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Chapter Three—The Room of Signs

Draco had, for some reason, expected the key to stick in the lock when he tried to turn it. But nothing of the sort happened. It turned as smoothly as though someone had used oil on it, or on the lock, and the door of Bubonic popped open.

Draco stepped inside first. Potter trod cautiously behind him, his wand practically poking Draco in the back, his hot breath rasping over Draco's neck.

Despite the way he wanted to hunch his shoulders and move away from that, Draco forced himself to stand and look around instead. The room in front of him was long and low and dim, but even before he called a Lumos Charm to his wand, he could see the row of pillars that ran down the middle of it. He wondered if they actually supported the roof. He rather doubted it.

When the light flared up, Potter started, and Draco had the feeling he was trying to suppress a shout. Draco frowned. I hope he's not paranoid, he thought, as he looked around. Or that the Withering Curse doesn't have some unanticipated side-effect that would mean he's going to start lashing out at shadows long before he should.

He wondered for a moment if they might stay in the house long enough for the curse to start destroying Potter. He grimaced. He might find it hard, even given his money and contacts, to escape a murder accusation if that happened.

Perhaps I should be grateful that Potter publicized his condition.

The room did indeed have a double row of wooden pillars, twisted in corkscrew shapes the way Draco remembered the posts of his parents' bed being. The wood was a deep brown, smeared with splashes of an even darker color running through it like veins through marble. Draco reached out and let his hand rest on the nearest pillar. The wood was cool and smooth beneath his fingertips, but not unusually so in either case.

Then the wood shuddered slightly. Draco pulled his hand back at once and whirled around, settling himself in the right position for casting if he needed to.

"What did you do?" Potter hissed, close enough to his ear to be pleasant if Draco had been in any other mood, in any other place.

Draco shook his head slightly, refusing the ridiculous question, and watched intently as the wood on the pillar rippled where he had touched it, shimmering and turning lazy spirals that ultimately melted into a new carving. Or what seemed to be a carving, Draco admitted to himself. He didn't know whether his touching it had called it to the surface or whether it was a natural reaction of the wood to his magic.

Whichever it was, perhaps it would be best not to touch things in this room in the future without premeditation.

That thought reminded Draco of the fact that he hadn't discovered how big the room actually was. He glanced quickly into the distance, between the rows of pillars, but couldn't see the end in the dim and glowing light. He turned back to the pillar and studied the symbol there, though he had already seen that he didn't know it.

"Let me see," Potter said, and leaned forwards over his shoulder. Draco raised his eyebrows and stood there without shifting, because he didn't know why Potter should be allowed to dictate his movements. Besides, since he didn't recognize the symbol immediately, he might feel the resemblance stir in his mind if he waited.

The symbol resembled a backwards question mark without the dot beneath it, though the bend was a bit sharper than what Draco normally saw in a question mark. It was raised from the wood, and Draco could see the surface of the mark, although not the rest of the pillar, gleaming as if from sweat. He grimaced. He had the unpleasant feeling that he had just given the house a taste of his magic, and that it was it savoring it.

"Bloody fantastic, Malfoy," Potter said, sounding resigned. "What did you do now?"

Draco leaned back in response, so that he could crowd Potter out of the way. Fit muscles and solid arms, he noted as Potter moved, reluctantly. You would never know that he was sick if he hadn't mentioned it.

"I don't know," he said, and moved on to the next pillar in the row. Potter drifted behind him, looking out of sorts.

The next pillar bore an amorphous pattern that might, for all Draco knew, be meant to represent a cloud formation, or a new continent. He leaned as near to it as he could, running all the symbols he knew through his mind. One could consider Bubonic a huge Dark artifact, and there were only so many decorations that a wizard who wanted to intimidate others would think to ornament his possessions with.

But he didn't recognize it, and he stepped back with an irritated little hiss at last, and moved on to the next one.

Harry snorted. He felt a little better now that it was obvious that Malfoy didn't know some of the basic Auror facts that had been pounded into Harry's head from the beginning of his training. It made him feel like he could contribute something to this mission besides following Malfoy around and staring over his shoulder.

He had to contribute to it. It was his last chance.

Harry took a deep, careful breath and decided that he was going to ignore any thoughts like that for now. He examined the symbols that appeared after that: what looked like the outline of half a human body, a pair of foreshortened parallel lines, and an odd thing that could have been part of an hourglass. The symbols also appeared on the pillars on the other side, along with the bent bow-thing and what looked like a cloud to Harry. He hadn't seen them before, and found himself shaking his head in confusion when the pattern began to repeat.

"You don't know what they are?" he asked the back of Malfoy's head.

"Would I be standing here with this baffled expression on my face if I did?" Malfoy asked dryly.

"You're turned away from me," Harry pointed out, more irritated than he should have been, he knew, by the fact that Malfoy was demonstrating that he was the same stupid git he had always been.

