Artemis Fowl 08 - The Last Guardian (13 page)

“Fowl,” barked one, being very familiar with Artemis’s scent. “Fowl. Fowl.”

“Good boy,” said Gobdaw, reaching up to pat the hound’s head with Myles’s little hand, which the dog did not think was very funny at all and would have bitten it had it not belonged to a superior officer.

Gobdaw called to his soldiers, “Warriors. Our noble brothers inside these beasts have picked up a trail. Our mission is to find the humans.”

No one asked,
What then?
Everybody knew what you did to humans when you found them. Because if you didn’t do it to them, they would do it to you, and your entire species, and probably anyone your species had ever shared a flagon of beer with.

“And the elf?” asked Bellico. “What of her?”

“The elf made her choice,” said Gobdaw. “If she steps aside, then we let her live. If she stands her ground, then she becomes as a Mud Person to us.” Sweat rolled down Gobdaw’s brow though the night was growing cool, and he spoke through clenched teeth, trying to hold back Myles Fowl’s consciousness, which bubbled up inside him like mental indigestion.

This exchange was cut short when the English pointers streaked away from the collapsed tunnel mouth and across the meadow toward the large human dwelling that crested the hill.

“Ah,” said Bellico, taking off after the dogs. “The humans are in the stone temple.”

Gobdaw tried to stop himself from talking but failed. “He says to tell you that it’s called a manor. And that all girls are stupid.”

Artemis, Holly, and Butler squirmed along a tunnel that Mulch had assured them would emerge in the wine cellar behind a rack of Château Margaux 1995.

Artemis was horrified by this revelation. “Don’t you know that your tunnel could affect the temperature of the cellar? Not to mention the humidity? That wine is an investment.”

“Don’t worry about the wine, silly Mud Boy,” said Mulch in a very patronizing tone that he had developed and practiced simply to annoy Artemis. “I drank that months ago and replaced it. It was the only responsible thing to do—after all, the cellar’s integrity had been compromised.”

“Yes, by you!” Artemis frowned. “Replaced it with what?”

“Do you really want to know?” the dwarf asked, and Artemis shook his head, deciding that, given the dwarf’s history, in this particular case
ignorance
would be less disturbing than the truth.

“Wise decision,” said Mulch. “So, to continue. The tunnel runs to the back of the cellar, but the wall is plugged.”

“Plugged with what?” asked Artemis, who could be a bit slow in spite of his genius.

The dwarf finger-combed his beard. “I refer you to my last question: Do you really want to know?”

“Can we break through?” asked Butler, the pragmatist.

“Oh yes,” said Mulch. “A big strong human like you. No problem. I’d do it for you, but apparently I have this other mission.”

Holly looked up from her wrist computer, which still wasn’t picking up a signal. “We need you to get the weapons in the shuttle, Mulch. Butler has some kit in the house, but Juliet could already be leading the Berserkers there. We need to move fast and on two fronts. A pincer movement.”

Mulch sighed. “Pincer. I love crab. And lobster. Makes me a little gassy, but it’s worth it.”

Holly slapped her knees. “Time to go,” she said.

Neither of the humans argued.

Mulch watched his friends climb into the manor tunnel and then turned back the way they had come, toward the shuttle.

I don’t like retracing my steps, he thought. Because there’s usually someone chasing after me.

So now here they were, wriggling along a claustrophobic tunnel with the heavy smell of earth in their noses and the ever-present threat of untold tonnage looming above them like a giant anvil.

Holly knew what everyone was thinking. “This tunnel is sound. Mulch is the best digger in the business,” she said between grunts and breaths.

The tunnel meandered, and their only light was from a cell phone taped to Butler’s forehead. Artemis had this sudden vision of the three of them stuck in there forever, like rodents in the belly of a snake, being slowly digested until not a trace remained.

No one will ever know what happened to us.

This was a redundant thought, Artemis knew, because if they didn’t get out of this tunnel, then in all likelihood there would be no one left to wonder what had become of their small group. And he would never know if he had failed to save his parents or if they had already been killed somehow in London.

Nevertheless, Artemis could not shake the notion that they were about to die in this vast unmarked grave, and it grew stronger with every grasping reach of his hand that drew him farther into the earth.

Artemis reached forward once more in the blackness and his scrabbling fingers met Butler’s boot.

“I think we made it,” said the bodyguard. “We’ve reached the blockage.”

“Is the blockage solid?” called Holly from the rear.

There followed a series of noises that would not sound out of place in a jelly factory, and a smell that would be totally consistent with a burst sewage pipe.

