The Observer Effect

      In the night, the first frosts came.       Rime lay like lace over the flowerbeds’ soil, hardened by cold, across the churned mix of mud and gravel of the paths, and sheathed leaves and grass with tiny white needles. Under its kiss, the blades drooped, lay down upon the earth, and resigned themselves to dying, but the trees still resisted, clinging to the remnants of their thinning finery. A delicate, brittle skin of ice touched the margins of the Black Lake, blanched the patches of rainwater, and turned the path down to the boathouses into a deadly fairground slide. Roof tiles, the stones of the castle walls, and the gallery floorboards—everything lay beneath winter’s veil, and had the moon peeped out from behind the ragged, racing clouds, it would all have sparkled as if silvered.       But there was no moon, nor any likelihood of it: its dark disc, indistinguishable against the star-strewn void, was sweeping its shadowed course overhead, and only the statue of Hipparchus tracked it with blind stone eyes, obeying the magic the sculptor had instilled. The Forbidden Forest creaked, groaned, and grated, tossing its tangle of boughs, and a chimney-stack skeleton, like a charred, threatening finger, jabbed at the sky—the only thing left of Hagrid’s hut. A chill wind came in gusts from the south-west, carrying the scents of fallen leaves, wet stone, a cold hearth, and that special, inimitable, keen tang of the first snow—the breath of icy purity, the perfume of sanctity and death.       At the stroke of midnight, as the sixth of December gave way to the seventh, deep below the lake’s waters, beneath the crag on which the ancient castle rested, at the dead end of one of the far corridors bored into the rock, in a dormitory behind tightly drawn bed-curtains, a boy woke.       He opened his eyes—useless in the impenetrable dark closing in around him—and for several long moments tried to recall where he was, and who he might be.       ‘My name is… Harry James Potter’—it did not sound especially convincing, even in his head, but his consciousness, slowly freeing itself from the manacles of oblivion, insisted that it was so. ‘I… am at Hogwarts. In… my first year. Slytherin House.’       Everything, barring the last, felt warped, wrong. He must not lie. Lying is forbidden. But what can he do if truth feels like falsehood?       ‘My name is Harry James Potter, and I’ve just had a dream.’       Harry very rarely remembered his dreams. The parade of phantasmagoria, mocking reality in odd, distorted ways, a kaleidoscope of absurd visions—a loquacious acromantula, or Draco grown up with long hair—usually survived into waking only as scraps, tatters of fog that melted with the coming of morning. But this dream he remembered—clearly, in the smallest detail.       He had dreamt of death.       Two bombs had already fallen in Newburn Street, and now anyone who wished could admire the cutaway view of a house—the building at the junction with Orsett Street had lost one wall, sliced away as if by a razor. It was a strange sight—a dolls’ house without dolls, a cross-section of middle-class life. Here was the kitchen, the hall, the parlour, the bedroom, and the maid’s garret in the attic. In the window without glass a surviving curtain flapped forlornly in the wind. Charred, half-melted, broken pieces were heaped high beside it—the neighbouring house had left only that behind.       On the corner, a woman in an apron was selling tea. In place of a spirit-lamp she had a tiny fire, bricked round, and on this primitive hearth she boiled water in an enamel bucket. A small queue had already formed; people were exchanging words, even chuckling, as if nothing had happened. Tea was tuppence a mug, and he made a pact with his conscience: if anything was left after the bookshop, so be it—he would buy one. He craved something hot—he was chilled to the bone. The night had been a nightmare; he hadn’t slept at all, and morning had been little better.       Worse than the all-pervasive smell of burning was the penetrating cold. The shelter was unheated, and the pipes in the orphanage building had been damaged in the raid. He had not taken off his boots or his coat for two days running, and, on top of all the other vile sensations, a gnawing disgust had taken hold. Five seconds would have been enough to warm himself and clean up with magic—and, of course, he had his wand on him. But he could not use it.       ‘Three violations, and I’ll be expelled. Three violations, and I’ll be expelled. One is already spent,’ he repeated it like some foolish prayer—only the beads were missing—while something inside raved and screamed in silence, for it was monstrously unfair, ridiculous, cruel, and senseless to forbid him to do magic just because Muggles might see.       The law was called ‘The Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery.’ Reasonable? Not a bit of it. His pure-blood classmates could do as much magic as they liked, and he alone could not. Because he lived outside wizarding London, because he had no wizard parents or wizard guardians, because he was not allowed to remain at school either.       One day, he would change the world so that no magical child ever found themselves in his place again.       The further he went along the street, the more ruins he saw. It made him uneasy—had the bookshop survived? A woman in red gloves was striding towards him in a brisk, businesslike way—a sudden bright blot in a world of olive drab and grey tweed, a greeting from a wholly different life. She was pulling a teenager along in the same sort of coat as his own, and saying something to him in a low voice, raising her eyebrows. Both had clumsy square bags slung across their shoulders—gas masks.       He was almost past them when it happened.       There was no siren. No drone in the sky. Only a strange sound, like wind whistling through a crack in a window.       