by Ryan Calejo
We’d run into some sort of giant birdcage!
Violet gripped one of the huge ivory bars and shook it with all her strength. “THE HECK?” she screamed, her eyes desperately searching for a way out.
Something heavy and squishy plopped onto my shoe. A moment later, something even heavier and squishier plopped onto my head. I flinched, heard a deep, throaty “riiiibbbbiittt,” and then Violet was shouting, “Charlie, it’s raining frogs again!”
“I noticed!” I started to shout back, but stopped as voices echoed painfully through my brain—a chorus of frantic, raspy, whispering voices. And the creepiest part? They were familiar voices… the same ones I’d heard back in Lapa do Santo. The same ones I’d heard underwater when our junky shell of a boat capsized off the coast of Chile.
Grimacing, I clapped my hands over my ears. “What is that?”
Violet frowned, glancing back at me. “Huh?”
“The voices… Can’t you hear them?”
“Charlie, I don’t hear any voices…,” she said, sounding grim.
I looked up, looked around—and felt my heart stop. The giant birdcagelike thing we’d run into wasn’t a birdcage at all—not even close.
It was another castell.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The voices had to be coming from the castell. It seemed like every time we got close to one, I started hearing them. But why? And more importantly, why was I the only one who seemed to be able to hear them…?
The fact that we’d now run into our third castell in South America—and the biggest one yet—wasn’t at all lost on me; but we had even bigger problems.
The anchimayen had caught up to us. They gathered at the entrance, spreading out to block our escape. Mario picked up a hunk of bark, set it on fire with just his touch, and then flung it our way. The flaming projectile hissed past my face, missing by only inches. A warning shot, obviously.
“Dude, chill!” I yelled, holding up my hands. “You’re going to burn someone’s butt off!”
He grinned mischievously. “That’s the idea, hermano.”
“Just stop it, okay? Stop!” Violet shouted, breathing hard now. “Listen to me: We don’t mean you any harm. We’re not looking for any trouble. But there’s something you should all know. He’s the Morphling, okay? This guy. Right here. And if you all don’t stop messing around and shooting fireballs at us, you’re going to get him angry, and he’s going to morph and put a serious beating on you kids!” She clapped her hands together a few times to drive home the point. The sound was surprisingly loud in the silence. And not one of the anchimayen moved or even seemed to breathe for several seconds as their dark little eyes looked me up and down, probably trying to decide whether to believe her or not. Then they all burst into laughter. Every. Single. One.
“The Morphling!” Mario cried, bent over, both hands wrapped around his belly. “That’s too good!”
“Hey, what’s so funny?” I shouted. “It’s true!”
“It’s not funny, amigo,” said another one. “It’s freaking HILARIOUS!”
I glared at Violet.
She shrugged. “What?”
“You’re embarrassing me.…”
“How?”
“They’re all laughing at me now!” Irritated, I glared around at them. “What? You guys never heard of the Morphling…?”
“Oh, sí, sí,” Mario said, fighting to catch his breath. “We heard of ’im. It’s just that… YOU?” His laughter pealed out again, a high, crackling sound that made him sound all of five years old. He reached up to wipe a tear from the corner of his eye, but it evaporated off his skin before he could get to it. “Oye, I gotta ask—where you from, amigo…?”
I crossed my arms over my chest and said, “Miami. Why?”
“Nah, I was just wondering why you owner let you go so far from home without your LEASH!” he shouted, and the rest of the anchimayen basically erupted. They were all laughing so hard now that dark smoke was pouring out of their ears in thick billowing columns.
Then Mario squatted down and started snapping his fingers and whistling like he was trying to call a dog over. “Come here, boy!” he shouted at me. “You wanna play fetch? You wanna? C’mon, less play!” He was making this big dumb show of it, too, tossing stick after flaming stick at my feet and whistling and clapping his hands, but I just didn’t get it.
“What kind stupid burn is that?” I snapped. Then, glancing down, I saw Alvin’s dog collar hanging from my neck and felt my ears go red. “Oh.”
