فصل شانزدهم

chapter-16-a-warning-shot

MULCH DIGGUMS was not dead, but he had discovered the limits of his digestive abilities: that it was possible to eat too many rabbits. He lay on his back in the half-collapsed tunnel, his stomach stretched tight as the skin of a ripe peach.

“Uuuugh,” he moaned, releasing a burst of gas that drove him three yards farther along the tunnel. “That’s a little better.” It took a lot to put Mulch off a food source, but after this latest gorging on unskinned rabbit, he didn’t think he would be able to look at one for at least a week.

Maybe a nice hare, though. With parsnips.

Those rabbits had just kept coming, making that creepy hissing noise, hurling themselves down his gullet like they couldn’t wait for their skulls to be chomped. Why couldn’t all rabbits be this reckless? It would make hunting a lot easier.

It wasn’t the rabbits themselves that made me queasy, Mulch realized. It was the Berserkers inside them.

The souls of the Berserker warriors could not have been very comfortable inside his stomach. For one thing, his arms were covered in rune tattoos, as dwarfs had a fanatical fear of possession. And, for another, dwarf phlegm had been used to ward off spirits since time immemorial. So, as soon as their rabbit hosts died, the warrior spirits transitioned to the afterlife with unusual speed. They didn’t move calmly toward the light so much as sprint howling into heaven. Ectoplasm flashed and slopped inside Mulch’s gut, giving him a bad case of heartburn and painting a sour scorch in the lower bell curve of his tummy.

After maybe ten more minutes of self-pity and gradual deflation, Mulch felt ready to move. He experimentally waggled his hands and feet, and when his stomach did not flip violently, he rolled onto all fours.

I should get away from here, he thought. Far, far away from the surface before Opal releases the power of Danu, if there even is such a thing.

Mulch knew that if he was anywhere in the vicinity when something terrible happened, the LEP would try to blame him for the terrible happening.

Look, there’s Mulch Diggums. Let’s arrest him and throw away the access chip. Case closed, Your Honor.

Okay, maybe it wouldn’t happen exactly like that, but Mulch knew that whenever there were accusing fingers to be pointed, they always seemed to swivel around to point in his direction and, as his lawyer had once famously said, Three or four percent of the time my client was not a hundred percent accountable for the particular crime he was being accused of, which is to say that there were a significant number of incidents where Mr. Diggums’s involvement in the said incidents was negligible even if he might have technically been involved in wrongdoing adjacent to the crime scene on a slightly different date than specified on the LEP warrant. This single statement broke three analytical mainframes and had the pundits tied up in knots for weeks.

Mulch grinned in the dark, his luminous teeth lighting the tunnel.

Lawyers. Everyone should have one.

“Aw, well,” he said to the worms wriggling on the tunnel wall. “Time to go.” Farewell, old friends. We gave it our best try, but you can’t win ‘em all. Cowardice is the key to survival, Holly. You never understood that.

Mulch sighed long and hard, with a hitching burp at the end, because he knew he was kidding himself.

I can’t run away.

Because there was more at stake here than his own life. There was life itself. A lot of it, about to be snuffed out by a crazy pixie.

I am not making any heroic promises, he consoled himself. I’m just taking a quick peek at the Berserker Gate to see just how far up the creek we really are. Maybe Artemis has already saved the day, and I can retire to my tunnels. And perhaps take a few priceless masterpieces with me for company. Don’t I deserve that?

Mulch’s stomach grazed the tunnel floor as he moved, still swollen and making strange, animalistic noises.

I have enough energy for twenty feet of tunneling, he realized. No more, or my stomach walls will split.

As it turned out, Mulch did not have to swallow a single bite of tunnel clay. When he looked up, he saw a pair of glowing red eyes looking back at him. There were scything tusks poking from the dark beneath the night eyes, and a shaggy, dreadlocked head arranged around them.

“Gruffff,” said the troll, and all Mulch could do was laugh.

“Really?” he said. “After the day I’ve had.”

“Gruffff,” said the troll again, and it lumbered forward, with paralyzing venom dripping from its tusks.

Mulch went through fear, past panic, and around to anger and outrage.

“This is my home, troll!” he shouted, shunting forward. “This is where I live. You think you can take a dwarf? In a tunnel?” Gruff did indeed think this and increased his pace, even though the walls constricted his natural gait.

