passing bad money in a bookshop?"

An idea was forming, shifting and nebulous, in Harry’s head. "Well," he said slowly, "it’s Hermione’s testimony that put him in prison, right? And we all heard him swear revenge on her last spring, on his way out of Dumbledore’s office. If he knew that she was connected somehow to that amulet … if he knew it could harm her … that might have been important enough to him to take the risk."

Ginny frowned. "But how would he know where to look for the book? And how would he find out about this Priestess thingy in the first place? Even Hermione didn’t know she had it until just before she left for Egypt."

Gabrielle raised one shoulder in an offhand Gallic shrug. "That’s easy," she said. "He was in prison, wasn’t he? He must have gotten the information while he was there."

Four pairs of eyes met and held in the firelight, wide with sudden realisation.

"Of course," Ron groaned. "Why didn’t we think of her before?"

Even from beyond the grave, it appeared, Rita Skeeter was still making trouble.

**

He really was brilliant.

Hermione had forgotten how easily he moved in the laboratory – exquisite economy of motion, consummate grace, his long aquiline face wiped clean of malice and discontent and almost waxwork-like in its serenity, only the slight furrow of his brow giving away the depth of his concentration. And this was a process which required the utmost delicacy – that much was clear. Hermione thought back to last Christmas, to her crude bucket-chemistry experiments on the Armoring Fluid, and found it hard to believe that she and Draco had gotten any results at all. This – this was qualitative analysis at its most mystical, its most precise, and it was clear she still had a lot to learn on the topic.

They’d put the ink through all the common tests of simple observation, and now Snape had begun the laborious process of separating out its disparate ingredients. "It’s an elimination game," he explained, beginning to unwind from the velvet the phials she’d transferred from his trunk to the table. "There are thousands of possible combinations for encryptoink – the trick is to use more than one approach when narrowing down your options, and to document everything."

"Right." His tone was just a bit didactic and professorial; still, Hermione rather liked him this way … too single-minded for irritation, too intent for the hot flush of sexual awareness that always seemed to drag tension in along with it, like a shy friend reluctant to be at the party. She tapped her page of notes. "So the colour was the first thing, right? I’d say we could rule out indigo and verdigris. Oh, and saffron. And it can’t be any of the berries, either, can it?"

"Mm. I’d think not." He transferred a miniscule amount of the reconstituted ink into a smaller glass dish and swirled it carefully to coat the bottom of the surface. "I’m leaning toward one of the aromatic spices, myself; it smelt quite strongly of pepper when I first hydrated it. I’m going to explore that possibility first."

"How many variants are there that use a peppercorn base?" Hermione asked. He jerked his head toward the trunk.

"You’re about to find out. There’s a notebook in there with a green cover – it has all the possible combinations listed. The peppercorn family starts somewhere in the middle; page forty-five or so. We could use a Replica of those pages – be careful of the original, though. I took those notes in college."

Gingerly, Hermione paged through the notebook. "You had better handwriting back then."

He slanted a sardonic look over his shoulder. "All professors develop abominable handwriting sooner or later. It’s in the faculty handbook."

"Professor McGonagall has beautiful penmanship."

"Yes, well. Minerva’s a law unto herself." He took the Replicated pages she handed him. "Right. How many are there …? Ah. A hundred and twelve. We have our work cut out for us."

"Sounds like fun." She smothered a yawn with the back of her hand, absently noting as she did so that it was past three in the morning, and looked up at him expectantly. "What do we do first?"

He looked at her hard, checked his own wristwatch, and rolled his eyes self-deprecatingly. "Wait until tomorrow, that’s what. You’re dead on your feet."

"I’m not that tired," Hermione protested, and immediately yawned again. He snorted.

"This can wait. Chemical experiments shouldn’t be undertaken in the small hours of the morning." He levelled another searching glance at her. "Having trouble sleeping?"

"Having trouble everything," Hermione admitted, after a moment’s pause, and to her horror felt that prickling sensation at the backs of her eyes again. She turned away. "Sorry – long day, that’s all. It’s nothing important."

I need to get a life, and you need to grow up.

Don’t be a baby, Granger.

If he touched her – if he said something nice to her – she was going to cry again. "I think I’m tired, after all," she gritted out, and was halfway to the door when he said her name.

"Hermione."

She was past even the pretense of graciousness. "What?"

"If you want answers," he said, "it’s best to go directly to the source. You shouldn’t accept secondhand information at face value."

Riddles. She was sick of riddles.

"What are you talking about?" she snapped, and turned halfway round again until she could see his face in profile. He had one of his enigmatic half-smiles firmly in place.

"For a wizard, Farouk’s amazingly technological," he said. "There’s even a telephone in his study."

"A telephone?" Hermione frowned. "What does that have to do with anything?"

He strode toward her, lifted her chin with one finger, and bent down until they were half an inch apart. "Small words, Miss Granger, since fatigue seems to be addling that prodigious brain of yours. Call your grandmother."

"Call my—" she repeated blankly, then blinked.

He was already gone.

**