CHAPTER 37
Outside Hreodwater, England
Avelyn dropped the phone into his lap, not quite able to believe what had just happened. The Pope had asked him questions about salt light. The Pope. He had basically called a cardinal an idiot.
He had said they were angels.
He was going to be defrocked.
And what in God’s name were those lights in the sky beyond the window? It had been salt light, that was for sure, but Avelyn had never seen it way up in the atmosphere like that.
Partway through the call, Jericho had guided him into the lobby of a hotel, out of the cold, where enough people were coming and going that nobody asked if they were guests or not.
He had disappeared for a few minutes, and now he was back with coffee from the bar.
After the salted hot chocolate at An El, it tasted of nothing, but Avelyn was glad for the heat of it all the same.
Peripherally, he heard someone trying to trade a diamond ring for a room.
He looked around properly for the first time.
Something strange was happening. The foyer was so busy because people were hurrying in from the street, and the hotel staff were turning them away, and people were arguing, and . . .
“Something’s happening to the banks,” Jericho said. “It’s all cash only.”
They were right next to the window. The street outside was busy, the Christmas lights sparkling and the buses full as they rumbled by, but now that Avelyn was looking more closely, it had a different quality than an ordinary Christmas late-night rush.
There was a huge queue outside the bank, and then, as he watched, a cry of dismay from everyone outside when a clerk closed the doors.
“We have to leave,” Avelyn said. “Whatever happened in Poland—it’s happening everywhere, all salt mines, and they said it’s coming here.”
Jericho nodded once. He was watching the crowd at the bank. Someone smashed the windows, and there was a surge as people poured in. It made Avelyn jump, but Jericho couldn’t have looked less surprised.
“Come with me,” Avelyn said. He didn’t know he was going to say it until he was saying it. “Please. We need to get a message back to Hreodwater, and then—we need to go. You can’t stay here, no one c—”
As if they had overhead him, sirens whooped outside.
They both looked out in time to see four police cars blocking the road.
In Italy, car horns would have started blaring straightaway, but there was an odd, expectant quiet now.
The blue lights flashed, and Avelyn’s eyes stung.
Police were getting out of the cars. He twisted in time to see mounted officers ride by. He had never seen that before.
“We are evacuating this area,” another officer called through a megaphone. “You’re within five miles of a salt mine at extreme risk of a catastrophic event . . .”
The voice was lost under the confused shouting as people leaned out of cars or stepped into the traffic to ask what was going on.
“Avelyn,” Jericho said, and nodded towards the broad television on the wall.
There was an emergency broadcast.
“. . . of the catastrophic loss of life in Poland, Sicily, and Canada, we are sealing off all salt mines in the UK,” the Prime Minister was saying from a podium in front of two British flags.
“That means that if you’re within five miles of a salt mine, you must evacuate.
We hope very much that this will be a short-term measure . . .”
Outside, there was a wave of disturbed voices. Army trucks were arriving.
Avelyn looked up at Jericho, at a loss. “What about Hreodwater?”
Hreodwater wasn’t part of England. Just like southern Ireland wasn’t on maps of the UK, and so Northern Ireland looked like it was a tiny island in the sea, it wasn’t on maps of East Anglia.
The fen looked like a lake. Even on Avelyn’s phone, Hreodwater didn’t appear, because no mapping company had ever flown a drone over: there was just blank green and blue.
So the police didn’t believe him when he said there was a town on top of the salt mine.
“We haven’t been told about anything like that,” an officer repeated for about the fifth time.
“No, you don’t understand, I’m from there, we just came from there now, you have to let us back through so we can—”
“I’m afraid you need to leave the area, sir—”
“There are four thousand people on the fen, including a lot of tourists—look, this is the website to get a visa for the day—”
“What do you mean a visa for the day? We’re not telling you to leave the country, just—”
“No, I’m telling you, Hreodwater is a different country, the border is right there—”
“I’m going to have to ask to ask you to step—”
Avelyn tried to duck past her, which was a huge error.
The police officer’s expression shut down. She spun Avelyn around and thumped him chest first into the side of a car. “I’m arresting you for obstructing officers in the course of their duties—stop resisting or I’ll break your arm—”
Avelyn gasped, because she was about to break his arm anyway. Urgent pain shot up his shoulder.
“Oh, hello,” Jericho said, singing it, like he had recognised her from school.
The officer blinked. “Hello,” she said.
“I wonder if I could steal him back from you?”
Avelyn thought she was going to give Jericho a baton to the head for that.
But instead, she stepped back a little. He saw her face in the reflection in the car window.
She looked as though an old friend really had jogged up to her over a hockey pitch, laughing and still glad they had both survived the legendary match of nineteen ninety six.
Was Jericho just that devastatingly attractive? No. Nobody was. Were they?
“Of course you can,” she said, and handed Avelyn over.