He’s a lot bigger than a rabbit, thought Mulch, and then the two collided in a blur of ivory, flesh, and blubber, with exactly the sound you would expect to hear when a lean killing machine hits a corpulent, gassy dwarf.

In the barn, Artemis and Holly were in a pretty desperate situation. They were down to two bullets in a gun that Holly could barely lift and Artemis couldn’t hit a barn door with, in spite of the fact that there was one close by.

They hunched in the back of Artemis’s solar plane, basically waiting for the Berserkers to launch their attack. Butler lay unconscious across the rear seats with smoke literally coming out of his ears, a symptom that had never been professionally diagnosed as a good thing.

Holly cradled Butler’s head, pressing her thumbs gently into his eye sockets, and forced her last watery squib of magic into the bodyguard’s cranium.

“He’s okay,” she panted. “But that bolt stopped his heart for a while. If it hadn’t been for the Kevlar in his chest…” Holly didn’t finish her sentence, but Artemis knew that his bodyguard had escaped death by a whisker for the umpteenth time, and umpteen was the absolute limit of the number of extra lives handed out by the universe to any one person.

“His heart will never be the same, Artemis. No more shenanigans. He’s going to be out for hours,” said Holly, checking the fuselage’s porthole. “And the Berserkers are getting ready to make their move. What’s the plan, Arty?” “I had a plan,” said Artemis numbly. “And it didn’t work.”

Holly shook his shoulder roughly, and Artemis knew her next step would be to slap him in the face. “Come on, Mud Boy. Snap out of it. Plenty of time for self-doubt later.” Artemis nodded. This was his function. He was the planner.

“Very well. Fire a warning shot. They cannot know how many bullets we have left, and it might give them pause, buy me a moment to think.” Holly’s rolled eyes spoke clearly, and what they said was: A warning shot? I could have thought of that myself, genius.

But this was no time to knock Artemis’s shrinking confidence, so she hefted Butler’s Sig Sauer and opened the window a slit, resting the barrel on the frame.

This gun is so big and unwieldy, she thought. I can hardly be blamed if I accidentally hit something.

In siege situations, it was standard practice to send in a scout. Send in being a nicer way of saying sacrifice. And the Berserkers decided to do just that, ordering one of the Fowl hunting dogs to literally sniff around. The large gray hound flitted through the moonlight streaming in through the barn door, planning to lose itself in the shadows.

Not so fast, thought Holly, and fired a single shot from the Sig, which hit the dog like a hammer blow high in its shoulder, sending it tumbling back outside to its comrades.

Oops, she thought. I was aiming for the leg.

When the plane finished vibrating and the gunshot echo faded from Artemis’s cranium he asked, “Warning shot, correct?” Holly felt a little guilty about the dog, but she could thrash that out in therapy if any of them survived. “Oh, they’re warned, all right. You have your minute to think.” The dog exited the barn a lot faster than it had come in. Bellico and her magical coterie were more than a little jealous when they saw a soul drift from the canine corpse, smile briefly, then disappear in a blue flash, on its way to the next world.

“We don’t need to enter,” said Salton the pirate, sliding the barn door closed. “All we need to do is stop them coming out.” Bellico disagreed. “Our orders are to kill them. We can’t do that from here, can we? And mayhap there’s something in there my host, Juliet, doesn’t know about. Another tunnel, or a hot-air balloon. We go in.” Opal had been very specific when Bellico had presented her with the information about the Khufu.

“My host protects the Fowl children,” Bellico had said. “The boy Myles is very inquisitive and followed Artemis to his hilltop workshop. So Juliet followed the boy. There is a sky craft in there, powered by the sun. Perhaps a weapon of some sort.” Opal had paused in her spell casting. “Artemis has no choice but to go for the weapon. Take a team and remove the craft’s battery, then wait for them to enter the workshop.” Opal clasped Bellico’s forearm and squeezed until her nails bit into the flesh. A slug of power crawled from Opal’s heart, along her arm and into Bellico. Bellico felt instantly nauseous and knew that the magic was poison.

“This is black magic and will eat into your soul,” said Opal, matter-of-factly. “You should release it as soon as possible. There’s enough there for one bolt. Make it count.” Bellico held her own hand before her face, watching the magic coil around her fingers.

One bolt, she thought. Enough to take down the big one.

Holly hovered anxiously around Artemis. He was in his thinking trance and hated to be interrupted, but there was bustling under the barn door and shadows crisscrossing in the moonlight, and her soldier sense told her that their refuge was about to be breached.

