“Of course,” Tessier said. He held out a hand. The captain took it and they shook. A pale, reddish gray light lit up between their palms.
The captain looked at Tessier in shock.
“I’m sorry, captain. A living crew has become a liability,” Tessier said. “I’m afraid I need something a little more pliant.”
The captain opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. He staggered, knees buckling, and then fell face-first onto the deck.
Tessier waved a hand across the width of the ship in front of him. He could hear the soft thumping as bodies collapsed, lifeless. In the blink of an eye, Tessier was alone on this ship.
And then with another arcane gesture of his hand, the dead began to rise. Without a question, without missing a beat, each corpse went back to doing exactly what it was doing before, preparing the ship to sale. Their eyes were vacant and cloudy white. Their movements were slightly jerky, just a little off, and they kept their heads bowed in a subservient manner. The captain made no eye contact as he shuffled off to the bridge.
“That’s better,” Tessier said, smiling wickedly. “That’s much better.”
Chapter 40: Return to the Scar
The Endless arrived in the waters above Atlantis and Poseidon’s Scar as deep storm clouds began to threaten overhead. Echo heard Barnabas ordering the ship’s ghost crew, directing them to bring the ship as close to directly above the Scar as he could remember.
Nearby, Echo saw Muireann practicing the detection spell Barnabas has taught her to guide them to the Needle. Barnabas admitted, without shame, that Muireann is inherently a stronger spellcaster than he is. His range of experiences, however, gave him access to a wider catalogue of spells he could understand and use. It took less than an hour for Barnabas to teach Muireann the divination spell, but the ondine, seemingly self-conscious and nervous about her role in the dive, practiced constantly throughout the journey.
Echo walked up to her, clothing draped over one arm.
“Hey,” Echo said. “You still feeling up to this?”
“The monsters are gone, right?” Muireann said. “I’m not afraid. I’m more concerned that it will take us too long to find what we’re looking for than I am about either of us getting hurt.”
“I’ll be ready for a fight in case any of the fish-men stayed behind,” Echo said. “And there were dangerous things living around the trench before. You should be aware of that, just in case. The afanc lived here before these creatures killed it, and without the afanc as the top predator in the area, other things may have moved in.”
“We’ll be fine,” Muireann said, offering a smile.
It rarely touches her eyes, Echo thought, studying that smile. Muireann is as haunted as the rest of us. No wonder we took her on board. We’re all running from ghosts.
“Anyway,” Echo said. “I know you’re a sea spirit and all that, but I thought even you could use better clothes to go deep sea diving than a skirt and wool sweater.”
She held out the clothes in her hand, revealing a spare pair of Atlantean-made armored leggings in bluish silver similar to the silver-green pair Echo herself wore, and a deep green cap-sleeved top, also of Atlantean make, with the look and feel of fine chainmail. Echo’s people had gifted her with a chest of clothing and armor like this when she left, all designed to be worn in the water without weighing the wearer down. The Atlanteans had given the ondine the equivalent of a set of “street clothes” when last they were in city, but Echo wanted her protected as well as she was. The armored cloth was the strangest material Echo had ever encountered, not a wicking material, not a wetsuit, just a fabric that seemed to allow water to pass through it easily without trapping it, lightweight but warm. Incredibly durable, too, Echo had found, mostly through combat. It took quite a fight to rip the material despite the way it felt no stronger than thin, soft cotton in her hands.
Echo explained this to Muireann, where it came from, what it did.
“I can’t take your things,” Muireann said.
“I promise you, if I go home, the Atlanteans will just give me more,” Echo said. “Something about being a princess who saved their kingdom or something. I won’t take anything else, so they give me pants. It’s okay, trust me. Plus we’re about the same size. Should fit you fine.”
Muireann let out a quick laugh at the comment about giving a princess pants and accepted the clothes from Echo, swapping her leggings for the armored pair, and turning her back to Echo to swap her knit sweater for the shirt.
