Page 69 of The Salt King

“There’s a place we think you should see,” Ras told him. “It’s about half a mile.”

“Maybe closer now,” Lady Hringen said from up ahead. “It’s blinding down there and getting worse. The King’s dreams are walking as solid as you and me.”

Avelyn nodded slightly, because he couldn’t keep saying What does that mean? on an endless loop like a toddler. If it was important, he would see in half a mile’s time.

The narrow way opened out suddenly onto a bridge the Romans would have been proud of.

It crossed a river. The water roared at the bottom of a gorge, moving a vapour of salt light just above the surface. It was far, far down. The columns of the bridge must have been at least a hundred feet high.

The water was falling so far that it flung vapour up right across their path. They were moving through a haze now. Lady Hringen and Ras were soon ghosts silhouetted in the salt light. It was bright, and even though they were underground, the deep part of his mind that woke up on the first morning of summer lifted its head, and he half expected to hear birdsong. It was beautiful and eerie at once.

“Be careful here,” Ras said, over the thundering of the water. “The light is bright enough to half-make his dreams.”

“Say again?” Avelyn called back, having fantasies about going home and teaching a Latin class at the pandemonic secondary school and understanding up to, oh, maybe even two-thirds of what was said to him.

“I say, watch your step!”

Avelyn looked down, because you didn’t tell people to watch their step over something spiritual, however religious you were.

Like it did everywhere, the salt had formed a frosty layer on the ground, and here and there he could see images in it—a horse, a person, a tower—but in the vapour it was slick, and there was a great deal more of it than at An El. Down the King’s Way, it had been the children’s job to sweep the path clear every day for the miners, and he didn’t doubt the same was true here, but there was already so much of it that it was forming stalagmites.

Only, not in the usual cone shapes.

They were building themselves into different things. One looked like a patch of flowers. One was a part-formed tree.

He jolted to a stop when he almost walked into another shape. At first, through the vapour, it could have just been a boulder; but then he caught the wavering lines of a stretching rib cage, a shoulder, the tendons in a neck, all straining to lift free of the ground.

There was another figure just beyond it. The salt made the solid floor look like water: the person was floating in it, head just above the surface, hair spraying out in a salt furl, eyes closed. They looked dead.

And another. And another. They were everywhere.

The further he walked, edging between them, the more they were emerging from the stone of the bridge. By the end, there was a person with their torso and both arms free of the stone, clawing to get out.

He bumped into a whole person and gasped, but it was only Ras.

“We think he’s remembering a time when the Flood rose and some people drowned,” Ras said. “Usually he only ever makes flowers along here. He loves gardens. But lately . . . well, his dreams have been more and more fretful. He’s afraid.”

That didn’t seem like very demonic behaviour. “Afraid of what?”

“I hope I never find out.”

Avelyn took a photograph of the whole bridge, then knelt to take another of the clearest figure close to. The details in it were beyond any human sculptor. It had eyelashes. “So in ordinary salt light, you see images in the salt. But when it gets brighter, they . . .?” He floated his hand upward, miming the rise of those unnerving figures from the ground.

“That’s right,” Ras said, looking pleased that Avelyn finally seemed to be following. “The nearer to the King you go, the brighter the light is, the more it happens, but . . . usually we wouldn’t see this until much, much deeper.”

Lady Hringen was an austere ghost waiting for them just beyond clear view. “This isn’t what you need to see. Come on.”

Ras and Avelyn followed her out of the mist, into the next tunnel, where the light was eye-watering. Ras stopped him and held up a silver mask, and showed him how it slotted into place like a visor through grooves in their helmets. Lady Hringen had already snapped hers on. It gave Avelyn an eel-writhe of unease to see her face vanish under it. Ras did the same, though, and finally, Avelyn clicked his into place too.

He had never been in salt light so bright that you could see it through silver. He hadn’t known it was even possible.

The mask was like wearing dark glasses; the headache he hadn’t really noticed building itself up in the front of his skull faded away.

“Aluminium alloy in the eyes,” Ras explained. “Enough silver in it to protect you, but little enough to see through.”

“Why a whole mask?”

“Unless you want to silver-tan even more,” Ras said. “You’ll scare the children.”