“Not a trail as such,” Merlin said as he walked. “There may not be much wild left in the City, but what there is of it, the weed-grasses and brush, the beetles and rats, they remember the scent of a powerful beast near here, too vague to pinpoint exactly.”
Moving swiftly, James followed his dad and the others into the darkness. Soon, they were stepping up over humps of railroad tracks, their footsteps grinding on gravel.
“Miss Vandergriff,” Merlin announced from the lead, “what shall we be looking for from this point? I understand that you are our resident expert on the sorts of Norwegian structures that might attract a particular dragonish heritage.”
“I’m nobody’s expert,” Millie said, “I told James, I barely know anything—”
Merlin stopped and turned, more suddenly and gracefully than seemed possible for a man of his size. In the darkness, he was like a faceless totem rising out of the rail-beds.
“Miss Vandergriff,” he said, his voice soft and deep, yet strangely penetrating. “While humility is widely considered a virtue, it is not one that I myself prize under even normal circumstances. I believe that you do indeed have the requisite knowledge to accomplish our mission this night. Therefore, pray, do not allow your own understandable insecurities to be an impediment. Call upon what your interests have cultivated. What are we seeking? More accurately, what may have attracted a creature of some limited intellect seeking a reminder of her ancestral Norwegian homeland?”
Millie opened her mouth to object, paused, and then, after a thoughtful moment, closed it again. James recognized Merlin’s subtle powers at work. The ancient sorcerer did not control people magically, exactly. But he did exert a sort of calming, focusing influence on them at certain important times.
James turned to look more closely at Millie. Her eyes were open wide, not in shock, but in thought. Her pupils flicked rhythmically back and forth, as if she was scanning a file cabinet in her own mind.
“There was no such thing as architecture in Norway for centuries,” she said in a musing voice, blinking rapidly. “They built huts and houses out of whatever was at hand, with no thought to design.
Except for the churches. Those they built with things called staves, tall posts that allowed them to build very tall and narrow, with sharp, sloping roofs. The magical varieties were built with Redwood staves, allowing them to be massively tall. Most of them were built with a sort of vertical diminishing redundancy.”
“Vertical…? Now she’s just not making any sense,” James muttered aside to his uncle Ron, who shrugged and shook his head.
Millie glanced at James. “I’m standing right here, you know,” she said. “I can hear everything you say.”
James gave a shrug, half apologetic, half impatient.
Hermione urged gently, “Go on, Millie, you’re doing well.”
Millie narrowed her eyes again in thought. “Vertical diminishing redundancy just means that the church structure is repeated atop itself in smaller and smaller versions, up and up, sort of like a Chinese pagoda.”
“Oh,” James nodded and shrugged. “Now I understand.”
Millie ignored him. “Norway is famous for their stave churches.
It’s their most defining building style. At least, it was for hundreds of years.”
“Then that is the sort of structure we shall be searching for,”
Merlin agreed, turning and stalking onward again.
Glancing around the switchyard, Harry said, “I doubt there are many stave churches in London.”
“It doesn’t have to be an actual stave church,” Hermione suggested. “Norberta’s no architectural expert. She’ll just look for something that sort of reminds her of such a place.”
The four tramped onward, climbing over humps of railroad tracks, moving into a warren of parallel switches dotted with lines of dark passenger carriages and tankers, looming like sleeping dinosaurs in the darkness. Trailing behind Merlin, who seemed to be following a sort of communal instinct all his own, they wended into the lines of railroad cars, cutting across wherever they could, climbing over iron connector knuckles wherever they couldn’t. Between the tracks, forests of dark gantries jutted up, each topped with boxes containing colored signal lights, currently all dark. A dizzying array of overhead wires connected the signals, stretching in every direction. James wondered how Norberta could possibly have navigated through those wires and gantries, had she attempted to land in this area.
Finally, the troupe came out beyond the lines of switches to a row of complicated brick buildings lined with ranks of windows, festooned with smokestacks and conveyor ramps covered in corrugated steel, each more industrial and looming than the last.
“Now where?” Ron asked, turning on the spot. “Any of these old places look large enough for Norberta to hide in.”
“That one,” Harry pointed.
James turned to look where his father was pointing. Sure enough, rising over the furthest roof, a tall structure hulked upwards against the clouds. It was a sort of silo tower with levels of steeply sloping roofs, all rusted to the color of Redwood. Running along the lowest roof were gigantic faded letters, barely legible: CROSTICK COAL.
Millie shrugged a little uncertainly. “Vertical diminishing redundancy. In a manner of speaking.”
Silently, with Merlin in the lead and Harry bringing up the rear again, the group picked their way along the edge of the dark brick buildings. Dead weeds and brush poked through sullen snowdrifts, diminishing to slushy bogs between the structures. Enormous smokestacks and mountainous piles of coal blotted out the breeze and noise and distant city lights, creating a sort of watchful gloom. Finally, the group picked their way across a pocked gravel parking lot toward the base of the Crostick Coal building. Signs posted to the chain-link fences rattled in the breeze. James turned to read one as they passed: CONDEMNED PROPERTY! KEEP OUT.
He worried briefly that Hagrid was not there with them. Then, he shivered and worried more acutely that he and the rest of them were.
The shadows surrounding the ancient coal work were dense and silent, leaving a distinct sense of unseen eyes peering from every broken window. And yet Merlin, for his part, seemed completely unfazed by the eeriness of the scene. Perhaps, James mused, the old sorcerer liked it here. After all, this was a section of the city that was slowly, irrevocably, being reclaimed by nature. The environmental predators of civilization—rust, weeds, and entropy—were hard at work here, reasserting the feral inevitability of nature. And the green wilds of nature, of course, were Merlin’s element.
James couldn’t be certain, be he almost thought the headmaster was humming cheerfully in the deepening gloom.
A not-unpleasant fact occurred to him: it was hard to be especially frightened in the presence of a happily humming Merlin.