Of course it was Butler who had rescued him, and as he dangled from the bodyguard’s grip, he saw Holly hanging from Butler’s other hand.
“Deep breath,” said Butler, and he tossed them both into the lake.
Five minutes later, Artemis arrived gasping at the other side minus one flak jacket, about which he felt sure Butler would have something to say—but it had been either ditch the jacket or drown, and there wasn’t much point in being bulletproof at the bottom of a lake.
He was relieved to find that he was flanked by Holly and Butler, who seemed considerably less out of breath than he himself was.
“We lost the crickets,” said Butler, causing Holly to break down in a splutter of hysterical giggles, which she stifled in her sopping sleeve.
“We lost the crickets,” she said. “Even you can’t make that sound tough.”
Butler rubbed water from his close-cropped hair. “I am Butler,” he said, straight-faced. “Everything I say sounds tough. Now, get out of the lake, fairy.”
It seemed to Artemis that his clothes and boots must have absorbed half the lake, judging by their weight as he dragged himself painfully from the water. He often noticed actors on TV ads exiting pools gracefully, surging from the water to land poolside, but Artemis himself had always been forced to climb out at the shallow end or to execute a sort of double flop that left him on his belly beside the pool. His exit from the lake was even less graceful, a combined shimmy-wiggle that would remind onlookers of the movements of a clumsy seal. Eventually Butler put him out of his misery with a helping hand beneath one elbow.
“Up we come, Artemis. Time is wasting.”
Artemis rose gratefully, sheets of night-cold water sliding from his combat pants.
“Nearly there,” said Butler. “Three hundred yards.”
Artemis had long since given up being amazed at his bodyguard’s ability to compartmentalize his emotions. By rights the three of them should have been in shock after what they’d been through, but Butler had always been able to fold all that trauma into a drawer to be dealt with later, when the world was not in imminent danger of ending. Just standing at his shoulder gave Artemis strength.
“What are we waiting for?” Artemis asked, and he set off up the hill.
The chitter of the crickets receded behind them until it merged with the wind in the tall pines, and no other animal adversaries were encountered on the brief hunched jog up the runway. They crested the hill to find the barn unguarded. And why wouldn’t it be? After all, what kind of strategist deserts a stronghold to hide out in a highly combustible barn?
Finally a touch of luck, Artemis thought. Sometimes being devious pays off.
They got lucky again inside the barn, where Butler recovered a Sig Sauer handgun from a coded lockbox bolted to the blind side of a rafter.
“You’re not the only one with barn secrets,” he said to Artemis, smiling as he checked the weapon’s load and action.
“That’s great,” said Holly dryly. “Now we can shoot a dozen grasshoppers.”
“Crickets,” corrected Artemis. “But let’s get this plane in the sky and shoot a big hole in Opal’s plans instead.”
The light aircraft’s body and wings were coated with solar foil that powered the engine for liftoff. Once airborne, the plane switched between powered flight and gliding, depending on the directions from the computer. If a pilot were content to take the long way around and ride the thermals, then it was possible to engage the engine for takeoff only, and some trips could actually create a zero carbon footprint.
“That plane over there,” said Butler. “Beyond the unused punch bag and the gleaming weights with their unworn handles.”
Artemis groaned. “Yes, that plane. Now, can you forget about the weights and pull out the wheel blocks while I get her started?” he said, giving Butler something to do. “Let’s leave the door closed until we are ready for takeoff.”
“Good plan,” said Holly. “Let me check inside.”
She jogged across the barn, leaving muddy footprints in her wake, and pulled open the plane’s rear door.
The plane, which Artemis had named the Khufu after the pharaoh for whom a solar barge was built by the ancient Egyptians, was a light sports aircraft that had been radically modified by Artemis in his quest to design a practical green passenger vehicle. The wings were fifty percent longer than they had been, with micro-fine struts webbed above and below. Every surface, including the hubcaps, was coated in solar foil, which would recharge the battery in the air. A power cable ran from the Khufu’s tail socket to the south-facing slope of the barn roof, so that the craft would have enough charge to take off whenever Artemis needed to make a test flight.
Holly’s head emerged from the darkness of the interior.
“All clear,” she said in a hushed tone, in case loud noises would break their streak of luck.
“Good,” said Artemis, hurrying to the door, already running the startup sequence in his head. “Butler, would you open the doors as soon as I get the prop going?”
The bodyguard nodded, then kicked the white wedge of wood from under the forward wheel. Two more to go.
Artemis climbed into the plane and knew right away that something was wrong.
“I smell something. Juliet’s perfume.”
He knelt between the passenger seats, tugging open a metal hatch to reveal a compartment below. Thick cables thronged the box, and there was a rectangular space in the middle where something boxlike should have sat.
“The battery?” asked Holly.
“Yes,” said Artemis.
“So we can’t take off?”
Artemis dropped the hatch, allowing it to clang shut. Noise hardly mattered anymore.
“We can’t take off. We can’t shoot.”
Butler poked his head into the plane. “Why are we making noise all of a sudden?” One look at Artemis’s face was all the answer he needed.
“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 themselv
es 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.