CHAPTER 30 #2
She scattered people, and dove straight into a knot of nuns who had been writing their names in the air with sparklers. The nuns tried to get out of the way, but the trader was sticking with them, trying to hide behind them, and above all of them, that shadow thing ran too. It had claws, and wings.
Other Hreoda had seen. Some people were jolting away, scooping up children, running. Others, like Avelyn, were frozen into place. Among them, Outsider pilgrims twisted around, confused, because they couldn’t see what people were running from.
Only distantly in control of his own hands, Avelyn lifted the silver camera and took a photograph just as the thing opened its wings, crouching towards the trader like an owl shielding prey.
“Gwen!” Redspear roared at the trader. She could make her voice carry right across the green. All the Witan could—it came of keeping teenagers in line in the mine—but she could have martialled legions. “Get behind the Outsiders! You in the blue, stand around her!”
The Sisters didn’t understand, but what they did understand was that a huge Hreod trader was trying to barge through them, and they were trying to get away from her.
“She’s not trying to hurt you,” Jericho called. He was already running that way. “Stand around her. It’s all right, she’s just scared, she wants you to protect her from a curse.”
“Anyone Hreod, move right back!” Redspear ordered. “If you’ve got salt eyes, put your hands over your eyes. I said over your eyes, tua-Brocken!”
Avelyn’s elbows obeyed without any intervention from his mind. He was built to obey voices like that. He pressed his hands over his eyes, and was sharply aware that all around him, at least two hundred people did that too. Suddenly no one was running anymore.
“Mind like a rock,” Redspear said over everyone, quieter now that there was a humming, dead silence. “Sing to the King, and nothing else.”
People sang. It was a Yule hymn. It lifted eerie into the quiet. Avelyn wanted to take his hands away, and he almost did, but then Redspear came up beside him and held his wrists in place.
“Seeing is believing and believing is true,” she said, quite gently. “Come on, sing to the King.”
As she said it, he could hear Jericho talking to the Sisters. “She’s asking you to say a deliverance prayer to Mary.”
There was an extraordinarily strange stillness, in which the Sisters prayed—Ave Maria, gratia plena—and the Hreoda sang. And then . . . nothing.
“All right, it’s gone,” Redspear said. “Well done, everyone.”
Avelyn took his hands away from his eyes.
There was no more thing in the salt light.
The Sisters were all looking at each other, confused, and at the wine trader with shades of feeling between scepticism and concern, and .
. . not a single one of them could see that with them, just outlined enough in salt light for Avelyn to make out the folds of her clothes, there was a trace of a woman.
She was quite small, not old or young, with a veil over her hair but not like a nun.
As he watched her, she walked away, fading into nothing.
“It was his fault, the witch from Rome!” the vintner said shakily. “He cursed me!”
“Don’t offend witches then,” Redspear told her, but her eyes ticked over Avelyn.
“Well, Dream,” she said to Jericho, who had come back.
She coughed, strangely awkward. She glanced over at Avelyn again, and it was different to the way she had been looking at him before.
She would have liked, he realized, to wall him into a silver room and leave him there.
“A fine witch we have here. Nearly as good as you.”
Jericho half smiled, but he was watching the sky as though he expected to see something terrible there.
Redspear looked troubled, and then back, because someone was calling for her. “I’ve got to talk to my sisters. No more curses, though, Avelyn. You’re a long way too convincing.” She turned away and headed towards the far end of the causeway, where most of the Witan were waiting.
Avelyn was still falling down a long set of internal stairs. He finally hit the bottom. “I just saw the Holy Mother in the salt light,” he whispered.
“I expect so,” Jericho said, still watching the sky.
Avelyn tried to get the world facing the right way up. “But—I didn’t see her, I was seeing . . . what . . . the Sisters believed was . . . helping?”
“I don’t know,” Jericho said. His eyes came back properly, and Avelyn must have looked shaken, because when he let his breath out, it was a low sympathy hum. “I’m not sure those two things are different. Are you all right?”
“If they hadn’t . . . that thing would have killed people, wouldn’t it?”
“I still quite want that update about whether you’re all right,” Jericho told him.
“Fine. I’m fine,” said Avelyn, although in fact he was about twelve feet to the side of his own body. Something important had been disjointed. “I’m not having a crisis of faith or anything.”
Jericho leaned forward, serious. “Please, very urgently, do not have a crisis of faith. All this would be much more noticeable and much worse if Hreodwater weren’t full of devout Catholics who believe in angels and miracles and the power of God, and not a horrible chthonic thing that might wake up and kill everyone accidentally. ”
Avelyn looked slowly across at him. It was difficult. He had never had a fight-or-freeze reaction to information before, but he was thoroughly having it now.
“The only thing better would be hundreds of devoted atheists who wouldn’t believe in a miracle or a monster if one bit them,” Jericho said, “but I think there are fewer of those, when you really come down to it, than anyone thinks.”
Avelyn sank onto a bench, and realized he was still holding the photograph.
The film showed up the thing in the light very clearly.
Jericho sat next to him. He had wonderful boots, Avelyn noticed with fever clarity.
They were printed with two old paintings, one of Eden, one of Pandemonium.
He nearly laughed. He’d never met anyone who so definitively did not have one foot in Hell.
How did you tell somebody their shoes were theologically nonsensical?
“So that’s why you can’t evacuate the mine,” he said at last.
“Yes.” Jericho’s dark eyes were steady now, and the seeming skittishness he had when everything was all right and Avelyn was teasing him was gone.
“That’s why Saint Hildegard built the abbey.
She realized something dangerous was down in the deep, and she knew what needed to be done to keep it from hurting anyone.
Two hundred faithful at all times, rotating out after a maximum of forty days, before the salt light can damage their health. An El is a firewall.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Avelyn demanded.
“Oh, Avelyn, just so you know, it’s the salt light, belief into matter, that’s why people are being cured and wine is turning to blood, and by the way, it’s getting dangerously bright because whatever’s down there is waking up, would you mind just relaying that back to the Vatican? ”
“And then what?” Jericho said. “Then all I’ve done is make more people believe there is a thing that can and will wake up.
” He sighed, restless. “I was hoping you’d come here and say, ‘Of course there’s nothing in the mine, all this is just a cult and whatever happened to Matthew was a trick.
’ But as soon as you said you weren’t even considering that, and of course it was real, and the only question was whether it was God or a—or a demon—I didn’t know what to tell you. ”
Avelyn stared at the ground. What the Witan had discussed made sense now. Belief into matter. If he believed enough—if exorcists from Rome believed enough—perhaps they could keep the King imprisoned.
“You would have been better off with scientists,” he said eventually.
Jericho tipped his shoulder. “Actually we have some very sought-after academic fellowships here, but the hit rate of apparently fire-breathing materialists who walk away convinced they’ve had a lovely spiritual experience is .
. . upsetting. I think you might be the only person I’ve ever met who hates the ras. ”
“Ugh, it’s like a pleased-to-see-you python,” Avelyn muttered. He was currently trying to unwrap it. It was all but pinning his arms to his sides, and the worst of it was, it felt wonderful, and not in an innocent way. He was on fire.
Fire.
A side thought uncurled, and then kept uncurling, and became a monster. He pressed his hands over his mouth. “I set you on fire in the mine, didn’t I?”