CHAPTER 31
Wieliczka, Poland
There were no ordinary planes flying to Krakow from Rome, and so Cai Li found himself on one of the Vatican jets, going direct to a small airfield at Wieliczka itself.
The other planes all looked military. Cai was met on the tarmac by some serious people in dark suits.
He thought they would wait for someone else, but they were there only for him, and then he was in the back of a car, listening to them murmur in Polish.
“We have to stop here,” one of them said after quarter of an hour.
The car had reached a barrier across the road.
Cai pushed the door open, not wanting to.
Swarms of other dark cars had stopped there as well, and police, lights flashing.
As soon as he was outside, he could taste it in the air: salt.
A harsh, dry tang, not like the gentle sharpness in the air around An El.
This tasted like it belonged to a terrible desert.
He could see it too, tiny particles of it floating all around them, catching the light in atomic rainbows.
Their steps crunched. Salt on the ground, like thick frost. The paper cut on his middle finger stung like hell.
There were people everywhere. That was the first thing he saw—people in suits, police, soldiers, people with all kinds of mysterious equipment, people setting up in hastily erected tents, more people handing out water—Christ, he needed it after ten seconds breathing the salt air—and, dotted here and there, press.
Cai clenched his hand around the paper cut.
He had never felt more superfluous. Whatever was happening here, it was vast. Maybe he had been wrong about a bomb.
But then he saw everything else.
Beyond the barrier was a bus. It had stopped in the middle of the road, facing them.
Salt had burst up from the engine in savage arcs twelve feet high.
Coming down the steps were people, frozen into place.
Or, they had been people. They weren’t anymore.
They looked like rough casts of humans in red crystal.
And beyond them . . .
The whole street was blasted white. The salt had engulfed buildings, cars, fountains, a church.
Sometimes there was glass left in the windows, but it was all vivid purple.
Cai jumped when something creaked, and then the church tower collapsed in a salt cloud that hung for a moment in the air and then billowed outwards, shrouding all of them, reducing the blue emergency lights to a deadened strobing, sending everyone into coughing fits as they tried to breathe through the sting.
Slowly, Cai held his phone out. Like he’d thought, the screen fizzed with interference. He walked closer to the barrier, easing between the ghosts of other people in the salt fog, his eyes hurting now, watching the screen distort more and more, until the image was gone. He retreated.
The glass over the screen had tinged violet.
Avelyn had laughed when Cai asked him why windows in Hreodwater were glazed in polished salt and not glass. Well, you want to see through it, don’t you?
He switched the phone off and stood at the barrier, watching the emergency crews move through the salt ruins of the town. They were checking car boots. He almost called to them not to bother. Unless someone had a silver-plated car, it would have made damn all difference.
Someone was calling them over to one of the big tents.
Cai glanced back at the suit-people who had escorted him here, expecting them to say this wasn’t for him, only those with a distant chance of helping, but they motioned him to go, and so, hesitatingly, he joined the throng.
He kept to the back, though. It was all very well to say that people and cities enduring chemically impossible destruction was a religious problem, but seeing it in person, it looked like an emphatically nonspiritual problem to him.
A lady about Cai’s age in the nicest suit he had ever seen stepped up onto a crate so that everyone could see her. Signs everywhere said to keep phones turned off. Electronics sometimes worked this far back from the barrier, but they would start cracking with salt after perhaps ten minutes.
“Hello, everyone,” she said in English. “I’m from the Ministry of Defence.” She introduced herself by a name he immediately forgot, because he was still thinking about the frozen shapes trying to stagger down from that bus.
“Welcome to Poland. All of you are here to try to understand what has happened, how, and whether it will continue to be dangerous. Early tests have confirmed that the substance out there is salt, in varying forms; some is powder, some is solid halite, some seems to form around electromagnetic force lines. We have also been informed by meteorologists running the Japanese satellite Himawari 8 that sites across Asia have experienced this phenomenon too.”
Behind her, a projector screen flickered to life.