“Look at us,” Echo said. “Team Atlantis Pants, ready for duty.”
“Do I get any armor to go with it?” Muireann said, noting Echo’s scaled tunic and bracers.
“Oh! I… I’m sure we can get you something if you want.”
“I’m kidding,” Muireann said. “The armor would just get in the way. Honestly, Echo, that was just a joke.”
“Okay, okay,” Echo said. “I’m not used to… man, we really haven’t had any time to talk like regular people, have we?”
“We’ve had a world to save and I’m being chased by a psychopath,” Muireann said. “It’s understandable.”
“I’m sorry for that. It feels irresponsible of me.”
“You’re the leader,” Muireann said. “Your job is to keep the rest of your crew safe. Sometimes that means not having time for niceties.”
“Like learning your sense of humor,” Echo said. “Well, tell you what, if we don’t die saving the world, you and I sit down for coffee and trade life stories, yeah?”
Muireann smiled again, and this time, it brightened her whole face.
“I don’t think any of you can really know how alone I had been before you found me,” she said. “Thank you for everything.”
“Well, don’t thank me yet,” Echo said. “We’ve recruited you to swim down into Poseidon’s Scar. You may not want to be friends anymore after today.”
The conversation was abruptly interrupted as Barnabas shouted for her from the foredeck.
“Echo!” the magician yelled. She looked up to see him pointing out at the water. Her anxiety spiking, she walked quickly to the rail to follow where he’d pointed. A wave of relief hit her when she spotted what had caught Barnabas’ attention. Sitting in the water, astride one of those ridiculous, giant Atlantean seahorses, was Grimmin, the old spymaster who had helped them before. Grimmin was flanked by a pair of Atlantean warriors, also on horseback.
“Good to see you, princess,” Grimmin said. “Permission to come aboard for a moment?”
Echo sighed, half out of relief and half annoyed at the delay, but she reached down to the deck to scoop up a rope ladder and toss it overboard. Grimmin showed his age a bit, grunting as he hauled himself up out of the ocean.
“I really don’t come up to the surface often enough,” he said.
Barnabas trotted down from the foredeck to join them as Grimmin scanned the rest of the ship.
“You’re missing a few,” he said. “I hope…”
“They’re fine. For now,” Echo said. “They’re scouting ahead, getting a look at where our monster is headed. What brought you to the surface, Grimmin?”
“My scouts saw you arrive,” he said. “I… after our last meeting, you understand my concern. I wasn’t sure if you were coming back to warn us or to tell us you’d won.”
“Neither,” Echo said. “We found out what we need to defeat the monster, but unfortunately, one of them is at the bottom of Poseidon’s Scar.”
“That is the worst news I’ve heard all day,” Grimmin said. “The Scar is enormous, Echo.”
“Yeah, I’ve been there. I remember.”
“Is there anything we can do to help? I’ll come with you if you need support. I’m old, but I can still put up a fight.”
“The pressure of the trench is going to make a deep dive tough. This falls on me alone, I think, and Muireann here, who has… powers beyond that of a normal person, like me,” Echo said. She put a hand on Grimmin’s shoulder. “But
thank you.”
“How will you even know where to look?”
“With the right spell, I’m a living, breathing compass,” Muireann said. “I’ll guide her there.”
“I do have one question for you,” Echo said.
“Of course,” Grimmin said.
“Do you know… have you ever heard of a weapon called the Needle of the Moon?”
Grimmin laughed, then caught himself.
“That’s either a really good sign or a really bad one,” Barnabas said.
“It’s an old Atlantean story,” Grimmin said. “I mean, it’s one of many. All folklore talks about named weapons, yes? Even in Atlantis we’ve heard the story of the surface world’s Excalibur, because sometimes it is said that the Lady of the Lake in that story was of Atlantean descent.”
“She wasn’t,” Muireann said. “She was—”
She looked to Barnabas, who shrugged nonchalantly.
“Yeah, I know,” he said.
“You know what?” Echo said.
