“I don’t know,” admitted Holly. “My father told me the legend as a bedtime story. It was passed down to him from his father. The whole thing came from the mind of an empath warlock who synched with Bruin Fadda in his final moments. All we know is that the second lock is complex magic. Opal is running on black magic now, but that has a high price and fades fast. She will want to get it open before dawn, while the fairy moon is still high. Her Berserkers will be bare wisps of their former selves after all this time, and they can’t last much longer than that. Some will give in to the afterlife’s call before then.”
Artemis turned to Butler for a question about tactics. This was the bodyguard’s area of expertise. “How should Opal deploy her forces?”
“Opal will have most of those Berserkers gathered around her, watching her back while she picks that magical lock. The rest will guard the walls and run roving patrols around the estate, armed to the teeth, no doubt. Probably with my arms.”
“Do we have any weapons?” asked Artemis.
“I lost my Neutrino after the crash,” said Holly.
“I had to sign in my handgun at Haven immigration,” said Butler. “Never had a chance to pick it up.”
Mulch returned to the campfire. “You did say every human on the surface would be killed. I just want to point out that you are underground. So you could, you know, just stay here.”
Holly shot him a pretty raw poisonous look.
“Hey, no need for that. It’s good to explore all the options.”
“If Opal does open the second lock, not only will it kill billions of humans, but it will spark off an unprecedented civil war among the People. After which Opal Koboi would probably declare herself supreme empress.”
“So you’re saying we should stop her?”
“I’m saying we have to stop her, but I don’t know how.”
Artemis looked toward the heavens as if divine inspiration were forthcoming, but all he could see were the glowing walls of Mulch’s subterranean refuge and the inky blackness of tunnel mouths dotted along their surfaces.
“Mulch,” he said, pointing. “Where do those tunnels lead?”
Dalkey Island, South County Dublin
There is a common misconception that trolls are stupid. The fact is, trolls are only relatively stupid.
Compared to astrophysicists and Grand High Hey-Hey Monks, trolls could be considered a bit lacking in the IQ department; but even a below-average troll will solve a puzzle faster than any chimpanzee or dolphin on the planet. Trolls have been known to fashion crude tools, learn sign language, and even grunt out a few intelligible syllables. In the early Middle Ages, when troll sideshows were legal, the famous performing troll Count Amos Moonbeam would be fed honey punch by his dwarf handler until he belched out a fair approximation of The Ballad of Tingly Smalls.
So, trolls stupid?
Definitely not.
What trolls are is stubborn. Pathologically so. If a troll suspects that someone wishes it to exit through door A, then it will definitely choose door B, possibly after relieving itself all over door A on the way out.
This made it difficult for trolls to integrate in the Lower Elements. The LEP even have a special troll division of trained handlers who log the most overtime hours per capita tracking down rogue trolls who refuse to be corralled in the tunnels of suburban Haven. At any given time there are a hundred-plus trolls who have chewed out their tracking chips and are crawling through cracks in the earth’s crust, moving inexorably toward magical hot spots on the surface.
Trolls are drawn to magical residue like dwarfs are drawn to stuff that doesn’t belong to them. Trolls feed on residue. It nourishes them and increases their life spans. And as they grow older, they grow craftier.
The oldest troll on record has been known by many names in his lifetime. His mother may have named him Gruff, or she may have been trying to say Get off. To LEPtroll he was simply Suspect Zero, and to the humans he was the Abominable Snowman, Bigfoot, or El Chupacabra, depending on which area he had been spotted in.
Gruff had stayed alive for several extra centuries by being prepared to hike across the globe in search of magical residue. There was not a continent he had not visited under cover of darkness, and his graying hide was crisscrossed with the scars and scorch marks of a hundred tussles with the LEP and various human hunters. If Gruff could put a sentence together, he would probably say:
Maybe I look beat up, but you should see the other guys.
Gruff was currently residing in a cave on Dalkey Island, off the coast of South Dublin, and he would swim ashore to a private slipway and help himself to livestock from surrounding farms. He had been spotted a few times by the owner of the slipway, an eccentric Irishman who now sang to him nightly from across the bay. Gruff knew that he would either have to move on or eat the human in the next couple of days, but for this particular evening he was content to lay his head on the carcass of a sheep, which would serve as a pillow for now and as breakfast later on.