by Eoin Colfer
“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 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 i
tself 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 pre-dictable?
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 hair 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 hair 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.