The Time Paradox (2 page)

Artemis is a magical man, thought Butler. The only one.

And now Butler just knew Artemis was going to use his magic to attempt a healing on his mother. It was a dangerous game; magic was not a natural part of his makeup. Artemis could well remove one set of symptoms and replace them with another.

The boy entered his parents’ bedroom slowly. The twins charged in here at all hours of the day and night, flinging themselves on the four-poster bed to wrestle with his protesting mother and father, but Artemis had never experienced that. His childhood had been a time of order and discipline.

Always knock before entering, Artemis,
his father had instructed him.
It shows respect.

But his father had changed. A brush with death seven years earlier had shown him what was really important. Now he was always ready to hug and roll in the covers with his beloved sons.

It’s too late for me, thought Artemis. I am too old for tussles with Father.

Mother was different. She was never cold, apart from during her bouts of depression when his father had been missing. But fairy magic and the return of her beloved husband had saved her from that, and now she was herself again. Or she had been until now.

Artemis crossed the room slowly, afraid of what lay before him. He walked across the carpet, careful to tread between the vine patterns in the weave.

Step on a vine, count to nine.

This was a habit from when he was little, an old superstition whispered lightly by his father. Artemis had never forgotten, and always counted to nine to ward off the bad luck should so much as a toe touch the carpet vines.

The four-poster bed stood at the rear of the room, swathed in hanging drapes and sunlight. A breeze slipped into the room, rippling the silks like the sails of a pirate ship.

One of his mother’s hands, pale and thin, dangled over the side of her bed.

Artemis was horrified. Just yesterday his mother had been fine. A slight sniffle, but still her laughing, warm self.

“Mother,” he blurted upon seeing her face, feeling as though the word had been punched out of him.

This was not possible. In twenty-four hours his mother had deteriorated to little more than a skeleton. Her cheekbones were sharp as flint, her eyes lost in dark sockets.

Don’t worry, Artemis told himself. In a few short seconds Mother will be well; then I can investigate what happened here.

Angeline Fowl’s beautiful hair was frizzed and brittle, broken strands crisscrossing her pillow like a spiderweb. And there was an odd smell emanating from her pores.

Lilies, thought Artemis. Sweet, yet tinged with sickness.

Angeline’s eyes opened abruptly, round with panic. Her back arched as she sucked a breath through a constricted windpipe, clutching at the air with clawed hands. Just as suddenly she collapsed, and Artemis thought for a terrible moment that she was gone.

But then her eyelids fluttered and she reached a hand for him.

“Arty,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper. “I am having the strangest dream.” A short sentence, but it took an age to complete, with a rasped breath between each word.

Artemis took his mother’s hand. How slender it was. A parcel of bones.

“Or perhaps I am awake and my other life is a dream.”

Artemis was pained to hear his mother speak like this; it reminded him of the odd turns she used to suffer from.

“You’re awake, Mother, and I am here. You have a light fever and are a little dehydrated, that’s all. Nothing to be concerned about.”

“How can I be awake, Arty?” said Angeline, her eyes calm in black circles. “When I feel myself dying. How can I be awake when I feel that?”

Artemis’s feigned calm was knocked by this.

“It’s the . . . fever,” he stammered. “You’re seeing things a little strangely. Everything will be fine soon. I promise.”

Angeline closed her eyes. “And my son keeps his promises, I know. Where have you been these past years, Arty? We were so worried. Why are you not seventeen?”

In her delirium, Angeline Fowl saw through a haze of magic to the truth. She realized that he had been missing for three years and had come home the same age as he had gone away.

“I am fourteen, Mother. Almost fifteen now, still a boy for another while. Now close your eyes, and when you open them again, all will be well.”

“What have you done to my thoughts, Artemis? Where has your power come from?”

Artemis was sweating now. The heat of the room, the sickly smell, his own anxiety.

She knows. Mother knows. If you heal her, will she remember everything?

It didn’t matter. That could be dealt with in due time. His priority was to mend his parent.

Artemis squeezed the frail hand in his grip, feeling the bones grind against each other. He was about to use magic on his mother for the second time.

Magic did not belong in Artemis’s soul and gave him lightning-bolt headaches whenever he used it. Though he was human, the fairy rules of magic held a certain sway over him. He was forced to chew motion sickness tablets before entering a dwelling uninvited, and when the moon was full, Artemis could often be found in the library listening to music at maximum volume to drown out the voices in his head—the great commune of magical creatures. The fairies had powerful race memories, and they surfaced like a tidal wave of raw emotion, bringing migraines with them.

