The Last Guardian

by Eoin Colfer

  In this respect, Artemis’s methodology was similar to that of American chess master Bobby Fischer, who was capable of computing every possible move an opponent could make so that he could counteract it. The only problem with this technique was that there were some scenarios that Artemis simply could not face, and these had to be shuffled to the end of his process, rendering it flawed.

  And so he plotted, realizing that it was probably futile, as he did not know most of the constants in this equation, not to mention the variables.

  A dark promise drifted below the surface of his logic.

  If my loved ones are harmed, then Opal Koboi shall pay.

  Artemis tried to banish the thought as it served no useful purpose; but the notion of revenge refused to go away.

  Holly had only a few hundred pilot hours logged in the Cupid, far too little for what she was attempting. But then again, there weren’t enough pilot hours in a lifetime for this kind of driving.

  The Cupid sped along the canal, its chunky tires finding purchase in the Plexiglas trough, the tiny rocket disguised as an exhaust pipe boiling a short-lived wake in the smart-water. Suitcases were crushed under its treads or popped like mortars along the belt’s scoop, showering those below with fluttering garments, cosmetics, and smuggled human memorabilia. The security guards on duty had had the presence of mind to confiscate most of these artifacts, but nobody ever figured out who had managed to stuff a life-sized Gandalf cardboard cutout into a suitcase.

  Holly drove on, concentrating through squinted eyes and gritted teeth. The luggage canal took them out of the terminal into bedrock. Upward they spiraled through archaeological strata, past dinosaur bones and Celtic tombs, through Viking settlements and Norman walls, until the Cupid emerged in a large baggage hall with a transparent roof that opened directly to the elements—a real James Bond supervillain–lair kind of place, complete with spidery metallic building struts and a shuttle rail system.

  Generally, the Sky Window would be camouflaged using projectors and shields; but these security measures were out of commission until all Koboi parts could be replaced with technology that hadn’t exploded. On this afternoon, bruised Irish rainclouds drifted across the beveled panes, and the baggage hall would be completely visible from above if anyone cared to photograph the fairy baggage handlers or forklift trucks that stood with smoking holes in their bodywork, as though the victims of a sniper.

  Holly asked the computer whether there was another way out besides the one it was suggesting. The onboard avatar informed her dispassionately that indeed there was, but it was three hundred miles away.

  “D’Arvit,” muttered Holly, deciding that she wasn’t going to worry about rules anymore, or property damage. There was a bigger picture to consider here, and nobody likes a whiner.

  Nobody likes a whiner. Her father had always said that.

  She could see him now, spending every free minute in his precious garden, feeding algae to his tubers under the sim-sunlight.

  You have to do your share of the housework, Poppy. Your mother and I work long hours to keep this family going. He would stop then and stroke her chin. The Berserkers made the ultimate sacrifice for the People long ago. Nobody’s asking you to go that far, but you could do your chores with a smile on your pretty face. He would stiffen then, playing at sergeant major. So hop to it, Soldier Poppy. Nobody likes a whiner.

  Holly caught sight of her reflection in the windshield. Her eyes brimmed with melancholy. Daughters had always carried the nickname Poppy in her family. No one could remember why.

  “Holly,” barked Artemis. “Security is closing in.”

  Holly jerked guiltily and checked the perimeter. Several security guards were edging toward the Cupid, trying to bluff her with useless Neutrino handguns, using the smoking hulk of a flipped shuttle for cover.

  One of the guards snapped off a couple of shots, dinging the front fender.

  A custom weapon, Holly realized. He must have built it himself.

  The shots had little effect on the Cupid’s plates. But if the guard had gone to the trouble of cobbling together his own backup pistol, perhaps he had thought to bolt on an armor-piercing barrel.

  As if reading her mind, the guard fumbled at his belt for a clip of ammunition.

  That’s the difference between me and you, thought Holly. I don’t fumble.

  She switched all power to the jets and sent the Cupid rocketing toward the Sky Window, leaving the security guards pretending to fire useless weapons at her, a couple even going so far as to make bang bang noises, though fairy weapons hadn’t gone bang bang in centuries.