He was flung face down onto the tarmac. It was as if someone had clapped giant hands over his ears. Not fully understanding what was happening, he got up automatically, and looked around.       A grey-brown curtain hung across the street. He blinked, dazed. The curtain was billowing, shifting. Dust. It was dust. And smoke, perhaps. All around, chaos reigned. Less than a yard from his boots lay a fresh heap—boards, bricks, earth, bits of metal, all in a jumble. And a hand in a red glove—just a hand, without a body. A Muggle boy, his head smashed to a pulp, was still holding it in his fingers.       For a second, because of the similar clothes, it seemed as if he was looking in a mirror.       Something sticky, icy, deathly cold touched him from within, brushed against his very soul, and ran playful claws across it. He screwed his eyes shut as hard as he could—and opened them into absolute darkness.       No, that had not been a dream.       Harry jerked upright, flinging off the stifling blanket with revulsion, and shivered at once in the dormitory’s cool air. The back of his pyjama top was soaked through with sweat.       Moving his numb limbs with difficulty, he crawled out of the cocoon of bedclothes, felt under the pillow for his wand, and glasses, put them on, and lit a feeble Lumos. The conjured light fluttered up to his shoulder like a firefly—Tom liked this particular variety of the charm, which freed one from the need to hold up a wand all the time like a Muggle torch. Harry had learnt it from him, and yesterday had taught Draco and Hermione. Their floating lights, too, had delighted them. Hermione especially.       Speckled all over with little sparks like a fairy with magic dust, she waved her wand, and, obeying her will, the lights rose, wheeled, tangled in her curls, and settled on her nose like glittering powder—the very image from the page of a half-forgotten book, the stubborn, hot-headed friend of the boy who refused to grow up. Tinker Bell—like the ring of a little bell. It suited her.       And it was precisely the mental picture of Draco laughing as he scatters Hermione’s cloud of sparks, then sends his own swarm of fireflies in reply, that gave Harry strength to stir. He could not, would not sleep any more. Not now.       He threw on his robe—straight over his pyjamas, for the first time since coming to school wholly indifferent to his appearance. No prefect patrols, nor Filch with his cat, nor the portraits—nothing could have stopped him now, short of a fire, an earthquake, or a third wizarding war. He had to see Tom, this instant.       They had parted on a poor note last night. To be honest, they had all but quarrelled.       The cause of their disagreement had been a question of trust.       Harry had smuggled his knights quietly into the Chamber of Secrets, then into the Room of Hidden Things; and if the visit to the former could be classed as an exclusive one-off—the other two, not being Parselmouths, would never be able to enter by themselves—then the secret of the latter Hermione and Draco now shared entirely. The super-secret Headquarters had grown a shade less secret: two adjutants had been admitted, both subordinate to Harry.       Tom, of course, had a number of objections.       ‘Their oaths will not save you if they truly decide to betray you,’ he prophesied darkly, contemplating the kneeling Harry—who had thought it best to display all possible signs of loyalty whilst delivering such equivocal news. ‘Just as they did not save me. Let me be plain—I am sorely disappointed.’       He turned away, walked towards the armchair, seemed to think better of it on the way, and began riffling through the books on the shelf. He opened one, rustled the pages in irritation. Watching that unnaturally straight back and those tense shoulders, Harry waited for more—and it came.       ‘Look at them,’ Tom hissed, whirling round suddenly, and banging the book back onto the shelf. ‘Snape, Malfoy… and that is the inner circle! I trusted them! And the rest? They skulk in corners, quaking for fear of my wrath, crammed themselves into cracks and under floorboards. And quite right, too!’       He bared his teeth, but to call that grimace a smile would have been a serious misstatement. The shadows round him grew blacker, deeper; the very air in the room grew heavier, and breathing was harder. The temperature dropped—as if one degree more, and Harry’s breath would have steamed. He swallowed. The subject of betrayal was, plainly, very… raw for Tom.       Glumly turning his wand over in his fingers, Tom collapsed into the armchair.       ‘Has any of them tried to bring me back? Anyone at all? Malfoy?’ His lip curled in disgust, and he slapped the armrest with his open palm. ‘Merlin, and to think I handed my phylactery to that pomaded cretin!’       Harry frowned. Draco’s father, once the first frightening impression had passed, had not struck him as a fool. Tired, angry, terrified—yes. But could it be that he truly had not known what the diary was for?.. In which case, the cretin would be Tom himself, for failing to leave the guardian proper instructions—and that was frankly unbelievable. The instructions had not been understood? Lost? Stolen? Mysteries multiplied, like Doxies in the Black House curtains.       ‘I chose them. I raised them up. I gave them my mark—do you understand what it means?’ Tom flashed his eyes at Harry, and that look sent gooseflesh racing down his spine. ‘I did not doubt them! And they all—all of them!—betrayed me.’       Plainly emptied out by his outburst, he shut his eyes, and rubbed his brow and the bridge of his nose.       ‘My lord,’ Harry ventured, ‘they did not betray you.’       Because, by Mordred, if anything drove Harry himself to the brink, it was Tom’s habit of identifying himself with Voldemort.       