Artemis Fowl 08 - The Last Guardian (20 page)

Four-foot-long arrows punched through the fuselage, rocking the plane on its gear and embedding themselves deep in the seating upholstery. One was so close to Holly that it actually passed through her epaulette, pinning her to the seat.

“D’Arvit,” said Holly, yanking herself free.

“Fire!” came the command from outside, and instantly a series of whistles filled the air.

It sounds like birds, thought Holly.

But it wasn’t birds. It was a second volley. Each arrow battered the aircraft, destroying solar panels; one even passed clean through two portholes. The craft was driven sideways, tilting onto the starboard wing.

And yet again the command came. “Fire!” But she heard no whistling noise this time. Instead there was a sharp crackling.

Holly surrendered to her curiosity, clambering up the slanted floor to the porthole and peeping out. Juliet was lighting the terra-cotta soldiers’ arrows.

Oh, thought Holly. That kind of fire.

Bellico squinted into the barn’s interior and was pleased to see the airplane keeled over. Her host’s memory assured her that this craft had indeed flown through the sky using the energy of the sun to power its engine, but Bellico found this difficult to believe. Perhaps the human’s dreams and recollections were becoming intertwined, so that to Bellico daydreams and figments would seem real.

The sooner I am out of this body, the better, she thought.

She wound a torch from a hank of hay and lit the tip with a lighter taken from the human girl’s pocket.

This lighter is real enough, she thought. And not too far removed in its mechanics from a simple flint box.

A straw torch would not burn for long, but long enough to light her warriors’ arrows. She walked along the ranks, briefly touching the arrowheads that had been soaked in fuel from a punctured gasoline can.

Suddenly the hound raised its sleek head and barked at the moon.

Bellico was about to ask the dog what the matter was, but then she felt it too.

I am afraid, she realized. Why would I be afraid of anything when I long for death?

Bellico dropped the torch as it was burning her fingers, but, in the second before she stamped on its dying embers, she thought she saw something familiar storming across the field to the east. An unmistakable lurching shape.

No, she thought. That is not possible.

“Is that…?” she said, pointing. “Could that be?”

The hound managed to wrap its vocal cords around a single syllable that wasn’t too far out of its doggy range. “Troll!” it howled. “Trooooollll.”

And not just a troll, Bellico realized. A troll and its rider.

Mulch Diggums was clamped to the back of the troll’s head with a hank of dreadlocks in each hand. Beneath him the troll’s shoulder muscles bunched and released as it loped across the field toward the barn.

Loped
is perhaps the wrong word, as it implies a certain slow awkwardness, but while the troll did appear to shamble, it did so at incredible speed. This was one of the many weapons in a troll’s considerable arsenal. If the intended prey noticed a troll coming from a long way off, seemingly bumbling along, it thought to itself:
Okay, yeah I see a troll, but he’s like a million miles away, so I’m just gonna finish off chewing this leaf,
then—
BAM
—the troll was chewing off the prey’s hind leg.

Bellico, however, had often seen the troll-rider brigade in action, and she knew exactly how fast a troll could move.

“Archers!” she yelled, drawing her sword. “New target. Turn! Turn!”

The terra-cotta army creaked as they moved, red sand sifting from their joints. They were slow, painfully slow.

They are not going to make it, Bellico realized, and then she had a grasping-at-straws moment.
Perhaps that troll and its rider are on our side.

Sadly for the Berserkers, the troll rider was most definitely not on their side, and the troll was just doing what he was told.

Gruff did indeed make a fearsome spectacle as he emerged from night shadows into the pale moonglow bathing the field. Even for a troll, he was a massive specimen, more than nine feet tall, with his bouncing dreadlocks giving the illusion of another foot or two. His heavy-boned brow was like a battering ram over glittering night eyes. Two vicious tusks curved up from a pugnacious jaw, beads of venom twinkling at the pointy ends. His shaggy humanoid frame was cabled with muscle and sinew, and his hands had the strength to make dust of small rocks and big heads.

Mulch yanked on the troll’s dreadlocks, instinctively resurrecting an age-old troll-steering technique. His granddad had often told stories around the spit-fire of the great troll riders who had rampaged across the countryside doing whatever they felt like, and nobody could even catch them to argue.