Malfoy turned around, but he had already wiped the baffled expression and put on a patient one. "No, I don't know what it is," he said. "I suspect that the signs together form a larger system, and interpreting it would give us the clue of this room." He reached out, and Harry drew in his breath to shout just in case he touched one of the pillars again, but Malfoy let his fingers hover above the smooth wood instead. "I can make guesses, but they will not be accurate ones."

Harry waited, but Malfoy only went on staring at the pillar, as if it was more worthy of attention than the living, breathing person who just happened to share the room with him. He cleared his throat noisily.

Malfoy gave the kind of abstracted jump that Hermione did when she sank too deeply into contemplation. Harry eyed Malfoy's back and snorted a bit. He wasn't sure that he believed Malfoy's supposed absorption into his investigation, but he would let it pass for now.

"I think that these must relate to the Dark artifact that I expect to find in the depths of the house," Malfoy said, and this time he did close his fingers around the nearest pillar, the one that bore the sign of a cloud formation, or whatever it was. Harry hissed, but the wood did nothing. "Such symbols can be used as advertisements, warnings, or smug boasts from one Dark wizard to another."

"What?" Harry blinked. That was something Auror training hadn't covered. Of course, Aurors finding Dark artifacts were supposed to hand them over to the Department of Mysteries instead of trying to handle them themselves. "'I have more power than you do, ha ha ha?'"

Malfoy gave him an obscure look, something tugging at the corner of his mouth that might have been a smile. "I'm sure that some of them would put it more dramatically. With more laughter."

Harry shook his head. Before today, he wouldn't have thought that Malfoy could take a joke about Dark wizards. "All right, fine. But why put the symbols here, a long way from whatever artifact Bubonic conceals?"

Malfoy bowed his head and stood still as though someone had asked him a troublesome question—or an interesting one, Harry reckoned. He seemed as if he would stand there for some time, in fact, so Harry leaned forwards and looked around him, into the distance between the rows of pillars.

The dim glow that stretched from Malfoy's wand, and from his now that Harry thought to light it, didn't reveal as much as it seemed it should have. There looked to be a solid wall at the back of the room that absorbed light. Or was that a different kind of light that did that, Harry wondered, or even a smoke or fog? The Charms simply didn't reveal enough to tell.

"I think that the whole house may be the artifact," Malfoy said at last, making Harry jump. "It would explain why my father took damage from it. I could see him resisting a surprise attack—which wouldn't be a surprise when he knew more about the house's nature than I do—or preparing for an encounter with an enemy concealed in the distance. But scars on his lungs speak to a different order of pain, and of attack." He looked up at the ceiling, and Harry could see the way his eyes shone. "Imagine the ceiling and the walls around us, even the pillars and the symbols, as small pieces of clockwork in the bowels of a vast machine, Potter," he whispered. "Isn't it fascinating?"

"I prefer not to think about bowels, if you don't mind," Harry said, giving another quick glance around. At this point, he would have liked mysterious threatening noises better than this vast silence. "It makes me envision monsters."

"And marching down the monster's throat?" Malfoy shook his head, his hair swaying around but not obscuring his superior, smug smile. "That's not going to happen to us."

"Us," Harry muttered, but so quietly that he didn't think Malfoy heard him. Malfoy had gone back to examining the walls around them with an air of absorption that suggested he wouldn't hear anything outside his head for the next little while. Harry raised his voice, though, because he didn't want to lose Malfoy to his thoughts. "What makes you think so?"

"Because of who you are," Malfoy said, glancing at him with an odd expression, as if he thought that Harry had asked for something incredibly basic to be explained, instead of something puzzling, "and because of who I am." Then he marched off into the dim light, towards that dim wall, or fog, or whatever it was, at the far end.

Harry followed because he had no choice, but already he was starting to seriously consider whether they would be able to survive Bubonic—Harry because the Withering Curse would kill him if nothing else did, and Malfoy because Harry would probably kill him.

But at least it was different from sitting at home waiting to die. Harry had to admit that much, at least.

Despite his confident words to Potter, Draco already knew that Bubonic, if artifact it was, was like nothing he had encountered before.

Artifacts responded hostilely or not at all to the touch of foreign wizards. In one sense, Draco's touching of the pillars had been foolish beyond measure, but in another, it was a foolproof test. It should have shown Draco what kind of protections he was facing, and the changed artifacts he carried about his body should have been enough to deflect any outraged energies the house could issue.

But the pillar had showed him the sign, and then done nothing else. Draco had to admit that he didn't understand that. If the signs were a warning of some sort, they weren't effective in warning away wizards who might try to steal Bubonic if no one understood them.

Of course, perhaps they meant something to whatever ancestor of his had built or bought the house, but Draco didn't think so. Lucius would have left a record of the symbols in his diary. They were something he would probably have known about before venturing into the house, and therefore not subject to whatever strange twist of mind had kept him from writing about his experiences inside Bubonic.

The other strong possibility he was considering at the moment was that Bubonic had recognized him as the rightful owner of it, due to his Malfoy blood, and offered him the signs as a greeting.

But Draco had to shake his head when he thought about that. Once again, it was not in the nature of Dark artifacts to do something like that. If they remained for a long time without a proper owner who attended to them and understood them, the way that Bubonic had, then they reverted to essentially "wild" status and would attack when touched.

