CHAPTER 36 #2
He thought there would be a shocked silence.
He thought that, like every other human being of the age of twenty-seven he had ever met, Avelyn would be startled into incoherence, and it would take a while to understand the underlying reasoning.
He glanced at the Holy Father, getting ready to say that perhaps he would have more luck in private, not on speaker in front of the Pope.
A nun took Cai’s phone from him, though, tapped something, and Avelyn appeared on the big screen.
Avelyn must have been able to see them too, because he nodded once.
“Right, good. We’ve solved the cures-and-turning-to-salt mystery.
Salt light enacts whatever the people close by believe is true.
” He said it clearly and slowly, the lift and fall of his Hreod accent making it somehow heavier than it would have been otherwise.
“Small quantities of it do this. After about thirty days at An El, an Outsider will have absorbed enough salt light for it to have noticeable effects. In a very religious person who believes they are in a holy place which can cure them of a disease or problem . . . it does cure them. Brother Matthew walked. A nun who was blind regained her sight right in front of me yesterday. However, continued exposure, or a high dose all at once, is fatal. You turn to salt. Hence Poland.”
“What do you mean, it enacts what people believe?” the Secretary said, frowning.
At the same time, an irascible American cardinal said, “What has this got to do with telling the international press it’s angels, young man?”
Avelyn tilted his head at him in the way that obviously meant: I feel like you might be a stupid person.
Cai had never had the heart to say it to him, but it was a singularly Hreod tilt.
Young Hreod men didn’t say much, so they cultivated eloquent eyelashes.
He had never met anyone else who could say things like ontologically problematic just with their face.
It was one of Cai’s favourite things about Avelyn: to write down anything he said, you’d have to do it in musical score, with two staves.
The top one was what he said aloud (Yes, Father), and the one underneath was what he was saying with his eyes.
There had been Qing dynasty courtiers who couldn’t do it like Avelyn.
“If you stand in salt light,” Avelyn said, wholly courteous and with no trace of you fucking idiot in his voice—God, it was superhuman—“and someone convinces you there’s a monster behind you .
. . there soon is. I saw it. But if you’re then surrounded by nuns who pray to the Holy Mother and truly believe in her intercession . . . guess what appears instead?”
There was a silence of the kind that Cai had only ever heard before close to electric fences. It had a hum.
Avelyn held up a photograph. It showed a crowd of people, a haze of amber-purple light, and in the light . . . something terrible.
“I took that today,” he said.
The American cardinal was determined not to follow. “Yes, but angels?”
Cai, though, was beginning to see. Tell someone there was a monster, and there would be. But tell people there were angels . . .
“Whatever these things are, they turn belief into matter,” Avelyn said. “Whatever you believe near them, happens. Is it better to think they’re like nuclear bombs—universally destructive—or to believe that they are basically good things you can talk to and reason with?”
“It wasn’t your place to make that decision,” the American cardinal said. “Do you have any idea how many hundreds of thousands of people are descending on the Vatican right now, absolutely certain that the apocalypse is happening?”
“Well, the apocalypse does rather seem to be happening,” the Holy Father said, so quietly it was difficult to tell if he was speaking to himself or to everyone.
“Avelyn, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to get in front of the news, but Poland is not the only place to have suffered a disaster.
It’s everywhere, and all the sites are salt mines.
Salt Lake City is being evacuated as we speak, and so is Amman.
We’ve just lost a significant portion of Sicily here.
Are you saying that there’s some hope against this phenomenon if .
. . people truly believe it won’t hurt them? ”
Avelyn thought about it. “I couldn’t say. Not knowing that it will hasn’t helped, but that isn’t the same as believing it won’t. I’ll try.”
“I suppose it’s rather difficult to choose what to believe,” the Holy Father remarked.
“No, but it’s easy to trick someone else,” Avelyn said, very much as though he was looking forward to selecting his victim.
Cai feared for the American cardinal.
“This is ridiculous,” the American cardinal began suicidally, but the Secretary spoke over him.
