Chapter 436 - Regulus: I Have Intelligence

Chapter 436: Chapter 436 - Regulus: I Have Intelligence

The talking in the tavern hadn’t stopped completely, but everyone had dropped their voices.

At the table by the door, the two wizards had their heads together, lips practically against each other’s ears.

The old man at the bar still stared at his glass, motionless, like he’d fallen asleep.

Nobody looked toward the corner, but every eye was tracking that table out of its edge.

Two white-haired wizards, one an old man with a beard, the other a young hard case with silver-white hair, sitting face to face.

The old one looked delighted. The young one had a leg crossed over the other, about as relaxed as a person could get.

One was studying, the other let himself be studied.

Dumbledore didn’t rush to speak. He’d already taken in the face and the clothes. Now he was looking at something deeper.

That layer of burning magic at the skin, pushed outward, violent, restless, pressing at everything around it. All of that was surface. Any wizard with decent perception would catch it.

Magic could be released, gathered in, changed in temperature and texture. Any well-trained wizard could do that. But the degree and the method varied enormously.

Ordinary outward release was physiological overflow. It escaped because it couldn’t be held, and in large volumes it felt like pressure, but at its root it was a loss of control, full or partial.

Regulus’s heat wasn’t that. Underneath the released magic, Dumbledore could see the grain of a will. It had direction. It had intent. It had shape.

He wasn’t unfamiliar with this. He’d seen the boy’s guardian will, used to control Fiendfyre, and used in an attempt to merge with the castle’s spatial structure.

That was probably the cleanest thing in him. A wish to protect strong enough to manifest and act on the outside world.

Drawing inward. Gentle, steady, holding a boundary.

Now he was seeing another kind.

Bursting outward. Expanding, violent, a will carrying heat and agitation.

Nothing like the guardian will at all. One pulled in to keep itself from being shaken by anything outside. The other charged out and slammed into every obstacle in front of it.

But looked at closely, the two weren’t opposites.

Protection required strength, and strength required direction. Protection without strength behind it was hollow, and strength without direction just crashed into things blindly.

A thirteen-year-old boy, with two outward forms of will. The same core had grown two complete faces.

This wasn’t the fracturing Dark Magic caused. It came from a will that was whole. He knew what he wanted to protect, and he knew what he had to unleash to do it.

Dumbledore had seen far too many wizards fall to one side. Some could only defend, retreating and retreating until there was nothing left. Some could only attack, until they burned themselves up along with everything else.

Regulus wasn’t like that. He could hold a boundary and clear away everything that threatened it.

Satisfaction flickered in Dumbledore’s eyes, along with relief.

The boy had gone further than he’d expected, and he’d gone there more steadily than expected.

He blinked, his tone light and casual. "When did you prepare all this?"

He grinned, chin lifting slightly, thoroughly pleased with himself. "Yesterday."

Dumbledore chuckled and nodded, his white beard shaking.

"Very thorough preparation," he said, with real appreciation, eyes crinkling. "Extremely thorough. You even changed your temper."

Praising this particular boy probably didn’t mean much to him, but it still needed saying.

Then he looked over the combat gear and added, teasing, "Minerva’s work?"

Regulus glanced down at himself and tugged at a cuff. He meant it. "The professor does good work."

Dumbledore smiled. He could imagine the expression on Minerva’s face while she made it.

Regulus had noticed the moment he sat down that a Muffliato was up around them, cast probably right as he pulled out the chair.

He leaned forward, arms on the table, amber slit pupils meeting the blue eyes, mouth tilting to one side. "You said you wanted to see what I can do."

Dumbledore looked up, something flickering behind the lenses.

"I brought intelligence."

Dumbledore’s eyebrows rose slightly. He folded his hands on the table, his expression turning focused.

Regulus didn’t circle around it. His voice dropped a little. "Last December, I saw him."

Behind the half-moon glasses, Dumbledore’s gaze sharpened.

He knew who was meant. He knew about the Christmas dinner, Lestrange Manor, Bellatrix, the Fiendfyre, Voldemort attending in person.

He had the information, pieced into a rough whole through various channels. But the details you could only get standing in front of Voldemort, those he’d never had.

Regulus started talking, picking out what mattered.

"His appearance has changed. The skin is like wax. From a distance he still looks human, but up close it’s wrong. The texture isn’t a living person’s anymore. It’s closer to... some kind of imitation."

Dumbledore’s blue eyes narrowed slightly.

"And the nose," Regulus said, gesturing at his own face, sliding a finger from the bridge down to the nostril. "The bridge is still there, but the nostrils are narrowing. The whole outline is flattening out. Like a snake, but not entirely."

Dumbledore frowned faintly.

"The eyes are dark red, with slit pupils. In normal light they look like dark human eyes. In the dark they give off a red glow."

