Page 60 of The Salt King

There was nothing he could do about it except start the day early and concentrate on work. On his way into the office, he stopped at the chapel and dipped his knees before the altar, the same genuflection he had made there for twenty years but which had never faded down to habit. As if it were magnetic, he was vividly aware of the tabernacle tucked off to the right, and the consecrated bread inside. As always, knowing that God was literally here, beaming out a haze of grace and goodness from that sacred place, shifted his internal dials a few significant points for the better.

When Avelyn was young, he had recognised what was happening in churches straightaway, even though he couldn’t feel it. It’s the ras of your king. Cai had thought that it would only be a matter of time before Avelyn felt it too. Sometimes it took new converts years to realize that believers experienced something concrete in churches, something on a Venn diagram between feeling, believing, and knowing.

But it had never come. Cai tried not to think about it too much. It was the single greatest sadness of his life. To live in the holy city, surrounded by grace, and to feel that the most sacred spaces were pleasant but nothing more special than the empty palaces of dead emperors, or pretty restaurants? It filled him with grief.

The office phone was ringing.

Cai shot across, but then sighed, because the international dialing code for England was +44. This was +962, wherever that was. He let it go to the answerphone and jabbed grumpily at the On button of his computer.

“Good morning,” said a voice in accented English through the answerphone, “this the Jordanian ministry of atomic energy. I’m looking for a Father Cai Li. I have sent you a video taken at a site near the Dead Sea by two nuclear inspectors. I understand that your department is looking into some unusual phenomena at a site in England similar to what our inspectors have recorded, and we would urgently like to compare findings. Please do get back to me as soon as you—”

Cai snatched the phone up as he jammed his password into the sleepy computer. “Hello? This is Cai Li. I’m sorry, I just got in.” What was he apologising for? It was six in the morning. Avelyn always said he apologised too much. “Did you say you’ve had nuclear inspectors record something similar to what’s . . . happening in Hreodwater in the UK?”

“Mr Li, I’m so glad I caught you,” the voice at the other side of the line said, sounding strained. “Yes. We have received footage from our inspectors. They are stranded in the desert, and they are reporting—pardon me, but may I ask first if the online footage from your shrine in England is genuine?”

“It’s genuine,” Cai said. “We’ve sent someone to investigate. As far as we can tell, a young man turned to salt there, crazy as that sounds. What have you got?”

“Have you received the video?”

He had just reached his emails. The fierce office filter had chucked the message from Jordan immediately into junk and didn’t want him to look at it in case it was full of malware—naughty, racist computer—but when he bullied the file open, it played a short video. “I’m watching it right now, hang on.”

In the video, an English woman introduced herself as Dr Tallis Osho in the precise voice of someone who would still speak in well-punctuated sentences if the Apocalypse was unfolding in front of her. She explained that she and her colleague had just abandoned a site after all their electronics cut out and glass was discoloured violet. A gateway at the site—an archaeological dig—had been blocked with silver. When it collapsed, everything went to hell. They didn’t know what they had been exposed to, but she showed the camera the sleeve of her shirt. It had been burned away. No—eaten away. The fabric was covered in a gritty white powder. Salt.

“It’s salt light,” Cai said into the phone. “It’s not ionising radiation, you’ve got a site contaminated with salt light, it . . . oh . . . my . . . God.”

Dr Osho was showing the camera a photograph. It was rough, developed from a film dosimeter, and it showed a hazy but very recognisable figure.

Many arms, many faces, wings, wheels set within wheels, as if it were churning. But in the middle of it all . . . something that might have been a person.

No. No; they couldn’t be real. What was in Ezekiel, what was in Revelation, those utterly uncanny, unnervingly mechanical figures around the throne of God—they were just images conjured to try and communicate a sense of the total alienness of omnipotence and eternity. Nobody had seen a real shape in a real . . .

No. It had to be a coincidence. He had spent thirty years in the Church. His brain was wired to see familiar patterns, that was all.

“Hello? Mr Li, are you still there?” the voice on the phone was asking, tight with urgency.

“Yes—sorry.”

“What is salt light?”

“Salt light—I’m sending you a link. It occurs inside that salt mine in England; I thought it was the only place in the world. It’s unstudied, electronics don’t work there, so nobody knows what it is, but . . .” He rushed through an image search until he found what he wanted. An illustration of the window at An El—an illustration by a Hreod scribe, who had drawn what you could see by salt light.

Many arms, many faces, wings, wheels.

At the other end of the line, there was a long quiet as he sent the email through, and then a string of Arabic, which he didn’t speak, but there was something international about swearing.

Cai spent an intense two hours trawling through social media channels. As his staff trickled in, he set them to it too.

He found the video of the boys in Tibet throwing coins.

He found something in Russian that he was almost, almost certain was a disconcerted police officer explaining how she had gone after some tourists into the salt mine at Yekaterinburg and had her torch burst into salt in her hands.

People were posting videos from Salt Lake City with the coin trick. Khewra too. At a salt mine in Kenya, after a rainstorm, the surface salt had dried into strange shapes that, if you got far enough above them—someone had flown a drone over—made a gigantic picture. It looked like hell: a war, people fighting, screaming, falling.

He printed out a world map across six pieces of sellotaped-together paper, pinned it up, and began to mark the sites, with notes about what had happened there. The rest of his staff began to add to it too. Before long, they had over fifty. The most common phenomenon was the coins, but there was also video after video of electronic devices bursting into salt. A few places where something alive had turned to salt—birds, a herd of pigs, and once, a man on a bicycle. Some of it was AI, just people jumping on what seemed to be a strange trend and trying to monetise it, but some . . . wasn’t.

It was everywhere. Salt mines, everywhere. And all of it from the last month. Although he hunted for it, he couldn’t find a single news service that had picked it up. Even the English local news in East Anglia had barely mentioned Hreodwater. All they said was that a young American priest was missing. Nothing about salt, nor miracles, but—of course there wasn’t. You could show English people Christ walking on water, and as one single human, they’d snort and say it was that magician off the telly cocking around again.

“Father—what is going on?” his assistant asked. She was staring at footage of a marine expedition off Antarctica. They had found a school of dead whales. All turned to salt, all bobbing on the surface of the ocean, as if they had tried to swim through . . . something. He gripped the back of her chair, wishing he hadn’t seen that. There was something sacred about a creature who sang its way around the world.