Page 130 of The Salt King

Nothing, except the plinking of acorns as they dropped into the water. It was such a lonely sound.

Avelyn frowned into the new dark. Why had he? It had been a senseless change of tack. A full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree pivot, inside about ten minutes. Jericho had gone from willing to do anything to . . . it was as if something had hacked his heart out and tossed it on the fire, but nothing had happened. Avelyn had just told him what had happened to his clan.

Oh.

“You can’t control what you dream,” he said softly. “You told me that. You can a little bit—maybe you were halfway to making a man in that cave years ago, but there I was and I believed you a dream so real that you could talk and feel and walk right up to the abbey and be the new doctor. I did that, not you.” He felt like he was putting down something immensely heavy, something he had been carrying for so long he had thought it was part of him. “You weren’t—trying to trick anyone. You weren’t punishing me. You were just dreaming. Why didn’t you just say that? Nobody deserves to die for that. It wasn’t your fault.”

Everything he had said. Demons, evil, vengeance.

If he hadn’t already lost his sight, he would have wanted to tear his eyes out.

“Of course you think I’m only saying it to make you do what I want now,” he said, despair-laughing. “I don’t know what else to say to show you I mean it. Please wake up. Please. Don’t die here.” He lifted his hand and skimmed it through the air until he found a fall of glassy hair. Cool, though the salt light was hot. And—at the temple, the slightest change of texture, and he knew that if he could see, he would see a bolt of white.

He wanted to say a thousand times more. He wanted to say that he could see very well that Jericho thought he’d driven Avelyn into a life with a church that forgave horrors and punished innocent things, that it was unforgivable, but of course it wasn’t: he wanted to say he wouldn’t have had it any other way, because however rocky it had been, he loved the way he had taken. He loved Father Li and teaching and reading the news in ridiculous Latin and learning how to use a cement mixer in Sudan, and more than anything, he was glad that it had all let him come back here and see. If he hadn’t been away, he wouldn’t have been able to recognise what home was.

It would all have been useless. Jericho knew he was good at talking.

Instead, he bent down and kissed him, only once, very light, his knuckles just resting on the curve of his cheekbone.

He felt him breathe in suddenly, then cool hands cradling his throat, then the shush of silver cloth. Avelyn locked both arms around him.

“Hello,” he whispered.

“Your eyes.” It was the voice he knew and not. There were chords in it, music. It was full of grief.

“Don’t do anything for it, I couldn’t believe you into this if I could see . . .”

The King drew their heads together. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care,” Avelyn said honestly. His hand shaking a little, he pressed his palm to the King’s chest. Thin cloth that would writhe like vapour in the faintest breeze; and bare skin, and under it, a real heart, beating. Miracles. “What now?”

The King was quiet for a long time. Beyond the silver wall, the other things like him raged, powering ecstasy right through into the chamber, Come out, come to us, come away, leave that . . . but it all felt thin now. “I told you that I fled a war.” He let that hang in the air for a few heartbeats. “You know the war I mean, don’t you?”

Avelyn nodded slightly. He could feel that the King was remembering it, because the salt light was making ghosts around them. There were voices like this one, voices made for singing, but they were screaming; the rush of fire, deafening artillery, and he could feel what it had felt like, to look up into the thunderheads and see the lightning-maimed legions falling.

“And . . . you know what that makes me, in your faith.”

He nodded once.

“Are you sure about this? Because if you aren’t—if you think you might stop believing me into this, then that’s dangerous. I’m . . .” He sort of laughed. It was a viola-string shudder in the air, and in the ras, and in their bones where his hip was pressed against Avelyn’s. “My light is far brighter than those things at the door. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous.”

Avelyn took his rosary out of his pocket and held it in his open palm, into the salt light. He felt it lose its form, and crumble into salt.

50

Amman, Jordan

Winter had come at last, and the desert was cold. Sally and Tallis had stolen some gear from a shop and walked as far as they could, then pitched the tent in some scrubland among dusty rocks that looked as though they might have been the very last tumbled remains of something ancient. Sometimes, on the way, something had crossed their path. Something dead, something on fire, or real things, real people. If it wasn’t real, Tallis could get rid of it. When there was a real barricade, Sally talked them past.

In isolated constellations, other people were arriving too, camping at a good distance from each other; one way or another, people were realizing that whatever was happening wasn’t so bad if you could get away from the nearest mass of humans.

They heated up some water to cook with over a stolen gas stove, the blue flames making Sally’s eyes turquoise. He was panning around with his phone. Sometimes the screen hazed, but there was no sign of the wires crackling into salt.

Not far from them, the skeleton pylon of the cell tower sang as the wind and the snow blew through its steel rungs. Whatever had passed over the city must not have gone directly above it, because the little red lights at the top were still blinking, and the dishes and antenna were not bound up in salt. Sometimes, for ten or twelve seconds at a time, there were a few bars of signal. If Tallis listened hard and stayed exactly still, she could hear a faint hum. She had no idea what that was, exactly, but it did mean the tower was working, and she thought it might be the best sound she had ever heard.

Sally stopped suddenly, looking hard towards the city.

“All right,” he said. “There’s one coming. It’s just walking. Let’s see if you can do this on camera. Are you ready?”