The Fowl Twins Deny All Charges

by Eoin Colfer

  In summary:

  There have been throughout recorded human mythology countless mentions of dwarves. In old England they were known as dwerghs, while the Vikings called them dvergr, and the Proto-Germans categorized them as dwergoz. While descriptions of dwarves tend to vary wildly, there are common denominators: Dwarves are described across the folk-loric board as a fairy race, small in stature, who dwell in subterranean habitats and work expertly with metals. Such is the saturation of the term dwarf in the language of humans that it has been co-opted to describe almost anything that is smaller in size than might be expected. Everything from a star to a plant to a human being of short stature—who, by the way, mostly prefer the term little person.

  Fairy files are a bit more useful.

  Dwarf physiology is a true example of evolution at its most efficient. Dwarves have, over the millennia, evolved to be perfectly suited to life in dark tunnels. The male dwarf has no need of tools for his excavating labors, as he can at will unhinge his massive lower jaw and take advantage of his elastic tendons and square teeth, which allow him to chew his way through even the most compacted earth and eject the waste from the rear end at rates of up to one hundred pounds per second. This may seem humorous to some, but it is no laughing matter to dwarves themselves, as “purging” is often quite explosive, and an untrained male can collapse a tunnel on his fellow workers. In fact, to facilitate training, many dwarf sporting activities are designed around the fine art of purging, and champions of Bummortar and Toppletower (the latter of which is a wind-powered version of the human game Jenga) are lauded as heroes among their people. Female dwarves are not usually biologically equipped for tunneling, although, as with genders of most species, there are exceptions who are, in that case, viewed as doubly blessed. Usually, female dwarves take care of more serious work, like motherhood, finances, politics, and combat strategy, leaving such activities as grubbing around in muddy holes to the menfolk. Dwarves have many other gifts, too, including their luminous spittle, a marvelous secretion that has a seemingly endless list of applications, e.g., as an adhesive for tunnel lanterns or protective cocoons.

  Luckily for Myles Fowl, he had read both files.

  Once the dwarf Gundred had locked him in the storeroom, Myles set about examining his prison while playing Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons on his mental stereo, as he considered “Violin Concerto No. 2” good plotting music. Artemis preferred Beethoven when plotting (see LEP file: Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox), but Myles found Beethoven a little wild and therefore distracting.

  It became clear to the Fowl twin, as he searched the space by the eerie glow of the phosphorescent-spit mattress, that the dwarves had commandeered an unused clerical storeroom of some kind as his prison. It seemed that the Horteknuts had made a cursory attempt to clear out the space, no doubt removing any obvious weapons like staplers, scissors, box cutters, and so forth, but they had neglected to shift more harmless stock, such as a single ruler, a pile of flat-packed cardboard boxes, several tubs of rubber bands, and a container of odd batteries.

  Aha, thought Myles, but he did not say it aloud, as proclaiming aha while one is plotting a prison break is a bit of a giveaway.

  Myles squatted behind the cover of a cardboard tower and slipped a single box from the middle, careful not to topple the pile on top of himself. He guessed he would have very little time to construct his planned secret weapon before any possible observer decided to check on him, so he worked with furious accuracy on his prototype, scoring cardboard planes with the ruler and stretching the rubber bands into place. He was a little daunted by the fact that he was planning to attack his captors, given that he was a scientist rather than a foot soldier, but in times of emergency a fellow had to operate outside his comfort zone.

  And this is certainly an emergency.

  From somewhere beyond the locked door came a scuffling ruckus, and Myles felt a twinge in his scar that told him that Beckett was behind the racket. Myles did not stop working but instead ramped up his efforts, for now his dear twin could be in peril, too.

  Beck would most likely cluster-punch the entire bunch of dwarves, but there was a chance he would be subdued, in which case it would be up to Myles to rescue them both.

  I promise to save you, brother mine, Myles vowed. I will be equal to the task.

  Unfortunately, Myles was to fall short on both elements of his silent vow.

  He would not save his brother this time.

  And he would not be equal to the task, in the short term, at least.

