Page 93 of The Salt King

“But what are you doing here?” Cai demanded.

“The satellite images you asked about. I called someone who called someone, and anyway, they put aluminium over the cameras on the space station.” He was opening the laptop as they walked, despite the heaving mass of people moving in the same direction, some trying to run, others just looking tired in advance of the fight to leave the airport that would assuredly ensue.

Cai kept a grip on the pilot, worried that the young man would drift to a standstill if he were allowed to. “Is there any pattern, anything that . . .”

They were packed into an elevator designed for fifty people, but which now had a hundred in it.

Steve gave him the laptop. There was a composite image on the screen. It showed the world, but unfamiliar and strange, because it was lit not by sunlight but by salt light.

Here and there were bright blasts above salt mines. Between them were paths of light. It could have been images of bioluminescent locust swarms, sweeping from place to place. At first, all Cai could think was that the light was everywhere, from Canada to Antarctica to the Himalayas. Gradually, though, he saw that some of the trails were faded; older, residue from yesterday.

“There are four main . . . wings, of whatever they are,” Steve said quietly. “One starts on the eastern coast of Australia, one on the western coast of the United States, one in the sea just off Antarctica, and one in Siberia.”

He could see it now. The pattern formed a shape like a spiral galaxy.

The centre was still dark. All the arms were converging, though, and it would not be dark for long.

“How long will take for them to get there?” he asked Steve.

“At the speed they’ve moved so far—I’d say about another four hours.”

Cai dragged his hand over his face and pulled his phone out as the elevator doors opened and everyone spilled out.

“Hi, this is Avelyn. If you’re calling about an accident that wasn’t my fault . . .”

“Avelyn, ignore the last message, I’m alive. But you need to get out of Hreodwater. Get on a ship, go out to sea. I’m sending you an image from the space station. Whatever these things in the salt light are—they’re all aiming straight at you. You have maybe four hours.”

35

Hreodwater, England

The fen was frozen. The mud was as hard as iron, and the new snowfall creaked as Avelyn and Jericho walked. Jericho’s Heaven-and-Hell boots left an angel print on the left, and a devil on the right. The fog moved in ghost shrouds over the land, and sometimes parted just enough to see the people ahead or behind.

“How bright is the Blessing, on the others?” Jericho asked at last. They had walked in silence for a long time.

“Not that bright yet.” Avelyn hunched forward in his thin Italian coat. His hands were numb lumps in his pockets. “I think we have a couple of days before the next . . . before the next one.”

Jericho nodded once. He was still the colour of the snow. Give him a spear and wings, and he could have stood on a plinth inside St Peter’s Basilica and no one would have known he was alive if he closed his eyes. “I should have stopped her going out walking round the lake. She was outside all the time. All the time, under all that salt light from the mine. If I’d made her keep to her room—”

“She would have just gone out when you weren’t looking, you know she would have,” Avelyn said. “Look: what were you supposed to do? If you’d said there was a carbon monoxide leak and kept people in their rooms, someone would have panicked and the abbey would have been shut down by the diocese. If you’d explained what was going on, best scenario is people would have thought you’d gone insane and you would have been suspended. Worst case, they’d have believed you, and they would have stopped believing so much in the cures, and . . . they might even have lost their faith if they realized that what they thought was God was just the ras. The last time the King woke, the salt light reached all the way into town; that’s where the last Northman is. Every Outsider in Hreodwater and all the way up here would have been killed if you’d let that happen. So get a grip. This isn’t your fault. It’s his.” He pointed at the ground to show who he meant.

Jericho nodded, but he didn’t seem convinced.

For about the fourth time, Avelyn looked around, tracing north. It wasn’t that he had an internal compass exactly. It was that he knew the fen very well, and the path, and Hreodwater, and so if he turned his head, there was an instinctive clunk when he faced the right way.

The clunk was happening in slightly the wrong place.

Watch your north.

But it didn’t matter, because up ahead now were the lights of the town and the railway station. He looked into the fog, half expecting to see the outline of knights and horses, but then they were past the stable, past the customs house at the border with its warning signs and the salt sensor and the cabinets of ruined machinery, and then—

“That’s him!”

“Bring that camera!”

“Father Brocken, what is the situation in Hreodwater?”

There was a microphone in his face and a bright light, electric light, blinding him to everything beyond it. After seeing by salt light, it felt jagged and artificial, and he had an overpowering sense of—wrongness, cheapness, the kind he felt if he tasted a truly horrible chemical that thought it was supposed to be strawberry flavoured. Cameras flashed, and the teeth-itching whinge of a drone was loud somewhere close overhead.