Page 81 of The Salt King

Avelyn tried to get the world facing the right way up. “But—I didn’t see her, I was seeing . . . what . . . the Sisters believed was . . . helping?”

“I don’t know,” Jericho said. His eyes came back properly, and Avelyn must have looked shaken, because when he let his breath out, it was a low sympathy hum. “I’m not sure those two things are different. Are you all right?”

“If they hadn’t . . . that thing would have killed people, wouldn’t it?”

“I still quite want that update about whether you’re all right,” Jericho told him.

“Fine. I’m fine,” said Avelyn, although in fact he was about twelve feet to the side of his own body. Something important had been disjointed. “I’m not having a crisis of faith or anything.”

Jericho leaned forward, serious. “Please, very urgently, do not have a crisis of faith. All this would be much more noticeable and much worse if Hreodwater weren’t full of devout Catholics who believe in angels and miracles and the power of God, and not a horrible chthonic thing that might wake up and kill everyone accidentally.”

Avelyn looked slowly across at him. It was difficult. He had never had a fight-or-freeze reaction to information before, but he was thoroughly having it now.

“The only thing better would be hundreds of devoted atheists who wouldn’t believe in a miracle or a monster if one bit them,” Jericho said, “but I think there are fewer of those, when you really come down to it, than anyone thinks.”

Avelyn sank onto a bench, and realized he was still holding the photograph. The film showed up the thing in the light very clearly. Jericho sat next to him. He had wonderful boots, Avelyn noticed with fever clarity. They were printed with two old paintings, one of Eden, one of Pandemonium. He nearly laughed. He’d never met anyone who so definitively did not have one foot in Hell. How did you tell somebody their shoes were theologically nonsensical?

“So that’s why you can’t evacuate the mine,” he said at last.

“Yes.” Jericho’s dark eyes were steady now, and the seeming skittishness he had when everything was all right and Avelyn was teasing him was gone. “That’s why Saint Hildegard built the abbey. She realized something dangerous was down in the deep, and she knew what needed to be done to keep it from hurting anyone. Two hundred faithful at all times, rotating out after a maximum of forty days, before the salt light can damage their health. An El is a firewall.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Avelyn demanded. “Oh, Avelyn, just so you know, it’s the salt light, belief into matter, that’s why people are being cured and wine is turning to blood, and by the way, it’s getting dangerously bright because whatever’s down there is waking up, would you mind just relaying that back to the Vatican?”

“And then what?” Jericho said. “Then all I’ve done is make more people believe there is a thing that can and will wake up.” He sighed, restless. “I was hoping you’d come here and say, ‘Of course there’s nothing in the mine, all this is just a cult and whatever happened to Matthew was a trick.’ But as soon as you said you weren’t even considering that, and of course it was real, and the only question was whether it was God or a—or a demon—I didn’t know what to tell you.”

Avelyn stared at the ground. What the Witan had discussed made sense now. Belief into matter. If he believed enough—if exorcists from Rome believed enough—perhaps they could keep the King imprisoned.

“You would have been better off with scientists,” he said eventually.

Jericho tipped his shoulder. “Actually we have some very sought-after academic fellowships here, but the hit rate of apparently fire-breathing materialists who walk away convinced they’ve had a lovely spiritual experience is . . . upsetting. I think you might be the only person I’ve ever met who hates the ras.”

“Ugh, it’s like a pleased-to-see-you python,” Avelyn muttered. He was currently trying to unwrap it. It was all but pinning his arms to his sides, and the worst of it was, it felt wonderful, and not in an innocent way. He was on fire.

Fire.

A side thought uncurled, and then kept uncurling, and became a monster. He pressed his hands over his mouth. “I set you on fire in the mine, didn’t I?”

Jericho lifted his jaw a tiny fraction. When he was serious, Avelyn was beginning to notice, the expressions didn’t quicksilver across him so brightly anymore; they turned so slight they were barely there. “Only briefly.” He studied Avelyn. “Most people don’t believe in Hell so solidly. Most people couldn’t actually set fire to something even with all the salt light in the world. Do you really disapprove of me that much?”

“No! No, it—of course I don’t disapprove, it’s just—I hate the rules, but they are the rules.”

Jericho turned unreadable again, and after a moment he took out a box of cigarettes and his silver lighter, clicked it once, and breathed smoke into the wind.

Avelyn couldn’t quite make that go through his head. “You smoke?”

“Not normally,” Jericho said.

Avelyn flooded with unease. “Are they your emergency don’t-punch-Avelyn cigarettes?”

Jericho was too Jericho-ish to say yes. “I’m glad you have your faith, I really am, but some of what you believe is penetratingly vile.”

It took Avelyn by surprise. They had been speaking so easily until now that he had forgotten they weren’t approaching the world from the same foundations. “No, it—God is the source of all goodness. Reject Him, and of course it’s Hell. Complaining about it is like saying that you hate light bulbs but then saying it’s unfair to have to sit in the dark. God isn’t punishing anyone, it’s just . . . what happens.”

Jericho took a long drag and said nothing, letting Avelyn hear his own words—and that Avelyn had just opined that it was impossible for Jericho to be a good person without faith, despite having saved Avelyn’s life twice in two days. Avelyn could hear the clash there as well as anyone, and he wanted badly to say that you could be good and do God’s work even if you didn’t call it that, but that was not doctrine: not if you were surrounded by people telling you what it was. Knowing the Church well, like Jericho did, and rejecting it with full consent anyway: that was grave.

“Did something happen to you, to make you push the Church away, even though you work for her?” Avelyn asked. “Because God understands—”

“What,” said Jericho, with a sad twitch of a smile, “apart from all the genocides, pogroms, witch hunts, legions of tortured children, and let’s not forget the seven hundred or so skeletons of babies they found in a tank outside a mother and baby home in Tuam not so long ago?”