by Eoin Colfer
Hurry up, Angeline. Come to the rescue.
Usually Lazuli came to her own rescue, but right at this precise moment she felt a little disadvantaged by the aftershock of having been strapped to a missile.
A pity Foaly suppressed my magic. Perhaps I could have healed Myles by now, and myself, too.
Lazuli glanced down at Myles lying on the rug, and maybe it was the power of suggestion, but she fancied that she didn’t feel any connection to the boy. Fairies are empathetic by nature, and this shivering figure did not elicit as much sympathy as it should have, given that she considered Myles a friend.
My mind is wandering, Lazuli realized.
Beckett must have realized this, too, because he laid his hands lightly on the pixel’s shoulders. The boy’s fingers and thumbs could have easily encircled her neck, but Lazuli knew she was safe.
Unless this is not Beckett, like this might not be Myles.
But it was Beckett. She could feel his nature coming off him in waves.
“So, if the thing on the floor is actually Myles, the LEP will heal him when they get here, right?”
Lazuli felt Beckett had prejudiced his statement slightly with the use of the phrase thing on the floor, but she nodded. “That’s right.”
“So, if the LEP arrive and we’re not here, Myles gets healed anyway. That’s right, too, isn’t it?”
Lazuli did not like where this was going, but she played along, played for time. “That’s right, Beck.”
“And if the thing on the floor is not Myles and we try to explain this to the grown-ups, what happens?”
Lazuli did not point out that she was more or less one of the grown-ups. Instead, she answered, “They don’t believe us.”
“And then?” said Beckett, prompting Lazuli to reach her own conclusion.
“And then I get whisked off to the Lower Elements for an investigation, and you visit a counselor.”
“Meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile, the real Myles is spirited away to who knows where, and we have no leads.”
Beckett squeezed the pixel’s shoulders. “Exactly. So, the only reason we would stay here is if we are basically bad people who don’t care about love, friendship, or the environment.”
Lazuli frowned. “The environment?”
“I just threw that in,” admitted Beckett, “because the seal always says to hit your opponent where they live. And you love the environment.”
This was true, but Lazuli knew that even without the eco-factor Beckett’s argument was sound. If this was Myles, then he would get healed; if it wasn’t, then there was no time to waste.
“Very well, Beck,” she said. “The seal taught you well. So, what is this great plan?”
Beckett twanged the elastic of his underpants. “We get dressed and then we follow the scar signal.”
Beckett had never been a fan of clothing, and for many years had run free as nature intended whenever he could get away with it—which was more often than one might think. Historically, the only item he rarely removed was a golden necktie made from the cured and laminated corpse of his very beloved and very deceased goldfish, Gloop, a variation on a security blanket which he would often chew. Beckett had gifted the tie to Myles during a previous adventure, and when Gloop had virtually disintegrated from wear, Myles had replaced it with a silk-and-gold-threaded tie patterned after a fan painting of Japanese koi by Katsushika Hokusai. He had a dozen of these made up, and Beckett grabbed a couple from Myles’s closet now and tied one on as a reminder of the mission’s focus, as if such a reminder were needed. He tossed the second tie to Lazuli and the pixel looped it around her neck like a scarf.
Lazuli found that she and Beckett were on the same page when it came to clothing, i.e., fast and functional. Beckett did a swan dive into a hamper of rumpled clothing and somehow emerged in a T-shirt, hoodie, and shorts, and while Lazuli could not replicate this feat of flash-dressing, she did manage to quickly select one of the black suits from Myles’s toddler era, which were conveniently labeled by age and sealed in vacuum storage bags. She balked at going on the hunt in black loafers and instead tugged on a pair of baby shoes that looked like they had never been walked in. All in all, they were in Myles’s side of the room for about half a minute, and then they were tumbling out the bedroom window and running toward the beach.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, thought Lazuli as the last wisps of narco-fog dissipated. At the very least I will be court-martialed, and there’s a reasonable chance I will face criminal prosecution.