“Artemis,” she said urgently. “Artemis, do you have anything?”

Artemis opened his eyes and brushed back a hank of black hair from his forehead.

“Nothing. There is no rational plan that will save even one of us if Opal succeeds in opening the second lock.” Holly returned to the window. “Well then, first in gets another warning shot.” Bellico ordered the archers to line up outside the barn’s sliding door.

“When the door opens, fire whatever you’re carrying into the machine. Then we rush it. The elf will have time for two shots, no more. And if any of us happens to be killed, well then, that’s our good fortune.” The Chinese warriors could not speak, sealed as their mummified remains were inside enchanted clay sepulchers; but they nodded stiffly and drew their massive bows.

“Pirates,” called Bellico, “stand behind the archers.”

“We are not pirates,” said Salton Finnacre sulkily, scratching his femur. “We are inhabiting pirates. Isn’t that right, me hearties?” “Arrr, Cap’n,” said the other pirates.

“I admit it,” said Finnacre sheepishly. “That sounded fairly piratelike. But it bleeds through. Two more days in this body, and I could sail a brig singlehanded.” “I understand,” said Bellico. “We will be with our ancestors soon. Our duty will be done.” “Woof,” said the remaining hound with feeling, barely resisting his host’s urge to sniff other people’s personal areas. Bellico wrapped Juliet’s fingers around the door handle, testing it for weight.

“One more glorious charge, my warriors, and the humans are forever vanquished. Our descendants can forever live in peace.” The moment buzzed with impending violence. Holly could sense the Berserkers psyching themselves up.

It’s down to me, she realized. I have to save us.

“Okay, Artemis,” she said brusquely. “We climb to the rafters. Perhaps it will take the Berserkers time to find us. Time that you can spend planning.” Artemis peered over her shoulder, through the porthole.

“Too late,” he said.

The barn door trundled open on oiled casters, and six implacable Chinese clay warriors stood silhouetted in the moonlit rectangle.

“Archers,” said Holly. “Lie flat.”

Artemis seemed dazed by the utter collapse of his plans. He had acted predictably. When had he become so predictable?

Holly saw that her words were not penetrating Artemis’s skull, and she realized that Artemis had two major weaknesses: One, he was physically hamstrung not only by his hamstrings but also by a lack of coordination that would have embarrassed a four-year-old; and two, he was so confident in the superiority of his own intellect that he rarely developed a plan B. If plan A proved to be a dud, there was no fallback.

Like now.

Holly hurled herself at Artemis, latching on to his torso and knocking him flat in the narrow aisle. A second later, she heard the command from outside.

“Fire!”

It was Juliet’s voice. Ordering the murder of her own brother.

As battle veterans know all too well, the urge to look at the instrument of your own death is almost overpowering. Holly felt that pull now, to sit up and watch the arrows as they arced toward their targets. But she resisted it, forcing herself down, squashing herself and Artemis into the walkway so the corrugated steel pressed into their cheeks.

Four-foot-long arrows punched through the fuselage, rocking the plane on its gear and embedding themselves deep in the seating upholstery. One was so close to Holly that it actually passed through her epaulette, pinning her to the seat.

“D’Arvit,” said Holly, yanking herself free.

“Fire!” came the command from outside, and instantly a series of whistles filled the air.

It sounds like birds, thought Holly.

But it wasn’t birds. It was a second volley. Each arrow battered the aircraft, destroying solar panels; one even passed clean through two portholes. The craft was driven sideways, tilting onto the starboard wing.

And yet again the command came. “Fire!” But she heard no whistling noise this time. Instead there was a sharp crackling.

Holly surrendered to her curiosity, clambering up the slanted floor to the porthole and peeping out. Juliet was lighting the terra-cotta soldiers’ arrows.

Oh, thought Holly. That kind of fire.

Bellico squinted into the barn’s interior and was pleased to see the airplane keeled over. Her host’s memory assured her that this craft had indeed flown through the sky using the energy of the sun to power its engine, but Bellico found this difficult to believe. Perhaps the human’s dreams and recollections were becoming intertwined, so that to Bellico daydreams and figments would seem real.

The sooner I am out of this body, the better, she thought.

She wound a torch from a hank of hay and lit the tip with a lighter taken from the human girl’s pocket.

This lighter is real enough, she thought. And not too far removed in its mechanics from a simple flint box.

