CHAPTER 23 #2
“We do not,” he said carefully, “say anything about that. Nobody says anything that even rhymes with Sodom and Gomorrah. We are simply drawing attention to facts, not interpreting them.”
“The fact that we are drawing attention to them is an interpretation,” she pointed out.
“How many salt mines are there in the world? How many people live close to one? If news outlets are brushing this off because they’re worried it’s AI nonsense, how many people are going to stay put when they should be moving away?
” he asked. “The Vatican is endlessly and famously concerned about looking stupid—it has weight if we stick our necks out and say, This is real. And I think we need to.” He took a photograph of the map. “I’m going to see the Secretary now.”
Just before he reached the double doors of the main office, the Secretary came out to meet him.
He was a meticulously unassuming scholar from India who never spoke above a murmur, but the archbishop’s robes made him look broader, the purple sash striking even from twenty paces.
20 He never looked at home under the marble columns and gilt ceilings; there was something anxious to his manner, as though he were a pilgrim who had taken a wrong turn and knew the Swiss Guard were about to find him and throw him out.
The Secretary seized Cai’s arms. He always seemed worried people would go by him without noticing him, despite the purple. Sackcloth, Cai reflected deliriously, was more a state of mind than a sartorial fact. “Cai! Have you seen the news?”
“News?” Cai echoed. As always if he had gone up to his eyes in social media, he felt foggy and disjointed.
“Poland!” the Secretary said, with an urgency that Cai had never seen in him before.
Usually, he would have used words like vexing and silliness about a massacre, and if he were to do anything as indecorous as have a heart attack, he would catch the appropriate bus to the hospital and disembark politely after the elderly lady in front, but now, he sounded scared.
“Something’s happened there. Wieliczka. Nobody knows what, but they’ve asked for our help. ”
“Our help,” said Cai. People sometimes asked for the Vatican’s help in negotiations between countries that hated each other, or they asked for money after disasters, but Wieliczka was a tourist trap near Krakow. It needed about as much help from the Vatican as Cardiff did. “What . . . for?”
“No idea. The Polish authorities aren’t saying anything,” the Secretary said, steering him inside his airy office.
It had a beautiful view across one of the inner courtyards of the gardens.
Two young nuns were sitting on a bench, clearly a few minutes away from starting work, sharing a hot drink in a flask and arguing laughingly—he could just hear them—about the English versus the American pronunciation of renaissance.
That flash of normality and quietness hit Cai in the gut, and for the second time, he had a certainty that it would all shatter soon. Dionysus was coming.
“And there’s a media blackout,” the Secretary was saying.
“God knows how they’ve managed that, but there isn’t footage from a single camera.
Not a news camera, not a solitary tourist taking a picture under police tape.
There are rumours on the diplomatic channels that there’s been some kind of nuclear strike that’s made normal communication in the area impossible, but I don’t see how that could be the case.
It would have been seen from satellites.
But there’s absolutely nothing. It’s like the whole town is in a black hole. ”
Cai was at an age where people just expected him to know everything, but he would never have known where or what Wieliczka was without Avelyn.
Wieliczka had been their first holiday, because Avelyn had wanted to see it.
Then, on the tour, he had bonded with about twelve enormous Polish miners, who in turn knew Hreodwater very well.
He had also just watched several videos of Polish teenagers doing the viral coin trick at Wieliczka.
“This is Wieliczka as in the massive salt mine?” he said.
“Yes?”
“I just came off an interesting call,” Cai said, and explained about the Jordanian ministry, the videos by Tallis Osho, and finally, the map.
“Eminence, something is happening at salt mines. Something chemically impossible.” He brushed the image from the radiation test in Jordan, and the etching of the Salt King.
His fingertips were shaking. Too much coffee, he decided.
He wasn’t afraid that, under fifty salt mines and God knew where else, there were things that had struck terror into the souls of prophets.
He wasn’t afraid that for some unknowable reason of their own, they were waking up.
“It all started at about the same time,” he said. “Hreodwater is the only place where the effects have always been noticed, but even there, it’s getting stronger. Whatever’s going on at Wieliczka, it isn’t a nuclear strike. Nobody calls the Vatican about a nuclear strike. It’s the mine.”
The Secretary was staring at Tallis Osho’s radiation test on Cai’s phone, and the thing in the light. “Right,” he said at last. “I’m afraid you’re going to Poland.”
19 “Hi, you’ve reached Avelyn. If you’re calling about an accident that wasn’t my fault, may the Holy Mother bless you and help you get a better job.
If you’re calling about work stuff, message me like a normal person: it isn’t nineteen eighty-eight.
If you’re Father Li, I love you and I’m probably not dead. ”
20 He was mortified that he had to spend his life wearing bright purple and had tried to ask for special dispensation to be plainer, but the Pope argued that while he was all for humility in archbishops, unsuspecting passersby did need to be alerted about them somehow, so it was either purple or some kind of neon collar.