Page 100 of The Salt King

All of it was still strobe-lit by the blue police lights, brighter than the innocuous sparkle of the Christmas lights.

They were coming up to an army truck. It had stalled, and the driver was struggling with the ignition. Avelyn could already see why. The salt light was foggy down its left side. If the engine did start, it would burst into salt. Another soldier was struggling with a radio. They were about to go right past him. Avelyn’s insides tightened with the certainty that the soldier was going to stop them. He must see them, this was surely the most fragile kind of witchcraft . . .

“Hey,” the soldier began.

Avelyn closed his eyes and forced his mind blank, as if he were casting salt. Just let Jericho do the believing . . .

“Er . . . never mind,” the soldier murmured.

A news helicopter was flying over, lights painfully stark and stabbing the beginnings of a headache somewhere behind Avelyn’s retinas. Any bright light was achy, he was noticing; he had a feeling he had done his eyes more damage in the storm in the deep than he’d known at the time. Of course if he could just cultivate Jericho’s skill of believing useful things, then it would be fine, but he suspected he couldn’t. Knowing how it worked was going to get in the way.

“We need to be fast,” Avelyn said. “Father Li said—something about swarms of things that make salt light. They’re coming here. He thought we should have a few hours, but I saw some on the call, and I don’t think . . .”

“Are you all right?” Jericho asked.

Avelyn had stopped. Perhaps it was only because he was half expecting to see it, but he thought there was a violet-amber glow in the sky in the southeast.

From the moment he realized there really was light from that horizon to the moment the things hurled into the visible sky was shockingly brief. Maybe six or seven seconds. He had never seen anything move that fast.

It was what he had seen behind everyone at the Vatican, but now he could see them clearly, it was far stranger than he had thought. They weren’t clear, straight formations. The salt light trails billowed, flocking in eerie murmurations, alive. Legions of them.

The helicopter fell out of the air, salt bursting through its engine. Avelyn caught Jericho and wrenched him into a doorway, because it looked as though it would come down right on top of them. It missed them by about twenty yards with a noise like a mineshaft collapsing, glass spraying them, a rotor blade smashing into a streetlight. For what felt like an incredibly long time, Avelyn locked eyes with the pilot, just before the helicopter nose crumpled.

Nobody screamed, though. Nobody shouted.

Everyone had stopped still. The cars had stopped too, the buses, the cyclists, the drunk men from Hreodwater still being escorted by soldiers. He felt himself going slack. Something wonderful was about to happen.

“Avelyn?” Jericho said, with an urgency that he hadn’t had even when he pulled out the crossbow bolt.

All at the same time, everyone spoke. It was all the same words. Avelyn heard himself say it too, in the way he sometimes knew if he was talking in his sleep. He could feel it was another language, something he didn’t know, and perhaps it even clicked somewhere in the middle, a sound he had never made in his life before, but something in his bones knew how. Oh, but it was ancient and holy, and good.

Gaudezhte *khiram.

Everyone said it, except Jericho.

38

Jericho was gripping Avelyn’s shoulders, trying to bring his attention back. He was saying his name. Avelyn blinked, foggy with happiness. It was like walking into the mine, like the ras, only rawer, much stronger. Standing in the mine was soothing; this was more like morphine. It had a saw-toothed edge.

“Avelyn?” Jericho said again.

He came back to himself properly. “Yes. Yes, sorry,” he said. “There was . . . I saw something in the sky. Is it—can you see . . . no, it’s salt light,” he said, aware he was incoherent. He shook his head at himself. Yes: those bright jet trails had combed salt light right across the sky.

When he was small, his great-grandmother had told him that during the war, she had looked up one day as a little girl and seen the Luftwaffe flying over, so high you couldn’t see the planes, only the silvery trails they left behind in this vast sky, when they hit the salt light above Hreodwater. They all fell in a cataclysmic rain of ruined engines into the fen. He had thought he would never see anything like that.

The salt light was down lower to the ground, too. It was coming from Hreodwater, rolling in like sea fog. A bright patch reached the middle of the road. The police cars shut themselves off. Above the cars, the strings of fairy lights flickered as the electrics struggled, then failed. Something about the coil of it in the air put him in mind of ink in water, the weird silver ink that the octopuses in the abbey lake shrouded around their stolen silver citadel to hide from the eels, and abruptly, he was struck with certainty. That was exactly what it was. It was . . . camouflage. The opposite way around. Silver ink was dark, and this was a confounding fog of brightness.

And these things coming in overhead—they were the eels.

All around them, people looked drugged. Some were standing still. A few had buckled onto their knees. In Italy, people would have been praying, but the English thought that sort of thing was silly, Father Li had told him, and he was right.

At least they wouldn’t have to deal with visions from Revelation coming alive and eating the populace. What did English people believe in? Apart from the basic human rights to a good kebab and to complain about whatever was going on with the wheelie bins, he didn’t know.

An arc of salt light shot overhead. Not way up in the atmosphere, not where those others had been: right overhead, maybe only a hundred feet above them, comet brilliant. Avelyn’s head snapped round to follow its path, and he just had time to notice that no one else saw it before joy kicked him in the chest.

It was delirious, insane. Glorious. It was every Christmas with Father Li, it was the day he was ordained, it was how it would have felt if any single one of the people he had ever loved had told him they loved him back. It was the moment Jericho had rescued him from the mine; it was the King sitting with him in the Lodge, one hand on his ribs. All at once.

Salt light roared up in a column like a detonating bomb. Whatever the thing was, it had crashed into the ground, somewhere towards the centre of town.