"Gringotts Bank is exceptionally well protected from thieves, Mr..."
"Uzumaki," I supplied for the goblin with the unpronounceable name. He sat opposite me in a high-backed chair, his long fingers practically braided together. Our eyes were level.
"Do not imagine, Mr. Uzumaki, that your spell could deceive our security systems. On the lower levels we also have dragons and a waterfall that washes away all enchantments."
"Why do I need to know that?" I asked, studying a ring-shaped pastry covered in pink glaze on the little plate that had arrived with my cup of green tea. I was trying to decide whether it was hard or soft.
It smelled good, and I'd grown hungry while we wandered around London. Unable to resist, I poked the ring with one finger. Soft. Something slimy-looking oozed out of the side. Perhaps I wasn't so hungry after all. I wondered whether they could have slipped one of the potions Harry had described into my tea. I'd drink it and fall in love with this... what was his name again... with the goblin. Right. Better not eat or drink anything here.
"I merely thought you should know that no one has ever robbed the goblins."
"Yeah. An S-rank mission," I muttered. "Extremely difficult, usually lethal, but highly profitable."
The goblin said nothing and continued boring into me with his small eyes. I settled more comfortably into the chair, closed my eyes, and prepared to wait for Harry. We sat in silence like that for about an hour. What a bore. Someone could at least attack us and make this interesting.
"Naruto," Harry called from a distance. I must have dozed off a little. Apparently the morning lesson had helped; he didn't touch me to wake me. "Come on. I'm finished."
I restored our henge, making the goblins exchange glances and mutter something incomprehensible. Perhaps they had a language of their own.
We left the bank.
"Want to eat somewhere?" I suggested. "Somewhere they won't slip us love potion or something that causes indigestion."
Harry gave me a sidelong look.
"What? You told me yourselves that you have all kinds of potions. We have plenty of poisons too. Interrogators use things like truth serum. Probably nothing for love, but there are lots that provoke lust. Every respectable kunoichi carries more than one capsule... Plenty of men aren't above using poison either," I muttered, remembering Sai and some of his espionage methods.
"I see..." Harry said quietly, looking unusually thoughtful. "You know, I've seen some students at Hogwarts wearing amulets and rings that detect poison and potions in food... Maybe I should buy something like that."
"Are you joking?" I asked in disbelief. "You could buy protection and still haven't? Some hero you are."
We visited several shops where Harry bought locally useful artifacts. I advised him to choose potion-detecting buttons. It would look strange if he returned to school covered in rings and pendants, but buttons wouldn't make anyone suspicious.
We had lunch in a small magical café, where we tested the artifacts, then entered a side alley and Harry called Kreacher.
"Take Naruto and me to the entrance of the Ministry of Magic," he ordered the elf.
Well... I had honestly expected something more... colorful, perhaps. Instead we arrived in a rubbish-strewn dead end containing a full-height red iron box with broken glass panels. Harry told me it was a 'telephone box' and dragged me inside. A black device with numbers arranged in a circle hung on the wall, and the boy entered a code. Oh! He had managed to impress me. It was a disguised entrance!
A woman's voice came out of the device, asking who we were and the purpose of our visit.
"Har—" I barely managed to clamp a hand over the unfinished wizard's mouth and drag him out of the box.
"Have you lost your mind?" I asked coldly. "'Harry Potter,' seriously? And who else? 'Naruto Uzumaki, summoned demon'? Purpose of visit: 'breaking into the Veil of Death'?"
"Uh..." He lowered his shoulders and looked up at me from under his brows. "Then what are we supposed to say?"
"What happens after we give our names and the purpose of our visit?"
"Badges should appear, and we're supposed to pin them to our robes." He closed his eyes as though recalling the procedure. "Once we put on the badges, the booth lowers visitors into the Ministry atrium. There we register our wands with the security wizard, and then we can go where we need to."
"Where exactly is the Veil?"
"In the Department of Mysteries, in the Death Chamber."
I created two clones and made them look about ten years older than us.
They entered the booth while Harry and I stood outside listening.
"Gaara Ript and Narun Makki," one clone said, producing names as tongue-twisting as possible. "We are here on a confidential research mission to the Death Chamber."
Well, perhaps the Sage of Six Paths would play along and these wizards really were that gullible...
"They actually gave us badges," Harry said in astonishment, staring at the clone's palm. "This one says 'Gaara Ript, research mission,' and the other says the same thing with 'Narun Makki.'"
"Remember your name and mine." I pinned on one badge, placed new henge over Harry and myself, and dispelled the clones.
