Page 97 of The Salt King

There was a silence of the kind that Cai had only ever heard before close to electric fences. It had a hum.

Avelyn held up a photograph. It showed a crowd of people, a haze of amber-purple light, and in the light . . . something terrible.

“I took that today,” he said.

The American cardinal was determined not to follow. “Yes, but angels?”

Cai, though, was beginning to see. Tell someone there was a monster, and there would be. But tell people there were angels . . .

“Whatever these things are, they turn belief into matter,” Avelyn said. “Whatever you believe near them, happens. Is it better to think they’re like nuclear bombs—universally destructive—or to believe that they are basically good things you can talk to and reason with?”

“It wasn’t your place to make that decision,” the American cardinal said. “Do you have any idea how many hundreds of thousands of people are descending on the Vatican right now, absolutely certain that the apocalypse is happening?”

“Well, the apocalypse does rather seem to be happening,” the Holy Father said, so quietly it was difficult to tell if he was speaking to himself or to everyone. “Avelyn, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to get in front of the news, but Poland is not the only place to have suffered a disaster. It’s everywhere, and all the sites are salt mines. Salt Lake City is being evacuated as we speak, and so is Amman. We’ve just lost a significant portion of Sicily here. Are you saying that there’s some hope against this phenomenon if . . . people truly believe it won’t hurt them?”

Avelyn thought about it. “I couldn’t say. Not knowing that it will hasn’t helped, but that isn’t the same as believing it won’t. I’ll try.”

“I suppose it’s rather difficult to choose what to believe,” the Holy Father remarked.

“No, but it’s easy to trick someone else,” Avelyn said, very much as though he was looking forward to selecting his victim.

Cai feared for the American cardinal.

“This is ridiculous,” the American cardinal began suicidally, but the Secretary spoke over him.

“Why is this happening now?”

“I don’t know.”

Maybe it was just the quality of the connection, but Cai thought that Avelyn looked lighter than he should have. Normally, if he happened to go out in civilian clothes, Rome’s legions of tour guides yelled at him in Portuguese or Spanish; now, though, nobody would have made that mistake. He looked like a billboard in Beijing for one of those sumptuously expensive historical dramas, where the actors were all moonlight skin and inkstone hair. Once Cai had noticed, he couldn’t stop noticing. It was bizarre. He didn’t think there was a filter on the call.

“Well, I have plenty of good folks at home worried about the sin of Sodom, and frankly it’s difficult to argue with them,” the American cardinal said drily.

The way Avelyn looked at him, it was amazing the man didn’t turn to salt right there.

“Vatican intelligence gathering is not what it was if a small tourist town around a salt mine in Poland is running a savage human trafficking ring and kidnapping men off the road to sell into sex slavery, and we hadn’t heard,” he said, and half the room actually laughed.

That’s my boy, Cai thought. Bite much worse than his bark, because he doesn’t see any point in warning someone he’s going to bite.

“Yes, well, you would say that,” the cardinal said, with a flick of a look at Li, and all the old accusations clanged onto the carpet.

Avelyn nodded once in the way that meant: I will shortly have you eaten by dogs, and the children shall rejoice over you with singing.

“Avelyn,” Cai cut in, even though he could see that the Holy Father had taken a breath to speak. “I’ve seen satellite images of the salt light. It moves between the disasters in a kind of—swarm, and whatever it is, it’s . . . all heading at you. At Hreodwater, I mean. You’re next. At the speed the swarms are travelling, you have about—maybe three hours from right now. You need to get out of Hreodwater. Everyone does.”

“Satellite images?” the Holy Father said.

“Yes, Holiness, I have a friend at the Observatory who . . . The point is, there are four separate arms of the salt light, and they all started in different places, but they’re converging now on—”

“You said swarms at first. What’s swarming?”

“They look like points of light. I don’t know, but they fly very high . . .” He held out his phone with the picture from Wieliczka, and Steve’s borrowed tablet.

Avelyn was frowning. Even on the screen, though, it was possible to see he wasn’t looking at them, but behind them, at the huge window that looked out across Rome. “I think you’d better keep an eye on the number of people who really believe they’re going to see all the prophecies in Revelation come true,” he said.

“You just said that only happens in salt light!” the American cardinal snapped.

The sharper people in the room were already looking back at the window.