Meanwhile, the rest of Mario’s gang were still laughing up a storm—or rather, a dense smoky cloud that hung over the treetops like a roiling blanket.
“Ay, amigo, you so funny.…” Mario sighed, trying to catch his breath. “It’s going to be a shame to roast you, ¿sabes? But, oye, if you really the Morphling—and not just someone’s runaway perrito—then this should be no problem for you.…” He held out one hand, palm-up, and big surprise, from between his mud-caked fingers rose a long, flickering tongue of reddish-orange flame. As I watched, the flame grew hotter and redder and denser until it had swelled into a single burning sphere that reminded me of a flaming comet. On a danger scale from one to ten, the thing looked like a solid fifteen.
“Hey, hey, hey! Hold on there!” I shouted. “I’m having problems with my—my manifestation, okay? So put that out right now!”
“Santi,” Mario said to the anchimayen standing beside him, “how you like your empanadas?”
“Extra crispy,” answered the grinning, reddish-haired girl with the fire hazard T-shirt, and raised one flaming fist.
I barely had a chance to shove Violet out of the way before twin pillars of hellfire came spiraling toward me.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The sound was huge. Deafening. On instinct I threw my arms up, squinting my eyes and praying it would all be over quickly. I wondered how badly being instantly fried to a crisp would hurt and suddenly felt very sorry for every chicken the Kentucky Fried colonel had ever gotten his hands on. The flames washed over me in a wave of incredible heat. Sweat instantly broke out all over my body. My entire world became a fiery orange blur. At any moment I expected to see the skin on my arms start to peel back as it melted off my bones.
But then something weird happened: Mario stopped shooting at me. Just like that. They lowered their hands and just sort of stood there, staring at me with looks of total confusion on their chubby little faces. Almost like they’d spent the last hour listening to me trying to escape the space-time continuum.
“Charlie!” Violet rushed over, but at first she was too scared to touch me—probably scared she’d hurt me. Or that I was in pain. But I wasn’t. “Charlie, your skin!” she cried.
I had a moment of terrible panic and shouted, “Is it HORRIBLE?”
And when she sort of shrugged like she wasn’t sure, I risked a peek and saw my skin was as black as coals, yet shiny somehow… not fried to a crisp, but smooth and supple, moist even. I ran a fingertip along my forearm.… It was soft as velvet.
“Looks like… stingray skin,” Violet breathed, and she was absolutely right! I’d seen enough of them in the Florida Keys to know that stingray skin was exactly what it looked like. And there was one awesome fact I’d learned from my dad about stingrays, which I’d never forgotten, would probably never forget: Stingray skin is completely fireproof!
A moment later the youngest of the anchimayen waddled up beside Violet. His cheeks were soot stained, his eyes all round and big. He cautiously reached one tiny, dirt-smudged hand out, touched my arm—and gasped. “How—how you do dat…?”
“Tienes que ser El Cambiador, ¿no?” breathed the one called Santi.
“¡Tienes que ser!” shouted another.
“Bro, so you really the Morphling…?” Mario asked, shaking his head.
I straightened, stood up nice and tall, and said, “That’s what we were trying to tell you! Maybe you guys should try listening more and ROASTING less!”
Beside
me, Violet was grinning from ear to ear. “You tell ’em, Charlie!”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Once the anchimayen finally accepted the fact that I was a Morphling, they were actually supercool (no pun intended). They offered to throw a great feast in our honor and said they’d gladly charbroil our choice of forest creature—flamingos were their specialty. We turned them down; you’d be surprised how cruel it sounds to charbroil an animal when you’ve recently been on the receiving end of a scorching fireball. Plus, neither of us was all that hungry. (Probably another side effect of almost being roasted alive.) But we did have some questions for them, the biggest of which being Why was there a castell in the middle of their island? Unfortunately, the anchimayen didn’t have an answer to that, and they seemed as terrified of the castell as we were. Mario believed that it had been built by the same people who had murdered their brujo, because one of them had seen “the hooded ones” come in this direction when they’d left the island. The anchimayen just wanted to get away from the thing as quickly as possible.
