by Eoin Colfer
Myles could not find it in himself to argue with that.
The duke turned toward Childerblaine House and his robotic army parted before him like the Red Sea before Moses.
The Island of St. George, Scilly Isles
Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye’s father had been fond of saying to company that Childerblaine House was built to furnish old Georgie’s dragon with a bonce. Bonce being English slang for head. If the Island of St. George were indeed the fossilized skeleton of the decapitated dragon of legend, then the house would sit where the dragon’s head might have been, at the top of the spinal curve.
“Of course, the whole thing is balderdash,” said the duke now from behind his desk. “Saint George wasn’t even English. The fellow was a Turk, don’t you know? And according to the history buffs, he actually slayed the dragon in Morocco.”
“Slew,” corrected Myles Fowl. “And it was Libya where he did the deed, using a lance named Ascalon.”
Myles was seated in an exquisite Edwardian club chair with intricately carved wooden lion’s-paw legs. The duke was semi-reclined in a complicated office chair that seemed to be comprised mostly of cables and pulleys and wearing slippers that he claimed were fashioned from the hide of an alligator he had wrestled from the Honey Island Swamp in Louisiana. He swirled a half-pint of brandy in a cut-glass snifter while Myles nursed a ginger beer. Each was swaddled in a blue velvet smoking jacket embroidered with the Bleedham-Drye family crest, which was an emperor swan with its wings spread over two crossed swords and the motto: NOS IPSOS ADIUVAMOS.
Meaning We must help ourselves.
The Bleedham-Dryes were obviously very fond of heraldry, as Myles had seen half a dozen of these ornate crests dotted around the manor already. It was uncomfortably reminiscent of Fowl Manor.
“Ascalon, eh?” said the duke. “A man who names his blades has too much time on his hands, if you ask me.”
“A chap can never have too much time,” said Myles, raising his glass.
“Never a truer word,” said Teddy, obliging the boy with a clink.
The duke tossed his Myishi smartphone onto the desk surface and the contact was met by concentric circles of blue electronic ripples.
The entire surface is an induction plate, Myles realized. He rested a hand on the desktop and detected the slightest of vibrations.
This is the duke’s server. Built right into his desk.
The pair settled into a comfortable silence while Teddy pawed through his cigar box searching for the perfect Monte Cristo. He chose one and offered the box to Myles. “Cigar, my boy?”
Myles declined. “I’ll stick to my own brand, if you don’t mind, Your Grace.” He took a pack of seaweed sticks from the pocket of his robe and unwrapped one, rolling it between his finger and thumb. “Excellent crackle,” he said, screwing the green stick into the corner of his mouth.
A fire blazed in the hearth, throwing flickering shadows on the eaves, and painting orange stripes on the steel curves of several suits of armor that stood watch over the pair. Myles rested his feet on a brass fire dragon that had been blackened by centuries of cinders. He was glad of the dragon’s support, for without it his feet would be dangling, and it was difficult to maintain criminal-mastermind poise with dangling feet, and Myles supposed that was what he must be now.
A criminal.
The latest in a long line.
Lord Teddy lit his Monte Cristo with a taper and took several puffs, rotating the cigar for an even burn. “So here we are, Master Myles.” He sighed with undisguised con-tentment.
“Here we are, Your Grace,” agreed Myles. “And I must say, it is rare to see an aristocrat so happy.”
Teddy barked with laughter. “That’s absolutely correct. From the nursery we are taught to repress our feelings, don’t you know? Decorum semper. Propriety at all times.”
“I quite understand,” said Myles, who was reserved by nature, aside from his love of melodramatic posturing.
The duke stroked his magnificent beard until it might have purred. “But there are moments—when a fellow is on the verge of achieving his life’s ambition, for example—when one feels a certain show of satisfaction is permitted by the gods of etiquette.”
Myles chewed on his seaweed stick. “I know what you mean, Your Grace,” he said. “I often think that an individual’s character can be judged by what he considers worthy of celebration.”
“Precisely,” said Lord Teddy, punctuating each syllable with a jab of his cigar. “By Jove, that’s exactly it.”