  The Sky Window is reinforced Plexiglas, thought Holly. Either it breaks, or the Cupid does. Probably a bit of both.

  Though she would never know it, Holly’s gamble would not have paid off. The Sky Window was built to withstand direct impact from anything short of a low-yield nuclear warhead, a fact that was proudly announced over the terminal’s speakers a hundred times a day, which Holly had somehow managed to avoid hearing.

  Luckily for Captain Short and her passengers—and indeed the fate of much of the wider world—her potentially fatal ignorance would never come to light, as Foaly had anticipated a situation where a fairy craft would be heading at full speed for the Sky Window and it would refuse to open. The centaur had also guessed that, because of the universal law of maximum doo-doo displacement—which states that when the aforementioned doo-doo hits the fan, the fan will be in your hand and pointed at someone important who can have you fired—the Sky Window would probably refuse to open at a crucial time. And so he had come up with a little proximity organism that ran on its own bio-battery/heart, which he had grown from the stem cells of appropriated sprite wings.

  The whole process was dubious at best and illegal at worst, and so Foaly hadn’t bothered to log a blueprint and simply had the sensors installed on his say-so. The result was that a cluster of these proximity beetles scuttled along the Sky Window pane edges, and if their little antennae sensed a vehicle drawing too close to a certain pane, they excreted a spray of acid on the window and then quickly ate the pane. The energy required to complete their task in time was massive, and so when the beetles were finished, they curled up and died. It was impressive; but, pretty much like the man with the exploding head, it was a onetime trick.

  When the beetles sensed the Cupid’s ascent, they rushed into action like a minute company of cavalry and devoured the pane in less than four seconds. When their job was done, they winked out and dropped like ball bearings onto the vehicle’s hood.

  “That was easy,” Holly said into her microphone, as the Cupid passed through a Cupid-shaped hole. “So much for Foaly’s great Sky Window.”

  Ignorance, as they say, is usually fatal, but sometimes it can be bliss.

  Holly powered up the Cupid’s shield—though with every single human satellite out of commission she really needn’t have bothered—and set a course for Fowl Manor.

  Which gives us about five minutes before Opal has us exactly where she wants us.

  A less-than-comforting thought, which she did not voice—but all it took was a glance in the rearview mirror at Butler’s expression to see that the bodyguard was thinking more or less the same thing.

  “I know,” he said, catching her eye. “But what choice do we have?”

  Irish Airspace

  Opal could not have turned her face from the lock now if she had put all her enhanced pixie might to the task. She was the key, and the two were paired. Their collision was as inevitable as the passage of time. Opal felt the skin on her face stretch toward the lock, and her arms were pulled until the sockets creaked.

  The elfin warlock was indeed powerful, she thought. Even after all this time, his magic holds.

  Her trajectory took her in a regular arc to the Atlantic’s surface and across the afternoon sky to Ireland. She descended like a fireball in a slingshot toward the Fowl Estate, with no time to wonder or worry about—or, for that matter, revel in—the
imminent proof of her theories.

  I will raise the dead, she had often thought in her cell. Even Foaly cannot make that boast.

  Opal hit the Fowl Estate like a comet come to Earth, directly on the worn nub of the Martello tower, with its alien creeping vine. Like a dog snuffling after a bone, her corona of magic destroyed the tower and cleared a crater for itself, spiraling twenty feet down, past centuries of deposit, revealing another more ancient tower below. The magic sniffed out the roof lock, settling over it like a shimmering man-o’-war.

  Opal lay facedown, floating, dreamily watching events unfold. She saw her fingers splay and twitch, spark-streams shooting from the tips. She saw the cloaking spell stripped from what had seemed to be a simple metamorphous boulder, revealing it to be a rough stone tower with complicated intertwined runes etched into its surface. The magical ectoplasm sank into the engraved runes, electrifying them, sending burning rivulets coursing through the grooves.

  Open yourself to me, thought Opal, though this is an interpretation of her brain patterns. Another interpretation would be Aaaaaaargghhhhhh.

