CHAPTER 40
Caer Halen
The road did not go around the castle, but through.
There was a gate, open, higher than at any castle Avelyn had seen in Europe.
The masonry was taller than gravity should have allowed, and as they came closer, it twisted at impossible angles.
The statues that guarded the way were crowned giants, a king and a queen, just as they were in the Hringen mosaic.
The king had his head bowed and his hands open, the old sign of welcome, while the queen drew a stone bow.
Avelyn stared as they passed beneath the lower recurve of the bow.
Had there once been a Salt Queen too? He never heard that. The King was always alone.
It was all dark, too. Or rather—within perhaps ten or twelve feet of the masonry, of the road, the archways, everything, there was a corona into which the salt light could not press.
So the light channelled into rivers well above head height.
Sometimes, where the way narrowed, it looked liquid: it had currents and eddies.
Where it had space in the courtyard, it hung in clouds.
It never touched the ground, though; nor the walls, or the roofs.
“Do we go in?” Avelyn said.
Jericho nudged his horse forward. “I think we’re safer here than back there.”
They had come into an open courtyard. The snow was falling through a broken dome.
It was thick now. Avelyn twisted around.
There were windows all around them, but no lights.
It didn’t feel like anyone was here; there hadn’t been for a long time.
The snow was making drifts in the window frames and the doorsteps, undisturbed.
Salt light arced low overhead, almost low enough to skim the dome, and crashed down in the fen behind them, not nearly as far away as the last one had done.
The horses saw too, ears going back.
“Jericho,” Avelyn said, and caught his arm to stop him.
“Wait, wait. Something just landed back over there.” Another plume of salt light fired into the sky, but this time, he could see into the heart of it.
Something was there. There was a shape that flickered and changed.
It looked like a person, and then it didn’t; it was walking on all fours, and then it wasn’t; then it looked more like a machine, all spinning rings, and eyes, and maybe it had wings, and then—
Joy, joy, joy—
It was coming this way.
Avelyn felt the horse shy and slung himself down to the ground.
He was just in time to pull Jericho down too before both horses bolted, ploughing into the snow and vanishing along a cloister.
Jericho half fell and gripped Avelyn’s arms, and Avelyn was still in command enough of his own mind to help him up and squeeze his hands to apologise for wrenching him out of the saddle with no warning—but that would change in another few seconds, because the joy was already much nearer.
“Inside,” Avelyn said, pulling Jericho to the left. “Try these doors, maybe one of them is open . . .” The happiness blasting from the thing on the road felt like the wind, or like north: he could turn his head and tell which way it was coming from.
It was much better than trudging through the snow trying to run away from something that wasn’t dangerous.
“Don’t,” he heard Jericho say, but distantly, like it was happening to somebody else.
The wonderful thing was coming closer on the path. It was almost at the gate, beaming out warmth and a floaty sublimity, and God, but it was such a holy thing . . .
There was a tingling on his fingertips when he held his hand out in the direction of the light. What pulsed up his arm was everything Father Li had told him he should be feeling at Mass. Waves of love. Beautiful delirium.
At a great remove, he was aware that Jericho had lifted him right off his feet, but it didn’t matter what was going on, except that miracles were coming . . .
Jericho slammed the door shut behind them and thunked the silver bar into place across it.
Avelyn blinked twice. The room was clad in silver.
The salt light wasn’t coming in, not even through the windows.
Silver shutters. He was sitting on the floor.
He couldn’t tell how he’d got there. Jericho dropped down next to him and seized his hands.
“Look. Look at this! Could you feel that?” He rubbed his thumb across Avelyn’s fingernails, and the whites . . . crumbled.
Salt.
Horror slimed down his back. He scrubbed his nails against his sleeve, just waiting for his fingertips to start crumbling too, but Jericho must have snatched him out of the way in time.
His sleeve, though, for all it was Hreod leather, fell apart.
The silver button on it clinked onto the floor.
Underneath, his broken tattoos glowed as if they were molten.
When he picked up the silver button, he felt something earth through the ink lines, and he had to drop the button again: it gave him something like a static shock, but sharper, and the molten glow of the tattoos went out.