Thoughtful, he marched his way between the pillars, noting from the corner of his eye that they signs repeated again and again on the pillars they passed. Apparently his touch on the first one had been enough to awaken them all, or make them sprout, or whatever the proper term for their emergence from the wood was.

Draco smiled. Though he was more baffled than he had let on to Potter, he was also excited. It was always good to be reminded that he didn't know everything about his chosen field of study, and that meant he had more to work with, more to explore, and less chance of getting bored with what would be his life's task.

The room ended at last, culminating in a large wooden wall with a single door set into it. The door bore all the symbols Draco had seen so far—bent curve, cloud formation, parallel lines, half a human, and the part of an hourglass. They were arranged in a circle around a new pair that had appeared in the center.

Draco bent closer. The human figures there were done in crude outlines, like the one that had shown up in the symbols, but around the head of one clustered scribbled squiggles that unmistakably reflected Potter's wild hair.

Draco smiled, slowly. The artifact that was Bubonic was alert in ways that he had not seen in a long time, then. Interesting. He spent a moment tapping his finger on the air a few inches from the drawings, and then moved back. Potter had already seen them, if the indrawn breath from behind Draco was any indication. Draco thought it best that he not try to hide them.

"That's us," Potter said, and he actually did reach out as if he would touch them. Draco caught his wrist, and found the skin dry and burning. He reminded himself, again, that he wouldn't actually be able to feel any signs of the Withering Curse in Potter's skin, no matter what he thought.

"Yes, it is," Draco said. "I suspect that my touch on the pillar awakened the spirit that dwells here." He glanced around, but of course the spirit, if that was it, showed no sign of its passage. The doors seemed to shiver in front of him, but if what Draco suspected was true, that was hardly unusual, for Bubonic to react to a mention of itself.

"Are you mad?" Potter's voice cracked. "Are you going to do something like that again? Am I going to have to fight to defend you before we've been in here an hour?"

Draco laughed. "It might have been longer than an hour. I have the feeling that time is subjective, in Bubonic." He wished there was some way he could be certain. That would assist him in determining what kind of artifact it was.

He had expected Potter to react to that with an insult or outrage, as appropriate, or at least a mocking challenge asking how Draco could know if time was that bloody subjective. Instead, Potter's face shut. "So twelve days might pass without one being aware of them," he said, softly, as though talking to someone else.

Draco rolled his eyes, more irritated with himself than Potter. He should have seen that of course the git's self-preoccupation would lead him back to thinking about the Withering Curse, instead of keeping his mind in the present. Arguments with an old enemy had to be less important to him than his own health.

Draco did not know if he would have felt the same things in the same position, but then, he would never have been stupid enough to become an Auror and put himself in the way of the Withering Curse in the first place, so he didn't think his experience and Potter's were comparable.

"Yes, that might happen," he said. "But I doubt it. And our experience is more likely to be subjective and uncertain the further we get into Bubonic, rather than near the door." Automatically, he glanced over his shoulder to see if he could gauge the distance to the door, and then shook his head when he saw only the dim corridor between the pillars. He had known that would happen. Forgetting was worthy only of a third-year student at Hogwarts. Or perhaps a Gryffindor first-year.

"Why does it matter where we are in the house?" Potter had gone back to staring at the image of himself on the door as if he had never seen anything more horrifying.

"Because of spiritual biogeography," Draco said.

As he had known they would, the words pulled Potter's head around. That was part of the point; Draco didn't intend to spend all his time with someone moping and talking about death. If he could stir Potter's curiosity, it would at least resemble lecturing to an appreciative audience.

"What?" Potter demanded, softly but so hard that flecks of spit launched themselves across the distance between them and landed on Draco's cheek. He wiped them off with the back of a single fastidious hand, glaring at Potter.

Potter had the good grace to look abashed, but didn't back down. "What do you mean?" he demanded. "What's spiritual bio-whatever?"

"Biogeography," Draco said delicately. "It refers to the distribution of different spiritual and magical aspects inside an artifact as large as this one, or inside a place that's been filled and manipulated with magic over the centuries, like Hogwarts. Surely you noticed that the dungeons were colder at Hogwarts than the rest of the school?"

Potter frowned. Draco had to admit that he looked attractive when he was thinking. "I just thought that was because they were underground," he said, sweeping hair off his scar. Even here, he can't go an hour without making someone notice it, Draco thought, but he had the feeling that it really was an unconscious gesture for Potter. "Closer to the lake."

Draco shook his head. "Dark Arts have been used there more often over the centuries than in other parts of Hogwarts," he said. "The spells have sunk into the stone. And there are more powerful wards there, too, left to guard artifacts like the Chamber of Secrets. In the spiritual biogeography of the place, it can't be as warm as, say, Gryffindor Tower undoubtedly was."

Potter swallowed. His throat bobbed in interesting ways. "And so time will pass more quickly further in Bubonic than here?"

Draco nodded. Potter gave his own glance back at the door they'd entered by, and Draco knew what he was thinking as clearly as if he'd announced it.

