puzzle over the course of five months or over the course of five seconds, but in any given population there'll be many more people who can do it in five months than in five seconds..." Harry pasted a hand against his forehead. "Darn it, how can I explain this? I suppose, from your perspective, the Dark Lord came up with a clever puzzle and I cleverly solved it and that makes us look equal."
"I remember your first day of Potions class," the Potions Master said dryly. "I think you have a ways still to go."
"Peace, Severus," Albus said. "Harry has already accomplished more than you know. Yet tell me, Harry - why do you believe the Dark Lord is less than you? Surely he is a damaged soul in many ways. But cunning for cunning - you are not yet ready to face him, I would judge; and I know the full tally of your deeds."
The frustrating thing about this conversation was that Harry couldn't say his actual reasons for disagreeing, which violated several basic principles of cooperative discourse.
He couldn't explain how Bellatrix had really been removed from Azkaban - not by You-Know-Who in any guise, but by the combined wits of Harry and Professor Quirrell.
Harry didn't want to say in front of Professor McGonagall that the existence of brain damage implied that there were no such things as souls. Which made a successful immortality ritual... well, not impossible, Harry certainly intended to forge a road to magical immortality someday, but it would be a lot harder and require much more ingenuity than just binding an already-existent soul to a lich's phylactery. Which no intelligent wizard would bother doing in the first place, if they knew their souls were immortal.
And the true and honest reason Harry knew the Dark Lord couldn't have been that smart... well... there wasn't any tactful way to say it, but...
Harry had been to a convocation of the Wizengamot. He'd seen the laughable 'security precautions', if you could call them that, guarding the deepest levels of the Ministry of Magic. They didn't even have the Thief's Downfall which goblins used to wash away Polyjuice and Imperius Curses on people entering Gringotts. The obvious takeover route would be to Imperius the Minister of Magic and a few department heads, and owl a hand grenade to anyone too powerful to Imperius. Or owl them knockout gas, if you needed them alive and in a state of Living Death to take hairs for Polyjuice potions. Legilimency, False Memories, the Confundus Charm - it was ridiculous, the magical world was supersaturated with ways to cheat. Harry might not do any of those things himself, during his own takeover of Britain, since he was constrained by Ethics... well, Harry might do some of the lesser ones, since Polyjuice or a temporary Confundus or read-only Legilimency all sounded better than an extra day of Azkaban... but...
If Harry hadn't been constrained by Ethics, it was possible he could've wiped out the eviller sections of the Wizengamot that day; all by himself, using only a first-year's magical power, on account of being clever enough to figure out Dementors. Though Harry might not have been in such a great political position after that, the surviving Wizengamot members might've found it easy and cheap to disavow his actions for P.R. purposes and condemn him, even if the smarter ones realized it was for the greater good... but still.
If you were completely unrestrained by ethics, armed with the ancient secrets of Salazar Slytherin, had dozens of powerful followers including Lucius Malfoy, and it took you more than ten years to fail to overthrow the government of magical Britain, it meant you were stupid.
"How can I put this..." Harry said. "Look, Headmaster, you've got ethics, there's a lot of battle tactics you don't use because you're not evil. And you fought the Dark Lord, a tremendously powerful wizard who wasn't so restrained, and you held him off anyway. If You-Know-Who had been super-smart on top of that, you'd be dead. All of you. You'd have died instantly -"
"Harry," Professor McGonagall said. Her voice was faltering. "Harry, we almost did all die. More than half the Order of the Phoenix died. If not for Albus - Albus Dumbledore, the greatest wizard in two centuries, Harry - we surely would have perished."
Harry passed a hand across his forehead. "I'm sorry," Harry said. "I'm not trying to minimize what you went through. I know that You-Know-Who was a completely evil, incredibly powerful Dark Wizard with dozens of powerful followers, and that's... bad, yes, definitely bad. It's just..." All that isn't on remotely the same threat scale as the enemy being smart, in which case they Transfigure botulinum toxin and sneak a millionth of a gram into your teacup. Was there any safe way to convey that concept without citing specifics? Harry couldn't think of one.
"Please, Harry," said Professor McGonagall. "Please, Harry, I beg you - take the Dark Lord seriously! He is more dangerous than -" The senior witch seemed to be having trouble finding words. "He is far more dangerous than Transfiguration."
Harry's eyebrows went up before he could stop himself. A dark chuckle came from Severus Snape's direction.
Um, said the voice of Ravenclaw within him. Um, honestly Professor McGonagall is right, we're not taking this as seriously as we'd take a scientific problem. The difficult thing is to react at all to new information, instead of just flushing it out the window. Right now it looks like we didn't shift belief at all after encountering an unexpected, important argument. Our dismissal of Lord Voldemort as a serious threat was originally based on the Dark Mark being blatantly stupid. It would require a focused effort to de-update and suspect the whole garden-path of reasoning we went down based on that false assumption, and we're not putting in that effort right now.
"All right," Harry said, just as Professor McGonagall seemed to be about to speak again. "All right, to take this seriously, I need to stop and think for five minutes."
"Please do," said Albus Dumbledore.
Harry closed his eyes.
His Ravenclaw side divided into three.
Probability estimate, said Ravenclaw One, who was acting as moderator. That the Dark Lord is alive, and as smart as we are, and hence a genuine threat.
Why aren't all his enemies already dead? said Ravenclaw Two, who was prosecuting.
Note, said Ravenclaw One, we had already thought of that argument so
