The Last Guardian

by Eoin Colfer

  But fairies were weak, and humans were weaker. Perhaps Fowl would hold back for the second it took for his little brother to plant a dagger in his side.

  “Do not waste too much time or resources. I want a circle of Berserker steel behind me while I work on the second lock. There are complex enchantments to unravel.”

  Oro stood, closing his eyes for a second to enjoy the breeze on his face. From beyond the walls he could hear the crackle of enormous flames, and when he opened his eyes the smolder of distant destruction licked the night clouds.

  “We are eager but few, my queen. Shall there be more enemies on the way?”

  Opal made a sound that was almost a cackle. “Not until morning. My enemies are experiencing certain difficulties. Mommy saw to that.”

  The part of Oro’s mind that was still his own and not in thrall to a glowing orange pixie thought: It is unseemly that she refers to herself as our mother. She is mocking us.

  But such is the strength of fairy geasa, or bonds, that even this rebellious thought caused the Berserker captain physical pain.

  Opal noticed his wince. “What are you thinking, Captain? Nothing seditious, I hope?”

  “No, my queen,” said Oro. “This puny body is unable to contain my bloodlust.”

  This lie cost him another twinge, but he was ready for it and bore it without reaction.

  Opal frowned. That one had ideas of his own, but no matter. Oro’s energy was already fading. The Berserkers would barely last the night, and by then the second lock would be open and the Koboi era would truly begin.

  “Go, then,” she snapped. “Choose a hunting party, but your duty is to protect the gate. I have arranged for the humans to be occupied for the moment, but once the sun rises they will come in a wave of destruction to destroy the last of our kind.” Opal decided to go all Gothic, so Oro would get the point. “Without mercy in their cold merciless hearts they shall come unto us.”

  This kind of talk seemed to penetrate, and Oro stamped away to pick his hunting party.

  The entire situation was, Opal had to admit to herself, absolutely perfect. The Berserkers would guard the perimeter, pitiful in their mistaken belief that their big gloomy gate actually led somewhere. And then they would simply evaporate into the afterlife, unaware of the unnecessary genocide they had helped to commit.

  Ghosts make such unreliable tribunal witnesses, Opal thought, smirking.

  But as enjoyable as self-congratulatory smirking might be, there was actual work to be done that required the entirety of her intellect. The lock remained locked, and she could only hold on to the black magic for so long before it consumed her physical body. Already she could feel blisters rising between her shoulder blades. The magic would leave her soon, but before then it would wreak havoc on her system.

  Her power healed the blisters as soon as they rose, but that cost her magic, and the blisters came back anyway.

  Why can’t I solve this problem by killing someone? she thought petulantly, then comforted herself with the mantra that had kept her going in prison:

  “Soon all the humans will be dead,” she said, droning in the time-honored fashion of gurus everywhere. “And then Opal will be loved.”

  And even if I’m not loved, she thought, at least all the humans will be dead.

  Oro stumped on little legs down the age-old steps that ran around the Berserker Gate and for a moment remembered clearly the day when he had helped construct this squat tower. There had been more magic involved than heavy lifting, though. Old Bruin Fadda had his team pouring every spark of power they could get their hands on into the lock. A big circle of warlocks hurling lightning bolts into the stone.

  Whoever opens this gate will get more than they bargained for, Bruin had promised later that week, even as Oro and his men lay dying. Bruin had been wrong. Queen Opal got exactly what she had been expecting.

  How did she know? Oro wondered. I was almost certain that the world had forgotten us.

  The Berserkers were bristling with repressed violence and anxious to inflict damage on humankind. They tried to stand still as Oro addressed them, but it was a struggle, especially for the pirates who were unable to stop their exposed bones from rattling.

  Oro stood on a tree stump so that the small body he occupied could be seen by all, and held his fist aloft for silence.

  “My warriors!” he shouted over the ranks. “Our day has finally come!”

  This was met with a chorus of yells, whoops, barks, and whistles as the various creatures inhabited by the Berserkers voiced their approval. Oro could not hide a wince. These were not the warriors he remembered, who fought and suffered mortal wounds on the Plains of Taillte, but they were what they were, and the will to fight was there, if not the ability. There were foxes in their ranks, for Danu’s sake. How was a fox supposed to heft a sword? Still, better to get his warriors’ blood going with some rhetoric. Oro had always been proud of his speechifying.

  “We will drink the bitter poison of our defeat and spew it at our enemies!” he shouted, his voice carrying across the meadow.

  His warriors cheered, roared, and howled their approval, except for one.

  “Pardon?” said his lieutenant, Gobdaw.

  “What?” said Oro.

  The lieutenant, who lurked inside the body of the second Mud Boy, wore a puzzled expression on his pasty face. In truth, puzzlement of any kind was new for Gobdaw. He was usually an ask no questions kind of fairy who did his talking with an ax. Generally, Gobdaw loved a nice bit of rhetoric.

  “Well, Oro,” said Gobdaw, seeming a little surprised by the words coming out of his mouth, “what does that mean, exactly? Spewing the bitter poison of our defeat at our enemies?”

  This question took Oro by surprise. “Well, it simply means…”

  “Because if you don’t mind my saying, using the word defeat in a motivational speech sends a little bit of a mixed message.”

  Now it was Oro’s turn to be perplexed. “Motivational? Mixed message? What do these terms even mean?”

  Gobdaw looked as though he might cry. “I don’t know, Captain. It’s my human host. He’s a strong one.”

  “Pull yourself together, Gobdaw. You have always appreciated my rhetoric.”

  “I did. I do, Captain. The young one refuses to be silenced.”

  Oro decided to distract Gobdaw with duty. “You have the honor of leading the search for enemies. Take the hounds, Bellico, and those mariners too. Everybody else, surround the gate. Queen Opal labors at the second lock. Understood?”

  “Yes, Captain,” roared Gobdaw, shaking his fist. “As you command.”

  Oro nodded. That was more like it.

  Gobdaw, Bellico, and the Fowl hunting hounds circled the collapsed tunnel. Bellico was feeling pretty good about herself, encased as she was in the body of Juliet Butler. This was a better host than she could have hoped for; an excellent physical specimen equipped with the knowledge of several ancient fighting styles, which, thanks to Juliet’s memories, she knew how to put into practice very well indeed.

  Bellico checked her reflection in the blade of a pirate’s knife and was pleased with what she saw.

  Not too ugly, for a human. It is almost a pity my life force will sustain me no more than a single night. Perhaps if we had been called upon within fifty years of being laid in the ground, then the magic could have sustained us for longer, but now our spirits are weakened by time. The spell was not constructed to keep us earthbound for this long.

  Bellico’s memory contained images that painted an ugly picture of Opal Koboi, but she had been warned that human visions of the fairy folk were unreliable. Such was the Mud Men’s hatred of the People that even their memories would be skewed.

  The pirates were less pleased with their inherited corpses, which disintegrated even as they walked.

  “It’s costing me all my magic just holding this skin sack of maggots together,” complained the one-time warrior giant Salton Finnacre, who inhabited the body of Eusebius Fowl
the lung-sucking pirate.

  “At least you’ve got legs,” grumbled his battle partner J’Heez Nunyon, who hobbled along on a pair of wooden stumps. “How am I supposed to do my signature dervish move on these things? I’m gonna look like a bleepin’ drunk dwarf falling over.”

  It was worse for the English pointer hounds, who could only form the most rudimentary sounds with their vocal cords.

  “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.”

  Fowl Manor

  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.”