“It’s not relevant. No, I take that back, it’s pretty irrelevant to this conversation. I might be related a little bit,” Barnabas said.
“To the Lady of the Lake,” Echo said.
“Like, distant, distant cousins, it’s really not important,” Barnabas said.
Echo raised her eyebrows and shook her head, returning her attention to Grimmin.
“So you’ve heard of it?” Echo said.
“Just in children’s stories,” Grimmin said. “And not regarding Atlantean mythology, specifically. It was just one of many named weapons you hear about in fairy tales.”
“Well, we’re supposed to find it. In the Scar,” Echo said.
Grimmin tugged at his beard, then shrugged.
“At this point, I’ll believe anything,” he said. “A giant creature with an army of cannibal fish-men just climbed out of Poseidon’s Scar. Mythical weapon, why not?”
“It would help immensely if we knew what it looked like,” Echo said.
“Atlanteans aren’t particularly invested in picture books,” Grimmin said. “And honestly, it was a myth. Any image I might have seen of it would be a rumor at best, exaggerated at worst.”
“All I want to know is what kind of weapon it was,” Echo said. “Was it a sword? An axe? I imagine with the name Needle it must be pointy. I’m just curious what we’re looking for down there so we have some vague idea what shape it is.”
“Oh that, the stories talk about,” Grimmin said. “It was a polearm. Like a spear, but the blade was wider, something you could swing like a sword. The stories said it was a long spear with a perfect blade on the tip, longer than a man’s forearm, sharp enough to cut through time itself.”
“Sword on a stick. Got it,” Echo said. “Thank you.”
“It was quite literally the very least I could do,” Grimmin said. “Can I at least offer you a pair of horses to take you below?”
Echo exchanged a glance with Muireann, who smirked back at her.
“I think we’ll be faster on our own, but thanks for the offer,” Echo said.
Chapter 41: The Priesthood of the Fallen Star
Simon Yee showed up at Clarissa’s house just after sunset. He’d chosen to wear a dark mock turtleneck sweater with dark coat over it light enough to hide the weapon he had stashed at the small of his back, dark jeans, and a pair of dark hiking boots. I look like what would happen if L.L. Bean opened a goth department, he thought, striding up to her door. He knocked politely.
Why do I feel like I’m going on a date? he thought. This is a terrible date idea. A stakeout date. A date-out. A stake-date.
Clarissa opened the door wearing dark jeans, a black hoodie, and black Converse All-Stars.
“Oh,” she said, caught off-guard. “I’m underdressed. Am I underdressed? I feel underdressed.”
“It’s fine,” Simon said, his own self-conscious anxiety building in response to hers. “This is just—this is what I wear to work. It’s fine. I’m not dressed up. I promise.”
Clarissa gave a conciliatory nod and stepped out into the night air, locking the door behind her.
“Good timing,” she said. I could see lights on the beach from my window. Either the townie kids are having a hell of a bonfire, or something’s going down.”
Clarissa led Simon down a walkway that felt more like an alley than an access point, between two tall high-end condo buildings. It emptied out into a boardwalk along the beach. Fogarty’s Folly was well-known for its coastline, but only certain areas offered a true beach-goer’s experience to the public. The town jealously guarded its private beaches, requiring proof of residency to swim or sunbathe at most of the beaches along the coast. Simon had never encountered this part stretch of sand before, but that didn’t surprise him. Much of the shore was private or hidden away.
Together, Simon and Clarissa dropped down from the boardwalk onto the sand, an undignified climb of eight or ten feet down the wooden walkway to avoid using the stairs where they might be more easily spotted. They stayed low as they darted along the edge of the beach, using the boardwalk for cover. Finally they could see the glow of a bonfire warming the area ahead of them.
“This is going to be so embarrassing if we just sneak up on some teenagers making out or something,” Clarissa said.
They found a taller sand dune and clambered up, falling into a crawl near the top to stay out of sight. With almost comical care to stay out of sight, they peered over the top of the dune down to the beach below.