Butler coughed several times, swore at length, then said a line heavy with dreadful implication. “Only the crust is solid.”

They tumbled through the hole onto a fallen rack of broken wine bottles, which had been knocked over by Butler’s hurried entry. Usually he would have inched his way through the entrance, moving the rack bit by bit, but in this case speed was more important than stealth, and so he simply crashed through Mulch’s tunnel plug and into the cellar beyond. The other two quickly followed, happy to escape the confines of the tunnel.

Artemis sniffed the liquid pooling in concave curves of broken bottle fragments. “That is most definitely not Château Margaux 1995,” he commented.

“It’s not even snake wine,” said Butler, brushing himself off. “Although I know a few mercenaries who would probably drink it.”

Holly hiked up the tall seventeenth-century stone cellar steps, then pressed her ear to the door.

“I can’t hear anything,” she said after a moment. “Wind from outside, that’s all.”

Butler pulled Artemis from the rack wreckage. “Let’s keep going, Artemis. We need to get to my weapons before it occurs to Juliet’s passenger.”

Holly opened the door a crack and peeped through. Halfway down a corridor was a bunch of pirates armed with automatic weapons. They stood absolutely still, probably in an attempt to stop their bones from rattling.

Butler crept up behind her.

“How are we doing?” he asked.

Holly held her breath as she closed the door.

“Not great,” she said.

They squatted behind a rack of 1990s California reds and spoke in urgent whispers.

“What do we have?” asked Artemis.

Butler held up his fists. “I’ve got these. That’s it.”

Holly searched the pockets of her jumpsuit. “Some plasti-cuffs. A couple of flares. Not much of an inventory.”

Artemis touched the tip of each finger against the pad of his thumb, one of his focusing exercises. “We have something else,” he said. “We have the house.”

Gobdaw and Bellico followed the hounds up Fowl Manor’s grand stairs and along the hallway to Artemis’s laboratory. Once through the door, the dogs leaped on Artemis’s white coat, which was hanging from a peg, using their teeth and claws to slash and chew the material.

“They smell the human,” said Gobdaw, disappointed not to have an opportunity to use the baby Glock that fit so neatly in Myles’s little hand.

They had raided Butler’s arms room, which was hidden behind a false wall in his quarters. Only four people knew the location of and passcode to the keypad—five, now, if Bellico could be counted as a separate person from Juliet. Gobdaw helped himself to the small gun and several blades, while Bellico chose a machine pistol and a carbon graphite recurve bow with a quiver of aluminium arrows. The pirates took more or less everything else, dancing happy jigs as they clattered downstairs to lie in wait.

“We should keep looking,” said Gobdaw.

Bellico did not agree, as she had Juliet’s knowledge of the manor. “No. Artemis’s office adjoins this room, so they will come here. We have warriors in the basement and the safe room. Let the hounds and the pirates herd them toward us.”

Gobdaw had enough leader’s experience to know a good plan when he heard it.

“Very well. We wait here, but if I don’t get to fire this gun before sunrise, I shall be most disappointed.”

“Don’t worry. You will need every bullet for the big human.”

Bellico grabbed the hounds by their collars and yanked them from the coat.

“You two should be ashamed,” she said. “Do not lose yourselves inside those beasts.”

One hound butted the second, as though the mistake had been his alone.

“Go now,” said Bellico, kicking their rumps. “And find us some Mud People.”

Gobdaw and Bellico squatted behind the worktop, one nocking an arrow and the other disengaging the safety on his stolen handgun.

“The house is a virtual fortress,” explained Artemis. “Once the siege function has been engaged on the security panel, then it would take an army to penetrate the defenses, all of which were designed and installed before Opal jumped from her time line, so there is no chance any of the components will have exploded.”

“And where is this panel?” asked Holly.

Artemis tapped his watch. “Usually I can access it remotely on my watch or phone, but the Fowl network is down. I upgraded the router recently and perhaps a Koboi component crept in, so we will have to use the panel in my office.”

Butler knew it was his function to play devil’s advocate. “Won’t that just lock us in here with a bunch of pirates?”

Artemis smiled. “Or lock them in here with us.”

Salton Finnacre was bemoaning the loss of his own body to his mate J’Heez.

“Remember those arm muscles I had?” he said wistfully. “They woz like tree trunks. Now look at me.” He jiggled his left arm to demonstrate how the flaps of flesh hung loosely from his bones. “I can barely hold this fire stick.”

“It ain’t a fire stick,” said J’Heez. “They’re called
guns
. That’s a simple enough word to remember, ain’t it?”

