Snapedom

The Dark Mark

What on earth was Severus doing at the end of GoF, brandishing his Dark Mark in Fudge’s face and explaining exactly how it worked? I mean, sure, we all appreciate that it was a heroic attempt to help Dumbledore to persuade Fudge of You-Know-Who’s return. But had Severus forgotten entirely he was going to be facing the Dark Lord himself in a short time? How was he supposed to spin that action to him?

What did he expect Lord Voldemort to think, after Snape displayed such transparent loyalty to Dumbledore?

Perhaps … that his servant was very clever and devious indeed, in getting the old fool to think that while secretly advancing the Dark Lord’s interests.



First off, Severus was able to point out to his incensed master that the heroic attempt to persuade Fudge did in fact fail. Snape’s brandishing his inflamed Dark Mark did not succeed in convincing Fudge that You-Know-Who had returned. Its success in doing so depended on Fudge’s ability (surely low) to evaluate impartially the implications of the Mark’s darkening, and further on Fudge’s willingness (surely non-existent) to trust the word of a self-admitted (if allegedly former) Death Eater.

What seeing the Dark Mark did do, emphatically, was to persuade Fudge that Albus Dumbledore had sometimes indulged in some extremely, ah, eccentric hiring decisions in the past.

Indeed, Severus could point out to his skeptical master that making Fudge distrust Dumbledore’s judgment was the only result his action could be relied upon to produce.

That Mark didn’t establish that Voldemort had returned, not to someone who’d never had Albus’s opportunity of studying its fluctuations throughout several of Tom’s vicissitudes of corporeality and power. Brandishing it was Snape’s confession, however, that he had once upon a time been a true Death Eater. And Albus tacitly admitted that he had known that all along—back when he’d first hired Snape to teach children.

Sure, Fudge could look up Snape’s sealed record and discover that he’d been exonerated (on guess-who’s testimony that Snape had left the Death Eaters and turned spy “at great personal risk”) before he was hired, but still! Installing such a person as a teacher?! Worse, bringing him into Hogwarts while Voldemort was still at large—surely before Snape had conclusively proven his change of loyalties, and anyway in utter despite of how decent folk would react to a Death Eater as a teacher, even one supposedly reformed?

After the werewolf scandal that broke at the end of last year (due largely to my efforts, my Lord), and the half-giant scandal Rita reported just a few months previously, the cumulative effect was to demonstrate that Dumbledore’s penchant for giving second chances led the headmaster flagrantly to ignore, not only decent respect for public opinion, but arguably, his students’ moral and physical safety. Repeatedly. For years.
Severus Snape’s Dark Mark was Exhibit A for Dumbledore’s duplicity.

But now let’s look further at what Snape actually said about that Mark: at what we readers, and Cornelius Fudge, thought we knew about how it operated after Severus brandished it in our faces.

For if Snape gave subtle misinformation on the Dark Mark to Fudge (and claimed to have given the same misinformation previously to Dumbledore), he could present that to Voldemort as proof that he had all along been playing a part to get Dumbledore to trust him, and had really intended to come back loyally to Voldemort’s side should he ever return. (Or at least, that he’d been doing so since he first noticed the Mark start to darken.)

Look at what Severus told Fudge, while heroically exposing his Mark to Fudge to try to persuade the Minister that Dumbledore was right in saying that Voldemort had returned.


Snape strode forward, past Dumbledore, pulling up the left sleeve of his robes as he went. He stuck out his forearm and showed it to Fudge, who recoiled.

“There,” said Snape harshly. “There. The Dark Mark. It is not as clear as it was an hour or so ago, when it burned black, but you can still see it. Every Death Eater had the sign burned into him by the Dark Lord. It was a means of distinguishing one another, and his means of summoning us to him. When he touched the Mark of any Death Eater, we were to Disapparate, and Apparate, instantly to his side. This Mark has been growing clearer all year. Karkaroff’s too. Why do you think Karkaroff fled tonight? We both felt the Mark burn. We both knew he had returned. Karkaroff fears the Dark Lord’s vengeance. He betrayed too many of his fellow Death Eaters to be sure of a welcome back into the fold.”