“And today is certainly worthy of celebration.” Myles drained his ginger beer. “This is a good brand. American?”
“I have it shipped from Seattle,” said the duke.
“Medium bubble,” noted Myles. “Very classy.”
The duke swirled his brandy so that the liquid flashed in the grooves of the cut-glass goblet. “What you did today, on the Spine, ridding us of your own brother…”
Myles sighed as if the enormity of what he had done was just now dawning on him. But then the moment of reflection passed and he leaned forward on his elbows once more. Kneading his brow, he dropped his spectacles into the well between his forearms and onto the desk.
“I do not regret my actions, Your Grace,” he said. “That half-wit was no kin to me in any way that matters. I was glad to see the back of him.”
“Still…” said Bleedham-Drye, watching Myles carefully for a lie. “He was blood.”
“He was, and that’s all he was,” said Myles evenly. “A blood relative. Sometimes blood ties must be cut—surely you agree?”
“Indeed I do,” said the duke. “I myself have pruned the family tree more than once to ensure certain inheritances.”
Myles sighed again. “I was fond of poor Beckett. But we were incompatible as a unit. I gave the fellow a good eleven years to shape up.”
“More than fair,” said the duke. “I have never seen the like. He walked right up to the cliff edge. Extraordinary.”
If Myles had any regrets, he hid them well. “A feeble mind is a malleable mind,” he said.
Lord Teddy glanced up to the oak-paneled ceiling, considering his next words—that is, whether or not to say them.
“Do you know what, dear boy?” he said finally. “I’m going to tell you something. Confide in you, if you will.”
Myles nodded slightly, honored.
“Now, don’t sulk when I tell you this, Myles, but my initial plan was to kill you. Even though you more than proved your enthusiasm for our project, I had planned to dispose of you once you were no longer of use.”
Not only did Myles not sulk, he actually dropped a wink. “I surmised as much, Your Grace. It was also my intention—to do away with you, that is. But now I have the feeling that we shall never outgrow our usefulness to each other. And, in point of fact, I enjoy your company. It is so refreshing to meet a like-minded individual.”
“You were going to murder me?” said Teddy. “Capital. Poison in the brandy, I suppose.” And now it was Lord Teddy’s turn to wink. “Or nudge me over a cliff, perhaps.”
“I try not to repeat myself,” said Myles, not in the least offended. “I thought perhaps a cyanide capsule in your cigar.”
Bleedham-Drye coughed a mouthful of smoke and just for a moment believed he’d come to the end of his rope, but then he caught the twinkle in Myles’s eye.
“A cyanide capsule in my cigar,” he huffed. “You are one of a kind, Fowl.”
“I am now,” said Myles, then offered a salute. “Here’s to being one of a kind. After all, adiuva nos ipsi.”
Teddy smiled. “Indeed. We must help ourselves.”
“And we will,” said Myles.
They toasted.
It would have been nauseating to watch had there been anyone to see.
Myles and Lord Teddy discussed the Brother Colman incident for an hour or so, but then science beckoned and the duke led his new friend up a metal staircase to his laboratory. The spiral stairway was of polished
steel and bolted to the wall. As they ascended, the duke unconsciously whistled the short phrase of a tune over and over, and when Teddy punched in the eight-digit code to his lab keypad lock, Myles realized the significance of this melody.
Aha! he thought (actually thinking the interjection aha!). A Portunus Five-Star keypad. And now I know the code.
Lord Teddy ushered Myles into the lab with obvious and merited pride, for to walk through the attic laboratory itself was akin to taking a historical tour through the modern history of scientific endeavor. The duke had clearly been at this game for many decades, and nineteenth-century monocular compound microscopes stood alongside their modern electron equivalent.
Myles stopped before a gleaming instrument. “My goodness,” he said. “Is this a Victorian bone saw?”
“Indeed it is,” said the duke, picking up the saw. “You have a good eye for craftsmanship. That fellow has seen me through many a tough skull.”
