The Effigy: Chapter Two
2.
Remus Lupin had been a young man in what he thought of now as the grim old days: Voldemort’s power was just beginning to grow; the strength and number of the Death Eaters was virtually unknown; and the conflict that would eventually erupt into outright civil war was still largely covert. His young manhood had been spent with all his closest friends; but instead of living care-free they had each played parts in a deadly game of spy-versus-spy, each working for the Order of the Phoenix when it had still been new.
Lily and James, newly married, had also wedded their particular talents for charms and transfiguration, and had made themselves a formidable team. They had already come into direct conflict with Voldemort himself once, and had successfully defied him.
Peter Pettigrew, with his affable manner and plump, non-threatening persona, had been uniquely suited to keeping his ears open without attracting much attention himself; the Order had set him to listening in a low-level job in the Ministry of Magic. Peter had been largely instrumental in the Order’s discovery of a fairly extensive Death Eater intelligence network within the Ministry itself, though he had not been able to learn the identity of the central spymaster who ran the ring.
Remus had been working on a new technique for reaching the broken minds of Order members and others who had sustained severe spell damage, combining elements of his working knowledge of Legilimency with some of his own unique, hard-earned abilities. He had believed he was nearing the achievement of a successful methodology, and would be ready to apply his theories in real life soon.
Sirius had wanted to be an Auror, but was well aware that his notorious family name alone would have been more than enough to keep the doors of the Ministry firmly shut to him. He did not even try to apply for admittance into the Auror training program; no Black could expect to be given any Ministry position during this time of growing suspicion and paranoia, and especially not while Barty Crouch was the Head of Magical Law Enforcement.
Sirius had done his best to swallow his own frustration and anger over a situation that, while dreadfully unfair, could not be remedied, so he poured all his passion into working for the Order instead. Because he was an unregistered Animagus, and because his alternate form, a dog, was a common enough animal to pass unnoticed in most situations, Sirius mostly specialized in infiltration operations. Though no one other than his closest friends in the Order knew how he did it, he could, thanks to Padfoot, often get inside places that were impenetrable to other wizards; he had managed to intercept quite a few secrets and had derailed a number of Death Eater plans in this way. The irony of this, that he specialized in passing through closed doors for the Order partly because he could never open certain doors for himself, had not been lost on him.
It had been this, in part, that had led Sirius to the creation of the new spell that was at the heart of Remus’ peculiar memory. Sirius had developed a bit of a reputation amongst their enemies, a sort of tissue of whispers that suggested that no sensitive information should be passed and no secret meeting should be undertaken without first determining precisely where the elder Black son was. To the Death Eaters, he seemed to be a bit like smoke, with ears in the unlikeliest places yet almost impossible to accurately track himself. A sort of a superstitious mystique had grown up around him among them, and though Sirius often laughed with contempt at the way Voldemort’s followers reflected their master’s rather credulous ways, he did not appreciate the way the extra attention had begun to hamper his own operations for the Order.
So he started work on some secretive project that, he had told Remus, might solve this problem: but he said nothing about the details, claiming it was too early to tell if the magic he was developing would work or not. All Remus knew was that he had taken to poring over a variety of antique grimoires, had laid in a supply of different aromatic woods and incenses, and, oddly, had destroyed large numbers of small, inexpensive mirrors in his research. Remus would often find the silvery shards in their rubbish bins on mornings after the dark of the moon and other significant astronomical configurations.
Sirius had been working on his project for some six months when Shacklebolt, the young Auror, had positively identified Ludo Bagman as one of the links in the Death Eater network at the Ministry. Most of the Order agreed that Bagman was probably an unknowing dupe and was highly unlikely to have the faintest idea that he was working, indirectly, for Voldemort. The consensus had been that Bagman’s genius was strictly limited to Quidditch, and off the pitch, he could be a bit of an idiot, gullible and trusting. But he could, however, possibly lead them to the mysterious central figure in the network, whom Pettigrew, despite all his efforts, had still been unable to uncover. So the Order had begun to watch Bagman carefully, tracking his every encounter with everyone, social or otherwise, within the Ministry and without.
