Days of blissful idleness — that's how I'd describe the not-quite-a-week following my visit to Amber.
Having acquired that particular instrument of retribution for any future need, I settled down somewhat, shut myself in at home, and spent as much time as possible with the family. There is, admittedly, one pursuit that's been consuming a fair portion of my free time — house design. And that particular endeavour comes with quite a lot of running around. But I'll take things in order.
On the sixth of July, first thing in the morning, right after the family breakfast, I headed to Diagon Alley — not alone, but with Hermione. My little sister had arranged to meet some girls from her year the day before: a walk, a chat, and so on. Naturally, they'd settled on Diagon Alley as the meeting point, and from there, according to Hermione, they might pop in for a get-together at one of their houses.
— You always dress so formally, — she said, glancing at me as we stepped out the front door, — when you go for a walk?
— Well, I'm not just going for a walk, — I adjusted the lapels of my dark-navy suit.
— Then you really ought to get a proper bag if you're going to be so businesslike...
— The thought had occurred to me, but I'd rather not multiply the number of bags I carry.
The rucksack, though it looked surprisingly decent even with a sort of business suit, still felt slightly out of place — practical, certainly, but not quite right. Hermione was dressed the way she usually was at school: jeans, a long-sleeved jumper, and a windbreaker slung over her arm in case it turned cool.
We walked together down the road, putting some distance between us and the house.
— Shall we Apparate, or do you want to get there some other way? — I asked, offering my hand.
— You don't actually think I'd reject the practical option just for the sake of the rules, do you?
Hermione took my hand, clearly a little nervous. A moment later, I brought us to the back courtyard of the Leaky Cauldron, opened the passage to Diagon Alley at once, and led her through by the hand.
— Not nearly as bad as the books described, — my little sister was taking stock of her own reactions. — Right, I'm off. The girls have probably been waiting at the café for ages.
— Go on, then.
Hermione practically broke into a run towards the café, on whose summer terrace four Gryffindor girls from various years were already seated at a table. I, meanwhile, had a rather different establishment to visit — one I had very little desire to enter, but if I intended to exist in the wizarding world, I'd simply have to.
At the doors of Gringotts Bank stood a goblin in armour, projecting an air of quite impossible self-importance. Small, hook-nosed, malevolent. And that's no prejudice on my part — I could see the malevolence in its eyes. Malevolence and a hunger to take a bite out of a person. Without salt, even.
Walking past the guard, I pushed open the door and found myself in a vast hall with extraordinarily high ceilings and crystal chandeliers beneath them. The floor was smooth stone polished to a mirror finish, the customer counters, the columns — nothing had changed since my last visit. Goblins in business suits and frock coats performed the role of civilised beings, working with papers, jewels, or money, ferrying folders of documents back and forth, or busying themselves with other such tasks.
There were few wizards about, and I found an unoccupied counter without difficulty, heading straight for it.
— Good morning, — despite my feelings about these little creatures, my face showed nothing but an immaculate, polite smile.
The goblin behind the counter — which was, incidentally, far too high — displayed absolutely no inclination to acknowledge me, either with any speed or at all. The fact that I was forced to look up at him was also mildly irritating.
The goblin deigned to notice my existence, set down his quill, and looked at me.
— What does the esteemed wizard require? — the absence of any actual esteem in his words was hardly difficult to detect.
— If you would be so kind, esteemed sir, — I replied in precisely the same tone, — I'd like to exchange Galleons for Muggle pounds.
— How many?
— A thousand Galleons at the current rate. Sir.
— The money, sir, — the goblin tapped a claw on the counter in front of him: Put it there.
Removing my rucksack, I used magic to float the coins — a complex gold alloy — out of the opening, stacking them in piles of ten before the goblin. The goblin channelled Snape, raising one long, curly eyebrow with a faint air of surprise. Once the full sum had appeared, the goblin produced a bundle of notes from behind the counter and counted through them in a single motion, as though shuffling a deck of cards. Then he produced a smaller stack, counted those, and removed one spare fifty-pound note. He added several smaller denominations after that, followed by a small amount of loose change, and only then swept all the Galleons away.
