by Eoin Colfer
Once inside the lobby, things take a decidedly more hospitable turn. The staff, who are of various shapes, sizes, colors, genders, and species, are courteous but do not insinuate themselves. They smile but never grin, as it were. The furniture is minimalist but perfectly comfortable, and the elevator doors are a lurid shade of gold that would be horrific anywhere else, but not in the Acorn, because here it is understood that this uncharacteristic garishness is an ironic jab at some of London’s flashier establishments.
One floor up there is a library that any literary scholar would give his tweed elbow patches to be buried in, but on this day there are only two individuals there, seated at a table overlooking Monmouth Street. Most humans might assume that neither of them had the requisite decades under their belts to be accomplished scholars, but most people would be dead wrong. For the human who sat with a cooler bag between the knees of his riding breeches may have had the appearance of a Caucasian male in his late twenties, but his one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old brain had been recently transplanted into this body, which he’d had 3-D printed by his longtime ally Ishi Myishi, supplier of gadgets and gizmos to the world’s criminal elite, using a schematic provided by the second person at the table, who’d had the plans but not the equipment necessary to make them a reality. This person was not a human child, as one might assume from her size, but a lady dwarf.
They made an odd couple. The human, with his runner’s physique and flowing black beard, was dressed impeccably in a tweed suit tailored to his rather antiquated specifications with lapels half an inch wider than the latest trend, and he wore a black satin beret with an embossed fleur-de-lis pattern. The dwarf was cosplaying as Sharkgirl in a neon-blue jumpsuit, a shark helmet, and biker boots. Odd couples were the norm in the Acorn Club, for it was one of five such clubs around the globe where humans and fairies who operated outside the bounds of their respective legal systems could safely meet. An interspecies safe space.
One of the few well-known facts about dwarves is that they are extremely photosensitive, but if the proximity to a window caused this dwarf anxiety, it didn’t manifest in any visible way, except for a drumming of gloved fingers on the arm of her leather chair, a sound that would have intensely irritated Myles Fowl had he been there to hear it. Having said that, even though Myles was almost four hundred miles away, he was, in a sense, present, because the conversation was shortly to focus on the Fowl twin’s immediate future.
“Nice to see you again, human,” the dwarf said in passable but heavily accented English. Her name was Gveld Horteknut. Gveld had been all the rage as a baby name some five hundred years ago, but modern dwarf parents considered it a little on the nose, as it was the old Dwarfish word for gold. Most dwarves were tired of everyone thinking that they spent all day lusting after gold and all night dreaming about it when they were also terribly fond of silver and diamonds. Gveld, however, adored her name almost as much as she adored the precious metal she was named for.
“Is it really?” said the duke, unconvinced. They both knew this was an arrangement born of convenience. The Horteknuts had contacted him simply because their fairy police sources knew about his dislike of all things Fowl, and his association with Ishi Myishi.
“You look better than the last time we met,” said Gveld. Their last conversation had been on the duke’s island residence some days previously, when Gveld had made her offer. She needed two brand new bodies, and he could keep one. The one he now inhabited.
“I wish I could say the same for you,” said the human in a weird chomping fashion, as though he were still getting used to his teeth, which, in actuality, he was.
This was not an insult per se, as Gveld’s features were effectively hidden behind the shield of her helmet.
“I have always thought a mind transfer would be electrical or magical,” commented Gveld Horteknut. “But you decided to go the organic route. I imagine that was a harrowing few hours.”
The man nodded spasmodically. “You have no idea. I was conscious for the entire procedure and spent yesterday recovering in Myishi’s Kensington clinic. It was necessary, to ensure the old me made the trip across. And let me assure you, a man hasn’t truly confronted mortality until he has listened to his own skull being cut open with a bone saw.”
“It was a paper-thin skull, from what I hear,” noted Gveld Horteknut. “You could have cracked it with a pebble.”
The man rapped on his forehead. “I prefer this one, madam. Guaranteed for half a century.”
“Any memory loss or confusion?” asked the dwarf.
