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, dreadlocked 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 itself 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.