Page 29 of The Salt King

“Will one of you be taking me up to the altar, or will you be flirting some more?” said Annunciata.

Jericho looked like he was having a fantasy about locking himself in the Lodge and staring at a wall, untormented by Jesuits or Carmelites.

“Yes, sorry,” said Avelyn. And then, because he wanted revenge for the weasel trap, “Can I flirt with you instead?”

Annunciata was right on it. “Only if you promise we’re going on a dazzling sex romp after?”

“A thousand times yes.” Avelyn laughed, and Jericho put his hands over his face.

The queue was quite long, and it wasn’t moving yet. The priest was—probably because of an admittedly sensible health and safety edict aimed at making sure people didn’t give each other herpes all drinking from the same chalice—pouring the communion wine into dozens of those tiny plastic thimbles that doctors gave you pills in.

“So what do people think Matthew did?” Avelyn whispered to Annunciata.

“Oh, he was a right prick,” she said unexpectedly. “Ran a YouTube channel, he did all sorts of stupid bollocks for a picture. I know the channel was part of his mission, but he never thought of anything else. He took a Hreod lad over the Flood to see the Outside. Kid was only ten.”

Avelyn stared at her. Hreod children didn’t leave Hreodwater until they were at least fifteen, and never alone. “Really.”

“Oh, yeah, they nearly chucked him out for that, and they only didn’t because he convinced them he didn’t know it was so bad, but he feckin did. He just wanted footage. I don’t know what tipped God over the edge. Perhaps Matthew was being called to a new purpose after the cure and he said, ‘Balls to that, I’m after three million views.’”

“God or something else?” Avelyn said.

“Ah, your man the Salt King?” She sounded amused. “Doesn’t An El mean ‘the angel’?”

“No it does not,” Avelyn grumbled, but he didn’t start with how, in Hreod, An El had been a title of the Salt King long before the abbey was built, but when Hreoda told Saint Hildegard it meant “the spirit that burns,” she had played fast and loose with the translation and behold! A seraph.11 If Annunciata was a linguist, then she would know a damn sight more about it than he did.

She gave him a wicked sparkle that suggested he had just dodged a trap full of spikes, but she had no chance to say anything else, because at the front of the queue down the nave, there was a disturbed flurry.

“What have you put in that stuff? It tastes of metal!”

The elderly priest looked flustered. “Oh—I apologise, it just came out of the bottle, I think it’s, er . . . some ordinary merlot . . .”

Someone choked. “Oh, my God! That is not merlot!”

“That’s blood,” someone else said, to an appalled and curious muttering.

Back in the pews, Jericho had straightened.

“It is. Look.” Someone held up a piece of cloth, stained very red. Not red in the way wine was red.

“Sorry about this,” Avelyn said to Annunciata, and wove his way to the front.

People let him through, and someone handed him the chalice. What was inside was too viscous to be wine. He dipped his fingertip into it. Yes: blood. He looked back and showed the chalice to Jericho, who had come up close after him. Jericho nodded, dark eyes troubled. There was an excited murmur through everyone around them. The queue had bunched up into a crowd.

The flustered priest was showing him the bottle of wine. It was just wine.

“Can I see the bread?” Avelyn asked, and there was a weird, instant hush.

The priest looked at him uncomprehendingly for a half second, then turned back and gave him the consecrated bread on its silver plate.

It looked like bread, but when Avelyn touched it, he pulled his hand back, because the crust didn’t feel anything like baked dough. It was like . . . skin.

When he tore off a tiny piece, he saw the membranes stretch and tear, and so did miniature thread veins, just perceptibly blue and purple. Then the bread started to bleed. He dropped it, and the noise it made was the thwack of a raw steak.

There was a yell from almost everyone who had seen, and in a surge, some people went down onto their knees, praying. Others stood frozen. Feeling as though his heart had climbed up his throat like a toad to sit behind his wisdom teeth, Avelyn raised the silver camera that was still resting on his hip and took pictures. The elderly priest, hands shaking and tears running down his face, eased the plate back onto the altar. The noise of the prayers and the exclamations and shouts morphed little by little into singing.

Avelyn didn’t take the priest aside to ask him if he had faked it somehow. Perhaps with access to a very sophisticated laboratory, a person with the right kind of doctorate could have grown something like this, but there was no lab here. The rest of the loaf was ordinary Hreod bread, dense and dark and full of seeds.

He had everything packed up all the same, to be sent for analysis, but he already knew what the results would show. Whatever the flesh on the silver plate was, it wouldn’t be lab-grown, and tests on the blood were going to show that it came from someone healthy, probably in their early thirties, and the genetic markers would suggest it was a man from somewhere around the Dead Sea.