Page 5 of The Salt King

“No, no,” Li said. He drew his hand down his rosary, to rest on the crucifix. “Avelyn. You know why I brought you to Rome. God told me to. I know you think that’s just a story I made up, but—while there might be something terrible in that mine, I promise you, lovely boy . . . God is there too.”

Avelyn had never said some things. He had never said that he missed the Salt King more than he missed his family. Even though he knew exactly what the Salt King was now, and even though it was not an angel. Or, it wasn’t anymore.

“Yes, Father.”

1 Like a lot of Jesuit jokes, this was hilarious provided you had access to footnotes. It was a quote—it was supposed to mean “Romans go home!” but in fact said “Some Romans go in the house”—from a 1970s British comedy called The Life of Brian, in which an irascible centurion corrects the grammar of someone trying to write abusive graffiti, and therefore touches the hearts of everyone who has ever had to study Latin.

2

By the customs house was a stable. The stable master had gone home, but there was an honesty box. Avelyn had to stand under the lamp looking down at his handful of crystal Hreod coins for an embarrassing few seconds before he had any sense of the value. Six pence in a shilling, twelve shillings was a crown, six crowns was a guinea—had he used to earn a guinea a month in the mine? What was reasonable for a borrowed horse? He peered into the box to see what other people had left. It was mainly the little amethyst tokens that were pence. Right.

On the back of the coin, the antler-crowned image of the Salt King flashed as it fell. It landed, as all the coins had, with the King facing upwards.

He went out to the paddock to see if he could entice anybody over with an apple, boots creaking on the stiff marsh grass that liked the briny earth here. All the horses were clustered at the far end: they were licking a standing stone of red halite as though they were hoping to tidy it up for an important occasion.

It was the salt shape from the video.

The footage had made it look like a lump of rock, but if you were walking, catching the light on it at different angles, you could see that it had once been a person. The lines of elbows and shoulders were still there, and a dip that was the inward curve of a spine.

Something else hadn’t shown up on the camera either.

Avelyn knew what was coming, and he thought he was ready for it—he had even given himself a talking-to on the train about it—but when his sight adjusted, it was still a deep-down shock.

The halite glowed. It was not light that any film footage had ever recorded.

Avelyn didn’t know what salt light was. He’d never thought twice about it when he lived here. When he left, he had wondered for a while if Hreoda saw slightly further up the spectrum and he’d been seeing ultraviolet light, but that didn’t explain why he stopped seeing it when he left. He had tried to research it, but because Outsiders couldn’t see it, the few scholars who had braved Hreodwater seemed to think it was just a metaphor.

But he was actually seeing.

Threaded through the red stone was light. That light floated outward in an uneven halo, tinting the air for ten or twelve feet in every direction. It had its own colour, one Avelyn hadn’t seen for twelve years: an eerie amber-violet. Wisps of it hung in the air.

The closer to the mine you went, the brighter it would be.

The horses were happy. They loved rock salt almost as much as sugar. If there was nothing else, they’d nibble the salt that formed on the fence, but the discerning horse would always go for halite.

Avelyn eased between the horses and chipped some salt from the pillar with the corner of his phone. Each ruby shard smouldered, ember-glowing, as it fell into his palm.

Then he jumped, because the salt was hot. Not just warm because a horse had leaned against it, but—hot, like it had just come out of an oven.

What?

He had a maddening need to try and take a photo. His phone would still work for a couple of minutes this close to the border, but it wouldn’t pick up salt light, which was enraging because . . . how was he supposed to explain this to the Vatican?

A horse harrumphed and nudged him.

When he gave her an apple, she huffed approvingly and let him loop a bridle over her nose so they could go inside. The smell of hay and horses picked him up and dropped him twelve years into the past, and he was sixteen again.

Rome was a dream. He wasn’t a priest. That was silly. He was the grandson of Lady Brocken, and betrothed to Lady Hringen. He was the apprentice of a well-regarded witch and only a walk in the deep tunnels away from earning his mask.

He had to stand there and gather up the years again. He wasn’t sixteen: he had taken his vows, he had held two ministries, he had a master’s degree in theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, he lived at the Jesuit Curia along with everyone else who worked for Radio Vaticano, where he looked after the pointless Latin section of the news service two days a week, and for the other three . . . he still had a year left teaching Latin to demonic teenagers at an inner-city secondary school before his training was finally done.2

The horse put her nose on his shoulder to remind him that she would be requiring more apples if he was going to hang around irritatingly.

Lifting down a saddle from the hooks, he was surprised at the weight of the tack. You forgot things like that if your normal commute involved a motorbike in Rome.

He had a strange rush of peace. Rome was good, and motorbikes were good, and honestly, so were taxis that could meet you by the station and wouldn’t kick you into a hedge if you startled them. But it was nice to do things properly again. Life in a city was tiring without being effortful; Hreodwater was effortful without being tiring.

He noticed suddenly he was doing it all without any normal light. The salt light was bright enough. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen it like this before so far from the mine. It was as clear as moonlight, glowing from the salt on the ground and in a fine haze in the air.