"No," he said, "I don't think you'll die in here. I never would have invited you along if I thought that. There would no doubt have been questioning of some kind, someone wanting to try me for Harry Potter's murder."

Harry blinked. He hadn't thought Malfoy would be so honest about his own motives for wanting to stay clear of the law and any action that might cast suspicion on him.

But the honesty was refreshing, too. Here's someone who doesn't care, Harry thought, his body relaxing. He doesn't want me to die while I'm with him, but other than that, he's indifferent to my death. So I can act like I am, too, instead of only thinking about it and feeling horrid if I don't.

"All right, then," he said. "How do we open the door?"

"We," Malfoy said in mild contempt, but he bent down and stretched his fingers out so they hovered above the door, closing his eyes. Harry watched the lines of his face smooth out. He cocked his head as though listening to music in a trance, and murmured a few words Harry didn't think were English or Latin.

Looking at him like this, Harry could see why he had acquired his formidable reputation as a dealer of artifacts. There seemed to be nothing he couldn't handle, nothing he would balk at.

That could have its bad side, too, Harry cautioned himself. Don't caught up in the romance of the quest and forget everything else.

"I'll need help," Malfoy said, but before Harry could step forwards and open the door, Malfoy took what looked like a long-handled silver spoon from a slit in his robe Harry would have sworn was too small to conceal it. Malfoy tapped his fingers against the handle, and a tiny, thin blade slid out of the bowl of the spoon. Harry moved a step away and cast a spell that ought to tell him what magical properties the spoon had; he didn't want Malfoy accidentally stabbing him with it, if he was working with his eyes closed.

"The help of that?" Harry asked. He tried to keep his voice from squeaking, but it didn't work. He cleared his throat and was about to try again when he saw the slow, steady way Malfoy's head moved, in a nod that made it seem as if he was balancing the weight of boulders on his neck.

"Yes. Shhhh, Potter."

The simple words shouldn't have been so effective. Harry felt the need to interfere pushing him. His spell had returned no answer, simply fading in blue sparks around the spoon. He should interfere rather than simply let Malfoy use a magical artifact of unknown potency and character in front of him.

But Malfoy's words soothed him, and he found himself moving out of the way and waiting passively for results before he thought about it.

Malfoy murmured more of the unknown words in what sounded like a question. His fingers slid up and down the handle of the spoon, and lingered on the blade. Then he thrust it forwards at the images that dominated the doors.

The images stretched out towards the spoon, yearning, with sparks and spirals of golden light. The spoon reflected the spirals, and the ghostly twin of them rose around the blade, adding an edge to it so thin that Harry had to keep blinking in order to see it. Unhesitating, Malfoy pushed the spoon, or whatever it was, straight into the center of the light.

It dissolved, running down the sides of the metal handle like water. Malfoy smirked at nothing and tossed up his spoon, catching it handily. By the time it landed in his hand, the blade had withdrawn into the bowl.

Harry licked his lips and found himself speaking in a croak. "What-what was that? I know you can change magical artifacts, but what did you change that one into?"

Malfoy, with his hand on the doors, paused and looked back at him with a faint half-smile. Harry's heart hammered, and he hardly knew why. Perhaps it was because he had rarely seen such a mysterious expression, even with that quiet edge to Malfoy's eyes and smile.

"I made it into a weapon that could cut through illusion, through magic, through barriers," Malfoy said softly. "As I believe you saw." He pushed, and the doors slid open with a hiss and creak that made them sound as if they had been powered by steam. He went through, one hand briefly trailing along the images on the door, brushing over the one that looked like a bent bow.

"What was it before you changed it, then?" Harry panted as he ducked after him, coming up in the center of a corridor beyond the doors. He glanced back, and of course the doors were already gone, although a dim red fog hung there, illuminated by blue-flaming torches that glowed on the walls and lent it an eerie effect.

"Nothing you would recognize." Malfoy was examining this second room with a cold, critical eye, and his voice was abstracted. Harry turned away from the place where the doors had been, trying not to wonder how they would get out again, and studied the room.

It was enormous, made of black marble blocks veined with silver, or at least it looked like that. Here and there, a reflection flashed back at Harry, and when he squinted, he could see shards of mirror embedded in the stone. He wondered what purpose the room had originally been built for, and why.

Or is this even the same room that we would have found if we hadn't used an artifact to open the doors? Maybe the house changes around the places it lets you enter based on the way you come in.

Harry shuddered, and then rubbed his arms briskly. He could do without speculations like that, thank you, in case it made him too uneasy to sleep at night.

Whatever night means here.

The blue torches cast streams of light like twin moon-paths across the marble. Malfoy studied both of them, and then began to walk down the stretch of stone exactly between them, making sure that his feet didn't touch the streams. Harry followed him gingerly.

"Why can't we touch the light?" he asked.

"Because I would have expected darkness here," Malfoy said, not glancing back at him. "A side-effect of my weapon is that it enforces darkness on the other side of whatever you use it to open. If this had been a door that led outside, we would have stepped into a haze that would prevent us from seeing the sun. This light is therefore unusual."

