CHAPTER 54
Caer Halen
There was a man at the castle gate. He was dressed in heavy tailoring that winked gem colours in the light of the torches, and the last of the sunset.
The wind pulled at the hem of his cloak, whose silver lining rippled.
To either side of him, the fen was gold and lilac.
He might have been something from a dream.
Although the way he was dressed made him seem tall, he wasn’t.
He was sharp and delicate, and certainly Hreod, with the long swan neck and violet eyes, but he was paler than anyone she had seen here years ago.
Here: no. She had never been here. There had been no dream citadel on the fen when she was a child, only the mist and the reed beds.
“Hello,” the man said. Balanced on his hand as if it were telling him things was a raven; the raven from before. There were lights in its eyes that were not reflections. “Are you Doctors Osho and Akhbar?”
She didn’t recognise him until she heard his voice. “Yes. You’re—Avelyn Brocken.”
“I am. We’ve been hearing about you for weeks. Welcome to Hreodwater.”
“How did you know we were coming just now?” Sally said.
Avelyn lifted his hand slightly, showing them the raven. He did it with something like apology, and Tallis was disproportionately grateful. He knew it was strange; he was trying to be careful with them.
The raven tipped its head, nudging his knuckles. He stroked its chest. He was holding it more gently than Tallis had ever seen an adult man do anything.
“This . . . isn’t real,” she said. “None of it is. Even that bird.”
“Things can be true without being real,” he said in his ancient-sounding accent, and she could feel then that it was him.
He was pushing back. She wouldn’t have been able to crumble even the edge of a single battlement if she’d tried her hardest. Right across Europe, she hadn’t thumped up against belief like this before. It was stone-solid.
“What . . . are you—I mean, what are you doing?” Tallis said, on the edge of scared now, because if she couldn’t do it here, if it didn’t work . . . “How are you doing that? The mammoths, the . . .”
“Believing,” he said. “But we call it witchcraft here. Speaking of which—you don’t need to wear silver. It’s safe.”
“How? There’s salt light everywhere, it would be lethal in hours,” Sally said.
He was looking through the camera, and frowning.
Behind Avelyn, the castle was just the castle.
There was salt light in wisps in the air, but it was above person height, and never close to the walls or the floor or the roofs.
“Dreams repel salt light,” he said, then shook his head slightly.
“I mean things that have been created with salt light, push it away. Like antimagnetism. On an animal, there’s a kind of dark halo.
” He touched the raven’s chest again. “In a building, though . . . the void is proportionate to surface area. Make a big enough structure, you can push it ten feet off the ground. As long as you’re inside the fortress, you’re safe. ”
She stared up at the gargantuan architecture. “You built—all this? The paths here, the castle, the . . . all those angels in the trees?”
“Only some of it. There’s about forty of us now. But no one like you,” he said. “No one who can look at something right in front of them and destroy it.”
“I could never do this,” she said to the great citadel and its towers.
“You can, you just need someone else to trick you,” he said lightly.
“I was hoping . . . you might consider staying. What you could do with all the salt light here—you’d be rocket-powered.
You cleared Islington of angels in an hour, I heard.
From here, you could clear whole cities.
Between all of us, eventually, we might even be able to put the world almost back together. ”
She looked at Sally, who smiled.
Tallis’s mind churned with the chemical possibilities around what the salt light did here, but as Avelyn led them into the castle, it was impossible to think of anything but the immensity of the structures.
On either side of them, even the statues guarding the gate were titans.
The towers vanished away into the fog. As they passed beneath the arch, and the first courtyard came slowly into view, so did high, high statues of figures who might have been gods, or saints, or cautionary tales.
A woman turning into a swan. A man trapped partly inside an oak tree.
And everywhere, just on the edges of hearing as always, that singing.
Not like the little angels in the trees.
This was the voice she had heard all the way from Jordan.
Then, up a set of steps and into a great hall, there were people.
Hearths flickered bright every twenty feet, and suddenly the way was busy—children in lessons, smiths working at anvils, weavers at looms, everyone talking, trading.
Way up in the rafters, black owls with violet eyes gazed down, and sometimes swooped to steal a piece of fish from a fire, or to charm it from someone’s hand.
She swore she saw an octopus making off with a silver camera.
“This place . . . what’s generating all the salt light?
” Sally asked. He was looking at it through his phone, and the effect was bizarre.
The walls, floor, and ceiling each repelled the salt light to a distance of about ten feet, leaving an almost perfect square block of it hanging in the middle space, safely away from everyone.
There was so much of it there, though, that it stormed and churned, beautiful in the way only lethal things could be.
“The quantity you must need to keep a structure like this stable—I mean, it’s more than we’ve ever seen. ”
“People are saying you—well, that you have an angel here,” Tallis put in, and heard how idiotic it sounded.
“We do,” Avelyn said. He held his hand to the side, and the raven launched into the air, but instead of flying . . . the shape of it became confused and smoky, and then instead of a raven, there was a man. For whole seconds, he had black wings.
He was tall and slim, dressed in black, with black hair down to his waist in wild curls, black eyes burning with lights that were not in the hall.
The hem of his cloak brushed the flagstones.
Just above his temple, there was a white bolt in his hair, and sewn into the beautiful robes down his left side were tiny, glowing stars, as if he had trapped angels inside beads.
Tallis almost fell over backwards. She had seen uncanny things, things born of madness between here and the desert, monsters, miracles, the beliefs of humans and of whales, of crows, even of bees, but she had never seen control like this.
She couldn’t tell if it was Avelyn who had believed the change of shape so exquisitely, or the man, or if they did it together, but it was bulletproof.
Even though her whole mind was howling that it couldn’t be real, he was real.
She could see the individual strands of white in his hair.
“Dr Osho,” Avelyn said, smiling again. There was a new warmth in his voice. “This is the angel of Hreodwater, and the architect of this castle; the Salt King.”
Tallis waited to feel her bones crumbling, but nothing happened.
The King wasn’t what the others were. There was no bizarre flickering of undecided shapes, no spinning, no sudden snap of wings and tails and impossible teeth, no blast of eviscerating joy and salt light.
He was a person. If she were to put her hand out, she would be able to find a pulse in his wrist, and listen to his heart, and if he were hurt, he would bleed.
A person, but not human. He was . . . more.
Later, she spent a long time trying to articulate the way he seemed, and failed.
It was Sally who said: Imagine if you could perceive only a one-dimensional universe, and you had to represent a whale face on.
It would be a single short line. That was right.
Beyond the restricted dimensions of the man, there was a leviathan.
The King smiled. When he spoke, those choirs she had been hearing since the desert were in his voice. “Or just Jericho.”