Page 136 of The Salt King

Jericho turned his shoulders to look, or at least, the shadow-figure of him moved, and a ripple of something that might have been silver-black cloth coiling in the wind. “Yes. And there are lights.”

“Really?” Avelyn said, because even though he was concentrating his whole soul on believing what Jericho was telling him now, there was no escaping the oh-look-convenient-stairs snowball fight. What was truly happening in Hreodwater? Was it just a ruin of salt? The angels were raging. Was Jericho looking at tumbled salt blocks that nobody would even recognise as buildings as the fenland wind tore the grains apart, and dissolved them into the Flood?

“Really,” Jericho said. His voice came softer and lower. “And the sun is rising. The Flood is all purple and gold.” He laughed a little bit. “There’s an eel owl on the ferry jetty.”

“And there’s just us here,” Avelyn said again, thinking of how the fen looked when it was empty in the winter—vast, eerie, unbroken, except for the pennants of Caer Halen snapping in the mist that never quite faded. It hadn’t changed since Saint Hildegard had come here. “And—perhaps some mammoths.”

Jericho was holding him by his ribs under the heavy cloak now. “It’s just us,” he promised. He kissed the top of Avelyn’s head, and Avelyn had never felt so safe. “And perhaps some mammoths.”

53

Outside Hreodwater, England

Three months later

London had been sticky with heat. Flies had swarmed over the forest of salt pillars in Trafalgar Square. Tallis knew that they were nearing Hreodwater when she started to feel a coolness in the air, even through her suit. They were walking along what had once been a road but was now an empty strip of concrete with moss and weeds encroaching from the verges. A herd of little deer with odd noses had clustered in the central division and watched them come, not worried. One hopped onto the bonnet of an abandoned car, which clanged up and down the silent road. Through the car, something that might have been part tree, and part something more like antlers, grew. It would be something to do with the beliefs of deer.

They looked all right, she thought, the deer; the salt light hadn’t wiped them out, at least. That wasn’t the case in London. They had found salt foxes, salt cats, salt pigeons.

She itched to take her helmet off. The glass visor was silvered, just like the suits—just like almost everything they carried now. She called them suits, but they were nothing like the old radiation suits. Old: God, she already saw the world of three months ago in the same way she saw the nineteenth century. Irretrievably gone. Even though she could remember all the stepping stones that had led them here, it felt distant. Time had crushed in on itself. A day now seemed to have as much in it as a year back then.

The first thing they had done when they left the desert was break into a museum. They’d stolen Roman armour replicas from the exhibits, because they laced on and they were easy to resize: though it was Sally who needed the resizing, because Romans had been short. Greaves, gauntlets, anything they could find, they had taken it all to an abandoned photography store and, in the absence of anything better, Sally had used silver nitrate to get a good layer of silver onto it all.

That was early on, before everyone else had realized that silver nitrate was now worth more than diamonds. Pharmacies and hospitals stocked it too, because it was an antiseptic, but within a couple of days, there was nothing left, and more and more often, you saw people who had brushed it straight onto their skin. Sally had reduced the liquid silver nitrate to pure silver with ammonia and sugar—he said it was how they’d made daguerrotypes in the old days—and so the finish was mirrory, but if you left it on skin, it went black. She still wasn’t used to seeing blacked-out faces. For all she knew exactly why people were doing it, it always gave her a knee-jerk jolt of unease.

Sometimes there were people like them, people who were well equipped, but shockingly few. Because how did you find out how to silver a glass visor when there was no internet left, no working electronics, and going to a library meant going outside, into the salt light?

She used to have lunchtime conversations at the agency about what would happen if people today had to function solely with what they knew, not what they knew how to find out. Everyone had been smug. They knew atomic physics.

Fuck-all good that was. Now the world was in the hands of silversmiths, mirror makers, and people like Sally, who just happened to be interested in the history of photography.

After a lot of experimentation, Sally had even found a way to silver phone screens. That sounded wonderful until you realized that charging a phone was a gauntlet nobody wanted to run more than once a month.

That was why they had stopped for so long in London. You could still get electricity there, in the Underground. A lot of people had survived down there—or a lot in comparison to other places, and surviving was a generous term.

There had been a lot of bartering, and a lot of running away. There always seemed to be that now. She had grumbled so much about “late-stage capitalism” before, hilariously blind to the astonishing, peacekeeping brilliance that was an economy.

Sally held up his shielded phone and nudged her.

A spectacular aurora of salt light danced up ahead.

“Do you think it’s true?” Tallis said, low, because there was an overpowering instinct not to speak loudly in the stretching quiet of the road. “There’s a friendly one there?”

Sally shook his head a little. “Well—whatever’s there, we haven’t seen any angels for two days. Oh, feel that. Oh, that’s good.” He lifted his head and smiled into the cold wind, which was cutting through the silver-woven shirts they were wearing under the suits. “I hope everyone’s right, I hope it is always winter there. I want some snow.”

For all it was only March, the heat had been miserable in London, weighed down as they were with silver protective gear. You couldn’t get anywhere close to the big cities without it now; turn a corner in Istanbul, in Milan, in Paris, and there would be angels haunting the spires and minarets. Although Sally was right and there had been none in the last couple of days, salt light still hung in the air like vaporised benzene.

“Tallis,” Sally said. He pointed at the road.

In huge letters, in chalk, someone had written:

TO HREODWATER. THE SILVER PATH IS SAFE.

Tallis could already see the mist coiling up ahead. It was good to know others had come this way too.

“Safe, how can it be safe?” she said.

“Let’s see,” said Sally.