Unfortunately, all their surveillance came to nothing. They learned that Bagman had something of a gambling problem, and was a bit over-fond of pub-crawling for a professional athlete, but they were unable to discover who any of his contacts were, since the flow of intelligence he had been passing had dwindled to a trickle of purely innocuous facts in a suspiciously short time. As Moody had put it at an Order meeting: “Fire and Brimstone! They know we’re watching the damn fool! How in hell did they find out?”
Dumbledore had been the one to suggest that they choose some small secret of their own and deliberately leak it directly to Bagman, thus making it possible to see who he talked to and how the specific secret would make its way into the Ministry network. It was like passing a phony Galleon to a mark in a counterfeiting scam, Caradoc Dearborn had said. But this plan could hardly yield results if the Death Eaters were aware that Bagman was being watched. The trick, everyone agreed, was how to make Voldemort’s agents believe it was safe to contact Bagman. Remus had said it was an interesting problem in misdirection.
And then Sirius had piped up.
“I think I might be able to handle the… misdirection part of it,” he’d said. “I’ve been working on something…”
“That odd little project of yours?” Remus had asked him, interested. “The one you’ve been so closed-mouthed about?”
“Well…maybe. We’ll see. I think it’s ready, anyway. Put me and … and … Remus on Bagman’s tail for the time being, all right Albus? Just us, us exclusively.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Black,” argued Dorcas Meadows. “They’ll make you at once! It’s gotten so they won’t even blow their noses unless they’ve pinned down your exact location first. They watch you more than they watch any of us!”
James had been looking at Sirius intently. “I think, Dorcas…” he’d said, pausing for a moment. “I think that’s the idea. Sirius?”
“I imagine there must be some use for the high profile the bloody wankers have given me, yes, James. I think I may have a way to fox ’em, in any case.”
“Have you put together some new spell, Sirius?” Peter had asked, in admiring tones. “You’re so good at that. Something clever to throw them off the track? What is it?”
But Sirius had declined to say, claiming that it was all very new and he did not know for certain if it would work and he’d rather just play it out in the field first, like test driving a new broomstick. Afterward, at home and in the privacy of their bedroom, Sirius had explained to Remus that there was clearly a leak somewhere in the Order, and though he just couldn’t believe that anyone who had been at the meeting could have been a spy, he had also just not felt comfortable revealing the details of his new magic to anyone but Remus. If nothing else, the new spell was devilishly difficult and the Arithmancy calculations had been awful skull-busters and he was just as likely to have the whole thing blow up in his face as he was to cast it successfully.
In which case James, of course, would never let him live it down.
Dumbledore gave Sirius permission to try his plan, reasoning, no doubt, that even if whatever Sirius was planning didn’t work, they would be no worse off than they had been originally. So Sirius and Remus had taken to following Ludo Bagman around, and often being, to Remus’ mind, ludicrously obvious about it. Once, in fact, Bagman himself had spotted them in the Leaky Cauldron and had brought a pitcher of butterbeer over to their table and invited himself to join them for the evening, prattling gaily for hours about Britain’s prospects at the next World Cup. Meanwhile, Pettigrew had accidentally-on-purpose mentioned to Bagman that he’d seen Albus Dumbledore at the Hogs Head Inn in Hogsmeade on two successive Tuesdays, and that each time he’d engaged a private room and had had some sort of meeting with a number of witches and wizards, and wasn’t that a peculiar thing for the Headmaster of Hogwarts to do?
Several weeks of this woefully obvious surveillance went by, Pettigrew’s planted information had not yet been passed, and Remus was beginning to get irritable. He did know that Sirius actually intended the Death Eaters to get a damn good look at him and Remus watching Bagman, but it was totally inimical to Remus’ rather secretive nature to engage in any ploy that was meant to attract attention. On the evening that they’d followed Bagman to some disreputable dive in Knockturn Alley, Remus had resorted to sarcasm, as he often did when he was feeling grumpy.
“There,” he’d said to Sirius, as they stood together on the pavement three doors down from the pub Bagman had just entered. “He went inside that rathole down the street. Shall we get out our ‘Order of the Phoenix’ hats and our ‘Ludo Bagman Surveillance Team’ badges before we follow him in?”
Sirius had only snorted quietly and taken Remus’ arm, swiftly walking him toward a dark, crooked alley down the block. Once they’d entered the alley, Sirius continued to pull Remus further down it, muttering things like “cranky bugger” and “sarcastic git” and so on as they’d moved deeper and deeper into the alley’s darkest corners.
