Back on the grass beneath the reddening sky and laughed until his throat was

Raw.

"What are we going to do, though?" said Hermione finally, hiccuping

herself back to seriousness. "He'll know, won't he? You-Know-Who will know

we know about his Horcruxes!"

"Maybe they'll be too scared to tell him!" said Ron hopefully, "Maybe

they'll cover up --"

The sky, the smell of the lake water, the sound of Ron's voice were

extinguished. Pain cleaved Harry's head like a sword stroke. He was standing

In a dimly lit room, and a semicircle of wizards faced him, and on the floor

At his feet knelt a small, quaking figure.

"What did you say to me?" His voice was high and cold, but fury and fear

Burned inside him. The one thing that he had dreaded - but it could not be

True, he could not see how...

The goblin was trembling, unable to meet the red eyes high above his.

"Say it again!" murmured Voldemort. "Say it again!"

"M-my Lord," stammered the goblin, its black eyes wide with terror,

"m-my Lord... we t-tried to st-stop them... Im-impostors, my Lord... broke -

broke into the - into the Lestranges' vault..."

"Impostors? What impostors? I thought Gringotts had ways of revealing

impostors? Who were they?

"It was... it was... the P-Potter b-boy and the t-two accomplices..."

"And they took?" he said, his voice rising, a terrible fear gripping

him, "Tell me! What did they take?"

"A... a s-small golden c-cup m-my Lord..."

The scream of rage, of denial left him as if it were a stranger's. He

Was crazed, frenzied, it could not be true, it was impossible, nobody had

known. How was it possible that the boy could have discovered his secret?

The Elder Wand slashed through the air and green light erupted through

The room; the kneeling goblin rolled over dead; the watching wizards

Scattered before him, terrified. Bellatrix and Lucius Malfoy threw others

Behind them in their race for the door, and again and again his wand fell,

And those who were left were slain, all of them, for bringing him this news,

For hearing about the golden cup -

Alone amongst the dead he stomped up and down, and they passed before him

in vision: his treasures, his safeguards, his anchors to immortality - the

Diary was destroyed and the cup was stolen. What if, what if, the boy knew

about the others? Could he know, had he already acted, had he traced more of

them? Was Dumbledore at the root of this? Dumbledore, who had always

Suspected him; Dumbledore, dead on his orders; Dumbledore, whose wand was

His now, yet who reached out from the ignominy of death through the boy, the

Boy -

But surely if the boy had destroyed any of his Horcruxes, he, Lord

Voldemort, would have known, would have felt it? He, the greatest wizard of

Them all; he, the most powerful; he, the killer of Dumbledore and of how

Many other worthless, nameless men. How could Lord Voldemort not have known,

if he, himself, most important and precious, had been attacked, mutilated?

True, he had not felt it when the diary had been destroyed, but he had

Thought that was because he had no body to fell, being less than ghost...

No, surely, the rest were safe... The other Horcruxes must be intact...

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 555