"Kreacher."
Sirius, who had been flung to the floor, whipped his head around. What he saw made him shudder from head to toe, and the hard, hunted sharpness in his gaze slid slowly into bewilderment.
A black steel spike had grown out of the mesh floor. It was five or six feet long, its tip needle-fine, its base, where it joined the iron, as thick as a man's wrist.
Drip. Drip. Drip…
A thin trickle of blood seeped from Kreacher's pierced left chest, ran down the spike in a dark thread, and fell into the black space beneath the mesh.
Hanging in midair, Kreacher struggled to lower his head and look down at himself. Then a forlorn smile appeared on his face.
"Kreacher?"
The whole world seemed to go silent, leaving only Sirius's voice, small and lost.
"No. No, no, no!"
He scrambled up from the floor and stumbled toward the old elf, his legs not feeling like his own. He looked the spike up and down, from the needle-point to the base, as though he were still working out how to lift Kreacher off it.
"Hold on," he muttered, his hands hovering helplessly. "Hold on. I'll get you down. Don't move. Just don't move, Kreacher, I'll think of something—"
"Master Sirius must not trouble himself so."
Kreacher shook his head, signalling that no one need trouble himself any further. His voice was faint, scarcely louder than breath, and the effort of speaking made a thin red bubble swell at his lips.
"Master Sirius must stop Harry Potter. Quickly, Master."
"Harry?"
Sirius flinched as though he had been struck across the face, and the look he turned on Kreacher grew more bewildered.
"Kreacher has heard that Master Harry insists that he saw Master Sirius captured by the Dark Lord. That he saw Master Sirius being tortured at the Ministry of Magic. And so he and his friends have left Hogwarts, Master. They have gone to the Ministry, to save Master Sirius."
Harry and his friends… had left Hogwarts, to go to the Ministry to save him?
Sirius's mouth fell open blankly. His whole body began to tremble harder than before. Behind them, in the shadows of the iron cage, Cliodna lowered her head.
"Master Sirius…"
Kreacher laboured to raise one hand, and Sirius caught it between both of his own. It was small and bony and rough as bark, and the warmth was already draining from it like water from a cracked cup.
Sirius's expression was still lost.
"I'm here. I'm right here, Kreacher. Say it. Say. I'm listening—"
"Kreacher sees Mistress—"
Kreacher only gave Sirius's blood-smeared, stricken face one long, deep look, and smiled. Then he turned his gaze away, his hazy eyes fixed on something far above the iron roof and the burning sky.
"Ah… yes. Mistress. Kreacher would never mistake Mistress. Kreacher has always missed Mistress, every day, in the dark of the house… every single day…"
He slowly raised his other hand, as though to touch a face that was not there, hanging in the empty air.
A strange, contented smile spread across his ghostly pale face, with its fine white down, and for the first time that night he looked young.
"Oh… my beloved Mistress… She is not angry with Kreacher. She is praising Kreacher! Well done, Kreacher, she says. Well done … and she says… ah, Mistress says, Master Sirius…"
Tears ran from Sirius's grey eyes. He was trembling so badly he could barely hold on, and he pressed that cooling hand harder between his palms.
"…Mistress says Master Sirius is the pride of the Black family, too."
So Kreacher said. He gave Sirius one last look, and one last smile, and then closed his eyes forever.
"Krea—"
Whoosh—BOOM!
Another sharp steel spike shot up from the floor, leaving a fleeting white afterimage on Sirius's eyes.
It drove toward his heart too fast. Neither his mind nor his body could react. All that flashed through his head was a single cold thought: so this is how it ends. He was about to die. He found that he did not even mind, much.
But just as death was about to claim him, a streak of green light, like a shooting star, slid past his side and struck the spike that was aimed at him dead on.
The sudden explosion hurled Sirius away through the air, and Kreacher's body whipped wildly on its spike, like a flag in a gale.
"Enough—"
Cliodna blinked wearily and lifted her head to look across at the far side of the cage.
As though he had lost all feeling of pain, Sirius, slammed hard against the steel wall, showed not a trace of agony. He stared at Cliodna first, a flicker of blank surprise in his eyes.
He had thought it was Cliodna who had just made the move…
Then Sirius followed her gaze to the opposite wall.
A man who had melted into the jet-black wall stepped into view.
Adam did not spare Sirius so much as a glance, as though he were a person of no importance. He brushed a speck of dust from his sleeve with two fingers and straightened his collar.
"So. You have finally decided to betray the Dark Lord, Miss Cliodna?"
Adam smiled calmly, pleasantly, as though all of this had been foreseen.
"Sirius is my assignment, Vogel."
Cliodna regarded this madman with green eyes gone cold and flat, and threads of murderous aura coiled around her like smoke. "You have crossed the line."