Or bloody fucking terrifying, Harry thought uneasily, casting a glance at the torches. In the end, he focused straight ahead, and tried not to think about the mirrors that sometimes showed glimpses of them passing, or the coldness of the floor.

Or the itching in his feet that had started up almost the moment they stepped onto the marble. He was sure that Malfoy wouldn't want to hear about such a trivial thing.

So far, Draco thought, Bubonic was more irritatingly incomprehensible than anything else.

He knew of no artifact that should have reacted with light to the darkness his weapon usually produced, especially not this kind of light. It resembled the flames that Draco had seen burn from driftwood, but it was without heat, and the flames never flickered. The paths of radiance they laid out were absolutely straight. He wondered if Potter had noticed that yet. Probably not. He noticed nothing unless he had to.

And the mirrors. Draco had been starting to think he understood what class of artifacts Bubonic was akin to-the dwelling artifacts, the kind that would provide temporary homes-but none of those had mirrors.

He kept one eye on the glasses as he and Potter proceeded between them, but saw nothing more unusual than their flashing robes and faces. He thought that if an attack came, it would come from that direction. Bubonic would expect them to be on the defensive, and might think the mirrors were less vulnerable than the walls or floor; there were so many that Potter and Draco couldn't watch them all at once.

If it was right to speak of Bubonic as thinking. Draco frowned and shook his head. There were tests that he could perform to determine Bubonic's nature, but he had been waiting to perform them, lest he be forced into a defensive posture too soon.

But their survival was more important than impressing Potter, or even Bubonic. Draco reached into his robe collar and removed the round pendant that dangled there at the end of a thick iron chain. The chain should have scratched his skin, or so numerous people who saw it had told him, but it never did.

Draco breathed on the pendant and tossed it into the air. It hung there, sparking, and Potter came to a step and sucked in a single startled breath.

"What's that?" he whispered. "I've seen something like it before."

Draco turned back. Potter's voice had changed. Once again he thought of the Withering Curse, and once again, he answered himself that it couldn't have started yet. Honestly, he was getting as bad as Potter's friends.

But when he caught sight of Potter's face, his senses sharpened. He did, in fact, look awful. His cheeks were pale, the bones straining against the skin as if they would break through. His hands clenched and wriggled in place as though he was fighting down pain. And his feet were shuffling and tapping up and down, up and down.

"What's the matter with you?" Draco asked. "That's the question we should be asking."

Potter stared at him. "What do you mean? Nothing's the matter with me." Then he shivered and scratched his arms violently.

His fingers went through his skin like knives through parchment, leaving long, bloody furrows.

Draco expected Potter to scream, but he didn't. He clamped his mouth shut instead, and breathed noisily through his nose. Then he closed his eyes, hissed through the tiny space left open in his lips, and said, "What should we do?"

Draco bent close to the scratches in Potter's arms without answering. Potter's hands were twitching, and Draco knew that, doubtless, he was trying to resist the urge to scratch at other portions of his body, lest the same thing happen to them.

"Hold steady," he whispered. A quiet voice could sometimes be the same as a calm one, at least to people afflicted with pain who reacted well otherwise. "I have to be sure of what we're dealing with before I move."

When he glanced up, he saw that Potter had let his eyelashes fall shut and was once again breathing through his nose, less noisily than before. Draco tilted his head in respect. He didn't know where Potter had learned such self-mastery, but it would make his task, which had to be conducted in silence if he was going to learn much of anything useful, infinitely easier.

The itching was the worst part. If he had ever pictured an injury of this kind, Harry would have said it was the pain, but no. Despite what had already happened, the itching that had invaded his shoulders and his hands and his feet and his face was of the kind that he wanted to relieve by scratching. Only the vision of his skin peeling away from his cheekbones and forehead kept his hands at his sides.

Well, that and Malfoy's unexpected authority, his expertise, his use of we. What "we're" dealing with, he had said, as though Harry's problem was his own, as though he wasn't about to snap at Harry for being useless and infected.

Of course, he might if he knew how long I had been feeling the itching, Harry thought, and focused his eyes on the wall over Malfoy's head. The pendant Malfoy had tossed into the air was shining steadily now, diffusing a light that the black marble fought with but couldn't absorb. Harry could make out more of the room.

It was no more welcoming than the first one they had stepped into, the room with the long row of pillars. At least it wasn't as dim, thanks to Malfoy's pendant. Long, slender scratches that reminded Harry of drawings of insect legs scrawled over the walls. Here and there were empty torch sconces, made of some cold metal, iron or perhaps silver. (Harry shuddered as the itching almost escaped his control, but he imagined his hands held in Incarcerous ropes and that helped, a bit). The veins of silver he had noted in the marble before were more vivid now, seeming almost to peel free of the stone.

Harry focused on them, maybe just because they were so similar to what his skin wanted to do now, and so he saw them moving.