Jericho smiled. “Thanks.” He put his arm around Avelyn and steered him through the police cars toward the Hreod border, where other officers looked straight through them.
Not quite as if they weren’t there—nobody bumped into them—but as though they were exempt from ordinary notice.
Not far away, a soldier rugby tackled a huge, drunk man who was trying to go the wrong way, but nobody came after Avelyn and Jericho.
The air glimmered with salt light. A fine mist of it was rolling in from the fen, the softest purple-amber glow. As denser patches drifted through, the police radios crackled and engines and blue lights stuttered.
“How did you do that?” Avelyn hissed, one hand still flat to his chest where his breastbone was complaining that it had the imprint of a car door on it.
“Oh, it’s a knack,” Jericho said.
“What do you mean, a knack!” Avelyn heard his own voice go at least an octave higher than normal. “She just handed me over!”
“Because,” Jericho told him, “I believe that humans are basically kind and helpful, and since there is salt light here, they . . . are.”
Avelyn remembered to close his mouth after about two seconds. “You aggressively believed your way out of being arrested.”
“I did,” said Jericho. “Like I say, it’s a knack.”
It was still percolating. “How do you know there’s salt light?”
“Your eyes are still violet. You’re like an angry dosimeter.”
“Right,” said Avelyn. He had expected to be less stunned after he had thought about it for a few seconds, but it hadn’t worked. All he could think was that he had just seen magic. Real, honest-to-God magic. “Thanks.”
“Welcome,” said Jericho.
To either side of them, police and soldiers were knocking on doors, hustling confused, angry, upset people out and away.
He could hear snatches of the conversations.
People were protesting that the banks were closed and they couldn’t access any money, that they had nowhere else to go with the baby, that they were still waiting for someone to come home from work; the police were saying implacably that they had four minutes to get ready and get out.
Some men were being hauled out of a pub, protesting that it was nowhere near closing time yet.
All of it was still strobe-lit by the blue police lights, brighter than the innocuous sparkle of the Christmas lights.
They were coming up to an army truck. It had stalled, and the driver was struggling with the ignition.
Avelyn could already see why. The salt light was foggy down its left side.
If the engine did start, it would burst into salt.
Another soldier was struggling with a radio.
They were about to go right past him. Avelyn’s insides tightened with the certainty that the soldier was going to stop them.
He must see them, this was surely the most fragile kind of witchcraft . . .
“Hey,” the soldier began.
Avelyn closed his eyes and forced his mind blank, as if he were casting salt. Just let Jericho do the believing . . .
“Er . . . never mind,” the soldier murmured.
A news helicopter was flying over, lights painfully stark and stabbing the beginnings of a headache somewhere behind Avelyn’s retinas.
Any bright light was achy, he was noticing; he had a feeling he had done his eyes more damage in the storm in the deep than he’d known at the time.
Of course if he could just cultivate Jericho’s skill of believing useful things, then it would be fine, but he suspected he couldn’t.
Knowing how it worked was going to get in the way.
“We need to be fast,” Avelyn said. “Father Li said—something about swarms of things that make salt light. They’re coming here. He thought we should have a few hours, but I saw some on the call, and I don’t think . . .”
“Are you all right?” Jericho asked.
Avelyn had stopped. Perhaps it was only because he was half expecting to see it, but he thought there was a violet-amber glow in the sky in the southeast.
From the moment he realized there really was light from that horizon to the moment the things hurled into the visible sky was shockingly brief. Maybe six or seven seconds. He had never seen anything move that fast.
It was what he had seen behind everyone at the Vatican, but now he could see them clearly, it was far stranger than he had thought. They weren’t clear, straight formations. The salt light trails billowed, flocking in eerie murmurations, alive. Legions of them.
The helicopter fell out of the air, salt bursting through its engine.
Avelyn caught Jericho and wrenched him into a doorway, because it looked as though it would come down right on top of them.
It missed them by about twenty yards with a noise like a mineshaft collapsing, glass spraying them, a rotor blade smashing into a streetlight.
For what felt like an incredibly long time, Avelyn locked eyes with the pilot, just before the helicopter nose crumpled.
Nobody screamed, though. Nobody shouted.
Everyone had stopped still. The cars had stopped too, the buses, the cyclists, the drunk men from Hreodwater still being escorted by soldiers. He felt himself going slack. Something wonderful was about to happen.
“Avelyn?” Jericho said, with an urgency that he hadn’t had even when he pulled out the crossbow bolt.
All at the same time, everyone spoke. It was all the same words.
Avelyn heard himself say it too, in the way he sometimes knew if he was talking in his sleep.
He could feel it was another language, something he didn’t know, and perhaps it even clicked somewhere in the middle, a sound he had never made in his life before, but something in his bones knew how.
Oh, but it was ancient and holy, and good.
Gaudezhte *khiram.
Everyone said it, except Jericho.