Page 71 of The Salt King

“Yes. That is the sound of a stream of completely ordinary photons being split into two by a completely ordinary laser and bouncing off a completely ordinary surface,” Harry said, his voice beginning to break. “It started last night. I’ve been running checks since then, and double-checking, and triple-checking. It isn’t our equipment. It’s that—it’s that randomness isn’t working.”

“What do you mean, randomness isn’t working?” Rachel managed.

Harry was leaning on the back of a chair, digging his fingertips so hard into the leather that it was tearing. “I don’t know how it’s possible, but it is what’s happening. And the fact is—the fact is, nobody actually knows why randomness happens. It just . . . does. It’s baked into quantum physics. Normally.”

“You said the economy was about to crash,” the Hong Kong trader said. He was still fiddling with his tie, trying to brush off the powder sugar. “I feel like I might get it, if it wasn’t the middle of the night, but . . . it is.”

Harry pressed his nails into the ripped leather of the chair. “Our encryption, everyone’s encryption, for every financial transaction in the world, relies on a good supply of random numbers. Devices like this. Data from lightning in the atmosphere . . . even the movement of wax inside lava lamps. But the random numbers aren’t random anymore. I’ve called weather stations, I’ve called random number generation sites, everything I could think of, and it’s all the same. If you listen to the data . . . it’s this song.”

Rachel sat back slowly. “What is it? Who’s singing it? How?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Harry said. “The point is: no encryption in the world is secure anymore. You might as well leave all your money in the middle of the street.”

27

Hreodwater, England

I thought I heard the lady say

Silk and silver, silver lads I’ll pay . . .

The shanty was floating up from further down the tunnel. The rest of the Hringen shift must have been close now. That was a working song, for the pit faces. Avelyn could hear that from the rhythm, but it was different to the Brocken songs. All the mining clans had their own. He missed singing theirs. They were fun. Mining shanties were usually four-fifths foul abuse aimed at the foreman or the lady of the clan, in the way that really meant everyone would happily die for her.

The path took them out of the tunnel, and into . . .

“Oh, my God,” he said in English.

Lady Hringen looked pleased, or he thought she did, from the way she was standing. “I do love it when people see it for the first time,” she said to Ras.

Ras squeezed Avelyn’s shoulders to remind him to keep walking.

There was a forest.

The cavern was as high and broad as the one that enclosed the abbey and its lake. Vast columns of salt held it up, and right across it . . . oaks. The same brilliant white oaks that stood across the courtyards up at An El, their acorns scattered like pearls, the leaves flickering silvery with the warm thermals billowing through from other, deeper cave systems. Above it all, the salt light rioted: some unknown, unstudied particles supercharged into an incredible torrent, tinting the trees amber and violet. The air looked like mother-of-pearl cast in three dimensions.

Awestruck, Avelyn took a photograph, then picked up a twig with a leaf and an acorn still attached to it so he had proof. The acorn was opally, shimmering with colours in the whiteness. What would they find if they put one of these leaves under a microscope? A strange kind of chlorophyll that hammered salt light, instead of sunlight, into energy?

Ras was looking at the camera, so Avelyn showed him the picture.

“What is it made from?”

“Paper and plastic.”

Ras tapped him in the chest, silver gauntlet clinking on the silver cuirass, to tell him where he would need to keep the photographs. “Shield them, or they’ll tarnish.”

Avelyn did as he was told.

They were passing into the shade of the trees. It was warm now, too warm for the leather mining gear. Summer. Avelyn tilted his head back, letting the light seep through him where it could reach between the silver plating. The cold that had got into his marrow yesterday was finally starting to thaw, and he didn’t feel so fragile with it now. The ras was as strong as the salt light aurora. Somewhere down in the vaults of his mind, he could hear music in it—or not hear. Perceive. It wasn’t hearing.

Lady Hringen was watching him, making sure he was going to keep walking. There was a deep attentiveness to it. She was looking at him, not being generally polite to a younger man from another clan.

That was what he had liked about her, years ago.

He thought of that meeting, held in Clan Brocken’s salt-glittering hall. His uncles had been there, his grandmother, Lady Hringen’s retainers. The conversation had been ostensibly with him, but really it had been with his grandmother. They had talked about mining rights and shipping, loans, bonds. He could remember Lady Hringen giving him an apologetic half smile across the table, one that had made him feel unbelievably grown up: Sorry it’s all so dull. She had been so much older, so mysterious because of that gulf of years that separated them. And yet here she was, caring whether he was bored or not, as if he mattered. On the way out, she’d asked him what he liked to do, and he’d told her with teenage eagerness about the icon-painting he did for the abbey. She had done grand work of pretending to be interested. Later his grandmother had said, “Caer Halen, Avelyn, you couldn’t have said archery like a normal person?”

But Lady Hringen had made the offer anyway, as if she had quite liked the idea of someone who didn’t say archery.

“Why didn’t you come to me, after the accident?” she asked him suddenly. “You could have. You should have. I was expecting you.”