Page 18 of The Salt King

Counterintuitively, there were trees down here. There was a kind of oak that grew by salt light. They were bright white, like birches, and now they were raining their acorns onto the path, each one pearly. They came into season around now, at Yule; Avelyn had never worked out why. He said so.

“This is the bright season,” Jericho explained. “It’s warmer, too. In summer you need a coat down here.”

Yes. The mine had its own seasons. How . . . that would have to go on the pile of things he didn’t know.

“It’s much brighter than I remember,” he said, feeling like that couldn’t be true, but sure it was. Even in winter, there hadn’t been all this salt light, not as high in the mine as An El. You could see by it then, but only like you see by a full moon. This, now . . . it was more like twilight.

“Yes, the Hreoda are saying so. It’s causing problems actually.” Jericho waved across the lake toward that towering archway that led into the working part of the mine. It shone. Just as Avelyn looked, a flare like a miniature aurora-stream flashed from inside. He’d never seen anything like that before. “I think it’s hurting people’s eyes. They’ve closed off the tourist routes now, and there’s talk about halting the mining shifts until it dies down.”

What was that—some kind of storm? If the mine could have seasons, then probably it could have weather. Couldn’t it?

“I’ve never seen that before,” said Avelyn, feeling indignant that this mine, which he knew atom by atom in some places, could do anything unexpected.

“I don’t think anyone has,” Jericho assured him. “Everyone’s talking about it.”

There was a statue in the courtyard. It was carved from black salt, so it glowed. It showed a woman with a miner’s axe. Avelyn stopped, because it might as well have come alive and punched him in the stomach. It was his grandmother.

The inscription on the plinth said in English and in Hreod:

IN MEMORIAM OF THE BROCKEN MINING CLAN. FIFTY-FOUR PEOPLE WERE KILLED IN THIS MINE ON FEBRUARY 12TH, 2018. WE COMMEND THEM TO GOD WHO IS IN HEAVEN, AND TO THE SALT KING WHO SLEEPS IN THE DEEP.

Avelyn looked at Jericho and couldn’t get the question out.

“The bodies were recovered. They were buried here,” Jericho said anyway. “A Requiem Mass was held in the chapel for each one.”

The Ordinary of the Mass, the basic texts of the Requiem Mass, was always and forever in his head not as words but music. It was something he loved about the Church. A requiem was a thing you sang. Requiem aeternam dona eis, domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis. Grant them eternal rest, Lord, and may light perpetual shine upon them. He doubted his uncles had ever heard it, but it was one of the few places where the two cultures matched up: you did not talk to your god, you sang. It clenched his throat now though, because never had there been light more eternal than in this godforsaken mine. It was a horrible joke.

And what would Jericho say, if he knew it had all been Avelyn’s fault?

“Who mines the King’s Way now?” Avelyn asked, to get off the subject. He realized he was wringing his hand around his own wrist, as if he could rub away the last of his tattoos.

“The Harkta.”

“The hauliers?” Traditionally, the Harkta clan shipped salt to the Outside. They had good English, so they tended to seem like Avelyn did now, neither Hreoda nor Outsiders, but they did know salt.

Jericho nodded, and in the most spectacular display of chivalry Avelyn had experienced in a long time, he didn’t ask if Avelyn was all right, or if coming back here was really a good idea, or if he needed to talk to someone. “They’re very nice. Sometimes they even say hello.”

“Hreoda, saying hello to someone who isn’t Hreod?” Avelyn said gratefully. “And have you contacted the relevant climate agencies about Hell freezing over?”

“I know, and I’ve only been here for ten or twelve thousand years. I think they’re going soft. Here we are.” Jericho pushed open a heavy side door.

The kitchen had no ordinary lamps. Instead, silver bowls of amber halite glowed with a warm light that danced in the steam from the ovens. Three or four people were still here despite the time, getting things ready for the morning. One of them looked around at the sound of the door, and to Avelyn’s surprise, she lit up.

“Avelyn Brocken, by the King! They said you were coming, and I never believed it. Where have you been?”

“In Rome. South in Rome,” he remembered to say, off balance.

“Southeast in Rome,” she told him, laughing like he’d come out in half-embarrassing, half-endearing baby talk. “Welcome home, brother. So it takes a man turning to salt to make you bother with us, then?”

He laughed too. He had been at school with her. She was called Fion, and she looked exactly the same as she had done when she showed him how to hammer a good edge onto a knife in the forge. “Oh, yes, sister, I’m much too important for all of you scum now.”

She hugged him and thumped his shoulder. “You prick,” she said warmly. “And you’re a witch for the nailed god now?” she added, looking at his clothes. “Is he well?”

“I think so,” he said, feeling peculiar, because he had forgotten the Hreod habit of talking about gods as if they lived next door. “And the King?”

“Well,” she said, and looked at the shrine in the corner as though the carving of the Salt King there had not been behaving.

Avelyn looked too, and had an awful lurch of loss. He liked the current pope, but working for someone interesting was not the same as serving a king. Nobody loved whoever they worked for in the Outside: that would have been unhealthy. But you could love your king. It wasn’t like other sorts of love. It wasn’t how he loved Father Li. It was blind, devoted, self-effacing love, and not a little insane. It was dangerous to feel that about anything or anyone—he could see that even while he was standing here feeling it—but it was also the purest and cleanest thing he’d ever felt. He wished he could go to that salt figure and leave an offering of silver or oak like he used to do.