HP: Fairy Tale Wizard - 166

Chapter 166: Stories Within Threads (Part Two)

Sterling tossed the other coloured threads aside. Without his deliberate effort to preserve them, the threads quickly melted away and vanished.

There was no need to keep looking. They were all variations on the same theme: “Lockhart’s hunt for material,” either plying people with drink or dosing them the moment he had them restrained.

In fact, if he meant to use Obliviate on every single person afterwards, then even information gained through drink would probably be followed by a memory wipe. Not either-or, but a chain of methods.

Sterling had nothing but contempt for this. Lockhart marketed those stories under the banner of “autobiography.”

And that Order of Merlin, Third Class, had been awarded for his “bravery in the face of dark creatures and the defensive methods introduced in his autobiographical works.”

As it turned out, the “autobiography” was not an autobiography, and the defensive methods were incomplete at best and completely false after “artistic embellishment.”

Was that not pure deception?

“Robin, do you suppose the Ministry has, well, reporting bounties? That sort of thing?”

Robin tilted its remarkably bright little head and shook it.

“No, chirp. According to a few example cases Mr. Nicolas Flamel stuffed into my head, it’s all unpaid, chirp.”

“I see. No matter. I’ll file the report anyway.”

Sterling felt a little regret at missing a potential reward. He didn’t lack money, but since coming to the wizarding world, he hadn’t earned any on his own yet. Money earned feels different from money spent out of Maleficent’s vault.

“Report what, chirp?”

“That Gilderoy Lockhart fellow. He stole other people’s stories to masquerade as his own experiences, and he abused Obliviate on the victims.”

“Perhaps the theft of stories can only be condemned morally, but the abuse of Obliviate is a different matter. By the way, Robin, Veritaserum is not to be abused either, is it?”

Robin’s small beak fell open. Its little brain could not comprehend how Sterling had managed to sit in a chair daydreaming and suddenly seize Lockhart’s loose thread.

If they had caught Lockhart yesterday, Robin would have sworn he was a born Legilimens, ripping the memories out of the man’s head.

But no, surely not. Was it some delayed version of Legilimency?

Forget it. Anything incomprehensible could be filed under “Sterling’s sorcery.” More mysterious than that day’s time-rewind? Hardly.

“First, Mr. Nicolas Flamel did not load me with much legal knowledge. Second, this one is common sense. Even Aurors cannot casually use Veritaserum during investigations. It is a strictly controlled potion at the highest tier.”

“Understood. Multiple counts, then.”

Sterling nodded. He planned to ask Hermione to draft a formal report once he wrapped up his current matters. She was, as far as Sterling knew, the single most adept person at writing such things.

Back when she lodged a complaint against Quirrell, she had somehow fished up a copy of “A Collection of Ministry Complaint Letters, 1923–1944.”

Merlin knew why such a book existed. In any case, Hermione had read it and mastered it.

Sterling took up the remaining grey thread. This should be Lockhart’s own story—and the shortest of them, which meant it was the most recent: what happened before he was thrown into the Thames.

Ah. So the grey thread wrapped in many colours meant Lockhart was a mediocrity wrapped in other people’s stories.

As for his being tossed into the river—had he simply slipped up?

With that hope, Sterling sank into the memory.

“Oh, so it really is as they say, a fellow who wears his stories right on his face.”

This was Lockhart’s inner voice. At last, a first-person view through Lockhart’s eyes, allowing Sterling to peer into this shameless man’s mind—although, truly, he had no desire to.

Sterling followed Lockhart’s gaze and startled.

It was a middle-aged man with brown hair, his skin weathered, his face full of wrinkles.

He wore bronze-coloured spectacles. The right lens was chipped at the edge, the left was visibly cracked, and the left arm had once broken and been taped back together.

He was wrapped head to toe in black robes, unusual in the summertime. Yet what shocked Sterling was not that.

Andrew Duplicate’s face—older, timeworn—but Sterling knew him all the same.

To find Andrew in Lockhart’s memory—Sterling had been confident he would discover clues today, but he had thought those clues would be housed in the threads drawn from that black plane.

Now, Sterling no longer lost control at the mere sight of Andrew. He observed him carefully, trying to glean something more.

“Hello, stranger. I imagine you will not mind sharing a table?”

Lockhart sauntered over as if they were old friends and fished a bottle of very strong liquor from his bag.

Sterling glanced at it and noted the staggering proof. No wonder he always managed to get people drunk.

Andrew nodded in silence. He was drinking Butterbeer—the very kind Sterling had seen at Robert’s, smuggled back from Hogsmeade.

Very low in alcohol. Practically a beverage with a hint of beer.

“Have a glass? Think of it as my apology for disturbing your peace.”

Lockhart first tipped back his own glass and emptied it. He truly drained it—Sterling had thought he must use some trick to swirl it away in his mouth, since he always still had a clear head to fish for stories after.

So it was a gift of constitution after all.

Andrew shot him a guarded look, took the glass, and drank it slowly.

Lockhart kept drawing the distance closer. After a few minutes, he decided they had reached the point of exchanging names and opened his mouth.

“My friend, what is your name? I am Gilderoy Lockhart. I imagine you’ve heard of me, hmm? I have some small confidence in my fame—”

Before he finished, Andrew’s expression changed at the name “Gilderoy Lockhart.” A small, inky-black serpent shot up from under the table and sank its fangs into Lockhart’s leg.

“Andrew Duplicate.”

“This is courtesy. I dislike you, so I have decided to use you for my amusement.”

Those were the last words Lockhart heard.

He had no strength to speak, but Sterling heard the landslide scream inside his mind. “Damn. I ran into a hater.”

Sterling pulled out of the memory, his face dark enough to drip.

