Page 132 of The Salt King

She made an effort to smile.

So they sat in the doorway of the tent and cooked some chickpeas, and Sally made some bread from nothing but flour and something that might have been kefir, but it came together in a beautiful dough and fried into flatbreads like she’d never had before. She said so. Sally looked pleased and told her it was just because she was hungry, and then giggled when she told him to fuck off.

“What’s your range, do you think?” Sally asked. He had done something magical to the chickpeas too, and now Tallis was wondering how she had ever thought supermarket ready-meals were even distantly related to food.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I could go for a walk after dinner and see if I can practise?”

“We,” he said seriously, “we can go for a walk. You can’t imagine away looters and armed militia.” He paused. “Can you?”

She had been thinking about that. “I don’t think so. Unless I caught it in the split second where I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating or not.” She struggled, because all this required her to articulate things that she had never had to say aloud before. “I think . . . I think it should be possible, but you’d need . . .” She found herself crossing her hands over as if she were trying to show him a mirror image. “You’d need the exact opposite kind of mind to mine. You’d need to be able to really believe it. Whereas . . . what I’m doing is unbelief.”

He nodded slowly, as though she was making any kind of sense. She was afraid she wasn’t. It sounded so arbitrary and so like the kind of thing somebody at a country fair might say, over a crystal ball decorated with plastic ivy and fairy lights. She pushed her hands over her face, wishing for a vocabulary that was different to that, and then kept them there, because her nose was cold. Opposite her, Sally was hunched down into his coat and scarf, watching her as if he was thinking about saying something. She looked down at the ground, grey with sand and snow.

It was settling on her little by little that there was nobody to go back to. She had been unmoved by the idea of dying and leaving nothing behind but the cactus; but the idea that she might live and have nothing but the cactus was as frozen and punishing as the desert.

“O-oh, look at that,” he said. He had checked his phone. It could only have been half an hour since he had posted the video, but his feed had exploded with likes and reposts and replies. “We aren’t the only ones with signal.”

Thousands, already.

“Am I going to do a little I-told-you-so dance? I think I might. You have a hashtag. HowToKillADemon. Nice.”

She looked over his shoulder. “But look at what’s trending. TheyAreAngels. Christ, it’s that sodding priest they sent to Hreodwater . . . for God’s sake, he’s got millions of views.”

“Of course he has,” Sally remarked. “People go crazy for a hot priest.”

“How has the Vatican managed to deploy the one available priest who doesn’t look like a creep for this?” Tallis snarled. “Why does he look like the adorable boy next door who would run into your burning house to save your dog?”

“Genius,” Sally said. He was watching the priest’s footage. The wretched man could really talk; he was articulate and precise, and he looked right into the camera with his hypnotising violet eyes. He was Hreod, of course.

“What? No, it’s garbage—”

“But genius garbage. Make people believe there’s something good, and—”

“We’re going to cancel each other out,” she said bleakly.

“I don’t think so.” Sally was starting to smile. “He’s talking to the people who are going to believe something no matter what, and you’re talking to the people who believe nothing no matter what. Those groups are mutually exclusive. You’re not cancelling each other out. It’s more like a pincer movement.”

Tallis shook her head and said nothing, not wanting to rain on his hopefulness. In her experience, though, a compelling religious zealot could bring people flocking, while the dry scientist with awkward posture was left with eight attendees at their conference in Hull.

Something changed behind them. There was no sound, and no flash, but it was a surge of feeling, sharp enough that they both twisted around towards Amman.

It was different to the storming joy that had shot overhead before. That had been an attack, like being pushed into a silo of cocaine. This was mellower, kinder, but much, much stronger.

“Can you hear . . .?” Tallis said.

“Music,” Sally murmured.

It wasn’t really there. There was no speaker rolling the sound over the desert, but it was distinct all the same. It was the surge of a mighty choir. If all of Heaven and Hell had sung together, it would have been this. It hummed through the ground and along the arm of the galaxy arcing above them, resonating in marrow and between the motes of snow. In it was the winter, and still, silver water, and reeds bowing before the wind as it sighed across mirror-flat land where the air tasted of salt. At the battlements of an impossible castle stood a man in black, in a salt crown, singing to the echoes of the towers.

“What is that?” Tallis blinked fast. It was making her cry. She had seen things in music before, understood images through the chords struck by strings and horns, but never like this. He was calling. He was telling them where to come—everyone who could hear.

There were other things in the song, too. Safety. High walls, clad in silver. Welcome.

Sally had fitted a card of aluminium over his phone camera, inside the case to keep it in place. “Look,” he said softly.

They looked like the missiles the two of them had seen over Israel. Points of salt light arced up from the city, each one leaving a brilliant trail, but it wasn’t just a desultory few. It was hundreds, lifting weightless into the air, rearing back to find a closer formation, and then . . .

They powered west, towards the song. Down in the city, there were still many lights, but fewer.