by Eoin Colfer
Opal’s voice came from beyond the throng, shielded by its mass.
“They have protected themselves. Kill them now, my soldiers. Bring their heads to me.”
Artemis coughed. Bring their heads to me? Opal used to be a little more subtle. It’s true what they say: Prison does not rehabilitate people. Not pixies, at any rate.
His own baby brothers advanced toward him with murder in their eyes. Two four-year-olds moving with increasing grace and speed.
Are they stronger now? Could Myles and Beckett actually succeed in killing us?
And if they didn’t, perhaps those pirates would, with their rusting cutlasses.
“Butler,” Artemis rasped. “Retreat and evaluate.”
It was their only option.
There is no proactive move open to us.
This realization irritated Artemis, even though he was in mortal danger.
“Retreat and try not to injure anybody except those pirates. The Chinese warrior mummies and I will not be overly upset if a few animals are harmed. After all, it is us or them.”
But Butler was not listening to Artemis’s uncharacteristically nervous diatribe, because Holly’s shot had pulsed his vagus nerve and knocked him out cold. A shot in a million.
It was up to Holly to defend the group. It should be fine. All Captain Short had to do was set her custom Neutrino on a wide burst to buy them some time.
Then a pirate’s blackjack twirled from the fingers of a pirate’s skeletal hand and cracked Holly’s nose, sending her tumbling backward on top of Butler’s frame.
Artemis watched the possessed creatures advance the final steps toward him and was dismayed that at the end it all came down to the physical.
I always thought my intellect would keep me alive, but now I shall be killed by my own baby brother with a rock. The ultimate sibling rivalry.
Then the ground opened beneath his feet and swallowed the group whole.
Opal Koboi elbowed through her acolytes to the edge of the chasm that had suddenly appeared to suck her nemeses from their fate.
“No!” she squealed, tiny fists pounding the air. “I wanted their heads. On spikes. You people do that all the time, right?”
“We do,” admitted Oro, through the mouth of Beckett. “Limbs too, betimes.”
Opal could have sworn that, underneath her stamping feet, the ground burped.
The Fowl Estate, Several Feet Belowground
Artemis tumbled down and down, striking knees and elbows against the crooks of roots and sharp limestone corners that protruded from the earth like half-buried books. Clumps of dirt crumbled around him, and stones rattled down his shirt and up his pant legs. His view was obstructed by the twirl of tumble and layers of earth, but there was a glowing above. And below too? Was that possible?
Artemis was confused by the thump of wood behind one ear and the luminous glow from below. It was below, wasn’t it?
I feel like Alice falling into Wonderland.
A line came to him:
It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.
No fall can last forever when gravity is involved, and Artemis’s descent was mercifully gradual as the crater funneled to a bottleneck, which Butler and Holly had the decency to block with their tangled frames and limbs before they plopped through the hole. Rough hands grabbed at Artemis, tugging him through to a tunnel beneath.
Artemis landed on the body heap and blinked the mud from his eyes. Someone, or something, stood naked before him, an ethereal figure glowing with divine light from head to foot. It reached out a shining hand and spoke in a deep movie promo voice:
“Pull my finger.”
Artemis relaxed neck muscles that he hadn’t realized were tensed. “Mulch.”
“The one and only. Saving your brainiac butt once more. Remind me, who’s supposed to be the genius around here?”
“Mulch,” said Artemis again.
Mulch pointed his proffered finger like a gun. “Aha. You’re repeating yourself. You once told me that repeating yourself is an exercise in redundancy. Well, who’s redundant now, Mud Boy? What good did your genius do you with those freaks up there?”
“None,” admitted Artemis. “Can we argue later?”
“’Cause you’re losing the argument,” scoffed Mulch.
“No, because those freaks are on our tail. We need to retreat and regroup.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Mulch, reaching a forearm into a hole in the tunnel wall and yanking out a thick root. “Nobody’s following us anywhere once I collapse the tunnel mouth. But you might want to scoot forward a yard or two.”
