Jewel Of The Nile

Chapter Fifty-One

For a technically wealthy man cut off from his own money, Lucius Malfoy was living very well indeed. As he was accustomed to living well, however – regrettable stints in incarceration notwithstanding – he didn’t give his current good fortune much thought.

He was too busy being annoyed with the book on his desk.

One of only two in the world, the bookseller had sworn, and had pointed out proof of his averral in the dusty, thick Ministry catalogue from under his counter. And if you’re looking for information on the Jade Priestess, this is the only place you’re going to find it written down. The author was a Priestess herself.

Of course, there was that pesky little matter of the encryption – the fact that no one knew for sure what Duathor bint al-Hussein had had to say about her experiences with the Jade Priestess was an inconvenience that had gone farther than expected in driving down the price. Not that the Galleons had been any good, anyway, but that was beside the point. Lucius hadn’t, in truth, been overly worried about the code at the time he’d obtained Duathor’s journal; he’d cracked codes before. It was just a matter of knowing the right spell.

Wasn’t it?

Except that he’d tried everything he could think of, during these months of waiting in his luxurious foxhole of a hideaway, and none of it had so much as ruffled a single page; the book continued to stare blankly up at him, its runes winking whisper-quick across the pages like tiny scornful eyes, tiny tittering mouths. Bloody obstinate thing, Lucius thought, and scowled. It was almost as if the book was laughing at him.

Irritating, to say the least.

But he was a patient man, when he absolutely had to be, and the payoff for all this effort was just too good to abandon. Even allowing for Rita Skeeter’s customary penchant for exaggeration – could the woman utter one sentence, just one measly teensy-tiny sentence, without overloading it with adjectives? – the tale was an incredible one, and a testimonial to what had been, underneath her annoying mannerisms and tabloid sensibilities, a genuine talent for journalism. It must have taken her the better part of a year to track down all the details of it, until she had enough data to draw a reasonable conclusion; Lucius didn’t imagine that the oh-so-noble Miss Granger had any way of knowing how the sabbatical she’d forced on Skeeter would come back to haunt her.

The thought brought a thin, cold smile to his lips.

Simple enough to put all the pieces together, once you had them – and he really had to hand it to her, Rita had been most accommodating with the legwork. Who would have thought that the bookish little brat would have a celebrity in her family tree (albeit a Muggle one), or that the singer would have chanced to cross amorous paths with one of the enigmatic al-Husseins? Once you knew about that, the rest was easy to deduce: no further witches among the royal family, now, were there? And from the pedestrian Muggle dentists, one bright, incongruous little phoenix.

Coincidence? He rather thought not.

It followed, then, that Miss Granger would have at some point ended up with the amulet. No one knew much about the al-Husseins that they’d rather keep private – their Muggle spin-doctors saw to that – but there had always been whispers about the Priestess, for those who cared to listen. The al-Hussein witches were powerful and formidable (mixed-blood or no), but also plagued with delusions and madness … enough to raise eyebrows and drop voices, and to keep prurient curiosity about their little family bauble at a safe distance.

Lucius, however, was beginning to wonder if the Priestess was really responsible for the havoc attributed to it. More likely that the bloodline itself was tainted, he mused – which would certainly explain Hermione Granger’s deplorable lack of current bad luck. If anything, the little twit was leading a charmed existence, according to his sources on the outside: blessed with friends and allies, lucky in love, steadily gaining in wealth and prestige.

Cornelius Fudge’s attempt to block sales of her migraine remedy in the wizarding world had been thwarted by his own cabinet – most notably that shopworn old pedant, Hubbard.

The murmurs about her possible induction into the Order of Merlin still abounded, despite wholesale apathy on the part of high-ranking Ministry officials … ever since word of Voldemort’s capture at her hands had leaked out to the general public, the nominations had come trickling in, steady and persistent and refusing to abate – even now, months after the fact. (Lucius imagined that he had Arthur Weasley to thank for that, and amused himself with an idle vengeance fantasy before pulling himself back to the matter at hand.)

