Page 30 of The Salt King

11 Seraph, pl. seraphim: literally “the burning ones.” People new to the Church were often surprised that the Bible described angels in a way so similar to demons, but it only made sense—they had started out as the same thing, and all this rubbish about demons appearing in a puff of sulphur and leering at you with rotten teeth and cloven hoofs was, as far as Avelyn was concerned, a frankly ingenious piece of propaganda from Hell. If you were looking for a cartoon devil, you didn’t recognise the real thing when it glided up to you smiling.

14

Avelyn took the samples of the transformed bread and wine and made the walk to the surface, his phone an infuriatingly dead weight in his pocket. If he could catch the first ferry and then take a horse and ride fast, he could be in the Outside in an hour, and on a video call to Father Li the second he was in signal range. And then he was going to have to sit in a café somewhere with about eight shots of espresso and stare into space until he could get to grips with the world again.

He walked with half the congregation from An El, all keen to go up and tell friends and relatives and probably newspapers about what had happened, everyone jubilant, some still singing. Avelyn had never seen a group of clergy so electrified. Some nuns had lit sparklers, drawing crosses in the air and laughing, filling the air with the lovely festival smell of gunpowder.

He should have been too.

He wasn’t. He didn’t feel any of the fizzy happiness that was bubbling all around him now.

He knew exactly what Father Li would say about that. Father Li would say that Avelyn had a deep wariness of anything wonderful happening, because he had trained himself to expect horrors so that he wouldn’t be so shocked when they inevitably arrived.

But it wasn’t that.

He kept thinking about the way the membrane of the not-bread had torn, how the blood had pinpricked and then welled in the tiny broken veins, how there had even been a layer of subcutaneous fat just beneath that crust. It hadn’t looked miraculous. It had looked appalling. And he kept thinking how glad he was he hadn’t been the person at the front, the one who’d got a mouthful of blood.

He spent his whole life translating. Latin, English, Italian, Hreod—if someone visited the Jesuit Curia who didn’t speak any of the usual languages, it was Avelyn who ended up called down to sit with them, not because he was fluent in anything useful or any better with translation apps, but because he knew how to be incoherent. It was a skill on its own, the ability not to be embarrassed when you didn’t know things, to communicate with no understanding of nuance or context. He’d learned to translate tone even if he couldn’t understand the words, he had a whole lifetime of gauging general gists and the difference between an insult and a mistake, culture and malice, all the rest. He knew how to think about information he couldn’t understand.

Every instinct said that whatever this was all for, it had not been intended to make anybody happy.

“Oh my gosh, imagine if they could clone Christ,” someone said next to him, ebullient. “Do you think they should?”

The man was Avelyn’s age, in a Franciscan habit. Avelyn looked at him twice, because he had a halo almost as strong as Annunciata’s.

“Fabian,” the man said. “I’ve come from Dresden. I’ve just been cured of bone cancer.”

He said it as though it was becoming a standard part of a person’s introduction at An El. Name, origin, cure.

“Have you,” said Avelyn, studying the halo, which was strong enough to light the way up the passage. The steep path was darker and darker the closer you went to the surface. The salt in the walls was no brighter than a silvery midnight now.

“So do you think they should?” Fabian asked.

Avelyn glanced back, because he had a trail of people who were angling to touch the silver cases he had the miracle samples in, and he was beginning to feel like he was at school again and trapped in a slow game of It. “No,” he said. “He suffered enough the first time around.”

“Well, but you see, imagine if we’re supposed to, imagine if this is the Second Coming—”

“When did you notice your symptoms improving?” said Avelyn.

Fabian blinked at him. “Are you, like, neurodiverse?”

“No, I’m a Jesuit.”

“You surely are. You do you!”

Avelyn wondered if he would be in trouble if he accidentally lost Fabian in the lake, and Fabian was eaten by eels. “Lately, or as soon as you arrived, do you think?”

“I was here for maybe two weeks. It was after Matthew,” Fabian said, warming to it. “I’d been praying for a cure already, but after I saw Matthew get up out of that chair . . . it was like I truly understood it could happen. Something changed in me then, in my prayers, you know? It was like I’d opened a doorway, and God walked right on through it.”

Avelyn thought: I bet you’re in a band that plays songs called things like “Jesus Is My Bestie.”

“Congratulations,” he said, looking back through the people around them. The ones with the halos were like lanterns in the gloom. So Fabian had been cured, and he had the halo. Was that a coincidence, or would the others have seen some improvement too? Had Annunciata arrived with a heart condition she didn’t have anymore?

He’d have to start the interviews the second he was back in Hreodwater.

“Thanks, man,” Fabian said, and segued smoothly into a lecture on how he was extra-confident now, given that he was the recipient of God’s personal grace, about the paper he was writing against the inclusion of women in the priesthood.

They were almost at the surface. Avelyn could see daylight, misty and grey. He wasn’t sure of the time, but it must have been around eight. “I’m going to find the ferryman,” he said, hoping Fabian would take the hint.