A/N: Sorry for the delay in posting, RL got a bit hectic - I've been learning lines in four languages (three of which I don't speak) and sewing costumes for two separate concerts on two consecutive days last weekend, as well as making bridesmaid dresses and helping my beginning-to-panic best friend organise her wedding. So at least I've got good excuses. :) But, as a birthday present to myself, I thought I'd allot myself some time to do the final proofread and put this up. (Yay! Twenty-three today!) Thanks for the reviews once again, it's exciting to have a whole new crop of reviewers! Oh, and I'd better give you a cliffhanger alert. But you knew there was going to be one of them, didn't you? Only one more chapter, after this one, and I won't make you wait (too long) for it!

Disclaimer: Not mine. Eoin Colfer's.

CHAPTER 7

Artemis was beginning to wonder if his message had made it through at all. His plan had relied rather heavily on either his father or Butler understanding the Prague reference, after all. He had to admit there was a strong possibility that Sool had been telling the truth and his parents were dead - and depending on how well the fairies had improvised, under the circumstances, Butler may have never even seen the footage. There may have been no one capable of understanding his message at all.

He had been concentrating rather hard on considering the situation in a solely academic light, when the light in his cell blacked out, plunging the small room into near-darkness. Even the tiny red LED on the video camera which kept a constant watch on him had blackened, although the corridor outside was clearly lit with greenish emergency lights.

Artemis reigned in a predatory smile as he put the box down on the table and steepled his fingers together. It was time.

A blackout, of course, was not all that he had asked the LEP to provide him. It was merely a precursor to the main event; in Prague, the blackout had served to disable the CCTV cameras. The alarms on the safe, however, had not run off the mains power and his father had been unable to find a way to disable them. He had done the next best thing – set off every alarm within an area of twelve city blocks, stretching the guaranteed three minute police response time to twenty-seven. That had been plenty of time to get in, get the jewels, and get out again.

In this case, however, there was no safe. No alarms. And the LEP would wait until he was ready before they arrived. The only purpose of these events was to manipulate Sool's actions – to channel him along the path Artemis wanted him to follow – and just as Artemis had predicted, it didn't take very long at all after the beginning of the blackout for his captors to arrive in his cell to check on him.

Sool stood silhouetted in the door frame for several moments, glaring around at the darkened prison cell, then he chanted a few short sentences in Gnommish and a lit candle appeared in his hand. The magical blue flame flooded the furthest corners of the room with light in an instant and Artemis had to work for a second to keep the intrigued expression off his face. He'd never actually seen a fairy cast a spell before, although he had heard that gnomes were meant to be the most proficient warlocks.

"Do you know why the power's been cut?" Sool demanded, stepping into the room, closely followed by Rheeson.

"It's a sign that there's a time stop up, sir," replied Artemis, truthfully enough. He neglected to mention, however, that the time stop was one he had specifically requested, or that the sign was more for his benefit than an unavoidable side-effect of disconnection from the power grid.

"WHAT?" roared Sool.

"The blackout. It's the LEP. There's a time stop," said Artemis coolly. "Sir."

"Those incompetent fools!" Sool spat. "The Book already tells us that a time-stop won't contain the power of Pandora's box! And what have you stopped for? You can see now, keep working!"

"I've got as far as I can without risking opening it," Artemis informed him. "It should only take me a few minutes to work out the last little bits, but it could fall open at any moment during that time. You did tell me not to actually open it."

Sool stared down at the box, as though he scarcely dared believe that he had actually reached the moment of truth – the moment where his plan to impose order on Haven by force would be realised.

It was then that the earthquake started. The first tremor rattled the furniture and rocked the foundations of the building, making the candle-flame gutter.

"What was that?" demanded Sool.

A second, larger tremor followed moments later, knocking them all to the floor, and then a third sent the fairies back there when they tried to get up again. After that, there was silence.

"Probably more of Foaly's work," Artemis shrugged as he pulled himself back into his chair. At least, the explosive charges Mulch was using probably were, and fundamentally that was what was causing the disturbance. "If you don't do something soon, he'll doubtless try to eliminate us all." That was also true, he was sure. He really had no idea how much time this would buy him with the Council.

"Let him," scoffed Rheeson. "He'll only blue rinse himself."

"Foaly's paranoid," countered Artemis. "He might check the bio-bomb before he launches it and find what you've done to it."

"Impossible!" scoffed the other fairy again. Internally, Artemis had to agree it was unlikely. However paranoid Foaly was, Artemis doubted that even he had reached the stage where he would open up a piece of standard LEP weaponry to check that each of the internals circuits was in working order before he used it. But he hadn't really expected that argument to work; he had a much better one prepared.

