Page 79 of The Salt King

Jericho had one fist resting against his mouth, composed and unsurprised.

It wasn’t a good photograph. Avelyn had held the camera out blind. What it showed was blurred, but it did show something. Something like—a bird. A very tall bird, but unsettlingly nearer to human than anything avian. Its face was some catch between a person and one of those owls that hunted in the deserts around Syria, the ones that were called lilliths in old stories, and which were supposed to be evil spirits who stole children, with black hollows for eyes, and cruel beaks.

“It was there,” he said, somewhere on the road between indignant and horrified. He looked at Jericho. “It was there, you must have seen it, but you told me—”

“I lied to you,” Jericho said.

“What?” Avelyn managed.

The other two sat back and exchanged a glance. Redspear shrugged a little. You first. Ras took a deep breath.

“This isn’t real,” he said carefully, about the photograph. He didn’t quite touch it, just skimming his fingertips a fraction of an inch above the surface of the plastic. The others were looking uneasy about it too. “This is the dream of a thing—the King’s dream, you understand?” His eyes begged Avelyn to understand. “But your seeing it . . . would have made it real. It could have hurt you.”

“You can see them and not make them true,” Redspear said, taking over just as carefully. They might have been passing a brimming cup between each other. “If we were to send a mad person down there, who knows they’re mad and sees untrue things all the time—the dreams would stay dreams. But for most of us, seeing is believing, and believing is true.”

She picked up a handful of salt and threw it just a couple of inches, so it landed back in her palm again. It made the image of a stag. “To cast the salt well is to believe nothing.” She did it again, and this time there was no stag, no image at all. “Which is how you must be, in the deep.” There was a tight little silence. “That’s why they won’t let you go down unless you can do it.”

Avelyn had to look away, because his memory flared that terrible image of his grandmother again, swinging the sledgehammer, in that last instant before she smashed the support pillar to matchsticks. The fox cub nosed at his hand, plainly hoping that the wine would taste better on a second go.

“You said you lied to me,” he said to Jericho, praying for English and an explanation that made sense.

“I made you believe it wasn’t there,” Jericho said heavily, “and so it wasn’t.”

“But you must have seen it, what about what you believe—”

“He isn’t really here either,” Redspear said.

Avelyn had to ignore her.

Even Jericho shot her a sideways glance that said she wasn’t helping. “I believed it would go away if I made you believe that too. It’s how I treated your leg. I told you it didn’t hurt, and I said it would get better quickly, and you believed me. It’s why the cures are happening: people believe they will recover, and so they do. That’s what salt light does. It converts belief . . . into matter.”

Avelyn had to sit and let it settle over him. The snow was doing that too, dusting all their sleeves, hissing when it fell into the hot wine. The fox cub manoeuvred down the front of his shirt and sat there looking pleased with itself. He stroked it, glad to have something warm and alive to hold.

“You do know this,” Redspear pushed, very gentle. “You know why there are sledgehammers on the support pillars in the deep. Remember?”

He could hear that roar of collapsing masonry again.

He had said to Father Li, “It was my fault,” and Li had said, “Don’t be ridiculous; your grandmother believed something wrong. Maybe she thought terrible things would happen if she didn’t collapse the shaft, but they wouldn’t have. There’s nothing down there. Just superstition, and God, because God is in all things, and you know what? There is nothing God can’t forgive.”

Fairy tales. Beautiful, hypnotising Roman fairy tales.

Down in the deep, from behind a witch’s mask and beside his fire, Hreodwater Avelyn gave him a long, sympathetic look, and fed a few more wooden crosses into the flames. The little bronze Christs were falling orphaned and blackened into the heart of the embers once the wood burned away.

“You knew,” he said to Jericho. “You knew the cures were happening because the salt light was bright. And you knew,” he aimed at Redspear and Ras, “that Matthew died because of overexposure, because of—salt tarnishing. Jesus Christ, why didn’t you say that to me? And why haven’t you evacuated all the Outsiders?” His voice broke over it. “People are going to die! For God’s sake, Annunciata is . . .”

She was dancing too. One of the black-and-feather-clad figures lifted her right up, and her distinctive laugh cut right around the green. Even with the firelight behind her, her halo blazed.

“I know,” Jericho said, “I know, but it isn’t—”

“I know no one can leave now with Caer Halen on the fen or whatever the fuck it is, but you had two weeks to move people before—”

Jericho was making No, no gestures with both hands, and both Ras and Redspear tried to talk at the same time, but they didn’t get far because they were interrupted by somebody else.

“Um, pardon me?”

It was the wine seller, the one who had been rude to Jericho before.

“Brother?” she said to Avelyn. She looked more worried and less angry than before. “Can you lift the curse now, please? I’ll sacrifice to your god.”