Page 94 of The Salt King

“What do you make of the reports from Poland?”

“Why are people turning to salt?”

The longer he didn’t say anything, the more questions the journalists asked, and the less anything made sense. There must have been a dozen of them, and behind them cars and press vans were parked haphazard at the place where the path narrowed too much for anything but a human.

But then: “I wonder if you could tilt those lights upwards,” Jericho said, just as friendly as he was with everybody. His voice cut through the questions. He was speaking more loudly than usual, but he wasn’t struggling to do it, and nor would he have struggled across a whole cathedral, chorister clear. There was an immediate quiet. “Thank you. I’m afraid we’ve not had access to the news. Would you mind saying what’s happened in Poland and . . . why you’re all here?”

Avelyn put his hand back, found Jericho’s, and squeezed. Jericho gripped back and didn’t let go.

“There’s been a disaster at a place called Wieliczka,” one of the journalists explained. “It’s a salt mine, just like Hreodwater, and . . . well, it looks like most of the city has been turned to salt. Early reports from the authorities say it’s salt light.”

Half a dozen people held out their phones with footage.

Avelyn couldn’t make sense of what it showed. At first he thought he was seeing a snowstorm, where everything had frozen in an instant. There was a bus with a bizarre white plume bursting from the front, not unlike ice, and inside, frozen human figures, all sparkling grey and white. Something like snow or ash winked in the air, but of course it wasn’t snow or ash, and what had destroyed the engine of the bus wasn’t ice. The salt traced its familiar electromagnetic arcs, and if he looked hard at those glittering frozen people inside, he could see that the new powder-salt had formed over that familiar ruby sheen of red halite.

Someone else was telling him that what seemed to be bodies had been found at a Russian salt mine too. Something about a place in Ukraine. Tibet. Khewra. Evacuation of Salt Lake City.

“Palermo’s gone!” someone shouted from a van. “Realmonte mine!”

“Another woman has died here too,” he said finally, not sure what else he could say. “She was cured of blindness, but then on the way here, she—”

They weren’t interested. “What is it? What is salt light, why are we seeing these tragedies at mines all around the world?”

“Can you really see it?”

Pull yourself together. Full Jesuit.

“Yes, I can see it. All Hreoda can. Nobody knows what salt light is, but it turns most matter to salt if it’s bright. It’s much brighter than normal in our mine now. The light dissolved a steel hammer right in front of me.” He showed them the pictures. People came closer to see. They weren’t just local journalists, he realized now. There were a lot of expensive coats; they had come from London.

“But you’re fine,” someone said after a strange pause.

“I’m Hreod, we’re from here, we’re . . . not immune, but resistant.” As he passed the photographs round, he noticed his own hands again. Too pale, his nails opalescent. He didn’t like it. The silver had protected him from the worst of it in the deep, but there were marks where the joints in the gauntlets had been and the light had crept through. White marks, like scars. “This footage—you need to tell the people filming at Wieliczka that they need to get further back, much further back, at least two hundred yards. Salt light is like radiation. You soak it in, and it’s doing you damage even if you seem okay. You can feel it. It’s warm. If anyone has to go into it—you need silver. Silver blocks it. It will work for cameras as well. Like this.” He showed them.

“Why, why silver?”

“I don’t know, I’m sorry, but it works. So does aluminium, though less so,” he said, thinking of the day he’d followed Father Li on a tour of the mine so he could rescue his glasses.

“What’s the Vatican’s position about what’s happening?”

“No idea. I’ve been down a salt mine with no electricity,” he said. “You’ll need to talk to the Vatican.”

“The last record of a person turning to salt is in the Bible, at Sodom and Gomorrah,” another journalist pushed. “My source at the Vatican confirms that you were sent here in order to ascertain whether there is an angel here, for the same reason. So is there?”

Avelyn had spent a year teaching teenagers. Nothing anyone could say or ask was a shock anymore, and he had half known that this question was coming, but even so, he found himself looking at Jericho.

“Say yes,” Jericho told him softly in Hreod.

“What?”

“Belief into matter,” Jericho whispered.

Avelyn had to stare at the ground.

“Father Brocken?” one of the journalists pushed.

“What did they just say?” someone else said in the background.

Salt light made what you believed was happening, happen. Was it better to let people think that whatever was happening in salt mines was some unthinking natural catastrophe, or was it better for them to do what people had been doing in Hreodwater for the last God knew how many thousands of years: believe it was an intelligent thing that you could talk to, and reason with?