Page 115 of The Salt King

“They can ride there for as long as they believe they’re alive,” An El said, as if he had brushed aside a few spiders.

She wanted to say that she didn’t understand, but it was stranger than not understanding. She could see that there was reason to this, some alchemy that had a system and a logic, but she couldn’t tell what it was, or how it was he was spinning the world into whatever matter he liked. All the world was only atoms, water and air and fire and earth, all arranged in different configuration to make the illusions of different substances, so of course you could take them apart and remake them, but surely not like this . . .

And then—and then the great castle faded. The fen was only the fen, the fog rolled through the walls as if they had never been solid.

There were no more voices in French.

42

Caer Halen

Now

Caer Halen was not an ordinary castle.

There were no corridors, no clear network to connect different wings and towers. The small room opened out into a hall of great pillars, vast windows letting in a wintry daylight, even though, an hour ago, it had been the middle of the night. Not our daylight. Some of the windows were broken, and snow feathered through.

The salt light snaked overhead, far off the floor and far from the walls, a great cloud system of it—and it was brighter at the far end.

The way wasn’t clear, though.

Salt statues stood everywhere, larger than life: people, horses, carts, railway tracks, the ruins of old buildings, the harsh lines of newer ones, and on the ground, the salt had built itself into a slurry that looked exactly like white mud, riven by the cart tracks and the horses’ hooves, people’s boots. It had all risen up through the floor exactly like those drowned images on the bridge of the Saint’s Way, but it was a fever-dream labyrinth of giants. Each figure was twice Avelyn’s size, or more. The proportions were different in different places, at crazy variance.

All through the air, the salt glittered, but none of it had any light of its own. It was all . . . dead.

Jericho touched a monstrous horse. It was stuck in the salt mud, frozen in the midst of a horrible struggle. All of it was like that. The people and the animals, even the structures, looked as though they were slogging endlessly and hopelessly.

Beneath a huge salt cart that lay with a broken axle across the way, Avelyn stopped abruptly, because there was a salt child crouched under it. She was twice his size, but just recently a baby. She was staring at nothing in the same way the salt image of Avelyn’s younger self had inside the chapel at An El.

A glimmer of light flared inside the salt figure, and he jumped, and then had to explain why to Jericho.

“Salt light reacts with belief,” Jericho said. “Maybe if there’s no one close by to believe anything . . . it goes dark.”

They were under another horse now, rearing desperately. Avelyn stared up. The salt traced out every muscle in the horse, every stitch on the harness. “What is all this? It’s horrible.” He turned around as he walked, then frowned when he saw, behind a pillar, small as if it were a long way off, the dome of the Witan building. “Jesus, this is Hreodwater. But . . .” He had stop, because they had come to gargantuan railway tracks, waist high. He had to vault over, and landed awkwardly, because the floor was lower down on the other side. He reached back to help Jericho down. “We’ve never had trains here.”

Jericho was gazing up at a salt engine. It reached to the ceiling, infernal, casting them into an acid-tasting shadow. “You could, though? I mean—the old trains. They weren’t electric. It was just . . . combustion. Valves, steam.”

“Yes. They—Christ, they fought this. I remember, from school. There was a group of industrialists who tried to buy all the land here, they were forcing it through somehow, but . . . people went out at night and blew up the railway tracks. Just as well,” Avelyn added, his eyes coming to rest on a butcher’s stall not far away. It was hung with dead pigs. As though pigs weren’t people.

“So it’s an old nightmare,” Jericho said softly. “These are like fossils.”

The child under the cart coughed.

Avelyn snapped backwards and away from it, and without any more discussion they both ran for the far door, and the brighter light, while behind them the salt nightmares shifted. When he looked back, Avelyn thought some of them had a ghost of colour to them that they hadn’t before.

He closed his eyes.

Seeing is believing, and believing is true. Mind like a rock.

Back the way they had come, there was pyroclastic euphoria.

“One of those things is inside,” Avelyn said.

Jericho hauled the door shut behind them.

They came out on a high gallery above a courtyard. Blessedly, there was nothing in it, no salt figures right on the edge of getting up and walking. It was snowy, and in the corners were pieces of what might have been broken equipment. In the centre stood a statue of Saint Hildegard, but Avelyn had a feeling it was a real statue, not something that had grown from the salt.

It was casting a salt light shadow, just. The light was a fraction stronger on the far side of the courtyard, through the next archway. He looked around for a way down. There wasn’t one. The gallery ran around all four sides of the courtyard, but there were no doors, and no stairs.