A straw torch would not burn for long, but long enough to light her warriors’ arrows. She walked along the ranks, briefly touching the arrowheads that had been soaked in fuel from a punctured gasoline can.

Suddenly the hound raised its sleek head and barked at the moon.

Bellico was about to ask the dog what the matter was, but then she felt it too.

I am afraid, she realized. Why would I be afraid of anything when I long for death?

Bellico dropped the torch as it was burning her fingers, but, in the second before she stamped on its dying embers, she thought she saw something familiar storming across the field to the east. An unmistakable lurching shape.

No, she thought. That is not possible.

“Is that…?” she said, pointing. “Could that be?”

The hound managed to wrap its vocal cords around a single syllable that wasn’t too far out of its doggy range. “Troll!” it howled. “Trooooollll.” And not just a troll, Bellico realized. A troll and its rider.

Mulch Diggums was clamped to the back of the troll’s head with a hank of dreadlocks in each hand. Beneath him the troll’s shoulder muscles bunched and released as it loped across the field toward the barn.

Loped is perhaps the wrong word, as it implies a certain slow awkwardness, but while the troll did appear to shamble, it did so at incredible speed. This was one of the many weapons in a troll’s considerable arsenal. If the intended prey noticed a troll coming from a long way off, seemingly bumbling along, it thought to itself: Okay, yeah I see a troll, but he’s like a million miles away, so I’m just gonna finish off chewing this leaf, then—BAM—the troll was chewing off the prey’s hind leg.

Bellico, however, had often seen the troll-rider brigade in action, and she knew exactly how fast a troll could move.

“Archers!” she yelled, drawing her sword. “New target. Turn! Turn!”

The terra-cotta army creaked as they moved, red sand sifting from their joints. They were slow, painfully slow.

They are not going to make it, Bellico realized, and then she had a grasping-at-straws moment. Perhaps that troll and its rider are on our side.

Sadly for the Berserkers, the troll rider was most definitely not on their side, and the troll was just doing what he was told.

Gruff did indeed make a fearsome spectacle as he emerged from night shadows into the pale moonglow bathing the field. Even for a troll, he was a massive specimen, more than nine feet tall, with his bouncing dreadlocks giving the illusion of another foot or two. His heavy-boned brow was like a battering ram over glittering night eyes. Two vicious tusks curved up from a pugnacious jaw, beads of venom twinkling at the pointy ends. His shaggy humanoid frame was cabled with muscle and sinew, and his hands had the strength to make dust of small rocks and big heads.

Mulch yanked on the troll’s dreadlocks, instinctively resurrecting an age-old troll-steering technique. His granddad had often told stories around the spit-fire of the great troll riders who had rampaged across the countryside doing whatever they felt like, and nobody could even catch them to argue.

The good old days, his granddad used to say. We dwarfs were kings. Even the demons would turn tail when they seen a mounted dwarf comin’ over the hill atop a sweat-steamin’ troll.

This doesn’t feel like a good day, thought Mulch. This feels like the end of the world.

Mulch decided on a direct approach rather than pussyfooting around with battle tactics, and he steered Gruff directly into the throng of Berserkers.

“Don’t hold back!” he shouted into the troll’s ear.

Bellico’s breath caught in her throat.

Scatter! she wanted to shout to her troops. Take cover!

But the troll was upon them, smashing terra-cotta warriors with scything swipes of its massive arms, knocking them over like toy soldiers. The troll kicked the dog into the lower atmosphere and sideswiped Bellico herself into a water barrel. In seconds, several pirates were reduced to a dog’s dinner, and even though Salton Finnacre managed to jab a sword into Gruff’s thigh, the massive troll lumbered on, seemingly unhindered by the length of steel sticking out of his leg.

Mulch’s toes located the nerve clusters between Gruff’s ribs, and he used them to steer the troll into the barn.

I am a troll rider, the dwarf realized with a bolt of pride. I was born to do this, and steal stuff, and eat loads.

Mulch resolved to find a way of combining these three pursuits if he made it through the night.

Inside the barn, the plane lay balanced on a wheel and wing tip, with arrows piercing its body. Holly’s face was pressed to the glass, her mouth a disbelieving O.

I don’t know why she’s surprised, thought Mulch. She should be used to me rescuing her by now.

Mulch heard the clamor of ranks re-forming behind him, and he knew it was only a matter of heartbeats before the archers launched a salvo at the troll.

And as big as my mount is, even he will go down with half a dozen arrows puncturing his vitals.

