assign you some sort of punishment detail, to keep order in the ranks. The good news is that we can throw you a birthday party after.'
'What? No one knows when my birthday is.'
'No one knows when baby Jesus was born, but there is a date all picked out for Christmas, isn't there? As leader, I can assign a date. Your birthday is the day after next. Then, the next bit of good news: the final exam!'
'Leader, what is going to be on the final? I mean, the reason why I got in trouble flying off... Well, you should tell us what we should be preparing for, right?'
'For the final, we are going to be sneaking back into civilization. Colin needs a piano or something. He should be practicing music. Quentin needs all sorts of supplies, everything from tarot cards to real clay. We need to replace missing mess gear.'
'That doesn't seem that hard.' I remember a distinct feeling of disappointment.
Now she smiled, and her eyes twinkled, and she knelt down again beside me to speak in a low voice. It is the kind of voice you use when you are telling a secret, whether there is anyone around or not. 'We are going to see if we can help your old friend Sam. The drayman who gave you a lift.'
Less than thirty-six hours later, after an afternoon of punishment chores I do not want to remember, and the most charming birthday I do not want to forget, we five were aboard the Argent Nautilus, in a fogbound Irish Sea, rolling and pitching in the choppy waves, and the smothering cold was leaving droplets on our thick woolen sea-coats.
Sam had mentioned to me that he had a nephew in an institution with a mental disease. I had once, half-jokingly, offered to grant him a wish. He wished for a cure.
Now we would see what we could do.
Pallid Hounds A-Hunting
This trip, we had bought supplies with more forethought. We had drifted off the coast of the Isle of Man. Quentin had passed across the waves as silently as a shadow, to approach Castletown, on the south of the island. He returned with the sweaters and jackets and caps we wore, and a heavy backpack filled with chow. We were still low on some things, but he had restocked our larder.
There was no piano to buy for Colin on the Isle of Man.
'The severed head of Bran has not seen us yet,' said Quentin as he stepped out of the shadows and down to the deck. 'The Isle of Man is not part of the United Kingdom, merely a possession of the Crown. I saw the shivering ghosts of Vikings, still hungry for blood, but no sigils of Arthur, no ravens loyal to the spells of Elizabeth the First. Officially, I did not step foot on the soil Bran protects. Now, since we are coming on a mission of mercy, perhaps, even when we do, he will not inform the gods of our coming. Perhaps.' He gave Vanity a look of doubt, but said no more. Very Victor-like.
A few hours later, after midnight, we had crossed the rough North Sea and were approaching the opposite coast. Quentin, on the bow, summoned friends of his from below the waters, while we all huddled in the stern, trying not to overhear the sinister whispers. But that worked, or something did, and the fog thickened as we crept silently into the mouth of the river Wear, with the lights of Sunderland above us. A short way up the river were the ancient stone bridges and modern iron shipyards of Durham.
Quentin hissed when we passed the peninsula where Durham Cathedral rose up against the foggy lights of the city. He announced that certain of his 'covenants' would not operate here, since the bone of Saint Cuthbert scared his allies away.
Edgestow is just north of Stockton-on-Tees, not far from Durham. We disembarked and sent the Argent Nautilus away to lead Mestor's needle somewhere else, and we spent most of the night tramping down roads, or occasionally crossing fields and climbing over walls and hedgerows.
(Yes, hedgerows, just the kind you think they don't make in England anymore, but this was the Northwest.)
It was a bitter January night, and the snow lay wet and thick on the ground, trampled into mud by the roads. The stars were hidden, but the moon rode veiled between tattered streamers of cold clouds.
Between my higher senses, Quentin's divining rod, Colin's hunches, and Victor's tapping into the global-positioning satellites, without trouble we found the tiny institution just before dawn.
We were all behind a snowy hedge, dressed in our thick blue coats and white turtlenecks, looking like a bunch of fishermen. Sneaky fishermen. The boys and Vanity were peering suspiciously down at an empty, snowy road- which looked sickly and yellow beneath the unflickering streetlamps-at the ugly cubical building of glass and concrete beyond.
We could see the ancient buttresses and Gothic spires of some ancient buildings on our side of the street. Perhaps the mental ward had originally been associated with the medical college here; at least, the solemn beautiful architecture of the ancient buildings looked like a campus to me, and I know what a campus looks like.
Orange light pollution lit the sky in one direction, and there was a dim noise of traffic elsewhere, but there was nothing in our immediate environment but those college buildings, an empty field we'd cut across, a white graveyard to one side, and beyond it, a chapel wearing a wimple of snow.
I should mention there was a smaller graveyard at the crossroads, not on the chapel grounds.
