A/N: So, you thought the mysteries were all solved, eh? Think again, my friends. Think again. :) Thanks once again for the reviews and comments, they are most helpful. And I believe I'm caught up with changes in response to review suggestions, as well. Thank you all for your assistance.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Eoin Colfer's.
CHAPTER 5
It was exactly three hours, forty minutes and twenty-one seconds later – keeping track of the flashes of light had turned out to be useful as a timekeeping device – when Artemis broke.
"ALL RIGHT!" he yelled, his voice cracking halfway through, "I'll swear your hideous oath, I'll swear it, but I need some water and please just stop that light from flashing! PLEASE, STOP IT!"
He gave a dry sob, trying to twist his face away from the light and running his parched tongue over cracked and bleeding lips. In a corner of his mind, however, he was counting off the seven seconds until the next flash was due. He very nearly smiled when it didn't come.
Forty-six seconds later, he was released from his bonds and, his legs incapable of truly supporting him any longer, he found himself in a trembling heap to the floor. Once his eyes adjusted to no longer having the light shining directly into them, he got his first glimpse of the room in which he was being held, keeping his head down as he surreptitiously glanced around from beneath his lashes.
His cell actually did seem to have been specifically designed to hold a prisoner, which was somewhat of a surprise. This entire operation must have been planned out from the very beginning. He suspected, however, that the prisoner in mind when the room was built had been a troll, since, unlike any other fairy building he'd seen, it was of such a size that Butler would have been barely able to reach the ceiling.
His hypothesis was borne out by the rest of the construction. The door and walls were thick, solid metal, and there were heavy rings sunk into the floor, walls, and ceiling to enable a prisoner of any size to be restrained.
The room was well lit by a spotlight, which seemed to give off a much more reasonable level of light now that it was not shining directly into his eyes. A small camera sat high up in one corner, a tiny red light winking at him from just to the left of the lens. It was recording, of course, sending its images back to some central security system from whence he could be watched over with a minimum of effort.
On the far side of the cell, near the door, was a small table which held a fairy-sized glass and a pitcher of water. Artemis felt quite certain he would have cried at the sight if there had been a drop of moisture left in his body.
Standing beside the table, with one hand resting on the water jug and a triumphant smirk on his face, stood Ark Sool. Another fairy in an LEP corporal's uniform stood directly behind him, covering Artemis with his weapon.
Artemis had a moment of panic that the world had gone mad and this was an officially sanctioned LEP operation – that would be a complication he hadn't expected! – before he realised with relief that it was the same Sool-supporting fairy who had almost drugged his mother at the start of interrogation. So, even if Sool had help, it was still quite likely a rogue operation.
The adrenaline level in his blood didn't fall too far, though, rogue operation or not. He was about to do the unthinkable.
"The light and the freedom," said Sool, walking over to Artemis as the boy finally raised his head to meet his captor's eyes, "are on faith. To get water, you'll need to swear. I assume you know the words."
This was it. After this, there would no turning back. Was it really worth it? He was gambling the entire fairy civilisation on his conjecture about an artefact he had never seen, on his own ability to manipulate his enemy even under a crippling compulsion. Was it really his decision to make?
And that wasn't even taking into account the sharp terror that gripped him at the very idea of submitting to this compulsion. Artemis, as he had found out during the incident with Spiro, was not very good at 'humble'. He wasn't very good at following orders, either. But this was likely to be his only chance to enter the situation with some control over his actions, his only chance to get out of this cell without being party to an atrocity, perhaps even alive. At any moment, Sool could discover that he was no longer resistant to the mesmer, or could find another way to open the box, and then…
Artemis dragged himself up onto his knees, his eyes level with the gnome before him, and restrained a flinch as Sool's hand came to rest over his heart, gathering a cloud of blue sparks that would do anything but heal him.
"I swear to obey your commands as your loyal s–" Artemis stuttered involuntarily over the words with which he would give up ultimate control over his own mind. It was several seconds before he could force himself to continue. "Slave," he completed, "from this moment henceforth, until your death or my own release me."
The blue sparks sank in as he finished speaking, permanently sealing the oath between them. Air left Artemis' lungs in a great whoosh, his spine arching back as the magic took up residence in his body, settling itself into his central nervous system, from whence it could control his every thought and action.
