by Brandon Mull
“What’s that?” Knox called, pointing out to sea.
Kendra shifted her attention to the ocean. The sea had drawn closer since the last time she looked. The motion of something scuttling out of the water drew her eyes. The serpentine body slithered forward, assisted by dozens of legs that crooked up to the sides like those of a spider. The ugly head was larger than a basketball, the fierce mouth full of needle teeth.
“A spider eel!” Kendra called. “It’s huge!”
“Keep a low profile,” Hako said, scrambling up out of the hole. “It’s a scout. When they spot us they will swarm.”
The eel moved in bursts, first one way, then another, mouth opening wider in rhythmic pulses. After a few moments it returned to the sea. Farther down the beach, Kendra spotted another eel coming out of the water. Then two more.
When Kendra checked on the progress in the hole, she found the steering wheel mostly uncovered. Knox shoveled furiously around it, having taken his speed potion. Kendra still had hers. Should she use it to dig, or save it to run?
An eel with a head the size of a sports bag came farther out of the water than the others had ventured, about a hundred yards to the left of the ship. Its body had to be forty feet long. Kendra kept a careful eye on it. How big did these things get? How many were out there? In hunter mode, Hako sank close to the sand and seemed to almost vanish. Kendra held very still until the big eel turned back to the water.
“It will get bad soon,” Hako whispered loudly enough for all to hear. “If we stay much longer, we will be devoured.”
Kendra realized it was now or never, so she drank the potion and slid down the side of the hole. She started digging quickly while everyone else seemed to move in slow motion. As Tanu administered smelling salts to Knox, Kendra got down to the base of the steering wheel. Shovels scraping against the stone, she and the others began clearing the petrified deck.
Most of the deck around the wheel looked like wooden planks turned to stone, but right in front of the wheel was a sandstone block, perhaps to let whoever was steering stand a little taller. Kendra saw no sign of a treasure.
Her breathing was becoming labored and her vision swam. The shovelfuls of sand seemed to quadruple in weight. The muscles in her arms strained and burned. Kendra sat down as the others slowly expanded the clear area around the wheel. They were no longer digging a hole. They were excavating an archeological site.
“Widen the radius,” Tanu said quietly.
Kendra’s head was swimming. She wanted to lie down and sleep. The effects of the potion ended abruptly. Everyone seemed to be working faster.
“Help,” Kendra murmured, her limbs exhausted. “Salt.”
Tanu put the salts under her nostrils, and alertness returned. They had cleared several feet in all directions around the ship’s wheel without revealing anything of note.
Except for the oddly placed sandstone block. Could it secretly be a box? Was it there by accident? It looked very plain.
“Here come the eels in force,” Hako said. “Time’s up. I’ll run left, try to misdirect them. Give me a moment and then run right. It’s now or never, people.”
Hako moved out of view. Newel, Doren, and Knox started clambering out of the hole.
“If you by chance should come to stand,” Kendra whispered, “beside the wheel with bold command.”
She went right up to the wheel and laid a hand on it.
“Show me the treasure,” she whispered, hoping nobody heard her. It was a long shot but seemed worth trying.
Her words had no discernible impact.
There had to be some trick to this. The poem asked for a wheel. They had found one. She was beside it. How was she supposed to make a bold command? According to the poem, that was the key to holding the treasure. Would a commander stand at the wheel? Or by the wheel? Where did she need to stand?
Vanessa and Warren climbed out of the hole.
“We’re in trouble,” Warren called down. “Hako wasn’t kidding. Hurry.”
“We better go,” Tanu said.
“Wait,” Kendra said, stepping onto the sandstone block and placing both hands on the stone wheel.
Something was suddenly different.
No, everything was different.
She could feel the waves against the beach. Feel the ships buried in the sand.
The experience reminded her of the time she had touched the Oculus. She was perceiving more than her senses ordinarily allowed. Much more.