"Can you be sure Foaly hasn't got some new invention he's intending to use instead?" he demanded. "If he's just going to use a blue-rinse, what was the earthquake about?"

"What would you know anyway, Mud Boy?" Rheeson sneered

"I certainly know I don't want to die," said Artemis. "I may not have been eager to swear a slave oath, but if this place gets blue rinsed, or worse, we'll all die. Why would I want that?"

"You're long past the point where you have a choice in what you want," growled Sool as he fished a laser engraving tool out of his pocket and slid it across the table towards Artemis. "But, you are right," he conceded, "it's a risk we don't need to take. That too-smug centaur has just chosen our first test subject – himself. Engrave the box with his name, human."

Artemis' stomach churned as, without any particular direction from him, his fingers picked up the engraver and went to work, quickly and efficiently. Somewhere, despite his best efforts, he'd gone wrong. The letters his uncaring fingers were etching into the golden lid of Pandora's box could well end the life of a fellow genius and, depending how much intrinsic magic the centaur really did have, possibly destroy a large chunk of Haven as well.

It was close to what he had been aiming for, but it wasn't close enough. Not nearly close enough.

The biggest problem with Arty's plan, I soon realised, was that there was absolutely no role in it for me.

We held the main briefing in the shuttle on the way to the warehouse where my son was being held and I explained the details of what Arty had asked us to do. The explosives we needed, it appeared, were easy for Foaly to arrange, and just as easy to set up to begin their count-down as soon as the time-stop cut off their signals from the shuttle.

Despite his initial reservations, Diggums had required little convincing to agree to bury them underneath the building. Acting Commander Kelp's promise of a medal if Arty's plan actually worked had been plenty and the dwarf had begun polishing the spot on his chest where he had decided to pin it almost immediately.

I was starting to feel vaguely claustrophobic. The idea of staying safely trapped in the shuttle while the dwarf buried the explosives and the rest of the fairies helped Foaly set up the time-stop was almost unbearable. But when I tried to suggest that I could accompany Mulch, perhaps assist him, things began to go quickly downhill.

"You can't go," Arty's Butler said, his voice polite, but firm. "I'm sorry, sir, I know you need to feel involved, but Mulch will work much faster on his own – dwarf tunnels are self-sealing. Besides, you're not going to be able to crawl through almost a kilometre of tunnel with your leg."

"Mr. Butler," I said warningly. "I don't think you quite understand…"

I trailed off as he mutely raised his eyebrows at me, a mannerism I suddenly recognised as having rubbed off on him from nearly fifteen years of safeguarding Arty's life.

"All right," I conceded, "maybe you do understand. But he's my son! I have to do something."

"You've done plenty already, Mr. Fowl," said the huge bodyguard, watching me with steely blue sympathy. "I'm afraid I must insist."

I tried to stand firm, folding my arms stubbornly across my chest, but deep down, I knew he was right. I had not really expected any other result. This was a task best left to a professional and my presence would only slow the dwarf down even if I had been in top physical form.

I was, in fact, about to concede the point when the trouble arose.

"I don't think you should be speaking to Mr. Fowl like that," said my Butler in a menacing tone. "If Mr. Fowl wants to go, then Mr. Fowl is going to go!"

Arty's Butler didn't speak, simply shooting mine a withering look before turning back to continue waiting for me to respond.

My Butler bristled at the dismissal, attempting to draw himself up to his full height, although in the fairy-sized shuttle it was more like a slightly fuller crouch. That action did catch Arty's Butler's attention. He turned back to face his cousin with narrowed eyes.

"I don't think," he said, in a deceptively quiet voice, and although he didn't appear to have moved a muscle from his relaxed crouch, he suddenly gave the impression of a jungle cat, tightly coiled to spring, "that you have any idea what you're doing."

My Butler seemed to swell, his face going red with some combination of embarrassment and rage, and he swept a miniature chair out from between himself and his cousin with an arm. It rolled to a halt several paces away, and the fairies started surreptitiously backing away as it began looking more and more likely that there would actually be a fight – something that would seem very much like a clash of the titans to their tiny eyes.

There was no question of who would win, of course.

My Butler was twenty years younger, stronger, had an inch of height on his cousin, and had never had to be raised from the dead – but to him, it was just a job. He would stand by my shoulder and menace my enemies and even take a bullet for me, because it was what he was trained to do, and there would be no time to think once a shot had been fired. But he didn't care if Arty lived or died, he didn't even care if I lived or died, as long as I didn't die on his watch.

