Page 42 of The Salt King

“I think,” she said, with building certainty, “that even if we’d dug that site up and stuck a film test right on that gateway a month and a half ago, we wouldn’t have picked anything up. Whatever’s in that tower . . . it wasn’t active.”

“But it has been, in the past,” Sally said gradually.

“Say again?”

He looked across at her. “The tower. Blocking the door with silver. Those—spikes outside. Someone knew. A long, long time ago, someone built that tower, sealed the door, and put those structures outside. I think they did that once the thing was dormant, in case it ever . . .”

Tallis swallowed down the need to say woke up. “In case it ever became active again.”

“God, but we need to get to some signal,” Sally said, twisting to see further down the main road. “I know we shouldn’t contaminate anyone else, but we also can’t just leave that place open for anyone to wander into. I think I’m going to try and flag the first car that—”

Tallis saw something plummet out of the sky and snatched him backwards right before it hit him.

It was another of those chunks of red crystal. Sally looked upwards. Tallis picked it up. Like the others at the site, there was a curve to it, as though somebody had started to carve it and smooth it down. And now she was touching it with her bare hands, not gloves, she could tell it wasn’t quartz, like she’d thought. It was dry, and gritty, and when she brought it up to her face, she could smell the sharpness. With her thumbnail, she scraped at it, and a fine powder came away. She touched her tongue to it.

Rock salt.

“Oh God,” Sally said, and yanked her in front of him, pushing her down almost to the ground, curling over her, and then—

Thump. Thump, thump, thump.

The red crystals were falling out of the sky all around them, dozens of them, thudding into the verges, cracking where they hit the tarmac, shattering into smaller pieces. Sally gasped as one hit him—Tallis felt the bang right through his ribs—and another clipped her boot, and she had a mad fear that it was some kind of meteorological thing happening because of some side effect of climate change nobody had anticipated—

It stopped.

“Are you all right?” Tallis demanded, shocked. Shocked that it had happened, shocked that his instinct had been to protect her. She wasn’t important. He could just as well report to the agency if she got an unlucky knock on the head. “I mean—thank you, thank you, but—”

“I’m okay,” he said, rubbing his shoulder and smiling his crooked smile, which was too old for him. “They weren’t falling that far, I don’t think, or it would have . . .” But he trailed off. He was looking at the one Tallis still had in her hand. “Oh,” he said softly.

“What?”

He turned it around in her palm, the other way up, and then she could see it too. The curve was a wing.

“They’re birds,” Sally said. “They fly through—whatever it is coming from the dig site, and they . . .”

Tallis lifted her eyes properly. “That priest in England,” she said. “Hreodwater. Electricity doesn’t work there either. And—it’s a salt mine.”

Her phone pinged.

Message sent.

18

Hreodwater, England

Avelyn woke up little by little, feeling much better than he had expected to. His leg was stiff and there was an ache deep in the ripped muscle, but madly, it was no worse than it would have been after lifting weights that were too heavy. Even though Annunciata’s news had spread around the abbey like wildfire and he had ended up drinking prosecco with a mob of Irish nuns who taught everyone sea shanties, he didn’t have a hangover either. And he didn’t seem to be passed out in a ditch. He was on Jericho’s couch again, unless the ditch had yellow velvet cushions.

He couldn’t tell what time it was, but he had an obscure certainty that it was still the same day. As he shifted, the old sense of north rolled: north was behind him.

The ras was there too. It was a quietness in his mind, one he never normally had. The difference was more incredible than how much his leg didn’t hurt. Usually if he had fallen asleep in the day, he jolted awake disorientated and irritable and racing around inside with snippets of half-finished thoughts and dreams and Christ, I didn’t mark that paper, I’ll have to do it in the ad break between the Noticiae and the Angelus . . .

Now: nothing. Calm.

He lay still with it, his eyes still closed, quiet-bathing. It was bliss.

Someone was sitting with him, one cool hand on his waist just where the muscle ached from scraping over the edge of the jetty, stroking the space between two of his ribs. It felt idle, like they were doing something else at the same time. Reading The Exorcist probably. He should have stopped it, but he wanted more than anything to move and lie the other way, with his temple resting on the green and purple jumper that he knew would smell of beeswax. And then maybe that cool hand would comb through his hair, and that would be . . . that would be good too.

He frowned into one of those strange, uncomfortable realizations that arrive when you have time to catch up with things that have happened too quickly.