CHAPTER 20
“What are those?” Annunciata asked suddenly. She was looking at his tattoos.
He explained what tattoos were, and then what they meant here.
“Different clans have different tattoos. They show who you belong to and what you do. My clan used to mine the King’s Way, which is a shaft in the deep, so Brocken tattoos were always of the King.
” He studied the stuttering lines. Beneath the lasered ink, the salt still glowed.
“There’s a legend that the Brocken were descended from the witches who originally sang the King to sleep in the deep.
They were supposed to be able to talk him. ”
“How come other people didn’t talk to the King?”
Avelyn shook his head. “I don’t know. It was supposed to be difficult, and dangerous. You could get lost in his dreams, and his nightmares. It’s all very airy-fairy and annoying,” he added.
She was studying him with worrying interest. “Jericho says you don’t think the King is an angel.”
“I don’t know what he is,” Avelyn said. “But he is fucking with me.”
“How?”
“Well, the ras making me feel as though bad is good, for a start.” He had to half close his eyes against the memory of the way Jericho had talked to him as if everything was fine, but held his knee so gently.
“I have to say, I’m not loving the way that consolation currently feels like it’s heading directly away from God. ”
“Are you sure that isn’t just the difference between what God wants and what you think God wants?” Annunciata said.
Avelyn was quiet, because he had thought about that, and now he thought about it again.
To the surprise of a great many people, Christ said not one solitary thing about the way he was feeling about Jericho.
Leviticus did, but Leviticus also banned clothes of two different weaves; it was a set of laws for a particular time and place, not eternity, and so cleaving to it now was like trying to obey speed limits imposed on mule wagons in classical Rome while you were driving to Fiumicino.
Saint Paul . . . you could argue until the cows came home about the Greek terms Paul used and what those had really meant.
There had been a Jesuit once who had said exactly that, and said that since God was love, then anything that took you towards genuine love was sacred.
He had been thrown out of the order.
“I’m sure,” he said.
“Well, tell Jericho,” she said. “He might be able to give you something to take the edge off. Whatever it is here, it certainly does bugger about with some kind of chemistry. Maybe it’s hitting you strangely; maybe you just need a bit of diazepam or whatnot.”
“No, I’ve bothered Jericho enough.”
“He won’t mind. He’s got a soft spot for you.”
“I don’t think so,” Avelyn said, surprised. “I’m a very frustrating person. He’s just polite.”
Annunciata laughed so much it echoed. “Only when he likes. Someone a few weeks ago tried to convert him and then asked him the best way to drive to Oxford for a person who hasn’t driven in England before, and Jericho told him to be sure to go through Slough.”
Avelyn knew only two things about London: one, that several alumni of the Venerable English College had been horribly martyred there, and two, that it had a suburb called Slough whose roadplan had been designed, according to Father Li, by the Devil himself.
“That’s diabolical,” Avelyn said, in awe.
“It’s a thing to behold.” She bumped him lightly, elbow to elbow. “Just ask him.”
Avelyn nodded and didn’t say that he shouldn’t overlap with Jericho any more than necessary, if he wanted not to be in a chronic state of mortal sin while he was here.
She quirked her head at him, more serious now. “Is there anything else bothering you? About the King, I mean.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean for this to turn into confession,” he said, uncomfortable. He hated people who made everyone else lug around their baggage.
“I owe you,” she told him. “You never said ‘candlestick.’”
He had to admit it would be nice to have a second opinion, one that wasn’t Jericho’s rose-tinted one.
Rose-tinted: what an understatement. Jericho was seeing through primordial wildernesses of roses.
“Well. There’s a thing with the salt . .
.” He looked for some salt to cast, but it was all solid and crystallised.
The eels were still close, though, trying to understand what Annunciata was. Among the dark masses of them, one or two—the Eel Queens, in the witches’ stories—had markings in salt light around their throats that looked like crowns.
“Hold on,” he said, and raided the tiki bar’s honesty box for silver coins. When he had a small handful, he threw one into the water.
The eels looked down, interested in this sudden void in the salt light.
Avelyn threw the next coin slightly further in, then the next to the side, the next closer, landing the coins in a rough circle.