Arty's Butler, on the other hand…

With a pang of grief, I thought of the Major. He had warned me of the danger of Mafiya intervention in my shipment to Russia and it had been his – and many others' – lives that had been lost in the icy waters of the Bay of Kola when I, who had ignored his good advice, survived. He would not have let me go on this fool's errand either.

While my new Butler may have had his father's looks, it appeared his resemblance to the Major ended there. All the sense, all the dedication, all the intuition that had made Major Butler the best bodyguard in the business had been passed straight on to his nephew.

"Stand down!"

I injected that note of command into my voice that all Butlers were programmed to obey without question and they both turned to look at me, keeping a wary eye on their opponent. "Arty's Butler is right," I said, levelling a disapproving look at my Butler. "I'm being selfish. Mr. Diggums will work faster alone."

My bodyguard looked confused at my change of position, but almost immediately seemed to shrug it off as the capriciousness of the principal and settled back to watching the shuttle for any signs of immediate physical threat.

I shook my head in resignation. Perhaps I was expecting too much of him, considering his youth and inexperience. Perhaps I would always expect too much of him, considering who his father had been. But perhaps it was time to start some discreet enquiries into a different body-guard.

From that point on, although the fairies kept darting nervous looks at both of the Butlers, the briefing went reasonably well. I made no further attempts to suggest that any of the humans would leave the shuttle; being unable to shield and almost double the average fairy's height, we were simply too conspicuous to be useful.

As soon as the shuttle landed, the fairies departed; Mulch, to bury the explosives, the rest of the fairies to help Foaly set up the time-stop in record time. Left alone in the shuttle empty of all but the humans and complicated, incomprehensible pieces of fairy hardware, with the moment where everything would be decided one way or the other approaching fast, my feeling of claustrophobia returned with a vengeance.

It wouldn't have been so bad if I was doing something. I had been all right while I was explaining, debating, decoding, persuading, planning – helping in any way whatsoever. But when my thoughts were allowed to drift, I would find them making their way of their own accord to Arty's situation.

I had convinced Short to explain the details of a slave oath to us on the way out, and her words kept running through my mind – words about how invasive and pervasive its effects were, words about the only way it would end…

In general, I hated to kill, to be responsible for a death, and I usually even avoided wishing death upon anything. Now, however, I could hardly suppress the rage that seized up my chest at the memory of Sool ruffling my son's hair as though he was a possession – and at Arty's obvious discomfort as he did so – or the revulsion at Short's quiet affirmation that it was effectively the truth.

Arty's Butler, I suspected, felt similarly – he had, after all, disassembled, cleaned, checked and reassembled his Sig Sauer more times in the last half hour than in the last two days put together. Given the stress he had been under in the last two days, that was saying a great deal.

I had no regrets about what I was about to say, as I moved across the shuttle and sat beside Arty's Butler. I was nearly certain that the bodyguard was thinking exactly what I was. Nearly. But this was too important to leave to 'nearly' certain. I had to be sure, and so it had to be said out loud.

"We can't leave Sool alive," I said, so quietly that only the huge bodyguard would hear. I let the incontrovertible truth of it hang in the air for a few moments before continuing. "You heard what Short said about this magical oath…"

"It dissolves on the death of one of the participants," he nodded. "Yes, I noticed that. I'm sure Master Artemis' plan will take it into account."

"Probably, yes," I agreed. "But Arty's under a lot of restrictions. If he hasn't been able to arrange it…"

I let my words trail off meaningfully.

"If he hasn't been able to arrange it," finished the huge bodyguard, reassembling his Sig Sauer with an ominous sounding series of metallic clicks, "I'll gladly do it for him. I don't think even magic can fix a bullet through the temple. If it can, then I'll use the whole clip."

"Good man," I said, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes in the vain hope that I could block out my own thoughts. "Good man."

An enormous hand squeezed my shoulder for a moment and then disappeared as Arty's Butler began the process of cleaning his weapon once again, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

Reflecting on how desperate Arty must have been to risk submitting to slavery was hardly a productive train of thought. Each mental image of what he could have been going through was worse than the last – but dwelling on the factual image of those sleepless and shadowed blue eyes that had been hardly recognisable as my son's was scarcely better. Nor was considering the bruises on his pale wrists, or the reasons he might have been pulling against his restraints in such a way as to produce them. Even worse was remembering the tense set of his jaw as his captor had so deliberately and insultingly patted him on the head. Perhaps the worst of all was the bone-deep fear that, even if Arty made it out of this alive and physically unharmed, he would be unable to avoid lasting psychological scars.