They’d turned the last dingy corner and Sirius had pulled Remus along with him as he’d slipped behind some smelly rubbish bins where the alley dead-ended.
“Here,” Sirius had said, excited. “This seems private enough.”
“Private enough for what?” Remus had asked as he watched Sirius begin to pull various objects out of his pockets.
Sirius looked at him sharply in response, then mumbled “…like waving a red flag in front of a bull…” under his breath, and quickly stole a kiss from Remus. Remus had not been quite sure whether to be annoyed or tickled by this.
“Oh, Padfoot, you’re so romantic!” he said, once Sirius had finished with him. “You take me to the nicest places, honestly! Is that a dead fish in that bin over there? Or a dead cat? This seductive setting is positively making my head spin!”
“Complain, complain, complain. There’s just no pleasing you, Moony. Anyway, I didn’t drag you down here just to snog you, adorable though you are. I think my new spell is finally ready and I’m going to try it out tonight.”
“Really? Why tonight? What does it do?”
“Well,” Sirius answered, removing things from his pockets once more. “I hope it will make whoever’s been watching us watching Bagman think they know exactly where I am. Only they won’t, see?”
“Well, no, I don’t see, actually.”
“You will,” Sirius replied, using a shaker jar of some greenish powder to pour out a six-sided pentacle on the ground at their feet.
He began to put various items into the center of the pentacle, things he had taken out of his pockets. A small lock of black hair that looked to Remus like Sirius’ own, several sprigs of mistletoe and twigs of beech, a vial of what appeared to be mercury, a small mirror that he peered into once and then quickly wrapped in grey silk before setting it down among the other things. Once his magical pentacle was fully assembled, he took out his wand.
“Or I hope you will, anyway,” he added, and drew a glowing sigil in the air over the pentacle with his wand. “Wish me luck. I’m still not sure how it will come out.”
“Luck,” Remus breathed absently, fascinated.
“Speculum Incendio,” Sirius said, and everything he had placed in the center of the pentacle burst into pale blue flame.
Remus was able to sense a sort of rushing in the air all around them and knew that Sirius was gathering forces, pulling in magic through all the incorporeal channels he knew how to tap. He could see the effort in Sirius’ face, illuminated by the magical fire. The bluish light cast a rather ghastly pallor over his features, and Remus felt a chill at the back of his neck. If not for the intensity of Sirius’ glittering eyes and the wild alertness of his expression, the blue firelight would have made him the very image of a corpse.
The fire blazed higher and its light burned brighter, but Remus could feel no warmth from the flames. A cool fire, then, he thought, and his suppositions were confirmed when Sirius thrust his wand-hand fully into the center of the flames and drew a second sigil. The flame instantly tripled in size and became a blue bonfire, as tall as a man.
“Exsto effigia: praesto ipsemet!” Sirius shouted, and raised his wand, burning blue, straight up towards the heavens. Instantly the tall blaze whooshed inward, a small, contained implosion within Sirius’ pentacle, and then went out with a loud, sharp pop, as though it had been suddenly sucked, light and flame alike, through a hole in the world. The alley they were in went completely black.
Remus heard nothing but the sound of Sirius’ hard breathing for a few moments, and he put his hand on Sirius’ shoulder in the dark as he fumbled in his own pocket for his wand. The scholar in him automatically translated the Latin of Sirius’ incantation into English as he pulled his wand out.
I appear in effigy; I manifest my very own self
Remus held his wand out at breast height. “Lumos,” he said.
There was Sirius beside him, still panting a bit from his exertions and staring toward the pentacle he had drawn. And in that pentacle, there was Sirius too, complete in every detail, gazing calmly back at both of them.
“What…how…how did you..?” Remus murmured, a bit incoherently. “Oh! Now I see why you went through all those mirrors when you were working on this!”
Sirius, or the Sirius at his side, smiled and raked slightly shaky fingers through his hair.
“Yes. I thought I might be able to take a reflection from a mirror and transfigure it into a three dimensional form. It was damnably tricky but…well…it appears I finally got it.”