The eels followed, and then went around again, then again, and soon they were spinning in one heaving mass just below the surface.
Within that orbit, the coiling bodies began to make other shapes.
“Can you see that?” Avelyn asked. For him, it was uplit in salt light.
Annunciata was staring. “Who is that?”
In the eel-made image, there was a woman walking down a long stairway, holding a lamp ahead of her in one hand and a walking staff in the other. She limped.
Avelyn frowned, because he had expected the boy on the causeway again. “That . . . is Saint Hildegard.”
Annunciata tore her new eyes away from the lake and looked at him instead. “What does it mean?”
“It means,” a voice said behind them, “that the King is calling once more for a great witch to wake him.”
The Balen shift foreman was standing just behind them.
Avelyn had never known any Hreoda to talk unsolicited to an Outsider before, and for a moment he was too surprised to say anything, but he could see why she had: she was looking at Annunciata with that particular fascination which some children aimed at decomposing birds.
Behind her, the rest of the shift was coming through the silver gates; about forty people, which was fewer than it should been.
“Grandmother,” he said. “The King keep you.”
“And you, tua-Brocken. What were you scrying for?”
It was more polite than anyone had ever spoken to him when he lived here.18 “Nothing particular. Actually we were waiting for you.”
“For me?”
“If you have a moment.”
“What does a witch want with me?” she said, laughing a little. It was nearly nervous.
“It’s about this lady,” Avelyn explained, nodding to Annunciata. “Some of the Outsiders at the abbey—w . . . est at the abbey—are attracting the salt light in this way. I was hoping someone from the mine might know what it is?”
Above them, the salt light from the gateway shot a flare out over the lake, faint but visible. They both looked.
“The King is restless,” she said, and he couldn’t tell if she was talking about the light, or about Annunciata.
As people always did across a longish walk, the clan had strung itself out, everyone walking in pairs or threes, but now the ones at the back were catching up, and more and more of them were studying Annunciata. The halo shone in something deep in their eyes and gave them a purple glow.
It wasn’t curiosity, the way they were looking. He saw some uneasy glances sling between the teenagers.
Peripherally, he noticed that there must have been new rules about what you wore down the mine.
When he was young, you could wear whatever seemed sensible; sometimes even Outsider jeans.
Now, though, it was more uniform. Despite the warmth of the salt light, everyone was dressed in leather, even the children, with high collars that had buckles on them as though they were supposed to attach to something else.
“This halo comes with improvements to their health,” Avelyn added carefully. “You don’t happen to have seen it on any Outsiders before? I just wanted to know if it’s going to—I don’t know, do anything else?”
He thought the foreman was going to say something along the lines of, Your guess is as good as mine, isn’t it odd, maybe one of the bards or the witches will know but I wouldn’t bet on it.
He was getting ready to ask whose witch or bard would be best, and where to find them, and he was even gearing up to the steep walk to the surface and Jericho’s inevitable wrath when he got back.
“We’ve been told we can’t speak to anyone from the Outside about it,” the foreman said.
Avelyn had already built at least a few hours’ worth of future on what he’d expected her to say, and so when she didn’t, it all fell down on him and he had to blink, disorientated.
“You’ve been told what? Why?”
She looked uncomfortable. “Aren’t you forward,” she said roughly, but it was artificial and awkward. “Keep your nose out of other clans’ business.”
“It is my business. The man who died had this halo too,” he pushed.
As he spoke, he noticed some of the others looking away—not from him, but from Annunciata.
It was as if, he realized with an unpleasant prickling feeling, they were seeing someone whose sleeve was on fire, and they’d been forbidden from pointing it out.
“The Outsiders think it means their god is choosing them, but if it isn’t . . .”
He trailed off, because above them, the salt light flashed an aurora curtain overhead, dancing with mauve and gold particles.
It was much clearer and brighter than that last flare.
Everyone looked up. Avelyn stared. It was glorious, and he never seen salt light do that before, even in the deep.
The colours took a long time to fade, painting themselves into the lake too.
The surface churned with eels. Annunciata, who could only see the eels, not what was driving them mad, looked at the water, surprised.