Gveld tilted her head.
“Be careful, human,” she warned. “Our arrangement is more fragile than that merchandise. Don’t forget that you are in the Acorn Club, the only place in London where fairies are safer than humans.”
“Shush, please,” said the Englishman, not realizing that shushing a dwarf was at least as dangerous as poking a troll with a stick, but Gveld was intrigued, so she let the insult go for the moment.
Nevertheless, the human must have sensed that he had crossed a line with his shushing, so he explained himself.
“Apologies for my rudeness,” said the man, “but I must concentrate for even such a simple task. It used to be that my brain would send orders scurrying down my spinal column, and my fingers would obey without complaint or deviation. But old brain, new fingers, and so forth.”
The man screwed one eye shut and made a single nick. From inside the bag came the mewling one might expect from a stepped-on kitten.
“There,” he said satisfied. “You might have one of your people heal that hand a little. But not completely, mind you, for that is a most important scar.”
Gveld understood now. The famous scar.
“Of course,” said the dwarf, peering into the cooler. “I find the merchandise acceptable. You will have the Fowl boy when I am finished with him.”
“And you may have the Fowl boy in the bag, as per our agreement,” said the man, sealing the cooler. “Though it is little more than a sack of printed organs, and without a viable brain it will begin to disintegrate as soon as you take it out of the bag.”
“That’s completely acceptable,” said Gveld Horteknut, smiling an 80 percent gold smile behind her visor. “This thing can die whenever it pleases. In fact, the sooner the better.”
Meet the Baddie:
Gveld Horteknut of the Horteknut Seven
In the interest of even-handedness and fair representation, it is only proper that the Fowls’ antagonist’s motivations be explained before we catch up with the twins. Gveld Horteknut could be fairly referred to as the master schemer, or in modern parlance, the “big bad” of this story, but Gveld would not have considered herself a villain as such, since it was her opinion that everything horrible her band visited upon humankind was richly deserved, and much more besides.
And who among us would argue that she did not make a valid point?
Truth be told, there were many in Haven City who secretly applauded Gveld and her group’s proactive strikes against humanity.
As we have already pointed out, Gveld Horteknut was not human, she was a dwarf. Not a human with dwarfism, but an actual mythological dwarf. That is, mythological from a human point of view, and in fact there are many so-called Underearthers in Haven who consider humans to be mythological and refuse to believe otherwise despite skyscrapers of evidence to the contrary.
Gveld was the leader of the Horteknut Seven, the militant arm of the ancient Horteknut family, whose roots stretched back to a time when dwarves had cool and noble names like Horteknut or Bludgeheart, and not ridiculous and insulting ones like Diggums and Pullchain.
Ten thousand years ago, when the fairy families burrowed underground to escape the rapacious nature of humanity, the dwarves had already been living below the surface and were more than a little put out by the sudden influx of creatures to their real estate. The richest of these dwarf families was the Horteknut clan, who had amassed an absolute fortune in dwarf gold. (Dwarf gold being twenty-four-carat, 99.9 percent pure with just a glob of dwarf spit mixed in during the smelt to toughen it up.) Unfortunately, the fleeing fairies led mankind directly through the Horteknut tunnels and the band lost most of their fortune to looting humans, which led to ten millennia of Horteknut heists in return, as they attempted to reclaim their ingots. Under Gveld’s leadership, the Horteknut Seven became the most successful reclamation team of all time, and, in fact, the most famous bullion heists in recent history can be traced back to Gveld and her band, including the Great Victorian Gold Robbery, the Walbrzych Gold Train Job, the Kerry Packer Bullion Heist, and the Brinks Mat Robbery, to name but a few.
And now Gveld had her eye on the biggest prize of all: the mother lode, which could account for more than 80 percent of the remaining lost gold. But she had run into a problem and decided that, since the human boy Fowl had survived her assassination attempt, he might as well help solve this problem. And so she took her Deliveroo bag to Dalkey Island.
Dalkey Island, Dublin, Ireland
Artemis Fowl I, that is to say the father of Artemis Fowl II and husband to Angeline Fowl, was not pleased with his younger sons. He had solid reasons for his displeasure, as the twins had borrowed the Fowl Tachyon jet without permission and ditched it in the Atlantic, barely escaping with their lives. Even more upsetting to Artemis Senior than the loss of a prototype jet that could change the world’s carbon footprint with its synthetic kerosene engine was the fact that Beckett had borrowed, and then lost, the treasured Rocket Man platform shoes from his rock legends memorabilia collection, leaving him with only Freddie Mercury’s Adidas sneakers from Live Aid and David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust boots in the footwear section.
The twins knew that their father was more unhappy than usual, because he had summoned them to his private study, which sat a little apart from the main villa in a Martello tower that had been restored by a firm of heritage architects and augmented with a few necessities such as internal walls, a suite of vintage Fritz Hansen office furniture, a dozen motion sensors disguised as rocks, wall-mounted mini-mag machine guns, bombproof glass, an escape submarine below the desk, more powerful broadband than the Pentagon had, a full-body scanner, a wall-sized live news multiscreen, and the Batman suit from Tim Burton’s movies—which was not strictly speaking a necessity, but Artemis Senior found it inspiring. All in all, it was pretty standard supervillain stuff, which the twins’ father couldn’t bear to part with, even though he claimed to be a 100 percent legit businessman now. But once a criminal mastermind…and so on and so forth.
The twins were seated in matching Series 7 chairs that had been fabricated from recycled ocean plastics, looking on as Artemis Fowl Senior rested his head on the desktop and kneaded his own neck. Beckett jittered in his seat; the blond twin had been sitting in his chair for almost a minute now, and that was an insufferably extended period as far as he was concerned. Myles was also jittering, but only with his eyeballs, as he was using blinks and pupil sweeps to select letters and solve the Guardian crossword on one lens of his graphene eyeglasses. Once Myles had finished the puzzle, shaving five seconds off his personal record, he was eager to get away and back to amassing knowledge.
“Father,” he said, “for that neck massage to have any effect, you must really target the trigger points. At the moment, you are simply rolling neck fat.”
Artemis Senior sat bolt upright. “I know that, Myles. And I do not have neck fat.”
“We all have neck fat, Pater. Honestly,” Myles said, and then flushed in shame that his father should be so ill-informed on the subject.
“Is that why you think we’re here, Myles?” asked Artemis Senior. “To discuss neck fat?”
“No,” said Myles. “I assume we are here to discuss the missile crisis.”