Remus looked once at the figure standing in the pentacle and then back to Sirius, and then did it again. The juxtaposition was so bizarre that Remus felt a mild wave of vertigo, but he could not stop. He moved a bit closer to the magical copy of Sirius, still standing silently, watching.
“Good heavens, Padfoot,” he finally said. “There’s not a detail missing. It’s an exact match.”
“Not exact, or so I expect,” Sirius said. “It’s a reflection, a sort of mirror image. Everything ought to be reversed.”
And so it was. Sirius had a small scar on the pad of his right thumb, from when a doxy had bitten him as a child. When Sirius raised his hands before him, palms up, his magical reflection did the same. Remus could see that the scar was there, but on the left thumb.
Remus walked all around the magical figure, examining it from every angle. Its eyes followed him as he moved.
“This is just an amazing piece of magic, Sirius,” he finally said. “But, I have to admit … I do find it a bit … eerie.”
“And I have to admit, I agree with you. It is a little creepy. It didn’t ever occur to me that it might be, in the planning stage, but you’re right. Still, it ought to serve its purpose well enough.”
“What is its purpose, then?”
“All right, here’s the plan I propose. You and the …effigy, I suppose we could call it … you take it over to that pub with you and plant yourself near the door, in plain view. Any Death Eaters who are watching will think they have a definite location on both of us, and then-”
“Where will you be?” Remus asked.
“I’ll be Padfoot, just a hungry mutt nosing at the rubbish bins in the back of the pub when Bagman comes out.”
“Okay, I see all that, but - but how do you know Bagman will be coming out the back way?”
“Oh, come on now, Remus, how long have we been following this bloke about? He always goes out the back way if he can, trying to duck out on his tab with the innkeepers. We can bank on that part, I’m sure.”
Remus nodded. “Yes, that’s a reasonable point. All right, so let me see if I have this right - I’ll be out front, along with your decoy here,” Remus nodded his head at the effigy. “And you’ll be-”
“I’ll be absolutely free to slink along after Bagman as Padfoot with none the wiser, however long it takes. But I expect it won’t take long. I’ll be very surprised if someone from that Ministry spy-ring doesn’t ‘just happen’ to meet up with him sometime tonight. I imagine they’ve been just furious not to have been able to pump him for the most recent intelligence while we’ve been watching him. But they’ll think it’s perfectly safe to contact him tonight, because Remus Lupin and ‘Sirius Black’ will be very visibly sat on their backsides in some appalling pub in Knockturn Alley, swilling rotgut gin and too stupid to realize Bagman snuck out the back!”
Remus smiled, a bit wolfishly. “Come to think of it, Paddy, I did see a few pavement tables out in front of the place. Perhaps your twin and I might have a nice little booze-up right out there. Can he … it …can it drink and eat and all that? How much actual consciousness does it have?”
Sirius gazed at his effigy for a moment, still standing calmly in the burnt out pentacle and watching them talk.
“I’m not a hundred percent sure, really,” he said. “I designed it to look convincing, so it ought to be able to eat, drink, blink its eyes, move about naturally, even follow directions. But, as to consciousness … hmmm … it is only a kind of a fancied-up mirror-image, after all. I don’t expect it can really think much. That’s why you need to go with it out there, talk to it, make it look natural. It’ll do as you tell it, in any case, I’m sure of that.”
“What makes you so certain?” Remus asked.
Sirius put his hand on the back of Remus’ neck and stroked gently. “I always do exactly what you tell me, don’t I?”
Remus’ face quirked into a very private sort of smile. “Sometimes…” he allowed. Then he looked back at the effigy.
“How will I know when it’s safe to leave the pub?” he asked Sirius. “That is, how do I know how long to keep playing decoy?”
“Well, that’s the sticky part,” Sirius admitted. “The spell has a preset time limit. I had to run the Arithmancy formulae a million times, but I was finally able to calculate a predictable duration interval. ‘Sirius’ here is scheduled to vanish in exactly three hours and forty-five minutes. That’s the longest I could make it.”
Remus glanced swiftly at the effigy, but it showed no sign of being dismayed to hear the very hour and minute of its impending dissolution. It merely continued to gaze at both of them with a vaguely interested look on its face. Remus’ sense of creepiness intensified and he rolled his shoulders a bit, trying to wriggle the small but persistent chill out of his spine.