  As was so often the case, Beckett was indeed the instigator of the hubbub. In fact, if a count were taken it would reveal that Beckett Fowl had instigated a hundred thousand hubbubs in his short life. And that was rounding down. For some reason there was usually a spike in August, which could possibly be attributed to end-of-summer-vacation anxiety.

  This particular hubbub, however, was not one of our plucky protagonist’s finest, lasting as it did a little less than five seconds, and certainly not resulting in the hoped-for outcome, i.e., the liberation of his beloved twin brother.

  What happened was this: The Fowl twin jumped not quite fearlessly but, to his credit, without hesitation into the dwarf tunnel. The reason for his trepidation was that, like many extremely active people, Beckett had a fear of restriction that bordered on the claustrophobic, which partly explained his distaste for clothes in general and most especially polo necks, which he described as the most hateful of all sweaters. Beckett held it together admirably, given that the tunnel smelled of dank recycled air and dipped quickly below sea level as the escape route veered toward the mainland. In truth, Beckett probably would have lost it completely had the tunnel not been strung with blobs of glowing gel, which Lazuli, to his rear, correctly guessed were globules of dwarf spit. Beckett plowed on with significant speed considering that he had never actually tunneled for any great length before, though he had quizzed a couple of the island’s moles about their process. In actuality, he was not so much tunneling per se as wriggling through a passageway that a Horteknut dwarf had already excavated. This particular tunnel was not built to last and, as wet clods slopped onto his back, it occurred to Beckett that, should the passage collapse, he and Lazuli would be crushed by the weight of the water above them. Luckily for Beckett, he was optimistic by nature, and so, instead of focusing on a watery grave, he decided to imagine a brighter future.

  “I bet,” he called back over his shoulder to Lazuli, “that we will not only find Myles down this hole, but when we come out, we shall both be knighted and given an obsidian castle to live in.”

  Beckett liked obsidian, because who would not like a cool, shiny rock that was forged in a volcano, for heaven’s sake.

  And thus calmed, he wriggled on.

  Lazuli did not hear Beckett’s obsidian castle comment. What she did hear was the rhythmic crashing of the Irish surf overhead, and she tried to shut it out, because there was nothing to do but drag herself onward by the elbows before Myles was utterly lost in the sheets of falling mud and alarming spurts of seawater.

  The end of the tunnel was in sight, with light streaming in that was both comforting and foreboding. Comforting in that they would soon be out of the tunnel; foreboding in that there would probably be warrior dwarves awaiting them with swords.

  No more than five dwarves, Lazuli fervently hoped. Horteknuts famously traveled in sevens.

  The pixel could only pray that Beckett could pull off a few of his cluster punches before the dwarves knew what hit them.

  She vowed to keep one dwarf conscious so she could find out what nefarious shenanigans the Fowls had involved her in this time, for even though she had faith in Myles Fowl, it was also true to say that she did not completely trust the cerebral twin.

  Somehow, she thought now, Myles is responsible for me being first strapped to a missile and now crawling through this fetid tunnel.

  However, all of Lazuli’s hopes and plans were about to be crushed and thwarted by nature with a littl
e help from a dwarf named Vigor. He was the Horteknut Third and often referred to by his tunnel-mates as Booby Horteknut. This was not because he was forever making mistakes, but because he was the world’s foremost expert on laying booby traps for any non-Horteknut who might try to utilize one of their tunnels. Laying traps for humans was child’s play, as men did not have a single clue about tunnels or tunnel etiquette. They put their big feet down any old place, and they dug into the clay like they were looking for treasure. Humans didn’t realize that the hole was already there in the ground, so to speak, waiting to be hollowed out, and all a talented tunneler had to do was find the path. So, crushing men was easy—but Vigor Horteknut was famous for squashing other dwarves who might be on the Horteknut band’s trail. His favorite trick was to wrap a trigger string around a worm so when a hungry dwarf sucked down the morsel, he would unwittingly activate the trap and collapse the tunnel on himself. For any members of the Seven, these triggers were signposted with markers, but to anyone else, one stone in the soil was pretty much the same as another, even if one end was spiked and could conceivably be pointing at something.

