InsaneJournal

NaNo Fanfic Part 9
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Pairings this part: None, really.  mention of Ron/Hermione and Harry/Luna toward the end
Rating: PG-13
This is my "International Aurors of Mystery" segment.  I now know much more about Magical Society in East Africa than anyone should.  I am a hopeless worldbuilder, what can I say?

March 2003, Anqasa Berhan ("Gate of Light")*, Aksum, Ethiopia

Harry ducked behind a plinth in the abandoned portico of the Aksum branch of Gringotts, and looked across at Ron who leaned, cloaked and with his hair hidden under a black cap, against a closed door across the market street.  The Anqasa Berhan was largely empty of its usual crowds at two in the morning, but the danger of catching civilians (or government property) in the crossfire prevented the local Aurors from advising a frontal assault on the storefront that currently housed Rabastan LeStrange and at least two of his disciples. 

Harry caught Ron's eye and his fingers flashed their simple sign language. Backup? They had called in their sighting of Rabastan twenty minutes ago.  Ron replied with a crude and effective gesture that was not strictly part of the Auror repertoire, but clear enough in meaning. Fucked if I know.

Harry sighed. 

Without backup from the local MLE, their options were limited.  Anti-Disapparition Jinxes were in place over most stores in the Anqasa Berhan as a matter of course, and they had checked this particular building twice.  The back entrance was positively laced with subtle thief jinxes and the windows were all rigged with banshee alarms.  Rabastan and his minions were not going to be able to slip away as they had in Morocco and Tunisia.  But with only Ron and Harry covering the exit, would they be able to strong-arm their way out?

Ron signaled, Movement on the roof.

Harry was going to kill someone in the London office if it turned out Rabastan had learned Voldemort's flying trick.  But there was no flying, only a shadow moving from back to front, and then the tiniest flicker of light.  For the space of two breaths Harry was afraid that sparks calling in assistance for the Death Eater were going up, then he realized that whoever was on the roof had lit a cigarette. 

Really, they had two options.  Storm the front door hoping to catch some of the occupants unaware, which was significantly less likely now that there was a lookout on the roof; or, go with the plan they'd made when they assumed the Ethiopian MLE might respond in something like good time - and perhaps they should have learned from working with London that no MLE responded in anything like good time unless you were communicating with the street officers directly - and have Ron mimic Rudolphus to get the front door open without a ruckus, then Stun everything that moved.

Harry signalled as the man on the roof turned to look out across the city.  Plan A.  Door clear. 

Ron slumped a bit in his cloak, and emerged from the shadows into lantern light.  Harry kept his senses alert, wand at the ready, as his partner walked up to the door and collapsed against it, pounding the wood with one fist.  "Open up, I'm back."  He was barely credible as Rudolphus when he was standing, but slumped against the door it became much harder to tell just how tall and slender Ron was, compared to the stocky Death Eater now lying trussed in the foyer of Mama Tussi's House of Seven Veils.  The voice was perfect, though, and the square peephole in the door opened. 

"Password?" said a person within, and Harry could tell from the accent and tone that this must be one of the LeStranges' new recruits, probably a boy barely out of school. 

"The Mark burns," said Ron in Rudolphus's voice.

Now was the moment of truth, when they found out if Rudolphus had given up the current code.  Harry was not confident of it, but now that he had one brother he was unwilling to wait long enough to acquire Veritaserum.  His Legilimens would never have Snape's razor-fine control, but Harry could usually manage.  The problem was interpreting what he found, and Rudolphus had proven stubborn on the point.  Mama Tussi had suggested some alternatives for the interrogation that had left even Rudolphus a bit wide-eyed, but Harry and Ron were not authorized for such measures. 

The door opened, and Ron had dropped the person on the other side before they could get another word out.  Harry glanced up at the roof, and the minute the cigarrette smoker's back was turned, he sprinted across the street.

Ron stood in the foyer over the Stupefied bodies of two teenagers in student robes from the Luxor Wizarding University where most of the region's magically-gifted youth enrolled after local schooling. His fingers moved swiftly as Harry closed the door.  Count two down plus three inside plus one roof.

Harry cursed under his breath.  Three more students to find and subdue in addition to Rabastan, if the Death Eater was even actually in the house.  For a moment a nightmarish image of Rabastan giving them the slip and freeing his brother filled Harry's mind.  But that wouldn't happen, and not only because of the powerful wards Harry had left in place over Rudolphus.  Mama Tussi was no pushover with a spell-ring on her hand, and there was much more to the House of Seven Veils than dancing girls and hookahs. 

Ron tilted his head toward the first set of doorways off the foyer, and Harry nodded.  They had done this countless times in different countries, for different targets.  Each time Harry used the calming technique Healer Zoran taught him before going into action.  It worked wonders for keeping him focused and keeping down casualties.

There was no one in any of the downstairs rooms, but they checked for jinxes, hexed objects, and wards anyway before creeping up the stairs, Harry on point this time.  

He had just reached the upper landing when a shrill voice came out of the darkness, shrieking, "Naake!"  The Coptic spell was no Crucio but it certainly stopped Harry in his tracks as he struggled to keep his hands from spasming.   He had encountered this version of the pain curse in Africa and the Mid-East before, though, so he was not completely unequipped to cope.  He even wore a ring amulet in echo of local practice, despite casting still with his wand. 

