CHAPTER 40 #2
Avelyn took his bad hand too and cradled it between both of his.
Very unlike usual, Jericho’s skin was hot, as though he hadn’t healed the burn exactly, but just diffused it into a scald up his whole arm.
There were limits, then, to what he could convince himself of.
Avelyn pressed some new snow into his palm and watched it melt, and for the second time that night, he thought how it didn’t add up.
However long Jericho had been at An El, he had absolutely not been there when the salt light was bright enough to do .
. . this. How did he know? In ordinary times, you would have to go right down into the deep to find light bright enough to practise anything like this.
“Thank you,” Jericho said again. When he blinked, those shock tears fell and tapped onto his knee. “Sorry. I . . . I’m not so good at it when . . .”
“Oh, funny that,” Avelyn said. “I have to say I’m not spectacular at anything when I’m in screaming agony either. We’ll sit here and be garbage together. Christ’s sake.”
Jericho snorted and rocked forward.
“How did you practise all this?” Avelyn asked, soft, and trying hard not to sound as if he were being—well, himself. It sent his voice light and high. “The salt light is never usually like this.”
Jericho’s eyes ticked up to meet his, then down again. “I’ve . . . spent a lot of time in the deep.”
Avelyn frowned. “Jericho, that’s so dangerous. Even if you can hold your mind perfectly blank, there are a hundred miles of tunnels—if you got lost, no one would ever find you. They wouldn’t even look, if you were beyond the witches’ doors . . .”
“No, I know.”
“Don’t do that anymore.”
Jericho nodded.
Avelyn had the strangest feeling he had misunderstood, but he couldn’t see where there was room to.
“Sorry, I’m not trying to yell at you, I just—don’t—want anything to happen to you.
I know I don’t even know you, but . . .” He trailed off and touched Jericho’s heart through his shirt, wishing he could say that the idea of that heart failing alone in the deep was much worse than any fear he had for his own.
Jericho covered his hand but looked up at the shuttered window. “Where is it, can you tell?”
“No.” Avelyn picked up another handful of snow and threw it at the shutters. They didn’t hiss. He edged one open—the slats were fused together but the hinge still worked—to snap a photograph. The camera dutifully chugged out the image.
The thing was over the far side of the courtyard, about fifty yards away.
Moving, it was impossible to see properly.
It had been three or four things at once, fluxing and mad, but the picture had caught it in a split second.
Faces, and wings, and claws, and a coil of fabric like a cloak, and something blurred that must have been spinning.
Further away, under the gateway, there was another one, and beyond that, just a star on the fen, a third.
Avelyn almost smiled. “Hmm. An El. The angel. The King looks like these things, in Hreod images. I thought it was just Christian iconography making its way into Hreod folklore.”
“Christian iconography?”
“Have you read Ezekiel?”
“Is that a normal thing to have read?” Jericho said tentatively.
“He was a prophet. He saw these, a long time ago. Described them . . . quite well, though God knows how, unless he could see salt light.” Avelyn gazed down at the photograph.
“He knew to be scared, too.” He lifted his eyes.
“So I was right. There’s a fallen angel in our mine, maybe in all those salt mines the journalists were talking about, and now .
. . these ones have come to find them all. ”
Jericho was watching him as though he were waiting for something awful to happen.
“So ours has been waking because it can hear them coming, I suppose,” Avelyn mused.
“Like you said. Well. Problem solved in a way. No need for exorcists if . . .” He had to laugh at the ridiculousness of what he was going to say.
“If the Archangel Michael is dealing with it for us. I feel like you owe me a drink, by the way?”
“Why?”
“You thought it didn’t mean anyone any harm. Not to put a crack in your bulletproof optimism, but it’s a demon and now angels are coming for it, so I feel like I . . . win?”
Jericho had been looking down at his scalded hand while Avelyn spoke, but fraction by fraction, his eyes clawed a way up, and when they hooked into Avelyn’s, they didn’t shift again. The stars in them burned. “Why do you think they’re good?” he asked.
“Why do I think angels are good?”
“They just killed thousands of people in front of you.” Jericho bent his neck as though looking at Avelyn were unbearably heavy, but he still didn’t let his eyes slip away. “Thousands more at Wieliczka, and at where else? Why is that good?”
“It’s not. It’s not, but . . .”
“But it’s an acceptable side effect of goodness?” Jericho said, and there was the glint of armour again. “We’re all so foul we should be annihilated?”
“It’s just . . . it’s what they are. In the Bible they destroy cities; that isn’t very nice, but nice and good are sometimes—”
“It isn’t very nice?” Jericho said over him.
It was hardly louder than a whisper, but Avelyn shut up.
“What would they have to do, for you to wonder if they weren’t good?
Maybe they would . . . I don’t know, make everyone around them feel so hypnotically happy it pulls you towards them, and then they kill you when you’re close enough?
You know what that reminds me of? Those things down in the deep sea with their own lamps, so that littler things swim towards them. ”
“They’re not eating—”
“Are they not?” Jericho said, his voice hardening.
Glint: armour. The singing of something lethal on a whetstone.
“These things are made of salt light. Salt light converts belief into matter, yes? And these things do something that attracts to them creatures who can believe! Not fish or mosquitoes or carbon dioxide, they attract people. That isn’t an accident.
Trees don’t convert light into energy for the hell of it, and Venus flytraps don’t trap insects as a funny side effect of their nature, it is their nature, they do it to live—so do you not think that maybe those things out there make you feel so good not because they are good, but because they are hunting? ”
Avelyn was an overpulled longbow again. He hated talking at cross-purposes like this. “Of course they’re hunting. If this is anything like last time.”
“Last time.”
“Do you know the Sodom and Gomorrah story?”
“I swear to God if you start telling me about the sin of Sodom—”
“Sex trafficking,” said Avelyn. “That’s the sin of Sodom.
They kidnapped travellers and sold them into slavery for huge profit.
The point of the story isn’t that we should kill all the gays, that’s mistranslated Victorian nonsense.
The point is, that sometimes a place is so evil that the best thing to do is wipe it off the face of the earth. ”
“That is—”
“I know! I know it’s horrible. It’s human to say that that’s never the right thing to do, and in the story, Abraham argues with God; he says, Wait, what about the good people?
And God says, ‘Find me one.’ Abraham sends angels to warn his nephew, Lot, because he thinks Lot is a good man.
But Lot isn’t a good man. He’s horrendous.
He ends up throwing a girl out to be gang-raped.
God was right. There was no one good left. ”
“That isn’t what you think,” Jericho said quietly. “The wholesale extermination of cities—that’s psychotic—”
“Yes,” Avelyn said. “It is psychotic if a king or an emperor decides, but . . . not this. Not when God does. So maybe they are hunting, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad.”