Page 96 of The Salt King

The footage must have been taken just now, probably while he was wading through the crowds outside. It was dark in England, and the cameras and reporters had clearly mobbed Avelyn on his way out of Hreodwater. He was wearing Hreod clothes, not the Jesuit black, and even though Cai had never seen him without them for twelve years, he wasn’t wearing his dark contact lenses. The light of the cameras shone in his eyes. They had changed from their Outside gold to uncanny violet. Beside him was a tall man who looked like a saint, vaguely familiar, watching Avelyn as though he was ready to get in the reporters’ way and pull him to safety.

Cai didn’t blame him. Avelyn was terrifying, and he carried himself as if he were tall, but surrounded by people, all crowding in on him, there was no avoiding it: he was small and willowy, hardly any broader than he had been as a boy.

Avelyn looked taut, like anyone would if they were confronted by twenty yelling reporters, but as they shouted questions at him, Cai saw that hard Jesuit calm come down over him. The one that drove aid trucks through gunfire, and sometimes started fights with American conservatives for fun.

He was explaining something he had seen in the mine, showing them photographs.

A hammer from outside Hreodwater, blasted to salt. A silver hammer from there, perfectly whole. He was showing them the silver-clad camera he had used to take the pictures.

Nobody was really listening to him. It was what happened—Cai had felt it again and again when he spoke to atheists—when people thought you were just talking nonsense because you were some sad mixture of stupid and brainwashed, having devoted your life to your imaginary friend.

Someone asked him if it was angels.

Avelyn frowned, but the man who looked like a saint leaned down to him and whispered something, and Cai saw Avelyn change his mind about what he was going to say.

“Yes,” Avelyn said.

There was an uproar, and the reel cut back to the studio, where the slate-faced newsreader added, in the tone of and while we’re enjoying that typical bout of Catholic lunacy . . . , “The BBC has approached Vatican sources for comment, but there has been no reply.”

The screen switched off.

“I wonder if you could explain what he was talking about,” the Holy Father said. “We cannot reach him for clarification.”

Cai took a deep, slow breath. He had always struggled to tell what Avelyn would or wouldn’t believe. When Cai first brought him to Rome, Avelyn accepted the idea of prophets and the Fall readily, he loved reading about the lives of saints, but for years he had point-blank refused to countenance that Christ was the son of God. He’d said, what do you mean, there are three gods but they’re all the same thing and one of them is its own son? Wholly God and wholly man, what? A holy mystery, you say? You can’t yell holy mystery to excuse every nonsensical piece of twattery you can’t be bothered to think about properly. Take your Trinity and shove it up your arse.

Cai wasn’t sure Avelyn was wholly convinced even now. The older Avelyn grew, the more difficult it became to know what was going on behind the dark contact lenses. Outside gold, or Hreod violet?

But Avelyn had been certain that whatever was in the mine was nothing good. That was only three days ago.

“I’ve been trying to call him,” Cai said lamely, “but I can’t get through. Electronics don’t work in Hreodwater.”

“He was outside it ten minutes ago. Try him again, would you please?” the Holy Father said in his endlessly mild way.

At least thirty people watched Cai negotiate with his phone. He put it on speaker.

The odd tzz, tzz of the English ringtone buzzed around the office.

The call connected.

“Father!” Avelyn’s voice exclaimed, magnified around the office. “Oh, my God, I’ve only just got my phone working, I’ve got eighteen missed calls from the Secretary’s office—”

“Yes, it is what happens when, in your capacity as a Vatican representative, you claim an international disaster is caused by angels, you see,” the Secretary put in, quite polite, as always, but looking as though he might reconsider starting the Spanish Inquisition again, only this time it wouldn’t be aimed at heretics but at annoying young men who found ways to derail international politics from a muddy island that everybody had naively assumed was too busy sinking itself into the Atlantic to do anything inconvenient.

“You’re on speaker,” Cai said bleakly. “I’m here with . . . well, with quite a lot of people. Including the Holy Father. We’d all like to know what made you say—what you just said on international news, which more than a billion Catholics will have seen by the end of the night.”

He thought there would be a shocked silence. He thought that, like every other human being of the age of twenty-seven he had ever met, Avelyn would be startled into incoherence, and it would take a while to understand the underlying reasoning. He glanced at the Holy Father, getting ready to say that perhaps he would have more luck in private, not on speaker in front of the Pope.

A nun took Cai’s phone from him, though, tapped something, and Avelyn appeared on the big screen.

Avelyn must have been able to see them too, because he nodded once. “Right, good. We’ve solved the cures-and-turning-to-salt mystery. Salt light enacts whatever the people close by believe is true.” He said it clearly and slowly, the lift and fall of his Hreod accent making it somehow heavier than it would have been otherwise. “Small quantities of it do this. After about thirty days at An El, an Outsider will have absorbed enough salt light for it to have noticeable effects. In a very religious person who believes they are in a holy place which can cure them of a disease or problem . . . it does cure them. Brother Matthew walked. A nun who was blind regained her sight right in front of me yesterday. However, continued exposure, or a high dose all at once, is fatal. You turn to salt. Hence Poland.”

“What do you mean, it enacts what people believe?” the Secretary said, frowning.

At the same time, an irascible American cardinal said, “What has this got to do with telling the international press it’s angels, young man?”

Avelyn tilted his head at him in the way that obviously meant: I feel like you might be a stupid person. Cai had never had the heart to say it to him, but it was a singularly Hreod tilt. Young Hreod men didn’t say much, so they cultivated eloquent eyelashes. He had never met anyone else who could say things like ontologically problematic just with their face. It was one of Cai’s favourite things about Avelyn: to write down anything he said, you’d have to do it in musical score, with two staves. The top one was what he said aloud (Yes, Father), and the one underneath was what he was saying with his eyes. There had been Qing dynasty courtiers who couldn’t do it like Avelyn.

“If you stand in salt light,” Avelyn said, wholly courteous and with no trace of you fucking idiot in his voice—God, it was superhuman—“and someone convinces you there’s a monster behind you . . . there soon is. I saw it. But if you’re then surrounded by nuns who pray to the Holy Mother and truly believe in her intercession . . . guess what appears instead?”