Page 109 of The Salt King

“You thought it didn’t mean anyone any harm. Not to put a crack in your bulletproof optimism, but it’s a demon and now angels are coming for it, so I feel like I . . . win?”

Jericho had been looking down at his scalded hand while Avelyn spoke, but fraction by fraction, his eyes clawed a way up, and when they hooked into Avelyn’s, they didn’t shift again. The stars in them burned. “Why do you think they’re good?” he asked.

“Why do I think angels are good?”

“They just killed thousands of people in front of you.” Jericho bent his neck as though looking at Avelyn were unbearably heavy, but he still didn’t let his eyes slip away. “Thousands more at Wieliczka, and at where else? Why is that good?”

“It’s not. It’s not, but . . .”

“But it’s an acceptable side effect of goodness?” Jericho said, and there was the glint of armour again. “We’re all so foul we should be annihilated?”

“It’s just . . . it’s what they are. In the Bible they destroy cities; that isn’t very nice, but nice and good are sometimes—”

“It isn’t very nice?” Jericho said over him. It was hardly louder than a whisper, but Avelyn shut up. “What would they have to do, for you to wonder if they weren’t good? Maybe they would . . . I don’t know, make everyone around them feel so hypnotically happy it pulls you towards them, and then they kill you when you’re close enough? You know what that reminds me of? Those things down in the deep sea with their own lamps, so that littler things swim towards them.”

“They’re not eating—”

“Are they not?” Jericho said, his voice hardening. Glint: armour. The singing of something lethal on a whetstone. “These things are made of salt light. Salt light converts belief into matter, yes? And these things do something that attracts to them creatures who can believe! Not fish or mosquitoes or carbon dioxide, they attract people. That isn’t an accident. Trees don’t convert light into energy for the hell of it, and Venus flytraps don’t trap insects as a funny side effect of their nature, it is their nature, they do it to live—so do you not think that maybe those things out there make you feel so good not because they are good, but because they are hunting?”

Avelyn was an overpulled longbow again. He hated talking at cross-purposes like this. “Of course they’re hunting. If this is anything like last time.”

“Last time.”

“Do you know the Sodom and Gomorrah story?”

“I swear to God if you start telling me about the sin of Sodom—”

“Sex trafficking,” said Avelyn. “That’s the sin of Sodom. They kidnapped travellers and sold them into slavery for huge profit. The point of the story isn’t that we should kill all the gays, that’s mistranslated Victorian nonsense. The point is, that sometimes a place is so evil that the best thing to do is wipe it off the face of the earth.”

“That is—”

“I know! I know it’s horrible. It’s human to say that that’s never the right thing to do, and in the story, Abraham argues with God; he says, Wait, what about the good people? And God says, ‘Find me one.’ Abraham sends angels to warn his nephew, Lot, because he thinks Lot is a good man. But Lot isn’t a good man. He’s horrendous. He ends up throwing a girl out to be gang-raped. God was right. There was no one good left.”

“That isn’t what you think,” Jericho said quietly. “The wholesale extermination of cities—that’s psychotic—”

“Yes,” Avelyn said. “It is psychotic if a king or an emperor decides, but . . . not this. Not when God does. So maybe they are hunting, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad.”

Jericho said nothing for a long time. He didn’t look away. When he did, his voice sounded as if it were under enough pressure to form diamonds. “Abraham tried,” he said. “He would have been a monster if he didn’t. So I’m going to try and get as many people down to An El and into silver-clad rooms as I can.”

“It won’t work,” Avelyn said. “Those rooms only have silver wallpaper, it will just melt and . . .”

“Well, I’m going anyway.”

“No, me too. Of course we have to try. I’m—Jericho, I’m not disagreeing with you.”

The way Jericho looked at him then made it clear that they disagreed about everything that mattered.

Avelyn would have given anything not to have had that conversation. Usually he was good at explaining to people outside the Church why it was less awful than so many atheists thought, but with Jericho, he was a useless mess.

Under the door, there was a flare of salt light, but it wasn’t the things in the courtyard. It was softer; an aurora flash, like in the deep mine. At the same time, Avelyn felt the warmth of the ras, and it was bizarre, because it was distinctly different to the savage ecstacy that the others generated. It was much gentler, just a sudden certainty that everything would be all right, someone loved him, loved him back, no matter what he thought about angels. He felt sick.

“That’s a point,” Avelyn said. “Where is he? The King, I mean. All the stories . . . when the town is in danger, he wakes.”

Jericho shook his head slightly. “He can’t fully wake without witches to believe him awake. I think that’s the whole point.”

“What?”

“Saint Hildegard had to go down into the mine to fetch him, when the French knights came. He didn’t appear by himself.”