Page 43 of The Salt King

There was a Jesuit exercise called the discernment of spirits. It was a way of making sure you chose the right thing to do if you had a difficult problem.

It was about taking care to listen to your own soul, which was actually a very good compass for God. Usually, down one direction lay a certain feeling: desolation. It meant dissatisfaction, a hollowness, a truly unpleasant restlessness. It wasn’t just something you didn’t want to do. Generally, doing something you thought you wanted to do brought desolation. Drinking too much, eating too many sweets, having affairs, punching someone annoying, all the rest: they were hollow pleasures because they were followed by that sense of cheapness and soullessness.

Down the other path was consolation, which was the opposite feeling: stillness, wholeness. You were supposed do what brought consolation, however difficult, because that was the path to God.

It always worked. He had used it for everything from deciding to join the priesthood, right through to what he should do with his savings; every time, there was a way that suggested consolation, another that suggested desolation. He ran everything through that filter now automatically, including this, this . . . whatever it was, this pointless longing.

What had just come to the surface of his mind was that what he felt, lying here right now, was consolation.

Like always, his hearing was the last thing to switch on, and so he had been awake for a long time before he realized that actually, people had been talking nearby all along.

Jericho was saying soothing things to someone Hreod who couldn’t speak English, and was talking through a friend who was just about functional.

“It’s not deep. It’s going to be fine. Just make sure it’s kept clean. If you develop a fever, I want you to see your clan witch straightaway, because that means there might be an infection.”

He was across the room at the desk.

So who was . . .?

Avelyn opened his eyes.

No one was sitting with him. No one was touching him. He was alone on the couch, curled under a fur blanket, in a beam of salt light from the high windows.

Just for an instant, there was the barest outline of a man in it. He would have sworn it. Then it was gone.

Disconcerted, he sat up and pressed his hand against his side. It hadn’t been a dream. He didn’t dream like that. It had felt as real as the velvet couch and the warmth of the salt light.

With a bloom of tired dismay, he pushed both hands through his hair. How were you supposed to tell right from wrong if the Salt King was there, with his fingertip on the compass needle?

Over at the desk, Jericho was talking to a boy of about seventeen, who was sitting anxiously on the spare chair with a new bandage on his arm. He was a Balen, with tattoos of Caer Halen on his unbandaged arm. With him was an older girl who had been translating.

“Ask him if you can get the water madness from a dream,” the boy said. He sounded scared.

A dream? What did that mean—he’d dreamed he’d been hurt?

“You can’t get rabies from anything here but bats,” Jericho told him, without waiting for the translation. The girl relayed it in Hreod. She wasn’t looking at him. She seemed like someone listening to a conversation on speakerphone.

“It’s still bleeding a lot,” the boy said bleakly to his arm.

He was right. There was blood just dotting through the bandages, making a circle shape. No—not a circle. It was a bite mark. Big, bigger than a dog could have made.

“It will stop in a minute,” Jericho told him. Jericho, Avelyn realized, could understand a lot of Hreod, although being a sane person he preferred not to speak it. “Would you like some hot chocolate?”

Both of them looked much more worried by that idea than anyone had probably been in the rest of history. Without a word of goodbye or thanks, they left.

Not seeming even a little surprised by that amazing rudeness, Jericho let his head rest back against his chair, offering his throat to the chandelier.

Avelyn watched him, thinking he looked tired, but not in the sense that he wouldn’t want to get up and walk. It was soul-tiredness. If someone had set a razor against his larynx then, Avelyn had an uncomfortable feeling that Jericho’s only reaction would have been to dare them to do it, and feel very little interest in the outcome.

“What was all that?” he asked.

“Oh, hello,” Jericho said, tipping forwards again to rest his elbows on his knees. “Sleep all right?”

“I—yes, well,” he said.

“That’s surprising, because you look like you just had an appalling nightmare.”

“The ras is quite strong,” Avelyn said anaemically. He was too hot, but he kept the blanket pulled up and leaned forward against his knees so that there was no chance Jericho could see the state he was in. “Do you . . . can you not feel it?”