On the Seine, the war between the Allied Forces and the Erkstag prisoners raged at full fury. Inside the safe house the goblins had built for themselves, meanwhile, the silence was of a different kind.
The Ministry of Magic officials from every nation that had signed the Mutual Defence Treaty stood ashen-faced, struck speechless, their eyes fixed on the great screen on the wall.
Anyone who was not hopelessly stupid could see that, in the present situation, the exposure of magic was now unavoidable. Tens of thousands of eyes had seen the tower stand up.
All along, the people of the wizarding world had believed the Statute of Wizarding Secrecy to be a form of protection for the Muggles.
But now, on the very eve of the wizarding world's exposure, these great personages of the magical world felt as though their clothes had been torn from their backs and they had been flung out onto a windswept wilderness, chilled to the marrow, body and soul.
It dawned on them, slowly and horribly.
The Statute of Wizarding Secrecy was, for wizards too, an indispensable shelter!
It had never really been about sparing the Muggles a fright.
It had been about sparing wizards from being counted, catalogued and drafted; from being hunted, as they once had been, by villagers with torches; from being ruled, one day, by those who could not be reasoned with and could not be resisted.
Behind that old, quiet wall, wizards had been free to live their strange, small, private lives. And now the wall had fallen, and the whole bright, crowded, frightened world was standing on the other side of the rubble, looking in.
"Please, everyone, do not despair."
Barnah stepped forward just then, his expression grave as he faced the circle of ministers, who were, for all their grey hair and gold chains, little better than frightened "youngsters" in his eyes.
"We still have a chance to protect the secret of magic!"
"How?"
Even the short-tempered Minister Adenauer looked dazed and lost at that moment.
"In fact, Bryan anticipated the dire straits we now find ourselves in, and he prepared for them."
Taking a deep breath, Barnah snapped his fingers. After a fleeting flash of electric sparks, a wine flask dropped into his hand.
The ministry officials from every nation crowded round, glaring with blazing eyes at the utterly ordinary flask.
"This is…"
Amelia stared at the flask, suspicion and astonishment mingling in her face as she leaned closer.
"Swooping Evil venom."
Barnah said it quietly, with a touch of deep feeling, and in his heart his admiration for Bryan rose yet another notch.
"Swooping Evil venom…"
Chairman Quahog blinked in surprise, and then laughed in spite of himself.
"So that's how it is! Well, you really are something, Bryan. By Merlin, that could actually work!"
"Oh! Mr. Newt Scamander used it in New York, didn't he?"
Amelia had caught on as well, her face was suddenly blazing with excitement, the colour was rushing back into her cheeks.
"Precisely."
Barnah nodded, then turned to Minister Nash of the French Ministry of Magic.
"We may yet defend the secret of magic, Minister Nash. And so I must trouble you to contact the Muggle president at once. Ask him, by all means, to rein in his military and pull them back from the wizards' battlefield as quickly as possible, so that we do not add pointless casualties!"
"All I can say is that I shall do my best to try."
Minister Nash said wearily.
"Special problems call for special actions."
Barnah drew another deep breath and put more weight into his words, fixing Nash with a resolute glare.
"In my view, you may take any means at all to make the Muggle president accept your opinion."
Any means—
Nash opened his mouth, his gaze darting left and right, instinctively seeking the counsel of the other wizards who, like him, headed a nation's Ministry of Magic. His throat moved as he swallowed.
But all that answered him were faces, one after another, silent and resolute. No one looked away. No one offered him a way out.
"I understand."
Minister Nash nodded slowly, took the Swooping Evil venom Barnah pressed into his palm, closed his fingers around it, and vanished from sight.
"Now—"
The ministers turned their eyes back to the great screen, where light flickered across their pale faces, and Barnah's wrinkled face once more took on a look of worry.
"It is up to them now."
A Muggle fighter jet swept across the night sky again and Sirius, crouched on his broom among the smoke and the sparks, could almost smell the cold breath of the vast machine as it passed.
He knew the plane might have held its fire only because the Muggles wanted a better look at this band of people. How long that patience would last, no one could say.
"Stop it…"
Sirius turned to look back at Alastor, who was firing curse after curse at the steel giant, and bellowed, close to cracking,
"But how am I supposed to stop it, Alastor? Tell me that!"
"Did you leave your brains behind in Azkaban, Sirius?!"
Alastor roared back.
"A Muggle-Repelling Charm! A Fire-Freezing Charm! Anything at all will do, you fool!"
"Oh. Oh, that's a good idea!"
Sirius ducked his head sheepishly. He really had been a bit too wound up.
As the invisible ripple of the charm spread, the grimly resolute look of the pilot, who had been trying to move in for another close pass, abruptly turned to bewilderment. His hands loosened on the controls. He blinked, as a man blinks coming out of a dream.
