Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

There wasn’t anything I could do. I couldn’t even lift a hand to make a dramatic gesture, and I only would have needed to move one finger.

The world was just too heavy.

The Titan turned toward me, triumph in her gaze, and lifted the spear she’d taken from One-Eye’s fallen form.

I’d been through a lot in my time. But I knew an ending when I saw it.

The Titan had won. The old world, the old darkness, had come back at last. Chicago would be laid into waste and ruin.

And I would die with it.

I met Ethniu’s gaze, and in that moment I knew that I probably wasn’t even going to be aware of it when I died: There was no chance at all that I could soulgaze that being and keep my mind intact. I would die mad.

Only it didn’t happen.

And I saw a truth even more hideous.

It didn’t take a wizard to see the Titan’s soul. It was already all around us. The sheer desire for ruin and destruction that filled her soul and had allowed her to master the Eye had been made manifest in the world. This was the world that Ethniu longed for. The terror, the death, the blood, the destruction, the senseless chaos—this was who and what she was. This madness was the fire that had fueled the Titans, that had made their destruction a necessity in the first place.

Blood was their art. Screams were their music. Horror was their faith.

Mortals could not stand before this.

I watched my death coming for me and wept in sheer despair.

I knew that it wasn’t just the actual pain. I knew it was also the dark will of the enemy, now unopposed by Mab’s battered will, and that that awful psychic pressure was running rampant with my emotions. I knew it was a lie.

But it was becoming the truth, right in front of my eyes.

And . . .

And then . . .

And then Waldo Butters stepped up.

The little guy appeared from behind me and put himself directly between the Titan and me.

He wasn’t an impressive figure under the best of circumstances. Standing in front of the towering Ethniu, he looked even less impressive. Even if they’d both been humans and the same height, she’d have had more muscle. Combined with everything else about her, her aura, her power, her grace, her armor, her height, her beauty, the war and ruin and mad-lit, dying city behind her . . . Butters didn’t even look like a human being. He looked more like a badly animated marionette standing next to a human being.

He looked small.

Dirty.

Tired.

Bruised.

Frightened.

The little guy glanced back at me, his face sick and pale. Then he turned to face the Titan.

And he squared his shoulders.

And he raised the Sword, a sudden white, pure light in that place, an unseen choir providing hushed music around it.

In that light, Ethniu’s armor looked . . . sharper somehow, harder, more uncomfortable, more inhibitive to her movements. Her beauty seemed flawed, harsh, as if it had been a trick of the light, and in her living eye I could see nothing but a desperate, empty hunger, a void within her soul that could never be filled.

Before that light, even the ancient terror of the Titan hesitated.

“Begone, Titan,” Butters said. His voice was quiet, mellow, resonant. It wasn’t a human voice at all. Though the volume never lifted, it could be heard over the battle, over the thunder, over the crackle and roar of fires. “These souls are not for you. Begone to the depths of your hatred and rage. There is no world for you here any longer.”

Ethniu’s face became a thundercloud, her lips twisting into a snarl of pure hate. “Do you dare give me orders, you lapdog, you traitor, you coward.”

“Ethniu,” murmured that voice, and the depth of compassion in it was like a deep, quiet sea. “I only offer vision, that you may avoid suffering.”

“You’re no more powerful than your instrument now.” Ethniu spat toward Butters, and the spittle actually began eating a hole in the ground, it was so virulent. “You chose the side of the insects. Be crushed with them.”

She straightened, whirled the spear as if it had been a reed, and smashed at Butters with a bolt of lightning that sounded like some enormous, angrily buzzing waterfall.

Butters screamed, in his dirty, tired, terrified, normal human voice, barely audible.

He lifted the Sword, and again I understood, on an instinctual level, that the blade of the Sword of Faith, though made of immaterial light, was for this purpose far more solid, more unbreakable, more real than it had ever been when made of steel. Had the Sword been lifted in this purpose before, mere molecular structure would have been shattered by the forces brought to bear upon it—but now, unpolluted by the material world, the true power of the blade could be brought to bear, and in that bar of silver-white light was a galaxy of subtle color, of immovable power, of something so pure and steady and fixed that the universe itself had been built upon its foundation, and in the background my addled brain could hear the faint echoes of a Voice saying, Let there be light.

The mortal man holding that blade met the Titan’s fury.

And he would not be moved.

Like a rock in the sea he stood, as a tide of power crashed against him. The light could have struck anyone too near it blind through its sheer intensity. The heat ripped and tore the earth around him, rendering the ground down to bare earth in a furious flood of energetic violence. For the space of seven slow heartbeats, Butters stood before that tide, gripping the Sword, and the light and fury and shadow and flying debris formed a shape in the air behind him, of a tall, indistinct form that folded graceful wings around him like an eagle protecting her young from the rain.

Then, like even the most terrible, hungry tide, that power passed.

And an utter silence fell.

Untouched in the center of a circle of destruction stood the Knight of Faith, shining in the white light of Fidelacchius, and that fire had done nothing but leave him untarnished and clean, dirt and grime and impurity burned away while he was left untouched, his white cloak stirred by the heat rising from the ground around him, his dark eyes glittering with determination behind his goofy sports goggles.

Ethniu only stared.

“You know what?” Butters said, and in the center of what looked like the end of the world, his merely human voice sounded, not epic, not mighty, not bold—not even scared or angry. He merely sounded . . . normal. Human.

And if there was anything in the universe more defiant of the world the Titan was creating than that, I couldn’t have imagined what it might be.

Butters nodded thoughtfully and said, “I believe you aren’t as tough as you think you are.”