“I was warned there would be a little,” admitted the man. “Is there, in fact, a place called Australia?”
“Indeed,” said Gveld. “Quite a big place.”
The man shrugged. “My memories of it seem fantastical. Monstrous insects, wave riding, and so forth. And tell me, is there a Narnia?”
“Absolutely,” said Gveld, and it was possible that she smiled behind her light-filtering face shield. “But it’s not so glorious anymore, since the human tourists happened upon it.”
“I feel that perhaps you are toying with me, Ms. Horteknut,” said the rejuvenated human. “But it is of no matter. The transfer took place mere hours ago, and I was warned that there would be a period of adjustment. My limbs perform tasks that they have not been instructed to undertake, but this will improve with time.”
“You are in no condition to hunt the Fowl Twins,” said Gveld, needling the human.
The man waved a hand, perhaps on purpose. “That too is of little import, as this story is not my story. I am content to be an anonymous facilitator, and you, in return, shall deliver Myles to me—if your plan succeeds this time.”
The dwarf ignored the needle. “As you know, Lord Teddy, Myles Fowl has a habit of escaping certain death. And as it turns out, I need him alive. For the time being.”
The Englishman attempted a scowl, but his disobedient features grinned instead, which was appropriate enough in the circumstances. “Alive? I would kill them both a dozen times over if the cost of clones wasn’t so blasted prohibitive.”
Gveld poked the cooler bag with the toe of her biker boot. “On the subject of clones, is the item in this…bag?”
“The subject should be copies rather than clones, and my pal Myishi was grateful for the plans, but at any rate, yes, what you need is freshly printed in this bag,” said Lord Teddy, and he too nudged the cooler with the heel of his riding boot. “And this is not just any bag. It is a Deliveroo bag. No one will give you a second glance while you’re carrying this. It’s a tight squeeze in there for our merchandise, I grant you, but I care not a fig for the comfort of anything that even resembles the Fowl brat.”
“I hope there is more than a resemblance,” said Gveld.
The man unzipped the bag. Mist rose from the dry-ice packs and electrolyte blocks that were heaped on the pale figure inside.
“There is,” said the Englishman. “It is an almost perfect copy.”
Gveld was surprised. In a bartering situation between two dwarves, it would be unheard of for one to admit that his product was less than perfect.
“Almost?” said Gveld. “As in, the Englishman almost survived his meeting with Gveld Horteknut of the Horteknut Seven?”
The human chuckled, his teeth clacking. “I see. You are threatening my life, but there really is no need. I misspoke, don’t you know? The item is, in fact, perfect, but what it needs to be is imperfect.”
Rather than elaborate on this cryptic statement, Lord Teddy took from his pocket a small knife that he habitually used to skin small animals—rabbits and the like. He flicked out a blade that glittered like an icicle and dipped it into the cooler bag.
Gveld tilted her head.
“Be careful, human,” she warned. “Our arrangement is more fragile than that merchandise. Don’t forget that you are in the Acorn Club, the only place in London where fairies are safer than humans.”
“Shush, please,” said the Englishman, not realizing tha
t shushing a dwarf was at least as dangerous as poking a troll with a stick, but Gveld was intrigued, so she let the insult go for the moment.
Nevertheless, the human must have sensed that he had crossed a line with his shushing, so he explained himself.
“Apologies for my rudeness,” said the man, “but I must concentrate for even such a simple task. It used to be that my brain would send orders scurrying down my spinal column, and my fingers would obey without complaint or deviation. But old brain, new fingers, and so forth.”
The man screwed one eye shut and made a single nick. From inside the bag came the mewling one might expect from a stepped-on kitten.
“There,” he said satisfied. “You might have one of your people heal that hand a little. But not completely, mind you, for that is a most important scar.”
Gveld understood now. The famous scar.
“Of course,” said the dwarf, peering into the cooler. “I find the merchandise acceptable. You will have the Fowl boy when I am finished with him.”
