Some motion, some color, had returned to the old wizard's face. "Perhaps not..."
"And in any case," Severus said with a slightly condescending smile, "Muggle weapons are not so easy to obtain, not for a thousand Galleons or a thousand thousand."
Doesn't Harry just Transfigure the devices he uses in his battles? thought Minerva, but before she could open her mouth to ask -
The fireplace erupted in green flames, then, and the face of Pius Thicknesse, Madam Bones's assistant, appeared therein. "Chief Warlock?" said Thicknesse. "I have a report for you, transmitted from -" Thicknesse's eyes flickered over Minerva and Severus, "six minutes ago."
"Six hours ahead, you mean," said Albus. "These two are meant to hear it; deliver your report."
"We know how it was done," said Thicknesse. "In Bellatrix Black's cell, hidden in one corner, was a potions vial; and testing the traces of remaining fluid shows that it was an Animagus potion."
There was a long pause.
"I see..." Albus said heavily.
"Pardon me?" said Minerva. She didn't.
Thicknesse's head turned toward her. "Animagi, Madam McGonagall, in their Animagus forms, are of less interest to Dementors. All prisoners are tested before their arrival at Azkaban; and if they are Animagi, their Animagus form is destroyed. But we had not considered that someone protected by a Patronus Charm while taking the potion and performing the meditation, might be able to become an Animagus after they went to Azkaban -"
"I understood," Severus said, having by now put on his customary sneer, "that the Animagus meditation required considerable time."
"Well, Mr. Snape," Thicknesse barked, "records show that Bellatrix Black was an Animagus before she was sentenced to Azkaban and her form destroyed; so maybe her second meditation didn't take as much time as her first!"
"I would not have thought it possible for any prisoner of Azkaban to do such a thing..." Albus said. "But Bellatrix Black was a most powerful sorceress before her incarceration, and she might have done it if any witch could. Can Azkaban be secured against this method?"
"Yes," said the confident head of Pius Thicknesse. "Our expert says that it is nigh-unimaginable that an Animagus meditation could be performed in less than three hours, regardless of experience. All visits to prisoners allowed to receive them will be limited to two hours henceforth, and the Dementors will inform us if any Patronus Charm is maintained in the prison areas for longer than that."
Albus looked unhappy at that, but nodded. "I see. There will be no further attempts of that sort, of course, but do not relax your vigilance. And when Amelia has been told all this, tell her that I have information for her."
The head of Pius Thicknesse vanished without another word.
"No further attempts...?" said Minerva.
"Because, dear Minerva," Severus drawled, having not quite taken off his habitual sneer, "if the Dark Lord had planned to free any of his other servants from Azkaban, he would not have left behind the vial of potion to tell us how it was done." Severus frowned. "I confess... even so I do not see why that vial was left there."
"It is some kind of message..." Albus said slowly. "And I cannot see what it means, not at all..." He drummed his fingers on his desk.
For a long minute or three, the old wizard stared off into nothingness, frowning; while Severus also sat in silence.
Then Albus shook his head in dismay, and said, "Severus, do you comprehend this?"
"No," said the Potions Master, and with a sardonic smile, "which is probably all the better for us; whatever we are intended to conclude from it, that part of his plan has misfired."
"You are certain, now, that it is You-Know... that it is Voldemort?" said Minerva. "It could not be that some other Death Eater conceived this clever notion?"
"And they knew about rockets, too?" Severus said dryly. "I don't believe the other Death Eaters were so fond of Muggle Studies. It is he."
"Aye, it is he," Albus said. "Azkaban has endured impenetrable for ages, only to fall to an ordinary Animagus potion. It is too clever and too impossible, which was ever Voldemort's signature since the days he was known as Tom Riddle. Anyone who wished to forge that signature must needs be as cunning as Voldemort himself to do so. And there is no one else in the world who would accidentally overestimate my wit, and leave me a message I cannot understand at all."
"Unless he has gauged you exactly," Severus said tonelessly, "in which case all that is just what he intended you to think."
Albus sighed. "Indeed. But even if he has tricked me perfectly, we may at least rely on the conclusion that it was not Harry Potter."
It should have come as a relief, and yet Minerva felt the chill spreading through her spine and her veins, her lungs and her bones.
She remembered conversations like this.
She remembered conversations like this from ten years ago, from a time when blood had run through Britain in wide rivers, when wizards and witches she had once taught in class had been slaughtered by the hundreds, she remembered burning homes and screaming children and flashes of green light -
"What will you tell Madam Bones?" she whispered.
Albus stood from his desk and paced to the center of the room, his hand lightly touching the devices, here an instrument of light, there an instrument of sound; he adjusted his glasses with one hand, used the other to center the long silver beard against his robes, and then finally that ancient wizard turned back and faced them.
"I will tell her what little I know of the Dark Art called horcrux, by which a soul is deprived of death," said Albus Dumbledore, in a soft voice that seemed to fill the whole room, "and I will tell her what may be done with the flesh of the servant."
"I will tell her that I am reconstituting the Order of the Phoenix."
"I will tell her that Voldemort has returned."
"And that the Second Wizarding War is begun."
Some hours later...
The antique old clock upon the wall of the Deputy Headmistress's office had golden hands, and silver numerals to make the clock-face; it ticked and jerked soundlessly through its motions, for there was a Quieting enchantment on it.
The golden hour hand approached the silver numeral of nine, the golden minute hand did the same, the two linked components of Time nearing each other, soon to be in the same place and never to collide.
It was 8:43 PM, and the time approached when Harry's Time-Turner would open, to be tested in the one way that no imaginable spell could fool, unless that spell could bypass the laws of Time itself. No body or soul, no knowledge or substance, could stretch an extra seven hours in a single day. She would make up a message on the spot, and tell Harry to take that message back six hours to Professor Flitwick at 3PM, and she would ask Professor Flitwick if he had received it in that hour.
And Professor Flitwick would tell her that he had indeed received it at 3PM.
And she would tell Severus and Albus to have a little more faith in Harry next time.
Professor McGonagall cast the Patronus Charm, and told her shining cat, "Go to Mr. Potter, and tell him this: Mr. Potter, please come to my office as soon as you hear this, without doing anything else along the way."
Chapter 62: The Stanford Prison Experiment, Final
Minerva gazed up at the clock, the golden hands and silver numerals, the jerking motion. Muggles had invented that, and until they had, wizards had not bothered keeping time. Bells, timed by a sanded hourglass, had served Hogwarts for its classes when it was built. It was one of the things that blood purists wished not to be true, and therefore Minerva knew it.