So we walked with them for a while and talked, and Violet and I explained how we believed that the same beings—or being—that had kidnapped Queen Joanna were probably the ones who had killed their warlock. Mario informed us that La Junta had recently been called, a summoning of warlocks from all over the world. He said they had been discussing something of great importance and that he believed that was why their warlock had been killed—something to do with a vote they were about to have, some big decision. He also said they would do whatever they could to help us find our queen and avenge their fallen brujo.
Then he and the rest of his gang began to whisper quietly among themselves, and Mario turned to us and said that there was something he wanted to show us. They led us through the Chilean jungle with only the moon’s pale glow lighting our way, and we eventually wound up back at the spot where we’d all first met: the Warlock’s Cave.
The entrance to the cave—just like in the legends—was guarded by a ravine with a fast-flowing river. Mario squatted by a large hole on our side of the ravine and began making all sorts of strange sounds—deep grunts and groans, guttural barks.
Which was freaky to say the least. But even freakier was when his grunts and groans were answered by deeper, more guttural ones from somewhere inside the dark hole.
A heartbeat later several squat, hunched figures appeared at the entrance to the hole. They just sort of sat there, half hidden in shadow, like they were scared to leave the familiar comfort of the darkness. Then all six suddenly scuttled out, revealing themselves in the moonlight—and my heart gave a painful jolt.
Invunches!
“What the heck are those things?” Violet breathed, retreating a step.
“Invunches,” I whispered back. “They’re deformed servants of the sorcerers. They guard the entrance to the Warlock’s Cave.”
“Really? Those things?”
“Yeah, the brujos do all these different rites and rituals on them to change their nature, make them super loyal. But they’re not things—they’re actually human.” Though you definitely couldn’t tell by looking at them. All their limbs were bent at weird angles, and they walked on their hands (well, their knuckles), using only one leg, because the other had been twisted around behind their backs so that the heel of their foot appeared attached to the base of their misshapen heads. Their bodies, compact and muscular and covered in coarse hair, were more apelike than anything. They wore simple leather tunics and nothing else.
“They are the only ones who can take us into the cave,” Mario explained. “They can run through the magia. Pick one,” he said. “Climb on.”
Violet did, so I did too, forcing myself to wrap my arms around its wide, hairy, sweaty shoulders and wrap my legs around its even wider, hairier, and sweatier waist. The moment I was “on board,” the invunche let out a deep, apelike grunt, popped up on its knuckles, and jumped back into the dark hole.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The hole—or, as I quickly discovered, the tunnel—was as dark as blindness. My eyes couldn’t make out a single thing. Not the walls, not the ceiling, not the floors—nada. The invunche, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be having any problems with the total and complete lack of visibility, because he had already begun to pick up speed, scuttling awkwardly (yet amazingly quickly) through a series of twists and turns that left me a little bit dizzy and a whole lot lost. I held on tight, feeling the incredible power of the man-beast beneath me as its bulky back muscles bunched and released, as its thick shoulders rolled and its single powerful walking leg kicked, thrusting us forward in a sort of long, loping run that had cold, stale air swirling through my hair and whistling noisily in my ears.
Finally, we escaped the heavy darkness of the tunnels, spilling out into a large stone room lit by skinny, candles as tall as people. Dominating the chamber was a great stone table in the shape of a crescent moon. No chairs stood around it. Just marks on the stony ground: shapes and lines, unfamiliar letters, symbols. One matched the marks on the backs of the anchimayen’s hands.
Upon the table sat a single leather-bound book, which was thicker than any dictionary I’d ever seen: the infamous sorcerer’s book of spells, I realized. Had to be.
Beside it was a large crystal bowl filled with water. Legend had it that it had been filled with the tears of the first warlocks of Chiloé. With a soft whimpering sound, the invunche lowered himself onto his butt, and I hopped off, turning back toward the tunnel just as Violet’s invunche came scuttling out of the darkness. Violet, of course, was practically beaming, her hair a wild, free mess around her face. The girl lived for stuff like this.
