* * *

Childermass blinked. “Where am I wandering to?” he asked himself irritably. “And what am I doing talking to myself? This is no time to be wool-gathering!” There was a smell of gunpowder. One of his pistols lay in the snow. When he picked it up it was still warm as if he had recently discharged it. That was odd, but he had no time to be properly surprized because a sound made him look up.

Vinculus was getting up off the ground. He did it clumsily, in jerks, like something new-born that has not yet discovered what its limbs are for. He stood for a moment, his body swaying and his head twitching from side to side. Then he opened his mouth and screamed at Childermass. But the sound that came out of his mouth was no sound at all; it was the emptied skin of sound without flesh or bones.

It was, without a doubt, the strangest thing Childermass had ever seen: a naked blue man with blood-engorged eyes, silently screaming in the middle of a snow-covered moor. It was such a very extraordinary situation that for some moments he was at a loss to know what to do. He wondered if he ought to try the spell called Gilles de Marston’s Restoration of Flown Tranquillity, but on further consideration, he thought of something better. He took out the claret that Lucas had given him and shewed it to Vinculus. Vinculus grew calmer and fixed his gaze upon it.

A quarter of an hour later they were seated together on a tussock beneath the hawthorn, breakfasting on the claret and a handful of apples. Vinculus had put on his shirt and breeches and was wrapped in a blanket that belonged to Brewer. He had recovered from his hanging with surprizing rapidity. His eyes were still blood-shot, but they were less alarming to look at than before. His speech was hoarse and liable to be interrupted at any moment by fits of violent coughing, but it was comprehensible.

“Someone tried to hang you,” Childermass told him. “I do not know who or why. Luckily I found you in time and cut you down.” As he said this, he felt a faint question disturb his thoughts. In his mind’s eye he saw Vinculus, dead on the ground, and a thin, white hand, pointing. Who had that been? The memory slipped away from him. “So tell me,” he continued, “how does a man become a book? I know that your father was given the book by Robert Findhelm and that he was supposed to take the book to a man in the Derbyshire hills.”

“The last man in England who could read the King’s letters,” croaked Vinculus.

“But your father did not deliver the book. Instead he ate it in the drinking contest in Sheffield.”

Vinculus took another drink from the bottle and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Four years later I was born and the King’s Letters were written on my infant body. When I was seventeen, I went to look for the man in the Derbyshire hills – he lived just long enough for me to find him out. That was a night indeed! A starlit, summer night, when the King’s Book and the last Reader of the King’s Letters met and drank wine together! We sat upon the brow of the hill at Bretton, looking out over England, and he read England’s destiny from me.”