"Malfoy," he whispered, staring so that he could be sure of his tricky vision. Yes, the veins of silver undulated back and forth, waving like seaweed trapped by a powerful current. The walls reflected their thin shadows, even, at least in the burning light of the pendant.

"Hold still, Potter." Malfoy sounded like one of the Healers who had cast the spells on Harry that confirmed the Withering Curse, holding down an impulse to snarl under a mask of exquisite serenity.

"There's something on the walls that you should see," Harry said. "Something that must be connected to this somehow." He flinched as a sharp brand of itching sliced down the back of his left hand. It burned. He had to get rid of it.

He raised his hand. He was going to use his teeth. That was less damaging than fingernails. It had to be. He had to get rid of it somehow.

"Incarcerous."

His hands flew behind him, tied together with the ropes that Malfoy had conjured. Harry uttered a low sound that twisted his voice in ways he didn't recognize. He would have said that only werewolves could growl, if asked, but here he was, making precisely that sound, and Malfoy only gave him a flat look and shook his head.

"No," he said. "I won't allow you to scratch yourself to death. Your skin's become an inadequate covering. Even a rubbing touch might tear it." He leaned back and looked suddenly thoughtful. "No, wait. Perhaps only your touch. My ropes didn't abrade your wrists." He leaned close to the rents in Harry's arms and whispered something Harry couldn't hear, but it made a sharp tingling run up the wounds.

"Ah," Malfoy said. "It has something to do with the nature of the room we're in. This must be one of the diseases of the body that Bubonic can create."

"I told you that," Harry said with exaggerated patience. "Would you look at the bloody wall and tell me what you see?" His eyes shot up, wondering if the house was devious enough to have stopped the motion of the silver tendrils, but they were still there and waving.

Malfoy turned around, with an expression on his face in profile that Harry thought meant he was just humoring Harry, but went still when he saw the tendrils that had formerly been veins in marble. He waved his wand through several abrupt patterns and cursed quietly at the end of them, whirling back to Harry.

"We have to break the connection between you and the room," he said. "But it's far too large to run through, and doing such a thing would eliminate our ability to understand Bubonic."

Harry bit his lip to stifle the impulse to laugh-where were Malfoy's priorities?-and gasped in soundless pain as that motion peeled away the whole of his lip. Malfoy picked up the strip of skin and flung it aside. He was tense but still balanced, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth between Harry and the wall.

"This is probably going to hurt," Malfoy said candidly.

The itching had crawled up behind Harry's eyeballs, and he was glad that his hands were restrained. He could too easily envision himself clawing his eyes out. He met Malfoy stare for stare and said, "Do what you need to do."

Though he tried desperately not to show it, Draco was impressed.

Potter was acting rational. Draco had expected him to be either noble or stupid, perhaps insisting that Draco leave him there and run away on his own, or at least to scream and complain the whole time. Those who were all bravery on the surface were often children in the face of true pain.

But Potter merely shut his eyes and stood there, waiting for Draco to do what he had to do to break the connection.

Draco drew out another artifact from a robe packet, a small silver pouch of what would look like ordinary salt to anyone else. He was a bit worried that he had already had cause to use three of his artifacts this early in the journey, but that was the nature of Bubonic, and the thought filled him with an almost sexual excitement as well. If he could tame the house, then it would make a far more powerful addition to his store than any of the ones he had used so far.

He had to move quickly. He glanced over his shoulder one more time and picked out the lowest of the mass of moving tendrils, the ones that he actually stood some chance of reaching with the altered salt. Then he opened the mouth of the pouch into a narrow funnel, so that the "salt" would go only where he directed it.

He gave one more glance at Potter, who stared at him, tense and sweating, his hands twitching in their bonds, but still didn't yield, didn't cry out, didn't surrender.

Draco shivered in the wake of his feelings from that and then spun in a circle, tossing the salt first on those lowest veins sticking out from the walls and then on the wounds torn in Potter's arms. At the same time, he whipped his wand forwards and then back, and cried out, "Corium novum!"

Several things happened at once. The tendrils stopped moving. The wounds in Potter's arms shimmered dimly, as Draco's altered salt fought with the Dark magic holding them open. Potter sagged to his knees with a scream.

And Potter's skin turned inside out, flew away from him, changed as it whirled through the next cascade of salt Draco tossed, and then came down to snugly enwrap Potter again.

It happened so fast that Draco would have had no idea what he was seeing if he hadn't been the one who cast the spell. Most wizards couldn't survive more than an instant or two without their skin, after all.

But the spell had worked the way Draco intended it to. The skin, turned inside out and transformed a moment after the connection with the room was broken, had no itching beneath it; all the itching had been on the bottom side of the old skin. Potter was himself again, wounded, panting, changed, but fixable.

Draco calmly healed the wounds in his arms with another pinch of salt and a minor, murmured Healing Charm. Then he released the ropes from Potter's arms and stepped back.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

Harry wanted to laugh, punch Malfoy in the mouth, claw away the wrong-feeling skin, and run in the other direction, all at once.

How did he feel? Flayed, stripped, exposed with his muscles and organs visible to the world for a single moment that his mind had already started to blur because of the agony involved, and then with the itching gone-

How was he supposed to feel?