When it was over, he was left panting for breath, desperately sucking in oxygen as though its return to his brain could release him from the magical compulsion. But there were only two things that could do that, and one of them would be much more difficult to achieve than the other.
Sool gestured to the fairy behind him, who left the room swiftly, not bothering to lock the door behind him. "Now, human –"
"I know, I know," interrupted Artemis in a tone of resignation, shooting a hopeless look at the open door. "I won't make any plans to escape, or lie to you, or do anything stupid."
"No, don't," said Sool, smirking as he made it an order. "You will also address me respectfully, as 'sir'."
"Yes, sir," agreed Artemis meekly, fighting the urge to shiver. He wasn't sure whether it was caused by the honorific or the strange sensation of the instructions settling magically over his brain, enforcing them at such a level that he would be physically incapable of disobeying.
"Good Mud Boy," grinned Sool, handing over a glass of water as a reward.
As he drained the glass, Artemis briefly considered asking for his clothes back, but quashed the urge as frivolous. It could only decrease his enemy's tendency to underestimate him and he would have a limited amount of goodwill to work with. At this stage, he needed every ounce of advantage he could get.
Still – so far, so good. As an initial list of instructions, those were quite acceptable. That his own suggestions for restrictions had been taken so easily was almost laughable; he had absolutely no intention of doing anything stupid and, since he already had a plan to escape, the injunction not to make such a plan was a little obsolete. Being unable to lie would certainly complicate his efforts, but was much preferable to an alternative which might restrict him from any deception at all – and despite the way the word stuck in his throat, he had no real objections to Sool's additional demand. It was almost impossible to stop yourself from underestimating anyone who called you 'sir', as he had found to his detriment in his own relationship with Butler. When combined with the fact that Sool would be taking anything he said as absolute truth… He was in with a fighting chance.
By the time he had drunk the rest of the water from the jug, Artemis felt much better. The water had vastly improved the state of his headache and the paranoid feeling that his thought processes were being slowed down by the thickening of his cerebrospinal fluid. The water was also an essential element of his plan; even in his dehydrated state, there was only so much he could drink before the execution of the first stage of his plan became biologically inevitable.
The LEP corporal shuffled back into the room carrying a heavy iron casket, which he placed on the table before leaving again.
"Pandora's box is in there," Sool informed Artemis, gesturing to the casket. "Work out how to open the box as fast as you can, but do not actually open it until I instruct you to do so."
Artemis' feet had already carried him all the way to the table and his hands were lifting the lid before he even realised he was there. He didn't have long to muse over the terrifying reality of being no longer ultimately responsible for his own actions, because he was reaching inside and lifting out the box. He turned it in his hands to examine the exquisitely crafted puzzle-box from every angle.
It was exactly as it had been described in the Book; a cylinder with tightly fitted alternating black and white tiles curving across its surface, perfectly symmetrical around its central axis. That was only a façade, of course – the internal mechanism would be manifestly asymmetrical, requiring exactly one set of movements to open it, but the symmetrical surface would make it more difficult to keep the box's orientation in mind. The solid gold top was engraved with the Gnommish death sentence for the royal family and the coalition of warlocks who had created it.
Aurum potestas est, thought Artemis irreverently. In this case, it was undeniably true.
He quickly found the key – a loose piece which could be removed, allowing the rest of the pieces to be shuffled around almost like a child's picture puzzle. Within moments, he was lost in the puzzle.
The first step was to create a mental map of the internal workings, based on how the external components moved. The tracks on which the panels slid had corners and junctions, which all needed to be found and memorised. Some of the pieces had irregular anchors which limited their movements compared to other pieces. Then there were the gravity-based pins which meant that the orientation of the box changed the behaviour of the panels…
"So?" demanded Sool, breaking his concentration.
"This will take some time, sir," Artemis replied, trying in vain to make his tone sound humble, although the instruction to be respectful effectively quashed his urge to sneer at the other's ignorance. "The sheer number of visible combinations this thing has is incredible, even without taking the internal mechanics into account – which are by far the most complex I've ever seen."
He shuffled the tiles for a few more moments before looking up at Sool. "I'm not at my best at the moment, sir. I don't know how long I've been here, but I'm still dangerously dehydrated and I haven't eaten or slept the entire time. If you want this to go faster, I need something to eat and plenty to drink to get my brain back in working order."
"I'll see to it," said Sool. "For the moment – keep working."