Then, ignoring his superiors' hoarse, screaming curses in his ear, he swung the plane's nose straight round, tore through the thick clouds, and streaked away into the dark.
Crack!
Sirius had just rejoined the fray and was about to fly toward Alastor when a green-skinned goblin appeared at Alastor's side a step ahead of him, popping out of nowhere in the middle of the flaming air, and whispered something urgently in his ear.
"I have been given a new assignment here, Sirius!"
Alastor snatched the flask the goblin had brought, then yanked up on his broom handle and shot toward the thick clouds above, where lightning flickered like a white vein in a black marble sky.
"Leave this to you for now!"
Whoosh!
Before Sirius could even ask what the assignment was, the steel giant swung a palm at him again, and he could only push his broom handle down and nimbly dodge the huge hand.
The battle had by now reached its peak of tense, grinding deadlock.
Several hundred Hit Wizards of the Allied Forces and the goblins each fought on their own, attacking the steel giant's defences from every angle by every means they could think of: stunners and shattering curses and fire and ice, all hurled together until the air above the river was one solid sheet of colour.
Yet the curses fell upon the magical barrier like driving rain, stirring up nothing but violent ripples, and still they could not break through.
And with every movement of the steel giant, the surging blasts of air always managed to knock some of them off their brooms and send them tumbling into the dark river.
Every wizard taking part in the assault was burning with anxiety.
The Hit Wizards had not forgotten for a moment that they were fighting an unprecedented battle right before Muggle eyes, and that if the crisis was not resolved soon, there was no telling how bad things might get.
Amid hundreds upon thousands of curses, one green curse, fired by who knew whom, grazed past Sirius's scalp and broke him out in a cold sweat.
The battle had by now gradually turned into a contest of magical attrition between the two sides, and only when one side ran out of magic first would this war end.
Looking into the barrier of light, at the prisoners standing on the steel girders one after another, Sirius's expression turned ferocious.
Clang!
In the air, a goblin unskilled at flying a broom narrowly dodged a palm slapped down by the giant, but the sudden wave of dizziness left it clinging to its broom and unable to avoid the vicious curse that came flying at it from the girders.
At the last possible instant, Sirius flicked his wand and threw up a barrier in front of the goblin.
But the exploding curse tore through Sirius's magical barrier at the same moment, and the violent blast of air instantly hurled the goblin off its broom.
Swish!
Sirius's body moved before his mind did, and in the next instant he had caught the goblin tumbling through the air, hauling it up by the arm.
The goblin was hardly bigger than a child, with a thin, clever, grey-green face and long, nimble fingers, wearing the black tunic of the Gringotts guard now scorched across one shoulder.
"Thank you, Mr. Black."
Hanging in midair by the arm, the goblin gasped several times before it came to its senses, then tilted its head back to thank him, its fingers still trembling around Sirius's wrist.
"Don't mention it, little one!"
Sirius dragged the goblin a little farther from the giant, then looked at the small figure who had lost its broom.
"I'll take you down—your broom's no use to you now!"
"Oh, there is no need, Mr. Black!"
The small goblin swayed in the howling wind, crying out in a shrill voice.
"I can Apparate down!"
"Apparate!"
Sirius gasped in astonishment. He suddenly remembered that the goblin who had brought Alastor the flask a moment ago had likewise appeared on the battlefield by Apparition.
"But this whole area has been covered by anti-Apparition spells! Oh—wizard magic can't stop goblin Apparition!"
Sirius's face lit up with wild joy.
"Little one, can you take me inside the barrier? In an instant?"
"I cannot, Mr. Black."
The goblin gave Sirius an answer that could hardly be called a surprise.
"The barrier protecting the Tower gives off too strong a magical field, Mr. Black. It interferes with the positioning of a goblin's Apparition. I would be torn to pieces."
Sirius nodded, his face turning grim.
"However—"
The little goblin he had saved had been inspired by the problem as well, and said hesitantly, thinking aloud,
"Perhaps… a house-elf's Apparition has great power to penetrate magical defences. Perhaps… perhaps…"
A house-elf?!
Sirius's breath froze, and his eyes went as wide as they would go.
Yes. Yes, that's it!
In the next second, Sirius gripped his broom handle, sucked in a sharp breath, and shouted at the top of his lungs into the howling dark,
"Kreacher!!!"
Pop!
On a battlefield rolling with the roar of explosions and thunder, no one noticed one unremarkable pop.
"Young Master Sirius! Your humble Kreacher is….!"
Before Kreacher could fall, Sirius scooped up with his other free hand the elf who had appeared suddenly in midair, badly frightened, flapping his bat-like ears and kicking his thin legs over a drop of several hundred feet.
"Kreacher, listen to me! Can you take me inside the barrier?!"
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