Page 128 of The Salt King

“You said—you’re saying they, not us,” Avelyn managed.

“Yes, they, like Hreoda aren’t American,” Jericho said, with a venom Avelyn would never have thought could possibly come into his voice. “We fought, after the first harvest.” He looked as though thinking about it made him feel sick. “They don’t need to do it. They don’t need to any more than the white settlers in America had to kill the buffalo herds. It isn’t about surviving.

“If one of us just . . . sits here, if we do nothing, the ras is enough that anyone nearby would just think that place was sacred. People believe enough, and it’s enough to live on. That doesn’t hurt you. But . . . they want more, and more, and more, and in order to make you believe like that—they turn the world into a slaughterhouse.” He half closed his eyes. “When we lost the war, we fled. Underground, to hide. Stay here long, and we make salt, from the light. Salt mines. There’s one of us at all of them. And these disasters people are seeing now—that’s the advance guard of the Harvest hunting out those of us who are still alive and who might sabotage them. That’s what the salt explosions are. They land, they blast out salt light, they feed on everything close, and then they kill whoever is in the mine. After them, the legions will come. Then it really starts.”

“You’re a dream.”

“Yes.”

“But I can talk to you,” Avelyn said. His voice was coming high as a dismayed child’s. “You talk to me, you—you hurt your hand, you’re in the world . . .”

Jericho nodded once. “Because you believe it.” He bumped his head back against the silver again. “I was surprised as you that day in the witches’ cave. You saw a shadow, and there I was.” He made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “When you believe something, you really believe it.”

Avelyn felt as though he were drowning in the fen. To start with, it was stupid: he couldn’t be hearing this, he couldn’t have sunk up to his knees in a mire, that was idiotic, and when he got home, everyone was going to laugh. But then he was up to his waist, and gradually it wasn’t so funny, because he really couldn’t move, and there was no one close by to help. And now he was up to his chest, the mud cold around his ribs, and he couldn’t reach those sturdy weeds on the shore that he had thought he could.

Avelyn could only just see him in the brilliant salt light. It was so bright everything was white.

Everyone had told him.

Don’t talk to things that aren’t there.

He isn’t real.

The quiet went on for a long time.

“What did you say to that one just now?” Avelyn asked at last.

“I told them to let you leave, and anyone trapped at An El. They’re here for me, not for you.”

“What happened to waking you?”

“What for?” Jericho said softly. “If you’re all gone and safe . . . what for?”

Avelyn had to press his hands over his eyes. The headache was pounding again.

Jericho saw. “You need to go back. If you get any closer to me—to where I really am—you’ll be blinded. At best. Avelyn, just go. Go somewhere with the fewest people, where there isn’t anyone believing anything. Out to sea is best, or into a desert. Don’t go back to Rome. Holy cities will be abbatoirs now. You were more right than you knew, about demons. The best immunity to them is never to believe in anything at all.”

“What is wrong with you?” Avelyn burst out. “You didn’t want to die an hour ago, it was you who said it was a good idea to come here, why are you suddenly suicidal? You could fight, you floored that thing in half a second! You’re different to most of them, aren’t you? There are others of you, and other salt mines, but nobody else preserved the culture above for thousands of years, nobody else made humans see salt light, nobody else gave off so much light even from deep underground that it affected electronics on the surface. You’re—what are you, what were you? A general, a king? Those things are afraid of you!”

Jericho only looked back at him. There was something shut down in his expression now.

“Tell me how much further it is,” Avelyn said, because he was absolutely not going to explain that he didn’t want to be alive if the King wasn’t. “Tell me where.”

“No,” Jericho said.

Avelyn had the same dead calm he had when Guillaume threatened them, and something bitterly close to amusement. Oh, but it had taken a long time to be told, and he had been slow, but that had always been the way. He had been slow to learn salt casting, he had been slow to understand Rome, and slow here, but sometimes you were slow because you were laying more foundation stones than other people. Once he did know a thing . . . he really knew it.

“Well, it doesn’t matter, does it. You’re not real.”

Jericho closed his eyes. Like so much cleverly formed smoke, he came apart, and misted away into the salt light.

49

The legend was that if you went deep enough into the mine, you came out on the fen. No one had ever said that if you pushed far enough into the salt light at Caer Halen, you reached the mine, but you did.

Avelyn had a feeling it was because nobody had ever survived it.

He found a body. The armour was a little like the images of Saint Hildegard’s, and for a few seconds he stood over it, wondering if it could be her. Knowing he was going to have to take at least some of it—he was being slowly blinded, he could feel that, stars bursting over his eyes as often as they didn’t after the flares in the salt light—he tried to lace up what armour he had on the inside for the moment he had to see what was underneath. When he turned it over, there was no mask, only silver cloth bound over the eyes, and that was just as well, because the plate silver was almost too hot to touch.