— Your... money. Sir, — he smirked.
Right, yes. Perfectly clear that ordinary paper money was not Money — capital M — in the eyes of goblins or wizards.
— Thank you, — taking the notes, I could tell easily enough that they were genuine, free of any magical tampering, at least as far as magic could determine. — Sir.
I tucked the money into my rucksack, gave the goblin a nod, and made my exit as briskly as possible. It genuinely irritates me that the wizarding monetary system sits in the hands of intelligent predatory little creatures for whom a human being is a menu item. No, truly — the decision to leave them alive was clearly a mistake, carrying the faint whiff of some medieval equivalent of deranged liberalism. Exterminatus would be warranted, for the common good, naturally. But I'm repeating myself. And I won't do it anyway. Hm. Does this make me a bigot? Werewolves — to the knife. Goblins — to the knife. Giants, incidentally, ought to be exterminated as well — they're the same sort of predatory creatures, ones for whom a human is food and a wizard is dangerous food you can negotiate with for miracles and more food.
I left the bank in a tolerably good mood, having come away with roughly six and a half thousand pounds. The Galleon's purchasing power against the pound had been rising rather sharply, but I feared it wouldn't last — a crash, or something worse, seemed likely. Unfortunately, I am no financier, and that particular domain of knowledge is not on my list for the foreseeable future. Neither is construction — which is, incidentally, precisely why I'd converted the Galleons. The wizarding firms offering architectural design services — there is exactly one of them — charge an absurd amount even for a rough draft. It's far simpler to use an ordinary Muggle firm. Honestly, the nerve of them, running a monopoly like that.
. . . . .
In principle, I could draft the basic floor plan myself — and I'll have to do it myself regardless — but everything else... Building technologies, materials, all of that, which I understand nothing of and can only evaluate in finished form thanks to what scraps remain in the dwarf shard's memories — all of that is essential. Yes, I could reinforce everything with magic, achieve excellent structural integrity and practicality, but I'd prefer to do things properly rather than end up with something like the Weasleys' house. I've nothing against the Weasleys, and I understand perfectly well that Mr and Mrs Weasley made their home as good as they possibly could. Only that doesn't change the fact that their little house is something out of a fairy tale. A frightening one. All that's missing is some grey wolf to come along, huff properly, and bring the whole thing down on everyone inside.
Walking along Diagon Alley, which was busier today than it had been of late, I glanced over at the summer terrace of Fortescue's café — Hermione and her friends were chatting away with enthusiasm over ice cream. Well, the weather today promised to be sunny and hot; why not have an ice cream? They noticed me, waved — I nodded back.
Passing the twins' shop, above whose entrance canopy a rather surreal enormous figure of a magician in a top hat had been installed — clearly meant to move, though currently static — I spotted the twins themselves through the windows, working at something, dressed casually, covered in grime. I knocked on the window with a flick of magic, caught their attention, and waved. The lads waved back, but the gesture caused Fred to drop something, and judging by the expression on George — now hopping on one foot — the other foot had suffered for it. Fred waved me towards the shop door.
— Hey! — a grime-smeared face appeared from the doorway a moment later. — Come in.
Inside, the shop was nearly finished. A great many colourful shelves, each clearly tailored to specific products, lighting, all the trimmings. There was, for instance, a display stand in the shape of enormous pink flowers with backlighting that immediately caught the eye. Inside each flower — saucers. Given the sickly sweetness of the whole construction, the plan was clearly to stock some sort of girls' merchandise here. And there were any number of similarly specialised stands and shelves, though without actual stock as yet — only the labels on some indicated what would be sold there.
— Just a minute, literally. I was passing by.
— Good, wonderful, — Fred nodded, wiping his grimy face with the sleeve of his work shirt. Unsuccessfully, I should note.
— We've been dreaming up all sorts of things, — George added.
— That's precisely why I stopped in. I'm heading off with the family for almost a month soon, slightly less. It'd be useful to know what to think about, what to design.
