The Salt King

CHAPTER 1

Hreodwater, England

If you took the unsignposted path across the sugar beet fields and followed it for about a mile from the railway station—which belonged to a town distantly aware that there was such a place as Hreodwater, but not in the way that meant anybody ever went there—you reached a broad channel of black water, a narrow bridge, and a customs house with a single lamp above the gate.

In the dark, which had been settling in since midafternoon, the lamp was warm and bright, glowing an orange patch onto the path and glittering in the salt that rimed the eaves and window ledges.

On the path now was a priest. He had black hair and one of those faces that always looked attentive even when he was daydreaming about whether he could get away with adopting a house rabbit.

He was also a Jesuit, and so although it was uncomfortable to wear when the day was more about airports and train strikes out of the London railway stations, he had on the black and the collar.

Nobody except him and God would have known if he’d changed into a normal shirt, but the way he saw it, someone in holy orders who took the collar off when it was irritating was no different to the person who took their wedding ring off in a hotel bar.

He had just come from Italy, and the iron cold that overhung the fen all the long winter was already biting through his coat.

Avelyn Brocken sounded like a name that ought to have belonged to somebody who spent a lot of time fighting Vikings in the tenth century.

If he had stayed in Hreodwater instead of escaping to Rome, he would have looked like that too—but he had cut his hair twelve years ago, lasered off the tattoos, and thrown the silver earrings into the Tiber.

He looked almost normal now, unless you saw the sun catch in his eyes.

He made sure that nobody saw that. He wore dark contact lenses.

The glow of the lamp above the customs house gave him a horrible, tight feeling, like a longbow pulled too far back.

He had hoped never to come back here.

The border between Hreodwater and the Outside was marked very, very clearly; not because anybody was territorial, but because the diocese didn’t like to be sued when someone took the warnings on the website less seriously than they should have and ended up in hospital, or several thousand pounds out of pocket—or dead.

On either side of the customs house was the fen, which was an expanse of undrained water that stretched for miles in both directions, haunted by swans.

In order to go any further, you had to go through the customs house, and once you were inside, there were signs and notices everywhere.

They all reminded visitors to turn their electronic devices off if they still wanted them to remain working electronic devices.

In a glass cabinet were examples of what happened if you didn’t.

A laptop, a phone, hearing aids, a Walkman, even an old wireless radio: they were all completely destroyed.

Salt was spiking out of their ports and screens, the glass and the plastic broken from the force of it.

WE AREN’T JOKING, said the sign in the cabinet.

THIS WILL HAPPEN IF YOU TURN ON ANYTHING WITH AN ELECTRIC CURRENT.

Then, right over the door that led out to the road and the stable, flanked with medical hazard symbols and repeated in five languages:

IF YOU HAVE A PACEMAKER, DO NOT PASS THIS POINT

Avelyn’s flight from Rome had been delayed, so it was after the normal hours when pilgrims would come through, but there was still a security guard.

Even though she had just watched him see the salt-bound devices and the signs, she reminded him to turn everything off, and asked if he had hearing aids, or an electrical prosthesis.

Anywhere else that wanted to detect electronic devices would need scanners, like an airport, but Hreodwater couldn’t do that: the scanners would be salt-bound in ten minutes.

Instead, they had a strange device that looked a little bit like those static electricity lamps, the ones that would send out tiny lightning bolts from a central sphere if you touched the glass.

These ones were about three feet across, and they weren’t lamps.

There were two, one on either side of the door.

Inside, there was Hreod salt. It was from the deepest parts of the mine, black, the most reactive kind there was.

Avelyn double-checked his phone was off and stepped between the salt sensors, and then paused, because the black salt lifted right up into the air inside the glass bulbs, trying to get at him.

“It’s your headphones,” the security guard said, not impatiently.

He’d forgotten they were around his neck.

He turned them off and told himself to get a grip.

You couldn’t walk into Hreodwater with your mind half in the Outside.

