Page 137 of The Salt King

The way into the mist and the cold led into a thicket of trees. The trees were bone-coloured. Different substances seemed to turn into different kinds of halite, and living wood was disconcerting. Dead wood would turn to dust, but a living tree became something that looked like pearl. Little spectra swam in the surface. She didn’t think it was reflecting sunlight. Strewn across the ground were white leaves and white acorns. Sally picked one up.

“They’re alive,” he said, gazing up into the snow that was flecking their visors now. The cold was sharpening. “Do you think . . . it’s something to do with what trees believe?”

“Maybe,” Tallis said. Three months ago, she would have laughed at him for talking about trees going around believing things, but she had seen too many eerie miracles now not to wonder. “Things are certainly adapting here.” She watched a squirrel with violet eyes skitter along a branch. “Do you think it works on people too?”

“Well, historically it must have,” Sally said. “That’s what the Hreoda are, right? Maybe they know.” Then, “Can you hear something?”

She could, in the place in her mind that hallucinated. It was somewhere between singing and chirping. They both looked around, trying to trace it, but as with all not-quite-sounds, you couldn’t hunt it out very well. There was something angry about the noise, though. It put her in mind of quarrelling swallows. Thinking of birds made her look up.

“Oh, fuck,” she said, and jolted backwards, thudding into Sally.

“What, what . . .” He followed her eyes upward.

There were angels in the trees, and she could see them.

They were points of light high in the branches, luminous through the mist. Hundreds and hundreds of hundreds, only . . .

Only, they were tiny. They were still angels, they were still the shapes she had seen on hundreds of silver-clad pictures now, but the ordinary ones were three times the size of a human. These . . . their miniature spinning parts could have been the very finest clockwork. That twittering was their song. A flock of them spiralled down to look at Tallis and Sally, but they stopped shy of the road, clustering right at the edge, cheeping, sometimes beating little wings, or lashing tiny lion tails, wheels and eyes and wheels and eyes. Tallis couldn’t tell if they didn’t dare to come closer, or if they couldn’t.

The path was inlaid with silver. It made a glorious, snaking mosaic through the forest. Something to do with the silver?

“Someone made them small,” Sally said. The lights danced and fought in his eyes.

“And visible,” Tallis said, half enchanted and half confused.

“How?” He was looking at her as if she ought to know.

“I have . . . no idea.” She stared at them. They were no bigger that hummingbirds, and she wanted to go to the edge of the road and see if she could pick one up, because it would be fascinating to see how one actually worked, not to mention invaluable—

“Damn. Tallis! Tallis.”

She snapped back to herself and realized Sally was gripping her arm, stopping her going any closer.

“Little bastards,” she grumbled. She glared at the angels. “You aren’t real.”

A swathe of them vanished, and the rest took flight into the trees, shivering and squeaking.

Sally showed her his phone. Through the screen, the silver road was repelling salt light: all through the woods, it was brilliant, but in a narrow corridor, it avoided the road. Safe, just like the sign had said. She was about to ask Sally how the hell that had been done when she realized he was staring at something beyond her shoulder.

“Oh, my God. Look. It’s true.” There was pure joy in his voice.

Above them, a raven took off and soared away into the mist. Tallis frowned, because it wasn’t a real raven; it had that memory quality to it that everything conjured by salt light did, but who was just—imagining ravens?

She forgot about it, because Sally was grinning, his sea-glass eyes all alight. “They’re just over there.”

And they were. Giants, pacing through the mist, impossible ghosts of what had been lost ten thousand years ago. Tallis’s instinct was that they weren’t real, and in the salt light, that should have been enough to crumble them to nothing, but . . . someone pushed back. She felt it. It was a little shove of belief against her disbelief, the most extraordinary feeling for all it was small. Whoever was doing it, they could believe harder than she disbelieved.

Up ahead of them through the snow, leading the way to Caer Halen, the mammoths walked on.

54

Caer Halen

There was a man at the castle gate. He was dressed in heavy tailoring that winked gem colours in the light of the torches, and the last of the sunset. The wind pulled at the hem of his cloak, whose silver lining rippled. To either side of him, the fen was gold and lilac. He might have been something from a dream.

Although the way he was dressed made him seem tall, he wasn’t. He was sharp and delicate, and certainly Hreod, with the long swan neck and violet eyes, but he was paler than anyone she had seen here years ago. Here: no. She had never been here. There had been no dream citadel on the fen when she was a child, only the mist and the reed beds.

“Hello,” the man said. Balanced on his hand as if it were telling him things was a raven; the raven from before. There were lights in its eyes that were not reflections. “Are you Doctors Osho and Akhbar?”