Artemis Fowl Read Free Page B

far corner of the bed, pulling the quilt under her chin.
    “Send the new girl.”
    “Yes, Mother.”
    “Send her with cucumber slices and water.”
    “Yes, Mother.”
    Angeline glared at him with crafty eyes. “And stop calling me Mother. I don’t know who you are, but you’re certainly not my little Arty.”
    Artemis blinked back a few rebellious tears. “Of course. Sorry, Moth—Sorry.”
    “Hmmm. Don’t come back here again, or I’ll have my husband take care of you. He’s a very important man, you know.”
    “Very well, Mrs. Fowl. This is the last you’ll see of me.”
    “It had better be.” Angeline froze suddenly. “Do you hear them?”
    Artemis shook his head. “No. I don’t hear any—”
    “They’re coming for me. They’re everywhere.”
    Angeline dived for cover beneath the bedclothes. Artemis could still hear her terrified sobs as he descended the marble staircase.
    The Book was proving far more stubborn than Artemis had anticipated. It seemed to be almost actively resisting him. No matter which program he ran it through, the computer came up blank.
    Artemis hard-copied every page, tacking them to the walls of his study. Sometimes it helped to have things on paper. The script was like nothing he’d seen before, and yet it was strangely familiar. Obviously a mixture of symbolic and character-based language, the text meandered around the page in no apparent order.
    What the program needed was some frame of reference, some central point on which to build. He separated all the characters and ran comparisons with English, Chinese, Greek, Arabic, and with Cyrillic texts, even with Ogham. Nothing.
    Moody with frustration, Artemis sent Juliet scurrying when she interrupted with sandwiches, and moved on to symbols. The most frequently recurring pictogram was a small male figure. Male, he presumed, though with the limited knowledge of the fairy anatomy he supposed it could be female. A thought struck him. Artemis opened the ancient languages file on his Power Translator and selected Egyptian.
    At last. A hit. The male symbol was remarkably similar to the Anubis god representation on Tutankhamen’s inner-chamber hieroglyphics. This was consistent with his other findings. The first written human stories were about fairies, suggesting that their civilization predated man’s own. It would seem that the Egyptians had simply adapted an existing scripture to suit their needs.
    There were other resemblances. But the characters were just dissimilar enough to slip through the computer’s net. This would have to be done manually. Each Gnommish figure had to be enlarged, printed, and then compared with the hieroglyphs.
    Artemis felt the excitement of success thumping inside his rib cage. Almost every fairy pictogram or letter had an Egyptian counterpart. Most were universal, such as the sun or birds. But some seemed exclusively supernatural and had to be tailored to fit. The Anubis figure, for example, would make no sense as a dog god, so Artemis altered it to read king of the fairies.
    By midnight, Artemis had successfully fed his findings into the Macintosh. All he had to do now was press Decode. He did so. What emerged was a long, intricate string of meaningless gibberish.
    A normal child would have abandoned the task long since. The average adult would probably have been reduced to slapping the keyboard. But not Artemis. This book was testing him, and he would not allow it to win.
    The letters were right, he was certain of it. It was just the order that was wrong. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, Artemis glared at the pages again. Each segment was bordered by a solid line. This could represent paragraphs or chapters, but they were not meant to be read in the usual left to right, top to bottom fashion.
    Artemis experimented. He tried the Arabic right to left and the Chinese columns. Nothing worked. Then he noticed that each page had one thing in common—a central section. The other pictograms were arranged