CHAPTER 44
Caer Halen
As the salt light brightened, the castle changed.
At first they had been in soaring impossible halls, halls to make cathedrals feel small.
But as Avelyn and Jericho followed the light, the architecture aged, and they were moving through older and older iterations of grandeur.
Until, now, they were moving through rough, narrow stone corridors.
The doorways were made of three standing stones, set aslant, and in the walls, so that the tusks made a curving canopy just above them, were mammoth skulls.
The ways were so small that although the salt light still didn’t touch the walls, you couldn’t walk in the shadows anymore.
The light was pounding, and Avelyn’s eyes were streaming.
He was trying to hold his mind still, but it was more and more difficult to do.
He couldn’t tell how long it had been now, but it felt like hours, and the brighter the salt light flared, the more his eyes hurt, and the more the heat of it shifted from something like summer to the pounding of an open forge.
It was as bad now as it had been down the Saint’s Way, full of lighting flickers and aurora flashes, and sudden flares that looked like something exploding on the surface of the sun.
He was having to try and predict them and get his hands over his face before they happened.
If he didn’t, he saw nothing but purple-green stars for whole minutes afterwards.
The stone lintels were bothering him too.
They were all covered in spiral patterns.
Spirals and spirals and spirals, and in the same deep-down place that had recognised the sound of the angels’ language, he knew that they were warnings.
Turn back, because this way, the world will turn upside down.
You think you’re on an open fen, and you can even see the sky—unchanging twilight—but soon it will all turn around, and you’ll be deep underground. Up is down.
Briefly the way opened out, and they were walking along a cliff edge, outside, and down on the plain below there was ice, and mammoths walking. It was a blast of gloriously cold air. But then they were plunged back into another tunnel and the flogging heat of the salt light.
All at once, Avelyn couldn’t go any further.
The tiredness slung into him just as heavily as the ecstasy behind them.
The salt in the air was so sharp now that it was lacerating the back of his throat.
He had a drilling headache. Soon he would have to walk with his eyes shut and just hope Jericho could guide him.
The idea of doing that again made him slow down and stop, his back against a stone carved with a huge, urgent triskelion.
“I need to sleep,” he said. “I’m going to collapse soon.”
He thought Jericho was going to say, Thank God, let’s do that. Jericho, though, looked troubled. “Me too, but I don’t think we should. Can you lucid-dream?”
“Can I what?” said Avelyn. “No. Can you?”
“Only a bit,” Jericho said.
Avelyn was about to say that that made no sense. But the sense trickled down.
He believed his dreams, when he was dreaming them. Sometimes he even questioned them and realized that it had to be a dream, only for his dreaming logic to tell him not to be so ridiculous and to keep running away from the mystery monster in the jungle.
He didn’t often have nightmares, but in this labyrinth, after he had murdered thirty people and seen Annunciata turn to salt, after everything in the town, the helicopter, all those people . . . the chances of good and harmless dreams seemed slim.
“I still have to stop. I’m sorry, my head is killing me. The light is—it’s like staring into stadium halogens.”
“No . . . no, all right. You’re right.”
Jericho held his lamp up. It looked wrong. There was the screaming white salt light with its storm fluxes and then, around Jericho, his slim dark aura. He was lost in pitch black except for the light of his lamp.
“Here,” Jericho said, and turned into a side chamber. “There’s—well, there’s a fire at least,” he said, sounding exhausted.
Avelyn had a feeling that there had not been a fire, there had been nothing, maybe even no room and no door, but a fire was all Jericho had the energy left to believe, or to make Avelyn believe.
A fire it was, though, set in stones in the middle of the floor, surrounded with fur rugs.
Temples thumping, Avelyn had to keep his eyes shut as they slumped down together.
They didn’t talk for a while. The fire clicked and sighed, and sometimes snowflakes hissed as they fell into the heat through the hole in the roof.
Avelyn sat with his hands over his eyes. He could see the bones again.