There was no time to open the glider door and scoop up its three passengers, so Mulch yanked on the dreadlocks, dug in his toes, and whispered in the troll’s ear, hoping that his message was getting through.

Inside the solar plane, Holly used the few moments before all hell would surely break loose to hustle a dazed Artemis into the pilot’s seat. She strapped herself in beside him.

“I’m flying?” asked Artemis.

Holly flip-flapped her feet. “I can’t reach the pedals.”

“I see,” said Artemis.

It was a banal yet necessary conversation, as Artemis’s piloting skills were soon to be called into use.

Gruff shouldered the plane upright, then put his weight behind it, heaving the light craft toward the open doorway. The plane hobbled forward on damaged gear, lurching with each rotation.

“I did not foresee any of these events,” said Artemis through clattering teeth, more to himself than to his copilot. Holly placed both hands on the dash, to brace herself against an impact toward which they were rolling at full speed.

“Wow,” said Holly, watching arrows thunk into the nose and wings. “You didn’t foresee a troll-riding dwarf pushing your plane down the runway. You must be losing your touch, Artemis.” He tried to connect himself to the moment, but it was too surreal. Watching the Berserker soldiers grow larger through the double frames of windshield and barn doorway made the entire thing seem like a movie. A very realistic 3-D movie with vibro-chairs, but a movie all the same. This feeling of detachment coupled with the old Artemis Fowl slow reflexes almost cost him his life as he sat dreamily watching a Berserker long-arrow arcing toward his head.

Luckily Holly’s reactions were stellar, and she managed to punch Artemis in the shoulder with enough force to knock him sideways to the limit of his seat belt. The arrow punctured the windshield, making a surprisingly small hole, and thunked into the headrest exactly where Artemis’s vacant face would have been.

Suddenly, Artemis had no problem connecting to the moment.

“I can air-start the plane,” he said, flicking switches on the dash. “If we get off the ground at all.” “Doesn’t that require coordination?” asked Holly.

“Yes, split-second timing.”

Holly paled. Relying on Artemis’s coordination was about as sensible as relying on Mulch’s powers of abstinence.

The plane battered its way through the Berserkers, decapitating a terra-cotta warrior. Solar panels tinkled and cracked, and the landing gear buckled. Gruff kept pushing, ignoring various wounds that now gushed with blood.

Bellico rallied her troops and hurried in pursuit, but none could match the troll’s pace except the hound, who latched on to Mulch’s back, trying to dislodge him.

Mulch was insulted that a dog would interfere in what was possibly the most valiant rescue attempt ever, so he locked its head in the crook of one elbow and shouted into the animal’s face.

“Give it up, Fido! I am invincible today. Look at me, riding a troll, for heaven’s sake. How often do you see that anymore? Never! That’s how often. Now, you have two seconds to back off, or I am going to have to eat you.” Two seconds passed. The dog shook its head, refusing to back off, so Mulch ate him.

It was, he would later tell his fellow dwarf fugitive Barnet Riddles, proprietor of Miami’s Sozzled Parrot bar, a terrible waste to spit out half a dog, but it’s difficult to look heroic with a mutt’s hindquarters hanging out of yer mouth.

Seconds after the live hound disagreed with Mulch to his face, the dead dog disagreed with his stomach. It may have been the Berserker soul that caused the onset of indigestion, or it may have been something the dog ate before something ate him—either way, Mulch’s innards were suddenly cramped by a giant fist wearing a chain-mail glove.

“I gotta trim,” he said through gritted teeth.

If Gruff had realized what Mulch Diggums was about to do, he would have run screaming like a two-year-old pixette and buried himself underground till the storm had passed, but the troll did not speak grunted Dwarfish and so followed the last command given, which had been: Push downhill.

The solar plane picked up speed as it ran down the clay ramp with the Berserkers in quick pursuit.

“We are not going to make it,” said Artemis, checking the instruments. “The gear is shot.” The runway’s end curved before them like the end of a gentle ski jump. If the plane went off with insufficient speed, it would simply plummet into the lake, and they would be sitting ducks alongside the actual ducks that were probably inhabited by Berserkers and would peck them to death. Artemis was almost reconciled to the fact that he was going to die in the immediate future, but he really did not want his skull to be fractured by the bill of a possessed mallard. In fact, Death by aggressive aquatic bird had just rocketed to number one on Artemis’s Least Favorite Ways to Die list, smashing the record-breaking dominance of Death by dwarf gas, which had haunted his dreams for years.