This account of how the Dark Mark works and can be used is consistent with what Harry (and therefore we) had already seen. We saw Tom Riddle touch Peter’s Mark with his reborn hand, saw it turn (or burn) “jet black” to the accompaniment of a howl of pain from Wormtail and a “searing” pain in Harry’s scar. And a few minutes later, Tom’s loyal followers started Apparating into the graveyard (having first taken time to find their masks and robes, and, presumably, their courage).

So, of course, Snape’s account must be correct. We have independent verification.

And so, Snape’s account, must also be, er, complete? Right?

It sounds complete. The Mark “was a means of distinguishing one another, and his means of summoning us to him.”


That’s what it was; that’s what it was used for.

An identifying Mark, a tattoo of brotherhood. (“Show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” whispered movie-Barty.)

And a means for Tom to summon his followers.

To his physical presence. All of them at once. And this method of summoning, required him first to be in the physical presence of a Marked follower.

Um.

An emergency call-button for all the troops, that’s fine. That’s a useful thing to have.

But Severus rather strongly implied that that’s ALL the Mark could do—or all that the Dark Lord did do with the Mark he placed on his servants. And should we really credit that?

Yes, I know, Severus is generally more veracious than Albus. I tend to believe what he says.

But here he’s speaking to Fudge. In front of Harry. A scant few minutes before Albus would send him off to try to persuade the Dark Lord that Snape was still, despite all appearances (including his showing that Dark Mark to Fudge), Lord Voldemort’s loyal servant.

Now back up, and reflect that neither Sirius nor Cornelius appeared to know anything at all about Voldemort branding his skull-and-snake image onto his most devoted follower’s flesh. Fudge didn’t recognize it, and Sirius was transparently ignorant that for a suspected Death Eater to clasp his left forearm might be at all meaningful.

If Sirius didn’t, we can infer that the rank-and-file of the Order did not. Whatever Dumbledore knew.

But that Cornelius also did not, argues that NO ONE has ever made that information part of the sub rosa briefing privily imparted to the Minister when s/he assumes office. I mean, that someone who’d been a junior member of the Department of Magical Catastrophes at the time of Voldemort’s fall should not have been cognizant of the Death Eaters’ tattoo, just means it wasn’t public information. But that the same man, now Minister for Magic, still did not, implies strongly that that no one in the Ministry (or no one acting for the Ministry) was officially cognizant of the Dark Mark branded into Death Eater forearms.

So that information was not known, officially, to the DMLE. Though Snape was not surprised that fake!Moody seemed to know it. But then, real-Moody was Dumbledore’s man before he was the Ministry’s, and Snape surely would have told Dumbledore all about the Dark Mark when he defected.

But it follows that the Aurors interrogating suspected Death Eaters had never found an obvious tattoo on certain arms, or they would have noticed the commonality. In fact, if all an Auror had to do to determine that someone was a Death Eater was to roll up his sleeve, how could any of them have escaped? Granted, that method would not have caught the fellow travelers or the Imperius victims. But it should have determined, unambiguously, the inner circle of Voldemort’s followers.

Before, of course, it faded to invisibility at Tom’s first fall.

If, as Snape implied, it really was devised as “a means of distinguishing one another.”

But why would Tom want his Death Eaters able to do such a thing, much less by means of a permanent brand? We are not talking a lodge handshake here, which one can offer or fail to offer, and which one can feign not to recognize if offered by someone one suspects of being a mole. We’re not even talking about wearing gang colors, which could be donned or discarded! We’re talking about a mark burned permanently into the flesh, whose visibility, Severus implied, directly reflected the Dark Lord’s power or corporeality.

Um, right. I can believe that the Mark darkened throughout GoF, and that Igor and Severus (and the other Marked followers) took this as a signal that their beloved leader was gathering his forces to return to them. But that it had been designed to be a visible means of distinguishing Tom’s inner circle of servants—a means fully visible to their enemies?

