Page 68 of The Salt King

Avelyn caught his wrist to make him stop. “I’m at capacity for the cryptic sidestepping, brother. Please.”

Ras still didn’t look at him properly, clamping down the fastenings that would hold the silver gauntlets in place. “We don’t know for certain, but there are old stories . . . light this bright can hurt you. That image at the Witan, it shows a witch called Gwenneth. Long ago, in the time of the mammoth, the King woke, and she went down to him, and she sang him back to sleep. But she was blinded doing it, and she could never have children after.”

Avelyn frowned. Now he was thinking about it, there must have been a dozen stories cautioning everyone not to go too far into the deep or too near the King. Even Saint Hildegard had vanished afterwards.

“I thought those stories were just about making sure children don’t wander off in the tunnels,” he said, gazing at the boxes and boxes of silver.

“So did I,” Ras said to the last of the clasps. “The King hasn’t shone like this in a thousand years. But . . . all this equipment has been stored here since then. They didn’t go to the expense of forging it just to frighten children.”

In the passageway, Lady Hringen was waiting. She nodded once. Avelyn kept his eyes tilted down, hating that she could see the colour. In his pocket, the dark contact lenses had already dried out and cracked. He hadn’t brought another pair.

The shaft tilted them down, and down; as far as An El was from the surface. The salt light was brighter with every step. It hung like glowing mist everywhere, and sometimes, something in it shivered, making half-familiar shapes.

At last they came to the crossroad between the main shafts. Avelyn felt a dull thud of recognition. He had come this way every day for years, and the last time he was here, it had been with his entire family.

The way forked in three directions. Down the path on the right was the King’s Way, the way Avelyn had always gone. Down the middle was the Tower, the vertical shaft owned by the Balen, which went down deeper than anyone in living memory had ever been. And on the left was the Saint’s Way.

Between them all, at the pillar where they joined, there was a silver bowl, sitting inside an alcove at the feet of a statue of the King. Avelyn gazed up at it and felt his tattoos burn again. It was a lovely burn. He had to crush it aside.

Lady Hringen went to the silver bowl and took out a handful of glowing black salt. She held it for a second, then cast it onto the flat base of the alcove. Avelyn watched to see what sort of picture it would make today, then blinked when it didn’t do anything at all. It was just salt, scattered as it would have scattered anywhere else.

Lady Hringen made a half-satisfied noise.

“Do you remember?” Ras asked Avelyn. “You have to hold your mind blank. You can’t wonder what the King is dreaming. Just think of salt. It helps it . . . remember to be only salt.” He closed his fist. “Mind like a rock.”

Mind like a rock.

He remembered that.

His uncles—twins—Hagan and Hengest, had said that to him all the time. He had a vivid memory of sitting between them when he was small, getting frustrated that he couldn’t do it, even though Gwen from school could do it perfectly, and now she was allowed to go into the mine with the big children while he was still stuck in the cleaning room, chipping salt off old chisels like a baby, even though he was whole months older than her. Gwen’s uncle had been bragging for weeks about how she was born to be a great miner. Hagan, who approached child-rearing competitively, had almost started a blood feud when he said that Gwen was born to be a great show pig. Hengest, being much more like Ras, had just said that it always took clever people longer than simple people to turn their minds off.

They had been the age he was now when they held the last doorway up and shoved him in front of them, and never had the chance to follow.

“Ready to try?” Lady Hringen asked, with an edge that she probably meant to be sharp, but it sounded a little raw. She didn’t like taking him, he realized; she was thinking about what had happened to the Brocken too.

Avelyn took a handful of black salt. It glowed, every crystal of it; a handful of starlight.

“Look at him, Ras, he couldn’t hold his mind still if his life depended on it,” Lady Hringen whispered, plainly not for him, but voices carried in here.

Avelyn looked back at her. Usually something like that would have fired him up and sparked Full Jesuit, but he only felt sad that he was about to prove her wrong. He knew he was going to: it wasn’t an opinion or an ambition, just a dreary certainty. He could have explained that if you had spent years in a seminary, unable to perceive the barest whisper from God, you knew all about stillness. His soul was built on silent rooms where nothing moved but the dust in the sunbeams. He had years and labyrinths of stillness in him.

“No,” said Ras, “he can.”

Avelyn dropped the salt without looking at it, because he didn’t need to. He could see what had happened in Lady Hringen’s face.

“My lord is wise,” she said admiringly, and clapped Ras’s shoulder.

“He is, actually,” Ras said. He squeezed her hand.

She laughed, loud enough to echo.

With a furl of envy-sadness, Avelyn realized that despite the friction he was bringing, they were beautifully matched. It was a good marriage. He looked away. You hardly ever saw the path not travelled, but he was seeing it. Ras was him, how he would have been. He would be Lord Hringen, with a silver choker and a married man’s authority, and maybe this same mysterious, sad, playful love for his lady—and maybe even have hers back.

That was more distant than Polaris.

Lady Hringen led the way down the first tunnel of the Saint’s Way. Ras followed, and then Avelyn. He had never been this way before. All the children from all the mining clans peeped into other clans’ shafts, obviously, but everyone’s uncles discouraged it in the way they discouraged spying on people in the shower. He felt like he was trespassing. The halite in the walls here waved shades of turquoise, formed in patterns. They were a fraction more deliberate than random, and a fraction too random to have been drawn.

Above them now was a permanent salt light aurora. It might have been the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. If he lifted his hand to brush his fingertips through it, miniature lightning strikes earthed themselves down the silver gauntlet and fizzed through his tattoos.