“Not ducks,” he said. “Please, not ducks. I was going to win the Nobel Prize.” They could hear commotion from underneath the fuselage: animal grunting and buckling metal. If the plane did not take off soon, it was going to be shaken to pieces. This was not a strong craft, stripped back as it was to increase the power-to-weight ratio necessary for sustainable flight.

Outside the solar plane, Mulch’s entire body was twisted in a cramped treeroot of pain. He knew what was going to happen. His body was about to react to a combination of stress, bad diet, and gas buildup by instantaneously jettisoning up to a third of his own body weight. Some more disciplined dwarf yogis can invoke this procedure at will and refer to it as the Once a Decade Detox, but for ordinary dwarfs it goes by the name Trimming the Weight. And you do not want to be in the line of fire when the weight is being trimmed.

The plane reached the bottom of the slope with barely enough momentum to clear the ramp.

Water landing, thought Artemis. Death by ducks.

Then something occurred. A boost of power came from somewhere. It was as if a giant forefinger had flicked the plane forward into the air. The tail rose, and Artemis fought the pedals to keep it down.

How is this happening? Artemis wondered, staring befuddled at the controls, until Holly punched his shoulder for the second time in as many minutes.

“Air start!” she yelled.

Artemis sat bolt upright. Air start! Of course.

The solar plane had a small engine to get the craft off the ground, and after that the solar panels kicked in; but without a battery the engine could not even turn over, unless Artemis hit the throttle at the right time, before the plane began to lose momentum. This might buy them enough time to catch a thermal for a couple of hundred feet, enough to clear the lake and outfly the arrows.

Artemis waited until he sensed the plane was at the apex of its rise, then opened the throttle wide.

Bellico and her remaining troops ran hell-for-leather down the runway, hurling any missiles in their arsenal after the plane. It was a bizarre situation to be involved in, even for a resurrected spirit occupying a human body.

I am chasing a plane being pushed down a runway by a troll-riding dwarf, she thought. Unbelievable.

But nevertheless it was true, and she’d best believe it, or her quarry would escape.

They cannot go far.

Unless the vehicle flew as it was designed to.

It won’t fly. We have destroyed the battery.

This thing flies without power once it is airborne. My host has seen this with her own eyes.

Her good sense told her that she should stop and allow the plane to crash into the lake. If the passengers did not drown, then her archers could pick off the swimmers. But good sense was of little use on a night such as this, when ghost warriors roamed the earth and dwarfs rode once more on the backs of trolls, so Bellico decided she must do what she could to stop this plane from leaving the ground.

She increased her pace, outstripping the other Berserkers, using her long human legs to their full advantage, and hurled herself at the troll’s midsection, grabbing tufts of gray fur with one hand and the pirate sword with the other.

Gruff howled but kept pushing.

I am attacking a troll, she thought. I would never do this with my own body.

Bellico glanced upward through the tangle of limbs and saw the whole of the moon, gleaming above. Beneath that, she saw a dwarf in considerable discomfort, changing his grip to hold on to the plane’s body, flattening himself to the fuselage.

“Go,” the dwarf instructed the troll. “Back to your cave.” That is not good, thought Bellico. Not good at all.

The plane swept up the liftoff ramp into the air. At the same moment, Gruff obeyed his master and released his grip, sending himself and Bellico skipping across the lake like skimmed stones, which was a lot more painful than it sounds. Gruff had a coat of fur to protect his hide, but Bellico covered most of the distance on a face that would have water burns for several months.

Overhead, Mulch could hold on no longer. He released a jetstream of watery fat, wind, and half-digested foodstuff that gave the solar plane a few extra feet of lift, just enough to send it soaring out over the lake.

Bellico surfaced just in time to be clocked on the forehead by what could have been a dog’s skull.

I will not think about that, she thought, and swam back toward the shore.

Artemis pumped the throttle for a second time, and the plane’s engine caught. The single nose propeller chugged, jerked, then spun faster and faster until its blades formed a continuous transparent circle.

“What happened?” Artemis wondered aloud. “What was that noise?”

“Wonder later,” said Holly, “and fly the plane now.”

This was a good idea, as they were by no means out of the woods yet. The engine was running, it was true, but there was no power in the solar battery, and they could only glide for a limited time at this altitude.