Right.

The Death Eaters, by design, were not supposed to know each other’s identities for security reasons (acto Igor in his hearing). Tom not only wouldn’t have wanted his enemies to have a means of identifying his inner circle, he didn’t even want THEM to have “a means of distinguishing one another.” Him, yes. Them, no. Those he wanted a certain Death Eater to know as his fellows, his team mates, he revealed.to that one Why else the masks and hoods in the private circle as well as when out on public missions?

No, that Mark was never designed to be always visible as a Death Eater lodge membership badge. Its visibility depended on Tom’s will.

That it was increasingly obtrusive during GoF was because Tom was pissed at all his servants for their faithlessness. He was making it darken deliberately, to warn them and punish them. (We are told the Mark “burned” both at its infliction and at its darkest—if its visibility/darkness correlates to the burning sensation, Tom’s punishment was physical as well as mental.)

So that statement of Severus’s, that it was a means for Death Eaters to identify each other, was almost certainly a lie. What about the next, that the Mark was “his means of summoning us to him”?

Well, there was Harry listening in. Harry had returned to be a witness, able to testify before the Ministry and the Order of what he had seen… If he’d been conscious at the time, Harry would certainly have watched the Dark Mark be used in the emergency call-button mode.

So, the thing for a loyal Death Eater to do to retrieve the situation as far as possible, was to spread the disinformation that the “all hands on deck” summons was the only power vested in that Mark. And to subtly distort how even that summons really worked.

And afterwards, to demonstrate to his lordship how faithfully (and subtly) he had done so….


Severus told Fudge that the summoned Death Eaters were to Apparate instantly to “his [the Dark Lord’s] side.”.

Is that precisely true? How do they know exactly where “his side” IS? In all the other Apparations we’ve seen, the one Apparating has to be clear about hir Destination. One of the D’s, remember?

So then those Marks must give the Death Eaters an automatic homing beacon on their Dark Lord….

All the time, or only while they are “burning black”?

No, to the latter. Severus was able to find his master to make a dangerously belated entrance--after he’d showed Fudge his Mark, which had faded from the initial burning.

So if it works to allow the Death Eaters to find their master, it does so all the time. Or at least all the time that it is activated enough to be visible. Or at the very least, when it burns black in a direct summons, and then for an hour or more after that.

Um—do we really think Tom Riddle would give his slaves a means of tracking him personally?

Any time they felt like it? Or even any time he activated their Marks?

Really?

Trusting sort, that Tom.

Anyone who turned his cloak, then, could lead an Auror party straight to Tom. Either at any time, or anytime Tom hit the call button. If Tom tried to escape, by Apparition or Portkey or Floo or whatever, the traitor could still track Tom’s new location and “Apparate instantly to his side.”

Yeah right. Tom would totally brand each of his slaves with a permanent tracking device set on himself.


Or, the Mark doesn’t act exactly the way Snape implied. It acts as a homing beacon, not to Tom, but to the Mark that Tom touched. Either to the person, or to the location.

Or, of course, there’s some communicative aspect to the Mark, not evident to outsiders, that allowed Tom to TELL his followers where to come. But we can rule that out. For in that case, Tom would definitely have moved (and not told Snape his new location) once Snape’s failure to come instantly to his side marked Snape as a possible traitor. For if a Snape-faithless-to-Voldemort had been told where to meet his erstwhile master, he might in turn have relayed that information to his presumed new master, Dumbledore.

At least if he was Apparating blind to an unknown destination, he would have to be tracked there himself in order for Albus to send in a full team of Order members and/or Aurors. There’s a limit to how many people one can side-along.

We don’t know that Peter was still in Tom’s presence when Severus finally breezed in, fashionably late.

But that seems much more likely than that Tom and/or his Death Eaters would have stuck around Little Hangleton after Harry’s escape. Harry could tell Albus and the Ministry where to find them—or rather, his testimony that he’d been at Voldemort’s father’s grave coupled with Dumbledore’s knowledge of Tom Riddle’s antecedents could. If Tom knew that Albus had, by then, traced his antecedents. (For that matter, could that reversible Portkey be traced to its destination?)

