CHAPTER 20 #2
A man about Avelyn’s age crouched down to a little girl who must have been his niece and pressed something over her face: a blank silver mask, without openings for the eyes. The little girl didn’t protest. She just hurried along beside her uncle as he started for the surface.
Other people were holding masks too, and walking away. Fast.
“I can’t talk to you, I’m sorry,” the foreman said.
“What are the masks for?” he asked.
“Safety,” she said steadily.
“If you won’t tell me what’s happening, then let me go down and see.”
“I can’t,” she said again. “You’d need the approval of Lady Balen for that, or Lady Hringen or Lord Harkta.
” Her eyes caught on his leg, and he realized he was standing awkwardly, even though it still didn’t hurt much.
Guilt skimmed over her face. “I’m sorry, son.
You were brave, trying to save that Outsider. My hands are tied.”
“I understand,” he said, though he didn’t at all.
More people were putting on those masks.
The silver was thin: they must have been able to see through it, just about.
Even knowing that, it looked horrible. Blank face after blank silver face, like some kind of dark ceremony. “Where is Lady Balen tonight?”
“The Witan is in session.” The last of the other miners passed her, and she stepped outside the gate and pulled it firmly shut. She was studying Annunciata again. Much lower than before, too quiet for anyone else to hear: “You need to get her out of the mine.”
She walked away under the storming light.
Annunciata brushed his arm. To her, it must all have happened in almost total darkness. The only ordinary light came from the windows of An El and the high glow of the chandeliers. “What was all that? What did she say?”
Avelyn turned back, not sure what to tell her. Those masks were sticking in his mind. They were so uncanny, and they weren’t just about helping the miners see in bright light. You could wear glasses for that. “She said . . .”
If a known liar told you that an avalanche was coming, you ran away, because maybe there wasn’t, but the worst consequence of running was looking silly, whereas the worst consequence of not running was dying.
“She said to get you out of the mine. She wouldn’t tell me why, but the way they were all looking at you .
. . it was like you were on fire.” He looked back through the silver bars of the gate again, overrun with that familiar frustration.
Above them, the salt light coiled. If he stayed exactly still, he could hear singing, right on the edge of everything else, nothing to do with the King’s hymns.
“I can’t tell if it’s something real, or something they only think is . . .”
Was this what it was like for atheists who tried to talk to Catholics?
Annunciata thought about it, much less bothered by any of it than he was. “Ah, so. Better ask Jericho if there’s anything wrong with me.”
The salt light flickered a new, faint aurora over the lake, just for long enough that he managed to take a picture of it to show her. He was glad, though, for some reason he couldn’t trace, that she hadn’t been able to see the silver masks.
Jericho listened to what they said, let Avelyn tell him it might be nothing but might be something, asked Annunciata how she was feeling—perfect—and then said that she seemed very well to him, but she was to tell him straightaway if anything changed.
Avelyn watched her go to meet her friends in the courtyard, four nuns from the same convent, who were playing cricket under the salt oaks with some increasingly traumatised Dominicans.
Avelyn knew he ought to go out and help the Dominicans—he could have, his leg didn’t hurt at all now—but he wanted to stay in here.
The fire was crackling to itself, the salt light was gold, and Jericho was the only person he had met so far who he could talk to with no effort.
If he had to go out there and speak to the others about what they couldn’t see and what he thought and what it all looked like, and then he had to repeat himself because they couldn’t understand his accent . . .
“All well?” Jericho asked him.
Avelyn glanced up at him, checking for incoming questions about his family, but Jericho didn’t add anything. He really was asking about now, not dragging the conversation back to where they left it earlier.
“I’m sorry I snapped at you before,” he said.
Jericho looked lost. “When?”
God, forget making blind nuns see: it was Jericho who was the miracle. Avelyn wasn’t sure he’d ever met someone so gentle who was also so bulletproof. Usually gentle people needed you to be gentle with them.
“Well, I did, even if it bounced off,” he said. “And I’m still sorry.”
Jericho was pouring out some hot chocolate now. He gave Avelyn the first cup, and a look that had opinions about how anxious young people were. “How’s the leg after walking?”
“Fine, I think. Thank you,” he added about the chocolate. He hadn’t known it was what he wanted, but now he was holding it, he would have defended it with his life. “When we found the miners, though, they were wearing these . . . masks. Silver. Have you seen that?”
