Oro stood on a tree stump so that the small body he occupied could be seen by all, and held his fist aloft for silence.
“My warriors!” he shouted over the ranks. “Our day has finally come!”
This was met with a chorus of yells, whoops, barks, and whistles as the various creatures inhabited by the Berserkers voiced their approval. Oro could not hide a wince. These were not the warriors he remembered, who fought and suffered mortal wounds on the Plains of Taillte, but they were what they were, and the will to fight was there, if not the ability. There were foxes in their ranks, for Danu’s sake. How was a fox supposed to heft a sword? Still, better to get his warriors’ blood going with some rhetoric. Oro had always been proud of his speechifying.
“We will drink the bitter poison of our defeat and spew it at our enemies!” he shouted, his voice carrying across the meadow.
His warriors cheered, roared, and howled their approval, except for one.
“Pardon?” said his lieutenant, Gobdaw.
“What?” said Oro.
The lieutenant, who lurked inside the body of the second Mud Boy, wore a puzzled expression on his pasty face. In truth, puzzlement of any kind was new for Gobdaw. He was usually an ask no questions kind of fairy who did his talking with an ax. Generally, Gobdaw loved a nice bit of rhetoric.
“Well, Oro,” said Gobdaw, seeming a little surprised by the words coming out of his mouth, “what does that mean, exactly? Spewing the bitter poison of our defeat at our enemies?”
This question took Oro by surprise. “Well, it simply means…”
“Because if you don’t mind my saying, using the word defeat in a motivational speech sends a little bit of a mixed message.”
Now it was Oro’s turn to be perplexed. “Motivational? Mixed message? What do these terms even mean?”
Gobdaw looked as though he might cry. “I don’t know, Captain. It’s my human host. He’s a strong one.”
“Pull yourself together, Gobdaw. You have always appreciated my rhetoric.”
“I did. I do, Captain. The young one refuses to be silenced.”
Oro decided to distract Gobdaw with duty. “You have the honor of leading the search for enemies. Take the hounds, Bellico, and those mariners too. Everybody else, surround the gate. Queen Opal labors at the second lock. Understood?”
“Yes, Captain,” roared Gobdaw, shaking his fist. “As you command.”
Oro nodded. That was more like it.
Gobdaw, Bellico, and the Fowl hunting hounds circled the collapsed tunnel. Bellico was feeling pretty good about herself, encased as she was in the body of Juliet Butler. This was a better host than she could have hoped for; an excellent physical specimen equipped with the knowledge of several ancient fighting styles, which, thanks to Juliet’s memories, she knew how to put into practice very well indeed.
Bellico checked her reflection in the blade of a pirate’s knife and was pleased with what she saw.
Not too ugly, for a human. It is almost a pity my life force will sustain me no more than a single night. Perhaps if we had been called upon within fifty years of being laid in the ground, then the magic could have sustained us for longer, but now our spirits are weakened by time. The spell was not constructed to keep us earthbound for this long.
Bellico’s memory contained images that painted an ugly picture of Opal Koboi, but she had been warned that human visions of the fairy folk were unreliable. Such was the Mud Men’s hatred of the People that even their memories would be skewed.
The pirates were less pleased with their inherited corpses, which disintegrated even as they walked.
“It’s costing me all my magic just holding this skin sack of maggots together,” complained the one-time warrior giant Salton Finnacre, who inhabited the body of Eusebius Fowl the lung-sucking pirate.
“At least you’ve got legs,” grumbled his battle partner J’Heez Nunyon, who hobbled along on a pair of wooden stumps. “How am I supposed to do my signature dervish move on these things? I’m gonna look like a bleepin’ drunk dwarf falling over.”
It was worse for the English pointer hounds, who could only form the most rudimentary sounds with their vocal cords.
“Fowl,” barked one, being very familiar with Artemis’s scent. “Fowl. Fowl.”
“Good boy,” said Gobdaw, reaching up to pat the hound’s head with Myles’s little hand, which the dog did not think was very funny at all and would have bitten it had it not belonged to a superior officer.
Gobdaw called to his soldiers, “Warriors. Our noble brothers inside these beasts have picked up a trail. Our mission is to find the humans.”
No one asked, What then? Everybody knew what you did to humans when you found them. Because if you didn’t do it to them, they would do it to you, and your entire species, and probably anyone your species had ever shared a flagon of beer with.