But when Harry glanced up, he realized that Malfoy had asked the question with a kind of professional interest, and was watching him with much the same. He wasn't expected to lie and respect Malfoy's feelings, the way he would have with his friends, the way he'd had to reassure and calm them through their grief. He could speak the truth.

"Bloody awful," he said. "Like I'm going to be sick in a minute, and need a lie-down after that." He scrubbed at his mouth with one hand, and winced. There was new skin on his lips, or at least it felt that way, but it burst into a thousand stings at the brush of his hand.

"Sit down, then. Put your head between your knees."

Malfoy forced him to the floor, and Harry bowed his head under directions-well, guidance, really, since Malfoy's hand had clamped on the back of his neck and shoved down-and breathed as softly as he could. His new coating of skin continued to feel strange. His memory continued to soften around the edges of that extraordinary moment when he'd stood there without any covering.

And he continued to realize that he owed Malfoy his life again.

"Thank you," he said, when he could look up. His voice croaked. He cleared his throat, because he thought that weakness in front of Malfoy would be inexcusable, and said, "Yes, thank you. Does that cancel out one of the life-debts you owe me?"

Malfoy blinked and focused on him. He had been peering at the places on Harry's arms where his fingers had torn through his skin, and that left his face closer to Harry's than Harry was comfortable with. He shifted back, and Malfoy receded until he was more calming, less close.

"Two?" Malfoy asked. "Several? I was unaware that I owed you more than one, when you saved me from the Fiendfyre."

"I took out a Death Eater who was about to hurt you, too," Harry said, a little sorry that he'd mentioned it now. Malfoy's expression wasn't professional; instead, he seemed to assume that Harry had brought up the life-debts to hurt him, and he looked wary. "Sorry. I didn't mean to-it isn't important." He looked away and started to get to his feet.

Malfoy's clamped hand on his arm stopped him. "It is important, for a pair of people who might have to save each other's lives several times over the next few days," Malfoy insisted. "How many is it?"

Harry shuffled his feet and managed to keep looking there instead of meeting Malfoy's eyes, which he thought would be too painful right now. "Two from you to me," he said. "Or one, now that you saving my life effectively cancels it." Malfoy gave him a little shake, and Harry winced, wondering if his newly healed wounds were going to split open from that. "And one from me to you, since you didn't identify us in the Manor. Oh, and one from me to your mum, since she saved my life in the Forbidden Forest," he added hopelessly. "I don't know if debts owed by blood relatives count."

"They can," Malfoy said, his eyes shut, his face still again. Harry discovered that he liked the expression, and decided that was a strange thing to learn, in the last days of his life or any time, that he liked the way Malfoy looked when he was thinking. "It depends on the total overall web of magic-did anyone else owe you a debt? Or do they?"

"Snape owed one to my father, that was apparently transferred to me," Harry said. "But I think that he more than fulfilled it with the help he gave us during the war. I don't really know how those things work."

Now Malfoy's eyes were open again, and they were incredulous. "What?" he asked. "How in the world couldn't you know? Why wouldn't you try to find out, once you discovered that you didn't know?"

Harry shot him a look of intense irritation. "Because I've lived with that kind of thing all my life, Malfoy. Someone always trying to kill me, someone always saving me, or me saving them. It's the kind of thing that ceases to matter after a while because you get numb to it."

"Shite," Malfoy murmured, and fell silent, his lips moving in what might have been a spell to calm himself. Then he started to his feet. "I can't let you die," he announced.

"What?" Harry stared at him. "I thought you were already trying to keep me alive so I could explore Bubonic with you."

"I mean, that I can't let you die of the Withering Curse," Malfoy said, shaking his head so briskly that Harry was amazed dandruff didn't fly away from his hair. Then again, Malfoys probably weren't allowed to have dandruff. "Not without fulfilling those life-debts. There has to be a way..." He broke off and spent some more time with his eyes closed, but Harry didn't know what he was contemplating this time.

"There isn't a way to cure the Withering Curse, except the one I won't take," Harry said. "You know there isn't. And as for fulfilling the life-debts, well, we ought to cancel them out easily, in a place like this. You save me one more time, I save you twice just in case the debt from your Mum is important, and that's that." He really didn't know why Malfoy was spending so much mental time and energy on this. Personally, he wanted to get out of this room and into a different one.

Even if that one was worse, it at least wasn't the place where the skin had been stripped from him and then returned inside out.

The conundrum of owing life-debts to Potter and letting him die with the debts unfulfilled was not one that Draco had thought of, and he should have. He spent a few moments coldly punishing himself for being so preoccupied with artifacts during the last few years, and the possibility of taming Bubonic, that he had not thought of the obvious consequences of Potter's Withering Curse.

But punishment could do nothing to help the man, and so Draco passed beyond it into other thoughts a minute later. What could be done?

Letting Potter die with the debts still between them was not an option. If that happened, Draco, Potter, and possibly his mother would be condemned to become phantoms, a lesser kind of ghost that haunted the scene where a life-debt had been formed. They would be conscious of their torment, but nothing could alleviate it.