The earth above them rumbled like thunderclouds cresting a low mountain, and Artemis was gripped with a sudden certainty that they were all about to be crushed. He scurried forward and flattened himself against the cold dark mud wall, as if that could possibly make any difference.
But Mulch’s tunnel held its integrity, and only the spot where Artemis had been was completely blocked.
Mulch wrapped his fingers around Butler’s ankle and, with some effort, hauled the unconscious bodyguard along the tunnel floor.
“You carry Holly. Gently now. By the looks of your hand, she drove those spirits away and saved your life. Before I saved it. Probably just after Butler saved it. You seeing a pattern emerging, Artemis? You starting to realize who the liability is here?”
Artemis looked at his hand. He was branded with a spiral rune where Holly had blasted him. The last globs of Berserker ectoplasm slicking his hair caused him to shudder at the sight.
A protection rune.
Holly had branded them to save them. And to think he had doubted her.
Artemis scooped up Holly and followed the glowing dwarf, tentatively feeling his way with tapping toes.
“Slow down,” he called. “It’s dark in here.”
Mulch’s voice echoed along the tunnel. “Follow the globes, Arty. I gave ’em an extra coating of dwarf spit, the magical solution that can do it all, from glow in the dark to repel ghostly boarders. I should bottle this stuff. Follow the globes.”
Artemis squinted at the retreating glow and could indeed distinguish two wobbling globes that shone a little brighter than the rest.
Once he realized what the globes were, Artemis decided not to follow too closely. He had seen those globes in action and still had the occasional nightmare.
The tunnel undulated and curved until Artemis’s internal compass surrendered what little sense of direction it had. He traipsed behind Mulch’s glowing rear end, glancing down at his unconscious friend in his arms. She seemed so small and frail, though Artemis had seen her take on a horde of trolls in his defense.
“The odds are against us, as they have been so often, my friend,” he whispered, as much to himself as to Holly. He ran a rough calculation, factoring in the desperate situations they had endured over the past few years, the relative IQ of Opal Koboi, and the approximate number of opponents he had glimpsed aboveground. “I would estimate our chances of survival to be less than fifteen percent. But, on the plus side, we have survived, indeed been victorious, against greater odds. Once.”
Obviously Artemis’s whispers carried down the tunnel, for Mulch’s voice drifted back to him.
“You need to stop thinking with your head, Mud Boy, and start thinking with your heart.”
Artemis sighed. The heart was an organ for pumping oxygen-rich blood to the cells. It could no more think than an apple could tap-dance. He was about to explain this to the dwarf when the tunnel opened to a large chamber, and Artemis’s breath was taken away.
The chamber was the size of a small barn, with walls sloping to an apex. There were feeder tunnels dotted at various heights, and blobs of glowing gunk suckered to exposed rock served as a lighting system. Artemis had seen this particular system before.
“Dwarf phlegm,” he said, nodding at a low cluster of tennis ball–sized blobs. “Hardens once excreted, and glows with a luminescence unmatched in nature.�
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“It’s not all phlegm,” said the dwarf mysteriously, and for once Artemis did not feel like getting to the bottom of Mulch’s mystery, as the bottom of Mulch’s mysteries was generally in the vicinity of Mulch’s mysterious bottom. Artemis placed Holly gently on a bed of fake-fur coats and recognized a designer label.
“These are my mother’s coats.”
Mulch dropped Butler’s leg. “Yep. Well, possession is nine-tenths of the law, so why don’t you take your tenth back up to the surface and talk larceny with the thing that used to be Opal Koboi?”
This was a good point. Artemis had no desire to be booted out of this sanctuary.
“Are we safe down here? Won’t they follow us?”
“They can try,” said Mulch, then he spat a glowing wad of spit on top of a fading spatter. “But it would take a couple of days with industrial drills and sonar. And even then I could bring the whole thing down with a well-placed burst of dwarf gas.”
Artemis found this hard to believe. “Seriously. One blast, and this entire structure comes tumbling down?”
