Page 19 of The Salt King

He closed his hand over the crucifix on his rosary, deep in his pocket.

“We’re not sure how he is,” Fion was saying. “The miners are having trouble in the deep. The songs aren’t working. The salt light is blinding halfway up the Saint’s Way now, can you believe that? The Outsiders are getting the Blessing, whatever that is, and now that poor man Matthew—so something’s happening.” She dropped her voice as though she was trying to skirt something awful; nuclear holocaust, or the eruption of Yellowstone. “The grandmothers say he’s waking up.”

Avelyn could have asked her in great detail about any one of those things, but the practicality of actually speaking to a human meant you couldn’t ask about even one-tenth of the confusing things, because, well, it was late, you were getting hungry, and the need to have a bath and scrub off Heathrow Airport was increasingly strong, and the person you were talking to needed to get home too. It would wait till the morning.

“It’s Yule,” Avelyn said, instead of asking. He found that his eyes, traitors, were resting on the shrine again. “Maybe he’s just feeling shiny.”

Fion laughed. She really was the same: just taller and broader, with the strength of adulthood. It was hard not to stare at her. He’d never seen an adult before who he had known when they were a child. The change, and the not-change, was miraculous. “I hope so, I hope so. Anyway, you’ll be starving. We saved a tray. Do you want to eat down here with us or take it upstairs?”

“You know, I’m going to be rude and take it away,” he said, because if he ate down here, the meticulous politeness required of hosts toward guests would mean all the cooks had to stay behind as well, and it was already late. “But I’ll see you tomorrow. Will I?”

“Oh, yes.” She clapped his arm again. “Welcome home, brother.”

“Thank you, sister,” he said, and he really did feel welcome.

Fion paused, and her eyes ticked past him. “Brother . . . did you come here alone just now?”

Even with his Hreod Thinking switched on, he didn’t understand what that meant. Jericho was just behind him in the doorway, holding his lamp. He hadn’t come in—for him the kitchen would be pitch-black and he was probably hearing their voices entirely disembodied—but he was clearly there. Then Avelyn realized it was probably an indirect, polite way of asking who his friend was. Maybe she hadn’t recognised Jericho: he could imagine that they never overlapped.

“Oh, this is the dean,” Avelyn said. “We’ve just come over from the Lodge. Ah—n . . . orth at the Lodge,” he added, his internal compass squeaking as it got to work again.

“No, he’s not,” she said. “He isn’t real. You shouldn’t talk to things that aren’t real.”

Pow.

There it was.

Hreod Thinking.

He had no idea what to say. “Oh, right. Well. Night, sister.”

“Night,” she said, as though she hadn’t just said anything demented.

“All well?” Jericho said as he led the way out into the courtyard again.

“Yup,” said Avelyn, who was thinking about the grovelling apology he was going to extract from Father Li when he went home. Father Li thought that Avelyn’s dismissal of Hreod Thinking as frustrating, generally stupid, and sometimes dangerous was a sort of self-hating internalised racism. But he was going in the intellectual stocks when Avelyn got back to Rome, and Avelyn was going to be pelting him with intellectual vegetables, because while it was normal to complain that it was difficult to see your doctor, it was unhinged to claim he was imaginary.

PART II

Three days before the waking of the Salt King

9

Yekaterinburg, Russia

If there was any group of people in the world who Katerina would have joyfully rounded up and shot, it was travel vloggers. In the good old days, she would probably have been allowed to do that, too. She couldn’t imagine the KGB having any patience with people like Hi I’m Vlad from Vladivostok and I’m Going to Take You on the Adventure of a LIFETIME!! Smash That Subscribe Button!!! There had probably been a special cell with a sloping floor and a drain at one end for those people. Probably using more than one exclamation mark would have been enough to get you deported to Kazakhstan.

But now you weren’t allowed to shoot people for being irritating. Now, if you were police, you had to spend a lot of time fishing vloggers out of stupid places where they weren’t meant to be, and you weren’t allowed to shoot them even a tiny bit. She’d bet anything that the police in Moscow didn’t have to deal with this nonsense. But if your city was only a hundred and fifty kilometers away from a massive nuclear facility that had been the stage for several spectacular disasters, you were flooded with the kind of people for whom a minibreak to Chernobyl was too tame.

“It’s another missing travel moron,” the dispatcher had said over the radio half an hour ago. “Actually, several travel morons.”

“If I have to drive to Lake fucking Karachay again and fish out the vomiting tourists and explain that it’s fucking radioactive, I will make them eat plutonium,” Katerina had said, teetering right on the edge of hurling her badge out of the window, sending a nice envelope of anthrax to the superintendent, and moving to Halkidiki.

“It’s much closer, don’t worry,” the dispatcher said soothingly. “It’s just the salt mine. Five lads posted something online about going down to explore three days ago and they were supposed to be there for no more than twenty hours. They’re just students,” he offered, in a tone that was only half hopeful she wouldn’t collapse the entrance of the mine and call it case closed. “Their parents have all reported them missing and one of the mothers is on the Something Committee, so the boss wants you to go straightaway.”

“Outstanding,” Katerina snarled.

So now, she was driving up to the gates. The salt mine had been abandoned years ago, and what had once been the parking lot was now just an empty, open space, ringed with barbed-wire fencing. The ground was all salt; it crunched and squeaked strangely under the tyres. She rummaged through her bag for a flashlight, and a spare battery for the flashlight, because she liked horror movies and had resolved never to be the subject of one.