The Wages of Salt

By Deborah Kalin

FIRST PUBLISHED IN POSTSCRIPTS MAGAZINE #17:

"Stories of children lost to the theriomorphs were like the ammonite fossils: everyone had their own."

Alessia Kinshin is an archaeological anthropologist at the University of New Persia, a city surrounded by salt pans and beset by theriomorphs. Half-human and half-monster, the theriomorphs prey upon the citizens and appear tied to the salt, but the exact nature of the link is not known.

Determined to learn the truth for her doctoral thesis, Alessia dares to dig at a pan still inhabited by the creatures. She makes a startling discovery: the body of a human boy, buried in the salt.

The find confirms many suspicions of the theriomorphs' nature. Layer by layer, however, it also reveals just as much about the inhabitants of New Persia.

And when the boy wakes up, Alessia must choose between conflicting values of the truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Deborah Kalin
• Release date: Apr 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310506895

Deborah Kalin

Deborah Kalin is an award-winning writer of literary speculative fiction, author of the collection Cherry Crow Children and The Binding novels. Her work has won two Aurealis Awards and has been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Awards, the Ditmar Awards and the Australian Shadows Awards. She lives in Melbourne, subject to the whims of a toddler who thinks she's a cat and a cat who thinks she's a person. Both of them whinge, mostly about sleep and food. (The toddler wants less of each, the cat more. Both want more outside time.) Kalin herself hasn't slept uninterrupted through the night since March 2012.

Book preview

Copyright © 2009 Deborah Kalin

This edition copyright © 2016 Deborah Kalin

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

Design and layout by Deborah Kalin

First published in the United Kingdom in 2009 by Postscripts, in Postscripts Magazine, Issue #18

Audio edition first published in 2010 by PodCastle, episode #117

This edition first published in 2015 by Deborah Kalin

THE WAGES OF SALT

Deborah Kalin

To avoid attention, we scavenged during the day.

Beneath the zenith sun, burnishing the soil sweeping out beyond the horizon and raising a white glare from the salt pan, we were safest. It was a time when the theriomorphs stayed holed up in the rocks on the pan’s western shore, away from the heat which made them slow and inattentive as drunkards. We started late in the morning and finished early in the afternoon. At night we camped halfway back to the walls of New Persia, and kept our fires inside the tents, to remain hidden.

It was hardly ideal. The heat took its toll on us, too. No matter how many bladders I poured down my gullet, the back of my throat was always dry and creaking. The few fossickers I’d found daring (or desperate) enough to work did so with dull eyes and sluggish, imprecise cuts. I’d seen men oppressed by a head full of last night’s fumes with more energy.

And so far we’d dug up only an endless stream of ammonite fossils, pottery shards, discarded amulets, and salt. It didn’t bode well for the prospect of a bonus—and that didn’t bode well for morale. We could have made a similar haul, faster and without danger, at an abandoned