The good old days,
his granddad used to say.
We dwarfs were kings. Even the demons would turn tail when they seen a mounted dwarf comin’ over the hill atop a sweat-steamin’ troll.

This doesn’t feel like a good day, thought Mulch. This feels like the end of the world.

Mulch decided on a direct approach rather than pussyfooting around with battle tactics, and he steered Gruff directly into the throng of Berserkers.

“Don’t hold back!” he shouted into the troll’s ear.

Bellico’s breath caught in her throat.

Scatter!
she wanted to shout to her troops.
Take cover!

But the troll was upon them, smashing terra-cotta warriors with scything swipes of its massive arms, knocking them over like toy soldiers. The troll kicked the dog into the lower atmosphere and sideswiped Bellico herself into a water barrel. In seconds, several pirates were reduced to a dog’s dinner, and even though Salton Finnacre managed to jab a sword into Gruff’s thigh, the massive troll lumbered on, seemingly unhindered by the length of steel sticking out of his leg.

Mulch’s toes located the nerve clusters between Gruff’s ribs, and he used them to steer the troll into the barn.

I am a troll rider, the dwarf realized with a bolt of pride. I was born to do this, and steal stuff, and eat loads.

Mulch resolved to find a way of combining these three pursuits if he made it through the night.

Inside the barn, the plane lay balanced on a wheel and wing tip, with arrows piercing its body. Holly’s face was pressed to the glass, her mouth a disbelieving
O
.

I don’t know why she’s surprised, thought Mulch. She should be used to me rescuing her by now.

Mulch heard the clamor of ranks re-forming behind him, and he knew it was only a matter of heartbeats before the archers launched a salvo at the troll.

And as big as my mount is, even he will go down with half a dozen arrows puncturing his vitals.

There was no time to open the glider door and scoop up its three passengers, so Mulch yanked on the dreadlocks, dug in his toes, and whispered in the troll’s ear, hoping that his message was getting through.

Inside the solar plane, Holly used the few moments before all hell would surely break loose to hustle a dazed Artemis into the pilot’s seat. She strapped herself in beside him.

“I’m flying?” asked Artemis.

Holly flip-flapped her feet. “I can’t reach the pedals.”

“I see,” said Artemis.

It was a banal yet necessary conversation, as Artemis’s piloting skills were soon to be called into use.

Gruff shouldered the plane upright, then put his weight behind it, heaving the light craft toward the open doorway. The plane hobbled forward on damaged gear, lurching with each rotation.

“I did not foresee any of these events,” said Artemis through clattering teeth, more to himself than to his copilot. Holly placed both hands on the dash, to brace herself against an impact toward which they were rolling at full speed.

“Wow,” said Holly, watching arrows thunk into the nose and wings. “You didn’t foresee a troll-riding dwarf pushing your plane down the runway. You must be losing your touch, Artemis.”

He tried to connect himself to the moment, but it was too surreal. Watching the Berserker soldiers grow larger through the double frames of windshield and barn doorway made the entire thing seem like a movie. A very realistic 3-D movie with vibro-chairs, but a movie all the same. This feeling of detachment coupled with the old Artemis Fowl slow reflexes almost cost him his life as he sat dreamily watching a Berserker long-arrow arcing toward his head.

Luckily Holly’s reactions were stellar, and she managed to punch Artemis in the shoulder with enough force to knock him sideways to the limit of his seat belt. The arrow punctured the windshield, making a surprisingly small hole, and thunked into the headrest exactly where Artemis’s vacant face would have been.

Suddenly, Artemis had no problem
connecting to the moment.

“I can air-start the plane,” he said, flicking switches on the dash. “If we get off the ground at all.”

“Doesn’t that require coordination?” asked Holly.

“Yes, split-second timing.”

Holly paled. Relying on Artemis’s coordination was about as sensible as relying on Mulch’s powers of abstinence.

The plane battered its way through the Berserkers, decapitating a terra-cotta warrior. Solar panels tinkled and cracked, and the landing gear buckled. Gruff kept pushing, ignoring various wounds that now gushed with blood.