Sometimes Artemis wondered if stealing the magic had been a mistake, but recently the symptoms had stopped. No more migraines or sickness. Perhaps his brain was adapting to the strain of being a magical creature.

Artemis held his mother’s fingers gently, closed his eyes, and cleared his mind.

Magic. Only magic.

The magic was a wild force and needed to be controlled. If Artemis let his thoughts ramble, the magic would ramble too, and he could open his eyes to find his mother still sick but with different-color hair.

Heal, he thought. Be well, Mother.

The magic responded to his wish, spreading along his limbs, buzzing, tingling. Blue sparks circled his wrists, twitching like schools of tiny minnows. Almost as if they were alive.

Artemis thought of his mother in better times. He saw her skin radiant, her eyes shining with happiness. Heard her laugh, felt her touch on his neck. Remembered the strength of Angeline Fowl’s love for her family.

That is what I want.

The sparks sensed his wishes and flowed into Angeline Fowl, sinking into the skin of her hand and wrist, twisting in ropes around her gaunt arms. Artemis pushed harder, and a river of magical flickers flowed from his fingers into his mother.

Heal, he thought. Drive out the sickness.

Artemis had used his magic before, but this time was different. There was resistance, as though his mother’s body did not wish to be healed and was rejecting the power. Sparks fizzled on her skin, spasmed, and winked out.

More, thought Artemis. More.

He pushed harder, ignoring the sudden blinding headache and rumbling nausea.

Heal, Mother.

The magic wrapped his mother like an Egyptian mummy, snaking underneath her body, raising her six inches from the mattress. She shuddered and moaned, steam venting from her pores, sizzling as it touched the blue sparks.

She is in pain, thought Artemis, opening one eye a slit. In agony. But I cannot stop now.

Artemis dug down deep, searching his extremities for the last scraps of magic inside him.

Everything. Give her every last spark.

Magic was not an intrinsic part of Artemis; he had stolen it and now he threw it off again, stuffing all he had into the attempted healing. And yet it wasn’t working. No, worse than that. Her sickness was growing stronger. Repelling each blue wave, robbing the sparks of their color and power, sending them skittering to the ceiling.

Something is wrong, thought Artemis, bile in his throat, a dagger of pain over his left eye. It shouldn’t be like this.

The final drop of magic left his body with a jolt, and Artemis was thrown from his mother’s bedside and sent skidding across the floor, then tumbling head over heels until he came to rest, sprawled against a chaise longue. Angeline Fowl spasmed a final time, then collapsed back onto her mattress. Her body was soaked with a strange, thick, clear gel. Magical sparks flickered and died in the coating, which steamed off almost as quickly as it had appeared.

Artemis lay with his head in his hands, waiting for the chaos in his brain to stop, unable to move or think. His own breathing seemed to rasp against his skull. Eventually the pain faded to echoes, and jumbled words formed themselves into sentences.

The magic is gone. Spent. I am entirely human.

Artemis registered the sound of the bedroom door creaking, and he opened his eyes to find Butler and his father staring down at him, concern large on their faces.

“We heard a crash; you must have fallen,” said Artemis Senior, lifting his son by the elbow. “I should never have let you in here alone, but I thought that perhaps you could do something. You have certain talents, I know. I was hoping . . .” He straightened his son’s shirt, patted his shoulders. “It was stupid of me.”

Artemis shrugged his father’s hands away, stumbling to his mother’s sickbed. It took a mere glance to confirm what he already knew. He had not cured his mother. There was no bloom on her cheeks or ease in her breathing.

She is worse. What have I done?

“What is it?” asked his father. “What the devil is wrong with her? At this rate of decline, in less than a week my Angeline will be—”

Butler interrupted brusquely. “No giving up now, gents. We all have contacts from our past that might be able to shed some light on Mrs. Fowl’s condition. People we might prefer not to associate with otherwise. We find them and bring them back here as fast as we can. We ignore nuisances like passports or visas and get it done.”

Artemis Senior nodded, slowly at first, then with more vigor.

“Yes. Yes, dammit. She is not finished yet. My Angeline is a fighter, are you not, darling?”

He took her hand gently, as though it were made of the finest crystal. She did not respond to his touch or voice. “We talked to every alternative practitioner in Europe about my phantom limb pains. Perhaps one of them can help us with this.”