Mulch adopted a heroic pose, one foot on a rock, hands on hips. “In my line of work, you gotta be ready to move on. Just walk away.”
Artemis did not appreciate the heroic pose. “Please, Mulch, I beg you. Put on some pants.”
Mulch grudgingly agreed, tugging faded tunneling breeches over his meaty thighs. This was as far as he was prepared to go, and his furry chest and prodigious gut remained glowing and bare.
“The pants I will wear for Holly’s sake, but this is my home, Artemis. In the cave, Diggums keeps it casual.”
Water dripped from a stalactite into a shimmering pool. Artemis dipped his hand in, then laid his palm on Holly’s forehead. She was still unconscious following her second physical trauma in as many minutes, and a single spark of magic squatted on her head wound, buzzing like an industrious golden bee. The bee seemed to notice Artemis’s hand and skipped onto the brand, calming his skin but leaving a raised scar. Once it had finished its work, the magic returned to Holly and spread itself like a salve across her forehead. Holly’s breathing was deep and regular, and she seemed more like a person asleep than unconscious.
“How long have you been here, Mulch?”
“Why? Are you looking for back rent?”
“No, I am simply collating information at the moment. The more I know, the more comprehensively I can plan.”
Mulch nudged the lid from a cooler, which Artemis recognized from an old picnic set of the family’s, and pulled out a bloodred salami.
“You keep saying that ’bout comprehensive planning, et cetera, and we keep ending up eyeball-deep in the troll hole without spring boots.”
Artemis had long ago stopped asking Mulch to explain his metaphors. He was desperate for any information that might give him an edge, something that would help him wrest control of this desperate situation.
Focus, he told himself. There is so much at stake here. More than ever before.
Artemis felt ragged. His chest heaved from recent healings and exertions. Uncharacteristically, he did not know what to do, other than wait for his friends to wake up.
He shuffled across to Butler, checking his pupils for signs of brain injury. Holly had shot him in the neck, and they had taken quite a tumble. He was relieved to find both pupils to be of equal size.
Mulch squatted beside him, glowing like a dumpy demigod, which was a little disturbing if you knew what the dwarf was actually like. Mulch Diggums was about as far from godliness as a hedgehog was from smoothliness.
“What do you think of my place?” asked the dwarf.
“This is…” Artemis gestured to their surroundings. “Amazing. You hollowed all of this out yourself. How long have you been here?”
The dwarf shrugged. “Coupla years. Off and on, you know. I have a dozen of these little bolt-holes all over the place. I got tired of being a law-abiding citizen. So I siphon off a little juice from your geothermal rods and pirate your cable.”
“Why live down here at all?”
“I don’t live live here. I crash here occasionally. When things get hot. I just pulled a pretty big job and needed to hide out for a while.”
Artemis looked around. “A pretty big job, you say? So where’s all the loot?”
Mulch wagged a finger that glowed like a party stick. “That, as my cousin Nord would say, is where my improvised lie falls apart.”
Artemis put two and two together and arrived at a very unpleasant four.
“You were here to rob me!”
“No, I wasn’t. How dare you?!”
“You are lurking down here to tunnel into Fowl Manor. Again.”
“Lurking is not a nice word. Makes me sound like a sea serpent. I like to think I was hiding in the shadows. Cool, like a cat burglar.”
“You eat cats, Mulch.”
Mulch joined his hands. “Okay. I admit it. I might have been planning to have a peek into the art vault. But look at the funny side. Stealing stuff from a criminal mastermind. That’s gotta be ironic. You brainiacs like irony, right?”
Artemis was appalled. “You can’t keep art here. It’s damp and muddy.”
“Didn’t do the pharaohs any harm,” argued the dwarf.
Holly, who lay on the ground beside them, opened her eyes, coughed, then executed a move that was much more difficult than it looked by actually springing vertically from where she lay and landing on her feet. Mulch was impressed until Holly attempted to strangle him with his own beard, at which point he stopped being impressed and got busy choking.
