Artemis Fowl 08 - The Last Guardian (19 page)

“Nearly there,” said Butler. “Three hundred yards.”

Artemis had long since given up being amazed at his bodyguard’s ability to compartmentalize his emotions. By rights the three of them should have been in shock after what they’d been through, but Butler had always been able to fold all that trauma into a drawer to be dealt with later, when the world was not in imminent danger of ending. Just standing at his shoulder gave Artemis strength.

“What are we waiting for?” Artemis asked, and he set off up the hill.

The chitter of the crickets receded behind them until it merged with the wind in the tall pines, and no other animal adversaries were encountered on the brief hunched jog up the runway. They crested the hill to find the barn unguarded. And why wouldn’t it be? After all, what kind of strategist deserts a stronghold to hide out in a highly combustible barn?

Finally a touch of luck, Artemis thought. Sometimes being devious pays off.

They got lucky again inside the barn, where Butler recovered a Sig Sauer handgun from a coded lockbox bolted to the blind side of a rafter.

“You’re not the only one with barn secrets,” he said to Artemis, smiling as he checked the weapon’s load and action.

“That’s great,” said Holly dryly. “Now we can shoot a dozen grasshoppers.”

“Crickets,” corrected Artemis. “But let’s get this plane in the sky and shoot a big hole in Opal’s plans instead.”

The light aircraft’s body and wings were coated with solar foil that powered the engine for liftoff. Once airborne, the plane switched between powered flight and gliding, depending on the directions from the computer. If a pilot were content to take the long way around and ride the thermals, then it was possible to engage the engine for takeoff only, and some trips could actually create a zero carbon footprint.

“That plane over there,” said Butler. “Beyond the unused punch bag and the gleaming weights with their unworn handles.”

Artemis groaned. “Yes, that plane. Now, can you forget about the weights and pull out the wheel blocks while I get her started?” he said, giving Butler something to do. “Let’s leave the door closed until we are ready for takeoff.”

“Good plan,” said Holly. “Let me check inside.”

She jogged across the barn, leaving muddy footprints in her wake, and pulled open the plane’s rear door.

The plane, which Artemis had named the
Khufu
after the pharaoh for whom a solar barge was built by the ancient Egyptians, was a light sports aircraft that had been radically modified by Artemis in his quest to design a practical green passenger vehicle. The wings were fifty percent longer than they had been, with micro-fine struts webbed above and below. Every surface, including the hubcaps, was coated in solar foil, which would recharge the battery in the air. A power cable ran from the
Khufu
’s tail socket to the south-facing slope of the barn roof, so that the craft would have enough charge to take off whenever Artemis needed to make a test flight.

Holly’s head emerged from the darkness of the interior.

“All clear,” she said in a hushed tone, in case loud noises would break their streak of luck.

“Good,” said Artemis, hurrying to the door, already running the startup sequence in his head. “Butler, would you open the doors as soon as I get the prop going?”

The bodyguard nodded, then kicked the white wedge of wood from under the forward wheel. Two more to go.

Artemis climbed into the plane and knew right away that something was wrong.

“I smell something. Juliet’s perfume.”

He knelt between the passenger seats, tugging open a metal hatch to reveal a compartment below. Thick cables thronged the box, and there was a rectangular space in the middle where something boxlike should have sat.

“The battery?” asked Holly.

“Yes,” said Artemis.

“So we can’t take off?”

Artemis dropped the hatch, allowing it to clang shut. Noise hardly mattered anymore.

“We can’t take off. We can’t shoot.”

Butler poked his head into the plane. “Why are we making noise all of a sudden?” One look at Artemis’s face was all the answer he needed.

“So, it’s a trap. It looks like Juliet was keeping closer tabs on you than we thought.” He pulled the Sig Sauer from his waistband. “Okay, Artemis, you stay in here. It’s time for the soldiers to take over.”

Butler’s features then stretched in an expression of surprise and pain as a bolt of magic sizzled into the barn from outside, engulfing the bodyguard’s head and torso, permanently melting every hair follicle on his head, and tossing him into the rear of the plane, where he lay motionless.

“It’s a trap, all right,” said Holly, grimly. “And we walked straight into it.”

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.