“Right, then,” Remus said, trying to sound brisk. “You’ve basically given yourself three clear hours to move about freely, while our enemies think they know exactly where you are. It really is brilliant, Sirius. I suppose I’ll need to hustle the …thing out of the pub before it disappears in a puff of smoke? Certainly that might seem a little suspicious to anyone watching.”
Sirius smiled, a bit uneasily. “No need. It’ll return here at the end of its time on its own. To this pentacle, I mean.”
Remus felt oddly disturbed to hear this, and he spoke without thinking. “Are you saying it will return to its - its birthplace to - to die?”
Sirius frowned, slightly irritated. “There’s no need for such drama, Moony. It’s just a spell. It’s not-”
“Not what? Not you?” Remus interjected.
“Not alive, I was going to say,” Sirius snapped. “And, no, it’s not me - it’s not much more than what I can see in a mirror any day of the week. Now can we please stop frightening ourselves like a pair of superstitious idiots and get on with it? We only have a few hours.”
Remus was beginning to feel as though the proposed strategy might have some gaping hole somewhere its logic that he could not … quite … put his finger on. “But…” he started to argue, and then realized he had no clear idea of what his objections actually were. He went on anyway. “But what if-”
“Look. It’s simple. You and it just have a seat at the pub, have a chat and a few rounds, make a show of checking on Bagman now and again, and give ‘em plenty of opportunity to have a good, long look at … ‘me’. Once three hours or so have passed, you say ‘good night’, and then you leave. All right?”
“You want me to just leave it there alone? And go where?”
“Just go home. I might even be there before you. And maybe I’ll have some interesting news about who our good chum Ludo happened to run into tonight after he left the pub, with any luck.”
“But what about the …the copy? Shouldn’t I stay with him until he comes back here and …you know?” Remus darted another quick glance at the effigy.
Sirius frowned again. “It doesn’t need you to see it off into the great beyond, damn it, Remus. It’s just a spell, I tell you, all smoke and mirrors, literally. Now stop being such a fussbudget, you’re giving me the creeps. It’ll sort itself out when the time comes!”
“All right, all right,” Remus muttered, and some of his formless misgiving made the tone of his voice a bit unpleasant. “Stop barking at me. Let’s just get it done. I’ll see you at home, then?”
Sirius was glancing between the effigy and the mouth of the alley. Then he stopped and looked Remus in the eye.
“Yes, I’ll see you at home,” he said. “And I’m sorry if I was …barking. I’m just a bit wound up, I guess.”
Remus smiled, mollified, and squeezed Sirius’ arm. “Wound up? Not you, Sirius, surely? The Wizard Who Walks Through Walls?”
Sirius snorted, amused. “Now you’re making fun of me, you condescending were-muffin. Don’t think I’m so egotistical I can’t recognize mockery when I hear it. Anyway, if you must know, the truth is…” Sirius let his remark trail off and gazed again at his magical copy.
“Yes? The truth is?” Remus prompted.
“The truth is - I still can’t quite believe I actually managed to do this.” He waved his hand at his effigy. “It’s … it’s not really a very pleasant sort of a spell after all, is it?”
Remus nodded, moving closer to the figure in the pentacle. “No, it’s not. But it really is amazing, Sirius, and I do think it’ll work, in any case. Let’s get underway, shall we? Good luck.” He hesitated a moment and then took the effigy’s arm.
“Perfectly solid,” he commented to Sirius, with a small, rather nervous-looking grin.
“Of course,” Sirius answered, also looking a bit unnerved. “Luck to you too, then.”
“Ummm … hello,” Remus said to the effigy. “I’d like to buy you a drink. Would you walk down this way, please?”
The effigy smiled at him with Sirius’ face, Sirius’ smile. Remus felt his own mouth automatically smiling back in response and he had to control a small shudder. Then the effigy gazed toward Sirius, a questioning expression on its face.
Sirius swallowed. “Go with Moony,” he said to his magical mirror-image.
It stared at Sirius for a moment more, then brought its gaze back to Remus, and once again smiled at him. Remus tightened his hold on its arm by a fraction, and then the two of them started off toward the light of the street at the far end of the alley.
After a few minutes, back in the dark end, a large black dog padded out of the shadows after them.
Story Continues