So. We do know that when Severus came late to the party, he was still able to locate his master. So did he home in on the Dark Lord, as he implied, or on the Death Eater whose Mark had been touched, or on the physical location where Peter had been standing when his Mark was touched?

Well, we do know from later independent evidence that there’s some kind of tracking property of the Mark.

And it allows the Dark Lord to track his servants, not vice versa. As one would expect.

When a Death Eater touches hir Mark, the Dark Lord is aware of it. And of who, and almost certainly also where, the summoner is.

And so, apparently, are the other Death Eaters. Or at least, some others. Either because of proximity, or at the Dark Lord’s discretion.

When Alecto touched her Mark, Severus received “the impression … that Alecto had apprehended an intruder.” (DH 30)

And he flexed his left arm, when Minerva asked him how.

So too had Amycus known that his sister had signaled to their master. He came to reinforce her, was worried when she didn’t respond when he knocked at the Ravenclaw door, and wanted to frame the students for making a false call when he saw no captive Potter.

At Malfoy Manor, Lucius and Bella fought over which got the honor of contacting Tom to notify him of Harry’s capture, which confirms that Tom knew precisely the identity of the summoner.

But also, in that instance, Tom knew to come to Malfoy Manor. Now, with Alecto’s summons, he might just have assumed that Alecto found Harry in the course of pursuing her assigned duties, and so would be at the school. Bellatrix, however, might have been anywhere while Tom was on the Continent tracking the Elder Wand. We have no reason to suppose her to have been under house arrest at her sister’s home. So that Tom knew to come straight to the manor implies that he could use the Mark, at least some of the time, to track specific followers to their current location.

Further, we can be sure there’s no general communicative aspect, at least not one that could be initiated by a Death Eater, because when Tom received Bella’s summons, he reflected that if she summoned him back for anything except Harry’s capture, she was in trouble. So there was no way for her to use her Mark to communicate to him, “Yes, I found him!” as opposed to, say, “Master, come quickly, it’s an emergency!”

So the evidence is that the one touching the Mark with hir finger communicates who, and the Mark touched communicates where. So a touch by Tom’s finger to someone’s Mark was indeed a summons—to the side of the Death Eater whose Mark Tom used. A safety measure for Tom—if a traitor tried to use a summons to bring in a team of Aurors, the traitor would home in on the Death Eater whose Mark had been used to send the message, not on Tom himself. Since it’s not always possible for one summoned to come instantaneously, the apparition-trace had to be active for some interval chosen by Tom….

*

Finally, there’s one last odd aspect to Severus’s description of how that Mark worked. He said that it was a means for Death Eaters to identify unknown fellows—which the Dark Lord didn’t want them able to do. He said it could be used as a general summons (which Harry had already seen), and that it allowed Death Eaters to locate their Dark Lord physically, well enough to Apparate to join him. Which, again, the Dark Lord wouldn’t want them able to do.

He implied that the Death Eaters could only use it as a recognition device with each other or to attend their Lord upon being Summoned, and for no other purpose.

Well, we know that that last is also untrue—the Death Eaters can use the Mark to attract their master’s attention. And they are apparently instructed to use it only when they are requesting his physical presence. (But it’s not a summons in the sense that demons are said to be summoned; he’s under no compulsion to come.)

But finally, Severus implied that the Dark Lord had to be in the physical presence of a Death Eater to use the Mark.

Because Tom Riddle was so fond of being dependent on others, that he’d invent something that was useless to him except when he was in the physical presence of a loyal follower!

And indeed, we saw that Tom’s Dark Marks functioned to tie his Death Eaters to him in some way—though not necessarily vice versa. Tom felt it when one of them touched it, and identified who and where that Marked follower was. I imagine Tom could also, if he chose, have used that link to summon someone directly to his side.

If there had been anyone he so trusted with a trace to himself.

