CHAPTER 49
The legend was that if you went deep enough into the mine, you came out on the fen. No one had ever said that if you pushed far enough into the salt light at Caer Halen, you reached the mine, but you did.
Avelyn had a feeling it was because nobody had ever survived it.
He found a body. The armour was a little like the images of Saint Hildegard’s, and for a few seconds he stood over it, wondering if it could be her.
Knowing he was going to have to take at least some of it—he was being slowly blinded, he could feel that, stars bursting over his eyes as often as they didn’t after the flares in the salt light—he tried to lace up what armour he had on the inside for the moment he had to see what was underneath.
When he turned it over, there was no mask, only silver cloth bound over the eyes, and that was just as well, because the plate silver was almost too hot to touch.
It wasn’t Saint Hildegard. It was a Hreod man with Brocken tattoos and the blue halite collar that the witches had worn centuries ago. He could see all that because the body was perfectly preserved, as if the man had died an hour ago. Like Avelyn was now, he was burned silver by the light.
He didn’t understand how the body was still so perfect. Was it the salt in the air? Was it just that nothing could rot down here? Or was it the King?
Trying not to think too hard about it, Avelyn unfastened the silver cloth around the eyes, but he was too ragged to hold his thoughts properly still.
A witch just like him had come here long ago and .
. . what? Maybe he had been light-walking, on his way for a witch stone to prove he was good enough, and become lost, or he had wanted to wake the King, or he was one of those so addicted to the light and the ras he had never wanted to surface again.
Maybe he had wandered for years in the incandescent heart of the mine.
In all honesty, Avelyn hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that he could die from the salt light before he even reached the King. Or—not the light. The things in it.
As if a real voice had murmured that to him, Avelyn shook his head once, impatient. No; no. The King could have whatever nightmares he wanted. After Jericho, some gear in his mind had turned. Cogs had clicked, it was built into him now, and he would never need to think about it again.
If he could believe away Jericho, then some nightmare stood no chance.
And that, he thought as he wound the silver around his own eyes and the howling headache quietened, was exactly what Saint Hildegard had done. She had looked into the King’s dreams, and just . . . decided they were nothing to do with her.
Up ahead, the way opened out into a place that wasn’t built.
No more lintel stones or carvings. It was a cave.
A deep pool of glowing water went down and down, endlessly still, and the branches of trees leaned over it.
Pearly acorns floated on the surface. In the centre there was a small island, and on the island was an altar.
What was on it was too bright for him to see.
It was just what Hildegard had described, only in her story, this place had been barely underground, right near the surface.
Here and not here; or, wherever you thought it was.
Behind him, ecstasy roared up closer.
All this salt light. He nearly laughed. All he had to do was use it. He turned back and tried what Jericho had done. You couldn’t will silver into being, it wasn’t wishing, it was . . . just knowing that matter was imaginary.
Silver raced across the wall, pouring down from the ceiling until there was an impenetrable seal of it. Outside, the angels screamed.
The King must still have wanted not to be woken, because from the water rose something terrible. Avelyn didn’t bother to look too closely at it. He believed it into some bright fish, who swam away looking much happier.
“No,” he said aloud to the altar, raising stepping stones out of the water. “You’re not going to scare me away now.”
Something horrendous reared down from the ceiling and the cave was filled with hissing whispers.
Turn back turn back turn BACK—
They were just owls.
When he reached the altar, the brilliant thing chained there was too bright.
It was like trying to look into a star, and he realized he was going to have a problem he hadn’t thought about.
To wake the King, the King had to be in a shape that could wake.
But—he was the King. He was something ancient and unearthly, not human, and for all Avelyn could believe away what he knew to be illusions, the King was real.
He had been real for longer than England had existed, he was more real than Avelyn was, raw reality, burning and shining here, and .
. . he couldn’t stare at this nuclear core of uranium-dense trueness and convince himself it could be anything but what it was.
Seeing is believing.
God, that was why it had worked for Hildegard. That was why the Witan had sent for an Outsider.
She couldn’t see salt light.
It was too bright even with the silver over his eyes. He pulled the cloth away.
It didn’t hurt, but he felt it, the moment his sight burned away.
The world went from brilliant to blotching twilight, to dark blankness, and it was a relief.
He set both hands against the altar, breathing slowly, his neck bent under the sudden floating calm of not having lightning stabbing around inside his skull. Good . . . good.
He reached out, half afraid he was going to find nothing but the heat of the raging salt light, but . . . he had been right. It was so much easier to know, without seeing, that he was going to find a person. His fingertips brushed a cool hand. He sagged.
