CHAPTER 42
Caer Halen
Now
Caer Halen was not an ordinary castle.
There were no corridors, no clear network to connect different wings and towers.
The small room opened out into a hall of great pillars, vast windows letting in a wintry daylight, even though, an hour ago, it had been the middle of the night.
Not our daylight. Some of the windows were broken, and snow feathered through.
The salt light snaked overhead, far off the floor and far from the walls, a great cloud system of it—and it was brighter at the far end.
The way wasn’t clear, though.
Salt statues stood everywhere, larger than life: people, horses, carts, railway tracks, the ruins of old buildings, the harsh lines of newer ones, and on the ground, the salt had built itself into a slurry that looked exactly like white mud, riven by the cart tracks and the horses’ hooves, people’s boots.
It had all risen up through the floor exactly like those drowned images on the bridge of the Saint’s Way, but it was a fever-dream labyrinth of giants.
Each figure was twice Avelyn’s size, or more.
The proportions were different in different places, at crazy variance.
All through the air, the salt glittered, but none of it had any light of its own. It was all . . . dead.
Jericho touched a monstrous horse. It was stuck in the salt mud, frozen in the midst of a horrible struggle. All of it was like that. The people and the animals, even the structures, looked as though they were slogging endlessly and hopelessly.
Beneath a huge salt cart that lay with a broken axle across the way, Avelyn stopped abruptly, because there was a salt child crouched under it.
She was twice his size, but just recently a baby.
She was staring at nothing in the same way the salt image of Avelyn’s younger self had inside the chapel at An El.
A glimmer of light flared inside the salt figure, and he jumped, and then had to explain why to Jericho.
“Salt light reacts with belief,” Jericho said. “Maybe if there’s no one close by to believe anything . . . it goes dark.”
They were under another horse now, rearing desperately.
Avelyn stared up. The salt traced out every muscle in the horse, every stitch on the harness.
“What is all this? It’s horrible.” He turned around as he walked, then frowned when he saw, behind a pillar, small as if it were a long way off, the dome of the Witan building.
“Jesus, this is Hreodwater. But . . .” He had stop, because they had come to gargantuan railway tracks, waist high.
He had to vault over, and landed awkwardly, because the floor was lower down on the other side.
He reached back to help Jericho down. “We’ve never had trains here. ”
Jericho was gazing up at a salt engine. It reached to the ceiling, infernal, casting them into an acid-tasting shadow. “You could, though? I mean—the old trains. They weren’t electric. It was just . . . combustion. Valves, steam.”
“Yes. They—Christ, they fought this. I remember, from school. There was a group of industrialists who tried to buy all the land here, they were forcing it through somehow, but . . . people went out at night and blew up the railway tracks. Just as well,” Avelyn added, his eyes coming to rest on a butcher’s stall not far away.
It was hung with dead pigs. As though pigs weren’t people.
“So it’s an old nightmare,” Jericho said softly. “These are like fossils.”
The child under the cart coughed.
Avelyn snapped backwards and away from it, and without any more discussion they both ran for the far door, and the brighter light, while behind them the salt nightmares shifted. When he looked back, Avelyn thought some of them had a ghost of colour to them that they hadn’t before.
He closed his eyes.
Seeing is believing, and believing is true. Mind like a rock.
Back the way they had come, there was pyroclastic euphoria.
“One of those things is inside,” Avelyn said.
Jericho hauled the door shut behind them.
They came out on a high gallery above a courtyard.
Blessedly, there was nothing in it, no salt figures right on the edge of getting up and walking.
It was snowy, and in the corners were pieces of what might have been broken equipment.
In the centre stood a statue of Saint Hildegard, but Avelyn had a feeling it was a real statue, not something that had grown from the salt.
It was casting a salt light shadow, just. The light was a fraction stronger on the far side of the courtyard, through the next archway. He looked around for a way down. There wasn’t one. The gallery ran around all four sides of the courtyard, but there were no doors, and no stairs.
“Why do I feel as though dream castles don’t have to follow the rules of real castles?
” he said, beginning to feel like he had after he had been shot: feverish and echoey.