The image was pale, because they were shining candlelight through old-fashioned films, but the picture was clear enough even so.
It showed a high aerial shot of what might have been Tibet and Nepal—in fact, yes.
He could see Mount Everest on it. A salt circle had blasted itself neatly among the mountains.
He had just circled that on his map this morning. It was Lancang: the place where the coin trick had started.
“This is a salt mine called Lancang,” the Defence Minister said, and then the slide moved on.
It showed the same thing, in a new place.
“Chinese authorities are not parting with much information, but this image does seem to show that an event similar to ours took place there late last night. Khewra, in Pakistan, another salt mine, was similarly affected in the night. And early this morning, a few hours before us—this is Soledar in Ukraine. Also a salt mine, though fortunately, almost entirely abandoned after the Russian invasion.”
Cai didn’t need to see the map on his phone to know he would have to pan west for Khewra.
West again. Ukraine.
West again. Poland.
Someone else had noticed too. “It’s moving east to west?”
“It appears to be,” the minister said, “although we don’t yet have enough to data to be certain.”
Holy Mother of God. He wanted to run out, demand to be taken to England, sprint across the fen, and haul Avelyn out of Hreodwater before—before.
But maybe it was too late, and maybe Avelyn was already dead.
How would anyone know if this had happened to Hreodwater?
No one would find out until relatives didn’t turn up after a pilgrimage.
“We believe there may also be a site in Russia too. And beyond that . . . everything is unclear. It’s unclear how solid brick and steel have turned to salt.
It’s unclear what is reacting to electronic devices, or why.
It’s unclear how it killed everyone beyond that line.
There have been no survivors so far. We don’t yet know if something inside the mine caused this, or if the mine was a target of something external.
All of you are here to piece together answers. Any questions?”
Cai was staring hard at his own memory. Unless all this had happened to Amman while he was on a flight, it wasn’t moving east to west. Jordan was further east than Ukraine or Poland. When had their ministry called? It had to be about quarter past six this morning.
He raised his hand, feeling like an imposter. “What was the exact time of the disaster here?”
“Five twenty-one,” the minister said.
People gave him odd looks, and he wanted to melt into the floor.
Poland was in the same time zone as Rome. Jordan had still been fine when this happened here . . . even though Jordan was four thousand kilometers further east.
He hesitated, then slipped outside and walked fast away from the salt border before turning his phone back on.
He strung together a probably incoherent message, and sent it to his friend at the Vatican Observatory.
The Observatory was run by the Jesuits, and Cai and Steve, one of the astronomers, had been in the same class during their formation.
They had done their pilgrimage in poverty together, and slogged all the way from Rome to Istanbul on the sporadic and unreliable goodwill of the general public.
Steve had loved it, what with sleeping out under the stars.
Cai had retreated immediately into the diplomatic service to avoid seeing the stars ever again.
I know all this sounds bananas, but is there any chance we have access to satellite imagery that could show up any of these disasters in the southern hemisphere?
“Are we sure it’s salt?” someone was saying when he came back, a scientist for sure; he had the close-cropped haircut and bad dress sense of somebody who never had to speak to anything more judgmental than an electron.
“It’s not chemically possible for anything that isn’t an alkali metal to have that reaction. ”
“Unfortunately, of that we are certain. This is halite. NaCl, same as table salt. We have no idea how it happened.”
Cai waited to see if anyone was going to mention salt light, because surely they were going to. The glass stained violet, the salt, the electronics . . .
“Has any area been discovered where the damage is less—total?” someone else said.
“There’s a jewellery shop round the corner,” a British voice called back. “The velvet beneath the christening gifts is fine, and we even found one super lucky spider inside a silver cup, but we don’t know why.”
Cai had that tight feeling in his chest he used to have as a student when he wanted to ask a question but couldn’t bring himself to because he shouldn’t really have been in the class at all. They were all scientists here. Someone would know about salt light.
“Okay,” the Defence Minister said, “I’ll hand over to our administrative team, who have put together a database which we can all access, and upload findings for . . .”