“No joke,” Warren said. “They’re swarming. Hundreds of them.”
Kendra could feel the eels slithering over the sand, their numberless feet scrambling.
“Come on,” Tanu said, grabbing her arm.
She jerked out of his grasp. “No. This is it. Something is happening.”
“We’re out of time,” Tanu said.
“We can go gaseous,” Kendra said.
Tanu held up two flasks. “We might be cutting it close even for that.”
While talking to Tanu, Kendra continued her extrasensory experience. It was like the beach had become part of her. She could feel how deep the sand went, perceive the encroaching sea, distinguish where shells were buried. She could sense the hole filled with water left by their digging, the mounds of sand around it, the location of the petrified chest. She felt the footfalls of her fleeing friends. The hoofs of the satyrs.
And the spider eels. So many spider eels.
She and her friends were in serious trouble.
Kendra brought her focus to the hole where she and Tanu were standing. She could feel the contours of the ship in the sand. Dozens of eels were squirming toward the ship. They would reach it momentarily. She reflexively wanted to raise the ship out of the way.
And suddenly the entire ship was thrust up by the sand. Kendra not only felt the motion through her sand senses but perceived it happening around her. The sand shoved the ship upward, and suddenly she and Tanu were no longer in a hole. Tons of grainy particles cascaded off the deck to either side. Kendra helped will the sand off the deck, pushing with her mind, and the particles went flying.
The petrified ship now rested as high on the beach as it would upon water, leaving much of the vessel submerged in sand. The deck was now well beyond reach of the eels. Kendra could feel that if she used the sand to push the boat too high, it would tip.
“Did you do that?” Tanu asked, wide-eyed.
“Yes,” Kendra said. “I can feel the sand. I can sense the whole beach. But I don’t just feel it. I’m somehow connected to it. I can control the sand, almost like how I can control my hand.”
“You’re commanding it,” Tanu said. “You were right about the poem. Can you help the others?”
From her new, higher vantage point, Kendra could see her friends fleeing to the left and Hako running to the right, all retreating away from the water toward the palm trees. The seaward half of the beach now teemed with eels. Kendra saw Hako stab one in the eye with a knife after dodging its strike. He was about to be overwhelmed.
Besides seeing Hako with her eyes, Kendra could feel his steps on the sand. She forced a wall of sand up around him, the beach immediately responding to her desire. She found that by compacting the sand, she could make it hold its shape nicely, protecting Hako within a tall, open-topped cylinder. Several eels flailed against the base of the cylinder, but none made a serious attempt to scale it.
Turning her attention to Knox, Warren, Vanessa, Newel, and Doren, Kendra envisioned the beach forming an enormous sand castle around them. The creation was simple in shape but massive in scale, with an outer wall more than twenty feet above the beach and a main tower nearly twice that height.
With her friends safely behind sandy barriers, Kendra focused on the top layer of sand beneath the eels and curled it up and away toward the sea, catapulting hundreds of eels into the air over the water.
As the layer of sand flung outward into a cloud, Kendra could still feel every grain, and she pulled them back in, returning them to the beach.
“Whoa,” Tanu said. “That was amazing.”
“It isn’t hard,” Kendra said. The beach had somehow become an extension of herself. Controlling it seemed perfectly natural.
A few eels wormed back onto the beach, and Kendra raised a twelve-foot wall just shy of where the sea had encroached, compacting the grains of sand so tightly that no water could leak through. Then she bowed the center of the wall outward, pushing back the tide until there was more beach exposed than when they had first arrived, leaving the ends of the wall curved inland so the water couldn’t slip around the sides.
“I can feel the treasure box under the original hole we dug,” Kendra said.
“Can you raise it to the surface?” Tanu asked.
Kendra found it was a simple matter of pushing up the sand beneath the chest while gently squeezing the sand around it. A moment later the petrified treasure box erupted from the beach and rested in plain sight. Kendra reached out to the sand cylinder and created an archway for Hako to escape, then created a similar archway in the castle wall.