*

So, although what Severus said about his Mark was technically accurate, pretty much everything Severus implied to Fudge was markedly misleading.


I think Albus and Severus had spent some little time concocting what to tell Tom that Severus had told Albus about that darkening Mark, and that Severus seized the opportunity to recycle the misinformation to Fudge.

What, after all, could most truly prove his loyalty to Albus than giving the headmaster Tom’s deepest secret of how he privately summoned his servants?

What could most truly prove his loyalty to Voldemort, than twisting that secret to utterly mislead Dumbledore?

I mean, think about it. Suppose Severus told Tom he’d conned Albus into thinking the Mark (when activated) provided a trace to the Dark Lord’s current location.

If you were Albus Dumbledore, crafty and creative, and you thought you had a tame Death Eater lapdog, and you thought his Dark Mark could (at least sometimes) track Lord Voldemort’s physical location—well, wouldn’t you try to use that either to set a trap for Tom, or to devise a way to track him?

Think about the Dark Mark working that way—some random time when Tom summoned his servants to meet him, one of them might have shown up accompanied by Albus and all his friends. And then when Tom tried to Apparate away, Albus’s lapdog would be able to track his supposed master. For at least an hour. And follow on, with Albus’s entire entourage.

Alternatively, if the Dark Mark sometimes acts as a homing device on the Dark Lord’s location, Albus might try to modify it so it always does. Expecting to end up, if successful, with a permanent tracking charm on Tom Riddle, in the person of Albus’s pet reformed-DE.

If the Dark Mark worked that way. Allowing the Death Eaters to track Tom any time he touched one of the Marks, and for some time (at least an hour) afterwards.

Conversely, if Albus only thought the Mark worked that way, and wove plans in that expectation, his plans might go dangerously awry if he was mistaken, might they not? Or
he might waste a lot of time trying to do something that could not be done.

In which case what Severus told Tom was: See, I looked to Dumbledore as though I was supporting his cause with the Ministry! And giving him, and them, valuable information about your Mark. But I told them no more than what they could infer from what Potter must have witnessed, and I left them with the impression that that one function was all your Mark could do.

And Dumbledore has spent the whole time since your Mark started darkening trying to use it to trace you.

Am I not a good deceiver in your cause, my Lord? I limited the damage to the unavoidable, and have sent Dumbledore, and now the Ministry, off on a false scent.

*

So how’d it really work? To use the Mark as an urgent summons, a DE (or the Dark Lord) touches it with a bare finger. I think the finger identifies who’s doing the summoning, while the Mark touched identifies who the person/people summoned are to come to, and leaves some trace on them so the Marked person is traceable to the summonee for some time (a useful feature in coming back to rescue--or kill—a wounded comrade who’d called for pickup, for instance).

And either all DE’s Marks react identically to every summons from everyone (one would think this would be a disadvantage, especially since every call firmly identifies the caller, and surely Tom wouldn’t want his followers to inadvertently out themselves to the group as a whole every time they have an emergency or call for his attention). In this case every DE alive knew, for instance, when Bellatrix Black Lestrange summoned Tom to announce she’d captured Harry….

OR… and I think this more likely, just in that it would be a better way for the system to work….

I think Tom can do sublinks. So that team members, for example on a raid or other mission, can call each other for emergency backup without alerting ALL the other DE’s. Instanteous communication of an emergency, however crude, would be a big advantage during many missions. And a team leader could call an abort, if need be, simply by Apparating away himself and summoning his team.

A Death Eater not linked into a team would default to communicating only with the Dark Lord.

In that case, of course Snape and the Carrows could attract each other’s attention at Hogwarts, even if they couldn’t Apparate to each others’ sides there. Tom would have adjusted their Marks that way.

In that case, I think Tom is aware of every call. And quite possibly every location of his slaves, when he wants to be.



(This is really a tribute to Swythyv, whose fascinating essay finally cleared up for me why the loyal Barty Crouch should have trained Harry Potter to resist the Imperius: to grossly mislead him, and his student allies, about how the curse is really used.)