CHAPTER 24 #3
But Lady Hringen lifted her head slightly; Lord Harkta had sparked a thought there, not that Avelyn could guess what it was.
“Your Roman Witan,” Lady Teksa said. “What do you hope to show them?”
“Light paintings, from the deep,” Avelyn said, because there was no direct Hreod word for photograph.
If you scattered English about too much, people winced at you like you were swearing.
“To show them the salt light. They don’t understand that the light is real, because they cannot see it.
If we are to make them understand that the Salt King really is in the deep, and that something is happening to him lately .
. . then the way to start is to show them salt light, and how it’s brighter the closer we go to the King.
This is to the purpose of understanding better what effect the light might have on Outsiders. Specifically whether it’s dangerous.”
There was a charged silence.
He had to concentrate on keeping still, even though the frustration was wild now.
Although it felt purposeful, the way they were lobbing their meanings over his head and making him lunge to catch even just one or two, he knew from long experience that was unlikely.
Most people struggled to imagine not understanding something they felt was self-evident.
It was why most people were balls at missionary work: they couldn’t imagine what it was like not to have faith.
It was why, when you learned a new language, you had to just live it until you understood, because if you asked an English person why in God’s name their language cared so much about when everything was done, all you got was a bewildered look, because how was that person to know it was unusual?
“How many at An El have the King’s Blessing now?” Lady Hringen asked abruptly.
“What?” said Avelyn, tumbled.
“May the King bless you” was a Hreod curse. It sounded mild if you translated it word for word, but what it really meant was something much closer to “I hope you die in a fire.”
Lady Teksa made a little It’s all right gesture and pointed to a carving on the wall. It was ancient, and showed a woman dressed in heavy silver robes—the silver was all done in filigree—surrounded by a brilliant golden-violet corona.
“It means the formation of salt light around a person,” Lady Teksa explained, with an impatient glance at Lady Hringen.
So they did know what it was.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Answer the question,” Lady Hringen said sharply.
“Fourteen this morning,” he said.
There was a collective hiss. His chest was starting to feel tight with that longbow feeling again.
“His Witan needs to understand what’s happening,” Lord Harkta said, not to him but everyone else. “They will need to send more of their witches soon, and they won’t if they don’t see. We cannot wait.”
“The purpose of not explaining to them was to make them send a stronger witch,” Lady Wolkvos said, sounding annoyed.
She had a strong marshland accent, the kind that the mining clans would consider beneath them, and she leaned into it now: she was emphasising her practicality and their overelegant intellectualising.
She plainly didn’t like Lord Harkta, maybe because she didn’t think he had earned his place here properly, or maybe just because he sounded as though he could recite bardic poetry from memory.
Avelyn had a dizzy out-of-body realization that if you were a native English speaker, this was how you understood most of the world all the time—every inflection and accent meant something, carried information, extra data. It lit up stark everything he was normally deaf to.
“Now we have a strong witch,” Lady Wolkvos was saying, “we want to kill his faith?”
What?
“Caer Halen is on the fen,” Lady Teksa said. “The knights are riding, and there are nightmares in the mine. I think we are beyond the point where one witch makes any difference.”
“Are you sure? Even this witch?” Lady Wolkvos snorted. “Don’t you remember? The last Brocken witch said, ‘Either train him, or send him where there is no salt light before something terrible happens.’ Never did a witch prophesy ring more true.”
“What?” Avelyn had to set his teeth against an unwanted stab of a memory.
The last Brocken witch, face invisible behind a silver mask, looking at him with the same affectionate rue his uncles did.
Bring me a witch stone from the deep, and I’ll give you a mask.
God, but he’d wanted that so badly at the time.
He couldn’t remember why. It was a mess of nonsensical Hreod Thinking now.
He would remember if he thought about it, but he was absolutely not going to do that.
“What really happened when the shaft collapsed?” Lady Wolkvos asked him. “Was it your fault?”
Avelyn hadn’t expected an attack like that, and it was a punch in the gut. He thought he was going to have to scrape up some kind of answer—Some kind of lie, Hreodwater Avelyn murmured—but it had been such a merciless blow that half the Witan stirred.
