"Everything you have! Concentrate everything you have, and strike the giant's head!"
High in the sky, where the gale howled and tore at his robes, Vipor, old in years and bleeding from a long scrape across one cheek, wiped the red from his face with the back of a trembling hand and roared at the top of his lungs.
The allied force, which had been roaming over the Iron giant's body in search of an opening, circling and darting like gnats about a bull, heard it, and understood.
They broke off, streaked up into the heights at top speed, hundreds of brooms climbing together through the smoke and the rain in a vast, shining column, and at the summit of their climb they swung round and raised their wands as one.
Boom!
In an instant, the curses erupting all at the same time blazed like a midday sun and lit the Paris night from end to end.
Endless lightning ravaged the land. A gale without equal tore across the river, so violent that it drained every drop of water from the Seine for nearly two miles around, leaving the old bed bare and shining and scattered with stones.
Like a leaf in the wind, Sirius, with Kreacher in tow, was flung half a mile by the surging waves of magic, tumbling over and over through the roaring dark, before he finally came to a stop.
The instant he steadied himself, Sirius looked toward the giant, unable to wait. One glance turned his heart half to ice.
The clash of two mighty forces had driven the giant back two steps, and even the magical barrier shielding its body had grown thin. But it was still there!
And the allied side had been blown away just as he had, scattered in disarray in every direction.
Roar!
Like a beast out of the ancient world, the Iron giant, which had come out slightly ahead of that exchange, threw back its head and roared at the sky. Its ringing metallic cry was a note so deep and so vast that it shook the whole of Paris, rattling windows ten miles away.
"Damn it!"
Sirius swore furiously and glared at Kreacher.
"Tell me, Kreacher. Is there any way that you can get me through and inside?"
Beneath the rolling thunderclouds, the towering Iron giant would have struck fear into anyone, and it struck fear even into Kreacher, whose whole withered body shook. But he nodded all the same.
"Kreacher can take Master Sirius across the barrier. But Master Sirius, there is something Kreacher must tell Master Sirius—"
"Then take me now, Kreacher, whatever it is! It can wait!"
Sirius roared at him, fired up, his hair streaming in the wind.
Kreacher hesitated for a moment. Whatever he had meant to say rose to his lips and was swallowed again. In the end, he did not disobey Sirius's order. Dangling in midair, he reversed his grip, caught Sirius firmly by the wrist, and in the next instant—
Crack!
After a momentary blur of vision, as though the world had been wrung out like a cloth, Sirius found, to his joyful surprise, that he had leapt clean past the pearly-white magical barrier and was standing on one of the criss-crossing Iron girders that made up the giant's body.
"Nicely done, Kreacher! I shall have to look at you with new— Hsss!"
Sirius had barely finished his excited shout when the sight before him shocked him into silence.
Inside the giant's body, among the tangled girders that rose and crossed like the ribs of some vast skeleton, the Erkstag prisoners stood scattered here and there on every platform and beam.
Some had been working the giant, hands moving in the air; some had been firing out at the allied army; all of them, as though at the same moment, seemed to receive some silent command. They stopped. They turned. And every one of them, in perfect unison, turned to stare at him.
Those pairs of eyes, devoid of feeling and shot through with a flat, terrible indifference, raised goosebumps all over Sirius's body. They looked at him the way a row of dolls looks at a child.
"These people…"
Dazed for an instant, Sirius understood.
"The Imperius Curse can be used like this too? Damn those villains to hell!"
At least forty or fifty enemies were in view. On seeing Sirius, they drew back their wands one after another and, moving like stiff machines, with jerky, mechanical grace, closed in on him from every direction.
Fear flickered through Sirius's grey eyes and was gone. He watched the enemy advance slowly toward him in a grey tide, and he drew a deep breath, and let it out.
"I'll handle these people myself. Kreacher, I need you to do something for me. Please—go out and bring the wizards from outside the barrier in here, as many as you can carry!"
'Please…'
Kreacher gazed up at the resolute face before him. His big eyes, round as tennis balls and cobwebbed over with fine threads, welled up with glistening tears as he blinked, and his crooked nose began to twitch.
"Kreacher means to protect Master Sirius! Kreacher cannot leave— Kreacher, I—"
"If you truly want to help, then do as I say, Kreacher! Now!"
Sirius roared the words. In the instant before a sky-filling barrage of curses broke over them, he gave a wild yell, lunged forward, and ducked behind a girder thicker than his waist, hurling a Shield Charm behind him as he went.
The dazzling flashes of the curses erupting inside the giant's body instantly caught the attention of Vipor, who had been blown onto the riverbank by the great blast and now stood on the bare, muddy stones with his hand pressed to his side, panting hard.
Someone had broken through the barrier's defences!