  The lock’s runes teemed with magic, becoming animated, slithering like snakes on hot sands, nipping at each other, fat ones swallowing the lines of lesser magic until all that remained was a simple couplet in Gnommish:

  Here be the lock first of two

  See it open and live to rue

  Opal had enough consciousness left to smirk inside her cocoon. Fairy medieval poetry. Typically blunt. Bad grammar, obvious rhyme, and melodrama coming out its metaphorical ears.

  I shall see it open, she thought. And Artemis Fowl will live to rue. But not for long.

  Opal gathered herself and placed her right hand flat on the stone, fingers splayed, magic clouding the tips. The hand sank in like sunlight through the darkness, cracks radiating from the contact.

  Rise, she thought. Rise, my beautiful warriors.

  The Berserkers were expelled from holy ground and into the air as though shot from cannon. The afterlife’s tug lessened, and the warriors felt free to complete their mission. The next death, they knew, would be their last, and finally the gates to Nimh would be open to them. This had been promised; they longed for it. For it is ever true that, though the dead long for life, souls are made for heaven and will not rest until they reach it. This was something unknown to the elfin warlock when he had forged the lock and key. He did not know that he had doomed his warriors to ten thousand years with their faces turned from the light. And to turn from the light for too long could cost a person his soul.

  But now, all the promises that had been whispered into their dying ears as the priests lugged their limp, heavy bodies to the trench were on the verge of fulfillment. All they needed to do was defend the gate in their stolen bodies, and their next death would open the gates of paradise. The Berserkers could go home.

  But not before human blood was spilled.

  The soil fizzled and danced as the ectoplasm of a hundred fairy warriors burst through it. Upward they surged, impatient for the light. They were drawn inexorably toward the key who lay over the stone lock, and they passed through the conduit of her magic one by one.

  Oro was first.

  It is a pixie, he realized with no little surprise, as pixies were known for their lack of magical ability. And a female! But, for all that, this one’s magic was powerful.

  As each successive warrior flashed through Opal’s being, she felt their pain and despair and absorbed their experiences before expelling them into the world with one command.

  Obey me. You are my soldier now.

  And so were Oro and his band of Berserkers placed under geasa, or fairy bond, to follow Opal wherever she would command. They tumbled into the sky, searching for a body to inhabit inside the magic circle.

  As leader, Oro had first choice of available ciphers, and he had, like many of his warriors, spent many thousands of hours considering what creature would make the ideal host for his talents. Ideally he would choose an elf with a bit of muscle to him and a long arm for swordplay; but it was unlikely that such a fine specimen would be readily available, and even if it were, it would be such a shame to take one elf and replace him with another. Recently, Oro had settled on a troll as his vehicle of choice, if there should happen to be one lumbering around.

  Imagine it. A troll with an elf’s mind. What a formidable warrior that would make!

  But there were no trolls, and the only available fairy was a feeble gnome with protection runes crisscrossing his chest. No possessing that one.

  There were humans, three of the hated creatures. Two males and a female. He would leave the female for Bellico, one of only two she-fairies in their ranks. So that left the boys.

  Oro’s soul circled above the males. Two curious little man-eens, who were not displaying the awe that this situation would seem to call for. Their world had dissolved to a maelstrom of magic, for Danu’s sake. Should they not be quaking in their boots, bubbling from the nose, and begging for a mercy that would not be forthcoming?

  But no, their reactions were surprising. The dark-haired boy had moved swiftly to the fallen girl and was expertly checking her pulse. The second, a blond one, had uprooted a clump of reeds with surprising strength for one his size, and he was even now accosting the doltish gnome, forcing him backward toward a ditch.

  That one interests me, thought Oro. He is young and small, but his body fizzes with power. I will have him.

  And it was as simple as that. Oro thought it, and so it became deed. One second he was hovering above Beckett Fowl, and the next he had become him and was beating the gnome with a fistful of whippety reeds.

