CHAPTER 53
Outside Hreodwater, England
Three months later
London had been sticky with heat. Flies had swarmed over the forest of salt pillars in Trafalgar Square.
Tallis knew that they were nearing Hreodwater when she started to feel a coolness in the air, even through her suit.
They were walking along what had once been a road but was now an empty strip of concrete with moss and weeds encroaching from the verges.
A herd of little deer with odd noses had clustered in the central division and watched them come, not worried.
One hopped onto the bonnet of an abandoned car, which clanged up and down the silent road.
Through the car, something that might have been part tree, and part something more like antlers, grew.
It would be something to do with the beliefs of deer.
They looked all right, she thought, the deer; the salt light hadn’t wiped them out, at least. That wasn’t the case in London. They had found salt foxes, salt cats, salt pigeons.
She itched to take her helmet off. The glass visor was silvered, just like the suits—just like almost everything they carried now.
She called them suits, but they were nothing like the old radiation suits.
Old: God, she already saw the world of three months ago in the same way she saw the nineteenth century.
Irretrievably gone. Even though she could remember all the stepping stones that had led them here, it felt distant.
Time had crushed in on itself. A day now seemed to have as much in it as a year back then.
The first thing they had done when they left the desert was break into a museum.
They’d stolen Roman armour replicas from the exhibits, because they laced on and they were easy to resize: though it was Sally who needed the resizing, because Romans had been short.
Greaves, gauntlets, anything they could find, they had taken it all to an abandoned photography store and, in the absence of anything better, Sally had used silver nitrate to get a good layer of silver onto it all.
That was early on, before everyone else had realized that silver nitrate was now worth more than diamonds.
Pharmacies and hospitals stocked it too, because it was an antiseptic, but within a couple of days, there was nothing left, and more and more often, you saw people who had brushed it straight onto their skin.
Sally had reduced the liquid silver nitrate to pure silver with ammonia and sugar—he said it was how they’d made daguerrotypes in the old days—and so the finish was mirrory, but if you left it on skin, it went black.
She still wasn’t used to seeing blacked-out faces.
For all she knew exactly why people were doing it, it always gave her a knee-jerk jolt of unease.
Sometimes there were people like them, people who were well equipped, but shockingly few. Because how did you find out how to silver a glass visor when there was no internet left, no working electronics, and going to a library meant going outside, into the salt light?
She used to have lunchtime conversations at the agency about what would happen if people today had to function solely with what they knew, not what they knew how to find out. Everyone had been smug. They knew atomic physics.
Fuck-all good that was. Now the world was in the hands of silversmiths, mirror makers, and people like Sally, who just happened to be interested in the history of photography.
After a lot of experimentation, Sally had even found a way to silver phone screens. That sounded wonderful until you realized that charging a phone was a gauntlet nobody wanted to run more than once a month.
That was why they had stopped for so long in London. You could still get electricity there, in the Underground. A lot of people had survived down there—or a lot in comparison to other places, and surviving was a generous term.
There had been a lot of bartering, and a lot of running away. There always seemed to be that now. She had grumbled so much about “late-stage capitalism” before, hilariously blind to the astonishing, peacekeeping brilliance that was an economy.
Sally held up his shielded phone and nudged her.
A spectacular aurora of salt light danced up ahead.
“Do you think it’s true?” Tallis said, low, because there was an overpowering instinct not to speak loudly in the stretching quiet of the road. “There’s a friendly one there?”
Sally shook his head a little. “Well—whatever’s there, we haven’t seen any angels for two days.
Oh, feel that. Oh, that’s good.” He lifted his head and smiled into the cold wind, which was cutting through the silver-woven shirts they were wearing under the suits.
“I hope everyone’s right, I hope it is always winter there. I want some snow.”
For all it was only March, the heat had been miserable in London, weighed down as they were with silver protective gear.
You couldn’t get anywhere close to the big cities without it now; turn a corner in Istanbul, in Milan, in Paris, and there would be angels haunting the spires and minarets.
Although Sally was right and there had been none in the last couple of days, salt light still hung in the air like vaporised benzene.
“Tallis,” Sally said. He pointed at the road.
