CHAPTER 31 #2
Not quite able to believe that was it, Cai looked around desperately, but everyone else was already noting down the log-in directions from the dry admin man.
He cut through the crowd, aiming for the Minister, who was pouring herself a cup of sludgy coffee from the jugs keeping warm on tripods set up over real fire braziers.
“Excuse me,” Cai said.
“If you’re going to ask why you’re here, it was decided by the Prime Minister,” she said, with only half a glance at his collar. “He’s a devout man.”
“No, no,” he said. “It’s, um . . .” He had a flash of impatient despair with himself.
If you put Avelyn in front of a group of people who had no interest in what he had to say, he did not care: he could speak without once saying um, or seeming worried, or laughing nervously.
It wasn’t arrogance—he just knew exactly what his mind could do, and that it could do a great deal.
Cai, who had had to learn over decades to stop exuding an air of apology just for existing, wished he could learn how to be like that.
He took a deep breath and tried to channel Avelyn.
But thinking of him only brought on a new, useless wash of fear.
Oh God, my boy, my lovely boy, please be all right .
. . “It’s just that I know what caused the salt and why the electronics won’t work. ”
She straightened up slowly. She was tall anyway, but she was wearing high heels, and so she was almost head and shoulders higher than him. “I beg your pardon?”
“I’ve seen it before. I’m—sure some of the scientists know this too.
There’s a place in England called Hreodwater.
A salt mine, like this. Electricity doesn’t work there.
They use halite in the windows, because glass turns violet, steel tools degrade there because of something they call salt-tarnishing .
. . and three days ago the Vatican sent an inquisitor, because a man turned to salt just outside the mine. ”
She was staring at him. “Is that true?”
“I’ve been there. My best friend is from there.
There’s something there that the indigenous people call salt light.
It’s what disrupts electricity and all the rest. Earlier today I had a call from Jordan to say some nuclear inspectors at a site there experienced the same conditions, and .
. . well.” He showed her the map he had made for the Secretary.
Her eyes sharpened as she took his phone.
There must have been a wisp of salt light in the air, because the screen fuzzed.
“A social media trawl showed similar conditions across about fifty salt mines worldwide. They all seem to be experiencing the effects of salt light. Some low-level, some high.”
“Salt light,” she repeated, and without any more pause, she took him outside again, away from the barrier and the border between the ordinary world and the salt-ruined wilderness, towards some trucks and caravans where people were set up with laptops and generators.
Within a few minutes, he had found some images of Hreodwater.
He had meant just to show her the blasted electronics that featured so heavily at the customs house on the Hreod border, but those weren’t what the image search showed.
Instead, it showed something like a castle built of light, side-by-side pictures of passages that, on the left, were lit up brilliantly by what looked like some kind of astonishing bioluminescence in the walls, and on the right, pitch-dark, except for the barest glow of a candle.
Confused, he tapped one that showed a half-familiar scene, a great round window where Saint Hildegard wrestled the Salt King, and a chapel floodlight with an ethereal lilac-gold glow.
It looked like the chapel at An El, but the real place was bound in forever-darkness, lit only by its towers of candles, not . . .
An El chapel by salt light. Image courtesy of Jericho Calder.
He stared for a good few seconds, then searched frantically for how that had been done. It was right there on the diocese website, and had been for years. He had just never looked at it since he had last been.
Because silver blocks salt light, pictures showing salt light in Hreodwater can be taken with a silver-clad camera. Pilgrims can rent one from the smith in Hreodwater; or, for those staying at An El, the Lodge lends cameras to guests free of charge.
Very soon, a whole group of people were researching, and then the minister was holding a file full of everything they could find.
Photographs of Hreod miners, their eyes shining unearthly violet.
Monographs about accelerated healing in the mine.
A series of pictures that showed what happened when you scattered salt onto the ground in the mine: not a random spray, but pictures, as though the salt were the iron filings in an Etch A Sketch.
A medical article from the nineteenth century about something called silver tanning—a phenomenon where Hreoda exposed to bright salt light turned pale.
The legends of the Northmen, of Saint Hildegard, the French knights trapped on the fen, Caer Halen, and the Salt King.
Cai found himself briefing a whole group of scientists about it within the hour.
His map had been projected larger behind him.
Everything was set up under a marquee, the electrics hooked up to a portable generator, while everyone sat at flimsy collapsible tables and chairs stolen from the ice cream shop opposite.
It was freezing, and on the canvas roof, there was a quiet patter: snow.
As it settled, the space darkened. It was already covering the ruin of the town, the army trucks, the media vans, whirling in nooses, sometimes finding its way in despite the plastic flaps of the marquee.
The flakes tasted of salt. His paper cut stung more than ever.
He saved the images of the Salt King and Tallis Osho’s radiation test for last. When he did, he could tell who had had a religious education, because their eyes flicked, suddenly sharp, from him to the images and back again.
He kept his expression neutral. If he started talking about the Bible, and what in the Bible looked like this, nobody would listen to him.
“That looks alive,” one of the scientists said.
Cai nodded slightly. “Whether it is or not: at Hreodwater, the indigenous understanding is that the salt light is generated by this figure. Dr Osho’s dosimetry test in Jordan certainly seems to corroborate that. As you can see, it is the source of the light in the images.”
“Then we’re positing that one of those things is in every single affected salt mine,” a radiologist said, in the leaden way of someone who had spoken in equations since she was ten. “And they are . . . causing these disasters?”