While chaos erupted behind them, Harry and Ron, out in front, had smooth sailing.
Of course they did. After all, no one was making trouble for them, were they? Nanyang Magic School, their closest pursuers, had already drawn very close to them at the third floating island.
But they could do nothing about Harry pushing the chests into the lake. That delayed them by another several minutes.
Harry felt happy, and his happiness was built on other people's suffering.
Overall, though, all the champions had picked up speed. Even when they had to get into the water to retrieve the chests, the time spent in between had been greatly reduced.
By now, Harry and Ron had reached the fifth floating island.
After opening the chest again, Ron offered his opinion.
"Almost there!" Ron said. "The general shape is already there."
Starting with the first chest, they had taken several oddly shaped objects out of every magic chest. An ordinary person-of course, that really ought to be an ordinary wizard here-would probably have been utterly bewildered by these things, with no idea what they were.
But with the earlier clues, Ron had already had some idea of what to expect. Comparing them now, he immediately identified what lay before him.
Magic puppets.
More precisely, parts for a pair of magic puppets.
Ron was very familiar with magic puppets. Quite apart from his great admiration for Professor McGonagall's war puppets, he was very interested in magical automata himself.
Ron had been studying magic puppets since his second year.
His progress had not been particularly fast, given his own abilities-magic puppets required a very solid grounding in Transfiguration and charms, and even some knowledge of alchemy-but compared with the vast majority of people, he already knew a great deal about them.
Although the