  Oro laughed aloud at the senses assaulting his nerve endings. He felt the sweat in the wrinkles of his fingers, the glistening smoothness of the reeds. He smelled the boy, the youth and energy of him, like hay and summer. He felt a youthful heart beat like a drum in his chest.

  “Ha!” he said exultantly, and he continued to thrash the gnome for the sheer fun of it, thinking: The sun is warm, praise be Belenos. I live once more, but I will die gladly this day to see humans in the ground beside me.

  For it is ever true that resurrected fairy warriors are supernoble in their thought patterns and don’t have much in the way of a sense of humor.

  “Enough of this playfulness,” he said in Gnommish, and his human tongue mangled the words so that he sounded like an animal grunting speech. “We must assemble.”

  Oro looked to the skies, where his plasmic warriors sloshed about him like a host of translucent deep-sea creatures. “This is what we have waited for,” he called. “Find a body inside the circle.”

  And they dispersed in a flash of ozone, scouring the Fowl Estate for vessels that would become their hosts.

  The first bodies to be taken were the humans who were nearby.

  It was a poor day to hunt for ciphers on the Fowl Estate. On an average weekday the manor would have been a virtual throng of humanity. And presiding over everything would be Artemis Senior and Angeline Fowl, master and mistress of the manor. But on this fateful day the manor was virtually shut down for the approaching Christmas holidays. Artemis’s parents were in London, attending an eco-conference, with one personal assistant and two maids in tow. The rest of the staff was on early leave, with only the occasional holiday visit to keep the manor ticking. The Fowl parents had planned to scoop up their offspring on the tarmac at Dublin Airport once Artemis had concluded his therapy, and then point the Green Jet’s composite nose cone toward Cap Ferrat for Christmas on the Côte d’Azur.

  Today, nobody was home except for Juliet and her charges. Not a nugget of humanity left to be preyed on, much to the frustration of the circling souls who had been dreaming of this moment for a very long time. So choices were limited to various wildlife, including eight crows, two deer, a badger, a couple of English pointer hunting dogs that Artemis Senior kept in the stables, and corpses with a bit of spark in them, which were more plentiful than you might think. Corpses were far f
rom ideal hosts, as decay and desiccation made quick thinking and fine motor movements tricky. Also, bits were liable to fall off when you needed them most.

  The first corpses to go were fairly well preserved for their ages. Artemis Senior had, in his gangster days, stolen a collection of Chinese warrior mummies, which he had yet to find a safe way to repatriate and so stored in a dry-lined secret basement. The warriors were more than surprised to find their brain matter reanimated and rehydrated, and their consciousnesses being ridden shotgun by warriors even older than they were. They clanged into action in rusty armor and smashed through the glass in mounted display cases to reclaim their swords and polearm spears, steel tips polished to a deadly glitter by a loving curator. The basement door splintered quickly under their assault, and the mummies crashed through the manor’s great hall into the sunlight, pausing for a moment to feel its warm touch on their upturned brows before lumbering toward the pasture and their leader, forcing themselves to hurry in spite of their awakening senses, which longed to stop and smell any plant life. Even the compost heap.

  The next corpses to be reanimated were those of a bunch of rowdy lads interred by a cave-in, in a cave, back in the eighteenth century, while burying a plundered galleon’s worth of treasure, which they had transferred from the breached hull of HMS Octagon to their own brigantine, The Cutlass. The feared pirate Captain Eusebius Fowl and ten of his only slightly less feared crew were not crushed by the falling rock but sealed in an airtight bubble that would admit not so much as a sparrow’s whistle for them to suck into their lungs.

  The pirates’ bodies jittered as though electrocuted, shrugged off their blankets of kelp, and squeezed through a recently eroded hole in their tomb wall, heedless of the popped joints and sprung ribs that the journey cost.

  Aside from these groups, there were sundry corpses who found themselves dragged from their resting places to become accomplices in Opal Koboi’s latest bid for power. The spirit had already moved on from some, but for those who had died violently or with unfinished business, a ghost of their very essence remained, which could do nothing but lament the rough treatment heaped upon their bodies by the Berserkers.