“I hate to resort to sayings,” said Myles, “but it is true that a craftsman is only as good as his tools.”
Teddy laughed. “Here’s another saying for you: They say some people are tough nuts to crack. Not with this fellow in your hand.” The duke replaced the saw on the table. “But as reliable as these old tools are, technological advances are truly most convenient. There is a lot of initial expense, I grant you, but I find that robots are not concerned with such trivial things as morals.”
On they went through the laboratory. Past shelves lined with specimen jars, and miles of coiled tubing, and Bunsen burners lined up like tiny rockets, and spectrometers, and autopsy tables.
Bleedham-Drye had partially overcome St. George’s incipient dampness with powerful dehumidifiers that droned in every corner like angry old men, but still the island insinuated its damp tendrils through cracks in the masonry. Myles sniffed the spore-laden air and wondered how experiments might be corrupted, but this thought evaporated when they reached the lab’s latest test subject, who was being held inverted over a table by four robot arms, his tiny tusks puncturing the rubber lid of a collection beaker directly underneath him.
“Whistle Blower,” he breathed.
The toy troll reacted groggily to his name, struggling vainly in the titanium clamps. The little chap was obviously sedated and there was an electrode attached to a shaved patch on his forehead.
“Whistle Blower?” said Lord Teddy. “What a curious name.”
Myles recovered. “My idiot brother came up with it,” he said. “Apparently he heard somewhere that an individual who squealed was known as a whistleblower.”
The duke guffawed. “Oh, dear lord, I hate to speak ill of the dead, but what an idiot.”
“I found the name quite charming, actually,” said Myles. And then: “But of course you are right. What an idiot.”
It was difficult not to feel sympathy for the tiny troll in these wretched conditions, especially when the electrode delivered a shock directly to the creature’s brain. Whistle Blower reacted to this interference by chomping down on the rubber top and squirting twin jets of venom into the beaker.
Myles was stunned by this development, which he had not anticipated. “The venom should not be collected this way,” he said, his tone clinical.
Lord Teddy was mildly surprised. “Don’t tell me you feel sorry for this beast? Perhaps you are not the stalwart I took you for.”
“I am a scientist, Your Grace,” said Myles, striking a scientific-style pose of right hand cupping left elbow, left hand stroking chin. “This troll’s comfort, or lack thereof, is of little concern to me. But if you repeatedly shock the fellow, then it is quite possible that the venom will be corrupted with diverse hormones and chemicals. Also, we should run an electrocardiogram to see how much his heart can take. It would be a catastrophe to lose our specimen during the first round of harvesting.”
Lord Teddy toyed with his beard while he considered Myles. Was the boy trying to trick him, or were his concerns genuine?
Myles plowed on. “Frankly, I am appalled at this procedure. I had expected best practices, and this is most certainly not it. There could be any number of unwelcome side effects to ingesting this venom: nausea, migraine, paralysis.” He paused. “Hair loss.”
The duke removed his fingers from the depths of his beard and, without a word, peeled the electrode from Whistle Blower’s forehead.
“I concede the point,” said the duke. “We shall harvest manually. It will take a little longer, but no matter. In the end, this is the world of man. No matter how magnificent the creature, it will fall before our superior intellect. Everything falls before us. Soon, even time itself will be vanquished.”
Myles thrilled to this notion, in spite of his better nature. Imagine what could be learned in five lifetimes. In a hundred. Myles Fowl would literally be the smartest person in the world.
But at what cost? Whistle Blower seemed so desolate. His small shaggy head turned to Myles and he grunted. Even though Myles did not share his brother’s magical gift of trans-species communication, he recognized that particular grunt.
He’s calling for Beckett, he realized.
With his forefinger, Lord Bleedham-Drye stroked the venom beaker, which was perhaps one-third full of a mucilaginous, honey-colored liquid.
“Imagine,” he said, “all the secrets contained in this jar. For thousands of years, man has searched for the fountain of youth, and here it is. We will drain this tiny troll till the animal is little more than a husk.”
“There may be more to this troll than venom,” said Myles. “We should do a complete blood workup and search for viruses and drug levels.”