There was, in fact, a bonfire, but it was something more than that. All around the flames, men and women gathered, dressed in ridiculous robes, a noncommittal dark green with gold stitching that looked as if it had seen better days. A makeshift altar stood near the water, just a slab of driftwood on top of piled stones to form a flat surface. There were a few candles on the altar, but nothing special, a combination of half-used store-bought scented candles and cheap ones from a dollar store.
The whole thing looked like a cheap knock-off of a cultist ritual, makeshift and shoddy, a child’s attempt at a dark religion. Except these were adults, some of whom, judging by their body language, were pillars of the Fogarty’s Folly community, with knives on their knotted rope belts. This didn’t feel like some fraternity prank anymore, Simon thought, turning his attention to the fire, which had been built with more care than a simple gathering on the beach would need.
The fire had been arranged with exquisite care, branches used to create a sort of cone to foster the flames, rocks of a material that looked completely out of place on the sand forming a circle around the fire.
In the center of the fire, Simon could see the distinct shape of a human being, unmoving as the flames curled around it.
Clarissa grabbed his arm and dug her nails into his flesh. Simon was honestly surprised at her restraint—screaming would have been a perfectly reasonable response. But he put a reassuring hand on hers.
“It’s not a real person,” he said. “Smell that?”
“Smell what?” Clarissa said.
“Just wood smoke. Burning people smells like… it smells like meat, Clarissa,” Simon said. “If they burned a human being, we’d be able to smell it. That’s just an effigy. See the hands?”
Simon pointed to the arms and hands of the human-shaped thing where each clearly ended in a bundle of branches or sticks instead of fingers, more like a scarecrow than a living thing.
“Why would they do this?” Clarissa asked. “What does it mean?”
“No idea,” Simon said, then put a finger to his lips and indicated for her to listen with him. He tilted his head, trying to filter out voices from the waves and wind across the water.
“It’s been generations, Sherman,” a voice Simon recognized as Frank Buskin, the owner of the local grocery store, said. Sherman had to be Sherman O’Neill, the fire chief.
“It’s okay if you can’t sense it, Frank,” Sherman said. “We’ve all lost some of our connection to the sea. None of
us are pure anymore. We’ve mingled with the land dwellers for too long. Our senses are dulled.”
“Screw you, Sherman,” Frank said. “Now’s not the time for your elitist ‘my bloodline is more pure’ garbage.”
“I’m not trying to start a fight,” Sherman said. “I’m just stating facts. And none of us are anywhere near as close to our lord as Father Branson.”
Sherman pointed to a portly, bow-legged lone figure near the alter. Father Branson was local priest whose denomination Simon had never been able to parse out. He dressed a bit like a Catholic cardinal, but called himself something else entirely, even claiming that his religion was almost extinct. Simon has avoided him as much as possible because of his weirdly superior attitude. And also the smell. The man always smelled like the pier.
“They’re all flat-out cuckoo bananas,” Clarissa said.
“Probably,” Simon said. “But I don’t think it’s just that they’re deranged or hallucinating. There’s something else going on here.”
“They are delusional, Simon.”
“I’m not saying they’re in their right minds, but I mean, look at all this,” Simon said. “It’s like something out of…”
He trailed off as all the cultists, at least a dozen, turned their attention as one to the sea.
“And now things get really weird,” Simon said.
“Are you sure the thing in the fire isn’t a real person?” Clarissa said.
“Yeah, I can see the shape of the branches and sticks they used,” he said. “Looks like someone’s lawn furniture had a bad day.”
For the second time, Clarissa dug her nails into Simon’s arm. He thought about making a joke about how he was going to look like a cat attacked him later but then he spotted what had caused Clarissa’s second moment of panic.
Something was rising out of the sea. No, some things, plural. Humanoid, hunched, slim, skin shining in the moonlight not just from moisture but with the silvery sheen of scales.
They strode silently to the shore, toward the cultists.
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