But, in truth, the pixel could believe it, because Beckett Fowl had uncanny instincts. In a way he was a hybrid, too, because there were magical sparks floating around in his system that had sharpened his instincts in mysterious ways. Foaly had told Lazuli in the Argon Clinic, which seemed like a lifetime ago, that he would love to get the Fowl child under an MRI machine, because his quarks would light up the scanner like fireworks.
So, if the human boy said something impossible was happening, then it probably wasn’t as impossible as everyone thought.
Beckett ran forward, his scarred wrist thrust ahead of him like a divining rod. “This…way,” he panted. “This…way.”
Lazuli followed, as that seemed to be her only option. She certainly didn’t have legs of sufficient length to overtake the human boy.
I don’t have long legs, she thought. I don’t have wings, and I certainly don’t have weapons.
And she did not have magic—Foaly had seen to that. If he had not, then this incident could have been but a footnote in the Fowl chronicles, as it was possible that her SPAM could have presented as healing power and cured Myles’s mystery ailment, if that was indeed Myles.
Beckett skidded on his heels to a sudden halt on the ledge that curled over the beach like an organic wave.
“What?” he said, seemingly to his feet. “Where?”
Lazuli managed to avoid crashing into him and asked, “What what? What where?”
Both of which questions would have horrified her English tutor in the LEP academy.
Beckett did not look up, and so Lazuli followed his gaze to the grass and realized that there was a bristling rat up on its hind legs, squeaking earnestly at Beckett.
“You’re not making sense, Oswald,” said the blond twin.
Lazuli could have sworn that the rat sighed, then launched into another series of agitated squeaks.
“What’s Oswald saying?” she asked.
Lazuli had never learned to speak Rat; it wasn’t a language offered in school. In fact, even fairies with the gift of tongues could not conduct any kind of nuanced conversation with animals. It was a skill they had lost over the millennia. But Beckett squeaked as though born in a sewer.
“Oswald is saying that the stones are alive. That’s the gist, isn’t it, Oswald?”
Oswald obligingly nodded, confirming that the stones are alive was indeed the gist of it.
“Maybe Oswald is mistaken,” said Lazuli, who was not overly fond of big rats on their hind legs, cute names notwithstanding.
“No,” said Beckett, thoughtfully. “Oswald’s body language is all over the place, and his fur is standing out in spikes. Something is wrong.”
“What does your scar tell you?” asked the pixel.
Beckett fanned his arm, searching for a signal, until he locked on to one.
“This way,” he said pointing toward the shoreline.
Which will lead us onto the stones that may or may not be alive, concluded Lazuli.
Then she had the most ridiculous thought of her life so far, though it would be easily trumped by day’s end, and this thought was:
Should we trust the rat or the scar?
“So, what’s next?” she asked Beckett.
“We follow the scar signal,” he said without a jiffy’s hesitation. “Myles is on the other end.”
They scrambled down the ledge onto the beach itself, leaving Oswald chittering his cryptic warnings.
Initially it seemed that the rat might
be mistaken, as the stones remained resolutely inanimate, but then, with a drumroll of rapid click-clacking, two piles surged upward directly into the pursuers’ path.
The stones are alive, thought Lazuli, but she quickly realized she was as mistaken as Oswald had been.
The stones were not alive, but what had been hidden beneath them most certainly was. Alive and aggressive.
The beach pebbles cascaded to the ground, revealing two squat figures clad from head to toe in suits woven out of vines.
A person might expect Beckett to be dismayed, but only if that person was not familiar with Beckett’s reaction to crises. In fact, the Fowl twin was jubilant.
“I knew it!” he said. “The scar never lies. Something is going on.”
Lazuli was considerably less overjoyed. She could tell instantly that these were dwarves, and it made sense that they would be from the same bunch who had gummed her to the rocket.
“Be careful!” she said to Beckett, instinctively shielding the boy with her own body.
“Careful?” said Beckett. “It’s just dwarves. Aren’t dwarves all jokey guys with funny names who love barbecue?”