Salton looked at the automatic handgun in his bony fingers. “I suppose. Just point and pull, is it?”

“That’s what Bellico said.”

“Did you hear that, Berserkers?” Salton asked the half dozen pirates squashed into the stairwell behind him. “Just point and shoot. And don’t worry about hitting the person in front of you, because we are already dead.”

They stood in the red-bricked corridor, praying for some humans to wander past. After all this time, it would be a shame if they didn’t get to kill anyone.

Ten feet below, in the wine cellar, Butler hefted two bottles of Macallan 1926 Fine and Rare whiskey.

“Your father will not be pleased,” he said to Artemis. “This is thirty thousand euros per missile.”

Artemis wrapped his fingers around the door handle. “I feel certain he will understand, given the circumstances.”

Butler chuckled briefly. “Oh, we’re telling your father about the circumstances this time? That will be a first.”

“Well, perhaps not
all
the circumstances,” said Artemis, and he opened the door wide.

Butler stepped into the gap and lobbed the bottles at the ceiling over the pirates’ heads. Both smashed, showering the Berserkers with high-alcohol liquid. Holly stepped under Butler’s legs and shot a single flare into their midst. In less than a second the entire bunch of pirates was engulfed in a
whoosh
of blue and orange flames, which painted the ceiling black. It didn’t seem to bother the pirates too much, except for the one with the peg legs, who was soon left without a leg to stand on. The rest lived on as skeletons, bringing their guns around to bear on the cellar door.

“The house will save us?” asked Holly nervously. “That’s what you said.”

“Three,” said Artemis. “Two…one.”

Right on cue, the manor’s fire-safe system registered the rise in temperature and instructed eight of its two hundred nozzles to submerge the flames in sub-zero extinguisher foam. The pirates were driven to their knees by the force of the spray, and they yanked their triggers blindly, sending ricochets zinging off the walls and down the stairs. The bullets played out their kinetic energy on the steel bannisters and fell to the ground, smoking. In the corridor, the pirates’ bone temperature dropped over a hundred degrees in less than ten seconds, making them as brittle as pressed leaves.

“Here we go,” said Butler, and he charged up the stairs, crashing through the disoriented pirates like a vengeful bowling ball. The unfortunate Berserkers shattered under the lightest impact, disintegrating into a million bone crystals, which fluttered in the air like snowflakes. Holly and Artemis followed the bodyguard, racing down the corridor, their feet crunching on bone shards, not stopping to collect weapons—most of which had exploded in the fire, rendering them useless.

As usual, Artemis was sandwiched between Butler and Holly as they fled.

“Keep moving,” Holly called from behind. “There will be more of them, count on it.”

There were more pirates in the panic room, feeling very pleased with themselves.

“This is the smartest thing we ever done,” said Pronk O’Chtayle, acting commander. “They comes in here to hide from us, but we is already here.” He gathered his bony crew around him. “Let’s go over it again. What does we do when we hears them?”

“We hides,” said the pirates.

“And what does we do when they comes in?”

“We pops up real sudden,” said the pirates gleefully.

Pronk pointed a bony finger. “What does you do, specifically?”

A small pirate who seemed to be wearing the remains of a barrel stood by the wall. “I bangs on this here button, dropping the steel door so’s we’re all trapped in here.”

“Good,” said Pronk. “Good.”

The sound of staccato gunfire bounced off the vaulted ceilings and echoed along the corridor to the panic room.

“They’re coming, comrades,” said Pronk. “Remember to kill ’em several times just to be sure. Stop slicing when yer arms fall off.”

They squatted in the gloom, light from the outside glinting on their blades.

If Bellico had probed a little deeper into Juliet’s memories, she would have realized that the panic room could be accessed or sealed from the outside, remotely, or with a voice-activation program. But even if she had known, it would not have made any sense for the humans to lock themselves out of their own haven. That would be pure insanity. Butler barely paused on his way past the panic-room door to talk into the small speaker set into the steel frame.

“Butler D.,” he said clearly. “Authorization prime. Lock.”

A heavy door dropped down, sealing the panic room completely and locking the giddy bunch of Berserker pirates inside. Artemis had barely a second to glance under the door.

Is that a pirate wearing a barrel? he thought. Nothing would surprise me today.

On reaching the laboratory/office work suite, Butler held up his fist. Artemis was not familiar with military hand signals and crashed into the bodyguard’s broad back. Fortunately the teen did not have the heft behind him to budge the bodyguard, for if Butler had taken so much as a stumbled step forward, he would have surely been skewered by one of his sister’s arrows.

