Page 141 of The Salt King

In the background, he heard someone else come across, tall but quiet: that would be Sally, making sure that Tallis was all right.

“It was the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” Li said, and Avelyn felt like he’d punched him in the chest. “I was wrong, wasn’t I? It wasn’t God who told me to save you. It was the Devil.”

“Okay, time to go,” Sally said, grim. He sounded like he wanted to hit someone. Time for the emergency cigarettes, Avelyn thought distantly.

“I’ll pray for you, lovely boy,” Li called back.

“Please do shut up,” Sally growled.

Avelyn sat exactly still, feeling the tears burn in his eyelashes and then go cool once they fell.

Tallis knelt down next to him. One of her knees always cracked when she did that, just like his. “I don’t know who that was, but he wasn’t well, Avelyn. The doctors are calling it ‘exaltation overdose’; have you heard that? He’s been too close to angels for too long, it’s like a heroin addiction. Whoever he was to you before—that wasn’t him, just now. He’s sick. Very sick. If you could have seen him—he looked like a chemotherapy patient.”

He nodded slightly, but he couldn’t tell if she was just saying that to make him believe her. Tallis was a bulletproof atheist. The more of them he met, the more he noticed how, just like the faithful, they didn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. It took just as much ferocious creativity not to believe as it did to believe.

He heard the rush and crackle as fire raced up his sleeve.

“Avelyn! Stop that right fucking now, don’t be ridiculous!” Tallis yelped. “It isn’t true, none of it is true, there is no Hell, for God’s sake!”

Of course there is. You chose wrong. Clack-clack, went the rosary in the candlelight.

He could feel her trying to disbelieve the fire away, but he was too strong now, after almost a year of maintaining Caer Halen despite her.

Someone clamped both arms around him, and then they weren’t in the hall anymore.

The snow was thick from the blizzard, and he fell into it backwards. He heard the hiss, and the fire extinguished, and then almost instantly, he was freezing. He let his head bump back. Ice formed in the roots of his hair. He heard it clicking. They were up on the balcony of the north tower. Far below, the wind whistled, and the mammoths sang to each other.

“Are you all right?” Jericho asked quietly, easing back. He had been holding Avelyn’s shoulders down with his whole weight.

“Yes. Thank you. I’m sorry.” He sat up and pushed his fingertips under his eyes, because the tear-tracks had frozen too, and it felt extraordinarily strange. “God, that was stupid. I’m sorry,” he said again, shocked at himself now. He had let that happen in a room full of people. Tallis could have been hurt. He could have set the whole hall on fire.

A heavy cloak dropped around his shoulders, and Jericho held his knees with both hands. “Avelyn. That wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, it was. My whole function here is to control what I believe,” Avelyn said.

“What did he say to you?”

“He said Rome was Heaven on earth. I know it isn’t, I know . . .”

“Well, it is for those who believe that’s what Heaven is,” Jericho said. “I’m sure it is, to him.”

“Tallis said something about . . . exaltation overdose. People get . . . addicted to . . .?”

“It’s exactly what happens here. Witches become addicted to the ras and never come out from the deep.”

Avelyn nodded slightly. “Is that happening to me?”

“No,” Jericho said. He took Avelyn’s hands this time. “Because I generate no salt light while I’m like this, unless you let me. I’m not just in the shape of a person, it isn’t a mask, I am a person.” He touched their heads together. “Things can be two things.”

“I don’t think I know what’s real or not,” Avelyn said, very quiet, because it sounded so—so not how he meant it. It sounded crazy.

Jericho made a quiet sound that was full of sympathy pain, and put both hands around Avelyn’s throat. They were warm. “What’s real,” he whispered, “is that genocide is wrong even when angels are in the siege towers.”

Avelyn hugged him. Jericho had wings today for the ceremony, and when he put his hands under them, Jericho closed them tight over his knuckles, so that he was warmer straightaway.

“Shall we go down to the Lodge?” Jericho asked. “I’m cold.”

Not, It’s cold, or You must be cold. I’m cold. Avelyn loved him for that.