"Oh, but there is no need to be so hasty about killing me, Miss Cliodna—"
Adam spread his hands, the very picture of a reasonable gentleman.
"I won't tell the Dark Lord, you know."
"Of course you won't—"
Cliodna said coldly.
"You'll not live long enough. The Allied troops are nearly on top of us. Tonight, you will die here, Vogel."
"Ah, on that point I think we can agree. But—"
The corners of Adam's mouth split wide, and the courteous smile slid by degrees into mania.
"I have no intention of dying at the hands of the Allied forces."
"What are you going to do?!"
Cliodna's gaze froze, and she demanded sharply. But Adam gave no answer. The wand he had raised high came sweeping down with a vengeance, its tip leaving long, shuddering afterimages in the air, and fire poured down upon the world.
In a single instant, Adam himself, the one who had unleashed the Fiendfyre, was swallowed by the roaring flames!
"You lunatic!"
Even Cliodna could not help but go pale in shock. She flung a sheet of green radiance up into the air, and in the single second it bought her, she caught the dazed, broken Sirius around the waist, gathered Kreacher's small body into her other arm, and carried both of them out of the Iron giant's brain!
In the space below, the gruelling battle raged on without pause.
Under the command of the returned Alastor, the Allied wizards, who had been fighting each on his own, cleared out the prisoners held under the Imperius Curse far more efficiently.
"Stay alert, the lot of you! Don't get careless! Spare none of them!"
Streams of bright green curse-light poured from Alastor's wand. He led the Allied wizards with his scarred face streaked with soot and his magical eye whirling wildly in its socket, and his bark carried over the noise.
"Left side, Hit Wizard! Left! No, your other left! Cover him! Cover him, curse you, are you deaf?"
"Yes, sir! Covering!"
They tore through the Erkstag prisoners' defences layer after layer with irresistible force. Now only a hundred or so of them remained, those who had once again committed monstrous crimes that night, hemmed in at the narrow throat that led up to the giant's brain.
All that awaited them was slaughter!
A battle this brutal left even veterans like Alastor and Vipor heavy-hearted on the eve of victory.
Vipor's gaze swept across their surroundings out of the corner of his eye: broken girders, scorched robes, faces turned up toward nothing, a goblin's small boot lying alone on a beam. A wave of sorrow rose from the depths of his heart.
Tonight, the Allied force had lost at least a quarter of its wizards.
For a moment, it was as if he was young again, back in those long-ago years of hunting the remnants of Grindelwald's Alliance across Europe, when every morning at camp a few more familiar faces were gone from the fire.
As the grief and rage ebbed, what burned stronger was the urge to kill.
Vipor, already exhausted, swung his wand without mercy. Like Alastor, he began, without authorization, to use illegal curses, wanting only to cut down these beasts who threatened the wizarding world as quickly as possible.
"Forgive me, Alastor," he rasped, between curses. "I never thought I should have to say it. But tonight the Statute is the least of my worries."
"Forgive nothing! Do it faster!"
Then, abruptly, an eerie sight appeared.
The hundred-some thugs crowded above, who had been resisting, all at once stopped fighting back.
Like marionettes whose strings had been pulled by a single hand, they raised their wands in perfect unison. As the Allied wizards stared in shock, their mouths forming no sound, in the very next instant, hellfire from the underworld descended upon the world!
ROAR!
The roaring Fiendfyre instantly swallowed the very masters who had summoned it, and then, like floodwaters after a dam bursts, went roaring on to swallow the world.
"Run!"
Without a moment's hesitation, Alastor and Vipor bellowed it in the same instant!
"Get out of the giant! All of you, OUT! Run!"
This stretch of river was still bound by the Anti-Apparition Jinx, so the wizards couldn't Apparate. But the goblins still could.
Goblin after goblin, within the narrowest sliver of time, flashed to the backs of the nearest wizards.
"Hold on to me, sir! Do not let go, whatever you do!"
"I can't, I can't, my leg—"
"Then I will hold on to you!"
Crack. Crack. Crack.
They seized the wizards by collar or arm or belt, and slipped away into the void.
No sooner had he landed on the bare riverbed than Alastor turned sharply to look at the giant. He was gasping like a bellows, and his robes smouldered at the hem, and he slapped them out without noticing.
In just a few breaths, Fiendfyre had swallowed the giant's entire body. A colossal giant of flame, lighting up the night sky for miles, stood in the middle of the Seine, its steel limbs glowing orange, then white.
The air around it rippled and shrieked with heat, and the stones of the drained riverbed ticked and cracked beneath their feet.
CREAK!
The ear-splitting screech of twisting steel made many people grimace in pain and clap their hands over their ears.
Then, in the next second, the steel giant, silent for a long moment, moved again. As many stared at it in terror, it lunged toward the Muggle commercial district near the collapsed Goblin Hotel!
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