Titans of Chaos

Quentin hissed when we passed the peninsula where Durham Cathedral rose up against the foggylights of the city. He announced that certain of his "covenants" would not operate here, since thebone of Saint Cuthbert scared his allies away.

Edgestow is just north of Stockton-on-Tees, not far from Durham. We disembarked and sent theArgent Nautilus away to lead Mestor's needle somewhere else, and we spent most of the nighttramping 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 theNorthwest.)

It was a bitter January night, and the snow lay wet and thick on the ground, trampled into mud bythe roads. The stars were hidden, but the moon rode veiled between tattered streamers of coldclouds.

Between my higher senses, Quentin's divining rod, Colin's hunches, and Victor's tapping into theglobal-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, lookinglike a bunch of fishermen. Sneaky fishermen. The boys and Vanity were peering suspiciously downat an empty, snowy road- which looked sickly and yellow beneath the unflickering streetlamps-atthe 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 thestreet. Perhaps the mental ward had originally been associated with the medical college here; atleast, the solemn beautiful architecture of the ancient buildings looked like a campus to me, and Iknow 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 fieldwe'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.

Quentin, following a croaking raven and carrying an entrenching tool, went off to do his spookybusiness there, while we shivered in the cold, waiting. Warlocks are something like doctors, Iguess. No matter how much you like them personally, there is quite a bit of nasty mess involved intheir line of work.