We plunged entirely through the enemy’s front line in seconds, taking them completely off guard in the thickened haze—and I almost didn’t see what had really just happened.
Behind me, I could see one of the abominations, reeling back from the surprise attack from Mab’s flying wedge, clutch at a long, shallow, frost-covered wound in its arm, probably Mab’s work, and suddenly begin to scream.
The creature clutched at its wounded arm, holding it straight up, rigid, as if it had been holding a mannequin’s arm.
I saw the skin along the edges of the wound writhe and suddenly turn black.
And that black began to spread.
The abomination screamed in piteous terror for several seconds, as the black color from the edges of its frostbitten wound raced throughout its body—bringing a terrible stillness in its wake. By the time the black had wrapped around the abomination’s torso, the screaming had stopped.
It died screaming.
And a second later, all that was left was an agonized-looking statue of dark stone.
I heard more, even more painful screams behind us, and realized that the weapons of the Sidhe had apparently carried the same curse. We had cut a swath through the enemy, and those we had wounded had . . . simply turned to dark, rough, sandy-textured stone.
And it had, as a consequence, split the group of abominations into two much smaller groups of abominations, separated by a wall of statues.
Without hesitation, Mab wheeled on the nearest group, screamed again, and led the charge through it, her scream carrying me, Butters, and the Sidhe warriors forward, through another round of desperate nightmare time. And once that group had been split, whatever will drove them could no longer keep them on the field. The abominations began to flee, screaming, vanishing into the Winter mist around us.
The Sidhe cut them down without mercy. Lethal blows were kinder: They left nothing but a dead horror upon the ground. Mere wounds began to blacken and petrify, carrying those struck to an agonizing final ending.
Die swiftly or die slowly. That was all the compassion Winter was willing to show.
Mab whirled on her steed the moment the enemy broke, and lifted a hand. As she did, a cold wind descended upon Chicago from the north, the scent of it dry and sharp like at the beginning of proper autumn. It howled across the park, and the billowing vapors of mist and frost fled before it, sweeping the field clean of dust and smoke and mist, leaving the park suddenly clearly visible.
And I saw what Mab had really been up to.
As I watched, about fifty yards away, Mab led a cohort of Sidhe into a formation of octokongs, their weird arquebus weapons bellowing to little effect. A dozen yards beyond that, Mab led a cohort of Sidhe into a formation of dog-beasts and their handlers. Beyond them, maybe four or five more Mabs were hammering their way through several formations of those heavily armored ape-things.
And behind us, more Mabs were doing the same thing. The enemy screamed and fought. From one side of the battlefield, sorcery suddenly struck, with a sound like a thunderbolt and a spreading cloud of bilious green smoke that . . . just dissolved a pair of hapless octokongs that got in the way.
Glamour.
All of the other Mabs, all of the other cohorts of Sidhe, all the casualties inflicted upon the enemy by them—they were illusion. Figments of Mab’s imagination, given life by all the energy in the air.
I stared in awe. Producing an illusion is, honestly, a task that might be slightly more difficult, magically speaking, than actually creating the illusory effect for real. Every detail, every wrinkle in fabric, every stray hair, every blade of grass that bent beneath an illusory boot, every footfall, every exhalation, every faint scent—they all had to be held and wielded by the conscious thoughts of the source of the illusion.
Imagine one person running two thousand puppets at once.
Mab was doing that in the back of her mind, while hacking at the enemy with her frozen sword. She took stock of the battle and lowered her hand, and mist and haze once again fell like a curtain as the cold wind ceased.
Outnumbered dozens to one, Mab had pitted the sheer power of her mind against a supernatural legion—and she was winning.
As long as the enemy couldn’t find and target Mab herself among all the duplicates, we weren’t fighting an army: We were holding a narrow pass where only a single unit of the foe could see us in the haze and engage us at the same time. Chaos and confusion and terror filled the minds of her enemies, and from them she built a fortress where their numbers counted for nothing.
If left unchecked, Mab and her killers could destroy the entire enemy legion, one unit at a time.
She let out another cry and the Winter unicorn leapt lightly into the haze, the rest of us following her like a comet’s tail. She hit a second group of abominations, and if they hadn’t been monsters, there to kill us, I would have felt sorry for the things. We dispatched that band, and then a third before the enemy gathered enough wits about them to respond.
A bolt of purple lightning came down out of the haze like the hammer of God and struck Mab squarely.
There was a flare of light so intense that I staggered and fell, dropping to a knee and barely staggering up again before the Sidhe warriors behind me trampled me to death. There’s a reason he fell became synonymous for he died. Losing your feet on a battlefield is an all-but-certain death sentence.
Blinking my eyes against the dazzling leftover image of the lightning bolt, I saw Mab’s slender body arch into a bow, curling around the spot where the lightning had struck her, her long, thin-fingered hands clenched around a ball of white-hot light, the edges of her nails blackening and smoking with the heat. Then, with a banshee wail of pure, terrifying scorn, she straightened again and sent the bolt of lightning raging ahead of the unicorn, plowing an even wider and more fearfully murderous path through the enemy ranks, blasting a burial-deep furrow in the earth as she went.
Hell’s bells.
I gave myself a stern reminder not to piss her off.
We plunged out of the wreckage of the third unit of abominations, and Mab, her face splattered with deep purple-maroon blood, let out a scornful snarl. “Corb should have shown his hand by now, the coward.”
“Fine by me,” I panted. There is no more difficult cardio than fighting, let me tell you. “The longer he lets us fight small groups one at a time, the happier I am.”
“That part of the dance is done,” Mab said, her eyes searching the haze. “These piteous lifespawn are helpless to us. But his other troops carry the Bane.”
The Bane, by which she meant iron. For reasons no one I know of has ever figured out, the Fae—and the Sidhe in particular—were vulnerable to the touch of iron and many of its alloys. It burned and sickened them, simultaneously acting as a branding iron and radioactive uranium. I knew the faemetal armor they wore would offer them some protection from the wounds—but the mere presence of too much of the stuff in their proximity would grind away at their endurance and mental cohesion. The Sidhe might be able to fight it for a while—but long-term, it was a losing proposition.