  Vigor had left one of these trigger worms in the Dalkey Island tunnel. He wasn’t actually expecting interlopers, but interlopers were sneaky by nature, so one of Vigor’s mottos was: Caution at all times. Another motto was: Never bet against a gnome in a crunchball game, but that was hardly relevant now.

  And as it happened, someone did follow the Horteknut abduction band through their subaquatic passage, but when animal lover Beckett Fowl spotted the worm trigger, he did not slurp it down as a dwarf might. Instead, he gently moved the little fellow aside, wiggling his fingers in imitation of the worm’s natural body language.

  Calm, the finger wiggle said. Friends.

  The worm wiggled in reply, saying, Go away, pale monster.

  Which was fair enough, although what the worm should have wiggled was Before you go away, pale monster, could you oh-so-carefully untie the string from around my tail?

  But that was a lot of information to squeeze into a wiggle.

  And since the worm wasn’t violently yanked, the tunnel did not immediately collapse in a chain reaction of cave-ins. However, Beckett had disturbed the string, which activated a slow release at that particular point in the passage.

  The noise of the ocean was so terrifyingly awesome that Lazuli did not notice the sound of a slow fill back toward the island until an icy sheet of Irish sea slid between her body and the tunnel floor like the specter of death.

  “Beckett,” she said, keeping her voice steady, “we need to hustle. We really—”

  Which was as far as she got before the slow fill became an ultrafast fill and a tube of compressed ocean picked them both up like the insignificant beings they were in the face of nature and bore them along at speed toward the tunnel mouth. The same tunnel mouth they had been planning to approach like sneaky interlopers.

  Perhaps it might have comforted Beckett sometime in the near future to learn that the worm was completely fine, but at that moment he was mostly concerned with trying not to drown.

  It is recommended dwarf procedure that when excavating below sea level, the lower end of the tunnel should be stoppered in case of a breach. Many dwarves do not bother with this safeguard, especially for a short-term tunnel, but the Horteknut Number Three, Vigor, was a stickler for procedure and he knew he would have to answer to Gundred if their basement HQ flooded. Thus he demanded that each male Horteknut cough up a few gallons of spit so he could roll a giant luminous plug, which was then wedged into the tunnel mouth. This spitball was designed with a self-sealing seam that would trap any ocean leakage, or indeed unwary follower, before closing back up.

  A proper plug could resist any amount of water pressure to maintain its seal on a tunnel mouth, but this one had been imperfectly placed, as what the dwarves had taken for a shiny rock was actually the corpse of a goat, which not only virtually disintegrated once the plug rested on it but also lubricated the rim.

  Beckett could definitely be classified as an unwary follower, and he emerged from the tunnel only to find himself immediately trapped in the heart of a giant spitball, which ingeniously self-sealed behind him. Then, thanks to the goat paste, the ball popped out of its hole like a periwinkle from a whale’s blowhole and engaged in a lumbering roll across the basement, leaving Beckett revolving slowly inside. Lazuli was the next one flushed out of the tunnel. The pixel slid across the floor of slick mud, still wearing her stolen suit of vines and losing her helmet in the process. Perhaps a thousand gallons of seawater washed her reasonably clean before the entire tunnel collapsed and self-stoppered.

  The three Horteknut diggers in the basement took a moment to absorb this before reacting, and when they did react their reaction was unexpected, given the tension in the room. They burst out laughing, one even going so far as to slap his knees. This guy had one of those names that made him sound very tough, which indeed he was. The cool name was Axborn. He was famous in dwarf circles for a very unique relationship, which we shall learn about at a later time.

  “Look at these idiots,” Axborn said, “swimming into their own prison.”

  While Lazuli coughed, she thought that perhaps this dwarf was underestimating the Regrettables somewhat. After all, for them to get even this far, three things must have happened:

  1. They had figured out the clone ruse.

  2. They had disabled the Horteknut rear guard.

  And…

  3. They had navigated a Reclaimer tunnel.

  All considerable achievements.

