He was sitting right next to Albus Dumbledore.

“Professor!” Harry said in a kind of strangled whisper. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to—I was just looking at that basin in your cabinet—I—where are we?”

But Dumbledore didn’t move or speak. He ignored Harry completely. Like every other wizard on the benches, he was staring into the far corner of the room, where there was a door.

Harry gazed, nonplussed, at Dumbledore, then around at the silently watchful crowd, then back at Dumbledore. And then it dawned on him…

Once before, Harry had found himself somewhere that nobody could see or hear him. That time, he had fallen through a page in an enchanted diary, right into somebody else’s memory… and unless he was very much mistaken, something of the sort had happened again…

Harry raised his right hand, hesitated, and then waved it energetically in from of Dumbledore’s face. Dumbledore did not blink, look around at Harry, or indeed move at all. And that, in Harry’s opinion, settled the matter. Dumbledore wouldn’t ignore him like that. He was inside a memory, and this was not the present day Dumbledore. Yet it couldn’t be that long ago… the Dumbledore sitting next to him now was silver haired, just like the present day Dumbledore. But what was this place? What were all these wizards waiting for?

Harry looked around more carefully. The room, as he had suspected when observing it from above, was almost certainly underground—more of a dungeon than a room, he thought. There was a bleak and forbidding air about the place; there were no pictures on the walls, no decorations at all; just these serried rows of benches, rising in levels all around the room, all positioned so that they had a clear view of that chair with the chains on its arms.

Before Harry could reach any conclusions about the place in which they were, he heard footsteps. The door in the corner of the dungeon opened and three people entered—or at least one man, flanked by two Dementors.

Harry’s insides went cold. The Dementors—tall, hooded creatures whose faces were concealed—were gliding slowly toward the chair in the center of the room, each grasping one of the man’s arms with their dead and rotten looking hands. The man between them looked as though he was about to faint, and Harry couldn’t blame him… he knew the Dementors could not touch him inside a memory, but he remembered their power only too well. The watching crowd recoiled slightly as the Dementors placed the man in the chained chair and glided back out of the room. The door swung shut behind them.

Harry looked down at the man now sitting in the chair and saw that it was Karkaroff.

Unlike Dumbledore, Karkaroff looked much younger; his hair and goatee were black. He was not dressed in sleek furs, but in thin and ragged robes. He was shaking. Even as Harry watched, the chains on the arms of the chair glowed suddenly gold and snaked their way up Karkaroff’s arms, binding him there.

“Igor Karkaroff,” said a curt voice to Harry’s left. Harry looked around and saw Mr. Crouch standing up in the middle of the bench beside him. Crouch’s hair was dark, his face was much less lined, he looked fit and alert. “You have been brought from Azkaban to present evidence to the Ministry of Magic. You have given us to understand that you have important information for us.”

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<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
The surface of the silvery stuff inside the basin began to swirl very fast.	\|	Karkaroff straightened himself as best he could, tightly bound to the chair.

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