— That we can do...
— That we must do...
— Have you got paper? — the twins looked at each other simultaneously, but seeing the incomprehension on my face, nodded. — Right.
— I'll fetch it, — Fred set off up the stairs at something close to a run.
— So, what do you think? — George was smiling, waiting for my reaction to the surroundings.
— Not bad, — I looked around, noting the details once more. — Bright, interesting, not as mundane as Zonko's.
— Well, our stock's completely different. See what we built? — Fred nodded at the pink flower construction I'd noticed earlier. — That's where the simple love potions will go.
— And how love-inducing are they?
— Oh, nothing much, — he waved a hand. — Not a patch on Amortentia. Just enough to get noticed by someone who looked straight through you before. Actually putting something on par with Amortentia on the market would be far too much trouble. You need licences for that, a Master Brewer qualification, the whole palaver...
The thunder of Fred's footsteps as he took the stairs two at a time made us both look towards the staircase.
— Here, — he stopped beside us, holding out around fifteen sheets of covered parchment. — We've put down our ideas for artefacts. All in a more or less sensible and serious direction — no jokes, no pranks.
— The serious goods category, as it were, — George added.
Taking the sheets and putting them in my rucksack, I nodded and smiled.
— I'll read through all of it properly. I think we genuinely could work well together.
— Absolutely, — the twins answered simultaneously. — So you won't stay a bit longer?
— I've still got a sea of things to get through today. Life isn't just boiling over for you two, you know.
— Too right, — Fred grinned. — Though a lot of it we're having to do with our own hands...
— ...For the first time...
— ...And it's going rather poorly.
— I can see that, — I smiled again, looking at the two of them smeared in something unidentifiable and various soot. They grinned back, quite aware of how they looked. — Right, I won't keep you. Good luck. If anything comes up — write. I'll be here another week, then best not to send owls — they might not make it.
— Going far?
— Honestly? No idea. But knowing my parents — it could be absolutely anything.
I left the twins' shop in noticeably better spirits. Not only on account of their artefact ideas, but generally. They really will drive off the gloom around here, and even a visit to a shop not yet fully stocked — but bright and pleasant — does wonders for one's mood.
The next stop planned for that day was a perfectly ordinary firm dealing in architectural design, construction, contracting, and similar business. It was located not far from the centre of London, so I walked there from the Leaky Cauldron.
Getting the managers and specialists to take me seriously — a young lad on his own — and to understand that I wasn't wasting their time proved somewhat problematic. What resolved it? No magic, in the literal sense — rather the perfectly ordinary kind available to anyone: a demonstration of money. After that particular magical persuasion, things began to move, I explained what I needed, and they assured me they'd lay everything out in fine detail — though they'd need at least a rough sketch and floor plan to work from. Bloody bespoke commissions.
I was forced to apply my brain and fairly quickly sketched out in broad strokes the layout of a two-storey manor house with basement levels. I didn't stray from the classic approach — a central hall rising two floors, left and right wings, basement space. Why? Because it strikes me as perfectly functional.
The firm promised to deliver a full project with materials, construction methods, and so forth. I asked them in turn to calculate the cost as though the entire national budget were at their disposal. It makes no difference to me — I'll be creating it all with magic. The important thing is knowing precisely what to create — which is why I'd come to them in the first place.
And that, in essence, was the sole thing for which I spent a fairly substantial but by no means alarming sum of pounds. And the whole day, too — but that's beside the point.
The remainder of the time before the family trip — wherever we're going, no one's said yet — I spent essentially at home, and aside from the usual household business, I had one project: working in greater detail on the house layout, using the sphere for three-dimensional modelling. The firm promised to have the plans ready within two weeks — I wasn't their only client. The completion date fell during my absence, and I'd warned them accordingly — I'd come and collect it myself when I returned; there was no need to send it anywhere to anyone.
---------------
Give me Powerstones if you like the story.
If you want to read 60+ advanced chapters, you can do so on my Patreon.
Patreon(.)com/TheRedSpell