Page 13 of The Salt King

Jericho gave him an unexpected, calm tilt of the head. “My anti-weaselling precautions are thorough, but feel free to try.”

Avelyn put his hands together, delighted. He hardly ever had willing victims.

“Anyway,” Jericho said, turning back to the stove again, “I’m also the doctor. Good idea to have a medic down here permanently because people arrive with all sorts of terrible problems. Any medical things you need to tell me about?”

“No,” said Avelyn, “just one of those million-day coughs everyone gets since the pandemic.”

“Oh, that’ll go away here in a couple of days.”

“It will what?”

“I know it’s odd, but it will,” Jericho said mildly. “Small things clear up quickly here.”

“Well, great,” said Avelyn, hoping that was true. “Actually I don’t remember ever getting a cold before I went to the Outside.”

“No, Hreoda are medically very boring. I was excited when Covid happened, but nobody got it. Researchers write to us every now and then and ask if they can poke around, but they change their minds when I explain about the electricity.”

“And about the people,” said Avelyn.

“The people are lovely,” Jericho said, but there was a hint of strain.

“You must realize that isn’t true,” said Avelyn, thinking what a fabulous time he was going to have grinding Jericho down to admitting he was a normal person with homicidal ideations like everyone else.

Jericho picked up a block of beautiful red salt and grated a dusting of it with a tiny golden grater into the chocolate, which was rich and silky already. For Avelyn, it looked like Jericho was grating a hot coal. He hovered on the edge of explaining that he wouldn’t be able to taste it, but he left it too long.

Jericho poured out the chocolate into two glass cups and gave Avelyn the first one. Even though it was warm down here in the salt light and by the fire, the cold on the fen had soaked into him, and it was wonderful to hold something hot.

“Thanks.”

“Welcome,” Jericho said, and once he’d sat down too, he crossed his legs to balance his cup on his knee. Close to, he was more like an old painting than ever. He had feral black curls with a white shock through the front, the kind you got if someone smacked you in the head with the butt of a gun—the kind artists loved because it looked like it was symbolic of something. “And second to last on my list of things to say . . .” He leaned over and took one of the silver-clad cameras from the line of hooks. He held it out.

Avelyn took it. It was heavy because of the silver, which was real silver. It had a hallmark. Along its sides were etched incredible, complicated patterns: water dragons and stags, oak trees, all beautiful Hreod designs he hadn’t seen for twelve years except in the ghosts of his tattoos. “What’s this?”

“If you try to use a normal camera down here, salt light fogs the film; it will come out looking like you’ve exposed it to bright sunlight. But salt light doesn’t go through silver, and a few years ago, the smith in town started to make these. They should show more or less what you can see.”

“No,” Avelyn said, disbelieving.

It had been a source of endless frustration that he’d never been able to show Father Li what he was seeing down here.

Jericho held his hands out. “Proof-of-life picture for Father Li?” he asked.

Avelyn looked up properly from the camera. It would have been on the paperwork that someone called Cai Li had sent him here, but it wouldn’t have said that they were friends, or that Li absolutely would require proof of life sooner rather than later. “You know Father Li?”

“I wake up sometimes in the night and feel grateful that he isn’t here anymore,” Jericho said, and took a picture of Avelyn just as he laughed. The shutter clucked, and then the cogs inside shushed as they sent out the photograph. Jericho held it, but he was looking hauntedly into the middle distance. “He once told me a joke about an octopus and some condensed milk. It was awful.”

Avelyn was guiltily pleased to find that Father Li sometimes terrorised people other than him. “I’m so sorry. He’s much reformed.”

“I don’t even slightly believe you,” Jericho said. He gave him the camera back, and the photograph, and already, Avelyn could see that the film had picked up far more than the dim light of the candles and the fire. The walls were all alight.

“I can’t believe you were here when he was,” Avelyn said. He’d thought Jericho was about his age. “You seem much too young.”

“No, I’m very old,” Jericho said, half laughing. His hand went to the white bolt in his hair.

“You’re one of those irritating people who are better at fifty than twenty, aren’t you. That’s vexing. You are a vexatious person.”

Jericho looked pleased and embarrassed, and Avelyn clenched his hand, annoyed with himself. Because there was no chance whatsoever of any romance, it felt logical to flirt as a general marker of liking someone. It wasn’t just him: it seemed to be a common side effect of holy orders. Father Li and the theology tutor at the Venerable English College often promised to elope together for a weekend of cocaine and wild sex in Milan. Avelyn loved it—it was freeing—but he was prone to forgetting that if you didn’t know what it was, it was just harassment.

“Thanks for this,” he said about the camera, again. He put the photograph on the arm of the chair to let it develop all the way. Tomorrow, he’d take it to the Outside and make it into a ransom note to send recorded delivery. “It’s a great idea.”