On the train, he had been listening to Father Li’s podcast about Jesuit life, because that was a way to hear Father Li’s voice without calling him and crying that this was going to be awful, please could he just be sent to a war zone to be shot at in an aid convoy, or, you know, burned relaxingly at the stake?

“And your pilgrim pass?” the security guard said, though her eyes caught on his face.

She was clearly wondering if she should have asked for a resident’s pass.

He was wearing the contact lenses, but he couldn’t do anything about the rest of him.

People from all over the world had come to live in Hreodwater for a thousand years and more, but somehow, everyone still turned out looking eerily the same within a couple of generations.

There were a lot of startlingly filthy Hreod stories about swans, and those made sense when you saw the people telling them.

Everyone was long-necked and elegant and inclined to bite those who irritated them.

“I’m not a pilgrim,” Avelyn said, and handed over the letter from the Vatican. “It’s about the missing priest.”

“He’s not missing,” the guard said, looking puzzled. “He’s over there by the paddock. He turned to salt.”

_____________

The day before, when Father Li messaged him to come to the office at the Vatican, Avelyn had already been on his way across St Peter’s Square.

It was Li’s birthday. Ever since Li had rescued him from Hreodwater twelve years before, it had been tradition for Avelyn to steal him from work early for dinner out at a proper restaurant.

He thought the message was just about telling him to hurry up.

Li never called him now, in case Avelyn was on air.

It had gone down in the annals of Radio Vaticano history when, in the middle of the news in Latin, Avelyn had to pick up the office phone and explain that it was okay, he wasn’t dead, he was coming in an hour; the high point being that he’d managed to do it in Latin.

He secretly hoped it would happen again.

Only about eight people listened to the Latin broadcasts (the same people who used the Latin-language ATM opposite the ice cream shop), and three of them had written in to say how funny it was.

The square was starry with camera flashes.

The Christmas tree was spectacular, about forty feet tall and full of lights, and everyone was taking pictures of the nativity scene at its base.

Avelyn must have seen about forty nativity scenes already this week.

There was a huge unspoken competition among all the churches in Rome to see who could do the most extravagant one.

Every year Avelyn and Li would, separately, visit as many as they could, and then compare their Nativity Bingo cards on Christmas morning: there was a bar of chocolate from the Extremely Posh Chocolate Shop near the Pantheon for whoever won.

It was getting dark. From the edge of the square, just over the Vatican border with Rome, street vendors were launching little flashing toys into the air, neon helicopters that flew up amazingly far before they sycamored back down again.

The air smelled of mulled wine and spice cake, and traders with parrots in light-up collars were taking them through the edges of the crowd, charging for selfies.

Up on the roof of the great cloister and the basilica, the statues of the angels and saints were floodlit.

He loved Christmas at the Vatican. For most of the year, the Holy See was a serious and majestic place, but in December half the world came to visit, the air turned fizzy, and everyone was suddenly full of fun and talking about Nativity Bingo and parrot selfies, as if the whole city was trapped in a bottle of champagne.

He texted Li back to say he’d be five minutes.

The Section for Relations with States was the Vatican’s department for foreign affairs.

Father Li was in charge of the little corner of it that was concerned with the United Kingdom.

To reach his office, right in the shadow of St Peter’s Basilica, you had to duck through the same side gate in the Vatican’s outer wall as the tourists, go through the metal detectors, and weave through the maze inside, which was sometimes tiny confusing corridors, sometimes broad, bright ways that led past courtyards and marble statues of saints and emperors, some open for the public, some hidden away, all chilly in the deepening autumn.

In the places where there was no public access, there were fairy lights on the statues now.

Probably it was against the rules, but nobody had complained, and every year the fairy lights became more luxuriant.

Who was responsible for the lights was a subject of much speculation.

There was also a neat sign in chalk graffiti’d by the department door: ROMANES EUNT DOMUS.1

In both cases, Avelyn suspected Father Li.

When he came into the office, what Li said was not to do with birthdays or restaurants, but: “This is a tricky one. Close the door.”