Inkway to Albreton

Chapter Nineteen

Salina didn't remember how she got where she was and she certainly didn't recognize the place. It smelled rank. In a weird muffled sense of hearing as her ears got back to working normally, she heard a shrill voice saying something she could barely understand. She focused on the sound, keeping her eyes closed for the moment in case whoever it was expected her to be asleep.

"A bargain," it was saying, bordering on laughter with its giddiness, "Look here! A perfect human! Not a scratch on it and it's such a pretty blue!"

The voice made Salina feel sick. She swallowed and her throat felt scalded. Her tongue was dry. She had to force herself not to be too noisy about clearing her throat. She wouldn't open her eyes yet, but she could still try and figure out where she was based on touch. She was sitting, that she knew, in a substance that felt very much like the dirt back home. But she remembered enough to know she wasn't there, not unless this was all a dream.

Well, her mind had played plenty of similar tricks before. Perhaps it was her imagination running wild. But the stench... when Salina dreamed, she never smelled anything, only felt and saw and heard. It couldn't be a dream. It was too real, real as the panic swelling in her heart.

Where was Albert? And the others? Where was she?

There was nothing supporting her back and the only reason she had remained upright seemed to be because she had been positioned so that her bones fully supported her while she was limp. Her spine ached something awful now, having been slumped over for a time, and her limbs felt weak and shaky. It wasn't long before that prickling feeling came, that feeling when appendages once asleep wake for the first time in hours and everything is electric needles against your skin.

"One of you wants to buy it," said the shrill chilly voice.

"How old is this one?" Whoever that was, they sounded monstrous and deep, like a hollow in the earth, like a cavern that bellowed in the wind.

"It's new! I picked it up in Fowlina's Forest near a new hole to Otherworld. You want? I know you want." The impish voice laughed then, and the fact that it was obviously trying to be charming sent a shiver right down Salina's aching spine.

She could wait no longer. She had to open her eyes. Slowly, tentatively, afraid of what she might see given the sounds and smells around her, she pried her eyes open. They stuck closed for a moment and she feared that maybe she couldn't, that perhaps whatever had brought her to this place also sealed them shut with some type of forgotten magic. But then she realized it was only her fear and this kind of fear would do no good if she were to escape. She needed the running fear, not the petrifying type. So she steeled herself and snapped her eyes open.

And she screamed and backed away from the thing in front of her. It was a boy, except the boy was rotted and dead and attached by a curving appendage to a giant fish, a fish with teeth like daggers and tattered fins whose breath smelled of decay and rain and the distinct scent of smoothed river rocks. It dripped with water, floating in the air as if it were swimming, yet the land Salina sat upon, scurrying back now, was dry as a bone and thickly caked around her ankles. The land is shackling me, Salina thought; it wants this thing to eat me right up. I'm going to die. But it was only her clothing twisting about, clinging to her nervous sweat.

With her eyes fixed on the giant fish before her, a fish that lacked any sort of face except its mouth and the half-rotted child's at its protruding appendage, she barely noticed the little green man who looked upon it fearlessly as if it were a comrade. As if the little green man were a merchant selling something to the fish, and then Salina realized that she was the good. She was food to both of them and it terrified her.