The time did not pass quickly, for me, although with plenty of fairies helping out, it took Foaly less than an hour to set up the five telescopic time-stop towers around the building. They were curious devices, each with a curved dish attached to the top and a reservoir of roiling blue sparks at the base. The fairies worked behind huge sheets of camouflage foil to prevent Sool from seeing exactly what was going on until they removed them – although he could hardly have avoided noticing the heat-shimmer in the air that was so thick with shielded fairies. I neglected to mention it, given how proudly Foaly had announced that the latest improvements on his camouflage foil had made it suitable for use with cameras. Arty had not specifically mentioned secrecy, even though it had been implied, so hopefully our efforts at subterfuge would be enough.

Foaly examined every inch of each tower personally, giving each the seal of approval one by one and plugging in long cables which snaked to the shuttle, where they connected into his laptop. From there, he could make minor adjustments from the comfort of the shuttle.

By the time he climbed back into the shuttle to make his final adjustments, my nerves had reached the point that I had to have a distraction from my own thoughts or I was certain I would go mad.

Back in the first days of Arty's captivity, I had been quite reluctant to distract Foaly while he was working. I had since come to understand, however, that the centaur was quite capable of continuing his work even as he expounded upon his own genius; in fact, he seemed to work even more efficiently with an appreciative audience.

I moved awkwardly through the shuttle to sit next to him. "So this it how you stop time, is it?" I asked.

"My greatest invention," he informed me with affected modesty, adjusting the inclination of one of the dishes with the push of a button. "The original form of the concept I was telling you about with the antimatter engine – although it doesn't so much stop time as push a particular region of space out of the same time-phase as the rest of the universe. Missing that distinction was what kept technicians from automating the procedure for millennia – they used to be performed by five warlocks chanting in time. My time-stop, however, is stable, reproducible, and lasts for up to eight hours at a time. Unless I open up a time-portal in the dome – which is harder than it sounds, just so you know – it's completely inescapable, at least for anyone except your son. I still don't know how he did that."

"You shouldn't have told me that," I said, mildly amused. "I know how he escaped the time field, because he gave me a summary of your weaknesses in case I needed to start improvising. You might have tricked it out of me if I'd thought you already knew."

Foaly glanced at me, looking chagrined, and then scoffed as he turned back to his screen, talking and typing with simultaneous fluency. "You wouldn't have fallen for that, would you?"

I laughed, the release of emotional tension making me feel a bit better. "You're right, I wouldn't. But it's the principle of the thing, you see."

"And this is you on the straight and narrow?" Foaly demanded, not taking his eyes off the screen where he was adjusting the time-stop dishes for a moment. "No wonder Mud Boy's so good at what he does – you probably taught him to manipulate in his cradle."

"I suppose I did, at that," I conceded, "but he didn't need much instruction. By the time he was eight, I was having to run to keep up, and he knew it."

I smiled faintly at the memory of waking up one morning when Arty was nine to find that all the Fowl bank accounts had been transferred into his name, except for a small savings account into which he was paying me the same miserly allowance that I provided him. That had taken me a week, several bribed bank officials, and every ounce of my political clout to set right again; a week of meeting Arty's smug little face across the breakfast table, hiding the warring pride in my son's genius and embarrassment at my own limitations behind the genial face we both presented to Angeline. I had taken Arty's point, though, and added an extra couple of zeros to the end of his pocket money when I finally managed to return things to normal – or as normal as they ever were in the Fowl household.

The door buzzed open, making me jump, and the hairy form of Mulch Diggums clambered into the shuttle.

"All done," he said, dusting off his hands and shuffling over to the locker where the foil-packed crew rations were kept. He tore open three packets at once and tossed them to the back of his cavernous mouth, spraying crumbs everywhere as he spoke. "I put the charges as close as I dared go to the asphalt, so they should definitely shake things up a bit for Mud Boy – but the LEP had better not wriggle out of giving me that medal this time!"

"Or out of rectifying those budget cuts Sool imposed on my department," added Foaly in the most serious voice I had heard him use yet. He let a final flurry of keystrokes flow from his fingertips before turning to face the gathered humans and fairies in the shuttle. "Now, I'm sure that no one here appreciates how quite complicated it was to arrange this so that we can see what's going on and I can control the time-stop from outside the stop zone – but it's ready whenever you are, Trouble."

