Page 140 of The Salt King

“The Church! The Church. Not God.”

“The Church and God are the same. You can’t get to God without the Church. How could you think that? After all the years—oh, Avelyn. You’ve been seduced. This is wrong.”

Avelyn hadn’t seen his own reflection for a year, but he knew he was losing any colour he might have held on to. “He saved us,” he said again. “He makes this light, it’s how the witches are clearing cities of . . .”

Li took his hand. His own felt frail now. God knew what he had waded through, to get out of Rome. “Listen to yourself. Clearing cities of angels. Which are righteous things.”

“Righteous! They murder—”

“Then we are the new Sodom and Gomorrah, and it was time for us to be murdered,” Li said over him. A sigh. “In a choice between dying and renouncing God . . . it’s so much better to die.”

“Just talk to him. You’ll see,” Avelyn said softly. “Please, Father. His name is Jericho because he was the angel of Jericho, once. He isn’t what you think.”

Li laughed a little bit. “Of course he is. I know you think what you’re feeling is consolation, but—if those stories I’ve been hearing about the Devil and his favourite witch have anything to them, which, knowing you and how your head turns every ten minutes, they do—it’s not consolation. It’s lust.”

Avelyn couldn’t say anything. Anger and dismay and shame kicked him in the chest and stole his voice.

He flickered when someone behind him put one hand on his shoulder. For a leaping instant he hoped it was Jericho, but Jericho was still speaking to some children who wanted to be witches. It was Tallis.

“So here’s my thought, about lust as a sin,” she said. She was always precise—she was the kind of person who said about two hundred and seventeen—but sometimes she could put a weight behind it, until it wasn’t the precision of a microscope but of a tank’s gun tower ticking through degrees. “Blokey, isn’t it? You perceive lust as dangerous for other people because it is—coming from men. It’s dangerous for women, dangerous for other men too, in prison showers and . . . vestries.”

Father Li half laughed. “I don’t think you need to—”

“And as humans do,” she said over him, “when we get together in a group composed only of people exactly like ourselves, you assume that everyone experiences it in the same way: you assume that desire is always a downward punch. But that is a very specific kind of desire, and I’d suggest that the people grabbing waitresses and altar boys are a very specific sort of man. Lust, the sin, is about power: it’s about treating people as objects whose destruction doesn’t matter. It isn’t the same as desire. Any woman can tell you that.”

“Yes, we agree,” Father Li said impatiently. “I do know the definition of the mortal sins.”

“I’m glad. Meanwhile you say that your god is love, but it’s astonishing how disgusted you are by love in the real world. Almost as though you resent it; almost as though, not being allowed much of it, you see it as a privilege to be awarded to the chosen, cooperative few, and not a basic fact of humanity, and almost as though your imagination is so starved by your tortuous doctrine, you cannot see any kind of love that isn’t just lust in the end. Which I imagine is enormously reassuring for you, because it allows you to imagine you aren’t amputating the best and most human part of yourself and calling it virtue. You are, however, wrong, and what you just said is obscene.”

Nobody ever said the rules were nice or fair, Rome Avelyn murmured from where he still sat propped by a dusty altar and one candle. But they are the rules.

“I didn’t make divine law,” Li said to her, quite gently now, the way he always spoke to people who had just fundamentally misunderstood. “They’re God’s laws.”

“And it’s God’s law that says millions of people should die.”

“I’m afraid so.”

There was no good person left at Sodom and Gomorrah, remember.

“Then your god is a genocidal maniac, and I’m going to ask you to take him with you as you leave.”

“Father,” Avelyn said. It was the first time he’d managed to pull together some real words instead of just a tumult of smoke and sorrow. “All the reports from Italy—they say Rome is terrible, and people are starving, and . . . and going mad, and dying. Everyone who makes it to the Wall is . . .”

“It’s only unbelievers, leaving for the Wall,” Li said, and Avelyn felt the air move as he waved his hand. “It’s very different if you have faith. It’s beautiful, Avelyn. Sapphire towers. Domes of . . . clear gold. It sounds impossible until you see it.”

“But the angels,” he tried.

“They sing to us, and we sing back,” Li said. There was love in his voice. “We can see them now. They’re beautiful. The song, Avelyn . . . it’s eternal adoration. Just like it was written. God is there.”

See? Rome Avelyn said without rancour. I told you there were no angels in Hreodwater.

“You touched one, didn’t you,” Tallis said abruptly. Her fingertips dug into Avelyn’s shoulder. She wanted him to listen. “That’s how you lost your arm. Your faith was enough for it not to just atomise you, but . . . nothing could stop your arm halifying.”

Avelyn’s head snapped up, even though he had no hope of seeing anything like that.

“His arm is missing to the elbow,” Tallis explained quietly. “The last inch or so is black halite.”

“What was it like?” he whispered.