It was not the sort of afterlife that Draco fancied.

He was considering the matter when they reached the end of the room, a single cramped, wooden door that looked out of place in all that marble, and Draco had to turn his thoughts from the problem of a seemingly impossible cure to a spell that was well-known and researched to the problem of a seemingly impassable door. There was no lock, keyhole, latch, or handle. Potter stood back, frowning, and considered it, too.

Draco sneaked a quick look sideways at him. In addition to more resilience than he had expected, it seemed Potter possessed considerably more intelligence. He knew not to touch dangerous things after only one lesson. Draco had worked with makers and purveyors of Dark artifacts who had not been so wise.

"Will you have to use another of your artifacts to pass this door?" Potter asked Draco. There was no judgment in his tone. He simply looked and sounded serious, even somber, as if he didn't like to think of Draco's tools being sacrificed so quickly.

Since Draco didn't, either, they were in harmony for at least that brief moment. He nodded choppily to Potter. "I probably will, but I don't yet know which one will be best. Allow me to think for a moment."

To Draco's amazement, Potter fell silent and did so, although his arms heaved a few times as though he was straining to keep himself from pacing. Draco eyed him, then reminded himself not to be distracted by that problem of Potter right now, and bent down towards the door.

A few cast spells revealed that the door was made of exactly what it looked like, ordinary wood, although beneath and behind it thrummed a magical power that made Draco grimace. He couldn't tell what it was, and he was reluctant to expose more of his artifacts to it before he had to. The door had to be got open first, in any case.

Other spells revealed no traps on the door, no hinges, and nothing attached to it that would attack if they charged through. Draco backed up a step, eyeing it meditatively, and then decided that he would have to haul out another of his toys. He reached into a robe pocket near the one that had contained the altered salt and tugged out a small, shining egg.

Potter caught his breath and leaned nearer to look. Draco smirked at him. He knew it was beautiful. He had captured an Acromantula that had somehow got into one of his clients' houses and changed it so that it laid eggs like this instead. The normally dull colors of spider spawn had become a wonderful deep blue in his hands.

"What is that?" Potter whispered.

"Watch," Draco said back, smugly, and attached the egg to the door. It clung as though it had its own share of silk on the outside, and Draco rapped smartly downwards on the shell with one finger. Then he jumped back, pulling Potter with him. The creature inside would fasten to the first thing that touched it after it hatched, and Merlin forbid it be one of them.

Potter's hand was warm in his, warmer than it should be, and dusty and dry. Once again, Draco told himself that there was no way he could be feeling the effects of the Withering Curse this early.

Then he realized that he was moving his finger back and forth over Potter's palm in a regular, soothing pattern, and made himself stop with a snort of disgust.

Potter didn't appear to notice that he had begun or that he had stopped, which only confirmed Draco's feelings that it was useless to touch someone so preoccupied. He watched with enthralled eyes as the egg cracked down the middle and revealed a blue, crouching spider the size of Draco's outspread palms. Potter tensed, but didn't move, and Draco nodded approvingly. This would have been a bit awkward if Potter had been afraid of spiders.

The spider tapped against the door with its feet, "reading" the wood as Draco had taught its altered siblings to read metal, cloth, earth, and sometimes flesh. (Not that anyone knew about those experiments). Then it lowered its jaws, dug its pincers into the wood, and began to chew.

"I didn't know you could breed something that would do that," Potter whispered.

Draco thought a moment, then decided that he didn't know whether those words referred to a testimony of ignorance in general, or whether he had specifically thought Draco couldn't do something like this, and so it would be foolish to be insulted when he didn't know if he should be. He answered instead. "They're born ravenous. They'll eat whatever they're first fastened to-eat through it."

"Oh," Potter said, eyes wide, and measured the distance between them and the spider with a glance. Draco heroically refrained from laughing.

The spider was charging ahead, its pincers digging into the wood, its legs moving the unswallowed shavings out of the way, its silk spinnerets acting as extra legs that would judge the thickness of the wood and feed magical strength to its pincers accordingly. In seconds, there was a large, ragged hole in the door at hand-height, and in a few more, the spider had disappeared on the other side.

"Now what?" Potter whispered as if there was something hiding on the other side of the door that could hear them. Well, for all Draco knew, there could be. He was impressed, once again, at how sensible Potter was for a Gryffindor.

"Now I take a look and make sure that there's nothing that we need to fear," Draco answered, taking his silver telescope from his pocket. "The spider will turn around and come back through the door if we give it enough time, disintegrating the whole thing eventually, but we can't be sure that it'll take care of any other surprises or frighten the magical creatures that may make their home there."

"Because it only eats wood, right?"

Draco concealed his smirk at the need for reassurance, nodded, and leaned forwards, extending the telescope through the hole in the door.

He had time only for a glimpse of darkness before something grabbed the other end of the telescope and hauled him forwards and through the door, shrinking him to make him fit, while Potter's yells diminished to the shrilling of an insect behind him.