Myles was ratcheted up high, sipping his favorite beverage: acai juice from a martini glass. Two ice cubes, no straw.
“This is my favorite drink,” he said, dabbing the corner of his mouth with a napkin monogrammed with the Fowl motto, Aurum potestas est. “I know that because I am me again and not a fairy warrior.”
Artemis sat facing him in a similar but larger chair. “So you keep saying, Myles. Should I call you Myles?”
“Yes, of course,” said Myles. “Because that is who I am. Don’t you believe me?”
“Of course I do, little man. I know my own brother’s face when I see it.”
Myles toyed with the stem of his martini glass. “I need to talk with you alone, Arty. Can’t Butler wait outside for a few moments? It’s family talk.”
“Butler is family. You know that, brother.”
Myles pouted. “I know, but this is embarrassing.”
“Butler has seen it all before. We have no secrets from him.”
“Couldn’t he just step outside for a minute?”
Butler stood silently behind Artemis, arms folded in an aggressive manner, which is not difficult to do with forearms the size of baked hams and sleeves that creak like old chairs.
“No, Myles. Butler stays.”
“Very well, Arty. You know best.”
Artemis leaned back in his chair. “What happened to the Berserker inside you, Myles?”
The four-year-old shrugged. “He went away. He was driving my head; then he left.”
“What was his name?”
Myles rolled his eyeballs upward, checking out his own brain. “Erm…Mr. Gobdaw, I believe.”
Artemis nodded like someone with a great deal of knowledge on the subject of this Gobdaw person would. “Ah yes, Gobdaw. I have heard all about Gobdaw from our fairy friends.”
“I think he was called Gobdaw the Legendary Warrior.”
Artemis chuckled. “I am sure he would like you to think that.”
“Because it’s true,” said Myles, with a slight tension around his mouth.
“That’s not what we heard, is it, Butler?”
Butler did not answer or gesture in any way, but somehow he gave the impression of a negative response.
“No,” continued Artemis. “What we heard from our fairy sources was that this Gobdaw person is a bit of a joke, to be frank.”
Myles’s fingers squeaked on the neck of his glass. “Joke? Who says that?”
“Everybody,” said Artemis, opening his laptop and checking the screen. “It’s in all the fairy history books. Here it is, look. Gobdaw the Gullible, they call him, which is nice because of the alliteration. There’s another article that refers to your Berserker friend as Gobdaw the Stinkworm, which I believe is a term used to describe a person who gets blamed for everything. We humans would call that a fall guy, or a scapegoat.”
Myles’s cheeks were rosy red now. “Stinkworm?
Stinkworm, you say? Why would I…why would Gobdaw be called a stinkworm?”
“It’s sad, really, pathetic, but apparently this Gobdaw character was the one who convinced his leader to let the entire Berserker unit get themselves buried around a gate.”
“A magical gate,” said Myles. “That protected the fairy elements.”
“That is what they were told, but in truth the gate was nothing more than a pile of stones. A diversion leading nowhere. The Berserkers spent ten thousand years guarding rocks.”
Myles kneaded his eyes. “No. That’s not…no. I saw it, in Gobdaw’s memories. The gate is real.”
Artemis laughed softly. “Gobdaw the Gullible. It’s a little cruel. There’s a rhyme, you know.”
“A rhyme?” rasped Myles, and rasping is unusual in four-year-olds.
“Oh yes, a schoolyard rhyme. Would you care to hear it?”
Myles seemed to be wrestling with his own face. “No. Yes, tell me.”
“Very well. Here goes.” Artemis cleared his throat theatrically.
“Gobdaw, Gobdaw,
Buried in the ground,
Watching over sticks and stones,
Never to be found.”
Artemis hid a smile behind his hand. “Children can be so cruel.”
Myles snapped in two ways. Firstly his patience snapped, revealing him to be in fact Gobdaw; and secondly his fingers snapped the martini glass’s stem, leaving him with a deadly weapon clasped in his tiny fingers.
“Death to the humans!” he squealed in Gnommish, vaulting onto the desk and racing across toward Artemis.
In combat, Gobdaw liked to visualize his strikes just before executing them. He found that it helped him to focus. So, in his mind he leaped gracefully from the lip of the desk, landed on Artemis’s chest, and plunged his glass stiletto into Artemis’s neck. This would have the double effect of killing the Mud Boy and also showering Gobdaw himself in arterial blood, which would help to make him look a little more fearsome.
What actually happened was a little different. Butler reached out and plucked Gobdaw from the air in mid-leap, flicked the glass stem from his grasp, and then wrapped him firmly in the prison of his meaty arms.
Artemis leaned forward in his chair. “There is a second verse,” he said. “But perhaps now is not the time.”
Gobdaw struggled furiously, but he had been utterly neutralized. In desperation, he tried the fairy mesmer.
“You will order Butler to release me,” he intoned.
Artemis was amused. “I doubt it,” he said. “You have barely enough magic to keep Myles in check.”
“Just kill me, then, and be done with it,” said Gobdaw without the slightest quiver in his voice.
“I cannot kill my own brother, so I need to get you out of his body without harming him.”
Gobdaw sneered. “That’s not possible, human. To get me, you must slay the boy.”
“You are misinformed,” said Artemis. “There is a way to exorcise your feisty soul without damaging Myles.”
“I would like to see you try it,” said Gobdaw, with perhaps a glimmer of doubt in his eyes.
“Your wish is my command and so on and so forth,” said Artemis, pressing a button on the desk intercom. “Bring it in, would you, Holly?”
The office door swung open, and a barrel trundled into the room, seemingly under its own power, until Holly was revealed behind it.
“I don’t like this, Artemis,” she said, playing good cop, just as they had planned. “This is nasty stuff. A person’s soul might never get into the afterlife trapped in this gunk.”
“Traitorous elf,” said Gobdaw, kicking his little feet. “You side with the humans.”
Holly waltzed the barrel trolley into the center of the office, parking it on the wooden floor and not on one of the precious Afghan rugs that Artemis insisted on describing in great historical detail every time she visited the office.
“I side with the earth,” she said, meeting Gobdaw’s eyes. “You have been in the ground for ten thousand years, warrior. Things have changed.”
“I have consulted my host’s memories,” said Gobdaw sullenly. “The humans have almost succeeded in destroying the entire planet. Things have not changed so much.”
Artemis rose from his chair and unscrewed the barrel lock. “Do you also see a spacecraft that shoots bubbles from its exhaust?”
Gobdaw had a quick rifle through Myles’s brain. “Yes. Yes, I do. It’s made of gold, is it not?”
“This is one of Myles’s dream projects,” said Artemis slowly. “Merely a dream. The bubble jet. If you delve deeper into my brother’s imagination, you will find a robotic pony that does homework, and a monkey that has been taught to speak. The boy you inhabit is highly intelligent, Gobdaw, but he is only four. At that age there is a very fine line between reality and imagination.”
Gobdaw’s puffed-up chest deflated as he located these items in Myles’s brain. “Why are you telling me this, human?”
“I want you to see that you have been tricked. Opal Koboi is not the sa
vior she pretends to be. She is a convicted murderer who has escaped from prison. She would undo ten thousand years of peace.”
“Peace!” said Gobdaw, then barked a laugh. “Peaceful humans? Even buried beneath the ground we felt your violence.” He wriggled in Butler’s arms, a mini Artemis with black hair and dark suit. “Do you call this peace?”
“No, and I apologize for your treatment, but I need my brother.” Artemis n