In huge letters, in chalk, someone had written:
TO HREODWATER. THE SILVER PATH IS SAFE.
Tallis could already see the mist coiling up ahead. It was good to know others had come this way too.
“Safe, how can it be safe?” she said.
“Let’s see,” said Sally.
The way into the mist and the cold led into a thicket of trees.
The trees were bone-coloured. Different substances seemed to turn into different kinds of halite, and living wood was disconcerting.
Dead wood would turn to dust, but a living tree became something that looked like pearl.
Little spectra swam in the surface. She didn’t think it was reflecting sunlight.
Strewn across the ground were white leaves and white acorns. Sally picked one up.
“They’re alive,” he said, gazing up into the snow that was flecking their visors now. The cold was sharpening. “Do you think . . . it’s something to do with what trees believe?”
“Maybe,” Tallis said. Three months ago, she would have laughed at him for talking about trees going around believing things, but she had seen too many eerie miracles now not to wonder.
“Things are certainly adapting here.” She watched a squirrel with violet eyes skitter along a branch. “Do you think it works on people too?”
“Well, historically it must have,” Sally said. “That’s what the Hreoda are, right? Maybe they know.” Then, “Can you hear something?”
She could, in the place in her mind that hallucinated.
It was somewhere between singing and chirping.
They both looked around, trying to trace it, but as with all not-quite-sounds, you couldn’t hunt it out very well.
There was something angry about the noise, though.
It put her in mind of quarrelling swallows. Thinking of birds made her look up.
“Oh, fuck,” she said, and jolted backwards, thudding into Sally.
“What, what . . .” He followed her eyes upward.
There were angels in the trees, and she could see them.
They were points of light high in the branches, luminous through the mist. Hundreds and hundreds of hundreds, only . . .
Only, they were tiny. They were still angels, they were still the shapes she had seen on hundreds of silver-clad pictures now, but the ordinary ones were three times the size of a human.
These . . . their miniature spinning parts could have been the very finest clockwork.
That twittering was their song. A flock of them spiralled down to look at Tallis and Sally, but they stopped shy of the road, clustering right at the edge, cheeping, sometimes beating little wings, or lashing tiny lion tails, wheels and eyes and wheels and eyes.
Tallis couldn’t tell if they didn’t dare to come closer, or if they couldn’t.
The path was inlaid with silver. It made a glorious, snaking mosaic through the forest. Something to do with the silver?
“Someone made them small,” Sally said. The lights danced and fought in his eyes.
“And visible,” Tallis said, half enchanted and half confused.
“How?” He was looking at her as if she ought to know.
“I have . . . no idea.” She stared at them. They were no bigger that hummingbirds, and she wanted to go to the edge of the road and see if she could pick one up, because it would be fascinating to see how one actually worked, not to mention invaluable—
“Damn. Tallis! Tallis.”
She snapped back to herself and realized Sally was gripping her arm, stopping her going any closer.
“Little bastards,” she grumbled. She glared at the angels. “You aren’t real.”
A swathe of them vanished, and the rest took flight into the trees, shivering and squeaking.
Sally showed her his phone. Through the screen, the silver road was repelling salt light: all through the woods, it was brilliant, but in a narrow corridor, it avoided the road.
Safe, just like the sign had said. She was about to ask Sally how the hell that had been done when she realized he was staring at something beyond her shoulder.
“Oh, my God. Look. It’s true.” There was pure joy in his voice.
Above them, a raven took off and soared away into the mist. Tallis frowned, because it wasn’t a real raven; it had that memory quality to it that everything conjured by salt light did, but who was just—imagining ravens?
She forgot about it, because Sally was grinning, his sea-glass eyes all alight. “They’re just over there.”
And they were. Giants, pacing through the mist, impossible ghosts of what had been lost ten thousand years ago.
Tallis’s instinct was that they weren’t real, and in the salt light, that should have been enough to crumble them to nothing, but .
. . someone pushed back. She felt it. It was a little shove of belief against her disbelief, the most extraordinary feeling for all it was small.
Whoever was doing it, they could believe harder than she disbelieved.
Up ahead of them through the snow, leading the way to Caer Halen, the mammoths walked on.