Robin was startled by his expression and clapped both little wings over its beak, striving to remain silent.

Andrew had changed. Whether by his own heart or by someone’s manipulation or influence, he now qualified as “dangerous.”

To place someone on the verge of death simply because of “dislike”—

He did not even know Lockhart was a fraud. He heard the man speak his own name, took a dislike to him, and then tossed him into the Thames.

Even Sterling had never considered depriving Lockhart of life. The man had not killed, and Sterling would not raise the thought of killing him.

Plagiarism was not a capital crime.

Andrew—Sterling clenched his fist, then opened it with a helpless sigh.

It had to be influence—no, outright control.

Sterling repeated the words to himself.

“Sterling? Are you alright? Shall I bring you something to eat, chirp?”

Robin tapped Sterling’s calf with a wing. Sterling realised his foul mood had affected Robin.

He rubbed his face. There was no time to be ruled by a bad mood. Finding Andrew sooner was what mattered most.

When the time came—

“Bring me a sandwich. The plainest ham will do.”

Sterling clapped his hands, and an illusion peeled away from his body—the usual glamour that let a little bird buy food on its own.

Robin eyed Sterling’s forced smile, then left with the illusion, clearly worried.

In the vacant room, Sterling drew a deep breath and took out a handful of rainbow threads salvaged from the black plane, along with a black thread plucked from a clock hand.

The usual rule: least important to most important.

The rainbow threads should be stories of various people, likely thin on useful intelligence. He did not pick among them but took one that looked pleasingly green and pressed it to his brow.

One second, two, three—

Sterling waited a full minute. Nothing happened.

He switched to a purple thread.

One second, two, three—

Sterling lowered the thread and stared at the bundle in disbelief.

Threads impossible to comprehend, impossible to read?

That was un-magical. Sterling accepted that this ability might have limits, but up to now, he had read even the memories of Sir Galahad, Knight of the Grail, without a hitch.

Yes, Galahad was not the ceiling of prowess, but what were the odds that two random pulls would both belong to people stronger than Galahad?

Sterling twirled a few threads in the air.

His intuition remained unmoved.

At that moment, a spark flashed through his mind.

As he fled the Thames under pursuit by the black plane, Sterling had scattered a measure of magic across its surface.

Since last night, the Star Observer had been parsing the black plane without rest, and had just now produced its result.

“Materialised memory.”

That was the essence of the black plane.

It was something Sterling had never even heard of. If the plane was materialised memory, then these “stories” salvaged from it—stories were themselves a kind of memory, were they not?

Why could they be observed as two different substances?

Could it be that magical sight judged stories differently from memories?

Wait. There was one difference.

Magical sight recognised memory as “the traces left upon the world by a life with magical ability.” Muggles’ stories, without magical ability, were not acknowledged by magical sight.

So, the black plane was materialised memory combining both wizards’ memories and Muggles’ memories, and what Sterling could observe were the wizards’ memories.

But that still did not explain why he could not read these stories—

“Sterling—I am back, chirp—”

Robin returned, noisy as ever, the claws on its feet hooked through two takeaway bags.

“But a nasty bird smacked into me, and the grape juice I bought for you mixed with my carrot juice. I don’t think it is drinkable anymore, chirp...”

“I will try a Reparo in a moment to see if it can be restored—wait, mixed together?”

Sterling lifted a thread.

What if they had been saturated with Muggle memory to such a degree that only the attribute Sterling could detect remained, while the attribute that allowed reading had been lost?

Now that was worth studying.

He gathered the threads together. He would research them properly when he had the time.

Setting aside these bothersome matters for the moment, Sterling and Robin sat down to enjoy lunch—Sterling had the beef sandwich he had asked for, and Robin’s choice far exceeded Sterling’s expectations: a fried chicken combo with fish and chips and roasted beef ribs.

The food was three times Robin’s size.

“I mean, you—”

“Alchemy, kid. Mr. Nicolas Flamel installed an Undetectable Extension Charm in my stomach, chirp. Even a Quidditch pitch worth of food, I can eat it all, chirp.”

Such a tiny space holding something bigger than a Quidditch pitch—Professor Flamel’s mastery of the Undetectable Extension Charm was truly superb.

Then a thought struck Sterling.

“Why have you never mentioned that you can store things? We wouldn’t need to bring a trunk at all.”

Faced with the question, Robin chose the “Who? Chirp chirp chirp?” tactic.

It tilted its head and cooed like a proper robin, hopping left and right across the table.

“So childish.”

Sterling gave it a helpless look and raised his wand toward the bulging plastic bag of mixed liquids.

“Reparo.”

The grape juice and carrot juice, mixed together, separated under the cocoon of magic. The squashed plastic cups reinflated, juice flowed back into them, and the lids sealed.

“It worked, chirp!”

Robin crowed triumphantly.

Sterling was pleasantly surprised. Using Reparo for this sort of situation required familiarity with the magic. He did not know what the two juices had looked like originally, and it was not trivial to deduce their original state from this mess.

For a spell to work under those conditions required a great deal of magical participation.

As ever: have the idea, hand everything else to magic, and wait for the miracle.

While they ate, in the headmaster’s office at Hogwarts—

“What do you mean, there is a black plane on the riverbed of the Thames that you can observe but cannot approach, and you want me to study it?”

Dumbledore wore a constipated look as he regarded a very embarrassed Kingsley.

“In other words, you need me to contact Newt, prepare a weather charm to cover London, pursue a suspicious Dark wizard while also helping you study the Thames riverbed, and finally, possibly handle the repairs of Westminster Bridge as well?”

Kingsley closed his eyes and nodded.

Dumbledore shut his eyes in despair.