Artemis ducked his head again, biting his lip as though nervous. "Sir?" he ventured. "I'll also need to visit the bathroom."
"I suppose that's unavoidable," agreed Sool grudgingly. "I'll send Rheeson down to escort you in a few minutes."
"Thank you, sir," said Artemis, bending his head over the puzzle and returning to systematically shifting the tiles. His half-lidded eyes barely even watched the rhythmic movements of his hands as he twisted, rotated, and slid the tiles in a half-trance, scrupulously recording every detail in his mind.
A day passed. Then another. Forty-eight hours of agony, not knowing whether my child was dead or alive, or in pain, or thought we had abandoned him. The only reason I slept at all was that Arty's Butler had bluntly informed me that I was no use to my son if I was too tired to think when he was found. After that, I tried to sleep as much as I could, obsessively snatching half-hour stretches in between reports and briefings and strategy meetings.
I never slept for long, though, because I found myself bolting awake from nightmares of my son, faced with a final choice between his own life and opening the box to 'unleash death and devastation' on innocents. In my dreams, he was the hero I'd always known he could become, the hero I knew he really would be if it came down to it. And now, I found myself actually wanting him to be selfish.
In the hospital in Helsinki, I had told Arty that the main catalyst for my sudden realignment of priorities was the time I had been afforded in captivity to rethink my life, but it was not really the truth. While had been no lie that, with my life hanging in the balance, I had deeply regretted my lifetime of emotional absence from both Angeline and Arty, it was by no means the whole story.
It hadn't taken me long after I woke up to discover the lengths to which Arty had gone – financially, criminally, emotionally – in search of a cold and distant father who, according to all rational logic, was dead. Faced with this puzzling obsession, for one so ruled by logic as my son, I came to a realisation far more humbling than the fact that I had chosen not to spend my life sharing the company of those who mattered to me; Arty had not even had the opportunity to spend his life with those that mattered to him.
My son still needed me. No matter how advanced he was on an intellectual level, Arty still craved not only my respect and approval, which I had always given him in abundance, but my affection and guidance, which I had not. Even before I had been kidnapped I had been failing to provide for him in the ways that mattered most.
Now, rather than finding it hard to remember that he had ever been a child, I found it harder to remember he wasn't still five years old, his already flawless poker-face at odds with his piping voice. He may never have shown his emotional immaturity in traditional ways, but now that I knew to look for it, it was visible in every move he made.
It was to be the most audacious scheme I had ever pulled off – and for the highest stakes. I had the initial advantage of Arty's emotional vulnerability, but my son was a master of manipulation himself. Once he grew accustomed to my presence again, one false move would have irretrievably shattered the fragile trust we had built up. But, despite a confusing setback around the time I was released from hospital, I largely succeeded in convincing him that he could trust my judgement; that it was worthwhile to take the opportunity to reclaim his childhood; that he could safely leave the family business to me because I loved him with every fibre in my body and would never let him come to harm while I still had breath.
That it was the truth had not make the task any easier. It didn't make the current situation any easier, either.
I don't know where Angeline found her strength over those days – although from the wan smiles she gave me from time to time, I suspected that she was only an inch away from losing it as badly as she had during my imprisonment. She had been keeping busy in the past month or so by organising a surprise party for Arty's fifteenth birthday; of course, my son had known about the party even longer than I had, and the party was still six weeks away. But even if Angeline had been able to contact the various caterers and decorators she was working with from underground, such a thing was hardly a helpful distraction from her missing son. Unable to feel useful in any other way, she spent hours praying, and the rest of the time staring into the stunning blue diamond that Arty had given her while I was missing, as though it held the answer to the whereabouts of our son.
Dear, sweet Angeline; she had never even suspected the jewel she had sworn never to take off was stolen, although I had recognised it the moment she explained its significance in Helsinki. The Fei-Fei diamond was the only one in the world of its colour and was absolutely priceless. I had never managed to discover how Arty had obtained it for her – it was still ostensibly on display in a museum, so his reproduction must have been very good indeed. At least I knew where he got the idea; Arty and I had worked together once, in Prague, to retrieve a pair of exquisite ruby earrings that Angeline still wore on special occasions.
Arty's innocent assertion that we had shopped for the jewellery together had completely disarmed her suspicions then, too. Perhaps I was onto something here…
I did find the time to finally explain to Angeline what was going on, Short helpfully filling in some of the details I was hazy about. It had turned out that there was a fair bit more that I was hazy about than I had originally thought.
