CHAPTER 10
Hreodwater, England
The tower room at An El had a view across the whole cavern and its lake.
It all danced with salt light, and the salt panes of the window had their own glow that would have gone straight through curtains if you had Hreod eyes—and so they were fitted with silver shutters.
Avelyn tilted them closed, and blinked when he saw the room lit only by lamplight.
Completely different. Much darker. Different colours.
He’d forgotten just how much he wasn’t seeing, by ordinary light.
No wonder he spent all his time stumbling around Rome not recognising people he knew.
He could only half see, in the same way he could only half taste.
There was silver cladding on the walls too.
Just a veneer, but it was enough to block the glow of the halite masonry.
It was good, of course, but . . . he couldn’t imagine many Hreoda ever stayed at the abbey.
That was a mad expense to go to for no reason, and he couldn’t think of a reason why an Outsider would need a silver-clad room.
He touched it, puzzled, and a mirror-Avelyn did the same thing in the reflection.
It made him jump, because he had taken out his contact lenses and his eyes had changed.
In the Outside, away from salt light, they were coin gold. That was bad enough. Here, though, adjusted to the light, they were violet.
Nope.
He pushed open the shutters, and the window for good measure.
Straightaway, a fog of warm salt light invited itself inside. He stood with his arms resting on the sill for a long time, soaking it in and feeling—distant but distinct—that wonderful certainty that someone here loved him. It sang with holy clarity.
He could see very well why people who didn’t understand the King might think something good was here.
He pushed his hands over his face. It didn’t feel like being drugged, or having your drink spiked.
He would have minded less if it had. Those things were unpleasant, but at least you could feel what it was, and see the difference between your own thoughts and the drug.
This was just . . . exactly like being in love.
Useless longing. The wickedness of it was that he didn’t want it to stop, because the only thing worse than feeling it was not feeling it.
“Yes,” he said, quietly but aloud. “Hello again.”
As if it were an answer, his old tattoos stung so much suddenly that he had to pull his sleeves up to make sure nothing was wrong.
They were glowing.
There was salt in the ink that he hadn’t been able to see in Rome.
It was faded, the lines interrupted where the laser had burned, but although the black ink was mostly gone, the salt must have needled deeper, because the light images were still recognisable, just. On his left arm, the King was asleep, surrounded by white oaks.
On the right, the King was awake, light beaming from him and the antler crown in knife-sharp rays that glowed purple and amber.
Avelyn pulled open the top half of the thirty-three buttons on his soutane.
Those ray-lines cut right across him. There would be more on his back.
He hadn’t burned those ones off—it would have taken too long, and it was painful, and there was no point, since no one but him ever saw them—and they were shining now.
He could have read a book by their light alone.
He should have been horrified. Instead, it was relief that crashed through him. He sank down on the edge of the bed, crossed his arms over his chest, and bent forward over them. Not gone. Still with him, after all those silent years.
The ras flared. Something unknowably mighty stirred, so great that it couldn’t touch him much without blasting his soul to smoke, but something like a wingtip brushed him, and although there were no words, a meaning dropped into his mind like a feather. Gladness and love and welcome home.
Jericho would probably have said he was tired and churned up from coming back here after so long, but none of it came from inside his own head. It was the difference between tapping his own shoulder and feeling other hands slip under his shirt and then trace down his ribs.
His whole body reacted as though that was exactly what had happened. Suddenly he was too hot, and there was a horrifying, lovely ache in the cradle of his hips, and his lungs seized up.
He heard laypeople talk all the time in confession about how lust was wrong, for sure, but it was nice too.
It was a great professional strain not to snarl that frankly it was a nasty piece of entitled decadence not to recognise the evil in the feeling.
All those pathetic men who said, Oh, I just couldn’t help myself, I lost control: you bloody well learned control if you didn’t live in a culture that winked and patted you on the head for grabbing at waitresses.
No: it was a fever you had to burn through and wait out, knowing you would be calmer on the other side.
