“All clear,” she said in a hushed tone, in case loud noises would break their streak of luck.
“Good,” said Artemis, hurrying to the door, already running the startup sequence in his head. “Butler, would you open the doors as soon as I get the prop going?”
The bodyguard nodded, then kicked the white wedge of wood from under the forward wheel. Two more to go.
Artemis climbed into the plane and knew right away that something was wrong.
“I smell something. Juliet’s perfume.”
He knelt between the passenger seats, tugging open a metal hatch to reveal a compartment below. Thick cables thronged the box, and there was a rectangular space in the middle where something boxlike should have sat.
“The battery?” asked Holly.
“Yes,” said Artemis.
“So we can’t take off?”
Artemis dropped the hatch, allowing it to clang shut. Noise hardly mattered anymore.
“We can’t take off. We can’t shoot.”
Butler poked his head into the plane. “Why are we making noise all of a sudden?” One look at Artemis’s face was all the answer he needed.
“So, it’s a trap. It looks like Juliet was keeping closer tabs on you than we thought.” He pulled the Sig Sauer from his waistband. “Okay, Artemis, you stay in here. It’s time for the soldiers to take over.”
Butler’s features then stretched in an expression of surprise and pain as a bolt of magic sizzled into the barn from outside, engulfing the bodyguard’s head and torso, permanently melting every hair follicle on his head, and tossing him into the rear of the plane, where he lay motionless.
“It’s a trap, all right,” said Holly, grimly. “And we walked straight into it.”
MULCH DIGGUMS was not dead, but he had discovered the limits of his digestive abilities: that it was possible to eat too many rabbits. He lay on his back in the half-collapsed tunnel, his stomach stretched tight as the skin of a ripe peach.
“Uuuugh,” he moaned, releasing a burst of gas that drove him three yards farther along the tunnel. “That’s a little better.”
It took a lot to put Mulch off a food source, but after this latest gorging on unskinned rabbit, he didn’t think he would be able to look at one for at least a week.
Maybe a nice hare, though. With parsnips.
Those rabbits had just kept coming, making that creepy hissing noise, hurling themselves down his gullet like they couldn’t wait for their skulls to be chomped. Why couldn’t all rabbits be this reckless? It would make hunting a lot easier.
It wasn’t the rabbits themselves that made me queasy, Mulch realized. It was the Berserkers inside them.
The souls of the Berserker warriors could not have been very comfortable inside his stomach. For one thing, his arms were covered in rune tattoos, as dwarfs had a fanatical fear of possession. And, for another, dwarf phlegm had been used to ward off spirits since time immemorial. So, as soon as their rabbit hosts died, the warrior spirits transitioned to the afterlife with unusual speed. They didn’t move calmly toward the light so much as sprint howling into heaven. Ectoplasm flashed and slopped inside Mulch’s gut, giving him a bad case of heartburn and painting a sour scorch in the lower bell curve of his tummy.
After maybe ten more minutes of self-pity and gradual deflation, Mulch felt ready to move. He experimentally waggled his hands and feet, and when his stomach did not flip violently, he rolled onto all fours.
I should get away from here, he thought. Far, far away from the surface before Opal releases the power of Danu, if there even is such a thing.
Mulch knew that if he was anywhere in the vicinity when something terrible happened, the LEP would try to blame him for the terrible happening.
Look, there’s Mulch Diggums. Let’s arrest him and throw away the access chip. Case closed, Your Honor.
Okay, maybe it wouldn’t happen exactly like that, but Mulch knew that whenever there were accusing fingers to be pointed, they always seemed to swivel around to point in his direction and, as his lawyer had once famously said, Three or four percent of the time my client was not a hundred percent accountable for the particular crime he was being accused of, which is to say that there were a significant number of incidents where Mr. Diggums’s involvement in the said incidents was negligible even if he might have technically been involved in wrongdoing adjacent to the crime scene on a slightly different date than specified on the LEP warrant. This single statement broke three analytical mainframes and had the pundits tied up in knots for weeks.
Mulch grinned in the dark, his luminous teeth lighting the tunnel.
Lawyers. Everyone should have one.
“Aw, well,” he said to the worms wriggling on the tunnel wall. “Time to go.”
Farewell, old friends. We gave it our best try, but you can’t win ’em all. Cowardice is the key to survival, Holly. You never understood that.
Mulch sighed long and hard, with a hitching burp at the end, because he knew he was kidding himself.