Page 14 of The Salt King

“It is,” Jericho said. He sipped his chocolate. “Just one last thing to mention. The maximum stay at An El is forty days. It’s just what the Church will fund. People will be rotating out all the time. If you need to conduct a lot of interviews, it would be best to start with the people coming to the end of their stay, or you’ll lose them.”

“No, that’s fine, I understand,” said Avelyn. “Thank you.”

Jericho’s black eyes ticked over him twice. There was something wary about it, and Avelyn understood. No matter how normally Avelyn had been talking, he was still an inquisitor sent from the Vatican to investigate something that was either miraculous or requiring an exorcist. It gave Avelyn a little snick of unhappiness. Just for the last few minutes, he’d felt like maybe they could be friends; but that wasn’t what he was here for.

“Is there anything you want to ask me now,” Jericho said, “or do you want to wait for the morning?”

Avelyn fought the urge to wince. He wasn’t a detective. He wasn’t even on the list of the hundred best people to deal with any of this. This needed a real professional, but—this was what being a Jesuit was. They dropped you in Beirut or Mexico with a map and five dollars and said, “Sorry, that’s what there is: have at it.” You weren’t there because you were an international expert who had written papers about how to sort this out. You were there because nobody else was.

“So, just to explain how this works,” he said at last. “My job here is to investigate whether this is a miracle or not—and that doesn’t mean whether it’s real or not. It can be real without being a miracle. A miracle has to fulfil some strict requirements. The first requirement is that it must be doctrinally legitimate. The Church’s position is that everything God has to say has already been said, mainly by Christ. That’s called divine revelation, which the Church assumes . . . however problematically . . . to be true,4 and anything that contradicts it is nothing to do with God. So, since we can all see it’s real already, there are only two conclusions I can make here. One, it is a miracle. Two, it’s nothing to do with God.”

An uneasy line etched itself between Jericho’s eyebrows. “You’re just assuming it’s real?”

“Assuming, no, but it is real. It isn’t AI, medical records confirm the cure, four witnesses and two separate sets of footage confirm the transformation, Matthew is missing, and there is something wrong with the halite standing where he was: I just looked at it,” Avelyn said. “Have I missed something?”

Jericho let his neck bend. “No,” he said, but he didn’t lose his frown. “I suppose I just thought . . . no. What do you think about it?”

Avelyn breathed in deep. “I’m here to ask what you think, and what everyone else thinks, that’s important. Another requirement for a miracle is moral certainty, which is the Church way of saying it’s beyond reasonable doubt. I only prove that by talking to everyone. What do you think?”

Jericho looked down into his hot chocolate. “I think the curative effects of the mine have been stronger in the last couple of weeks than ever before, in any of our records—and the records go back to the tenth century, to Saint Hildegard.” He nodded to a set of bookshelves filled with ledgers, the top ones very old. “Matthew was just the most extreme case, but I’ve got three cancer patients with marked improvements since last week, and someone who needed a heart transplant when she arrived is now doing laps around the abbey. It’s extraordinary even for An El. Something’s different.”

Avelyn set his hot chocolate aside to cool and leaned forward. “What is it?”

Jericho shook his head. He still looked uncomfortable.

“Anyone whose prayers seem to be especially effective?” Avelyn asked, because if someone particular had been praying and that prayer had worked, then the Church would love it. There was a chronic shortage of saints in the twenty-first century. People did all sorts of good things, but you had to drum up a miracle to beatify someone, which was, even with the most open-minded approach, a right faff. Gone were the days when you could say, Look, someone cleared this field of geese, it’s a miracle, or My cheese was stolen, but lo, it hath miraculously reappeared.5

“Well, everyone prays, but . . . I’m not clergy. I’m not even Catholic. They wouldn’t necessarily have told me.”

“You’re not Catholic?” Avelyn said, taken with the novelty.

Jericho shook his head. “Not anything.”

Not wanting to seem as though he was flirting again, Avelyn didn’t say how exotic and fascinating that was.

“Okay,” he said instead, “I’ll start asking in the morning. Thanks.” He looked into space, thinking. More cures. Even Lourdes wasn’t like that. He sipped the hot chocolate, and then forgot about everything else.

There were different kinds of salt in Hreodwater, dozens: some were only good to grit roads with, some were worth more than diamonds. Whatever this one was, it tasted of caramel and gunpowder, like Yule Night fireworks from their little boats on the Flood. It really tasted of that. Like nothing had tasted of anything, for twelve years.

“This is . . .” He didn’t want to say revelatory. He would sound like the sort of person who thought they could manifest world peace.

“I know,” Jericho said. “Once you’ve had Hreod salt, nothing tastes of anything ever again.”

“No,” Avelyn said, shocked. He tried it again to make sure.

Yes. God. God.

Twelve years.

Twelve years of all food tasting of nothing: he’d thought there was something wrong with him. He tried to remember what he was supposed to be doing.

Why hadn’t anyone told him it was the salt? Well. It wasn’t as though he had given anyone a chance to mention it. He had left with Father Li and never looked back. Not even to find out if the bodies had been retrieved.

He would have to ask about that, too. Suddenly he felt like he had an anvil strapped to his back.

Jericho watched him for a long time. He was sitting very still now, far more still than people with his quicksilver energy ever usually could, and in his eyes there were points of light that weren’t from the candles, nor the salt. Avelyn couldn’t tell what that was, but now he had noticed it, he noticed something else too. Jericho seemed like he was more in shadow than the rest of the room. The salt light was everywhere, glowing from the masonry, from the block of salt by the stove, from tiny wisps in the air, but it didn’t quite . . . reach Jericho in the way it was reaching Avelyn, who was lit starkly by comparison. Only nothing was casting the shadow, and those bright points in his eyes—they looked like the stars would if you saw them from deep underwater.

Avelyn looked down, aware he had been staring.