“I know a man in China,” said Butler. “He worked with Madame Ko at the bodyguard academy. He was a miracle worker with herbs. Lived up in the mountains. He has never been outside the province, but he would come for me.”

“Good,” said Artemis Senior. “The more opinions we can call on the better.” He turned to his son. “Listen, Arty, do you know someone who might be able to help? Anyone. Perhaps you have some underworld contacts?”

Artemis twisted a rather ostentatious ring on his middle finger so that the front rested against his palm. This
ring
was actually a camouflaged fairy communicator.

“Yes,” he said. “I have a few underworld contacts.”

CHAPTER 2

The giant sea monster that is the kraken sent its finned tentacles spiraling toward the ocean’s surface, pulling its bloated body behind. Its single eye rolled manically in its socket, and its curved beak, the size of a schooner’s prow, was open wide, filtering the rushing water through to its rippling gills.

The kraken was hungry, and there was room for only one thought in its tiny brain as it sped toward the holiday ferry above.

Kill ... Kill ... KILL ...

“That is such dwarf manure,” said Captain Holly Short of the Lower Elements Police, muting the sound file in her helmet. “For one thing, the kraken doesn’t have tentacles, and as for ‘kill, kill, kill’ . . .”

“I know,” said Foaly, the voice of mission control in her communicator. “I thought you might enjoy that passage. You know, have a laugh. Remember laughing?”

Holly was not amused. “It’s so typical of humans, Foaly, to take something perfectly natural and demonize it. Krakens are gentle creatures, and the humans turn them into some kind of murderous giant squid. ‘Kill, kill, kill.’ Give me a break.”

“Come on, Holly, it’s just sensational fiction. You know those humans and their imaginations. Relax.”

Foaly was right. If she got worked up every time the human media misrepresented a mythical creature, she would spend half her life in a rage. Over the centuries Mud Men had caught glimpses of the fairy folk, and had twisted the truth of these glimpses almost beyond recognition.

Let it go. There are decent humans. Remember Artemis and Butler.

“Did you see that human movie with the centaurs?” she asked the centaur on the other end of her helmet communicator. “They were noble and sporty. ‘My sword for thee, Majesty, then off for a spot of hunting.’ Fit centaurs, now that did make me laugh.”

Thousands of miles away, somewhere in the earth’s mantle below Ireland, Foaly, the Lower Elements Police’s technical adviser, rubbed his paunch.

“Holly, that hurts. Caballine likes my belly.”

Foaly had got married, or
hitched,
as centaurs called the ceremony, while Holly had been away with Artemis Fowl, rescuing demons in Limbo. A lot had changed in the three years she had been away, and sometimes Holly was finding it difficult to keep up. Foaly had a new bride to occupy his time. Her old friend Trouble Kelp had been promoted to LEP Commander, and she was back working at Recon with the Kraken Watch task force.

“Apologies, friend. That was mean,” said Holly. “I like your belly too. I’m sorry that I wasn’t there to see a hitching sash around it.”

“Me too. Next time.”

Holly smiled. “Sure. That’s going to happen.”

Traditionally, male centaurs were expected to take more than one bride, but Caballine was a modern fairy, and Holly doubted if she would stand for a new filly in the household.

“Don’t worry, I’m joking.”

“You’d better be, because I’m meeting Caballine at the spa this weekend.”

“How’s the new gear?” said Foaly, hurriedly changing the subject.

Holly spread her arms wide, feeling the wind ripple her fingers, seeing the Baltic Sea flash past below in shards of blue and white.

“It’s wonderful,” she said. “Absolutely wonderful.”

* * *

Captain Holly Short of LEPrecon flew in wide lazy circles above Helsinki, enjoying the brisk Scandinavian air filtering through her helmet. It was just after five a.m. local time, and the rising sun set the Uspenski Cathedral’s golden onion dome shimmering. Already the city’s famed marketplace was strobed with headlights as vendors arrived to open up for the morning trade, or eager politicians’ aides made their way toward the blue-gray facade of city hall.

Holly’s target lay away from what would shortly be a bustling center of commerce. She adjusted her fingers, and the sensors in her armored gloves translated the movements to commands for the mechanical wings on her back, sending her spiraling down toward the small island of Uunisaari, half a mile from the port.

“The body sensors are nice,” she said. “Very intuitive.”

“It’s as close as it gets to being a bird,” said Foaly. “Unless you want to integrate?”