  Admittedly, number two had been mostly due to Beckett, but the dwarves couldn’t know that. But in spite of these achievements, the Horteknuts guffawed, chortled, and smirked.

  Lazuli knew she should be afraid, probably even terrified, but the same indomitable spirit that had pushed her through the Academy drove her to her feet now. She spat a pint of salt water on the floor and said, “Specialist Heitz, LEP. You people are all under arrest. I don’t even know how many laws you’ve broken, but if I had to prioritize, I’d say strapping me to a missile is at the top of the list. I traveled at the speed of sound outside that vehicle, people. And it was not a habit-forming experience.”

  Quite a cocky statement from a sopping-wet specialist fitted with a magic-suppressor and outnumbered three to one by a legendary band of fighters, but Lazuli was hoping that the Reclaimers might be cowed into submission. It was at best a million-to-one shot, and as is so often the way in these situations, those odds did not pay off.

  “I see,” said another dwarf, this one named Vigor. He was dressed in a simple shift that rippled with muscles as though his torso were composed of thickly coiled snakes. His vinesuit was resting in a bucket of water on a ledge behind him. Vigor took over the speaking from Axborn for two reasons:

  1. He was the ranking Reclaimer

  And…

  2. Axborn was not the best at speaking.

  “So, perhaps we should simply lay down our arms and surrender, eh, Specialist Heitz?”

  Lazuli heard the sarcasm but chose to ignore it. “Yes, that’s exactly what you should do, sir.”

  “Well, boys,” said Vigor, not trying too hard to conceal his grin. “What do you think? Should we stitch up our bum flaps?”

  Bum flaps being dwarf slang for the evacuation vents on the rear end of every tunneler’s trousers. To stitch up one’s bum flap meant a laying down of arms, so to speak.

  Lazuli tried one more time. “You better stitch up that flap, Reclaimer, before I come over there and do it for you.”

  Vigor’s grin dropped right off his face. Enough was apparently enough.

  “You don’t even know what you’re wearing, do you, officer?” he said.

  Lazuli knew that dwarf vinesuits were made from a kreperplont, which was paired somehow with its wearer, but that was about the limit of her knowledge on the subject.

  “I know all about vinesuits,” she said, hoping to bluff it out.

&nbs
p; “I see,” said Vigor. “In that case, you know that Horteknut tunnelers are paired with their kreperplonts at birth and they share an almost telepathic bond.”

  Lazuli wondered if this guy might be doing a little bluffing himself. “Telepathic vines? Are you kidding?”

  Vigor’s grin returned. “I am, a little. It’s mostly whistles, clicks, and gestures that control the kreperplont, to be honest. But it’s amazing what vines can do. Axborn here may not be the brightest, but when it comes to kreperplonts, this fellow is a virtuoso.”

  Axborn stepped toward Lazuli, into the flickering light cast by the giant glob of gel that held Beckett immobile at its heart. This dwarf was a hulking specimen with a shaved scalp and long mustache tied in a bow under his chin, which was a grooming choice not many people could pull off, but Axborn managed it. His vinesuit was wrapped around his abdomen and limbs in thick coils that glistened as he moved.

  “That’s right, cop,” he said. “This fellow is a virtuoso. And by this fellow I mean me.”

  “Most vinesuits are coded to their wearers,” continued Vigor. “But there are general commands common to all suits.”

  Lazuli suddenly understood where this speech might be going.

  I don’t think anyone is surrendering here. These dwarves are toying with me.

  And suddenly she wished that she had her magic, unpredictable as it was, to get her out of this hopeless situation.

  “Now hold on a second…” she said, but there wasn’t a second to be had.

  “Commands like squeeze,” said Axborn, whistling a single note, and right on command the vinesuit tightened around Lazuli’s body, forcing the breath from her lungs until she was only running on the oxygen in her bloodstream.

  She wanted to cry out, but there was no air for that. All she could do was topple like a felled sapling and lie on the cold, wet floor.