Bellico rallied her troops and hurried in pursuit, but none could match the troll’s pace except the hound, who latched on to Mulch’s back, trying to dislodge him.

Mulch was insulted that a dog would interfere in what was possibly the most valiant rescue attempt ever, so he locked its head in the crook of one elbow and shouted into the animal’s face.

“Give it up, Fido! I am invincible today. Look at me, riding a troll, for heaven’s sake. How often do you see that anymore? Never! That’s how often. Now, you have two seconds to back off, or I am going to have to eat you.”

Two seconds passed. The dog shook its head, refusing to back off, so Mulch ate him.

It was,
he would later tell his fellow dwarf fugitive Barnet Riddles, proprietor of Miami’s Sozzled Parrot bar,
a terrible waste to spit out half a dog, but it’s difficult to look heroic with a mutt’s hindquarters hanging out of yer mouth.

Seconds after the live hound disagreed with Mulch to his face, the dead dog disagreed with his stomach. It may have been the Berserker soul that caused the onset of indigestion, or it may have been something the dog ate before something ate him—either way, Mulch’s innards were suddenly cramped by a giant fist wearing a chain-mail glove.

“I gotta trim,” he said through gritted teeth.

If Gruff had realized what Mulch Diggums was about to do, he would have run screaming like a two-year-old pixette and buried himself underground till the storm had passed, but the troll did not speak
grunted Dwarfish
and so followed the last command given, which had been:
Push downhill.

The solar plane picked up speed as it ran down the clay ramp with the Berserkers in quick pursuit.

“We are not going to make it,” said Artemis, checking the instruments. “The gear is shot.”

The runway’s end curved before them like the end of a gentle ski jump. If the plane went off with insufficient speed, it would simply plummet into the lake, and they would be sitting ducks alongside the actual ducks that were probably inhabited by Berserkers and would peck them to death. Artemis was almost reconciled to the fact that he was going to die in the immediate future, but he really did not want his skull to be fractured by the bill of a possessed mallard. In fact,
Death by aggressive aquatic bird
had just rocketed to number one on Artemis’s
Least Favorite Ways to Die
list, smashing the record-breaking dominance of
Death by dwarf gas
, which had haunted his dreams for years.

“Not ducks,” he said. “Please, not ducks. I was going to win the Nobel Prize.”

They could hear commotion from underneath the fuselage: animal grunting and buckling metal. If the plane did not take off soon, it was going to be shaken to pieces. This was not a strong craft, stripped back as it was to increase the power-to-weight ratio necessary for sustainable flight.

Outside the solar plane, Mulch’s entire body was twisted in a cramped treeroot of pain. He knew what was going to happen. His body was about to react to a combination of stress, bad diet, and gas buildup by instantaneously jettisoning up to a third of his own body weight. Some more disciplined dwarf yogis can invoke this procedure at will and refer to it as the Once a Decade Detox, but for ordinary dwarfs it goes by the name Trimming the Weight. And you do not want to be in the line of fire when the weight is being trimmed.

The plane reached the bottom of the slope with barely enough momentum to clear the ramp.

Water landing, thought Artemis. Death by ducks.

Then something occurred. A boost of power came from somewhere. It was as if a giant forefinger had flicked the plane forward into the air. The tail rose, and Artemis fought the pedals to keep it down.

How is this happening? Artemis wondered, staring befuddled at the controls, until Holly punched his shoulder for the second time in as many minutes.

“Air start!” she yelled.

Artemis sat bolt upright.
Air start! Of course.

The solar plane had a small engine to get the craft off the ground, and after that the solar panels kicked in; but without a battery the engine could not even turn over, unless Artemis hit the throttle at the right time, before the plane began to lose momentum. This might buy them enough time to catch a thermal for a couple of hundred feet, enough to clear the lake and outfly the arrows.

Artemis waited until he sensed the plane was at the apex of its rise, then opened the throttle wide.

Bellico and her remaining troops ran hell-for-leather down the runway, hurling any missiles in their arsenal after the plane. It was a bizarre situation to be involved in, even for a resurrected spirit occupying a human body.

I am chasing a plane being pushed down a runway by a troll-riding dwarf, she thought. Unbelievable.