“And you may have the Fowl boy in the bag, as per our agreement,” said the man, sealing the cooler. “Though it is little more than a sack of printed organs, and without a viable brain it will begin to disintegrate as soon as you take it out of the bag.”
“That’s completely acceptable,” said Gveld Horteknut, smiling an 80 percent gold smile behind her visor. “This thing can die whenever it pleases. In fact, the sooner the better.”
Meet the Baddie:
Gveld Horteknut of the Horteknut Seven
In the interest of even-handedness and fair representation, it is only proper that the Fowls’ antagonist’s motivations be explained before we catch up with the twins. Gveld Horteknut could be fairly referred to as the master schemer, or in modern parlance, the “big bad” of this story, but Gveld would not have considered herself a villain as such, since it was her opinion that everything horrible her band visited upon humankind was richly deserved, and much more besides.
And who among us would argue that she did not make a valid point?
Truth be told, there were many in Haven City who secretly applauded Gveld and her group’s proactive strikes against humanity.
As we have already pointed out, Gveld Horteknut was not human, she was a dwarf. Not a human with dwarfism, but an actual mythological dwarf. That is, mythological from a human point of view, and in fact there are many so-called Underearthers in Haven who consider humans to be mythological and refuse to believe otherwise despite skyscrapers of evidence to the contrary.
Gveld was the leader of the Horteknut Seven, the militant arm of the ancient Horteknut family, whose roots stretched back to a time when dwarves had cool and noble names like Horteknut or Bludgeheart, and not ridiculous and insulting ones like Diggums and Pullchain.
Ten thousand years ago, when the fairy families burrowed underground to escape the rapacious nature of humanity, the dwarves had already been living below the surface and were more than a little put out by the sudden influx of creatures to their real estate. The richest of these dwarf families was the Horteknut clan, who had amassed an absolute fortune in dwarf gold. (Dwarf gold being twenty-four-carat, 99.9 percent pure with just a glob of dwarf spit mixed in during the smelt to toughen it up.) Unfortunately, the fleeing fairies led mankind directly through the Horteknut tunnels and the band lost most of their fortune to looting humans, which led to ten millennia of Horteknut heists in return, as they attempted to reclaim their ingots. Under Gveld’s leadership, the Horteknut Seven became the most successful reclamation team of all time, and, in fact, the most famous bullion heists in recent history can be traced back to Gveld and her band, including the Great Victorian Gold Robbery, the Walbrzych Gold Train Job, the Kerry Packer Bullion Heist, and the Brinks Mat Robbery, to name but a few.
And now Gveld had her eye on the biggest prize of all: the mother lode, which could account for more than 80 percent of the remaining lost gold. But she had run into a problem and decided that, since the human boy Fowl had survived her assassination attempt, he might as well help solve this problem. And so she took her Deliveroo bag to Dalkey Island.
Dalkey Island, Dublin, Ireland
Artemis Fowl I, that is to say the father of Artemis Fowl II and husband to Angeline Fowl, was not pleased with his younger sons. He had solid reasons for his displeasure, as the twins had borrowed the Fowl Tachyon jet without permission and ditched it in the Atlantic, barely escaping with their lives. Even more upsetting to Artemis Senior than the loss of a prototype jet that could change the world’s carbon footprint with its synthetic kerosene engine was the fact that Beckett had borrowed, and then lost, the treasured Rocket Man platform shoes from his rock legends memorabilia collection, leaving him with only Freddie Mercury’s Adidas sneakers from Live Aid and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust boots in the footwear section.
The twins knew that their father was more unhappy than usual, because he had summoned them to his private study, which sat a little apart from the main villa in a Martello tower that had been restored by a firm of heritage architects and augmented with a few necessities such as internal walls, a suite of vintage Fritz Hansen office furniture, a dozen motion sensors disguised as rocks, wall-mounted mini-mag machine guns, bombproof glass, an escape submarine below the desk, more powerful broadband than the Pentagon had, a full-body scanner, a wall-sized live news multiscreen, and the Batman suit from Tim Burton’s movies—which was not strictly speaking a necessity, but Artemis Senior found it inspiring. All in all, it was pretty standard supervillain stuff, which the twins’ father couldn’t bear to part with, even though he claimed to be a 100 percent legit businessman now. But once a criminal mastermind…and so on and so forth.
