Opal’s voice came from beyond the throng, shielded by its mass.
“They have protected themselves. Kill them now, my soldiers. Bring their heads to me.”
Artemis coughed. Bring their heads to me? Opal used to be a little more subtle. It’s true what they say: Prison does not rehabilitate people. Not pixies, at any rate.
His own baby brothers advanced toward him with murder in their eyes. Two four-year-olds moving with increasing grace and speed.
Are they stronger now? Could Myles and Beckett actually succeed in killing us?
And if they didn’t, perhaps those pirates would, with their rusting cutlasses.
“Butler,” Artemis rasped. “Retreat and evaluate.”
It was their only option.
There is no proactive move open to us.
This realization irritated Artemis, even though he was in mortal danger.
“Retreat and try not to injure anybody except those pirates. The Chinese warrior mummies and I will not be overly upset if a few animals are harmed. After all, it is us or them.”
But Butler was not listening to Artemis’s uncharacteristically nervous diatribe, because Holly’s shot had pulsed his vagus nerve and knocked him out cold. A shot in a million.
It was up to Holly to defend the group. It should be fine. All Captain Short had to do was set her custom Neutrino on a wide burst to buy them some time.
Then a pirate’s blackjack twirled from the fingers of a pirate’s skeletal hand and cracked Holly’s nose, sending her tumbling backward on top of Butler’s frame.
Artemis watched the possessed creatures advance the final steps toward him and was dismayed that at the end it all came down to the physical.
I always thought my intellect would keep me alive, but now I shall be killed by my own baby brother with a rock. The ultimate sibling rivalry.
Then the ground opened beneath his feet and swallowed the group whole.
Opal Koboi elbowed through her acolytes to the edge of the chasm that had suddenly appeared to suck her nemeses from their fate.
“No!” she squealed, tiny fists pounding the air. “I wanted their heads. On spikes. You people do that all the time, right?”
“We do,” admitted Oro, through the mouth of Beckett. “Limbs too, betimes.”
Opal could have sworn that, underneath her stamping feet, the ground burped.
The Fowl Estate, Several Feet Belowground
Artemis tumbled down and down, striking knees and elbows against the crooks of roots and sharp limestone corners that protruded from the earth like half-buried books. Clumps of dirt crumbled around him, and stones rattled down his shirt and up his pant legs. His view was obstructed by the twirl of tumble and layers of earth, but there was a glowing above. And below too? Was that possible?
Artemis was confused by the thump of wood behind one ear and the luminous glow from below. It was below, wasn’t it?
I feel like Alice falling into Wonderland.
A line came to him:
It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.
No fall can last forever when gravity is involved, and Artemis’s descent was mercifully gradual as the crater funneled to a bottleneck, which Butler and Holly had the decency to block with their tangled frames and limbs before they plopped through the hole. Rough hands grabbed at Artemis, tugging him through to a tunnel beneath.
Artemis landed on the body heap and blinked the mud from his eyes. Someone, or something, stood naked before him, an ethereal figure glowing with divine light from head to foot. It reached out a shining hand and spoke in a deep movie promo voice:
“Pull my finger.”
Artemis relaxed neck muscles that he hadn’t realized were tensed. “Mulch.”
“The one and only. Saving your brainiac butt once more. Remind me, who’s supposed to be the genius around here?”
“Mulch,” said Artemis again.
Mulch pointed his proffered finger like a gun. “Aha. You’re repeating yourself. You once told me that repeating yourself is an exercise in redundancy. Well, who’s redundant now, Mud Boy? What good did your genius do you with those freaks up there?”
“None,” admitted Artemis. “Can we argue later?”
“’Cause you’re losing the argument,” scoffed Mulch.
“No, because those freaks are on our tail. We need to retreat and regroup.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Mulch, reaching a forearm into a hole in the tunnel wall and yanking out a thick root. “Nobody’s following us anywhere once I collapse the tunnel mouth. But you might want to scoot forward a yard or two.”
The earth above them rumbled like thunderclouds cresting a low mountain, and Artemis was gripped with a sudden certainty that they were all about to be crushed. He scurried forward and flattened himself against the cold dark mud wall, as if that could possibly make any difference.