Ron took the steps three at a time and barreled into the girl, knocking her into the wall and interrupting her casting. And what was with the girls and pain curses? Were the LeStranges training up Bellatrix clones everywhere they ran to ground?

Harry turned his attention to the other rooms as Ron secured the girl and stripped her hands of rings.  If, as they had observed, there was only one person on the roof, then the other two people in the building had to be on this floor. 

After checking two rooms which were empty except for cots and magical tools, Harry found the other two occupants of the house in the large room that ran across the whole front of the house and was obviously a nursery.  He sighed and set three wards over the crib, two to protect the occupants from stray spells and one to alert him if anything moved within three feet of them. 

Ron stood in the doorway and quirked an eyebrow.  Harry's hands said, Children, two, secure. Ron pointed upward and Harry nodded.  If Rabastan was still here, he was on the roof. 

Ron took point this time, and counted down with his free hand as he readied his wand to blast open the trapdoor at the top of the stairs.  Five. Four. Three. Two. "Confringo!" 

The wooden door burst off its hinges with a sick metallic creak, then crashed onto the brick roof.  Harry immediately leaped up so that he and Ron rose back-to-back, covering as much of the roof's area as possible.   Rabastan shouted something incoherent - perhaps it was meant to be a spell but he had lost track of what language he should be casting in.  Whatever it was, it had no immediate effect that Harry could discern except confirming Rabastan's location on the roof. 

Ropes shot from Ron's wand across the expanse of white-painted brick, but the Death Eater dived out of their path, rolling unto the low wall around the perimeter of the roof.  Lights were beginning to come on in the buildings nearby as the noises woke the residents.  Harry wanted to get this done with fast, before any civilians presented themselves as potential hostages or crossfire victims.

"Give it up, Rabastan," Harry said as he sent a burst of red Stunner fire toward his target.  "Rudolphus broke. It's over."  There was no answer but harsh breathing from the other side of the roof.

Ron scrambled on hands and knees to cover Rabastan's possible escape vectors, leaving a trail of sticky webs blocking the rest of the roof.  Harry ducked a bolt of red return fire, got clipped by a slicing curse, then felt the nimbus of a Confundus hit the bricks nearby.  He was holding his own with Stunners and the occasional Incarcerous when a bolt of unmistakable, deadly green shot way too close for comfort. At that point he sent up the wand signal he and Ron had been using for years - a firework shaped like a Cannons pennant illuminated the rooftop for a moment. 

Ron's spells became immediately more threatening, aiming now to wound or incapacitate instead of merely slow down.  Once the target had thrown an Avada Kedavra at one of them, all bets were off.  Harry and Ron wouldn't kill if they could help it, but they got a lot less friendly. 

Rabastan made a move as if to dive off onto a neighboring roof.  It was a calculated risk on his part, since it left him completely exposed.  Harry had been waiting for just such a move, and cast a wordless Levicorpus, leaving the Death Eater hanging by his ankle above a two-story drop. 

Ron stood up and shook out his robes.  "Incarcerous," he said quietly, and this time the ropes wound neatly and thoroughly around the younger LeStrange.  Harry released the jinx and lowered Rabastan to the roof. 

"Potter," their captive spat.  "We should have killed you in Istanbul." 

"But you didn't," Harry replied, running a hand over the tear in his robes where the slicing hex had just missed his skin.  "Your loss."  Istanbul had, indeed, been bad.  There would be scrolls of paperwork and at least one lecture in his future, and that was just at headquarters.  He was lucky Luna was not inclined to screaming rows over his near-misses; Hermione would rip into Ron something fierce the moment she learned what had happened.  Ron almost always came back to work after those rows looking smug and shagged-out, though, so Harry couldn't work up too much sympathy.

"The Dark Lord will always return!" Rabastan screamed. 

"Silencio," said Harry.  "The Dark Lord is dead."  And this man was the last known Death Eater at large.  "Let's get them back, Ron.  I could use a drink."  

Just as Ron and his levitated prisoner reached the foyer, the Aksum Aurors showed up.  Typical, thought Harry.  Even in London they were like that when International was called in.  No one wanted the International Task Force trampling through their territory.  At the moment, though, Harry was happy to hand the locals over to their own MLE, who would also take custody of the children upstairs. 

"Kingsley had better have three weeks of time off waiting on his desk for us," Ron muttered as they walked back down the Anqasa Berhan to the House of Seven Veils to retrieve Rudolphus and pay Mama Tussi for babysitting. 

"If we're lucky he'll have three weeks of time off without a ticker-tape parade," Harry said with some resignation.  This would be big news back home.  The Death Eater Menace ended at last, and once again Harry Potter was a name in the news. 

Ron looked at Harry and burst out laughing.  "Oh, mate, if you could see your face.  Let's just get these two back to Azkaban where they belong." 

Harry nodded and opened the door of the House of Seven Veils, knowing that at last, after these long weeks, home was just an International Floo journey away.

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*Anqasa Berhan is the Ethiopian Wizarding community's equivalent to Diagon Alley.