The camouflaged dwarves drew distinctive curved short swords with luminous blades of crystallized dwarf spittle, and Lazuli knew exactly what band they were from.
“These aren’t just dwarves,” she said, if there even was such a thing as just dwarves. “These are Horteknut Reclaimers.”
Beckett was a little envious of this title. “That is a great team name,” he said.
“They are a great team,” said Lazuli. “They’ve been settling a score with humans for thousands of years.”
“Is that bad?” asked Beckett.
“Only if you don’t like dying,” said Lazuli.
MYLES Fowl was immersed in a dream in which he was debating the existence of the fabled pentaquark with Murray Gell-Mann, who had originally proposed the existence of quarks in 1964. Myles knew he was dreaming, because Gell-Mann had passed away not so long ago, and also because Myles was losing the argument.
As we have already gleaned, Myles did not relish losing arguments, and this distaste extended to his dream state, so he decided to wake himself up. But rather than emerge fully into wakefulness, Myles suspended himself in a hypnopompic state of threshold consciousness, in which he could think in a superfast mode without alerting his captors to the fact that he was indeed alert. Beckett referred to this semi-suspended state as sleepy-wakey, which Myles had to concede described it perfectly in layman’s terms.
Myles had no doubt that he had been abducted. He remembered walking across from Father’s office toward the main house when the ground erupted beneath his feet.
And then…
Of the rest, Myles wasn’t certain. Could it be, as his memory insisted, that he had been swallowed whole? Surely that wasn’t possible, but that had been his impression.
Had he been slimed? Swallowing and sliming would seem to indicate the involvement of dwarves.
The whole thing seemed impossibly juvenile, like one of Beckett’s stories.
Myles dismissed the very recent past for the moment and regressed to the quite recent past.
Why was all this happening? Were they, in fact, in the middle of another extended adventure?
The Chinese general Sun Tzu had written in The Art of War that “the whole secret lies in confusing the enemy, so that he cannot fathom our real intent.”
And we are certainly confused, Myles thought now.
But that was surely temporary, as bringing order from confusion happened to be one of Myles Fowl’s specialties.
If a mysterious antagonist was moving against the Fowl Twins, then it would seem logical that the Fowl Twins had unwittingly involved themselves in that particular antagonist’s business.
So, what have I been up to? wondered Myles.
Perhaps some multinational is threatened by my advances in the field of DNA storage.
Or could it be that my plan to use Beckett’s cluster-punching ability as a cure for migraines has alarmed a pharmaceutical company?
No, he realized. It is, of course, the ACRONYM treasure. Myles had learned, by hacking into the organization’s supposedly secure e-mail server, that the source of all the agency’s funding was held in their Florida facility, which was why he’d been checking it out in the Tachyon.
Thus prepared, Myles Fowl opened his eyes and saw that he was in a dark room with light emanating in phosphorescent sparkles from the depths of his wobbling mattress. Globs of the same material were adhered to three of the walls.
His “bed” was a quivering slab of what could have been the bell of a giant jellyfish. The substance lit a neuron in Myles’s memory.
Those are dwarf-spit lanterns. I am reposing upon dwarf spit, Myles realized. Plus, I was, until recently, covered in it. How fascinating. And this explains my confusion, as, according to Dr. Fowl’s frankly overwritten files, there is some form of sedative in the gel.
Myles blinked to clear his vision as much as possible, and then studied his cell, for that was surely what it was. The glow from the bed crept across the packed mud floor but dissipated before it could brighten the walls, which were deep in viscous shadow.
Myles silently berated himself for his flowery thought process.
Viscous shadow? Really, Myles? Perhaps a more pertinent detail than the viscous shadow is the fact that there is a dwarf lady seated on a stool beside your bed.
Myles often argued with himself in the second person, as he believed it was a way to teach his unconscious mind new thought patterns.
