CHAPTER 31 #3
Cai hated the idea that it was even distantly possible that Avelyn had been right all along.
Down in the deep, the King sleeps, and dreams. He had spent twelve years trying to chip away at that, trying to assure Avelyn that there was nothing at Hreodwater but superstition and an isolated cult, and on some days, he was sure Avelyn believed him.
On some days, though, he could see that he was talking not to a priest but to the prince of a Hreod mining clan, a witch to be, who was gentle with this Outsider doubting the King, but whose mind had been forged in older, deeper darkness than Christ had ever reached.
“I’m afraid I don’t know,” he said, and heard it come out too brusquely. “The main thing to take away is that machines will work if they’re clad in silver, and we should be able to see this stuff through a silver-clad camera, with a silver shutter.”
The group broke apart. As he stepped back and away from the ramshackle setup of screens, Cai finally had the space in the front of his mind to notice that everything was tinting purple.
Annoyed he hadn’t thought of it already, he pulled off his glasses and cast around for some aluminium foil.
It had happened before, at An El. At the time—maybe three days after the King’s Way collapsed—Avelyn had been shut down, his normal personality buried under the rubble, but every so often he did something that made Cai see a glimmer of who he really was.
The first was when he had rescued Cai’s glasses.
When Cai had gone to Hreodwater, he’d known that there was a salt light problem with glass, but he hadn’t been able to get plastic lenses in time.
He’d been okay at the abbey, but then he went on a tour of one of the old mineshafts with a Hreod guide and about ten other people.
To his surprise, Avelyn had followed him—the previous three days had been a struggle to make him do anything, including eat—even though they couldn’t communicate much.
He had thought Avelyn would be scared to go so deep underground again, but he didn’t seem to be, ghosting after Cai without a lamp, violet eyes sheening, always a little way back, as though he didn’t want to be spoken to.
The guide took them to a spectacular waterfall where you could call down into a fissure in the halite that would echo your voice round and round, and before long, Cai started to notice that his glasses were tinting violet.
Dismayed, he took them off, then jumped when, entirely silent, Avelyn took them from him and took out a neatly folded sheet of aluminium foil.
He wrapped Cai’s glasses in it, then handed them back.
He had come because he had known what would happen, but he hadn’t had the English—nor the mental energy—to explain.
Up at An El again, he had unsealed the foil, and the glasses were fine.
When Cai tried to get him to say why, he had cast around and then, at last, pointed to the window.
The frame—silver—was solid and opaque. The coloured halite pane, though, was translucent; the aluminium was like that.
“Can you see through it then?” Cai had said, fascinated.
Usually Avelyn was expressionless, but with a sudden playful twinkle, he held the foil up in front of his eyes and held up three fingers to show what Cai should do.
Cai held up five, and behind the foil, Avelyn held up five too.
At Cai’s explosion of disbelief, he had, for the very first time, laughed.
Now, half listening to phone calls in different languages—someone was speaking to a silversmith in English and asking how quickly machinery and cameras could be modified—Cai cast around.
There were the remains of people’s lunches all over the place, and before long, he found some sandwich crusts in some aluminium foil.
He shook out the bread, smoothed out the foil, then stopped.
Aluminium was translucent to salt light. It would do bugger all if the light was too strong, but where the light was soft, where it was around but not totally destroying electronics, maybe . . .
Dr Osho’s radiation test had showed its image from under an aluminium shield.
Feeling stupid because surely it wouldn’t work, he fixed some foil around his phone camera.
When he took it outside, he thought he’d only see blackness from the covered lens.
But when he held it up, what it showed was incredible brightness, almost whited out.
Within the glare, there were shapes. There was the bus beyond the barrier.
The people. And in the background, a mighty Hell glow, blinding close to the ground, and breaching right into the sky, great columns of salt light blasting into the atmosphere like the pillars of God’s own cathedral.
He panned the camera upward, trying to find the place where the light faded. Up, and up, and up . . .
He stopped.
Far above the clouds, there was more light.
It looked as though somebody had managed to attach a little light to each sparrow in a stupendous murmuration, then filmed it on slow exposure, so that the sky filled with thousands of light trails, all combing across the stratosphere in an invisible, brilliant armada.