Kelp gave Foaly a sour look, then drew in a deep breath and looked around the shuttle, doing a quick head count. "Is everything in order, then?" he asked. "All fairies present and accounted for? All tasks completed?"

There was a moment of silence and then Kelp gave a firm nod. "All right, Foaly. Let's give Fowl what he asked for."

"Let's," agreed Foaly, wriggling his fingers in the air in an exaggerated gesture to loosen them up.

"Lights…" With the press of a button, the warehouse was cut off from the main power grid and the lights blacked out, all at once.

"Time-stop," he continued and pressed another button. A shimmering blue dome formed around the outside of the dishes, distorting and tinting our view of the towers, the batteries at their bases – of everything, really, but the long cables which emerged from the barrier and led out to the shuttle.

Beneath the ground, three explosive charges were cut off from their signals, beginning a countdown. Not knowing exactly what Arty's plan was, I had insisted that we follow the exact schedule we had in Prague, so there were two full minutes of blacked out silence before the explosives detonated, one by one, shaking the ground inside the stop zone.

"And action…" finished Foaly expectantly.

Nothing happened. No one had really expected it to; we would simply have to wait for whatever Arty had planned to play out.

Almost five minutes later, I saw something moving. At first I dismissed it as paranoia – a dark shadow moving in a dark shadowed corner, but after a few more moments, the shadows began to build up and it grew clear that they were not merely figments of my imagination. There were definitely tendrils of black – something – and they were making their way out of the building, straight through the solid walls. The questing strands twisted and turned in the air, tapping along the ground like a thousand blind men's canes, searching for something.

"Is this Fowl's idea of a plan?" breathed Foaly, obviously recognising what was happening. "Surely he wasn't stupid enough to open the box!"

I bristled instinctively at the disparaging remark. My son may have been many things, but 'stupid' was hardly one of them.

"I'm sure he's got a –" I started, but never finished as first one, then more of the questing tendrils seemingly found what they were looking for.

As the strange substance made contact with the magical batteries of the time-stop, it seemed to lock on, the network of filaments condensing in an instant to just five strands, and shockwaves burst out from each of the magical reservoirs at their tips, battering the warehouse with wave after wave of pure magical force. The magically reinforced windows shattered like the finest Waterford crystal, the DNA cannons set around the perimeter of the warehouse exploded in a spectacular display of orange fireworks, and the pipes supplying them split open, spilling fizzing orange gel over the ground.

The blue dome of the time-stop, however, seemed to be protecting us from the force of the explosions inside the demolition zone; the shockwaves striking the barrier with an impact that seemed all the greater for the lack of noise.

"That's –" gasped Foaly, lost for words and not seeming to like the sensation too much. "That's impossible! The Book says it can't hold it in!"

But, as the shockwaves battering the barrier kept coming, two things became obvious. First, that whatever the Book said, the time-stop was most definitely protecting us from the destructive force within the stop zone. And second, that the pure blue magic in the batteries was being slowly but surely consumed by the malevolent tendrils; already, the brightness of the battery had faded to nearly half what it had been, as had the colour of the dome that was all that stood between us and the devastation beyond.

Still, I thought, for a moment, that the magic might prevail against the choking tendrils of blackness – then I realised with horror that the ropes of blackness had not been diminished in the same way as the batteries. Instead, the tendrils were growing thicker and blacker than they had been to start with as more and more of the smoke-like substance rushed out of the building to reinforce it.

Angeline mutely crossed herself beside me.

"Frond save us," breathed Kelp, obviously coming to the same conclusions as I had. "How long can it hold?"

Foaly shook his head despairingly as he typed, bringing up statistics on his view. "It shouldn't be holding at all – but it's at sixty percent… fifty-four percent… forty-eight – at the rate it's being sucked dry, it can't last more than half a minute. Whatever Fowl's plan is, it's not working."

And only then did I pull myself together enough to remember that, while the time-stop was protecting us, my Arty didn't have any protection at all – and the only hope I had for him scared me even more. Pandora had managed to survive at ground zero when the box had been opened the first time, but it had not been unscathed.

My wife seemed to have come to the same realisation as I, because she clutched her diamond and began to pray out loud, the familiar Hail Mary tumbling from her lips without deliberation or pause.

I couldn't speak. Even if I could have, I wouldn't have prayed to the God I hadn't believed in since I had learned the art of crime at my father's knee. If Arty was to get out of there, it would not be because God had interceded for him – it would be because my son had crafted and carried out another brilliant plan.

I may not have believed in God – but I certainly believed in Arty. His plan would work it. It had to.

To be continued...