And the assassin he’d sent after her – paid with the promise of the Priestess, though Lucius hadn’t actually intended to let the Russian walk off with it – had simply … disappeared, beyond the reach of any Location Charm he could muster. It seemed likely that his hired wand was dead. The only question that remained: how?

The Priestess amulet had something to do with her continued blessed existence – Lucius was sure of it. That thought might have dissuaded a lesser wizard from his chosen pursuit, but it only made him more determined.

First, he was going to figure out the code in the book. And then, when the secrets of the Priestess lay bare before him, he was going to find that bushy-haired little mongrel, and turn her protection against her once and for all.

He bent over Duathor’s journal once more, smiling.

**

Malfoy Manor, Red Scare Version, was dim and quiet as they turned out of the grand salon toward the kitchen wing. Gabrielle was a silent little shadow next to him; Draco would have scarcely known she was walking beside him if she hadn’t been gripping his hand so tightly.

He himself was counting house-elves in his head. All through his childhood there had been six, counting Dobby. Subtract him, and that left five. He could probably take Looma off the list, too – Looma, his favourite, a quiet little she-elf who made the best cocoa he’d ever tasted, and who had been devoted to his mother. Most likely, she’d gone with Narcissa to St. Mungo’s.

Four, then. Two of them were kitchen- and laundry-elves, like Dobby had been, and unless things had changed since he’d last lived at home, Lucius had them too cowed and fearful to concentrate on anything other than their work. It wouldn’t be too difficult to take them by surprise.

He was more concerned about the other two, the watch-elves … they were a different story. Taller and stronger than the others, they were also less domesticated: lean and hungry-looking, unfriendly nearly to the point of hostility, and just the teensiest bit trigger-happy when it came to elf-magic. Lucius had a rather Hagrid-like hobby of inter-species breeding – illegal, of course, but who was going to call him on it? – and Draco had long suspected that these two were some nasty sort of hybrid. Part troll, maybe; they had a very Goyle-like way of sniggering behind their hands, and an unpleasant leering expression that wasn’t anything like the regular house-elves’ soulful Bambi eyes.

Draco hugged the plant mister full of Dreamless Sleep protectively against his side and sent up a small, fervent prayer to the God of Good Luck – well, two prayers, actually: firstly, that he’d find the watch-elves before they found him, and secondly, that he wouldn’t miss his first shot with the mister.

It was a lot to ask for.

On the other hand, he’d been saving up for the occasion.

As they got closer to the servants’ wing, the corridor narrowed and the ceiling began to drop. It wasn’t a building flaw, Draco knew, but an architectural conceit, common among old pureblood families; an elf-sized kitchen was absolute proof that the owners never had to cook for themselves, just as an elf-sized laundry meant the lady of the house never laid her manicured hands on an iron. Draco had, as a child, found the house-elves’ foreshortened quarters comforting, somewhere he could go where his father couldn’t follow.

That was then. Now, he just felt cramped.

They were in single-file now, edging cautiously along the side of the corridor, Draco slumping his shoulders and bending his knees as the ceiling sloped ever downward. Finally, when it became clear that he was going to have to shuffle along on his hands and knees if they went much farther, Gabrielle tugged on the back of his Cloak to stop him.

"Give it to me," she whispered. "I’ll do it. I can still fit."

He leaned down to where he thought her ear probably was. "No. Too dangerous."

She made a small impatient sound next to his face. "Don’t be ridiculous," she hissed. "You said yourself that these are the nice ones. You can deal with the watch-elves, when we find them. Let me do this."

"No."

"Oh, mon Dieu. Give it here."

"No," he repeated yet again, then nearly cursed out loud as she made an excellently-informed grab for the spray bottle and slid it neatly out from under his arm. "Damn it, Gabrielle, wait!"

All of this in a tense whisper that went sadly unheeded; he didn’t know where she was, but he had the feeling she’d already taken off for the kitchens. "Bloody hell," he breathed – unwittingly borrowing a phrase he’d heard from Ron a hundred times if he’d heard it once – and reluctantly sank to his heels on the imported Byzantine tiles.

Nothing to do now … except to wait.