“No thank you,” Holly said vehemently. She loved flying, but not enough to have a LEP surgeon stick a few implants in her cerebellum.

“Very well, Captain Short,” said Foaly, switching to business mode.“Pre-op check. Three W’s, please.”

The three W’s were every Reconnaissance officer’s checklist before approaching an operation’s zone: wings, weapon, and a way home.

Holly checked the transparent readouts on her helmet visor.

“Power cell, charged. Weapon on green. Wings and suit fully functional. No red lights.”

“Excellent,” said Foaly. “Check, check, and check. Our screens agree.”

Holly heard keys clicking as Foaly recorded this information in the mission log. The centaur was known for his fondness for old-school keyboards, even though he himself had patented an extremely efficient virtual keyboard.

“Remember, Holly, this is just reconnaissance. Go down and check the sensor. Those things are two hundred years old, and the problem is more than likely a simple overheat. All you need to do is go where I tell you and fix what I tell you. No indiscriminate blasting involved. Understand?”

Holly snorted. “I can see why Caballine fell for you, Foaly. You’re such a charmer.”

Foaly snickered. “I don’t rise to jibes anymore, Holly. Marriage has mellowed me.”

“Mellowed? I’ll believe that when you last ten minutes in a room with Mulch without throwing a hoof.”

The dwarf Mulch Diggums had been at various times enemy, partner, and friend to Holly and Foaly. His greatest pleasure in life was stuffing his face, and not far behind that was irritating his various enemies, partners, and friends.

“Perhaps I need a few more years of marriage before I get
that
mellow. A few more centuries, in fact.”

The island was large in Holly’s visor now, surrounded by a monk’s fringe of foam. Time to stop the chitchat and proceed with the mission, though Holly was tempted to circle in a holding pattern so she could talk some more with her friend. It seemed as though this was the first real conversation they’d had since her return from Limbo. Foaly had moved on with life in the past three years, but for Holly her absence had lasted only a few hours, and, though she had not aged, Holly felt cheated of those years. The LEP psychiatrist would have told her she was suffering from Post-time-travel-displacement Depression, and offered to prescribe a nice shot to cheer her up. Holly trusted happy-shots just about as much as she trusted brain implants.

“I’m going in,” she said tersely. This was her first solo mission since debriefing, and she did not want anything less than a perfect report, even if it was only Kraken Watch.

“Copy,” said Foaly. “You see the sensor?”

There were four bio-sensors on the island relaying information back to Police Plaza. Three pulsed a gentle green in Holly’s visor display unit. The fourth sensor was red. Red could mean many things. In this case,
every
reading had risen above normal levels. Temperature, heartbeat, brain activity. All on the danger line.

It must be a malfunction
, Foaly had explained.
If not, the other sensors would show something.

“I have it. Strong signal.”

“Okay. Shield and approach.”

Holly twisted her chin sharply left until her neck bone clicked, which was her way of summoning the magic. It wasn’t a necessary movement, since the magic was mostly a brain function, but fairies developed their own tics. She let a dribble of power into her limbs and vibrated out of the visible spectrum. Her Shimmer Suit picked up her frequency and amplified it so that a tiny spark of magic went a long way.

“I’m out of sight and going in,” she confirmed.

“Understood,” said the centaur. “Be careful, Holly. Commander Kelp will be reviewing this video, so stick to your orders.”

“Are you suggesting that I occasionally stray from the rule book?” said Holly, apparently horrified by the very notion.

Foaly sniggered. “I am suggesting that you may not own a copy of the rule book, and if you do possess one, you certainly have never opened it.”

Fair point, thought Holly, swooping down toward the surface of Uunisaari.

Whales are thought to be the world’s largest creatures. They are not. The kraken can stretch to three miles in length and have been a staple of Scandinavian legend since the thirteenth century, when they appeared in the Orvar-Odd saga as the fearsome
lyngbakr
. Early descriptions of the kraken are the most accurate, describing the sea creature as an animal the size of a floating island whose real danger to ships was not the creature itself, but the whirlpool it created when it sank into the ocean. But by the Middle Ages the legend of the kraken had been confused with that of the giant squid, and each credited with the most fearsome attributes of the other. The squid was pictured as big as a mountain, while the peaceful kraken grew tentacles and developed a bloodlust to rival that of the deadliest shark.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The kraken is a docile creature whose main defenses are its sheer size and the bulk of shell, gas, and fat cells enclosing a melon-size brain, which provides it with just enough intelligence to feed itself and shed its shell. Underneath the crust of rock, weed, and coral, the kraken resembles nothing more than the common acorn barnacle, albeit a barnacle that could easily house an Olympic stadium or two.

