I know that smell, Butler realized, holding on grimly. Dwarf.

Whatever was holding the dwarf up whined and dipped, dunking Butler and his wriggling captive into the lagoon’s waist-high water. For Butler, the dunking was harmless enough—he was virtually clamped around the invisible dwarf, and in fact the cool water felt quite refreshing—but for the shimmer-suited fairy, the sudden dip was catastrophic. Abrasive contact with the sharp scree on the lagoon bed punctured his camouflage suit, breaking the skin, releasing the charge.

The dwarf, Cruik, was suddenly visible.

“Aha,” said Butler, hauling Cruik from the surf. “Dwarf head. Good.”

Cruik had forfeited his gift of tongues along with the rest of his magic, but he had been living among the humans for long enough to pick up a smattering of several languages, and Butler’s simple statement was terrifyingly easy to misinterpret.

Dwarf head? This Mud Man is going to eat my head.

Butler was actually glad to see the dwarf’s head because dwarf heads are disproportionately large, and this particular dwarf’s head was even more bulbous than most. It was almost Butler-sized and there was a helmet perched on top of it.

With a fairy helmet, I can see what this little guy sees.

It was the helmet Butler was after, not the meaty noggin inside.

“C’mere, slippy,” grunted the bodyguard, intuitively snapping the helmet’s seals and popping it off. “Did you just try to shoot my sister?”

Recognizing the word shoot, Cruik glanced down at his own hands and was dismayed to find them empty. He had dropped his gun.

Cruik was a career criminal and had lived through many close calls without losing his nerve. He had once faced down a gang of drunken goblins armed with only a jar of burn lotion and three bottle tops, but this bloodthirsty giant with a face of fury and a thirst for brains finally sent him over the edge.

“Nooooo,” he screamed shrilly. “No brain biting.”

Butler ignored the tantrum and the musty helmet pong and gripped the protective hat one-handed, as a basketball player might grip a basketball.

Cruik’s skull was now totally exposed, and the dwarf swore he could feel his brain trembling.

When a dwarf finds himself unnerved to this extent, one of two things is likely to happen: one, the dwarf will unhook his jaw and attempt to eat its way out of trouble. This option was not available to Cruik because of his suit’s hood. And two: the terrified dwarf will trim the weight. Trimming the weight is an aviators’ trick, which involves jettisoning as much unnecessary cargo as possible to keep the ship in the air. Dwarfs are capable of shedding up to a third of their body weight in less than five seconds. This is obviously a last resort and can only be performed once a decade or so. It involves a rapid expulsion of loose-layered runny fat, ingested mining dirt, and gases through what dwarf mommies politely refer to as the nether tunnel.

Trimming the weight is mostly an automatic response and will be engaged when the heart rate nudges past two hundred beats per minute, which happened to Cruik the moment Butler enquired whether Cruik had tried to shoot his sister. At that moment, Cruik more or less lost control of his bodily functions and had just time to scream “No brain biting!” before his body decided to trim the weight and use the resulting propulsion to get the heck out of there.

Of course, Butler was not aware of these biological details. All he knew was that he was suddenly flying backward, up high through the air, holding on to a jet-powered dwarf.

Not again, he thought, possibly the only human who would have this thought in this situation.

Butler saw Juliet shrinking into the distance, her mouth a shocked dark circle. And to Juliet it seemed as though her brother had suddenly developed the power of flight while wrestling a dwarf clad in a shiny hooded leotard.

I’ll worry about Juliet worrying about me later, thought Butler, trying not to think about the glossy, bubbled stream pushing them farther into the sky and closer to whatever craft they were suspended from. Look out below.

Butler had a more urgent problem than Juliet worrying about him, which he realized upon jamming Cruik’s helmet onto his own head. He and Cruik were coming up on the gyro, fast with no control over their approach. All Cruik could do was yell something about his brain, so it was up to Butler to see them through this alive. Altitude wasn’t the problem. They weren’t high enough to sustain any real damage, especially with a watery mattress below. The problem was the gyro’s rotor blade, which would slice them both into fine strips if they passed through it, then doubtless the gyrocopter would explode and incinerate the slices. The engine was whisper quiet, but a couple of bodies passing through the blade would soon blow the mufflers.

My last act on Earth could be to expose the Fairy People, and there is nothing I can do to prevent it.

Up they went, whooshing backward, wind snagging their clothes, chilling their skin. The dwarf’s eyes were wide and rolling, and his flesh hung in loose flaps.

He was chubby before. I’m sure of it.

The gyro blade was feet away as they whiplashed over the top of the craft and hung suspended for a nanosecond as Cruik finally ran out of nether-tunnel steam.

“Nice timing,” snarled Butler, then down they went directly toward the rotors.

Still, thought Butler. Killed saving my sister from a murderous dwarf. It could be worse.

At the last possible moment, the gyro’s rotor swiveled ninety degrees, tilting the craft dramatically, allowing Butler and Cruik to slot into it neatly on the leeward side.

Butler barely had a moment to thank his lucky stars when he was thrust into yet another perilous situation.

There seemed to be some serious fighting going on among an entire gang of dwarves. The passenger bay was littered with unconscious fairies while the three remaining dwarfs were slugging it out, two against one. The one had a bloody nose and a sooty star on his shoulder where someone had tagged him with a Neutrino, but still he seemed quite cheery.

“It’s about time you got here,” he said to Butler from the side of his mouth. “These guys are quite angry that I flipped their gyro.”

“Tombstone, you collaborator!” howled one of the remaining dwarfs.

“Tombstone?” said Butler, managing to groan and speak at the same time.

“Yeah,” said Butler’s old friend Mulch Diggums. “It’s my out-and-about name. And lucky for you I do go out.”

The gyro’s stabilizers steadied the craft, and Butler took advantage of the moment’s peace to disentangle himself from Cruik, whom he tossed out of the bay door.

“Ah, Cruik,” said Mulch. “Rarely does one meet someone with such a phonetically appropriate name.”

Butler wasn’t even listening. If there were a time to engage with Mulch’s ramblings, he hadn’t reached it yet. Instead he turned to the remaining hostile dwarfs.

“You two,” he said, treating them to his fiercest expression, an expression which had once made a troll think that maybe he had bitten off a little more than he could chew.

The two in question quailed under Butler’s gaze and wondered anxiously what this giant would order them to do.

Butler jerked a thumb toward the bay door. “Jump,” he said, keeping it simple. The dwarfs looked at each other, and the look spoke volumes.

Should we actually jump into daylight, they thought, or should we stay and fight this terrifying man mountain?

They held hands and jumped.