Page 82 of The Salt King

Avelyn was in pain. “No one’s saying we’re free of original sin, we’re not, the Church is broken because humans are broken. We’re not saying we’re better, just like scientists aren’t saying they’re better. We’re just saying that what we say is true. Gravity is real. Hell is . . . is real.”

“No, all right,” said Jericho, with the same soul-tiredness Avelyn had seen on him before in his office, when he had thought no one was watching. Avelyn actually saw him give up and decide it wasn’t worth the energy to argue, and that was worse than being shouted at.

Because he was himself, though, Jericho held the cigarette box out.

Avelyn had given up years ago, but he took one now.

They were both quiet. Not far away from them, some miners were singing again, a different hymn to the King, and so were plenty of other people, and Avelyn understood now. If you were singing that unearthly harmony with its different parts for deep miners, for children, for surveyors, for witches, the song weaving around itself and echoing and incredibly, incredibly difficult—you weren’t thinking about anything else. You weren’t thinking of how that shadow looked like a monster, or how those branches could be the antlers of a great stag.

Mind like a rock. Sing to the King, and nothing else.

Redspear and the Witan were still talking. Groups of nuns and priests were clustered together too, but the tone was different. They hadn’t seen what had happened—not the thing in the light, nor the lady. All they had seen was a trader panic and then stop panicking after some prayers and an eerie Hreod song. The conversations were interested and excited, but not urgent, and people were speculating about why the Hreoda were all so upset. Avelyn could see some of them gearing up to come over here and ask him, and he felt completely unable to face that. What would he say?

“Why now?” Avelyn said. It felt like an artificial foray into normal conversation, brittle and run through with fractures. He ploughed on anyway. “In the stories, the Salt King—whatever that really is—wakes up when something dangerous is here, Romans or Vikings or Norman knights, or whatever, but there’s nothing. Why would it wake now? What’s different?”

Jericho was looking at the sky again. He seemed content to ignore the argument they weren’t having, but Avelyn was building a good enough idea of him now to know he wouldn’t forget it. He was an optimist, not an idiot. It was a miserable thought. At last he said: “I think that suggests . . . something is coming.”

31

Wieliczka, Poland

There were no ordinary planes flying to Krakow from Rome, and so Cai Li found himself on one of the Vatican jets, going direct to a small airfield at Wieliczka itself. The other planes all looked military. Cai was met on the tarmac by some serious people in dark suits. He thought they would wait for someone else, but they were there only for him, and then he was in the back of a car, listening to them murmur in Polish.

“We have to stop here,” one of them said after quarter of an hour.

The car had reached a barrier across the road. Cai pushed the door open, not wanting to. Swarms of other dark cars had stopped there as well, and police, lights flashing. As soon as he was outside, he could taste it in the air: salt. A harsh, dry tang, not like the gentle sharpness in the air around An El. This tasted like it belonged to a terrible desert. He could see it too, tiny particles of it floating all around them, catching the light in atomic rainbows. Their steps crunched. Salt on the ground, like thick frost. The paper cut on his middle finger stung like hell.

There were people everywhere. That was the first thing he saw—people in suits, police, soldiers, people with all kinds of mysterious equipment, people setting up in hastily erected tents, more people handing out water—Christ, he needed it after ten seconds breathing the salt air—and, dotted here and there, press. Cai clenched his hand around the paper cut. He had never felt more superfluous. Whatever was happening here, it was vast. Maybe he had been wrong about a bomb.

But then he saw everything else.

Beyond the barrier was a bus. It had stopped in the middle of the road, facing them. Salt had burst up from the engine in savage arcs twelve feet high. Coming down the steps were people, frozen into place. Or, they had been people. They weren’t anymore. They looked like rough casts of humans in red crystal.

And beyond them . . .

The whole street was blasted white. The salt had engulfed buildings, cars, fountains, a church. Sometimes there was glass left in the windows, but it was all vivid purple. Cai jumped when something creaked, and then the church tower collapsed in a salt cloud that hung for a moment in the air and then billowed outwards, shrouding all of them, reducing the blue emergency lights to a deadened strobing, sending everyone into coughing fits as they tried to breathe through the sting.

Slowly, Cai held his phone out. Like he’d thought, the screen fizzed with interference. He walked closer to the barrier, easing between the ghosts of other people in the salt fog, his eyes hurting now, watching the screen distort more and more, until the image was gone. He retreated.

The glass over the screen had tinged violet.

Avelyn had laughed when Cai asked him why windows in Hreodwater were glazed in polished salt and not glass. Well, you want to see through it, don’t you?

He switched the phone off and stood at the barrier, watching the emergency crews move through the salt ruins of the town. They were checking car boots. He almost called to them not to bother. Unless someone had a silver-plated car, it would have made damn all difference.

Someone was calling them over to one of the big tents. Cai glanced back at the suit-people who had escorted him here, expecting them to say this wasn’t for him, only those with a distant chance of helping, but they motioned him to go, and so, hesitatingly, he joined the throng. He kept to the back, though. It was all very well to say that people and cities enduring chemically impossible destruction was a religious problem, but seeing it in person, it looked like an emphatically nonspiritual problem to him.

A lady about Cai’s age in the nicest suit he had ever seen stepped up onto a crate so that everyone could see her. Signs everywhere said to keep phones turned off. Electronics sometimes worked this far back from the barrier, but they would start cracking with salt after perhaps ten minutes.

“Hello, everyone,” she said in English. “I’m from the Ministry of Defence.” She introduced herself by a name he immediately forgot, because he was still thinking about the frozen shapes trying to stagger down from that bus.

“Welcome to Poland. All of you are here to try to understand what has happened, how, and whether it will continue to be dangerous. Early tests have confirmed that the substance out there is salt, in varying forms; some is powder, some is solid halite, some seems to form around electromagnetic force lines. We have also been informed by meteorologists running the Japanese satellite Himawari 8 that sites across Asia have experienced this phenomenon too.”

Behind her, a projector screen flickered to life. The image was pale, because they were shining candlelight through old-fashioned films, but the picture was clear enough even so. It showed a high aerial shot of what might have been Tibet and Nepal—in fact, yes. He could see Mount Everest on it. A salt circle had blasted itself neatly among the mountains.

He had just circled that on his map this morning. It was Lancang: the place where the coin trick had started.

“This is a salt mine called Lancang,” the Defence Minister said, and then the slide moved on. It showed the same thing, in a new place. “Chinese authorities are not parting with much information, but this image does seem to show that an event similar to ours took place there late last night. Khewra, in Pakistan, another salt mine, was similarly affected in the night. And early this morning, a few hours before us—this is Soledar in Ukraine. Also a salt mine, though fortunately, almost entirely abandoned after the Russian invasion.”