“They should sooo have a ride like this in Orlando,” she said, hopping down next to me.
There was a soft cooing sound above us. We looked around. Shallow recesses had been carved high along the walls of the cave, and perched among these were dozens and dozens of those hideous sorcerer-head birds. Most were asleep, but a couple watched us from the corners of their strange red-ringed eyes. “Ugh, those things again,” Violet groaned.
“The ancient ones keep watch over this place,” Mario said as his invunche emerged from the tunnel. He hopped off, grinning at us, his pupils like dark tongues of fire. “They guard El Libro de los Hechizos and the Seeing Bowl.”
I noticed the ceilings were hung with paintings—hundreds of them, all shapes and sizes. Some were layered two, three, or even four deep. Many of the frames were cracked, a few had finger-size holes in the canvas, but the colors were so bright and vivid that even in the dim candlelight I had to wonder if they’d all been freshly painted. Mario saw me staring up at them and said, “Those you must never touch. That’s why we hang them so high. They not oil and canvas.… Those are memories.”
I shook my head, confused. “You mean, like, real memories?”
“Oh, sí… If a brujo or bruja wants to forget something, they make one of those—a lienzo, they called. This way, their minds can be free, but they are kept here in case they ever need to remember it again.” He motioned for us to follow. “Vamos.”
As the gang of anchimayen led us toward a passageway in the back, Santi saying something to Violet about this place being almost as old as the island itself, two chonchones, one black haired, the other blondish, flew down from their perches to land in the center of the stone table. The dark-haired one (who I was pretty sure was the one that had crashed into our window back on the train—it was hard to forget a nose that busted up and crooked-looking) glanced up at me and said, “Pequeño, óyeme… listen here.”
“Sí, listen to him,” cooed the other. A long tongue, forked and purplish, flicked briefly out from between its beaky lips. “Listen closely.…”
Then the familiar one said, “There is a traitor in La Liga—a traitor among your friends.…”
Which stopped me dead in my tracks. “What’d you say?”
“One from within has turned against the rest.… They have begun to pull away from the
others. It was inevitable.”
“How… do you know that?” I asked with a shaky voice.
“Because the Seeing Bowl allows one to see.…”
Frowning, an uneasy feeling rising in my chest, I stared down at the fine crystal, my eyes almost drawn to it, pulled like magnets. “To see—what?”
“Secrets…,” answered the other chonchón. It skittered to the edge of the table on its stick-thin legs, angling its large, misshapen head to look straight up at me. “Can you hear them, pequeño…?” it asked in a screechy whisper. “Can you hear the voices?”
I nodded slowly, sort of freaking out that this head on legs knew that. “Yeah… Can you?”
“No,” said the one from the train, “but we can feel them. The earth is littered with their bones. We walk upon the graveyard of the ages, largest in all the world.”
The other chonchón said, “You have many questions, pequeño.… The bowl is an infinite reservoir of knowledge. Perhaps it holds the answers you seek.”
“Peek inside,” whispered the familiar one. “Behold its secrets.…”
The water in the bowl began to swirl hypnotically as I bent over to peer in. At first I didn’t see anything, but as I leaned closer, I did see something.… Glittery, glistening, silvery lights were dancing across the surface of the water. I thought it might be moonlight, but that was impossible; there were no cracks or openings in the ceiling of the cave. But even more interesting, as I watched, still trying to figure out what those lights were (or at least where they were coming from), they began to form images… A large, hairy hand. And it was holding some kind of knife: A wicked-looking thing with a gleaming silver edge. I watched it raise the dagger high, and next thing I knew a man was tumbling, face-first, off a great gilded throne embroidered with what looked like a Spanish coat of arms. The crown, which had sat atop his head, glittered faintly as it fell, striking the ground with a resounding clang, and the man, obviously wounded—or worse—fell beside it, lying motionless on the red-and-gold mosaic floor. His attacker, however, remained in shadow. Only their hand was visible.