Page 112 of The Salt King

She had expected the armour to be heavy, but it was almost nothing. It hadn’t been made to take a lance to chest, or to stop a sword. It was hammered almost as thin as cloth, riveted onto leather that moved well. She’d tried to ask what this salt light was that everyone was anxious about, but all they could tell her was that in the mine, there was a kind of light she couldn’t see, and that enough of it was . . . well. Enough of it turned you to salt.

There were carvings on the rocks on either side of the stairway, the whirling kind that you saw sometimes inside the old stone circles and the ruins of the castles in the west, and which nobody could read anymore. She had a crawling feeling that these said something like: Turn back. One of them showed a scene that looked horribly like dead people sinking into the fen.

Her steps and the thump of her staff echoed. The air smelled powerfully of salt; the stuff was everywhere. Even on her. It was starting to coat the tiny hairs on her wrists. The steps were distorted with it. Stalactites of it hung from the ceiling.

The way led into a cavern. Water gleamed in the torchlight. Another lake: the water must have run down from the fen above. And, in that lake, another island, a great crag of—was it glass or salt?—and on the island, a tower, built in the old way without mortar, just stones packed tight together.

When you reach the cavern, the lady had said, put the helmet on. She did, and the silver gauntlets, and not a second too soon. The ends of her hair were crumbling into salt.

God in Heaven.

Only . . . God hadn’t been here in some time, she was sure.

There was a bridge. Salt poured off it like a frozen waterfall on either side.

Christ, the tower had no door.

They had walled someone in.

“Is anyone in there?” she said, and then jumped so hard she cricked her neck, because the cavern snatched her voice and boomed it back at her. THERE THERE there there there . . .

Nothing.

She shoved the torch into some salt, stared at the stonework for a few seconds, and then tried to pull out a piece of rock so she could see into the tower, but everything had been rammed in so tight it must have been done with a mallet. Instead, she smacked the hilt of the sword into it, hard, so that the halite broke. Another few punches with the steel hilt and she had made herself a window big enough to shine the torch through. Before she did, though, she breathed in deep and tried to tell herself that if she saw a body in there, it wasn’t frightening, only sad, and what she would need to do was get in there and say a blessing over it.

There was no body.

There was a man.

He was asleep on something like an altar, and she could see he was asleep because he was breathing. Around him, impossible and titan in her lamplight, there were trees; oak trees, the ground scattered about with acorns that, just for a split second, she thought were pearls. The branches interlocked above the man, as though they were shielding him from rain that would never fall.

She knocked more stones out and crept awkwardly through, the ragged doorway scraping down her back. Her bad leg panged, the dangerous pain that said it would settle in right up her back tomorrow morning.

As though it had any business down a mine, as though there was nothing more ordinary, a white stag blinked at her and ran away into the blackness. She jolted her lamp higher, shocked. The tower was round, she had seen it, and they were on an island in a lake, but . . .

But they weren’t.

There was architecture beyond the trees. Columns, arches. Hooves clattered on what sounded madly like steps. She went in further, hand stretched out, expecting to find the wall of the tower at any second, but . . . nothing. What she found was a balcony, and steps that led down and down, and somewhere below, the sigh of trees, and the singing of what she would have sworn was a river. The air was hot here, but it was open too. She could feel that there was a vast space in front of her.

Some ancient kind of witchcraft.

Nothing she wanted to investigate. Look too long at sorcery, and sorcery would look back. There were things you had to understand in order to defeat them—cankers, wounds, madness—but there were others that you just had to extinguish. Get too near a fire, and soon you were on fire too.

She looked right into the darkness, at the arches that looped above her, promising a gigantic structure above, at the steps, at the first ghosts of trees beyond, barely half-sketched by the penumbra of her light, and put it all out of her mind. None of that mattered, and sure as the Devil roared, none of it was anything to do with God.

Slowly, she turned back to the sleeping man.

For an entire second, she thought he was an unearthly colour, but in fact, what she had taken for his face was a silver mask. It fitted to him so precisely that it looked real. The metalwork was beautiful, but plain—just the cast of a man’s face, a youngish man she thought. His black hair flowed over the edges of the altar, gleaming with spilled-oil rainbows.

Silver chains shackled his wrists to the altar.

God, what had they done?

She leaned down over him to see how the mask was fastened on, dreading what she might find, but they hadn’t nailed it into his skull, thank Christ. There was just a strap, and a silver buckle. She took it off and eased it away. Underneath, his face was exactly the same as the face of the mask. He was so pale he must never have seen daylight, the lines of his brows and lashes deep black ink strokes. Not Hreod. She had never seen a human like him before. Perhaps he was Irish, or Cornish; people said they were like ghosts.

She put one hand to his chest and pressed gently.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m a physician.”