The twins were seated in matching Series 7 chairs that had been fabricated from recycled ocean plastics, looking on as Artemis Fowl Senior rested his head on the desktop and kneaded his own neck. Beckett jittered in his seat; the blond twin had been sitting in his chair for almost a minute now, and that was an insufferably extended period as far as he was concerned. Myles was also jittering, but only with his eyeballs, as he was using blinks and pupil sweeps to select letters and solve the Guardian crossword on one lens of his graphene eyeglasses. Once Myles had finished the puzzle, shaving five seconds off his personal record, he was eager to get away and back to amassing knowledge.
“Father,” he said, “for that neck massage to have any effect, you must really target the trigger points. At the moment, you are simply rolling neck fat.”
Artemis Senior sat bolt upright. “I know that, Myles. And I do not have neck fat.”
“We all have neck fat, Pater. Honestly,” Myles said, and then flushed in shame that his father should be so ill-informed on the subject.
“Is that why you think we’re here, Myles?” asked Artemis Senior. “To discuss neck fat?”
“No,” said Myles. “I assume we are here to discuss the missile crisis.”
“Exactly,” said Artemis Senior, somewhat self-consciously removing his hands from his neck and straightening the collar of his beige stretch cotton leisure jacket, which was emblazoned with a golden AF symbol, as it came from his wife’s fashion line. “I simply need a moment to get my ducks in a row.”
Beckett stopped jittering. “Do you mean to tell me we have ducks you can order to swim in formation?”
Artemis Senior sighed once more. Sometimes it seemed to the Fowl patriarch that sighing was his main mode of exhalation when dealing with his sons, either singly or as a team.
“Of course not. That’s preposterous, Beckett.”
Beckett was in full agreement. “I know. Ducks never do what you ask. They’re worse than badgers, which are frankly”—Beckett screwed up his face to deliver the next clause—“scritch-scritch-arrrrr.”
Artemis Senior knew he shouldn’t ask but couldn’t help himself. “And what language might scritch-scritch-arrrrr be in?”
Myles jumped in. “I am no expert, Father, but I would wager Beck is speaking in the language o
f badgers to avoid swearing in English.”
“Myles is right,” said Beckett. “He is no expert. We should have recorded him saying that, as he’ll probably never say it again. But I was speaking Brockish, which is what badgers speak, by the way. And it was a bit sweary.”
Artemis Senior dropped his head to the desk once more and rolled his forehead along the cool aluminum surface. When he spoke, it was toward his own feet, but the tower had excellent acoustics, so the twins heard his words nevertheless. “Some years ago, I was held captive by the Russian Mafiya.”
Myles raised a finger. “They refer to themselves as the Bratva these days, Father.”
“Thank you, Myles. Well, I would refer to the ones who held me, Vassikin and Kamar, as scritch-scritch-arrrrr, if you take my meaning?”
Myles nodded, appreciating the segue, while Beckett smiled, appreciating the rude joke and his father’s excellent Brockish pronunciation.
“And I can honestly say,” continued Artemis Senior, “that the two of you scare me more than they ever did.”
This statement shocked Myles so much that he stopped mentally puzzling on the second of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (magic, he believed, was the missing factor) and focused on his father.
The statement shocked Beckett so much that he could no longer be confined to a chair and jumped to his feet. “We scare you, Dad? That’s terrible. We would never hurt you.”
“Not physically, perhaps,” said Artemis Senior. “But the emotional toll of parenting such extraordinary children has been so very high.”
Myles scrambled to justify the twins’ shenanigans. “Yes, but Father, in our defense, the Fowl DNA is positively littered with epigenetic markers passed down by generations of masterminds, so in many ways we have no option but to act as we do. I would go so far as to say that we are the victims in this—”
