Twenty feet up and thirty yards to the south, Opal Koboi was sinking her hands into the deep algebraic enchantments of the second Berserker lock. Symbols wrapped themselves like glowworms around her fingers and surrendered their power one by one as she discovered their secrets. Some could be beaten into submission by the sheer force of her black magic, but others had to be coaxed with sly hexes or magical tickles.
I am close, she thought. I can feel the earth’s strength.
The wave of death would be in the form of geothermal energy, she presumed, and would be drawn from the entire planet’s resources and not just the shallow hydrothermal reservoirs. This would put quite a dent in the world’s reserves and could theoretically plunge Earth into another ice age.
We’ll survive, she thought callously. I have some nice heated boots in storage.
The work was challenging but manageable, and it gave Opal some satisfaction to know that she was the only fairy alive who had done enough research on the intricacies of ancient magicks to open the second lock. The first had been simple—that had required little more than a blast of black magic—but the second needed an encyclopedic knowledge of spell craft.
That techno-fool Foaly would never have managed this. Not in a million years.
Opal was not aware of it, but so self-satisfied was she at that moment that she rolled her shoulders and made a purring noise.
Everything is going so well.
This plan had been outlandish even by her standards; but unlikely or not, all the elements were falling into place. Her initial thought had been to sacrifice her younger self and use the ill-gotten power to escape from the Deeps. It then occurred to her that this power would have to be jettisoned almost immediately to prevent it from eating her alive—so why not put it to good use?
Opportunity had presented itself to Opal when her younger self had made telepathic contact.
One morning Opal had been deep in a cleansing coma and—ping!—suddenly there was a voice in her head, calling her Sister and asking for help. It had occurred to her briefly that she could in fact be insane but, little by little, the information filtered through. A younger Opal had followed Artemis Fowl from the past.
I have no memory of this, Opal realized. Therefore, my younger self must have been captured and sent back with these events wiped from her mind.
Unless…
Unless the time line had split. Then anything was possible.
Opal was surprised to find her younger self a little whiny, even boring. Had she really been so self-absorbed?
It’s all me me me, thought Opal. I injured my leg in the explosion. My magic is fading. I need to get back to my own time.
None of this was in the least helpful to Opal stuck in her prison.
What you need to do is get me out of here, she broadcast to her younger self. Then we can see to your injuries and send you home.
But how to accomplish this? That darned centaur Foaly had incarcerated her in the most technologically advanced cell in the world.
The answer was simple: I have to force them to release me because the alternative would be simply too horrible to even contemplate.
Opal wrestled with the problem for several minutes before she accepted that the younger Opal would have to be sacrificed, and once that piece of the puzzle had clunked into place, she quickly built the rest of the plan around it.
Pip and Kip were two sleeper gnomes who worked in the civil service. The Council had sent them to do an audit of one of her factory’s accounts a few years ago, and Opal had hypnotized them using forbidden runes and dark magic. All it took was a phone call from young Opal to activate their loyalty even at the cost of one or both of their lives. She broadcast instructions to young Opal, telling her exactly how to set up the fake kidnapping and telling her how to use the traces of dark magic still left in her system to find the legendary Berserker Gate. The gate was the way back to the past—or at least that was the story Opal sent out.
Younger Opal could not know, but the instructions for Pip and Kip were very specific for a reason. Hidden inside the words was a simple code that Opal had implanted along with their loyalty bonds. If young Opal had thought to write down all the letters that corresponded to prime numbers, she would have found a far more sinister message than the one she thought she was delivering:
Kill the hostage when time runs out.
You had to keep it simple for civil servants.
Everything had worked out exactly as she had foreseen, except for the arrival of Fowl and Short. But in a way, that too was a stroke of good fortune. Now she could kill them up close and personal.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
Suddenly Opal felt her stomach churn as a wave of nausea assailed her. The pixie’s first thought was that the black magic was struggling with her own antibodies, but then she realized that the source was external.
Something offends my enhanced magical senses, she thought. Something over there.
The wrecked shuttle stood beyond the circle of warriors that stood guard over their queen.
Below the shuttle. Something is coated in a substance that sickens me.
It was that cursed dwarf, sticking his bum flap in where it didn’t belong, and not for the first time.