“I need to find something silver soon,” he said at last. “My skull is going to explode.”
Jericho touched his forehead. He was only checking for a fever, but the second his hand was within a few inches, all the light vanished.
Darkness. Blissful, glorious, real darkness.
Avelyn caught his hand and held it there, and opened his eyes.
The headache was instantly gone. There was no light but the fire, tracing the rug and the flagstones and Jericho, who looked confused.
“Oh, my God. Just sit like that,” Avelyn said, too relieved to be self-conscious.
“Or?” Jericho opened his other arm.
Knowing he shouldn’t, Avelyn hinged sideways into his lap.
That dark halo was broad enough that it cradled him to his shoulders if Jericho leaned forward.
He breathed out gradually. The ordinary absence of a screaming headache was as good as the ras.
Jericho laid one hand on the side of his skull.
He had never enjoyed darkness so much. The fire popped and skittered an ember close to the edge of the rug.
He smiled a little at it, because it looked like something alive that had come to have a look at them.
“Will you go blind if I lie down?” Jericho asked.
“Do you—mind if I face you?”
“Nobody would mind that except you,” Jericho said, and there was weariness in his voice.
Tired of Avelyn’s exhausting neuroses, and no wonder.
He put his hand over Avelyn’s eyes so that moving wouldn’t strobe salt light at him, and lay on his side facing the fire.
Avelyn turned over to press his forehead to Jericho’s shoulder. “Okay?”
“Mm. Thanks,” Avelyn said, knowing already there was no way he could sleep like this.
Though it was cool in Jericho’s salt light shadow, his whole skin was too sensitive now.
He could feel the seams on his shirt, the place under his collarbone where the silver crucifix was imprinting itself into him at an awkward angle, the dig of the rosary beads in his hip pocket, even though it wasn’t the hip he was lying on.
He swallowed hard—the air tasted of seawater now—and took the rosary out.
He didn’t like praying it. Some people found it meditative, but he wasn’t good at hearing any meaning in words he said again and again.
Liturgical reading was much better; if he read in different languages, it was easier to see the same meaning fresh.
His Greek was garbage now, but he had liked it when he was studying.
The word for “sin” was hamartia. By the time Saint Paul was preaching, it was very much sin, a conscious decision to do wrong, but if you read the old poems from before Christ was thought of, it had been an archery word: it just meant a miss, as in, you missed the target.
You were trying but you’d twitched wrongly at the last second and the arrow didn’t quite hit where you’d hoped.
The firelight was just enough to trace the cherrywood beads. Father Li had given this to him at his ordination. He kept it close between them so the light couldn’t atomise it.
Jericho wasn’t asleep either. Avelyn could feel it from the way he was breathing. There was a tightness to his collarbones and the tendons in his throat that made Avelyn sure he was clenching his teeth.
“You think I’ve given my whole life to a horrible mistake, don’t you?” Avelyn asked quietly.
Jericho breathed deeper. “I was seeing if I could make a fire mouse.”
“A . . .?”
Jericho reached over his shoulder and picked up something.
It had started out as the ember that had skittered across the floor, but now it was a little snuffly fluff ball, still gently on fire and smoking, but not burning him.
It sat in his palm, washing its face. Avelyn smiled and stroked it.
It held onto his fingertip with both paws.
“But yes,” Jericho said. “I think it’s cruel, what the Church does.
I think it’s unspeakably horrible that it forces a life on you that you don’t want but tolerate because anything else would be even worse.
I think it’s a rancid and insidious abuse to insist that suffering is improving.
Tell that to the altar boys and the girls in the laundries.
But I can see we’ll need to agree to disagree. ”
Avelyn was quiet. No one had said it to him so frankly before, nor with so much anger vibrating under the surface.
“God forgives, though. The King doesn’t.”
“What?”
Avelyn let his breath out slowly, and then drew the next one deeper. Maybe it was time to tell it.