Page 77 of The Salt King

“Jericho! It’s right here—”

“No.” Jericho caught him in both arms. It was sudden enough and unfamiliar enough that Avelyn’s mind stalled, and all he could think was that their belt buckles had made a little chiming noise as they touched.

It was blessedly cold, too. He had been slowly roasting, but as soon as he was within a few inches of Jericho, the salt light stopped, and he could feel the real temperature of the mine. Shockingly cold: Jericho was wearing a coat. Very close to his shoulder, Avelyn risked opening his eyes again, just in case . . .

Yes. Darkness. Absolute darkness. He couldn’t see the lamplight except for the barest line at the edge of the mask. He didn’t dare turn his head. For the first time, he had enough space inside his own mind to notice how hot the mask was. He wanted to tear it off, but if he did, he would be blinded the second he straightened up again.

“I promise you,” Jericho said, with an authority that Avelyn couldn’t have imagined from him before this second, “there is nothing here. It’s all right. There’s nothing alive here but the trees.”

Avelyn listened. Jericho was right. All he could hear was the water. It sang with nearly human voices, echoing across the rocks and the moss, but nothing else.

Perhaps because he knew it would be another little belt-buckle shock, Jericho held the side of his throat. Avelyn had to shut his eyes again, because he had leaned back, and he wasn’t close enough to be inside Jericho’s dark halo anymore. “It’s all right,” Jericho said again. “Come on, let’s get out of here. And then you’ll need to excuse me while I murder Lady Hringen.”

Avelyn gripped Jericho’s hand much more tightly than he needed to, but it was horrible, trying to walk on the uneven ground with no idea where he was going. Jericho steered him around corners, slow and careful, keeping up a reassuring narration of where they were all the time, and no, nothing was following them. At last, after they had passed through the cool mist on the bridge, Avelyn stopped seeing green blotches, and stopped feeling the pressure of the light through the silver over his eyes.

He wrenched off the mask. The light was still bright, he could see that through his eyelids, but not blinding. He opened them. And there was Jericho, holding a glass lamp and watching him intently, sliced across with razor shadows.

“Hello,” Jericho said.

“Hi,” Avelyn whispered, and sank back against the wall. The silver-cased camera clanged as it bumped the halite. They were almost at An El. “Thank you. Thank you. How did you know to come?”

“I had a bad feeling. Followed you.”

Avelyn lurched forward and hugged him. Jericho, who was taller, bent forward over him and held him tight so that their hearts were pressed together. Avelyn dropped his head against Jericho’s shoulder. It took him inside Jericho’s shadow aura again. Dark, lovely painless dark, and blessed cold. He pulled in a lungful of cool salt air, then another. God, but what a luxury it was to take an unlaboured breath, untainted by the damp metal taste inside that mask.

He had done some bloody stupid things before: found himself being irritatingly mugged behind a hospital once in Mexico, had a gun in his face in Sudan, but never this. Never something outright insane, and never, not once, had he been this certain he was going to die. Lady Hringen had tried to tell him, but no, he’d been too angry, he’d ignored her, and never mind that no Hreoda was used to explaining any of this to anyone, because for them it was literally blindingly obvious . . .

Slowly, the ras folded around him, stronger than he had ever felt it, enough that he went slack in Jericho’s arms. It felt like an apology from the . . . from the thing he had prayed to before. It was careful. There was no anger in it, no sense he was being punished for his tattoos or what he had done years ago, just relief and love, soaking through his soul. He shut his eyes again, floating in it. Prayers answered.

“What happened?” Jericho asked when they leaned apart again.

After he’d escaped them for a couple of seconds, the heat and the light were worse than before, for all they were far less now than in the forest. The headache was back, a hammer to the bone just above his eye.

Maybe because of that, maybe because the ras had faded down too, maybe everything, he had a wash of exhausted hopelessness. Jericho had come down here to find him, even past all the Hreoda fleeing the light storm, Jericho who was so kind, but by the laws of God and Heaven, he was on the wide road to Hell. Only through me shall you be saved. There was always hope, because someone might recognise Christ in their last seconds, but it was still the worst law in all of Church doctrine. Father Li called it “the tragedy of Hell,” but Avelyn hated that. “Tragedy” made it sound like a piece of dark theatre for the entertainment of the more fortunate. Whenever he talked to anyone outside the Church, he was uncomfortably aware that here was a person who was probably going to suffer for eternity—but now, it was a gut punch.

Flames raced along Jericho’s sleeve.

Jericho saw them too. He looked right at them, then at Avelyn with something indecipherable in his eyes, then ran his hand down his sleeve. The flames vanished.

Jericho said nothing about it.

Usually Avelyn trusted his own mind entirely, but on top of everything else, that was so uncanny that he wasn’t sure it had really happened.

“Did you just see . . .”

“See what?” said Jericho. His sleeve wasn’t burnt, or even singed. He was waiting with his expression open. It wasn’t how anyone would be, if they had just that second been on fire.

“I thought—nothing,” Avelyn said.

Confused, he pulled off the silver gauntlets, which were as warm on the outside as if he had been standing right in front of an open furnace. He was still seeing green slashes across everything, and the back of his scalp was still crawling with the feeling that something had followed them. He didn’t look back.

“The light is so bright,” he said. “Like a lightning storm. I’ve never seen it like that. It was destroying everything that isn’t from here; it ate through a steel hammer in seconds. It’s doing the same to people. That’s what the halo is. It’s what happened to Matthew. He went down the King’s Way, he broke off from a tour. It’s going to kill people.” He pressed his free hand over his face, still trying to bring some order to the enormity of what was going to have to happen now. “We need to evacuate the mine.”

“We can’t,” Jericho said.

“What? Why?”

Jericho cast a glance back the way they had come. The salt light was still bright, but because it didn’t touch him, he was lit up only by the lamp. “Let’s get to the surface first.”