Artemis pulled the stick back, climbing to a hundred feet, and as the wider world spread out below them, the magnitude of the devastation wrought by Opal’s plan became obvious.

The roads into Dublin were lit by engine fires fed by fuel tanks and combustible materials. Dublin itself was blacked out, except for patches of orange lighting where generators had been patched up or bonfires lit. Artemis saw two large ships that had collided in the harbor, and another beached like a whale on the strand. There were too many fires to count in the city itself, and smoke rose and gathered like a thundercloud.

Opal plans to inherit this new earth, Artemis thought. I will not let her.

And it was this thought that pulled Artemis’s mind back into focus and set him scheming on a plan that could stop Opal Koboi for the final time.

They flew over the lake, but it was not graceful flight—in fact, it was more like prolonged falling. Artemis wrestled with controls that seemed to fight back as he struggled to keep their descent as gradual as possible.

They crested a row of pines and flew directly over the Berserker Gate, where Opal Koboi labored in a magical corona. Holly used the flyover as a chance to recon their enemy’s forces.

Opal was surrounded by a ring of Berserkers. There were pirates, clay warriors, and other assorted beings in the ring. The estate walls beyond were patrolled by more Berserkers. There were mostly animals on the walls—two foxes, and even some stag, clopping along the stone, sniffing the air.

No way in, thought Holly. And the sky is beginning to lighten.

Opal had given herself till sunrise to open the second lock.

Perhaps she will fail and the sunlight will do our work for us, thought Holly. But it was unlikely that Opal had made a mistake in her calculations. She had spent too long in her cell obsessing over every detail.

We cannot rely on the elements. If Opal’s plan is to fail, we must make it fail.

Beside her, Artemis was thinking the same thing, the only difference being that he had already laid the foundations of a plan in his mind.

If Artemis had voiced his plan at that moment, Holly would have been surprised. Not by the plan’s genius—she would expect no less—but because of its selflessness. Artemis Fowl planned to attack with the one weapon Opal Koboi would never suspect him of possessing: his humanity.

To deploy this stealth torpedo, Artemis would have to trust two people to be true their own personality defects.

Foaly would need to be as paranoid as he had always been.

And Opal Koboi’s rampant narcissism would need to have run so wild that she would not be able to destroy humanity without her enemies at hand to witness her glory.

Finally Holly could not sit and watch Artemis’s clumsy attempts at aviation any longer.

“Give me the stick,” she said. “Give it full flaps when we hit the ground. They’re going to be on us pretty quickly.” Artemis relinquished control without objection. This was not the time for macho argument. Holly was undeniably ten times the pilot he would ever be, and also several times more macho than he was. Artemis had once seen Holly get into a fistfight with another elf who said her hair looked pretty, because she thought he was being sarcastic, as she was sporting a fresh crew cut on that particular day.

Holly didn’t go on many dates.

Holly nudged the stick with the heel of her hand, lining up the plane with the manor’s pebble driveway.

“The driveway is too short,” said Artemis.

Holly knelt on the seat for a better view. “Don’t worry. The landing gear will probably totally collapse on impact anyway.” Artemis’s mouth twisted in what could have been an ironic smile or a grimace of terror.

“Thank goodness for that. I thought we were in real trouble.”

Holly struggled with the stick as though it were resisting arrest. “Trouble? Landing a crippled aircraft is just a normal Tuesday morning for us, Mud Boy.” Artemis looked at Holly then and felt a tremendous affection for her. He wished that he could loop the past ten seconds and study it at a less stressful time so he could properly appreciate how fierce and beautiful his best friend was. Holly never seemed so vital as when she was balancing on the fine line between life and death. Her eyes shone and her wit was sharp. Whereas others would fall apart or withdraw, Holly attacked the situation with a vigor that made her glow.

She is truly magical, thought Artemis. Perhaps her qualities are more obvious to me now that I have decided to sacrifice myself.

Then he realized something. I cannot reveal my plans to her. If Holly knew, she would try to stop me.

It pained Artemis that his last conversation with Holly would be by necessity peppered with misdirection and lies.

For the greater good.

Artemis Fowl, the human who had once lied as a matter of course, was surprised to find that in this instance, lying for the greater good did not make him feel any better about it.

“Here we go,” shouted Holly over the howl caused by the wind shear. “Shankle your bootbraces.” Artemis tightened his seat belt. “Bootbraces shankled,” he called.