This was a problem with waking up after a magical healing: often the brain is totally unharmed, but the mind is confused. It is a strange feeling to be smart and dopey at the same time. Add a time lapse into the mix, and a person will often find it difficult to transition from a dream state to the waking world, so it is advisable to place the patient in tranquil surroundings, perhaps with some childhood toys heaped around the pillow. Unfortunately for Holly, she had lost consciousness in the middle of a life-or-death struggle and awoke to find a glowing monster looming over her. So, she understandably overreacted.
It took about five seconds before she realized who Mulch was.
“Oh,” she mumbled sheepishly. “It’s you.”
“Yes,” said Mulch, then coughed up something that squeaked and crawled away. “If you could please relinquish the beard—I just had a salon conditioning treatment done.”
“Really?”
“Of course not really. I live in a cavern. I eat dirt. What do you think?”
Holly finger-combed Mulch’s beard a little, then climbed down from the dwarf’s shoulders.
“I was just sitting in spit, right?” she said, grimacing.
“It’s not all spit,” said Artemis.
“Well, Artemis,” she said, rubbing the faint red mark on her forehead, “what’s the plan?”
“And hello to you, too,” said Mulch. “And don’t thank me. Saving your life once more has been my pleasure. Just one of the many services offered by Diggums Airlines.”
Holly scowled at him. “I have a warrant out for you.”
“So why don’t you arrest me, then?”
“The secure facilities aren’t really operating at the moment.”
Mulch took a moment to process this, and the trademark bravado drained from his craggy features, crease by crease. It almost seemed like his glow dimmed a few notches.
“Oh, holy lord Vortex,” he said, tracing the sacred sign of the bloated intestine over his stomach to ward off evil. “What has Opal done now?”
Holly sat on a mound, tapping her wrist computer to see if anything worked.
“She’s found and opened the Berserker Gate.”
“And that’s not the worst thing,” said Artemis. “She killed her younger self, which destroyed everything Opal has invented or influenced since then. Haven is shut down, and humans are back in the Stone Age.”
Holly’s face was grim in the
glow of luminous spit. “Actually, Artemis, finding the Berserker Gate is the worst thing, because there are two locks. The first releases the Berserkers…”
Mulch jumped into the pause. “And the second? Come on, Holly, this is no time for theatrics.”
Holly hugged her knees like a lost child. “The second releases Armageddon. If Opal succeeds in opening it, every single human on the surface of the earth will be killed.”
Artemis felt his head spin as the bloody scale of Opal’s plan became clear.
Butler chose this moment to regain his senses. “Juliet is on the surface with Masters Beckett and Myles, so I guess we can’t let that happen.”
They sat in a tight group around a campfire of glowing spit while Holly told what had been considered a legend but was now being treated as pretty accurate historical fact.
“Most of this you will already know from the spirits who tried to invade you.”
Butler rubbed his branded neck. “Not me. I was out cold. All I have is fractured images. Pretty gross stuff, even for me. Severed limbs, people being buried alive. Dwarfs riding trolls into battle? Could that have happened?”
“It all happened,” Holly confirmed. “There was a dwarf corps that rode trolls.”
“Yep,” said Mulch. “They called themselves the Troll Riders. Pretty cool name, right? There was a group that only went out at night who called themselves the Night Troll Riders.”
Artemis couldn’t help himself. “What were the daytime troll riders called?”
“Those gauchos were called the Daytime Troll Riders,” answered Mulch blithely. “Head to toe in leather. They smelled like the inside of a stinkworm’s bladder, but they got the job done.”
Holly could have wept with frustration, but she’d learned during her brief period as a private investigator when Mulch had served as her partner that the dwarf would shut up only when he was good and ready. Artemis, on the other hand, should know better.
“Artemis,” she said sharply, “don’t encourage him. We are on a timetable.”
Artemis’s expression seemed almost helpless in the luminescence. “Of course. No more comments. I am feeling a little overwhelmed, truth be told. Continue, Holly, please.”
