Page 121 of The Salt King

And exactly like those figures in the graveyard, seeing it felt much more like the memory of seeing, not real seeing. It was an echo.

She snapped her fingers in front of her face. It was a sudden enough, sharp enough sound to startle her occipital lobe. She saw moths.

“Oh—God, where did those come from?” Sally coughed, hunching forward and covering his mouth and nose.

What?

She swung around. “Can you see moths?”

“Of course I can see moths! Come on!” Sally pulled her hand and dragged her into a side alley. It was so dark it was impossible to see even a few inches ahead, but they plunged down it anyway.

There was a clang and a gasp right in front of her, and then she bumped into Sally. Sally had walked straight into a fence. It crossed the whole alley. There was no gate, and no way to see how high it was.

The thing on fire had followed them. The flames began to catch on a pile of old cardboard boxes. The boxes were so dry that the fire engulfed them straightaway, the top layer withering to show the wavy pattern of the next, crumbling and distorting into an ashy mass. Sparks landed on Tallis’s sleeves.

Failure of randomness. Coins. Dice. Coffee grounds.

Red moon. Resurrection. Jinn.

Moths.

“It’s the salt light,” she said. “This didn’t start until the salt light blew in over the city.”

“What?” Sally croaked.

“It’s making . . .” She couldn’t get her fingernails over it, but some instinct she couldn’t name made her brush him behind her.

“Tallis, don’t . . .”

The burning thing had almost reached her. She could feel the heat off it. But the heat was the same as that artificial joy before. It was fake. Even the flames on the cardboard—they were flames, the cardboard was burning, but it wasn’t right.

“It’s not real,” she said aloud, at the same time as she understood.

The flames stopped. The burning thing just . . . came apart, crumbling to embers that blew away in a breath of sparks and charcoal back down the alleyway.

44

Caer Halen

As the salt light brightened, the castle changed. At first they had been in soaring impossible halls, halls to make cathedrals feel small. But as Avelyn and Jericho followed the light, the architecture aged, and they were moving through older and older iterations of grandeur. Until, now, they were moving through rough, narrow stone corridors. The doorways were made of three standing stones, set aslant, and in the walls, so that the tusks made a curving canopy just above them, were mammoth skulls. The ways were so small that although the salt light still didn’t touch the walls, you couldn’t walk in the shadows anymore. The light was pounding, and Avelyn’s eyes were streaming.

He was trying to hold his mind still, but it was more and more difficult to do. He couldn’t tell how long it had been now, but it felt like hours, and the brighter the salt light flared, the more his eyes hurt, and the more the heat of it shifted from something like summer to the pounding of an open forge. It was as bad now as it had been down the Saint’s Way, full of lighting flickers and aurora flashes, and sudden flares that looked like something exploding on the surface of the sun. He was having to try and predict them and get his hands over his face before they happened. If he didn’t, he saw nothing but purple-green stars for whole minutes afterwards.

The stone lintels were bothering him too.

They were all covered in spiral patterns. Spirals and spirals and spirals, and in the same deep-down place that had recognised the sound of the angels’ language, he knew that they were warnings. Turn back, because this way, the world will turn upside down. You think you’re on an open fen, and you can even see the sky—unchanging twilight—but soon it will all turn around, and you’ll be deep underground. Up is down.

Briefly the way opened out, and they were walking along a cliff edge, outside, and down on the plain below there was ice, and mammoths walking. It was a blast of gloriously cold air. But then they were plunged back into another tunnel and the flogging heat of the salt light.

All at once, Avelyn couldn’t go any further. The tiredness slung into him just as heavily as the ecstasy behind them. The salt in the air was so sharp now that it was lacerating the back of his throat. He had a drilling headache. Soon he would have to walk with his eyes shut and just hope Jericho could guide him. The idea of doing that again made him slow down and stop, his back against a stone carved with a huge, urgent triskelion.

“I need to sleep,” he said. “I’m going to collapse soon.”

He thought Jericho was going to say, Thank God, let’s do that. Jericho, though, looked troubled. “Me too, but I don’t think we should. Can you lucid-dream?”

“Can I what?” said Avelyn. “No. Can you?”

“Only a bit,” Jericho said.