"You wiped his memory?" I demanded, feeling a chill all over at the thought. "No wonder he suddenly relapsed on all the progress I thought I'd made with him while I was in hospital! Giving up half a tonne of gold for his mother's sanity, shooting me to save my life – those would have formed critical parts of his psychological make-up! You can't just remove them and expect his choices to be stable!"
"Well, he did agree," defended Short, looking suitably embarrassed on behalf of her species. "And I was personally opposed to the decision. I didn't mind him calling me to bring Butler back from the dead, so much, but he did black out Haven for over three hours with his little scheme to extort money from Spiro!"
"You do realise," I said coldly, my mind veering away from the implications of her indirect statement about Arty's Butler, "that when he bankrupted Spiro, there was only a comparatively small deposit in the Fowl bank accounts – and a suspiciously similar sum of money to what was missing made its way to Amnesty International? He'd already made his choice and you changed it!"
"He bankrupted Spiro?" asked Short, just as coldly. "That wasn't a part of the deal."
"Of course he –"
"Calm down, darling," interrupted Angeline softly, before I could begin to wax lyrical on the utter absurdity of leaving Spiro with enough money to hire either a decent lawyer or a hit man – or both. Especially if Arty had known he would soon remember nothing about the incident! "Debating ancient history won't help Arty. Besides, you haven't tracked him doing anything truly unethical for months – they obviously realised their mistake and gave him back his memory soon enough."
There was no way it had been that simple.
Short flushed a dark auburn colour that matched her hair and eyed me nervously but, although I gave her superior look to let her know that I could tell there was a story there that she didn't want to tell, I didn't press the matter. Angeline was right; this wasn't helping Arty.
I hit it off a little better with Foaly than I had with Short, although there was admittedly some initial tension over the difficulties with Arty's tracking device. But it didn't take long before I was spending most of my time with him, in his Operations booth – mainly because it was the first place any news of Arty would reach, but also because the sheer marvel of technological gadgetry served as an excellent distraction from my anxiety.
While I don't come close to approaching my son's technical genius or, it seemed, the centaur's, it became clear very quickly that both my interest in how things worked and my ability to understand the explanations far surpassed that of most of his acquaintance. Since Foaly didn't seem to get the chance to expound upon his own brilliance quite as often as he felt he deserved, he was quite happy to explain the principles behind many of his inventions. Once you got past the constant stream of Mud Man insults, he really was quite good company – and I was going to make an absolute fortune on the patents.
Or not. Sometimes it was hard, in the face of temptation, to remember that I had officially turned over a new leaf. I also had a suspicion, given the fairies' seemingly casual attitude to the violation of human memories, the only reason they were being so open with me was that if I started to cause any trouble, they could simply wipe my mind clean of the past few days. We would have to see about that. In any case, when it got down to the details, it became clear that many of Foaly's inventions were far from entirely technological – there was an element of magic woven into nearly everything, if not in final form then at least in the production process. Still, some of his ideas were truly intriguing, and served as a welcome distraction from my all-consuming worry for my son.
Nearly forty-nine hours after Arty was captured, the two of us were in the middle of a deeply technical discussion on matter-antimatter engines. Intriguingly, the device Foaly had designed was inherently safe, since he could use a kind of localised time manipulation to contain the destructive energy blast that would be released if the fuel cell was breached and the antimatter allowed to come into contact with matter. Unfortunately, he had still not completely solved the problem of reliably containing the antimatter itself using technology, magic, time, or any combination of the thereof, and so the device was still purely theoretical.
Before I could get into the reason for why the antimatter could so easily pass from one time-stream to another, we were interrupted by the sound of Foaly's amplified voice emanating from a computer; it had found something.
"It's Fowl," Foaly explained tersely, as the Butlers, Kelp, and several other fairies from Retrieval One joined us. After the first six hours of searching had passed with no results, the teams had been searching in shifts – two teams out on the field at any one time, one bunked back at LEP headquarters. No one, it seemed, was sleeping very heavily, at least not heavily enough to miss the sound of Foaly's alarms. "He must have escaped – it'll just take me a moment to pinpoint his location, then we can pick him up…"
Kelp pressed a button on Foaly's dashboard and spoke. "All units, we have a fix on Fowl's location. Stand by for coordinate transmission."