The duke had little patience for this notion. “What care I about viruses or drug levels? I will be immortal, dear boy.”
“Immortality is expensive, Your Grace,” Myles pointed out. “This troll’s blood could conceivably cure various diseases and might be worth a fortune to Big Pharma. People need hope, and we can sell it to them.”
The duke clapped Myles on the shoulder. “What price a dream, eh, my boy? Already our partnership yields dividends. The names of Bleedham-Drye and Fowl will go down in history, and we will live to see it.” Lord Teddy removed the venom beaker from Whistle Blower’s jaws. “But this we will never sell. This is for us alone.”
And it seemed to Myles as though the duke would drain the beaker of venom right there and then.
“Have a care, Your Grace,” said Myles. “We must proceed with caution with the elixir of life. Brother Colman survived only because of an almost incredible series of events that would be nigh on impossible to re-create. The venom must be analyzed and the dosage carefully calculated. Being a well-preserved corpse holds little attraction for me.”
Lord Teddy held the beaker up to the laboratory light strips and Myles saw that there were tiny particles in the liquid that sparkled like gold dust.
“Marvelous,” said the duke with some considerable reverence. “You have no idea how long I have searched for this. How much blood I have spilled, how much more I would be prepared to spill…. Oceans of blood.”
Myles felt he had to ask. “But tell me, Your Grace, why? What drives you to such extremes?”
Lord Teddy thought before answering. “That, to quote Sherlock Holmes, is a three-pipe question.”
Three-pipe problem, thought Myles, but he did not correct the duke, as he was trying to build trust.
The “three pipes” Lord Teddy alluded to were actually three more snifters of brandy, and once they had loaded tiny samples of Whistle Blower’s venom into various analytical machines, including a spectrometer, a rheometer, and an elemental analyzer, they retired to a second study in the cellar, where the duke filled a brass tub from a pool that was plumbed directly into the bath. Myles noticed the slick coils of small electric eels gliding through the water and wondered if he himself were about to be tortured.
But no; Lord Teddy disappeared behind a screen and emerged clad in a neck-to-knee-long, striped Victorian bathing costume.<
br />
It would appear, thought Myles, that the duke is about to voluntarily electrocute himself.
Lord Teddy lowered his frame into the salt water, a brandy decanter beside the yellow washcloth on his varnished wooden bath tray. He quickly poured and swallowed his first measure, allowing the eels to cluster around him like old friends.
“Don’t fret,” said the duke to Myles. “These are only baby eels. And they know me, so low-level shocks only, and nothing direct. Even less electricity than our troll friend was getting. You should try it—the effect on the epidermis is phenomenal.”
“I am eleven years old, Your Grace,” said Myles, settling on a velvet footstool. “My epidermis is fine for the time being.”
Lord Teddy poured himself yet another generous snifter of brandy, his only reaction to the almost continuous shocking being a slight quivering of the upper lip.
Two beings enduring shock treatment in one house, thought Myles. How utterly bizarre.
“Now to your question, dear boy,” said the duke. “Why my obsession with eternal life? This is a subject I have often pondered. In the beginning I was simply an adventurer like many of my nineteenth-century peers. I traveled to India and beyond on the trail of glory and, of course, treasure. War, I found, was the best way to earn a sovereign, but I soon discovered that rich men die just as easily as poor ones. Cold steel does not differentiate between the two, as many of my fellow officers can bear witness to from beyond the grave. Life itself and its preservation, I realized, was the prize. Shortly after this inarguable truth occurred to me, I was wounded by the Afghans at Maiwand. Mortally wounded, as it happened—took a scimitar right in the guts. Oh, it was all done and dusted for the future duke of Scilly, according to the camp sawbones.”
Lord Teddy paused for a nip at his brandy and Myles nodded as though the story had his full attention, which it most certainly did not. It would be a dull individual indeed who required any more than a half percent of his active brain cells to follow such a simple narrative, and Myles Fowl was definitely not a dull individual. He was using the rest of his gray matter to plot his next move.