CHAPTER 38
Jericho was gripping Avelyn’s shoulders, trying to bring his attention back.
He was saying his name. Avelyn blinked, foggy with happiness.
It was like walking into the mine, like the ras, only rawer, much stronger.
Standing in the mine was soothing; this was more like morphine. It had a saw-toothed edge.
“Avelyn?” Jericho said again.
He came back to himself properly. “Yes. Yes, sorry,” he said. “There was . . . I saw something in the sky. Is it—can you see . . . no, it’s salt light,” he said, aware he was incoherent. He shook his head at himself. Yes: those bright jet trails had combed salt light right across the sky.
When he was small, his great-grandmother had told him that during the war, she had looked up one day as a little girl and seen the Luftwaffe flying over, so high you couldn’t see the planes, only the silvery trails they left behind in this vast sky, when they hit the salt light above Hreodwater.
They all fell in a cataclysmic rain of ruined engines into the fen.
He had thought he would never see anything like that.
The salt light was down lower to the ground, too.
It was coming from Hreodwater, rolling in like sea fog.
A bright patch reached the middle of the road.
The police cars shut themselves off. Above the cars, the strings of fairy lights flickered as the electrics struggled, then failed.
Something about the coil of it in the air put him in mind of ink in water, the weird silver ink that the octopuses in the abbey lake shrouded around their stolen silver citadel to hide from the eels, and abruptly, he was struck with certainty.
That was exactly what it was. It was . .
. camouflage. The opposite way around. Silver ink was dark, and this was a confounding fog of brightness.
And these things coming in overhead—they were the eels.
All around them, people looked drugged. Some were standing still. A few had buckled onto their knees. In Italy, people would have been praying, but the English thought that sort of thing was silly, Father Li had told him, and he was right.
At least they wouldn’t have to deal with visions from Revelation coming alive and eating the populace. What did English people believe in? Apart from the basic human rights to a good kebab and to complain about whatever was going on with the wheelie bins, he didn’t know.
An arc of salt light shot overhead. Not way up in the atmosphere, not where those others had been: right overhead, maybe only a hundred feet above them, comet brilliant.
Avelyn’s head snapped round to follow its path, and he just had time to notice that no one else saw it before joy kicked him in the chest.
It was delirious, insane. Glorious. It was every Christmas with Father Li, it was the day he was ordained, it was how it would have felt if any single one of the people he had ever loved had told him they loved him back.
It was the moment Jericho had rescued him from the mine; it was the King sitting with him in the Lodge, one hand on his ribs. All at once.
Salt light roared up in a column like a detonating bomb. Whatever the thing was, it had crashed into the ground, somewhere towards the centre of town.
The pillar of salt light was infernal. It bloomed into the sky, but then it raced outwards and outwards, silhouetting the buildings and the falling snow, and once, an owl, which must have been able to see, because it wheeled away from the light, but too late.
It crumbled to salt fifty feet in the air.
Avelyn could see exactly what was going to happen, and he had no idea what to do to stop it. Nothing: there was nothing.
The salt looked like frost as it surged down the busy road.
The people slowed down, and faded, and then the halite bloomed red, glowing from the inside.
Car engines exploded. Salt smashed through the bonnets, arcs of it gritting eight, ten feet above.
Inside a bus, it travelled from front to back at walking pace—slowly enough for the people packed inside to see it, and try to run, and fail.
The lights strung between the shops fizzed and cracked, and broke.
The streetlamps burst one after the next.
The traffic lights. The floodlights at the station.
There was a screech from the railway that must have been a moving train losing its engine and skidding along the tracks.
The drunk men fused together with the soldiers.
Darkness ate everything, and soon, there was nothing left but the salt light.
Avelyn and Jericho were an islet of colour among all the white and grey.
Jericho’s coat looked wrong, with its moss-green lining.
His dark halo was clearer than ever. When Avelyn shifted, he felt a stiffness across most of himself, and looked down in time to see his own coat fall apart into salt that caked his Hreod clothes underneath.
