Page 34 of The Salt King

“All right, up you get,” Jericho told him, and helped him upright. He was talking as though it was normal to extract crossbow bolts from morons who had provoked mystery knights on the fen. “Let’s get you home, and I can clean that up properly.”

Avelyn liked him fiercely for not suggesting a stretcher; he would have murdered anyone who tried to put him on one. He would get himself down to An El, or he would sit here and spontaneously combust.

High in the fog, those lights still shone, the spectres of the battlements still stood, and somewhere, thudding through the ground, there were hoofbeats.

12 In biblical times, saying somebody was “a son of God” just meant he was a nice person, not any kind of genetic relation, in the same way you could say in English that someone was “a child of nature.” Christ never said it about himself in any of the gospels except John, which was written decades after the rest. Rather, he was gloriously tricksy, and called himself the Son of Man. “Son of man”—ben adam—was just a way to say “person,” Joe Ordinary. But maybe it also referred to a prophecy in Daniel about a messiah figure, “one like a son of man.” The famous trial scene where the high priest says, “Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God,” and Christ says, “You have said so” was a piece of fabulous cattiness. It was a source of continuing chagrin for Avelyn that so many people read the New Testament and completely missed that Christ was deadpanning throughout, always tightrope-walking on double meanings but consistently, marvellously, taking the absolute piss out of enraged hardliners pretending that everyday phrases meant treason, even at his own trial. It was brave and clever and futile in a way hardly anyone noticed anymore.

13 Guns did work in Hreodwater. But, like everyone else in Europe, the Witan had taken one look at guns and made them illegal. Visiting Americans were often puzzled by this and talked as though Europeans had decided that for some reason washing machines were a bad idea, although in Hreodwater, they tended not to do this for long, because while Hreoda didn’t have guns, most people absolutely did have brilliant aim, a plentiful supply of old cauliflowers, and a practical approach to international ethics.

15

The Dead Sea, Jordan

Tallis was desiccating. The heat had arrived all at once, the salt in the air was sharp, and now they were striking the tent in sunglasses, even though it wasn’t much past seven in the morning. Sally had attached his phone to his car speakers, so they were working to some nineties music that she suspected he thought was retro. Every so often the sound crackled, and Sally looked over, somewhere between confused and annoyed. It was a new car.

“Have you got signal?” he asked her. “Mine was fine yesterday, but . . .”

“I got a scary message about roaming last night, so I turned my phone off,” Tallis admitted, looking at her bag, where the phone was crouched in a side pocket like a very expensive bomb. “I thought it would kick in automatically, but then I had to buy some at the airport, and now it’s angry with me and yelling about allowances and—that was a long way of saying no, sorry. I could try—”

From the direction of the sinkhole, there was an odd noise. It was something like the sound of a skip being emptied; slow and quiet at first, and then a crash of—something. Brick, debris.

“Did something collapse?” Sally said, straightening too.

“We’d better go and look, to make sure we can tell them it wasn’t our fault,” said Tallis, having visions of being blamed by the archaeologists for ruining something of historic importance. All her colleagues would believe them too, and talk about The Time with the Jar of Caesium.

It was much easier to navigate over the uneven ground by daylight, but it didn’t make the site any less disquieting. Lit stark, the metal spikes were worse than before. At least in the dark they were lost reassuringly in the gloom after a few yards. Now, they cast razor shadows, deep black against the white of the salt, so that the whole site looked as though it had been shot somehow in monochrome, under the light of a star too bright and cold to be theirs.

“Oh, God. The door in the gate,” she said.

The door hadn’t just collapsed. It had been pulverized. There was just—no more wood in the gateway. The noise they had heard must have been those bizarre silver tacks tumbling inward into the tower, tonnes of them. Beyond was darkness.

“Exposure to the air?” Sally said, pulling out his phone to take a picture. He was right. Nobody would believe it wasn’t them, but they did need to document it. “It was protected all that time, and now—well, it was probably just dust.”

Tallis stared into the gateway. If their tests could be trusted, then in that darkness was a kind of light that neither of them could see, so powerful that it shone through wood and aluminium onto film, and coming from . . . from something that had certainly looked as though it could be alive. It was unnerving to see nothing now, with her own eyes.

Sally’s phone made a hissing noise. The screen fuzzed. Something in it cracked, something blasted out of the electronics inside, brushing his hand, and he dropped it. When it landed on the ground, it split open, and for a terrible fraction of a second Tallis thought something alive was mangling its way out. For the next fraction, she thought she was hallucinating in a way far more sinister than usual, but then, aeons later, she realized that Sally could see it all too.

Spikes of salt had blasted out of the phone’s sockets and through the screen. The salt formed loops, following the arcs of electromagnetism. They both stood looking at it, waiting for it to do anything else, but it seemed not to want to. The arcs broke when, gingerly, Sally picked it up.

For a long time, neither of them said anything. The silence seethed. Down in the pit, the darkness beyond the gate was inky. Tallis stared into it. A primordial part of her mind stirred. With as much certainty as she knew that Sally was beside her, she knew that something in that darkness was watching them.

Right on the edge of perception, she could hear singing. Or, not hear: it was more like the memory of having heard. She had never hallucinated a sound before. She turned her head one way, then the other, waiting for it to fade, but it was constant, so quiet it almost wasn’t there; but only almost.

But then she supposed she had never stood on the edge of a pit in the desert and wondered if there was something alive in an unclassified type of radiation, either. Perhaps epilepsy liked to move along with events.

“I feel like insurance . . . might not cover this,” Sally said, turning over the mess of crystals and bits of wiring that had been his phone.

An alarming thought cracked open. “Jesus, the cars.”

He was paralysed too for a second, and then they were scrambling up and hurrying as quickly as they could without breaking ankles. Salt dust puffed around them, so dry it floated in the air. Tallis had the car keys in her hand long before they reached the cars. God, what did they charge you if you wrecked a hire car? A portion of your liver and rights to your firstborn, at least.

Clack-click: the lights flashed on as she unlocked the car, quick and untroubled. Relief bashed her over the head. She picked her bag up from the ground by the tent, quite hoping that her phone had turned to salt too, but of course it bloody hadn’t. It was probably broadcasting a signal that would let the company charge her a thousand pounds just for the privilege of turning it back on again. She decided not to try.

“Mashallah,” Sally said, laughing. His keys had worked too. “I really thought we might be stuck here just then.”

“Not that I would have minded the company,” Tallis said, laughing too. She heard how inappropriate that was, but she was too giddy to mind. Or, she would have a good full-body cringe about it at two o’clock in the morning in the privacy of her hotel, but for now, it didn’t matter. “Would you mind if I followed you back into Amman? I had the satnav on my phone on the way here, I don’t think I can get back by myself . . .”

“Oh, of course. I can take you to the hotel. I know where it is.”