A powerful wizard he may have been—no use denying it (the sense of old Ollivander’s muddled mutterings, heard long ago during the purchase of a wand, had at last dawned on Harry—the man would go on about a wizard who had done ‘terrible, but great’ things)—but between him and Tom yawned a chasm of years and the life experience that went with them. How had Hermione once put it? ‘Memory is the foundation of personality.’ Tom’s memory contained not a third of Voldemort’s biography. The foundation was different, and the person, therefore, too.       But Tom would not have it. Now, as then, he returned a rock-hard answer: ‘Me. Voldemort is me.’       ‘No, not you,’ Harry retorted, just as stubbornly, getting to his feet. For one thing, it was foolish to argue in that posture of submission; for another, his legs had gone numb. ‘Or another you.’       ‘What is the difference?’ Tom glowered at him from under his brows.       ‘There is a difference,’ Harry shook his head.       But he could not convey the heart of it, and Tom kept his view.       Several hours had passed since, and now, in the night hush of the corridors Harry was stealing along, hunching into his robe and turning up the collar of his pyjama shirt, the idea of wrangling with Tom about a pack of traitors seemed unbelievably foolish. What had come over him? What were they to Harry anyway? They were grown men; let them look after themselves. Hermione and Draco were nothing like them. This was quite different, and sooner or later his brother would see it.       As if responding to his mood, the Room of Hidden Things met Harry in semi-darkness. He looked around hopefully—but Tom was not inside. Cold fingers of anxiety clutched at his heart, made him shiver—what if something had happened to Tom? What if something was wrong with him? Was that why the heavy vision had come?       The slightly sticky drawer of a chest scraped as he pulled it open. Harry crouched, rummaged through yellowed papers, pulled out the diary, an inkwell, and a quill. He put a dot on the page, and waited.       One second followed another. From the bookcase came the ticking of a clock. Nothing happened. Harry took off his glasses, and rubbed his face with his hands. His scar hurt. But that pain was a mere tickle beside the other awful feeling that had not left him since he woke.       ‘Tom,’ Harry traced with a trembling hand. ‘Tom. Please.’       And, as usual, there was no breath, no sound of steps, no rustle of cloth. Even so, he turned.       Tom stood behind him, not a foot away, looming—a pale, hardened wraith. The light of Lumos had left a hazy afterimage in his eyes. Haughty, masterful, composed. Dangerous. Exactly as Harry had first seen him—it felt an age ago.       ‘Stay with me,’ he asked, taking off his glasses again, and wiping the lenses quickly on the hem of his pyjama jacket. ‘Please, I’m begging you.’       ‘What is the matter with you?’ Tom enquired, without much kindness, but under the mask of indifference Harry made out—or wanted to believe he made out—concern. He shrugged.       ‘A nightmare.’       Tom raised his eyebrows in lofty disbelief.       ‘How could I forget you are only a child,’ he pronounced, thrust his hands into his robe pockets, and rocked from heel to toe. ‘Very well. This once. Get up, and put yourself in order, for Merlin’s sake.’       Grateful to tears both for the concession, and for the careless manner of its delivery, Harry hauled himself upright, using his hands, and clutching at the chest of drawers, blew his nose, and smoothed his clothes with a quick spell—an absurd combination of robe and sleepwear. He shuffled to the sofa and collapsed onto it in a limp heap. Tom, who had already picked up a book (Shades and Spirits, Harry read on the cover, mechanically), and kept a faint Lumos hovering over his shoulder as a makeshift reading lamp, settled into the armchair, and opened the tome—but stared at Harry, not the pages. Harry just breathed, trying to keep it quiet and steady, without the sobs catching in his throat. Little by little, he was letting go.       ‘Thank you,’ he muttered. ‘It is easier when you are here. Sit with me a bit more, will you?’       ‘What is happening to you?’ Tom repeated, more insistent now, but Harry did not know the answer himself. He shrugged, and tilted his head.       ‘A dreadful dream. Only it was not a dream, I think,’ he concluded, and frowned, picking at the sofa’s upholstery with a nail. ‘I think it is a memory. And I think it is yours.’       ‘Is that so,’ Tom said, snapping the book shut. He had dropped any pretence of reading; his attention was fully on Harry.       ‘What are the side effects of Legilimency?’ Harry asked in his turn, and hastened to explain: ‘I remember we were always having trouble with it. And I do see that, properly, I should read up on all this. And I will. But I need to know right now. Could any… bits of your memory have got into my head by accident?’       He kicked off his slippers, pulled the robe tighter round himself, and curled up in the sofa’s corner, hugging his knees. He wanted to hug Tom, not his own legs; for the umpteenth time, the impossibility of touch—so simple, and yet so awful—stabbed straight into his heart, opening it up like a wound, like a sharp thorn driven into the soft flesh of a palm.       ‘Impossible,’ Tom cut him off, putting the book aside, and sitting up straight in the chair. Fingertips steepled, lips pressed, gaze piercing—he was the very embodiment of dispassionate curiosity. ‘What, precisely, did you fancy you dreamt? Be coherent, if you please.’       Harry tried—though he had grave doubts as to his coherence.       ‘The Blitz,’ he said, picking his words with care. ‘And a dead Muggle. I saw the moment your boggart changed. No,’ he corrected himself. ‘Wrong. I did not see it, I… felt it, from inside. As if I were you. Not at all like then, in your or my memories.’       ‘Amusing,’ Tom observed, in a voice devoid of the slightest glimmer of amusement. ‘If it is a true memory, and not fantasy, you should know what the boggart had been before. Well?’       Harry swallowed.       ‘Death by hunger,’ he answered quietly. ‘That boy… Barney? Barry? The one who pinched rolled oats from the kitchen, and ate them raw, and his gut twisted, and…’       ‘Correct,’ Tom cut him off, not listening to the end. Harry fell silent at once—not that he had any desire to continue. Boggarts are not a subject to encourage light conversation, and here and now he had less wish than ever to speak of them.       ‘It is a true memory,’ Tom said, after a pause.       He rose, and, playing with his wand, began pacing the tiny patch of floor in their secret Headquarters. His long strides repeatedly carried him right up to the next heap of junk, and he turned back with a grimace. It happened over and over. If it had been Harry himself, he would have called it ‘jittery,’ but for Tom the word was, perhaps, misplaced.       ‘But it has nothing whatsoever to do with Legilimency. Nothing like that is described anywhere, and I have read rather a lot on the subject, I will have you know. Besides, I was in full control of the entire process. You could not have acquired any fragments of my memory by chance.’       ‘What about that time we watched my memories of Mrs Figg’s house?’ Harry persisted. ‘I saw something of yours then as well, remember? There was a green light, and a woman shouting something like, “please, no, kill me instead!”’       ‘What are you on about?’ Tom protested. ‘That was your memory!’       ‘No! Definitely not!’ Harry objected hotly.       They stared at each other.       ‘I can suppose… two things,’ Tom said at last. ‘Either it is to do with our magic’—he gave Harry a careless little salute with the wand—‘or… but let us address the first. I have told you already: our case is like no other. To confess, I… in a way, I do consider you genuinely special. And it is impossible not to note a certain resemblance between us. You know what I mean.’       Harry nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on Tom. Heir of Slytherin, both of them. But much else bound them. Half-bloods—however much modern, liberal terminology might let Harry call himself a first-generation pure-blood, it made no difference in substance. Both had been brought up among Muggles. Not in the cosiest of conditions either. And…       And Harry felt it in his bones—ever since the moment he opened the shabby little diary, and read: ‘T. M. Riddle.’ Yes, from that very instant, even before the ink had soaked into the paper, before someone as yet unknown, but already compellingly attractive in his mystery, wrote to him: ‘Greetings to you, stranger. Strictly speaking, this is my diary.’       ‘I still think we are related by blood,’ he put in. ‘Remember those cases you mentioned, when in one family…’       ‘No,’ Tom cut him off. ‘You are missing the point. In those cases, it was thought to be a matter of reincarnation. One and the same soul for some reason assumed flesh twice. Since you and I are separate individuals, it does not fit.’       Something was scraping in Harry’s brain, some thought. He rubbed his itching scar hard, as if trying to force it out with his fingers.       ‘Separate, separate,’ he muttered. ‘Tom! How many before you had made… phylacteries? Oh, by the way, I quite forgot to ask—this is the same thing as a Horcrux, is it not?’       Tom waved that aside, and paced again, shelf to chair and back.       ‘A Horcrux is primitive,’ he declared loftily. ‘I improved upon it substantially. But the same magic lies at the root, you are right. And—no one knows. At least, we have no notes from any of them. Not that anyone has ever studied the matter properly. The only more or less complete work in which the process and effects of creating anchors for the soul are described in any detail is Secrets of the Darkest Art, and, I regret to inform you, the part on Horcruxes is merely a retelling of Herpo the Foul’s works, a derivative, much abridged retelling, at that. The originals are lost entirely, and Magick Moste Evile contains only…’       ‘I know, I have read it!’ Harry, not very politely, cut short the lecture. Tom was being borne confidently away into theoretical thickets—a sure sign he was nervous. Very. Why, Harry did not quite understand yet—but, while he held forth, Harry’s idea crawled into the light, and he blurted it out before it slipped away: ‘Tom, Tom! If a soul is anchored to the world of the living… if a piece of it is enclosed in a material object… does that mean the rest cannot reincarnate?’       Tom stopped dead.       ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I had not considered it in that light. You believe, then, that our magic and soul are one and the same?’       From his lips, it sounded uncommonly sinister.       And, if you thought about it, it was complete…       ‘Morgana’s tits,’ Harry commented on the drift of his reflections. ‘Tom, how do we put you back together, then? Oh,’ he realised a moment later, ‘I shall have to die, presumably.’       ‘Do not talk nonsense,’ Tom cut him off. ‘If one part of a soul can obtain a body, then the other, with equal ease, can also,’ he explained, cool as you please. ‘And we do not yet know whether your theory is true.’       Harry breathed out. And wondered at himself—he did not want to die. So much so, that even a nightmare had set in about it. But as soon as the subject was Tom, all his brakes seemed to fail.       ‘Hmm.’ He massaged the bridge of his nose under his glasses. ‘And what is your theory? You did not finish.’       ‘Kindred souls,’ Tom shrugged, and pulled a face. ‘The idea has an insufferably sentimental aura, but at the core, it seems, there is a grain of truth.’       ‘A link of souls?’ Harry mused. ‘Interesting. Is there a way to check?’       ‘I am working on it,’ Tom twitched the corner of his mouth, and Harry drooped, disappointed.       ‘Forever we have to reinvent from scratch,’ he grumbled, thinking of the other problems waiting their turn—working out how to bring Tom back, learning to fly without a broom, becoming an Animagus, and… Suddenly, something struck him.       Harry jumped up, and began feverishly burrowing through the books on the low table before the sofa. He was sure it was here somewhere! He remembered leafing through it this week—then setting it aside in favour of Think What You Think: How to Live with a Legilimens. And the little volume did indeed turn up beneath layers of others that had piled up since. On Animae, and How They, Their Natures, Whence Wrought, Do Manifest, ran the title.       Harry had mistaken it for some Animagus primer, but quickly realised it was a treatise on souls. That, too, might have been of use, but his initial interest had cooled when it turned out the author’s style was ponderous, hideously archaic, and that, rather than practical magic, he preferred philosophical constructions. Still, there were a couple of spells in the book, and if Harry had understood correctly…       ‘Fancy that,’ Tom snorted somewhere above his crown, having come up behind, and peered over his shoulder. ‘Ever full of surprises. It would never have occurred to me to look for anything in this slag-heap.’       ‘I was not looking, I stumbled upon it…’ Harry began, and at once regretted giving up a chance of praise. He hardly noticed, though. His forefinger was sliding along the lines, and he could practically feel Tom’s intent gaze moving with it.       ‘…to mortal eyen made manifest. And each shall see them as his like, with spiritual fire illumined. Would any assay this, let him lift his wand against his breast with his left hand, and with his right make the sign of Unut. The words that be spoken are these—em khena ba-a sauti haibit-a un-uat en ba-d en haibit-a maa-f.’       ‘Coptic?’ Harry tipped his head back. Tom stretched over the sofa’s back, and took the book from him.       ‘Ancient Egyptian,’ he corrected. ‘Getting the pronunciation right will not be trivial.’       Contrary to his sceptical forecast, they managed it rather quickly, the author having taken the trouble to illustrate the ‘sign of Unut’ then and there (in fact, it was the drawing that had caught Harry’s eye when he first leafed through the treatise).       He knew they had succeeded when a pale golden glow sprang up around Tom. Harry gaped, unable to decide whether to be alarmed or delighted. One soul the two of them, after all?       While he tried to make his peace with that realisation, Tom darkened, and suddenly stepped aside, looking past Harry’s shoulder.       ‘And what, pray, is that?’ he ground out between his teeth, as if pronouncing a foul oath.       A second later Harry understood the cause of his reaction. There was a second source of ‘spiritual fire’ in the Room of Hidden Things.       A gentle radiance, the very hue of the first rays of dawn, emanated from Rowena’s defiled relic.       ‘Er…’ was all he managed, blinking. The spell was not working after all? What was going on? Tom, having seized the diadem, turned it in his hands. The glow did not fade; if anything, it grew stronger.       ‘I am beginning to think,’ he said slowly and quietly—and a shudder went through Harry—he heard carefully suppressed fury in Tom’s voice, ‘that you, regrettable as it is, are right. I and… the one who wrought this… are different persons.’       Harry lowered his wand. He wanted to exclaim something on the order of, ‘What are you on about, may a manticore take you?!’ but self-preservation counselled him not to, or at least to put it differently.       ‘My lord?’ he whispered. Tom lifted his eyes, heavy with rage, to meet his.       ‘You asked me, as I recall—what magic could be worth breaking Rowena’s charms for?’ he continued, just as softly. ‘Well, here is your answer.’       Harry’s legs buckled. He dropped back onto the sofa, dizzy, nauseated. His wand fell from his slackened fingers. The spell dissipated—but not what it had revealed.       Yes. One soul—but not for two. For three. The third was a piece of it, lodged in a material object.       A Horcrux.       ‘Merlin’s cock,’ Harry summed up, and Tom did not so much as rebuke him. ‘So… the other you…’       ‘I am not him,’ Tom spat, and at any other time Harry would have rejoiced to hear the assertion at last; now it gave him not a drop of joy. He hurried to rephrase: ‘Voldemort, then, made another phylactery later, after you?’       It still sounded nasty, galling. Tom went to the armchair, sat, and, with studied care, set the diadem down on the open pages of the little book, On Animae. Harry suspected that what he really wanted was to hurl the damned thing on the floor, and burn it to cinders with fiendfyre. He, for one, certainly did.       ‘It is not a phylactery. I should know my own magic,’ Tom said again, and, for the first time, neither his posture, nor his tone, suggested a sovereign prince. Suddenly, he looked young—as young as he was, only five years Harry’s senior—and monstrously tired. ‘A Horcrux, plainly, now that I see it,’ he straightened, and drummed his fingers on the armrest, scowling. ‘I had thought about it. Making several. It would have guaranteed that, even if one were destroyed, I would not die. But later I gave up the idea. The wish to improve upon the Horcrux took me—to create a truly viable copy of myself. And, as you see, I succeeded. But… he, it seems, chose otherwise.’       ‘How… how many were you going to make?’ Harry croaked, his tongue suddenly stiff.       ‘A magical number,’ Tom bared his teeth. ‘Three? Seven? How should I know?’       Harry folded his arms around himself.       ‘All right,’ he said after a minute or two, calmer. ‘All right. Fine. That is to say, not fine, but not beyond remedy. Can you… feel them? The others… er, I mean the ordinary Horcruxes?’       ‘No more than you can feel your severed finger,’ Tom snapped back, and rubbed his face with his hands. ‘No, that is not right. With one of them I definitely… feel a resonance.’       ‘Do you?’ Harry perked up, cautiously. ‘And where is it? Somewhere near?’       ‘Oh yes,’ Tom smiled, grimly. ‘Very near, as near as it gets.’       Harry at once called up the silly soul-charm, and looked around. Besides the diadem, nothing glowed. Apart from Tom, of course.       ‘Where?’ he demanded, cross. Trust Tom to find a pretext and an opportunity to play at riddles even now! ‘Is it invisible, or what?’       Tom rolled his eyes.       ‘Right here, in front of me, you halfwit!’       A sharp sense of déjà vu pricked Harry.       ‘There is nothing here, clever-clogs! There is only…’       ‘Me,’ he wanted to finish, and could not.       ‘You have finally caught up with my train of thought, splendid,’ Tom observed.       If Harry had thought he felt wretched before, now he truly went sick.       They were not kindred souls. Nor two incarnations of one soul. No: in the most literal sense, they were parts of a whole.       ‘What am I, then?’ he asked after a long silence—he almost thought of it as a minute of silence. ‘Am I even… a person?’       Tom crossed one leg over the other, and propped his chin on steepled fingers. His composure was returning—and with it, his customary lofty manners.       ‘A Horcrux lodged in a living being, I should think. In fact, a rather elegant solution. You can defend yourself, unlike my diary, for example.’       Harry threw up his hands.       ‘Oh, excellent! Now you are justifying him! Back to what it was—he is you, you are he, and you have a clutch of soul anchors, how very convenient!’ he hissed, not a jot less venomously than Tom could.       ‘Pull yourself together, at once,’ Tom cut short the incipient hysteria. ‘I am not he, and do not dare to say it again. I merely observed that the idea is not without wit…’       ‘If you do not praise yourself, no one will,’ Harry thought, and wisely held his tongue.       ‘…but I would never have sacrificed one of the Founders’ relics.’       On that, Harry could not argue. Tom loved Hogwarts, and prized everything to do with it beyond measure. And in general—what manner of monstrous mind did it take to conceive of such a thing? Anything would have done—a common Muggle notebook had served, had it not. Why despoil something sacred? Pure pride?       Harry realised he did not, in fact, much want to know. A vile act—and a vile man had committed it. Tom was right—he and Voldemort had shockingly little in common.       ‘Yes,’ he said aloud, massaging his temples. ‘I know. Sorry. It is just… a bit much for me. I propose we take a pause to think, and, for now, add ‘me as a Horcrux’ to… well, you know—to the list of things we do not talk about.’       ‘Like the fact Voldemort killed your parents?’ Tom prompted, obligingly.       ‘Like the fact I killed a man for you!’ Harry flared.       ‘It is a list we do not talk about,’ Tom said reprovingly.       It need hardly be said that Harry had slept monstrously little.       He got back to the dormitory just before wake-up time, under an Invisibility Charm—and praise be to Salazar for that, as at the entrance to the common room he narrowly missed a yawning Farley. He was still shaken by the night’s revelations, but a substantial breakfast did the trick—a double helping of fried sausages, and a nutty chocolate bar helped him settle, and, naturally enough, Harry was then overcome with an irresistible urge to sleep. Alas, a kip on the Slytherin sofa (or, better yet, in the Room of Hidden Things beside Tom) wasn’t on the cards—there was a Quidditch match on this Saturday, the first of the season. Gryffindor were playing Slytherin, and, of course, tempers were riding high.       Enterprising Nott had started a book as early as the end of September, but Selwyn had caught him at it, hauled him by the ears, and, to the horror of the punters, confiscated the whole kitty as a lesson. The betting resumed, but went deep underground—now and then Harry glimpsed a parchment with the stakes in Theo’s hands, but it vanished at once if you looked too closely.       The House had faith in victory—and a run of wins in recent years only strengthened that confidence. Most of the bets were on the final score, and the number of penalties for each side. The Gryffs played dirty, the Slytherins always gave as good as they got, and only the fact that Quidditch has nothing like a red card allowed the players to stay on the pitch. Otherwise, matches would have turned into ‘Seeker versus Seeker,’ and even then they would probably have annihilated each other in a quarter of an hour.       For all the delights of Quidditch Through the Ages, Harry had not taken to the game. Flying was brilliant, no argument, but flying under fire from weighty balls in the company of the Weasley twins armed with deadly clubs—he had not signed up for that. Draco, however, was not troubled by the game’s obvious murderous potential—he was set on trying out for the team next year. Harry made a mental note to learn Healing Charms by then—especially those that dealt with concussion, and broken bones. Such things had to exist, surely? There was another task for Granger—let her draw up a list, and toady up to Madam Pomfrey; with luck, the matron would not refuse to help with practical work on the topic.       The morning was brisk, but clear. The pale-blue sky was adorned here and there with light grey clouds, like feathers plucked from a pigeon’s tail. The rime had melted entirely, leaving only brown patches of flattened grass as a reminder, and by ten o’clock—kick-off—the sun had real warmth—not summer heat, but enough to make Harry drowsy at last.       