Chapter 281 - 281
Evening at St Mungo's Hospital wasn't much different from morning, or afternoon, or even night. Though, to be fair, people do sleep in the wards at night, and the on-duty Healers see far fewer visitors. There isn't really such a thing as an emergency department here, or anything of the sort, at least not by that name. The on-duty Healers fill that role themselves — they can be called out to emergencies, and they take in urgent patients as well.
But under Smethwyck's supervision, I only worked with what might be called light cases, and in the more serious ones I mostly watched, learned, and so on. I understood perfectly well that I could have handled the medium and severe cases without any trouble, and that's not bravado — it's a matter of record. Whenever I was only allowed to observe or run a diagnosis, I drew the correct conclusions and prescribed the correct treatment absolutely every time — Smethwyck said so himself. But no matter how talented a wizard might be, no one is going to hand him genuinely complex, high-stakes work right away, especially work touching on other people's lives and health. Nothing to be done about that.
Several hours running on tonight's shift, Saturday into Sunday, we spent doing little more than idling and handling light cases. Smethwyck, of course, tried not to waste the time entirely and kept tossing me unusual little problems along the lines of: "Now tell me, Hector, what if a diagnosis like this turned up results like so-and-so?"
Close to midnight, one of the Healers came running in — not a young man, though then again, young Healers are something of a rarity here in general.
"Sir, all available Healers are to report for a call-out," this Healer I didn't recognise looked rather harried, clearly dashing about the hospital. "Assembly in the transport hall in… seven minutes."
"Understood," Smethwyck nodded, but the unfamiliar Healer had already dashed back out of the room. "Wonder what's happened."
"With you?"
"Of course, Mr Granger. Of course."
We left the office, Smethwyck locking it with a charm, and we hurried off down the ground-floor corridors. I'd never once been to the transport hall, but I knew it lay behind a pair of large double doors somewhere along one of the far corridors on the ground floor. On the way we passed another Healer in lime-green robes, hurrying in the same direction as us.
The hall doors stood open when we reached them, and we went in. Not many people inside — seven, all told. All in lime-green robes, focused, discussing something. The hall itself was simply a large stone chamber with a vaulted ceiling. But if you paid attention to the magic itself, you could say with some confidence that there was a runic construction running round the perimeter of the hall. That construction seemed to trace out a great circle across the floor, spanning the entire room.
"What is this place?" I asked Smethwyck quietly, standing beside me, my voice lost in the low murmur of the other Healers' conversations, though the question reached its target all the same.
"For mass Apparition to one wizard's coordinates, or something along the lines of a Portkey. Depends on the circumstances."
"I see. Runes?"
"Among other things."
"Do I need to know how to do anything for this?"
"No," Smethwyck shook his head. "You'll simply get pulled along, same as during Apparition. The main thing is not to resist. If you resist, nothing happens, and you'll just be left standing here."
"Understood."
Before long the array of runes in the floor activated, the first wizard vanished into the Apparition funnel, and the rest were "pulled" along after him, myself included. The sensation really wasn't any different from ordinary Apparition, and a moment later we were spat out somewhere in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of a wood. A moment's analysis of the situation told me it wasn't actually a wood, but something more like a park or a copse on the outskirts of a small town.
We were already being met — by Aurors, though not only in their standard scarlet robes, but in plain clothes too. Some of them looked rather battered. All around, one could easily make out signs of destruction, if not catastrophic ones. Smoke was rising here and there, clearly visible in the light of various dim sources — the odd streetlamp, or an unextinguished fire.
"Good," the senior Auror nodded to us, lighting up the surroundings with a Lumos above his head. "Plenty of wounded and cursed, wizards and Muggles both."
"You pulled us straight into the middle of a battle?" one of the Healers in our group demanded, outraged.
"There's a perimeter of Aurors and DMLE staff," the Auror nodded.
"Let's go," Smethwyck nodded to me, and we made our way over to one of the wizards. "My apprentice and I will handle the wizards."
"Apprentice? Hm, well, that's a state of affairs…" the Auror, somewhat singed, with the hair burnt off the left side of his face — in some previous life he'd evidently been the proud owner of a magnificent moustache, though now only the right half of it remained. "Follow me. We've been bringing the wizards to one spot, it's safer there."
We came out of the copse onto a road and made our way towards one of the single-storey houses, a fairly large one, though its windows had all been blown out, and the light coming from inside was clearly magical, and only in patches.
"Not fit for transport?" Smethwyck asked.
"Anyone who could be hauled off by Apparition or Portkey's already been hauled off," the Auror nodded.