Even knowing that, he didn’t want it to stop. He let it go on for far too long before shame elbowed its way through everything else, and he got together the will to turn the shower to freezing cold and sit under it.
He didn’t sleep. He was afraid to let go of the waking world because of what he might find in the dreaming one. In the end, as the bells tolled six, he got up, thinking he might as well trudge down to the chapel and hear Lauds or Mass or whatever they were doing next.
The chapel was more the size of what most people would call a cathedral, dominating the south side of the courtyard with its soaring round arches.
He was surprised to see that under the salt light there was candlelight inside too, shimmering colours onto the ground through the stained windows.
Someone was up and lighting those. He had an unreasonable wash of relief.
Usually he didn’t mind being by himself; he liked his own brain, and it was good company most of the time, but it wasn’t behaving itself and he wanted someone to tune it against. He slipped through the long cloister and inside.
The whole abbey glowed with salt light, but inside the chapel, it was something else.
Halite crystal had been inlaid into the walls in tiny mosaic squares.
The walls, the columns, the roof, it was all alight.
Up at the ceiling, they had used the salt that shone brightest, different tones of white and gold, so that it looked like sunlight.
Down closer to the ground were illusion archways and pillars.
It made the chapel look four times the real size, stretching into the distance.
Up behind the altar was the famous window: Saint Hildegard wrestling the Salt King.
Anyone would be able to see that part, but what only Hreoda could see was that the figure of the King—just a man with wings in the ordinary image, an angel—was much stranger than a man in the salt light.
By salt light, the shape of him was unstable, only just a man, the rays coming off him warping into wheels and writhing shapes that suggested faces, wings, eyes, surrounded by fire.
Avelyn almost fell over. The optical illusion was phenomenal. If he concentrated, he could see what was a column and what was an image in the salt mosaics, and that there wasn’t a real sky above them, but . . .
Someone was singing.
The song echoed bell-clear in a language he didn’t know. At first he thought that it was a recording, taken by one of those incredible soloists at a Cambridge college, but then his mind caught up. It couldn’t be a recording.
He stepped slowly towards the nave, not wanting to interrupt, but very much wanting to listen. The song was lifting and falling, effortless. He hadn’t heard anyone sing like that in a decade of Vatican choirs.
It was Jericho.
He was sweeping the floor by the light of an iron tower of candles.
More than ever, he looked like a painting—like a prince sold into slavery until he could be rescued by a passing knight, or a saint sworn to poverty and work that began before the dawn.
Avelyn watched him, hypnotised. He had only ever heard one person sing like that before, and hearing it again brought on the same alloy of shame and longing as the ras.
He knocked on the back of a pew for want of a door. Jericho turned around.
“Avelyn.” He sounded pleased, but surprised. “Is everything all right?”
“Italian time is ahead,” Avelyn said, which felt like a lie though it wasn’t. “Can I help?”
Jericho seemed to see that this was one of those rare instances where not only was the offer real, but Avelyn urgently needed something practical to do. “Yes please. There’s another brush there. It’s the salt, it forms overnight now.”
He was right. All across the floor, the pews, everything, the salt sparkled just like it did further down the mine on the pit faces, where the children spent hours cleaning it off tools every day.
Avelyn had spent a whole chunk of his life doing that.
It was called salt tarnishing. If you left something in the mine for longer than about a fortnight, the salt ate it, and you wouldn’t make much of a dent even with the best chisels.
His uncles used to maintain a Mobile of Shame in the King’s Way: it was made of cups and toys and kit engulfed in salt after people had forgotten about them for too long, all hung up on wires.
At the far end of the chapel was a bank of statues, at least eighty saints, all in rows of alcoves in the wall, five or six high. Salt was forming across all of them. The whole chapel looked as though the winter had come for a look around.
Where Avelyn had come in, he had left sharp boot prints in it.
“What was that song?” he asked. The brush was the old kind, willow sticks bound to a shaft with twine.
“Oh, I learned it when I was young. I love it, but I never hear it anymore unless I sing it, so.”