One Honest Heart

5. Words, Words, Words, Something Wicked this Way Comes

The sounds of potion-making seemed loud
but distant – clear arrows of noise pecking at a mind muffled by fear. Lucius
kept his balance on a floor that was at once his own yet foreign, still as the
stone beneath the rich carpeting yet rattling his legs as an unsettled heap of
his ancestor’s bones. Perhaps even a ghostly image of his own whitened bones
could be glimpsed through the carpet’s complex patterns, coiling before his
fear-addled eyes.

Determined
to avoid his morbid reflection on the floor, Lucius let his gaze sweep the
room, back and forth, back and forth. He stood perfectly still save for the
swivelling of his head, like a sentinel keeping the silence at bay by giving it
the very coldest of Malfoy stares.

Looking
at those walls, his own that now seemed so alien to him, Lucius found himself
wondering if perhaps they marked the end of the world, a thin shield against a
nothingness that had consumed all else. It seemed to him that the room existed
now in a vacuum, adrift in limbo. Not a sound was heard, the subtle presence of
the world around him became clear to him now only by its omission. To his mind,
there existed only the room, and the strange presence haunting it, freezing his
limbs and agitating his heart.

‘Lucius!’
exclaimed Voldemort. ‘How, exactly, did you come by this sample?’

Lucius
startled out of his frozen vigilance and turned an apologetic face towards his
master’s scaly back. ‘My lord?’

Voldemort
did not turn away from the metallic liquid rippling softly in the small stone
basin before him. ‘The sample, Lucius! How did you acquire it?’

‘I
assure you, my lord,’ faltered Lucius, ‘it’s – it is what I have said it is.
Surely, it is enough that you have a gentleman’s word—’

‘NO, it is NOT!’ roared Voldemort. ‘That
would imply trust, and trust is a weakness I do not allow myself. You should
know this, Malfoy. Now, tell me exactly what you did to get the sample.’ His
voice was measured and cool. It was a voice his followers either learned to
obey the first time they heard it or not at all.

And
so, Lucius told his lord, told him all but the most intimate of details.

In
the hearth, the fire fought a losing battle against a harsh, cold wind.

The
room had no windows.