"Standing by," echoed the twin voices of Short and Vein, the leaders of Retrieval Two and Three.
There was a tense silence as Foaly painstakingly performed a grid search of the on-screen map of Haven.
"Paranoid little Mud Whelp," he muttered, as one of the grid squares finally scored a hit. His hairy fingers blurred over the keyboard and the onscreen map enlarged to show a few suburbs on the east edge of the city. "Couldn't have designed something easy to track, could he?"
Considering the tinfoil hat he wore, the centaur's remark was perhaps a little hypocritical, but I didn't want to risk distracting him at this critical moment by remarking upon the irony.
A grid-square flashed and enlarged as Arty was found again and this time I could see the individual buildings. A small dot blinked just outside one for a moment, and then vanished.
Foaly typed furiously for a few moments, then let out his breath through closed lips in a very horse-like sound. "We've lost the signal again," he said, reaching up to rub his temples with a hairy hand.
"Has he been recaptured?" asked Kelp.
"It looks like it," nodded Foaly. "Nonetheless, we've found him. I've sent the coordinates of the warehouse through to Holly and Vein's helmets. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how much good it'll do Fowl."
"What do you mean?" I prompted.
"It may be LEP property now," said Foaly, shaking his head, "but before it was confiscated, that warehouse was one of Opal Koboi's. We disabled all of her security features when she went to prison, of course, but they're still functional. Sool – or any Council member, for that matter – would have the passwords to reactivate them, so we could well be talking about an absolute fortress here."
For some reason, several faces turned towards the tiny, hairy fairy whose role I hadn't quite managed to work out. He didn't seem to be a member of the LEP and the only contributions he had made over the past few days had been eating constantly and insulting everybody else.
"Sorry folks," he said, and there was real regret in his gravely voice. "I wish I could help, but I had nothing to do with the construction of this one; it was built after I broke into Koboi's laboratory the first time. She never found out how I got in, but I hear that she bedded the footings of every subsequent warehouse in six metres of asphalt, all based on an impenetrable dwarf-proof mesh. I don't exactly fancy death by asphalt. I might be able to rattle the windows a bit with some heavy explosives, but that mesh couldn't be scratched by the kind of blast that would leave anyone alive inside. If you're going in to rescue the Mud Boy, it'll have to be through the front door."
"I'm afraid that's just not an option," Foaly shook his head. "Not if those defences have been activated. Koboi warehouses have DNA cannons guarding every inch of the perimeter and, even if you could get inside, they're scattered all through the interior too. I could deactivate them if we could get some tech equipment on site, but the entire place is disconnected from Haven's networks – except for the mains power. I could cut that, but the targeting on the cannons is battery-powered and the plasma would carry enough residual charge to blast a small army to pieces. There's simply no way to get around active DNA cannons – DNA doesn't lie."
Then they all turned to look at me, much as they had previously looked at the dwarf, and I was horrified to realise that they were expecting me to come up with a plan. They had obviously been around my son for long enough to learn that when the situation is without a solution and all hope seems lost, it is time to turn to Artemis Fowl.
But I wasn't my son. I didn't have the sheer brainpower to think my way ten moves ahead of my opponent. I didn't have the audacity to find and extort an entirely new species. I didn't have the creativity to pull solutions to seemingly impossible situations out of thin air. I didn't know enough about fairy technology to even begin to think of how to circumvent a security system that their resident genius had labelled impenetrable. And as for the enemy – well, he already had everything he needed to establish his new world order, so even if we could establish contact I wouldn't know where to start negotiating Arty free.
"I can't see any way in right now," I said finally. "We need to give it more time – Arty seems to have escaped once, he might be able to do it again – or the thief could make a mistake – and at least we know where they are now."
"The Council won't like it," Kelp said dubiously. "Giving him more time to work on Fowl – or to work out another way of cracking Pandora's box open… It's risky – and the Council doesn't like to gamble."
"Do you have an alternative?" I demanded, suddenly realising that the knowledge of Arty's location was a two-edged sword and not liking the direction this was headed.
Kelp exchanged a guilty look with Foaly. "Just one," he said finally, "and I'm afraid, given the way I got into office, that I won't have a great deal of influence with the Council. I am truly sorry."
He spoke as though my son was already dead.