Myles studied the dwarf lady for nonverbal clues as to who he might be dealing with. He calculated that she was perhaps three feet tall, with corpse-pale skin that showed off her rune tattoos nicely, and copper-red hair that was coiled in bandolier braids around her shoulders and torso. Her bearing bordered on regal, and Myles guessed that this lady was close to the top of whatever food chain she hunted in. And it seemed as though the dwarf was focusing on his golden tie, though it was difficult to be sure, as the eyes that regarded him seemed to be all pupils, and Myles wondered if dwarf eyes had UV-receptive cones like some bats. But that was by the by. What Myles was really interested in now was the confidence that emanated from those eyes, which confirmed his deduction that this was no lackey. He was dealing with the boss here, or at least someone high in the command structure.
I wonder, he thought, if this lady will attempt to form a bond with me, hoping to develop a Stockholm syndrome situation in which the captive grows to rely upon, trust, and even befriend the captor. If she is dull enough to attempt this tired trick, I shall play along.
“Hello, human,” she said. “I am Gveld Horteknut, and I have killed more men than you have had days in your life, so do not believe we could ever be friends.”
Quite the intro.
Myles winced, not at the words themselves, which he presumed were hyperbolic, but at the dwarf’s harshly accented English, which with every consonant put him in mind of an ax hacking at a tree trunk.
“Women and children too I have slaughtered,” continued Gveld, her vicious grin exposing a grill of engraved gold teeth. “So trust me when I say that dispatching you to whatever version of hell you are surely bound for means less to me than crushing an ant. Far less, in fact, as the lowliest ant actually contributes something to this planet.” Gveld Horteknut stood, and Myles was quietly smug that his estimate as to her height was inch-perfect. He noted that she wore a short-sword scabbard from hip to knee, which gave him a handy reference for her femur-to-body-length ratio. It was, incidentally, one to four, if he was not mistaken, corresponding with Dr. Fowl’s notes on dwarf proportions.
“I shall leave you for five minutes to organize your thoughts,” said Gveld, cutting across his calculations, “so that you may most efficiently transmit the information I need. I’m sure you know of which information I speak, boy. Just to sharpen your mind, there will be a forfeit for meandering. For every superfluous syllab
le in your delivery, I will take a finger joint. Nod if you understand.”
Myles nodded, his mood shifting quickly from smug to anxious. It was, he realized, the specific nature of the threat that had intimidated him so. A joint per syllable.
“Good,” said Gveld.
Myles watched the dwarf lady leave the dank cell and thought, No Stockholm syndrome from Ms. Horteknut. Straight to threats.
Then: I am in a pickle here.
The Fowl twin held up his scar and concentrated, but there wasn’t so much as a faint buzz to indicate that Beckett might be on his trail.
My brother is nowhere near, he realized. And without Beck I am in more than a mere pickle. I am in mortal danger.
Dalkey Island
Beckett was also in mortal danger, though it was made clear to Lazuli that he did not grasp this notion when he said, “Aw, look at these guys. I think they want hugs.”
Hugs! thought Lazuli. The only reason Horteknut dwarves ever hug anyone is to crush their bones.
In fact, one of the dwarf band’s signature martial-arts moves was a version of the Heimlich maneuver, the main difference being that the hugger did not unlock his fingers until the huggee coughed up their heart and lungs, both of which would be punctured by splintered ribs.
“Hugs!” she spluttered. “They have swords, Beck. Stop fooling around.”
“Don’t worry,” said Beckett. “Remember those special-forces guys in Amsterdam?”
Lazuli did remember those guys.
Of course she did. She and Beckett had made a formidable team against the foot soldiers of ACRONYM (see LEP file: The Fowl Twins). But the twin had never faced the likes of these dwarves. Horteknut Reclaimers’ training began shortly after birth, and the majority of the lessons were devoted to myriad methods of converting live humans into dead ones. Lazuli decided that when she and Beckett had a little more time, if they ever had a little more time, she would tie the twin down and make him listen to the Horteknut backstory, which did not have a happy ending, a cheery beginning or, for that matter, a lighthearted middle section.
“These are more than just special forces,” she said with some urgency. “These are Horteknut Reclaimers.”