In that instant Vipor worked it all out. But before he could even show any joy, a house-elf appeared suddenly in front of him, so near that he leapt back a step on instinct.
"You—"
Vipor cried out in astonishment.
But the old house-elf before him, with snot and tears hanging from his face and a bloody tea towel flapping about his thin body, gave him no chance to ask a single question.
He seized Vipor's scorched sleeve in a fist, and a second later Vipor found himself inside the giant's body.
After the young wizards of the allied force entered the Eiffel Tower and engaged the prisoners in combat, the giant became an immobile statue standing in the river, and the magical barrier that had shrouded it dissolved along with it.
Then began the most savage, agonizing close-quarters fighting of all.
Every second, someone fell from the giant's towering body. Every second, the tragically dazzling flashes of curses devoured the lives of wizards, so that the whole giant seemed to be lit from within by a dreadful, flickering festival of lights.
The prisoners of Erkstag, stripped of their reason, had no room to retreat and no thought of it. The wizards of the allied force had no room to give way either. They had to kill every last one of these evil men here, tonight, before the sun rose.
The giant's body had become the most brutal of meat grinders. The flesh and blood of fallen wizards stained the Iron red, running down the girders in thin rivulets, and not even the rain pattering from the sky could wash it away.
But, encouragingly, as time went on, the allied force finally gained the upper hand.
Compared with the elites of the various nations, the Erkstag prisoners had been weaker to begin with. On top of that, while the Imperius Curse made them fearless of death, it also limited how much of their own strength they could bring to bear.
Only ten minutes passed before, on every small battlefield scattered across the giant's body, the allied force had completed the work of cutting the prisoners apart and surrounding them.
Something's wrong!
After a chaotic melee, Sirius, now at the giant's chest, hurled a prisoner aside with a slash of his wand and slipped behind a girder to catch his breath. His arms were trembling. His chest hurt with every breath.
He pushed back a lock of hair that rain and blood had soaked and plastered over his eyes, and by the ceaselessly flickering light of the curses, he studied one stiff face after another among the fallen and the fighting.
Every one of them was a stranger's face. Not one of them was one of his familiar "old friends"!
Then…
Where had the Death Eaters been sent?
On the battlefield where explosions still rumbled on without pause, Sirius's blood ran swiftly cold.
Remus's family, and Amelia…
Reason told Sirius they ought to be fine. After all, with what had happened to James and Lily as a warning, Remus would not make any elementary mistakes.
But he could not keep himself from worrying.
The war here had to be brought to an end as quickly as possible.
Sirius clenched his teeth and resolved it in his heart once more.
By now, the situation on the battlefield had grown clearer.
As if sensing their own losing position, all the prisoners, resisting without pause, were gradually converging on the giant's neck, drawing in toward it like iron toward a magnet, as though guarding something there.
In the gloom, a sharp gleam flashed in Sirius's grey eyes.
These prisoners were under the control of the Imperius Curse, and since they could respond in time to changes on the battlefield, that meant the wizard controlling them was nearby!
"Kreacher—"
Sirius called softly, and at once Kreacher appeared out of the dim air at his elbow.
"Master Sirius, Kreacher has been helping with the fighting too, sir! Kreacher has defeated two of the villains!"
The tea towel Kreacher wore was soaked red with blood; clearly, he too had been through fierce fighting, and there were cuts on his arms.
"Ah, well done, Kreacher."
Looking at the panting Kreacher, Sirius pressed his lips together, and a pang of emotion began to stir in his chest.
A house-elf's magic might be wondrous, but that did not make them powerful; otherwise it would be wizards serving house-elves by now.
For a house-elf so old he was a candle guttering in the wind, to have come through a battle this brutal was all the more remarkable. Sirius found that he had a lump in his throat.
But on a battlefield where the situation shifted by the moment, there was no time for sentiment. Sirius's face turned grave, and he pointed up at the neck of the iron-tower giant, which the prisoners were plugging with their own bodies.
"Can you help me one more time, Kreacher? I suspect the wizard controlling these prisoners is hiding inside the giant's head. Perhaps you can get me through the blockade!"
"Kreacher has served the Black family all his life, and Kreacher is very willing to serve Master Sirius too!"
Kreacher said it, the fuzz on his ears stained with blood and all, and straightened his bony back. Then he took hold of the finger that the smiling Sirius held out to him. With a crack, they vanished on the spot.
The Iron giant's head had been sealed in by curved girders, which, together with the girder platforms inside, formed an enclosed room, an iron cage hung high above the world.
The instant he flashed out of the void, in that empty iron cage, a figure with green hair and skirt both fluttering on the air made Sirius's eyes go wide with horror.
"Cli…"
Bang!
Squelch!
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