He paused, then put a little more weight into it. "His magic can’t be picked up by normal perception. Your eyes see a person standing there. Magic Perception reaches out and gets nothing back. There’s nothing in that spot, like a piece has been cut out of him at the level of magic itself."

Dumbledore’s eyes lowered to the tabletop.

He knew how sharp this boy’s perception was. Being enough to interest Nicolas was a standard in itself.

"What proves he’s there," Regulus went on, "is a tremor deep in the bones, and a response at the level of the soul."

Dumbledore fell silent. He didn’t press for more. His brow was deeply furrowed and the light in his eyes had gone dim.

Regulus didn’t wait for him to speak. "The way he looked at Bella, it was like looking at something dead."

He’d said this much to Slughorn too, but there he’d stuck to the objective facts without adding any judgment.

With Dumbledore he could go a bit further.

"My guess is that he paid a price for some kind of power, or to reach some kind of state. The ability to empathize, the ability to connect with people. Those are draining away."

What had happened to Voldemort’s soul, how many pieces it had been split into, and by what method, none of that was something he should know, and none of it would leave his mouth.

Horcruxes weren’t really that remarkable a secret among Pure-blood families with any history.

Secrets of the Darkest Art, Life and Death: The Secret of Horcruxes, Magick Moste Evile, Theory and Practice of Dark Arts.

They were all recorded in those books, and none of them were unique copies. Every family had them on a shelf somewhere.

The concept, the principle, the danger. Anyone who’d read them knew roughly what was involved. Anyone with a functioning brain wouldn’t touch it.

Soul damage happened often enough. Research pushed too far, a curse taken from someone, years spent handling dark magic. All of it left scars on the soul.

But that was wear. It wasn’t deliberate cutting.

Tearing your own soul open and stuffing the fragment into a container meant dismantling yourself by hand, then expecting the removed parts to keep dragging the whole machine along.

Not many wizards in a few hundred years had that kind of nerve.

But it couldn’t come out of his mouth.

Horcruxes, tearing the soul apart to step over death. That was Voldemort’s most central secret.

At this point in time, apart from Voldemort himself and possibly Slughorn, nobody knew about it.

Knowing what a Horcrux was would be perfectly normal. Knowing that Voldemort had made them would require an explanation.

Dumbledore might start thinking there was some overlap between him and Voldemort that shouldn’t exist.

So not a single word of it. Loss of humanity was enough. The old man could assemble the rest himself.

Dumbledore was quiet for a long time. Then his eyes lifted from the table to Regulus, and he sighed, his beard trembling slightly.

The feeling in his eyes was complicated. Regret, tiredness, and a heaviness.

He was thinking of the Tom he used to know.

The boy in the orphanage who used magic to get back at the children who bullied him. The student walking alone down a Hogwarts corridor with his books. The Prefect who produced a perfectly appropriate smile for every professor.

Back then he still had the capacity to connect with people. Superficially, calculatedly, but at least he needed others.

He didn’t need them anymore.

When a person stops needing anyone, all that’s left is himself.

Loneliness at least still wants company. He didn’t even have loneliness.

He’d torn the human parts off himself piece by piece and traded them for power. Now he stood at the top of that power and looked down, and there was nothing underneath.

Regulus waited a moment.

The old man showed no sign of asking anything further. He just sat there, then raised his eyes and looked at him again.

Dumbledore might guess more. That was his business. He might already have certain leads. That was his business too.

That was all Regulus could say about Voldemort.

He put the thought aside and kept going.

"Voldemort is putting together a Werewolf army. Fenrir Greyback, northern Yorkshire, an abandoned mining village. Thirty or forty Werewolves holed up there, and they’re still biting people to grow the numbers."

"He’s controlling them with supplies and territory. Food, daily necessities, potions to ease the pain of transformation. The condition is that they cooperate with the wider plan and don’t attack wizarding settlements outside the designated targets."

Dumbledore’s brow relaxed.

Voldemort’s soul and body were core-level problems. A few dozen Werewolves were a tactical deployment. Not remotely the same order of magnitude.

But the blue eyes stayed focused, and he nodded now and then.

"Lucius Malfoy told me. There are also Inferi. Voldemort is making Inferi. There was a massacre at Little Hangleton. The scale isn’t clear, but what Malfoy said was that the village was emptied overnight."

"The Ministry of Magic has been infiltrated. Someone’s inside the Auror Office. And the Dementors are loosening their grip."

Some of this Dumbledore already knew. Some were fragments now lining up with what he had. Some was new.

He listened to all of it in silence, and stayed silent a while afterward.

Something ran past the window outside and barked twice. A stray dog, probably, or something else.

Dumbledore looked at Regulus, his voice gentle. "The Inferi, I’m looking into that as well."