Page 106 of The Salt King

Rattle, scrape, rattle. She glanced towards the window. “Sorry, is there something stuck outside? Can you hear that pipe? Has someone got a cat?”

“I’ve got a cat somewhere, but I think she bounces between me and Mrs—” He stopped. “Look down there.”

He wasn’t trying to see any guttering. He was looking down into the graveyard.

It was crowded.

The rags of old shrouds flickered in the wind. The ground crawled. Some people weren’t standing but crabbing out from behind monuments, joints bending wrongly. Once they were upright, they stopped and stood, blank, as if they were waiting.

But seeing them didn’t feel like seeing. It felt like remembering having seen.

She waited for them to disappear, but they didn’t. Sally could see them too. He looked mired somewhere between awestruck and horrified.

He said something in Arabic she didn’t understand, but the cadence had music in it; he was quoting scripture. He glanced at her. “All bodies shall be resurrected.”

Tallis had never, ever been wrong in telling the difference between a real thing and a hallucination, not even once. That difference, that seeing versus the memory-of-seeing, it was always there, and it was always right.

She pushed her hands over her face. If that was wrong now, if she couldn’t tell, she was going to go mad. She was going to start trying to open doors that weren’t there, and not running from men with guns that were.

Rattle, scrape, rattle.

It was very close.

A shape still half bound in a decaying shroud dropped off the gutter and onto their balcony, and stood motionless outside, staring in through the glass.

40

Caer Halen

The road did not go around the castle, but through. There was a gate, open, higher than at any castle Avelyn had seen in Europe. The masonry was taller than gravity should have allowed, and as they came closer, it twisted at impossible angles. The statues that guarded the way were crowned giants, a king and a queen, just as they were in the Hringen mosaic. The king had his head bowed and his hands open, the old sign of welcome, while the queen drew a stone bow. Avelyn stared as they passed beneath the lower recurve of the bow. Had there once been a Salt Queen too? He never heard that. The King was always alone.

It was all dark, too. Or rather—within perhaps ten or twelve feet of the masonry, of the road, the archways, everything, there was a corona into which the salt light could not press. So the light channelled into rivers well above head height. Sometimes, where the way narrowed, it looked liquid: it had currents and eddies. Where it had space in the courtyard, it hung in clouds. It never touched the ground, though; nor the walls, or the roofs.

“Do we go in?” Avelyn said.

Jericho nudged his horse forward. “I think we’re safer here than back there.”

They had come into an open courtyard. The snow was falling through a broken dome. It was thick now. Avelyn twisted around. There were windows all around them, but no lights. It didn’t feel like anyone was here; there hadn’t been for a long time. The snow was making drifts in the window frames and the doorsteps, undisturbed.

Salt light arced low overhead, almost low enough to skim the dome, and crashed down in the fen behind them, not nearly as far away as the last one had done.

The horses saw too, ears going back.

“Jericho,” Avelyn said, and caught his arm to stop him. “Wait, wait. Something just landed back over there.” Another plume of salt light fired into the sky, but this time, he could see into the heart of it. Something was there. There was a shape that flickered and changed. It looked like a person, and then it didn’t; it was walking on all fours, and then it wasn’t; then it looked more like a machine, all spinning rings, and eyes, and maybe it had wings, and then—

Joy, joy, joy—

It was coming this way.

Avelyn felt the horse shy and slung himself down to the ground. He was just in time to pull Jericho down too before both horses bolted, ploughing into the snow and vanishing along a cloister. Jericho half fell and gripped Avelyn’s arms, and Avelyn was still in command enough of his own mind to help him up and squeeze his hands to apologise for wrenching him out of the saddle with no warning—but that would change in another few seconds, because the joy was already much nearer.

“Inside,” Avelyn said, pulling Jericho to the left. “Try these doors, maybe one of them is open . . .” The happiness blasting from the thing on the road felt like the wind, or like north: he could turn his head and tell which way it was coming from.

It was much better than trudging through the snow trying to run away from something that wasn’t dangerous.

“Don’t,” he heard Jericho say, but distantly, like it was happening to somebody else.

The wonderful thing was coming closer on the path. It was almost at the gate, beaming out warmth and a floaty sublimity, and God, but it was such a holy thing . . .