“Why is this happening now?”
“I don’t know.”
Maybe it was just the quality of the connection, but Cai thought that Avelyn looked lighter than he should have.
Normally, if he happened to go out in civilian clothes, Rome’s legions of tour guides yelled at him in Portuguese or Spanish; now, though, nobody would have made that mistake.
He looked like a billboard in Beijing for one of those sumptuously expensive historical dramas, where the actors were all moonlight skin and inkstone hair.
Once Cai had noticed, he couldn’t stop noticing.
It was bizarre. He didn’t think there was a filter on the call.
“Well, I have plenty of good folks at home worried about the sin of Sodom, and frankly it’s difficult to argue with them,” the American cardinal said drily.
The way Avelyn looked at him, it was amazing the man didn’t turn to salt right there.
“Vatican intelligence gathering is not what it was if a small tourist town around a salt mine in Poland is running a savage human trafficking ring and kidnapping men off the road to sell into sex slavery, and we hadn’t heard,” he said, and half the room actually laughed.
That’s my boy, Cai thought. Bite much worse than his bark, because he doesn’t see any point in warning someone he’s going to bite.
“Yes, well, you would say that,” the cardinal said, with a flick of a look at Li, and all the old accusations clanged onto the carpet.
Avelyn nodded once in the way that meant: I will shortly have you eaten by dogs, and the children shall rejoice over you with singing.
“Avelyn,” Cai cut in, even though he could see that the Holy Father had taken a breath to speak.
“I’ve seen satellite images of the salt light.
It moves between the disasters in a kind of—swarm, and whatever it is, it’s .
. . all heading at you. At Hreodwater, I mean.
You’re next. At the speed the swarms are travelling, you have about—maybe three hours from right now.
You need to get out of Hreodwater. Everyone does. ”
“Satellite images?” the Holy Father said.
“Yes, Holiness, I have a friend at the Observatory who . . . The point is, there are four separate arms of the salt light, and they all started in different places, but they’re converging now on—”
“You said swarms at first. What’s swarming?”
“They look like points of light. I don’t know, but they fly very high . . .” He held out his phone with the picture from Wieliczka, and Steve’s borrowed tablet.
Avelyn was frowning. Even on the screen, though, it was possible to see he wasn’t looking at them, but behind them, at the huge window that looked out across Rome.
“I think you’d better keep an eye on the number of people who really believe they’re going to see all the prophecies in Revelation come true,” he said.
“You just said that only happens in salt light!” the American cardinal snapped.
The sharper people in the room were already looking back at the window.
“It looks like jet trails,” Avelyn said uneasily.
“They’re coming towards you. I don’t think the electronics are going to last much longer.
Listen, you need to do what Saint Hildegard did in Hreodwater: you need a firewall of the most faithful people you can find, the ones who truly believe in the mercy and grace of Heaven, and—and if you can, get some scientists who don’t believe in anything—”
The screen fizzed in a marbling pattern, and then the connection cut. At the same time, the lights flickered. Outside, all the streetlamps and mobile phones and speakers cut too. Then: total darkness, lit only by the candles down in the crowd below.
Just for a moment, there was silence. Nobody moved; but the lights didn’t come back. Slowly, Cai’s eyes adjusted, and all the people in the room became shadow figures whose angles were brushed gold by the candles down in the square. The crowd below was stirring, like a worried hive.
“What did he mean, ‘jet trails’?” someone asked.
Cai dropped his phone as salt hissed from its plug ports. Above them, one of the light bulbs burst, and down in the square, something similar must have been happening, because there were yells.
Then—joy.
Overwhelming, wonderful joy, the kind Li felt whenever he looked at the altar of the basilica, but amped up a hundred times louder.
He saw everyone feel it. Everyone swayed. Down in the vast crowd between the encircling arms of the colonnade, there was a wind-in-the-rushes sigh that was tens of thousands of people stopping still.
In one mighty choir voice, everyone in the room, everyone down in the square, all those tens of thousands, said:
Gaudezhte *khiram.