Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

I eyed her and said, “Oh. Good.”

Mab glanced at me and said, “Do not be afraid of Corb, my Knight. He and his were destined to be sacrificed from the moment Ethniu conceived of this plan.”

“I know the Sidhe are dangerous,” I said. “But there’s not enough of them. Not for what is coming at us.”

The clicking grew louder.

The Queen of Air and Darkness cast back her head, her eyes going wild, her smile widening to inhuman proportions. “The numbers stand at one Mab to none. That advantage shall be sufficient.”

Suddenly I was aware of the creatures of Winter beneath my command, racing to join us. The temperature around us abruptly plummeted. White winter frost began to crackle across the face of the Bean, and Mab shuddered and arched her back, her eyes closing, as the breath of Winter itself gathered around us. White mist began to thicken the grey haze of the city. The air suddenly became close, intimate, as the cloud of cold vapor enveloped the cohort.

The faemetal weapons of the Sidhe began to creak and moan as deathly frost formed upon them.

And I realized that I could suddenly see no farther than maybe fifteen feet, tops.

“We won’t be able to see them coming,” I said in a low voice.

“Irrelevant,” Mab replied.

In the shadows of the Bean behind us gathered the malks and Black Dogs, the rake and the ogre, the gnomes and double dozens of the viciously mischievous Little Folk of Winter.

Before us, the Sidhe abruptly began to chant and sing, gesturing with their hands as they did. Flickers of light glittered over the cohort in a dome. Shapes and sigils, runes and formulae, crackled briefly in the air, as two hundred sorcerers gathered their power from the hyperenergetic air.

What the hell? I held up my staff, opening the channels to the energy storage structures inside, and drew that energy down into it. The task normally took an hour of intense concentration and exhausting effort, when I had to provide the energy for the staff myself. With the air gone mad with power, the staff charged in seconds, which should not have been possible, not without the excess energy overflowing into waste heat and burning the thing to a crisp.

Instead, it simply let out a low hum, the runes carved into glowing green-gold, and the faint, excellent scent of scorched wood edged the night.

Mab surveyed her troops, evidently waiting as the various shields and wards and charms and abjurations were assembled from mystic energy. She glanced aside and said, “This is the new Knight of the Sword?”

“Sir Waldo,” I said, lifting a hand to Butters down at belt level, in warning. “He’s been my ally many times.”

“All grown up,” Mab noted, in the voice of someone looking at a cow and seeing only steaks. “Welcome, Sir Knight.”

Waldo cleared his throat, bowed slightly at the waist, and said, “My pleasure, ma’am.”

“Your new Sword,” she said, “has shed its mortal limits. Now it harms only the wicked.”

My arm throbbed.

The clicking grew steadily louder.

The weapons of the Sidhe groaned with cold and bloodlust.

“The Sword defends the defenseless, ma’am,” Butters said. “As it always has.”

The chanting of the Sidhe rose to a swift, fevered climax. Flickering sparks began to dance over their weapons and armor, dazzling as a pool of paparazzi’s cameras, in every hue imaginable and some that I couldn’t remember ever seeing before. It was the opposite of a veil—an enchantment that forced you to notice it, an irritating distraction that simply would not cease being a nuisance.

Mab lifted her head in time with the fevered chanting of the Sidhe and let out a scream that somehow blended perfectly with the song.

The sound of that scream pulsed through me like the most powerful music I’d ever experienced, like the hardest rush of adrenaline I’d ever felt.

I couldn’t help it. I drew in a breath and answered the scream with one of my own. As did the Sidhe. Even Butters lifted his voice in a furious shriek.

And then, without conscious command, we were moving, the Sidhe cohort darting forward with unnatural fury and grace. That power that carried them forward wrapped around me, drawing my feet with more surety and dexterity and power than I could have managed alone, and Butters kept pace despite his diminutive stature.

We moved forward together, as lightly as any troupe of dancers, and as we did the formation changed as smoothly as if choreographed. Mab, upon her dark steed, surged forward, through the ranks of armored Sidhe, until she was at the head of the formation, with me behind her and to her left, Butters opposite me, and the Sidhe and creatures of Winter dropping into an arrow-shaped formation behind us. Mab’s hand fell to her saddle and drew forth a long, jagged blade of what looked like ancient glacier-blue ice. She raised the sword as icy vapor billowed around us, the whole cloud flashing and flickering with faelight like a thunderstorm.

Like I said. When Mab decides it’s time to do business, she doesn’t just sit around waiting for things to happen.

And that’s how maybe two hundred and fifty fae charged five thousand Fomor at the Battle of the Bean.

We moved together, all but blinded by mist and vapor, following Mab’s will, and suddenly the enemy was there in front of us, hundreds of twisted abominations armed with clubs and rocks and claws and teeth.

Mab howled as the dark unicorn lowered his head and plunged straight down the enemy’s throats.

Mab struck left and right with her sword, flickering cuts as swift and light as the beating of a hummingbird’s wing. She struck at arms, shoulders, faces, leaving nothing but little incisions the depth of a fingernail’s width in soft spaces of flesh—but covering a space as big as my spread hand around the wound with vicious, bitterly cold Winter frost.

There was barely any time to notice anything but the flying limbs, weapons, and furious faces of the Fomor abominations. Where Mab rode on her unicorn, a nexus of terror followed. Those abominations closest to her recoiled and were struck with bitter wounds, even as they blocked their allies from getting close enough to strike Mab. This left her riding forward into a vacuum of space that could never quite close around her—and which left those of us running in her wake an opening to exploit.

Butters and I plunged into that limited space of confusion around Mab. Butters brought Fidelacchius to life and began striking, sending the Fomor’s hideous troops reeling in reaction. On my side of things, I began laying about me with my staff, each blow dispensing a thunderclap of kinetic energy and sending my target flying a good ten feet in the direction of the blow. I simply left the energy channels in the tool open, drawing in from the power-laden air on a continuous basis as I hammered wider the opening Mab had created.

Behind me came the Sidhe, their weapons shrieking and wailing as the cold, cold faemetal sank into flesh and tasted hot blood, and vapor boiled away from the wounds the supernatural weapons inflicted, their bloodied lengths bubbling as new-drawn blood hissed into plumes of vapor. The light of the Sidhe’s armor and weapons and eyes was terrible in the vision of the Fomor’s slave-soldiers, and the abominations howled and tried to shield their eyes from the painful hues.