He coughed as he breathed in motes of it, and had to shake it off his shirt, eyes stinging.
It didn’t matter. The salt light had made the cold night feel like a summer morning.
Silence. Perfect silence. No roar of traffic, no voices, no distant murmur of the station announcements, no radios or carols or sirens.
The only sound was the trickling of water.
The snow had all melted, and now it was streaming down the sides of the road, and down the gutters of the roofs.
Closer to the blast, the houses were ruined, missing roofs, walls crumbling, all salt.
“Something landed over there,” Avelyn said softly. He felt like it wasn’t safe to speak, but he couldn’t trace why. They were the only things left alive for—it must have been as far as the salt light reached. How far did it reach? All the way to Hreodwater?
All the way to Cambridge?
“Hang on.” Jericho was looking at the shop next to them, which was a souvenir place that sold replica Hreod rubbish for pilgrims. He disappeared inside, and after a minute or so came back out again with a lamp and some spare candles. He lit one with his silver lighter.
For an entire second, Avelyn didn’t understand, and then finally he realized that for Jericho, the whole street was pitch-black.
Avelyn took a photo of the light column and showed it to him. It wasn’t until he was holding it out that he saw his own hands. He was white. Almost as white as Jericho. It was as if he’d plunged his arms into hot water, but instead of going red, the burn was pale.
“We need to get back to An El,” Jericho said, very quiet. “Get as many people inside the abbey as we can. Away from the surface.”
Avelyn stared into the Hellfire of salt light.
He could still feel that joy hammering at him.
What had just happened . . . he should have been shocked and scared and angry, but he didn’t feel any of that.
He was full of unearthly calm, and goodwill towards everyone.
The light was beautiful. And . . . was something bright in it coming this way? “Should we see what it is?”
Yes yes yes, his brain said happily, good idea!
“No,” Jericho said, alarm in his voice. “Don’t—”
“I think . . .”
Everything was right in the world. It was a beautiful evening.
The way the salt misted off its newly formed arcs from the engines, the way the salt-people sparkled in that gorgeous nuclear glow up ahead, even the way the salt-ruined Christmas lights had broken and draped themselves across the road—it was all magical.
Miracles everywhere. The air sang with them.
And if he could just go a little closer to that light, he wouldn’t just feel happy: it would be another shot of obliterating joy.
Jericho gripped his shoulders. “It isn’t real! It’s that thing.”
He seemed very urgent, given that it was such a lovely evening.
“Avelyn!” Jericho slapped him.
Avelyn didn’t really feel it. People did odd things sometimes.
Jericho looked into his eyes and seemed not to find whatever he was hoping for. “I’m sorry about this. But—I’m hoping you’re professionally good at forgiving people, and I don’t want to hit you any harder.” He bent and kissed him.
It was gentle and chaste and shocking.
Avelyn stood paralyzed for a full two seconds, then stepped back, into the wall, and knocked his head back against it hard. His normal thinking came back. The insane joy was still there, but he could feel now that it was artificial. It had a nasty afterglow.
“Hreodwater,” he said.
“Yes,” Jericho said. There was dread in his eyes. “Avelyn, I’m so sorry, I . . .”
“Don’t be silly. Come on.” He turned away and pulled his sleeve over his eyes. They were watering because of all the salt in the air. Not anything else. He was shaking.
“Avelyn.” Jericho could sink his voice far lower than usual when he liked. He could have spoken like Redspear did, right across the mine.
“Can’t you see when someone wants to pretend they’re all right?” Avelyn said, but not with any force.
“I can, but it’s my job not to cooperate,” Jericho said.
Avelyn supposed that was true.
Jericho watched him, but didn’t touch him. He still looked scared, not of what had happened around them; of Avelyn. “Can you see?” he asked.
See: there was an inferno behind them. “I can see,” he said. “Are you okay with the lamp?”
“Yes. Shall we see if the horses are . . . still there?”
They were both talking with a horrible forced courtesy.
As they walked towards the stables, there was nothing in the quiet but the crunch of their boots in the salt, and the snicker of engines cooling, shedding crystals.