He clenched his hand. So the tattoos conducted salt light. No wonder Ras had been so horrified to see he’d wrecked them. Maybe the ruins of them had been just enough to save him, just then.
No: Jericho had saved him. Not the fucking King. “Thank you,” he said.
The stars that were always in Jericho’s eyes were scattering fractals now, because they were full of tears. “Don’t do that again. Please.”
Avelyn struggled to find some words. Seeing Jericho so upset blasted apart his normal thinking almost as much as the thing on the fen had done. After feeling around in the rubble, he eventually found his voice again, though when it came, it sounded rough, full of shrapnel. “I won’t. I’m sorry.”
Retreating into the mask he always seemed to wear when he was unhappy, Jericho nodded by perhaps an eighth of an inch.
There was light outside. It was spiking under the door in knitting needles. Whatever blocked the light within reach of the castle’s stonework wasn’t enough against this onslaught. “It’s right outside,” Avelyn said.
They both knelt in silence on the stone floor.
Avelyn could feel it through the wall and the silver as it moved, a ball of raging joy. It swung one way and then another, turning slowly. It was searching for something. Another turn. It was the way Avelyn spun to look for north.
“It’s lost,” he whispered. “Do you think it can get in?”
“No.” Jericho’s eyes were fixed on the door. “I don’t think it’s really there if nothing is believing it into a shape.”
He was right. The thing was grinding along the outside of the wall, but the barred door didn’t so much as judder, and nothing burst through.
The dust on the silver shutters smoked, and burned.
Avelyn had to close his eyes. He wanted to open the door, for all he knew exactly what would happen if he did.
Jericho saw and clamped both arms around him, pulling him back to lock Avelyn into place. He put their temples together. Avelyn had an insane surge of awkwardness. No one had ever touched him this much. At exactly the same time, he wanted to remember it, because they never would again.
That he could feel that was a good sign.
“It’s going. I think it’s going.”
“Can I borrow that?” Jericho asked about the camera.
He took it to the window and touched the shutters, clearly meaning to tilt them open enough to take a picture, but then he snatched his hand back with a soft cry that had agony in it.
Avelyn jolted across to him in time to see a drop of molten silver plink onto the floor.
Smudges of it were seared into Jericho’s first two fingers. He was curled forward. It must have been maddening pain, and even more maddening to know that there was snow outside, but that they couldn’t go outside.
Come on. Be a Jesuit.
Be a witch.
Belief into matter.
When Avelyn turned around, there was going to be a little hole in the ceiling behind him, because this place was ancient and derelict, and it would be ludicrous if it had survived all these centuries without some damage.
On the floor, there was going to be a heap of snow they hadn’t noticed before, and it was going to be pristine and clean and new, because the snow had been falling since he had come to Hreodwater.
In fact, hadn’t he seen that on the way in and thought, Bugger that, it’s going to be freezing in here if we have to stay long enough to calm down?
He turned back.
A tiny hole in the roof. A little heap of snow, glimmering. He scooped up a fistful and guided Jericho’s hand straight into it.
“Okay,” he heard himself saying, “you’re okay. It’ll be fine . . .”
Only, he couldn’t see how a burn from molten silver could possibly be fine. He couldn’t envisage how it could heal properly. Did you end up with silver fused into your hand forever? Surely that would get infected, and . . .
“It’s all right,” Jericho said, breathing more normally again. He gripped Avelyn’s hand with his good one. “You don’t need to do the rest. That was perfect. Thank you. Just, um . . . hold your mind blank for a few seconds. I know it looks awful, try to think about something else.”
Avelyn slid into that dead zone of thought that he had in all those endless imprisoned hours of “quiet contemplation” at the seminary, and before casting salt in the mine.
Jericho let his breath out slowly, and the wounded part-healed right there and then. He lifted the silver away from his fingertips. It had formed perfect prints. Under it, there were fresh scars, and they looked angry and sore, but there was no blood anymore, no blackened skin.
“Christ,” Avelyn whispered. “How do you do that? I could only just convince myself there was a hole in the roof.”
“I’ve lived here for years,” Jericho said with a pale smile. The wound was better, but he looked shaken. There was a sheen of sweat across his skin, and his lashes were wet.