Page 119 of The Salt King

“What are you—”

“Just tell me, my lord.”

“It’s ten hundred and sixty-seven.”

“No.” Avelyn took the silver camera out of his bag. He took a picture of Guillaume with it and leaned fast to the side when, startled, Guillaume tried to knock it out of his hands. He gave him the picture, which was developing.

“What . . . is that? This is me. How did you put a mirror on paper?” Guillaume looked up properly. “You’re no priest. You’re a witch.”

“I am a priest, and that isn’t witchcraft. It’s a machine. It was made almost a thousand years after you were born. You have been here far longer than you think.” Avelyn looked across the courtyard to make Guillaume look too. “You haven’t eaten. You don’t remember how many times you’ve come back here. It’s because you aren’t really here anymore. None of you are. Look at this courtyard. Really look.”

“You’re insane,” Guillaume said, but his eyes skimmed past Avelyn. “What am I supposed to be looking for?”

“Bones,” Avelyn said, light and soft. “Men. And horses. And old shields, bearing sigils . . . no one knows anymore. You were lost a thousand years ago. You have been trapped in circles ever since. You’re all dead. You just didn’t notice. All you are is an echo of old belief in the magic here.”

Guillaume’s eyes crept past him again, and this time, when Avelyn looked too, there were bones. Rusted armour with no one in it, broken pennants, the bright cloth long since rotted away; it all cluttered the edges of the courtyard, half hidden by snow drifts, but there.

“No,” Guillame said, but he was already coming apart in the wind.

The others saw, and perhaps because seeing is believing, perhaps because they had half suspected something was wrong too, the wind combed them away as well, and Avelyn and Jericho were alone in the courtyard.

Avelyn stood still, watching the new snow cover the hoofprints of the horses that weren’t there anymore, and breathed out slowly. He had always known he was ruthless. People always said, You never know how you’ll react in a terrible situation until it happens; they said things like, What would you do if a train was about to run over five people on the tracks, but pulling a lever to divert it to a different track would kill someone else? They always said it as if the point was that no normal human could possibly divert the train because nobody could live with the death on their conscience, even if they saved five lives. But to him, that had always been a non-problem. He’d pull that bloody lever, and it would be tough luck to whoever was on the line. You weren’t supposed to be like that, but he was.

There was a difference between knowing he was that way, though, and having proof.

Jericho came up beside him and towed him inside one of the rooms the knights had broken into. At first it was derelict and cold, but after Jericho had glanced around, a fire crackled into being in the grate.

When Jericho held his arms out, Avelyn stepped into them.

“Thank you,” Jericho said. “I heard what he said.”

Avelyn stayed where he was. He wanted to hang in this second forever. He didn’t want to go on, or to find the King, or to see whatever happened after that. It would kill them, one way or another. Either those things following would catch up, or the King would reduce them both to halite. He wanted to stay just here, like this, thinking of nothing except the bright sorrow of impossible longing. Jericho was another waystation on the lonely road he had chosen, one he would never be able to stop at. He could only look through the windows at the light inside and wish.

43

Amman, Jordan

There was no discussion. Sally pulled the door open and pushed Tallis through it first, then followed with two coats snatched from the hallway pegs, and then they were running down the stairs—along with at least ten other people from other flats. Everyone was silent, everyone was trying to run with as little weight as possible, and everyone was sending scared glances back at the huge, bearded man carrying a tiny baby in a Moses basket. She hesitated at the outside door to see which way the man and the baby went, then pulled Sally in the opposite direction, back down the steep, dark hill. Behind them, someone shrieked.

“We need to go to the mosque,” Sally said tightly. They were running again. Despite what must have been a fog of salt light in the air, it was cold now, the desert night dry and cloudless and biting. He threw a coat to her. “Maybe someone there knows what to do.”

“Some random parish imam is going to know bugger all except how to advertise the charity bowls match for the elderly,” Tallis said, coughing, because the air tasted of salt again, and gulping it in while they ran was as bad as swallowing seawater. “We need a—Christ alive—lab.”

He pushed his hand over his face as they slowed down for the darkest part of the passageway. Neither of them had any light, but some girls up ahead had lamps. “The Grand Mosque then. Tallis . . . I think you might feel something there, I think you might—see a way to believing. Please come with me.”

She didn’t understand what he meant at first, but then her tired brain caught up. Only believers could be saved. He was trying to help.

She held his elbows. “Okay. But you have to promise that nobody is going to be offended if I fall asleep on the floor. I’m so tired now. Mosques have carpets, don’t they? It’s such an error, it’s inviting people to get too comfortable.”

He scooped her into a sudden hug. She froze for a whole second, then put her arms around his waist. His ribs fluttered, and she felt an old packet of cigarettes crush flat in his pocket. She pressed her teeth together and rubbed his back. She probably reminded him of his mother.

Without streetlamps, the dark was deep and rich, and cold. Tallis had never been in darkness like it inside a city. It felt old, as if it had rolled in from the desert, having bided its time for a hundred years, waiting for the failure of electrons in their wires to reclaim everything from the light.

They walked close together, as quickly as they could, looking dead ahead to keep from staring towards the graveyard. At sharp corners, other people clapped or whistled low, because there was no other way to know someone else was coming the other way. Her eyes kept flickering of their own accord to the sides of buildings and deep-shadowed balconies, always half convinced something was there, but it seemed, at least, that they had left the dead behind for now. People weren’t panicking here. Here and there were little fires, from gas canisters or wood, and people were sitting outside on flimsy mismatched chairs, eyes glinting. It was surprisingly calm. Mostly, they were just cooking, or trying to keep warm. A family with tiny twin boys was playing a board game by the firelight, or trying to.

“You’re cheating!” one of the boys exclaimed. “It’s always landing on six!”

“I’m not!” his brother squeaked, but he sounded delighted. Their parents looked bewildered.