Page 134 of The Salt King

“We aren’t,” he said, as simple and light as he said anything else. “And you don’t remind me of my mother. You don’t remind me of anyone at all, which is . . . wonderful.”

“Oh,” said Tallis.

Sally put his arm around her and tucked her against his side so they could share the stolen blanket, and she was wrapped up in the smell of terrible cigarettes and old leather. “So west then,” he said.

51

Rome, Italy

There was a crystal city in the clouds. It shone, light rainbowing through the sapphire towers and the golden domes. Gold, but as clear as glass, spinning into existence even while Cai watched, backlit mauve and silver from the astounding light—light that was nothing to do with the sun, because it was the middle of the night.

It was only half there. Sometimes he could catch a sideways glimpse of it. Sometimes the sky was black, and churning with smoke from what was on the ground.

It was not far from the Jesuit Curia to the basilica, so close in fact that usually he didn’t even think about anything on the walk there if he’d gone to visit Avelyn. Now, though, he was inching along, his breath steaming in the freezing air, trying not to crush any of the people trapped in the ice.

The great piazza with its encircling colonnades was frozen. All those people who had been living and fearing and clustering around the little fires before . . . they were silent. He could see some of them lying full-length below the surface. Some had fallen deeper. Some had almost reached the air before the terrible lake froze, and they were the worst, just eyes frozen open showing above the ice. If I were to get a pickaxe and dig down as far as I could, he thought feverishly, what would I find at the lakebed? Not the paving of the piazza.

Behind him, a frightened stream of Jesuit brothers followed, just the random collection of people who happened to have been in the building.

From different directions, more people were edging towards the basilica—nuns in white from the convent tucked behind the papal gardens, young priests coming from further away, from the different colleges, from the university, all different orders.

“This isn’t even in the Bible,” one of the men behind Cai whispered. He was a producer for the radio usually. “It’s Dante.”

“I guess every Italian reads the Inferno at school,” Cai whispered back, but his heart was cracking, because what this meant was that after years of the Church perpetrating and disguising horrors, some critical mass of people didn’t believe it was good anymore. They believed it was . . . this.

In the new, awful silence, though, there was singing. It was a long line of Carmelite sisters, and their voices were beautiful. The harmonies floated upward into the vapour from the ice. It wasn’t a dirge. It was a song with joy in it.

Sing to the king, and nothing else.

Oh, God, they had known in Hreodwater, they had always known.

“Come on, lads,” he said to the Jesuits. “Come on, help them.”

“What?” someone said.

“Sing!” Cai said.

Almost certainly it wouldn’t have done much for a different group; but if people in holy orders knew anything, it was singing. Hesitantly at first, they fitted their voices around the women’s, then clearer. Not far away, another stuttering trail of Franciscan brothers caught the melody too, and then a flock of grey-clad novitiate nuns who must have been pulled from an evening lecture when all this began.

Above one of them, Cai noticed, the fog was clearing. She was looking into the sky, at the place where he could catch glimpses of the city, and she was smiling a little. And the ice around her was—not melting exactly. Just . . . not existing. A young man who had been trapped in it until she walked past stood up, dazed. He wasn’t standing on ice, just the usual flagstones of the piazza.

“Oh, my God,” the producer said. He had seen too. “That sister . . .”

They were gathering now on the steps of the piazza, the different orders mixing. The song was starting to fade as cardinals and Swiss Guards rushed out to meet them.

“No!” Cai said with sudden certainty. “Don’t stop! Keep going—come on! Sing! We can clear the square, look what’s happening! Use your faith, it’s stronger than all this nonsense, remember why you were ordained in the first bloody place! What are we for if we can’t sing to Him? Remember what John saw! He saw this!”

People looked, and he was right, and they saw that he was. The young sister who had already rescued one man from the ice blinked when five or six pairs of hands guided her to the edge of the steps to face into the piazza.

“I rather think we should wait for the Holy Father’s orders!” the angry American cardinal said, and too late, Cai realized that the fragile, precious figure in white had been hidden from him among the towering guards.

Everyone looked around.

The Pope laughed a little bit. “No, no. Please, sister. What are we singing?”

She looked uncertainly at Cai, who was somehow the one people seemed to think might know what was going on. He gave her an encouraging nod and tapped his heart with his knuckles to remind her what to listen to.

So she told them, and they sang, and way into the clouds, the crystal city became clearer and clearer, new echelons building themselves down nearer and nearer to the ground, the walls and battlements alive with gemstones, and the twelve gates all carved with astonishing precision from gigantic single pearls, stolen, Cai could only suppose, from some breathtaking leviathans in a churning deep that had been forgotten long, long ago. He sang, aware he was crying, but it was just joy. His soul was singing too.