Something was coming after them; he could feel the push of the unnatural joy grinding nearer, and eventually it would be at this door, and when it was .
. . would he just open the door? Jericho was strong enough to pick him up and stop him doing it, but Jericho would have nowhere to go with him.
They were making what must have been their third circuit of the balcony, the snow stinging whenever they faced into the wind.
In a sudden clatter, ravens flew overhead and settled on a tower in what he was almost certain was not the north, though everything in his mind insisted it had to be.
The ravens were laughing a hacking laugh.
“Well, they don’t if you go around thinking about it like that,” Jericho said. “Come on, Brocken, what kind of witch are you?”
Avelyn looked up at him. “All right, dickhead. I don’t know if I can change what I believe just because it’s convenient—can you?”
Jericho looked a little helpless, but then his eyes slipped past Avelyn’s shoulder, and he brightened. “Well, it doesn’t matter, because there are stairs there. We just didn’t see them, it’s the angle of the gallery I think.”
“Oh, okay.” Avelyn turned around, then stopped. There were indeed stairs, but they definitively had not been there before. “I want to think there will come a point when I know not to believe you, but I’m worried you believe I’ll believe you too much for that to happen.”
“That’s possible,” Jericho admitted.
“So much for free will,” Avelyn grumbled.
“No, you can do it to me just as much as I’m doing it to you.”
“Can I though? Because I feel like your joy and goodwill to all humans and otherwise is bulletproof. The Devil could flap down over there, and you’d ask if he’d like a biscuit, and he would.”
“Well, believe properly then. You’re not trying hard enough.”
Avelyn didn’t look away from him, but dropped down into a crouch to scoop up some snow. Jericho realized what was about to happen and ran away, though not quite quick enough, and yelped when the snowball hit him in the head.
The ras hit Avelyn sideways and bundled him up: that was the King laughing.
He swayed. It was good, painfully good, but again, different to what was coming up behind them.
It faded again as Jericho brushed himself off, shaking snow out of his curls and muttering about Gen Z, and in its outrun, Avelyn had a wash of pure affection for him.
Adoration wasted; yes, he knew all about that.
“Which way?” Jericho asked, halfway down the steps and clearly ready to run away from him again.
The light was bright on the north side of the courtyard. Avelyn pointed, suddenly sad and tired. What time was it, and how long it had been since they’d last slept, or eaten? It felt like a long time.
He heard the chink of armour and chain mail before it reached the top of his mind.
In an abstract way, he thought what a sinister noise it was, how you’d run from it if you heard it out in some field a thousand years ago, and stand on the edge of the woods, powerless to do anything while those riders burned and salted the earth.
Then he understood and dragged Jericho into what little shadow there was in the cloister.
The knights galloped into the courtyard.
The men and the horses were so heavily armoured, it was hard even to see their eyes.
The noise of hooves and chainmail shuddered the ground, and blue pennants snapped in the torchlight and the falling snow.
Someone shouted an order in a language Avelyn didn’t know at first. After a lag, he thought it might be French.
Behind their pillar, broad but not enough to hide them if the knights were looking for anyone, Jericho drew Avelyn in front, so that Avelyn was tucked between him and the stone.
Avelyn looked back, not wanting to be human-shielded, but Jericho put one hand against the pillar, locking him into place with a glance that said, Argue with me now, and I’ll make your insides come out of your nose. Avelyn shut up.
The knights were dismounting. Some of them were trying doors around the courtyard. Avelyn watched them, mesmerised. They had dark halos, like the stag, but they looked real. They were talking to each other, taut and on the edge of panic, he thought. He couldn’t tell what they were looking for.
Both of them stayed perfectly still. The knights were kicking in doors just along from them. There was nothing shielding them from view at all but the shadows between the torches and, maybe, the knights’ assumption that there was nobody else here.
We aren’t here, Avelyn tried to think. They can’t see us, they can’t see us, just like the police in the Outside, we’re just not here, and they can’t . . .
He could feel he wasn’t doing it right. It didn’t feel like it had when he had convinced himself there was snow for Jericho’s hand before. He didn’t believe it. He was just wishing. He knew they were going to see.