“King’s teeth, leave him alone,” Lady Hringen growled, and he was nearly as shocked to see her defending him as he was by the ambush.
“Tua-Brocken,” Lord Harkta said to Avelyn, quite gently. “Tell us: what do you believe the Salt King is? Don’t say what you think we want to hear. Say what you know. You will not be punished. You are a witch: you are free to speak.”
Avelyn didn’t know what to do. He had spent his adult life being told to speak freely, to say what he really thought, but if he had done that, he would never have been allowed into holy orders; he would have died on a street somewhere in Italy years ago.
Yes, of course I accept that God’s hand guides us.
No, I believe in no other god. And . . .
to say what he thought the Salt King was, in front of the Witan: even a witch could be flogged for that.
But something was going on here he didn’t understand. What had Lady Wolkvos meant, that seeing what was in the mine would kill his faith, and that a witch had said he was dangerous? What did Lord Harkta mean, that Rome needed to see what was there, to send more clergy?
There was no help from Ras, who was as unreadable as halite.
Then . . . it was as though someone behind him held both his elbows.
His ruined tattoos sang. He knew no one was there—it wasn’t the same as real pressure on his skin—but the feeling was so distinct, the certainty that something outside him had brushed by was so absolute that he wanted to look around anyway.
It was warm, and careful, something unsayably mighty touching something unsayably fragile.
It was how he imagined it felt to be struggling against the tide at sea, only for a whale to swim under you and brush you with one curious fin, easing you into a kinder current.
That, Father Li would have said, was God.
It wasn’t.
“I know this is a terrible thing for me to say in this place of all places,” he said at last. “I know . . . your love for the King, of course I know it. I can feel the ras right now.”
Even Lady Hringen was listening. Listening, not just facing him.
“But the Salt King is no god, and An El is a woeful mistake of a name. There are no angels in Hreodwater. Angels do not fall from Heaven and then hide underground, murdering priests and setting up cults for their own worship. The Salt King is a demon, and what you need is not more witches generally. You need exorcists, the strongest witches there are. If I can prove that they are required, my Witan will send them. Whatever is happening, they will contain it.”
“How do they do that?” Lady Wolkvos asked, serious and intense.
“The god of Rome and his family are much stronger than anything down a mine in the fen. Exorcists invoke the Holy Mother, who is . . .” Christ, how did you explain what Mary was.
“A great spirit who can defeat such things as this. To her the Salt King is nothing. She has sent princes of Hell back to the inferno.”22
There, he thought numbly. If they don’t attach me to four horses and make them run in four different directions, then today is a good day.
He would have sworn Lord Harkta winked at him.
“Now there is faith,” Lady Teksa murmured. She shot an admiring look over at Ras, as if he had done something fiendishly clever bringing Avelyn here. Ras, of course, had his eyes down, motionless.
Everyone was looking at Lady Hringen.
There was a long pause in which she stared at some point beyond the floor.
“I’ll take you down,” she said abruptly, “and you can bring your light painting machine. Meet me in an hour. Wear something more sensible than that. Don’t be late.”
21 The legal title of the King of England was something along the lines of King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the Commonwealth, Except Hreodwater, Where He Is Very Welcome If He Is Not a Nuisance.
22 Father Gabriele Amorth, founder of the International Association of Exorcists, died just before Avelyn came to Rome, but Avelyn had read all his books, and unlike showmen like Reyes, he was sincere and funny, and maintained that it was no good invoking Christ against anything demonic.
Only the Holy Mother seemed to have much effect.
He did also think that you could be cursed by safari souvenirs and that rock music let the Devil in, but Avelyn’s approach towards the wackier ends of the Church was that he would believe claims that didn’t arise naturally from being an elderly man worried by foreign travel and Today’s Youth.
That detail about Mary wasn’t one you’d come up with—or he didn’t think so—if with typical Vatican machismo, you thought the solution to spiritual problems was to shout at them until they went away to bother someone else.