Wrapped in a thick, fur-lined winter robe, and a chunky knitted scarf, he sat high up in the stands, and listened to Madam Hooch calling for a beautiful, fair game. To his left, Greg was snorting with impatience; to his right, Draco fidgeted, almost bouncing in his seat. Vince, Llywelyn, and Blaise had settled a tier above, and unfurled a massive, bright-green banner: ‘GO ON, TERRY, GO ON!’ The enchanted letters shimmered in living silver.       Slytherin’s Seeker, Terence Higgs, was, by last season’s lights, good. His opponent was new—the previous Gryffindor Seeker, yet another of the red-headed blood-traitor brood, had finished school in the spring. A third-year, Alicia Spinnet, had been pulled off the bench to fill the gap; she had been a Chaser, and was, therefore, a dark horse with the bookies. It was she who had smashed her broom during the dragon hunt, but, evidently, she had found herself a moneyed sponsor—or, more likely, the House had, in a fit of solidarity, turned out their pockets—for Spinnet was clutching a Nimbus Two Thousand, this year’s new model, billed by the maker as the fastest broom on the market. At the sight of it, Draco hissed with vexation—one stroke of bad luck had turned to good; had Spinnet not wrecked her previous broom, would they have had a whip-round for another?       The whistle went, and fifteen brooms—seven players a side, and the referee—shot up into the air. The stands hummed and stirred. In the middle of the scarlet-and-gold section a placard rose, ‘SPINNET FOR PRESIDENT’. The Hufflepuffs briskly produced flasks and snacks. Half the Ravenclaws buried their noses in the books they had brought; the others whipped out notebooks and quills—gambling was not alien to the highbrows either. Perhaps they were simply studying game theory, or something of that sort. A flicker of gold appeared, and vanished—the Snitch. A Bludger whooshed through the air. The game was on.       ‘…clean pass to Johnson, and… No, Slytherin have the Quaffle. Flint makes a break, he’s flying like an eagle, he’s going to score… and, in a fantastic dive, Wood snatches the quaffle!’       Lee Jordan’s voice, amplified by Sonorus, carried over the pitch and into the stands. Credit where due—the Gryffindor made an excellent commentator, and helped no end in making sense of what was going on. Red and green robes were chasing one another in three dimensions instead of two, and Harry, whose experience as a sports spectator extended to Muggle school football, was a little at sea at first, staring at the whirling tangle.       Left to himself, he would not have come at all—why? From next year, if Draco truly got into the side (and, alas, there was no reason to doubt it), attending matches would be Harry’s duty as a friend. Until then, one might have thought he could skive off—but Harry saw that keeping himself apart from the House would not do. An heir must lead any collective act, however daft. The Queen must be bored rigid at ceremonial receptions too—and she managed somehow…       And you could not even take out a book. What a misery.       ‘Gryffindor starts a counter-attack… With the ball, Chaser Katie Bell, she slips magnificently past Flint on the right, climbs above the pitch, and… Oh, hard lines… that must hurt—a Bludger to the back of the head!’       Goyle gave a piercing whistle, and stamped his feet.       ‘Have her! Yeah!!!’ he bellowed. The Great Silent One was transformed when it came to Quidditch.       ‘Pucey, go on, go on!’ Draco bawled.       ‘Sly-ther-in! For-ward!’ Crabbe chanted, in a thin voice.       Harry sighed.       ‘Slytherin with the Quaffle. Montague heading for the Gryffindor hoops…’       A sudden, loud crack drowned the next words. Harry, lost in thought, jumped and brushed splinters off his knees—chips from the stand’s barrier, knocked out by a Bludger gone wild. Just as he had feared—the Weasleys with bats in their hands were a menace to all, including innocent bystanders.       ‘Quaffle to Johnson, no one in front of her, she streaks forward… What a flight! Ducks the Bludger… she’s right in front of the hoops… come on, Angelina! Keeper Bletchley dives for it… misses… Goal!!! Gryffindor open the scoring!’       Miles Bletchley, Honoria’s little brother, looked ready to eat his own gloves for rage. The enemy stand exploded in exultant yells; the stand around Harry groaned and howled in many voices—like a chorus of sinners in hell; it made one’s skin crawl.       ‘Slytherin have the Quaffle, Montague dodges a Bludger… another one… he outflies the Weasley twins and Katie Bell, he’s sprinting forward… wait, was that the Snitch?’       The fans grabbed for their binoculars. Harry craned his neck round. How did Seekers ever make out a tiny ball in that scrimmage?       A blow like a clap of thunder shook the stand. Harry flinched. Goyle grunted and swore, and Draco sprang to his feet.       ‘Crowd-bludgeoning!’ he yelled. ‘Penalty!’       A ‘crowd-bludgeoning’—as far as Harry recalled from his reading—was the name for the deliberate sending of a Bludger into the crowd, in the hope of distracting the other side’s Beaters, or forcing the referee to halt the match to assess the damage. Dirty, no doubt, but Quidditch Through the Ages asserted there were over seven hundred ways to break the rules. Madam Hooch, however, did not react to Draco’s cry—either she hadn’t heard, or she deemed the second ball to hit the stands a coincidence.       ‘Flint has the Quaffle, he dodges Johnson… dodges Bell… A-a-and a powerful Bludger to the face—looks like a broken nose?.. No, lucky. Slytherin score! The score is…’       But Harry was not destined to learn what the score was for the home side. A third Bludger slammed in between him and Malfoy—an inch to the side and one of them would have taken it in the head. Splinters rained down on him. He leapt up—instincts demanded that he fight, or make a run for it, but which applied here was not at all clear. Swearing and whistles rose all around him.       ‘Crowd-bludgeoning! Crowd-bludgeoning here!’       ‘Wood! May a hippogriff shag you! Rein in your gimps!’       ‘Weasleys, Mordred’s bastards!’       Cooler, but less adequate than the rest, Malfoy acted. He breathed, whispered, ‘Bitches!’ and jerked his wand out of his sleeve. Harry had just enough time to grab and hang on to his arm.       ‘Stop!’       ‘Thwack!’ objected the next ball. Angry shouts multiplied; panic joined in. Malfoy twisted, trying to shake Harry off, but Harry knew he must not let go. Hurling curses at the players—whatever madness they were about—was forbidden, and the last thing anyone needed was to hand Slytherin a forfeit, indeed!       ‘What the—?!’       ‘Stop the match!’       ‘Weasleys! Morgana’s miscarriages!’       ‘Go to Mordred!’ came from the pitch. ‘It’s not us!’       Indeed, Harry realised, nobody was hitting the Bludger. It turned itself at the far end of its arc and, with a roar of torn air, came at them again. This time, the entire green-and-silver stand erupted in yells and abuse. The referee blew for a stoppage, but no one was watching play any more—all eyes were fixed on the mad ball. Someone hastily conjured a Protego; over it, more shields settled. Intertwining and crossing, they ran in ripples and iridescent gleams like soap bubbles. Harry drew a breath—but the Bludger ignored the protection with horrifying ease.       A heartbeat before it met Harry’s face, Malfoy hooked his leg round Harry’s ankle and shoved him hard in the shoulder.       They went down in a heap, and Draco, ending up on top of him, tried to stuff Harry under the seats. He could not manage it completely, but it worked regardless; there was another blow, uncertain, feeble, and, at last, silence—if the excited roar of a crowd could be called silence. The cessation of the attack registered in his brain that way, at any rate. Harry felt as if he had been under an artillery barrage—and now, thanks to the dream-not-dream, he had a basis for comparison. The sensations did not differ much, he had to say.       ‘I think you’ve probably broken my arm,’ he confided to Malfoy, whose nose had gone white with shock. ‘Well done, Draco. How did you work out they were aiming at me?’       The other swallowed several times before replying, his voice a little hoarse: ‘I don’t know, my lord. Intuition. I’m half Black.’       Yes, Harry’s troublesome relations had a particular way with Dark magic; that could not be denied. Witches were better known for it than wizards, true, but heredity was a wayward thing…       ‘Come out!’ someone shouted from above. From the voice, Harry recognised Blishwick. ‘Potter, all clear! It’s over, it’s over!’       Somehow, rubbing bruised places—it felt as if they had tumbled all the way down the bloody stand to the ground, counting every tier on the way—Harry crawled out. First thing, he checked his wand—by Salazar’s mercy, it was intact. The arm seemed unbroken too, though it hurt like the devil. Draco was already tidying himself—he flicked his wand at Harry as well, conjuring Scourgify and a smoothing charm, and Harry was genuinely grateful—he could not have managed even a lumos just then.       The deranged Bludger had been taken away—Harry hoped at least one adult would think to examine the magic laid on it. He could still see, as if in a photograph, the moment the ball punched through the Protego dome. He had to learn that spell, whatever it took—and then study it, and find a counter, for Harry refused, categorically, to go through anything of the sort ever again.       Quidditch was a brutal sport—and the fact that the game resumed a quarter of an hour later proved it beyond doubt. Harry, however, had had enough—even a monarch is generally removed from the scene of a terror attack, despite the need to display national fortitude. Draco trailed after him. He was still green around the gills and trembling. Harry suspected he himself looked little better. Why was it that every time he was in mortal peril, Tom was nowhere near!       Behind the stands they ran into Granger.       ‘Harry, are you all right?’ she asked, anxious.       ‘Fine.’ He was not going to whinge to a girl. She swept her curls off her forehead and beamed: ‘Oh, thank Go—er, praise Merlin!’ Harry’s words about the need to adopt the natives’ manners and customs had plainly reached her heart. ‘Did you see who did it?’       ‘You are joking?!’ Malfoy pulled a face. ‘We had enough to look at up there, no time to be distracted!’ Shock had him drawing out his words even more than usual. Harry shook his head.       ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘And I do not think anyone did. Everyone was watching the game at first, then the bewitched ball. Why do you ask?’       Hermione lit up and drew herself up proudly.       ‘In that case,’ she announced, with pride, ‘how fortunate, my lord, that you have me! For I was not goggling at the ball.’ She displayed the binoculars hanging from her neck. ‘As soon as I understood what was happening, I started scanning the stands. And, Harry, I found him!’ The longer Hermione talked, the more she slid from her grand tone into her usual rapid gabble. She rose on her toes, her hair a thundercloud about her face. ‘Everyone was looking the same way, it’s true, but only he was moving his lips—and he stopped at the very moment you fell, and went out of sight. And you remember: ‘no see, no sorcery.’ It was him, no mistake,’ she finished, excited.       ‘Good thinking, Hermione.’ Unlike his Head of House, Harry had no qualms about using her ‘magic button’. He gave her an encouraging smile, meeting her eyes, bright with pleasure. ‘So, whom have you run to ground, then? Who is it?’       ‘Professor Quirrell,’ Hermione answered, darkening. ‘I know it sounds odd, but it was most certainly him.’