Page 57 of The Salt King

His torch flickered. He smacked it, then realized other people were doing that too.

The captain held out a little device like a wand, and Artem almost swallowed his own tongue.

Krr. Krr. Krr.

“Dosimetry’s normal, it’s not radiation,” the captain said. “Come on, let’s go quick.”

Artem shook his head and clambered up the steps of a tank to open the top and chuck in a brick of PE8 plugged into one of the clever Bluetooth detonators that would mean the captain could set the whole lot off in one satisfying spectacular. How many points did you get for five hundred tanks? They were going to be able to get all the artillery they wanted from the government after this.

Away in the darkness, far into the great salt hall beyond the light of their torches, something thudded. It was a heavy noise, like a bomb landing a long way off, but it was inside the mine.

Everyone went still.

Another thud, and this time, there was light too. Red, just edging the darkness. Something was on fire.

A horrendous inhuman shriek howled out from the tunnels. It was so loud that Artem had to smack his hands over his ears. He had never heard anything like it, but deep down in his cells where the old memories of the time before fire still lay coiled, something recognised it. He didn’t know what it was, but he knew to run.

His torch fluttered, and went out. Everyone’s did.

The dark thundered in, and so did something else.

22

Hreodwater, England

Up on the green, they had lit the fires, and the witches were dancing.

The heat was glorious. The willow structures that had gone up over the last few days—the mammoth, the stag, the wolf—were impressive enough when they were just clever wooden frames, each about twenty feet high. They came alive in the fire, though. In the swirls of sparking ash, the wolf looked like it was breathing. Avelyn smiled into the light. He’d loved this when he was little.

In other parts of England, there were such things as morris dancers. They were sweet, just ordinary people with bells tied to their calves and sticks in their hands, which they would sometimes clock together in a friendly sort of way. They always struck Avelyn as being a memory of something older and weirder; and that older and weirder thing, he would have been willing to bet his life, was Hreod witch-dancing.

The dance was supposed to frighten away the King’s nightmares. It was no light clip of sticks and a happy chink of bells. Sinister and lurching, the dancers wore dark costumes made of pheasant feathers and charred deer bones, and when those staves slammed together, the noise was a thunk that you could feel through the ground. Each spin and leap—and God, but they looked like they could float—chimed the silver bells, a warning to stay out of the way. Heavy drums kept them in time, and the unsettling drone of the pipes. By the salt light and the effigy fires, it could have been conjured from a fever dream.

It was midmorning, just after a Mass where, once again, the bread and the wine had transformed. The reaction today had been quieter—everyone had almost expected it—but Avelyn wasn’t sure he liked the new solemnity any better than the explosive joy from yesterday. He’d been glad to get away. Just as Jericho had said, people were starting to treat anyone with a halo differently. Cliques were forming, groups of disciples who thought Reyes’ way of praying or thinking would help bring on a cure, or Fabian’s, or Annunciata’s. Annunciata kept saying she had nothing to say, but people stayed close by anyway in a polite but implacable comet tail.

Reyes, Avelyn noticed, was loving it, doling out advice every fifteen seconds. Fabian was giving his no-women lecture to a cluster of rapt nuns who Avelyn hoped would be ashamed of themselves soon. The Korean sister and the Peruvian bishop had made friends and, sensibly, seemed worried about saying anything at all, even though people kept taking silver-clad pictures of them both and exclaiming.

Avelyn hadn’t expected Jericho to come up to the surface to see the fair, but he had. Avelyn was worried it was an effort to win the sort-your-life-out contest from last night, and although Jericho seemed all right—the crowds and the smoke and the market stalls made it all feel less exposed, perhaps—Avelyn didn’t like the idea of leaving him to it, which he was going to have to do soon. After he had shown Annunciata how to fast-bowl a beanbag at the coconut shy, and after she’d won a coconut with a military overarm shot that earned cheers from a group of spectating Hreod boys, he leaned closer to her.

“Listen, I need to go and speak Hreod to some people soon, but—don’t tell him I told you this—but Jericho has agoraphobia. I’m worried he only came up to win a fight with me, and he’s, you know, eventually going to have some kind of nervous collapse. If you see him looking a bit . . . not okay . . . would you take him back down to An El?”

Annunciata tapped him with the coconut. “He’s a grown man, so. I’m sure he knows when to take himself.”

“Sorry, have you met grown men?” said Avelyn, looking back, because they’d lost Jericho.

Jericho had stopped to say hello to an escaped piglet. It was black and soft and it ran up to him like a puppy, squeaking joyfully. It had a blue ribbon on. There was a Show Pig competition on the next green; people here were intense about that. It would be followed by the even more intense pig racing.

She gave Avelyn a patient look. “This is the same grown man who’s now cuddling a piglet?”

“We have range,” he said.

“Hah,” she said. “All right, I’ll keep an eye. But you’re not off right now?”

“I’m gearing up to it,” he admitted. “I hate everything, have I mentioned that? I hate Hreod, I hate Hreodwater, and I fucking despise mining clans.”

“Don’t go then,” she said more gently. “As you say, it’s probably nothing. Jericho’s not worried.”

Avelyn looked back to where Jericho was still talking to the pig, and didn’t say that he had another theory about why Jericho had come up above: so he could keep an eye on Annunciata.