Two more wizards in plain clothes stood on guard at the house, wands ready. We were let through without any trouble.
Inside, everything was in ruins, though the debris and the like had been shoved back against the walls with magic, clearing some space. We walked into a large, spacious room, absolutely littered with the mangled, injured, twisted bodies of wizards. Some still had more or less intact clothing; on others, only charred scraps remained. A few were conscious — no guarantee they were thinking clearly, but conscious all the same.
"So, here—" our guide started to say.
"We'll manage," Smethwyck cut him off, already moving towards one of them. "Hector, can you handle this?"
"Absolutely."
Drawing my wand, I knelt beside the nearest injured wizard and began my examination. Beyond the indirect damage from magic — scorch marks and crusted burns — there was also direct magical harm in the form of curses. Clearly Dark, causing the flesh to rot. First aid had been administered competently, the process halted, but not eliminated, and the burns hadn't been treated at all.
Fighting the curse with local methods could take an unacceptably long time, and it would need specific potions I unfortunately didn't have. If there'd been only one patient, it would have been simple enough — brew it up, he wouldn't die within half an hour. But this was a different matter entirely.
Touching my wand to the wizard's cursed side, I channelled a little Life energy, and with it began to simply squeeze the curse and the corrupted magic itself up to the surface, absorbing it as it came — the bond with the dark phoenix is a genuinely wonderful thing. The unconscious wizard let out a hoarse breath, tensing slightly, and the curse's effect withered away to practically nothing, leaving behind only a relatively harmless, heavily inflamed patch of skin. The body was still at risk, yes, but now the wizard's own magic could help him along. All that remained were the burns, which for a wizard are far more dangerous than inflammation, intoxication or bacterial infection.
The burns… a couple of flicks of the wand, and I removed the damaged, crusted tissue. Stopped the bleeding at once, fed in a little Life energy, and the burns began healing over almost before my eyes, covered by fresh pink skin.
Yes, I'd made use of a few things beyond the local school of magic, but only a little, even if their effect was significant.
Satisfied the wizard would be fine, I moved on to the next. Smethwyck, for his part, had finished with his own first patient too.
One casualty, then another, then a third… At first glance all their injuries looked different, but it came down to a difference in severity, really. The curses they'd suffered numbered only three, and all three were similar, all Dark. The rest of the damage was indirect — from fire, from an explosion, simply being struck by something heavy, that sort of thing. On its own, none of it was much of a problem for a reasonably competent wizard, and I'm sure the Aurors get courses in more than just first aid, something closer to proper treatment. However…
A powerful explosion sounded somewhere in the distance, and things outside were growing noisier.
"I'm not the curious type," I said, glancing at the shattered window, though I couldn't make anything out. "But what's actually going on?"
The Auror escorting us stood nearby, ready at any moment to cover Smethwyck and me.
"Auror Office and DMLE operation," the Auror answered tersely. "Focus on your work."
I couldn't get anything more out of the soldier, and honestly I didn't see much point in pressing him, so I simply carried on healing the wounded.
At one point, I caught sight, out of the corner of my eye, of black trails against the night sky, among the smoke and the moonlight — like rocket trails, except they weren't rockets, moving too slowly for that. Wizards, then. The spell-beams being fired from those trails only confirmed it further. The Auror noticed them too, but only clenched his fists, jaw working, and stayed put, guarding us and the wounded. Another series of explosions rolled through.
Thoughts were swarming in my head — that in this clash between wizards, clearly Death Eaters against the Auror Office and the DMLE, ordinary people were the ones suffering. And yet here I was, a wizard, occupied with a task I'd taken on myself — healing the wounded. Perhaps, if I didn't have shards of memory from all manner of creatures of all manner of size and completeness filling those shards, I'd have burned with righteous fury at the situation and gone charging off to punish everyone involved, but…
But somehow that doesn't work, not while it's not me or my own being touched. Selfish? Yes. I have the means to do a great deal, after all, but all these riots, uprisings, internal civil conflicts, armed clashes… all of it is such a savage game that once you stick your nose in, they won't let you out again until it's over, one way or another, or until you die. But the worst part is that in a matter like this there's no right side or wrong side, nothing at all — there's only the advantage and the interests of whichever faction is stirring up or putting down whatever uprising happens to be at hand.
And who suffers in situations like this? Right — ordinary folk. My drive for power isn't born of some wish to impose my own game on anyone; it's so that I won't be an ordinary bystander. So that I and the people close to me don't get crushed by whatever "forces" happen to come along, and so that if those forces ever decide it might be handy to use me, I'll be in a position to push back against that force.
