Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

Eighteen

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Bean. Probably you have, on a TV show or in a movie. It’s this big silvery sculpture that’s supposed to look like—I don’t know—an air bubble underwater or something. It has an arch in the middle that you can pass under, and it was originally named the Cloud Gate, because from far overhead you can look down and see it reflecting the sky and the clouds.

But if you don’t have that very privileged viewpoint, if you look at it from the perspective of everyday people, it looks like a big old bean lying on its side. So Chicagoans called it the Bean, much to the artist’s apparent disgust. It casts a distorted reflection of the city skyline on one side, and of the concrete and trees of the park on the other.

Tonight, on one side of the Bean was a hazy reflection of a city on fire.

And the other side showed the backs of maybe a couple of hundred of Mab’s soldiers, who were facing east, toward the lake, standing in their armored ranks, and waiting.

Before we rode into the hazy park, we heard a couple of sharp, high-pitched, twittering whistles. The Sidhe could communicate like that if they wished, in whistles and birdsong. They had a complex musical language, too, and for some reason the Winter Sidhe absolutely loved human music. No idea why, but it was a genuine thing with them. I’d rarely seen a gathering of Winter that didn’t include mortal music, and mortal musicians where possible, though I had come away with the impression that one really, really didn’t want to be chosen to perform for the Sidhe. Bad things tended to happen.

You know all those brilliant musicians who wound up dead way sooner than they should have? Call it maybe a fifty-fifty chance that the Sidhe were involved along the line. It was part of how my godmother had made her bones with Mab.

Mab stood behind them, in her battle mail, her pale hair glowing with starlight, mounted upon a freaking unicorn.

Don’t get the wrong idea. The unicorns who serve Winter aren’t like the ones you’ve maybe seen in books or movies or cartoons. These things aren’t silver and white and pretty. They look like a unicorn as designed by H. R. Giger. They have exoskeletons in creepy variants of black that sort of nodded at other colors in the shining highlights. And they have no eyes. I’d seen exactly one of them, once before, and even that one had been only a glamour around a different creature.

This thing . . .

Power radiated from it. It was the size of a Budweiser horse, plus an extra few hundred pounds of armored chitin that looked black but shone deep purple wherever light reflected from it. Its smooth head and the blank spots where eye sockets should have been were eerie, and when it champed its jaws, it showed hard, serrated ridges of bone in a jaw that could open wider than it ought. Its ears swiveled about alertly, moving too smoothly, like exceedingly precise automation, and a flicker of insight made me realize why the Winter Sidhe respected their unicorns: They had no eyes to be deceived by glamour or beauty. It didn’t have a horn. It had horns. Curling ram’s horns as big across as a stop sign armored to either side of its skull, and the horn that arched from its forehead was more a spiked saber than a spiraling lance.

Mab’s steed pounded a foot down against the concrete impatiently, and the energy that rippled out from that impact lifted a visible, expanding ring of dust from the ground and stirred the haze in the air. Mab laid a hand upon its neck, a soothing motion, and the unicorn stilled—but it didn’t take a wizard to detect the rage and hatred seething off of the creature.

It wanted to fight. It wanted to kill.

I knew how it felt.

Ah, that was it, then. The horn. What had that Tim Curry character called it, an antenna pointing to heaven? Maybe he’d been half-right. After I focused my attention on the power surrounding the creature, I could feel Mab’s subtle influence, the spirit of Winter in the air, pouring off the unicorn’s horn, the energy buzzing like high-tension lines carrying current. The being was serving as a living focus for Mab’s power, the way I’d use a staff or blasting rod—or the knife at my hip, the one I had carefully not touched, barely even with my thoughts, since coming ashore.

That artifact, taken from Hades’ vault, continued to vibrate with a power all its own that remained unabated and uninfluenced by the terrible forces in the air around the city.

I kept on not touching it—and, after a moment of mental effort, not even thinking about it.

I touched a hand to Murphy’s shoulder, and she brought the bike rumbling to a halt. I swung off and crossed fifty or sixty feet of concrete. A block of the Sidhe, each warrior armored in that faemetal they preferred to steel, shining in variegated shades of glacial green, winter blue, and deep, dark purples, whirled to face me as a single being, their boots stomping hard on the concrete as shields were raised and weapons came up.

I didn’t so much as break stride. Lions do not lower their heads for jackals. Even jackals know they can kill what fears them.

The Winter Sidhe respected those who understood the law of the jungle, and I had demonstrated to them from the first that I wasn’t putting up with any of their crap. They would test me—predators always test potential prey for weakness—but as long as I made them think it would be more trouble than amusement to push me, they would press no further.

The warrior Sidhe, male and female alike, each deadly skilled and experienced in the art and practice of war, yielded before me, melting as smoothly from my path as if they had never been there.

For today.

They would look for weakness again tomorrow. Assuming any of us survived to see it.

As I approached, I saw Mab staring hard at me, and then past me, at the uncertain form of the people who had followed my banner. Her eyes narrowed and then bored into mine, even as I walked the last few yards to her. For some reason, I felt . . . utterly naked, as if my clothing had vanished and a cold chill had swirled into damned uncomfortable places.

Then her expression changed. For a flickering portion of an instant, I thought I saw . . . something, in her eyes, some vague shadow of pain. Of . . . sympathy?

Then Mab was Mab again.

“My Knight,” she murmured. “Half a dozen cohorts have come to your banner.”

Eleven hundred and eighty-seven, I thought. I blinked. Because that’s how many people had chosen to follow me. I didn’t know how I knew that. It just . . . flew into my head. This had to be another instance of intellectus, a form of intelligence that bypassed standard human processes of rationality, just as I experienced on the island.

But this was different.

It was people.

Mab tilted her head to one side. “You did not embrace the cold.”

“No,” I said. My voice felt rough.

Her chin lifted, and her hard, cold eyes flickered in naked, unconcealed pride. “Never once in your life, my Knight, have you taken the easy road. I chose well.”