Chapter 218: The Wall of Blades

The runes on the floor of the clearing ran like something alive, and every time they brightened the space above them bent a little out of true.

Volodya and Sokolov cast in a rhythm that never varied. Their Stupefys came at fixed intervals into fixed places, weaving across the narrow ground until there was very little of it left to stand in, while Krum and Vasiliev came round the flanks with something considerably worse than a Stunner gathering at their wand-tips.

"They are driving us." Edward went sideways and a red beam went past his ribs and broke into ripples across the flame shield. "If they wanted us finished they would have closed. They are keeping us moving, which means they want us somewhere."

Harry turned a binding curse aside with an Impedimenta and got his breath back in one piece. "The centre."

"Every trap in this maze has been pushing that way since we came in. That is a drive, not a defence." Edward's eyes went up to the thorn walls, which were closing by inches on both sides and doing it far too evenly to be a plant. "So we go the other way. Now."

Fleur understood before he had finished. Her wand came round in a long clean arc and she put a gale into the hedge on the right, and the thorn tore open on a narrow black passage.

The three of them went through it at a run, straight away from the centre.

Behind them, Volodya and Sokolov stopped for half a second. It was the pause of a thing that has been given an instruction and has met a circumstance nobody wrote into it. Then both wands came round together and something thick and black came off them, and the passage floor turned into a boiling swamp under their feet.

"Fire Path."

Edward put his wand down to the ground and the gold-red went out across the surface and set, and the tar under it went up in a stink of smoke that made the eyes run.

"Finite Incantatem." Fleur took Sokolov's next spell apart before it had finished leaving his wand.

They ran the fire path and got to the end of it, and the end of it was where the night stopped being merely dangerous.

Books came up out of the ground ahead. Dozens of them, heavy and old and bound in dark leather, rising until they hung level with a man's chest and then opening. The pages turned by themselves, faster and faster, and where the paper caught the light there were dark green runes worked into the margins, and every page that turned came away from the spine as a blade and hung there.

Within seconds the passage was closed off by a slow turning wall of paper edges, and the draught coming off it was cold and smelled of dust and old glue.

Edward knew it from a book of his own. It was medieval work, and it had been built to keep thieves away from libraries rather than to kill anybody, and whoever had put it here had gone into the original and changed what it was for. That took time, and it took access to the text, and neither of those things was available to a student.

"The paper burns." Fleur had her arm up in front of her face. "The bindings do not. There are fire-protection charms on every cover."

"Then we burn the paper and go through the gap the covers leave."

The flame came off him and did not spread. It gathered instead, and took a shape, and what stood in front of them a moment later was a gryphon made of fire twelve feet at the shoulder, which was a piece of conjuration he had first managed six weeks earlier and had never yet done twice in a night.

It stood a moment with the light of itself running along the headstones of thorn on either side, and then it went into the wall of books with its wings open.

The noise was appalling, paper edges shrieking against fire. Book after book curled and went black and came apart, and the covers held, glowing sullen green, refusing. Sweat came out along Edward's hairline. Holding a conjuration that size and driving that much heat through it was taking his reserve out of him the way a broken sluice takes water.

"There." Harry had his arm out. Three of the volumes had burned through to the boards and gone, and where they had hung the turning wall now had a gap in it about the width of a man.

Fleur went first and Harry after her. Edward held the gryphon until both were clear, then let go of it, and went through the gap himself as a line of fire and came out the other side on his feet. Behind him the whole corridor lost its support and came down at once, and burnt pages drifted onto the path like black snow.

They had perhaps four seconds to be pleased about it.

The passage ended in a wall of blades. They stood vertically, edge outward, hundreds of them, each one shining a faint blue with rune-work etched down the length of the steel. Nothing about it belonged to the maze the school had built. It had been put there afterwards, by somebody who had considered the possibility that three champions might work out what the runes were doing and try to leave.

"Together, and fast." Edward did not offer an alternative because there was not one. "Stay inside the shield and do not slow down."

He took the flame shield out to the limit of what he could hold and it closed over all three of them, and they went at the wall with him at the front.

The blades came against it and screamed. The shield rang and rippled and bent inward and held, and the steel went past them a hand's breadth from their shoulders on both sides, close enough that Fleur turned her face away from it. They were three quarters of the way through when the light changed.

Every rune cut into the ground behind them came on at once.

What came out of the pattern was not a spell. It was space itself giving way, arriving like water through a broken dyke, and it went through the flame shield and simply undid the structure of it as though the thing had been drawn rather than built.

Edward felt himself taken hold of. It was not a blow and there was nothing to push against; it was a hand closing round him that had no surface, and everything in his body objected to it at once.

The last things he saw came in a single second. Fleur going backwards out of the shield with her arms up. Light coming in over the top of the hedges from outside, silver and urgent, McGonagall's, arriving too late by about four seconds.

And Harry, an arm's length away, with the same thing closing over him. Edward reached for him, but the collapsing space tore the movement apart before their hands could meet.

Then it took them both, and there was nothing at all.