Bill Weasley was really beginning to regret taking the job of assisting in fixing the Hogwarts wards. He'd been just about ready to head back to Egypt, reporting to his boss's boss to get his portkey back to the pyramids, when Dumbledore had arrived at Ginggotts to ask for help. Since then he and two other curse breakers had been crawling through the bowels of Hogwarts, tracing down where the various charms and wards were linked together.
He'd had one good piece of luck to start things out. His twin brothers had given him the map. Though the map itself had turned out to be somewhat of a dead end, studying the charms on it had allowed him to find where it linked into protections of the castle. Even better, he'd found a couple common connection points. Where the map was connected was pretty clear. In fact it looked like whoever had attached the map there had actually cleaned up some mess when they did so.
If his suspicion was correct, it might not have been the original connection attempt, though. The signature was slightly different around that connection. It seemed to be balanced a bit more towards the right, up, and red, to use the curse breakers three element signature shorthand. He had an idea why the difference had occurred. There was a heart vandalism on the paneling in front of the connection that he was going to have to show Harry Potter.
The connection point he was looking at currently wasn't as nearly as clean, and that was before the fact that it was located above the composting bin was taken into account. He was sure that the compost bin hadn't been originally intended for the purpose it was currently being used for. After all the nearby Greenhouse Seven had been built in the 1960s.
Bill was a son of Arthur, so he knew about plugs. In fact he knew more about them than his father. He'd had to rent a place on the muggle side during his first stint as a curse breaker in Egypt, and he'd seen an over loaded socket with a large number of plugs attached. That was what this particular point reminded him of. Everything was going to have to be "unplugged" from this point, and if he was right, it was going to take down several major charms in the process.
He began to catalog everything hooked in at that point, enumerating each one on his list, so they could be restored, properly connected into the system at mostly other points, if possible. There was there was Greenhouse Seven climate control, Ravenclaw Tower entry security, Gravity recharging point for Ravenclaw Tower, Passageway Gamma Three distance compression, Control for dumbwaiter to the Divination Professor's Quarters, hot water charm for the third floor boys bathroom, Defense Against the Dark Arts Curse, deicing charm for the northwestern battlements, Ravenclaw Tower orbital launch control ... wait.
Defense Against the Dark Arts Curse ... Bill had to go back and check that. He examined the curse closely. Oh boy it was complex, with a count down that started when the Defense Professor took possession of his office, with a rather innovative charm attached to determine where the Defense Professor's office was. It looked like that was linked to the Headmaster's Office somehow. He'd have to track down that end before he took it down. Maybe not. It was an information in port. He could probably detatch and use it as an input to help take it down.
Oh that was neat, a connection to the hospital wing to encourage mistakes in healing that professor. It looked that like that one was at least already blocked off. In fact it looked like a couple connections had been found and sheared off somewhere, but at least in one case, the curse had grown new connections, making this a rather insidious curse. In fact, it looked like it was linking itself into a good third of the items hooked into the castles systems at this point.
That being said, it was no where near as bad as some of the ones he'd removed. You-know-who was no Egyptian Pharos. Oh, it looked like he might have just found the link to the main control of that curse. It headed off towards the seventh floor corridor, near that tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy if his reading of the connection and the map he'd gotten from Fred and George was correct. That map was turning out to be really helpful, especially once Bill had managed to bring up the high detailed version.
It was a good thing that he'd remembered the inscription left by James Potter under the bed in the Head Boys Quarters.
Bill finished categorizing the thirty-three connections plugged into Hogwarts at that location, making sure he knew what each one was trying to accomplish. Some of them probably wouldn't be restored, and not just the Defense Against the Dark Arts Curse. All of them would be down in the next two hours, or his name wasn't William Arthur Weasley.
He knew it wouldn't be easy, but it had to be done now. If he even left for a minute, there were charms inside that curse that could hook to him, preventing anything from happening to the curse. So, down it had to go, and afterwards he'd find that control and remove it to.
With a bright spark at the base of the connection plate, Bill began the process of untangling and removing the curse. Each little bit sparked as he took it off, but it was a carefully controlled spark, discharging the little bit of energy that would have backfired if he hadn't allowed the release. Some smoke rose, a deep black smoke, from the center of the curse's cable. It was only then that Bill really knew what was controlling the curse. You-know-who had made a horocrux and it was somewhere in the castle, probably off the seventh floor corridor.
Fortunately, Bill was prepared. He couldn't destroy it until he got to the actual object, but he did carry a small vial of basilisk venom. A drop on the connection and a charm sent it backwards a good hundred yards, burning the control back far enough to prevent the feedback from taking him out. Then he started to remove the methods of death, and links through the castle. It looked like there might be one more node near the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, but Bill isolated it, so he'd be able to clear it after he got this, the main node. The secondary taps were removed with flashes of purple sparks, and the tangle of connections began to unravel.
He nearly sent the command for Ravenclaw Tower to go into orbit, catching the signal at the last possible second. Then down went the climate control for Greenhouse Seven, followed by the Divination dumbwaiter. A bright orange spark followed, and then blue smoke, before it all cleared.
The connection point no longer had anything connected to it, though there were still a few connections that he could restore. The only one he did was for the Greenhouse, the rest he pulled carefully away, labeling them, and double checking that no more connections of the curse were present in the composting bin.
Taking a deep breath, he checked the time. It seemed that he'd done it in just a half-hour. True there was still that node, and the horocrux, but he'd count this as a job well done, and go to lunch ... after he took a shower and changed.