Page 32 of The Salt King

His heart tried to leap and sink at the same time. The result was a dizzy roll, half joy, half dread. He was about to cry; the burn was starting in his eyes. It was real. All these years, and he had honestly thought . . .

Of course it wasn’t real. It was a mirage. That was all.

Redspear let her breath out in a weary cloud. “Can’t let anyone cross. The town won’t be there. They might even get stuck.” She glanced across at him. “Might even come across the knights.”

“What’s she saying?” a man asked Avelyn. “We’ve got to get back: the overnight car park ticket runs out at nine, and the wardens are animals!”

Redspear looked annoyingly amused at the translation problem she’d just given him.

“She said . . .” Avelyn felt like someone had just asked him to explain quantum mechanics. Actually, that would have been much easier, because at least then he could have said, Honestly, I know all this about dead cats and boxes sounds mad, but you can look it up.

Well, they’d sent him here to translate. It wasn’t as though anyone was going to do it better, even if he made a nuclear disaster mess of it.

“Right, everyone, thanks for waiting,” he said, loud enough to carry. He had no experience of talking to angry mobs, but if you could hold the interest of twenty demonic fifteen-year-olds who truly did not want to learn Latin, then probably it was no trouble. “As you all know, Hreoda have their own faith and their own beliefs, and they take those beliefs seriously.”

Fortunately, everyone went quiet.

“If you look out into the fog over there, you’ll see some lights, high up. I don’t know what they are, or if they’re some kind of illusion—”

They aren’t, said Hreodwater Avelyn from by his fire deep inside. He was burning crucifixes to keep it going.

Shut the fuck up.

“—but here, people believe that those are the lights of a place called Caer Halen. It’s the palace of the Salt King—the god of the fen, and the mine.”

Tourists and clergy were peering into the fog.

“The Hreod belief is that close to Yule, if there’s snow, it is not our snow. It comes here from the world of the Salt King. Caer Halen is at the border of that world. The ferryman thinks that if she takes you across now, and you were to follow the path . . . you wouldn’t come out in the town. You’d be lost in another world, and you might even come to harm from some of the people in it.”

It had come out sounding less mad than he had thought, because if you put anything in a straight line you could almost make it sound reasonable, but he could feel he was still in a dangerous twilight zone where someone could throw a shoe at him and say, That’s fucking ridiculous.

Hreodwater Avelyn laughed a low laugh.

He ignored it.

“I know that means you’ll be stuck here for another day and night, and I know it sounds crazy, but no one here will let you cross when the lights are on the fen. If you try, you’ll be in real trouble. Hreodwater is not part of England: it has its own laws, and the Wolkvos Clan—that’s the police here—can and will put you in a cell if they want. There’s also corporal punishment: if you’re violent, you’ll be flogged. So, if you wouldn’t mind waiting in the warm up at the inn, the Witan will make sure you all have accommodation overnight, either up here in the town, or down at An El. I’m sorry, everyone. This is just what Hreodwater is. Any parking charges, any expenses you incur because of this, I’ll get you the address to send everything to. Keep your receipts.”

“But we’ve got to be back by tonight,” someone said. “We’ve left our little girl with my sister, she won’t know what’s happened—”

“It’s Tuesday, I’ve got to be at work later,” someone else said indignantly. “I’m supposed to be at the hairdresser at six tonight—”

“If the ferry won’t take us, can’t we just rent a boat and—”

Behind them, Avelyn could already see Wolkvos people deploying along the jetty, putting themselves between everyone else and the eel boats.

“The only way you’ll get across is to swim,” Avelyn said over everyone. “They’re not going to let you use the boats. You have to understand, they believe they’re stopping you walking into a place you won’t be able to find your way back from.”

He wished he could look up what those lights really were. When he’d lived here, he’d had no idea what the internet was, and if you wanted to find something out, you had to ask someone. But now . . . he felt cut off, like he never had as a child. If he could just get three miles over the fen, there was a whole world of information, and probably there would be interesting articles about illusions and mirages, but standing here, all he could think was that the lights really did look like torches on high walls, and that he really could see the ghost of a portcullis gate.

“It’s just a bloody mirage,” an angry man snapped. “For fuck’s sake, this is mad. Why are you listening to a bunch of hippie morons and a professional kiddie-fiddler?” He waved at Avelyn. “If I have to swim over, then fine, I will. I have a job interview in the morning.”

The man jumped straight in with a splash whose waves rippled out violently enough to lap over the edge of the swans’ nest further along the shore. The swans hissed, indignant. There were yells from the humans too. There was ice among the sea lavender, and it was still a three-mile walk on the other side.

“Tell him to get back,” Redspear said to Avelyn.

Avelyn tipped his head, because he didn’t think the man was being unreasonable. If it were him, he wouldn’t have listened to a Catholic priest and assorted Hreoda either. He wanted the man to get across to the other side, stamp into town, and live angrily ever after. “I don’t think he’ll die of cold. He’s quite big.”

“No. Look,” she said, pointing to a bank of reeds.