Carefully, he felt upward until he found the chains. The clasps on the manacles were easy to open, even without seeing them. He pulled them both free.
Nothing happened.
He was so tired. What else was there?
“Please,” he said. “Jericho.”
Nothing.
Crackling away like a Geiger counter in his head was a quiet but urgent fear. How long could he keep this up, how long could he believe this thing was a person? If he stopped, if his mind slipped, he was just going to crumble into salt.
“Why did you go from being willing to do this one moment, to being determined to lie here and die the next? You’re not usually that . . . that bloody melodramatic.” His heard his voice crack with frustration.
Nothing, except the plinking of acorns as they dropped into the water. It was such a lonely sound.
Avelyn frowned into the new dark. Why had he?
It had been a senseless change of tack. A full one-hundred-and-eighty-degree pivot, inside about ten minutes.
Jericho had gone from willing to do anything to .
. . it was as if something had hacked his heart out and tossed it on the fire, but nothing had happened.
Avelyn had just told him what had happened to his clan.
Oh.
“You can’t control what you dream,” he said softly.
“You told me that. You can a little bit—maybe you were halfway to making a man in that cave years ago, but there I was and I believed you a dream so real that you could talk and feel and walk right up to the abbey and be the new doctor. I did that, not you.” He felt like he was putting down something immensely heavy, something he had been carrying for so long he had thought it was part of him.
“You weren’t—trying to trick anyone. You weren’t punishing me.
You were just dreaming. Why didn’t you just say that?
Nobody deserves to die for that. It wasn’t your fault. ”
Everything he had said. Demons, evil, vengeance.
If he hadn’t already lost his sight, he would have wanted to tear his eyes out.
“Of course you think I’m only saying it to make you do what I want now,” he said, despair-laughing.
“I don’t know what else to say to show you I mean it.
Please wake up. Please. Don’t die here.” He lifted his hand and skimmed it through the air until he found a fall of glassy hair.
Cool, though the salt light was hot. And—at the temple, the slightest change of texture, and he knew that if he could see, he would see a bolt of white.
He wanted to say a thousand times more. He wanted to say that he could see very well that Jericho thought he’d driven Avelyn into a life with a church that forgave horrors and punished innocent things, that it was unforgivable, but of course it wasn’t: he wanted to say he wouldn’t have had it any other way, because however rocky it had been, he loved the way he had taken.
He loved Father Li and teaching and reading the news in ridiculous Latin and learning how to use a cement mixer in Sudan, and more than anything, he was glad that it had all let him come back here and see.
If he hadn’t been away, he wouldn’t have been able to recognise what home was.
It would all have been useless. Jericho knew he was good at talking.
Instead, he bent down and kissed him, only once, very light, his knuckles just resting on the curve of his cheekbone.
He felt him breathe in suddenly, then cool hands cradling his throat, then the shush of silver cloth. Avelyn locked both arms around him.
“Hello,” he whispered.
“Your eyes.” It was the voice he knew and not. There were chords in it, music. It was full of grief.
“Don’t do anything for it, I couldn’t believe you into this if I could see . . .”
The King drew their heads together. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t care,” Avelyn said honestly. His hand shaking a little, he pressed his palm to the King’s chest. Thin cloth that would writhe like vapour in the faintest breeze; and bare skin, and under it, a real heart, beating. Miracles. “What now?”
The King was quiet for a long time. Beyond the silver wall, the other things like him raged, powering ecstasy right through into the chamber, Come out, come to us, come away, leave that .
. . but it all felt thin now. “I told you that I fled a war.” He let that hang in the air for a few heartbeats. “You know the war I mean, don’t you?”
Avelyn nodded slightly. He could feel that the King was remembering it, because the salt light was making ghosts around them.
There were voices like this one, voices made for singing, but they were screaming; the rush of fire, deafening artillery, and he could feel what it had felt like, to look up into the thunderheads and see the lightning-maimed legions falling.
“And . . . you know what that makes me, in your faith.”
He nodded once.
“Are you sure about this? Because if you aren’t—if you think you might stop believing me into this, then that’s dangerous.
I’m . . .” He sort of laughed. It was a viola-string shudder in the air, and in the ras, and in their bones where his hip was pressed against Avelyn’s.
“My light is far brighter than those things at the door. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous. ”
Avelyn took his rosary out of his pocket and held it in his open palm, into the salt light. He felt it lose its form, and crumble into salt.