Neutrality is the hardest thing in the world to actually achieve. It sounds so simple to say: "I'm not with you, and not with you either, and honestly, not with anyone." Except nobody cares in the least about your declarations, and if you happen to hold any power that matters to one side or another, or offer some other advantage, they will try, by every fair means and foul, to drag you onto their side — including dirty tricks, or outright force. And it's precisely to avoid that sort of thing that you need enough strength to knock both sides of a conflict flat on their backs, ideally at the same time.
I suspect that's precisely why the so-called "neutral faction," in the country's economy and politics, ends up dominant in every meaningful sense.
Thoughts of that sort kept circling in my head while I moved from one wounded man to the next.
"Are ordinary people being treated too?" I asked Smethwyck, who was working magic over a patient nearby.
"Of course. I suspect that's exactly why they called in such a large group."
"No fatalities yet," the Auror said. "Not among the Muggle civilians. But it's cost us two Aurors and three DMLE officers already. The situation's more or less stabilised — they've called in Obliviators and repair crews."
"Repair crews?"
My question made the Auror pause his scanning of the surroundings and the sky through the window long enough to glance at me — but only for a moment.
"They handle rebuilding the damage. Whatever anyone thinks, the Ministry has fairly extensive agreements and obligations towards the Muggles and their government. Regarding incidents of this sort."
I'll choose to believe there are no fatalities among the civilians, and that some of the damage will be repaired. Though it's hard to even imagine what ordinary people go through, having lived their whole lives within their own picture of the world, only to find themselves, one night, caught up as victims of a clash like this one. Flashes of light, real magic, explosions, people vanishing into thin air, and all the other ordinary miracles of magic, under circumstances like these, could easily shatter someone's mind entirely. An Obliviate might not fix a thing, in a case like that. Hm.
When you find yourself in the middle of a combat zone, one of two things happens: either the extraneous thoughts shut themselves off and you carry out whatever task is in front of you, even if it's purely reflexive — running, or fighting back — or, the opposite, those thoughts start overwhelming you instead, landing moral blows on your psyche from the most unexpected directions, tearing down whatever shaky principles and convictions you'd built for yourself. Fortunately, that elf shard brought its own set of principles and convictions along with it, and they're rather solid, rather unshakeable. Right now, I'm here to heal the wizards entrusted to my care and, if necessary, to see to their safety. Everything else is secondary.
"The enemy's practically been pushed back," the Auror said, clearly relaying something over some means of communication with his colleagues.
Going by the feel of the magic, and by the sounds outside in general, the situation really did seem to have more or less settled down — everything had gone quiet, only the odd shout or cry carrying from somewhere, and the occasional flash of light in the distance.
"Is it a big town?" I asked, working on my last patient, under the gaze of the few who were still conscious but too exhausted and worn out to move.
"Village," the Auror answered. "No more than a hundred households."
"I see," Smethwyck said, standing beside me as I finished treating my patient, "you're managing quite well even without potions."
"I've got a lot of talents. The situation calls for using them."
"That's true, however—"
A distant howl cut Smethwyck off. Those still conscious flinched, and the howl began multiplying, blending into a single continuous wave.
"Werewolves," the Auror tensed, and even glanced briefly up at the moon. "But it isn't the full moon."
"There are potions for shifting," I recalled a couple of facts.
The situation was heating up fast. One of the Aurors on guard came dashing straight up to the window, very nearly catching a spell to the face from our escort — well, one shouldn't go jumping about like a jack-in-the-box when things are turning that dicey around you.
"Werewolves out there! We're properly buggered!" this newcomer announced, rather briefly and to the point, poking his head in from outside. "How are the wounded?"
"Still not fit for transport," Smethwyck answered. "And I can feel a Portkey block, besides."
I'd never come across any kind of anti-Portkey protection before, so it took me a moment to place that magical sensation at the edge of my awareness. It felt quite different from both the Anti-Apparition barrier around Hogwarts and other anti-Apparition measures generally. Had I been standing right beside whatever was generating the interference, I might have been able to work out the meaning of the active charms or spells on an intuitive level, but not from here.
"Merlin's beard," our Auror, standing by the window, breathed out. "Can't Apparate them out."
"There are civilians too," I reminded him.
"To hell with the Muggles," the Auror outside waved a hand. "We don't even know how many werewolves there are."
"By the howling — no fewer than two dozen. A small pack," Smethwyck said, nodding gravely. "So we hold the line, then."
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