Salt Read Online Free Page A

struggled to sit up. He stepped forward, using the sounds as a guide, and took the old man’s shoulders – bones as thin as rat bones – and helped him find a comfortable place against the wall.
    ‘Thank you, boy. You can let in light if it will help.’
    Hari found the wedge of stone blocking a hole in the wall and pulled it out. The light made scarcely any difference, but after a moment he was able to see Lo dimly – a man shrunken with age and with years of near-starvation, sitting on his bed-rags in the dust, with only a scrap of cloth about his loins. Hari wondered what kept him alive.
    ‘I don’t know,’ Lo answered, hearing the thought. ‘I will not see Company’s end. Or even the beginnings of its end. But the beginning of beginnings, perhaps.’
    ‘My father is gone.’
    ‘And you grieve. That is right. None come back. You must live by your own wits now.’
    ‘You haven’t asked where they’ve taken him.’
    ‘There’s no need. Tarl was a free man. He was unbroken. They will take him to Deep Salt.’
    Again Hari felt his innards churn at the name. His throat tightened so he could scarcely speak.
    ‘What’s in Deep Salt? Tell me,’ he managed to say.
    ‘I’ve heard all sorts of tales, and none of them true. Don’t be afraid, boy. Salt worms, salt tigers – they’re creatures that live only in men’s minds. Salt rats? Perhaps. Rats are everywhere. But know this, Hari: something is there. I’ve heard of men sucked away in the night, sucked from the places where they sleep, and they are never seen again. Those are tales too – but I have heard a whisper among the rats that such things happen. And what a rat knows . . .’ He left it unfinished, but after a moment said, ‘Tarl will be one who is sucked away. Others die at their labour and their fellow workers leave their bodies in the empty tunnels, where they lie forever. But the thing, whatever it is, will take Tarl.’
    ‘How do you know?’ Hari cried.
    ‘I’ve told you, boy, between what happens now and what will happen a curtain hangs, as black as my world has been since the cannon flash, but now and then a hand takes mine and leads me to the edge of tomorrow, and lifts the curtain aside, and I see . . .’
    ‘What do you see? Do you see my father? Do you see him now?’
    ‘Only shadows, Hari. But he seems to stand up from where he has fallen, and there’s a voice that whispers: “Follow me.” I can’t tell if it’s a friendly thing or something evil – but he stands . . .’
    ‘And follows? He follows the voice?’
    ‘So it seems to me. But the curtain closes, Hari, and the night that I live in comes back.’
    ‘I came to tell you . . .’
    ‘Yes, what?’
    ‘That I’ve promised to save him.’
    ‘Ah,’ Lo said. He was silent for a long time. Then Hari saw his mouth widen in a grimace. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that is what you must do.’
    ‘Do you see something? Is the curtain lifting?’
    ‘No, boy. Nothing comes. But I think you must do what you must do. Follow your voice when it calls.’ He grimaced again. ‘I’ll be sorry to lose you. I’ll die when you’re gone . . .’
    ‘No.’
    ‘You’ve kept me alive. Teaching you has been a reason to put my face to the hole in the wall and feel the breeze and hear the sea breaking. Hari, you alone know the things I’ve known. The men who told me the tales and the history, and the men, the women too, who learned how to reach into the minds of the animals, and taught me the skill, are dead long ago, and you are left. I found no others.’
    ‘My father. I’ve told him.’
    ‘And did he know? Did he learn?’
    ‘He learned enough to fight Company. And teach me how to fight.’
    ‘And that is all?’
    ‘He could not . . . it was too hard for him, reaching inside the rat or cat. And the stories you told me and I told him, they made him angry and he would sharpen his knife on a stone and hunt in the burrows for a king rat, and cry as he killed: “Company dies!”’