“I see,” whispered Artemis. “The raised fist means
Stop
.”

Butler placed a finger to his lips.

“And that would mean you wish me to be quiet. Oh, I understand.”

Artemis’s words were enough to elicit a reaction from inside the lab, taking the form of an aluminium arrow that penetrated the partition wall, thunking through the plasterboard, sending flakes fluttering.

Butler and Holly did not discuss a strategy, as they were both experienced soldiers and knew that the best time to attack was directly after shots had been fired—or in this case, arrows.

“Left,” said Butler, and that was all he needed to say. Translated for the layman, his utterance signified that he would take any hostiles on the left of the room, leaving the right side for Holly.

They darted low going in, splitting into two targets as they crossed the floor. Butler had the advantage of being extremely familiar with the lab’s layout, and he knew that the only logical hiding place would be behind the long stainless steel workbench where Artemis played around with the unknown and built his experimental models.

I have always wondered how secure this thing is, he thought, before charging it like a football player entering a scrimmage where the cost of losing was death. He heard an arrow whistle past his ear a second before his shoulder rammed the stainless steel, lifting the bench from its supply cables in a flurry of sparks and a hiss of gas.

Gobdaw clambered on top of the bench, and he had both a short sword and fire stick raised to strike when the Bunsen burner gas said hello to the electric cable. Sparks and a brief explosion resulted, flipping the Berserker backward into the velvet curtains.

Bellico assessed the situation quickly and bolted toward the office.

Butler saw her go. “I’m after Juliet,” he barked at Holly. “You subdue Myles.”

Perhaps the boy is unconscious, thought Holly, but this hope faded as she saw Myles Fowl disentangle himself from the velvet curtains. The look in his eyes told her that there was still a Berserker in that body and that he was not in the mood for surrender. He was armed only with a short blade now, but Holly knew the Berserkers would fight to the last drop of blood, even if the blood was not, strictly speaking, their own.

“Don’t hurt him,” said Artemis. “He’s only four years old.”

Gobdaw grinned, showing a mouthful of baby teeth, which Myles cleaned religiously with a toothbrush modeled on Einstein’s head, the bristles being Einstein’s trademark spiky hair. “That’s right, traitor. Gobdaw is only four years old, so don’t hurt me.”

Holly wished that Artemis would stay out of it. This Gobdaw might look innocent, but he had far more battle experience than she would ever wish to have; and, judging by the way he was twirling the blade on his palm, he hadn’t lost any of his knife skills.

If this guy was in his own body, he would take me apart, she realized.

Holly’s problem was that her heart was not in this fight. Quite apart from the fact that she was battling Artemis’s little brother, this was Gobdaw, for heaven’s sake. Gobdaw the legend. Gobdaw, who had led the charge at Taillte. Gobdaw, who had carried a wounded comrade across an icy lake at Bellannon. Gobdaw, who’d been cornered by two wolves in a cave after the Cooley raid and come out of that cave wearing a new fur coat.

The two soldiers circled each other.

“Is it true about the wolves?” Holly asked in Gnommish.

Gobdaw missed a step, surprised. “The wolves at Cooley? How do you know this tale?”

“Are you kidding?” said Holly. “Everyone knows that. At school, it was part of the pageant, every year. To be honest, I am sick of that story. Two wolves, right?”

“There were two,” said Gobdaw. “One was sickly, though.”

Gobdaw began his strike in mid-sentence, as Holly had known he would. His blade hand darted forward, aiming for his opponent’s midriff; but he didn’t have quite the reach he used to possess, and Holly rapped him hard on the nerve cluster in his deltoid, deadening the arm. That arm was about as much use now as a lead pipe hanging from his shoulder.

“D’Arvit,” swore Gobdaw. “You are a tricky one. Females were ever treacherous.”

“Keep talking,” said Holly. “I am liking you less and less, which should make my job a lot easier.”

Gobdaw took three running steps and jumped onto a Regency hall chair, grabbing one of two crossed reproduction pikes from the wall.

“Be careful, Myles!” shouted Artemis, from force of habit. “That’s very sharp.”

“Sharp is it, Mud Boy? That’s the way I like my spears.” The warrior’s face twisted as though on the point of sneezing, then Myles broke through for a second.

“It’s not a spear, idiot. It’s a pike. You call yourself a warrior?”

Then the features twisted again, and Gobdaw was back. “Shaddup, boy. I’m in charge of this body.”

This brief breakthrough gave Artemis hope. His brother was in there somewhere, and he hadn’t lost a lick of his acid tongue.