Kraken enjoy a lifespan of several thousand years, thanks to an incredibly slow metabolism and a huge network of support systems surrounding their soft centers. They tend to settle in a food-rich or magical environment and remain there until the food or energy residue runs out. Nestling in the middle of an archipelago near a human port provides not only camouflage but an abundant source of edible material. And so this is where kraken are found, anchored to the seabed like gigantic limpets, vacuuming city waste through their gills and fermenting it into methane in their vast stomachs. But if human garbage is their salvation, it is also their damnation, for increasingly high toxin levels have rendered the kraken sterile, and now there are less than half a dozen of the ancient creatures left in the oceans.

This particular kraken was the oldest of the bunch. According to shell scrapings, old Shelly, as the small dedicated Kraken Watch referred to it, was more than ten thousand years old, and had been masquerading as an island in Helsinki Harbor since the sixteenth century, when the town was known as Helsingfors.

In all that time, Shelly had done little but feed and sleep, feeling no urge to migrate. Any need he may have felt to move on was dulled by the seepings of a paint factory built on his back more than a hundred years previous. For all intents and purposes, Shelly was catatonic, having emitted no more than a couple of methane flashes in over fifty years, so there was no reason to believe that this red light on his sensor was anything more than a crossed wire, and it was Holly’s job to
uncross
it. It was a standard first-day-back-on-the-job kind of mission. No danger, no deadline, and little chance of discovery.

Holly turned her palms into the wind, descending till her boots scraped the roof of the island’s small restaurant. Actually there were two islands, separated by a small bridge. One was a genuine island, and the other larger section was old Shelly nestled into the rock. Holly ran a quick thermal sweep, finding nothing but a few rodents and a blotch of heat from the sauna, which was probably on a timer.

Holly consulted her visor for the sensor’s exact location. It was twelve feet underwater, tucked below a rocky ledge.

Underwater. Of course.

She stowed her wings, midair, then plunged feetfirst into the Baltic Sea, corkscrewing to minimize the splash. Not that there were any humans close enough to hear. The sauna and restaurant did not open until eight, and the nearest fishermen were on the mainland, their rods swaying gently like rows of bare flagpoles.

Holly vented the gas bags in her helmet to reduce buoyancy, and sank below the waves. Her visor informed her that the water temperature was a little over ten degrees, but the Shimmer Suit insulated her from cold shock and even flexed to compensate for the slight pressure increase.

“Use the Critters,” said Foaly, his voice crystal clear through the vibration nodes over her ears.

“Get out of my head, centaur.”

“Go on. Use the Critters.”

“I don’t need a tracer. It’s right there.”

Foaly sighed. “Then they shall die unfulfilled.”

The Coded Radiation Tracers were microorganisms bathed in radiation of the same frequency as the object being located. If you knew what you were looking for before leaving Foaly’s workshop, then the Critters would bring you right to it; though they were a little redundant when the sensor was a few feet away and beeping on your screen.

“Okay,” moaned Holly. “I wish you would stop using me as a guinea pig.”

She pulled back a watertight flap on her glove, releasing a cloud of glowing orange mites into the water. They bunched for a moment, then sped off in a ragged arrow toward the sensor.

“They swim, they fly, they burrow,” said Foaly, awed by his own achievement. “God bless their tiny hearts.”

The Critters left a glowing orange wake for Holly to follow. She pulled herself below a sharp ledge, to find the Critters already excavating the growths covering the sensor.

“Now, come on. That is handy. Tell me that’s not useful to a field officer.”

It was very useful, especially since Holly only had ten minutes of air left; but Foaly’s head was big enough as it was.

“A gill helmet would have been more useful, especially since you
knew
the sensor was underwater.”

“You have more than enough air,” argued Foaly. “Especially since the Critters are clearing the surrounding area.”

The Critters ate away the rock and moss covering the sensor until it gleamed like the day it came off the assembly line. Once their mission was completed, the Critters flickered and died, dissolving in the water with a gentle fizz. Holly switched on her helmet lights and focused both beams on the alloy instrument. The sensor was the size and shape of a banana and covered with an electrolytic gel.