Hako emerged from his sandy confinement. A moment later the others exited the castle.
Tanu cupped his hands around his mouth. “Kendra has control of the beach. The treasure box is on the surface. Get it before the tide rises.”
Kendra was impressed by how loudly Tanu could shout when he needed to be heard. Everyone ran toward the treasure chest. Some eels started trying to slip around the ends of the seawall she had raised, but Kendra ripped up more sand and hurled them back into the water.
Kendra could feel her friends’ footsteps on the sand. She considered moving the sand beneath them to hasten their progress, but she wasn’t sure if she could do it with enough finesse to avoid harming them. She did move the treasure box toward them, but she left it still once they got close.
“I’ll eat my shirt with mustard!” Hako called out.
The group gathered around the petrified box. Warren and Tanu tried unsuccessfully to lift it.
“It’s brutally heavy!” Warren cried.
“I’ll try to pick the lock!” Hako called.
Even from up on the ship, Kendra could see the big iron lock holding the lid closed. Hako got out some gear and knelt in front of the chest. Kendra repelled more eels trying to worm around the wall.
“Got it!” Hako crowed.
He and Warren raised the lid together. Hako distributed the contents of the box to the others. Kendra could see gold and jewels.
“Mission accomplished!” Hako called. “Let’s go!”
Warren closed the lid, and everyone started racing away from the water toward the palm trees. The satyrs flanked Knox.
“We should scram too,” Tanu said.
“Let me finish up,” Kendra said.
She let the petrified ship sink into the sand until the deck where she and Tanu stood was level with the beach. Kendra made sure the seawall was holding strong, flung away some encroaching eels one last time, and stepped off the sandstone block.
The instant Kendra moved off the sandstone, she lost all connection to the beach. Even after such a short time in sync with the sand, it felt a little like losing a limb. The sand was now separate and inert, no longer hers to command.
“Are you all right?” Tanu asked.
Kendra realized she wasn’t moving. “I’m good. It was kind of a jolt losing the connection.”
“We should hurry,” Tanu said. “Without you guarding the beach, who knows how soon it will be flooded with water and eels?”
They leaped over the railing of the ship into the sand and followed the others into the palm trees. By the time Kendra reached the trees, she looked back to see water gushing around the ends of the seawall to fill the previously protected beach. Writhing eels came with the water.
“This way,” Hako said, leading them deeper into the palms, angling back toward the crossing to the larger island. “We may have been fast enough to return without waiting twelve hours.”
“What was in the box?” Kendra asked as they jogged.
Warren held up a slim stone tablet. “This has a map. And a lot of text. We’ll sort through the rest later.”
“The goal is to find the Phantom Isle,” Hako said. “The map could be the key.”
“We found some gold and jewels too,” Newel mentioned.
“Quite a good haul,” Doren said.
“You are a genius, Kendra,” Hako said. “If we had relied on my instincts, that treasure would have gone unclaimed until the end of tides.”
“That’s why we’re a team,” Tanu said diplomatically. “Thank you for leading us here, Hako.”
“I just hope the treasure guides us where we want to go,” Hako said.
They reached the white sand beach and found the strip of sand back to the island covered by an inch or two of water. Hako splashed out onto the slightly submerged sandbar.
“What about the eels?” Knox cried.
“I never see them over here,” Hako said. “Hurry.”
Kendra and the others splashed along behind Hako. At its deepest the water barely came above her ankles. When they arrived at the opposite beach, everyone stopped to catch their breath.
Kendra moved to where Warren was studying the stone tablet. The others gathered to him as well.
“The map has lots of words,” Kendra said, trying to get a good look.
“We’ll try to translate them when we get back to Crescent Lagoon,” Warren said.
“I can read them,” Kendra said.
“Being fairykind comes with some skills,” Warren said, handing the tablet to her.