And not a millisecond too soon. The ground seemed to rush up to meet them, filling their view, blocking out the sky. Then, with a tremendous clatter, they were down, being showered by blurred stones. Long-stemmed flowers fell in funereal bouquets across the windshield, and the propeller buckled with an earsplitting shriek. Artemis felt his seat belt bite into both shoulders, arresting his leftward lean, which was just as well, because his head would have naturally come to rest exactly where a prop blade had thunked through the seat rest.

The small craft lost its wings sliding down the avenue, then flipped onto its roof, coming to a shuddering halt at the front steps.

“That could have been a lot worse,” said Holly, smacking her seat-belt buckle.

Indeed, thought Artemis, watching blood on the tip of his nose seem to drip upward.

Suddenly something that looked like a giant, angry peach slid down what was left of the windshield, buckling the anti-shatter glass and coming to a wobbly stop on the bottom step.

Mulch made it, thought Artemis. Good.

Mulch literally crawled up the manor steps, desperate for food to replace his jettisoned fat. “Can you believe that supermodels do that every month?” he moaned.

Artemis beeped the door and the dwarf disappeared inside, clattering down the main hallway toward the kitchen.

It was left to Artemis and Holly to lug Butler the length of the steps, which in the bodyguard’s limp, unconscious state was about as easy as lugging a sack of anvils.

They had made it to the third step when an uncommonly bold robin redbreast fluttered down and landed on Butler’s face, hooking its tiny claws over the bridge of the bodyguard’s nose. This in itself would have been surprising enough, but the note clamped in the bird’s beak made the little creature altogether more sinister.

Artemis dropped Butler’s arm. “That was quick,” he said. “Opal’s ego doesn’t waste any time.” Holly tugged the tiny scroll free. “You were expecting this?”

“Yes. Don’t even bother reading it, Holly. Opal’s words are not worth the paper they are written on, and I can tell that’s inexpensive paper.” Of course Holly did read the note, and her cheeks glowed brighter with every word.

“Opal requests the pleasure of our company for the great cleansing. If we turn ourselves in, just me and you, then she will let your brothers live. Also she promises to spare Foaly, when she is declared empress.” Holly balled the note and flicked it at the robin redbreast’s head. “You go and tell Opal no deal.” The bird whistled aggressively and flapped its wings in a way that seemed insulting.

“You want to take me on, Berserker?” said Holly to the tiny bird. “Because I may have just crawled out of a plane crash, but I can still kick your tail feathers.” The redbreast took off, its birdsong trailing behind it like a derisive chuckle as it flew back to its mistress.

“You’d better fly, Tweety!” Holly shouted after it, allowing herself an unprofessional outburst, and it did make her feel marginally better. Once the bird had disappeared over the tree line, she returned to her task.

“We must hurry,” she said, hooking her arm under Butler’s. “This is a trick. Opal will have more Berserkers on our tails. We’re probably being watched by…worms…right now.” Artemis did not agree. “No. The gate is paramount now. She will not risk more soldiers hunting for us. But we must hurry all the same. Dawn is only a couple of hours away, and we have time for only one more assault.” “So we’re ignoring that note, right?”

“Of course. Opal is toying with our emotions for her own gratification. Nothing more. She wishes to place herself in a position of power, emotionally.” The steps were coated with seasonal ice crystals, which twinkled like movie frost in the moonlight. Eventually Artemis and Holly succeeded in rolling Butler over the threshold and onto a rug, which they dragged underneath the stairs, making the hefty bodyguard as comfortable as possible with some of the throw pillows that Angeline Fowl liked to strew casually on every chair.

Holly’s back clicked as she straightened. “Okay. Death cheated one more time. What’s next, brainiac?” Holly’s words were glib, but her eyes were wider than usual, with desperation in the whites. They were so close to unthinkable disaster that it seemed even Artemis, with his knack of pulling last-minute miraculous rabbits out of his hat, could not possibly save humanity.

“I need to think,” said Artemis simply, quick-stepping up the stairs. “Have something to eat and maybe take a nap. This will take ninety minutes at least.” Holly clambered after him, struggling up the human-size steps.

“Wait! Just wait,” she called, overtaking Artemis and looking him in the eye from one step up. “I know you, Artemis. You like to play your genius card close to your chest until the big reveal. And that’s worked out for us so far. But this time you need to let me in. I can help. So, tell me the truth, do you have a plan?” Artemis met his friend’s gaze and lied to her face.

“No,” he said. “No plan.”