“Like the witches do?” Jericho said.
“Sort of, but—these things have no eyes. They’re bloody creepy. And the men were putting them on the children first, like it was . . . I don’t know, like they were shielding them.”
“Against the salt light?”
“It has to be, but I don’t know why they aren’t just wearing normal visors. Have you seen the salt light from the . . .? No. This is what it’s doing now.” He showed him the photograph of that aurora light dancing over the lake.
“Christ,” Jericho said softly. “It looks like a storm.”
“I’ve never heard of salt light hurting anyone.
But the way they were looking at it, and at Annunciata, it was like they were waiting to be struck by lightning.
I’m just . . . I don’t know.” He didn’t have any real idea.
He just wanted to talk, and for it not to be something only he knew.
“I’m wondering if they’ve seen something in the deep where it’s really bright.
Maybe they know something we don’t. Maybe .
. . people with the halo shouldn’t stay down here. ”
Jericho looked troubled. “There’s nowhere for them to go,” he said.
“It’s snowing, and the inns up above are all full with the stranded Outsiders.
I’ve put up a family of five in our only spare room.
” He was quiet for a moment. “But all the rooms here are silver-clad. If the salt light is doing something damaging . . . at least when people are inside, nothing’s happening to them.
” His eyes slipped to the window, to the cricketers outside.
They must have met the family of five, because they had acquired some children.
“Maybe this has something to do with why the rooms are all silver-clad,” Avelyn said. “I noticed it last night, and I couldn’t think of a reason to do it.”
The angle of Jericho’s eyebrow sharpened, pensive.
Avelyn bumped back in his chair. “I don’t know why I’m taking what Hreoda think so seriously all of a sudden. Fion in the kitchens thinks you’re imaginary, did you know that?”
“Everyone does,” Jericho said, as if that were a reasonable thing to think about a person. “Hreoda won’t talk to me unless it’s an emergency.”
“Why?”
He lifted his shoulder a little, the wry sketch of a shrug. “They haven’t said.”
“Christ’s sake,” said Avelyn. “Why do you put up with it?”
“Oh, you know. Everyone has their ways,” Jericho said, unflustered, and then tilted his head so that some of his wild curls fell to one side.
His black eyes and their stars went over Avelyn twice, fully up and down.
“Sorry, this is an odd thing for me to say, but were you that pale when you arrived?”
“Pale?” said Avelyn, who was forever being mistaken for a person who spoke Arabic or Spanish, or really anything but the languages he did in fact speak, and had never been or been called pale in his life.
But when he looked down at his arms, Jericho was right.
He was two shades lighter than he should have been.
Across his elbows, under his sleeves, he was a little bit darker, but not right.
He had a sudden thought and looked down the front of his top, moving aside the crucifix that had been sitting above his heart.
There was a precise outline of the silver cross stamped in his normal colour.
He pulled his collar down so Jericho could see.
“It . . . looks like the opposite of a tan,” he said, perplexed. When he turned his arms over, the light sheened strangely on his fingernails. Now they had a pearly shine, not unlike the acorns in the salt oak trees outside. “It must be the salt light.”
Jericho took his hand to see when Avelyn showed him.
His own was cold, and Avelyn had an urge to clasp it until he warmed up.
“God, look at that. There’s silver in you, and it’s .
. . coming up to the surface to protect you, just like melanin would in the sun.
” He looked up. “I didn’t know Hreoda did that. ”
“Neither did I,” said Avelyn, unnerved.
Jericho was holding a candle close to see the light move over Avelyn’s nails. “That’s beautiful.”
Avelyn took his hand back and pulled his sleeves down, though he could see that Jericho only meant it in the sense of biologically fascinating. “I’ll add that to the pile of things to ask about when I can get up to the surface,” he said.
“Tomorrow,” Jericho told him, stern now. “At the earliest. I mean it, Brocken. If you try to abscond tonight, I will tell everyone you’ve gone off to enjoy the company of a nice young lady with a whip and some fluffy handcuffs, and you know what? Everyone will believe me.”
Avelyn looked up slowly, glee dawning. “Jericho. Are you secretly a monster who only pretends to be an incredibly lovely doormat so that when you do strike, everyone will blame Fabian?”
“Find out. I dare you,” said Jericho, dead straight.