But Mulch’s tunnel held its integrity, and only the spot where Artemis had been was completely blocked.
Mulch wrapped his fingers around Butler’s ankle and, with some effort, hauled the unconscious bodyguard along the tunnel floor.
“You carry Holly. Gently now. By the looks of your hand, she drove those spirits away and saved your life. Before I saved it. Probably just after Butler saved it. You seeing a pattern emerging, Artemis? You starting to realize who the liability is here?”
Artemis looked at his hand. He was branded with a spiral rune where Holly had blasted him. The last globs of Berserker ectoplasm slicking his hair caused him to shudder at the sight.
A protection rune.
Holly had branded them to save them. And to think he had doubted her.
Artemis scooped up Holly and followed the glowing dwarf, tentatively feeling his way with tapping toes.
“Slow down,” he called. “It’s dark in here.”
Mulch’s voice echoed along the tunnel. “Follow the globes, Arty. I gave ’em an extra coating of dwarf spit, the magical solution that can do it all, from glow in the dark to repel ghostly boarders. I should bottle this stuff. Follow the globes.”
Artemis squinted at the retreating glow and could indeed distinguish two wobbling globes that shone a little brighter than the rest.
Once he realized what the globes were, Artemis decided not to follow too closely. He had seen those globes in action and still had the occasional nightmare.
The tunnel undulated and curved until Artemis’s internal compass surrendered what little sense of direction it had. He traipsed behind Mulch’s glowing rear end, glancing down at his unconscious friend in his arms. She seemed so small and frail, though Artemis had seen her take on a horde of trolls in his defense.
“The odds are against us, as they have been so often, my friend,” he whispered, as much to himself as to Holly. He ran a rough calculation, factoring in the desperate situations they had endured over the past few years, the relative IQ of Opal Koboi, and the approximate number of opponents he had glimpsed aboveground. “I would estimate our chances of survival to be less than fifteen percent. But, on the plus side, we have survived, indeed been victorious, against greater odds. Once.”
Obviously Artemis’s whispers carried down the tunnel, for Mulch’s voice drifted back to him.
“You need to stop thinking with your head, Mud Boy, and start thinking with your heart.”
Artemis sighed. The heart was an organ for pumping oxygen-rich blood to the cells. It could no more think than an apple could tap-dance. He was about to explain this to the dwarf when the tunnel opened to a large chamber, and Artemis’s breath was taken away.
The chamber was the size of a small barn, with walls sloping to an apex. There were feeder tunnels dotted at various heights, and blobs of glowing gunk suckered to exposed rock served as a lighting system. Artemis had seen this particular system before.
“Dwarf phlegm,” he said, nodding at a low cluster of tennis ball–sized blobs. “Hardens once excreted, and glows with a luminescence unmatched in nature.?
??
“It’s not all phlegm,” said the dwarf mysteriously, and for once Artemis did not feel like getting to the bottom of Mulch’s mystery, as the bottom of Mulch’s mysteries was generally in the vicinity of Mulch’s mysterious bottom. Artemis placed Holly gently on a bed of fake-fur coats and recognized a designer label.
“These are my mother’s coats.”
Mulch dropped Butler’s leg. “Yep. Well, possession is nine-tenths of the law, so why don’t you take your tenth back up to the surface and talk larceny with the thing that used to be Opal Koboi?”
This was a good point. Artemis had no desire to be booted out of this sanctuary.
“Are we safe down here? Won’t they follow us?”
“They can try,” said Mulch, then he spat a glowing wad of spit on top of a fading spatter. “But it would take a couple of days with industrial drills and sonar. And even then I could bring the whole thing down with a well-placed burst of dwarf gas.”
Artemis found this hard to believe. “Seriously. One blast, and this entire structure comes tumbling down?”
Mulch adopted a heroic pose, one foot on a rock, hands on hips. “In my line of work, you gotta be ready to move on. Just walk away.”
Artemis did not appreciate the heroic pose. “Please, Mulch, I beg you. Put on some pants.”