* * *
The Ministry of Magic... Paper airplanes flying through the air, and once again crowds of people hurrying somewhere. Far too much smooth, slippery stone for my taste: floors, walls, ceilings, statues. House-elves and goblins turned out not to be the only intelligent races. In a statue and in a stone mosaic on the walls, I saw half-horse people and half-fish people as well.
We got through easily enough. We presented our wands. I made mine with a shadow clone technique; the guard touched it, weighed it, and handed it back. Harry asked where I'd got a wand and when I'd managed to buy one. What an idiot. I created clones right in front of him, yet he couldn't work out that shadow duplication could reproduce anything, not merely a piece of wood. I told him shinobi had their secrets, since he couldn't figure it out himself.
The Veil of Death really was unsettling. It looked like an enormous open archway cut into a relatively thin slab of stone. Yet a black, cobweb-like curtain hung in the opening, and an extremely quiet, indistinct whisper came from it. It sounded like the demonic illusion Kyūbi had shown me in my inner world. Interesting.
I created a clone, put a small amount of chakra into him, and sent him to investigate. He entered the arch but did not emerge from the other side. Stranger still, I couldn't dispel the technique. It was as though the connection had been severed.
"I lost contact with the clone," I told Harry. He was staring at the arch in fascination and had taken a couple of steps toward it.
"Hey!" I shook his shoulder. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes. I can hear someone whispering and crying very softly..."
"Oh, that. Ignore it. Genjutsu are always like that. Circulate your magic through your body and you won't hear the voices."
Harry nodded and concentrated, then looked at me in surprise.
"You're right. The voices seem quieter, and I don't want to..."
"Walk into it?" I finished. "Brother, are you really going to let a few voices drag you somewhere you don't want to go? Pull yourself together. The important thing is—"
"What now?" Harry asked. "You lost contact with the clone. Does that mean he died?"
"If a clone dies, its chakra returns to me. Most likely he entered another world where I can't sense him, and he can't return. So we don't know what that thing is."
"They say it's a direct path to the Land of the Dead." Harry shivered, though he continued circulating magic.
"Even if it isn't a path to the dead but to another world, I'll tell you immediately: if thirteen days have passed here now, your godfather is definitely dead already. He may have lived for a long time there first, but time between worlds often moves very differently. When I return to my world, only a few hours will have passed at most—and that's if I'm stuck here with you for a couple of months. So decide for yourself."
"So he might not have died. He may simply have been transported to another world and lost the ability to return?" Harry understood.
"He might be dead," I said, refusing to give him false hope. "But either way, he protected what was precious to him—you. Think about what Sirius would say if he saw you like this."
"Whining?" Harry finished quietly, sitting beside me on the stone bench.
"Being chosen isn't easy, Harry," I replied softly. "I know from experience."
"Let's leave." He stood, looking at me in an entirely different way. "I understand now, Naruto."
* * *
"It's beautiful here," I said, gazing through the window of the enormous, long iron machine Harry called a 'train.' Green fields and meadows swept past outside.
"Yeah." He smiled.
"You'll love the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, boys—it's incredible!" A cheerful and pretty redhead named Emma, with a rather good figure, hugged me and pressed that figure against my side. Her friend Jess sat beside Harry and smiled at us. Though she smiled at Harry too.
Everything had happened easily and spontaneously.
The morning after our trip to the Ministry, Harry learned that I could disappear at any moment now that I had completed my 'mission.' He decided to show me King's Cross Station and the platform where the train to his school departed. Kreacher took us there.
As always in England, there were a lot of people, though the crowd now contained more young people.
"Hi! Are you going to the festival too? Can we get to know you? Have you bought tickets yet?" Two girls approached us, one ginger and one dark-haired. "I'm Emma, and this is Jessica, but you can call her Jess. Maybe we could buy seats together? The trip takes more than four hours... It won't be so boring that way."
Charming little devils... And I had the impression Harry had no experience with girls whatsoever. At the mere sight of them he alternated between blushing, paling, and stammering. What could I do? I was kindhearted and a positive hero. I had to say that we too were going to whatever festival they meant, then go with them to buy tickets and ice cream.
At first Harry said he only had Galleons, wizarding money. But after watching Jess pay, I made shadow copies of the local notes. I told Harry we could spend a little time with ordinary girls and Kreacher could take us back at any moment to the four walls of his gloomy house, where Harry couldn't use his wand. After that, Harry suddenly became much more sociable.
I also told him that heroes' lives could be short, so it was worth taking a break and enjoying life now and then.
In short, we were traveling to Edinburgh.