**

Flushed with giddy triumph, Gabrielle tiptoed further down the shrinking corridor, then paused just outside the door to the kitchens and took a deep, calming breath. The Invisibility Cloak, she knew, wouldn’t wholly protect her from the eyes of the house-elves, though it was good for maybe a casual glance or two. No, the only sure way to do this was to sneak up on them from behind. She poked her head cautiously around the doorjamb, saw a pair of elves in earnest simultaneous activity – one grinding coffee beans with a hand crank, the other heating water over a spirit lamp – and took the split-second opportunity afforded her to whisk into the room and barricade herself between the open door and the wall.

The elves, their faces tense with concern, didn’t notice. One was dipping its spindly forefinger repeatedly into the scalding water at regular intervals, presumably to test its temperature, then withdrawing it again with whimpering alacrity. The other, intent on its bean-grinding task, kept repeating: Cream – no sugar, cream – no sugar, under its breath in a mumbled monotone. They both looked pitiable in their frayed, too-large tea-towel uniforms, and Gabrielle – whose only prior knowledge of house-elves ran to the happy, efficient Hogwarts crew and the two roly-poly, gently sarcastic French kitchen-elves who had presided over her grandmother’s flat in Paris and now hovered reproachfully around Fleur, clucking their tongues, if she tried to make her own chocolat chaud – felt a bright stab of mingled outrage and sympathy.

Poor things. I hope they don’t catch it for this.

She was just wondering how best to proceed when the faint sounds of a brief scuffle echoed in from the corridor – apparently, Draco had found one of the watch-elves, or else it had found him; from the sound of it, Gabrielle couldn’t tell. A few moments later, a doubled-over, invisible body came sliding around the door to pin her against the wall. The house-elves didn’t look up.

"Ow!" she hissed, and stepped hard on his foot. Draco dropped the hood of his Cloak and nodded reassuringly at her.

One down, he mouthed. Gabrielle thrust a considering tongue into one cheek.

"I have an idea," she whispered presently into his ear. "Want to hear it?"

**

The plan required a certain amount of chutzpah to carry off, and would have been unthinkable if Draco hadn’t gotten such high marks on his Transfiguration N.E.W.T.s. Neither one of them knew how to make decent coffee, so they waited – not quite patiently – behind the door, as the elves, visibly nervous, combined water and grounds in a coffee press and set the mixture to steep.

The moment the coffee was separated out and transferred into its serving carafe, they moved – Draco stepping into the light, straightening as far as possible into a half-crouch and yelling, "Hey!"; Gabrielle taking advantage of the elves’ disorientation, shock, and subsequent defensive action to scuttle in under the line of fire and deliver the coup de grâce with the plant mister.

Not the most elaborate of schemes. Ridiculously simple, as a matter of fact – like a magic trick explained ahead of time … squirt once, turn, squirt again, and down they went for the count, one trailing a leftover Stunning Spell from its fingertips that misfired as it fell and dislodged a sizable chunk of the kitchen ceiling. Draco had sustained minor damage from a glancing enchantment and was lying on the floor, breathing heavily. Gabrielle hurried over to him.

"You’re all right?"

He flexed his wand arm gingerly, then winced. "Fine. A little numb on this side is all. Go ahead – do it."

‘It’ referred to the coffee.

Carefully, Gabrielle unscrewed the lid of the carafe and tipped in a generous slug of Dreamless Sleep. "Done," she said, satisfied. "Now – quick, before it cools! I need some bad hair and a big nose."

Draco raised his wand, then unexpectedly lowered it again and snickered. The effort made him wheeze. Gabrielle frowned.

"What’s so funny?"

"Nothing," he said, still grinning.

"What?"

"Sorry," he said, and pulled himself up to a sitting position using his good arm. "It’s just that I must be the only wizard in history who’s ever tried to turn a veela into a house-elf. Struck me funny, that’s all."

Put that way, Gabrielle supposed it did seem a bit … odd. "Just so it’s not permanent," she said, and shook back her cloud of ringlets. "Being blonde may be a mixed blessing, but I don’t hate it that much."

"Ha. Well, hold still, then."

He really was handsome when he smiled.

**