Kendra noticed that the islands were simply identified as “land,” but the ocean was full of details. She recognized the shape of Timbuli from the map in Savani’s room. A trail from Crescent Lagoon ran down to an underwater settlement.
“This is a map to the merfolk village,” Kendra said. “It’s under the sea.”
“Scuba gear,” Knox said.
“Way under the sea, by the look of it,” Kendra said.
“Submarine?” Knox asked.
“It says the demon Remulon holds the compass to the Phantom Isle,” Kendra said. “The merfolk protect the secret of his lair.”
“The merfolk are not easy to deal with,” Hako said.
“There is a formula for a potion,” Kendra said. “It’s called the Elixir of Dry Depths.”
“You’re kidding,” Tanu said. “Does it list the ingredients?”
“Looks like it,” Kendra said.
“That potion is legendary,” Tanu said. “If we can brew it, we won’t need scuba gear or submarines.”
“What does it do?” Knox asked.
“Under the influence of that potion, we could move through water as if it were air,” Tanu said.
“Let me guess,” Newel said. “It won’t work on satyrs.”
“Probably not,” Tanu said.
Doren gave Newel a high five. “Nap time.”
In a quiet room in the Under Realm, Seth sat at a round, iron table with Ronodin and the Sphinx. The chairs were iron as well, cold and hard to the touch, and heavy enough that moving them was no small matter. On the table rested a lantern, a vial of ointment obtained from the Pinaki people, and Dezia’s wooden token.
“May I?” asked the Sphinx, reaching for the doll.
“Sure,” Seth said.
The Sphinx picked up the little doll, hefted it, and began examining it from various angles, tapping it here and there with his forefinger. Ronodin watched intently.
Seth glanced at the ointment. Earlier that day, he had found the royal kingfisher in a wooden cage at the appointed location and received the ointment as planned. Seth
had met up with Ronodin at Bridge Cove without difficulty, and, after boating back to the Phantom Isle, Ronodin had gone off in private to summon the Sphinx.
“You want to use the phantom to help find the Everbloom?” the Sphinx verified.
“Exactly,” Ronodin said.
“I know just the person to do this for us,” the Sphinx said. “I’ll need to keep the token.”
“Can we destroy the token after we get the Everbloom?” Seth asked.
The Sphinx shook his head. “If you throw that token in the volcano after we use it to control the phantom, you invite retaliation. The token must be kept secure to hold Dezia bound.”
Seth frowned. “I agreed to throw it in the volcano.”
“The phantom took advantage of you,” the Sphinx said. “She asked too much from you for too little in return. Fortunately, she underestimated your friends.”
“Outsmarting a phantom is standard practice, Seth,” Ronodin said. “If you’re not in charge, you’re getting played. The undead don’t call the shots. Are you a shadow charmer or a shadow chump?”
“Of course I don’t want to be played,” Seth said. “I know I’m new at this. But I don’t like going back on a promise.”
“The phantom will not be pleased you broke the arrangement,” the Sphinx said. “But she will be powerless to retaliate. We can make her very useful. An incorporeal being will have a much easier time searching those caverns for the Everbloom than we would. The heat-repelling ointment you retrieved has limits. After Dezia finds a route, you’ll have a direct path to the Everbloom instead of needing to negotiate a convoluted labyrinth where some paths lead to molten lava or volcanic creatures.”
Seth wasn’t sure if he wanted to force Dezia to find a route. Yet both the Sphinx and Ronodin seemed to think this was the obvious move. Right now, they were his only allies. Did he want to risk throwing the token into the volcano even though they thought it would be foolish? Did he want to take sole responsibility for finding the Everbloom?
Ronodin folded his hands. “Destroying the token in the volcano gives Dezia a very long leash. The phantom will have more power to haunt you if you follow her plan. Don’t let the undead set the terms. The Sphinx’s way allows Dezia less freedom to roam. And it gives you more information.”