Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

I stared.

Hell’s bells.

Marcone had rallied whatever troops he had left after the fight with the Jotnar. He had gathered his people together and then had to have circled down to help the southern defenses at the svartalf embassy. He must have gathered up a following much like I had—and he’d been able to arm them, and brought them sweeping unexpectedly to the aid of the southern defense.

Who had then been free to come help us in turn.

And now the enclosing arms of that force were about to spill directly onto the Fomor’s legion as they blindly encircled the Winter Lady, hungry to destroy her.

Marcone, at the front of his own army, supported by some of the most powerful beings it had been my pleasure or misfortune to encounter, lifted one of those damned old guns, aimed it at Ethniu, and pulled the trigger.

And he got lucky. There was a sudden buzz-thump, and the Titan twitched as sparks flew from her armor.

The Baron of Chicago dropped the gun, drew another, and lifted his chin in sheer defiance.

And the Titan’s face twisted in utter fury.

“What?” she spat, so furious that spittle flew from her lips and spilled between her teeth, burning the ground where it fell. She twisted in place, feet scraping the earth like a furious child’s, only more apocalyptic, and Butters flinched in physical pain at the sheer rage and hatred in the Titan’s voice. “These mortal beasts. These worms. I will grind that man’s teeth to dust beneath my heel.”

It was seeing that helpless fury that had taken her, that frustration and rage that did it, I think. I’d felt that way before. And I could handle it way better than she could. I had seen the Titan’s weakness: She had the vices of her virtues.

In a way, it wasn’t her fault. Ethniu was an elemental being, a primal force of the universe. Such beings had been meant to shape worlds from raw matter, not to cope with their wills being frustrated. Her own personal power meant that she could demand and get her way in nearly every circumstance.

But when she found a circumstance that wasn’t like the others, she was confounded. She had been able to make things happen her way for so long, she was not used to coping with opposition, had grown rigid in her habit of victory. She never needed the reflexes to deal with an agile opponent, with adversity, with unpredictability. She reacted to them the way a child would, confronting such obstacles for the very first time.

She spent precious seconds throwing a tantrum.

And hope rekindled and flickered to life.

Just this little light inside. That made everything matter again.

That reminded me that I had a job to do.

“Heh,” I cackled. “Heh. Heh, heh, heh, heheheheheheh.” My voice came out creaky and cracking, but genuinely amused. “You noob.”

Ethniu glared at me, and my heart skipped a little beat. Because fear was a thing again, too. Fear that I might still lose this fight.

Because I knew that I could still win.

Marcone’s shot had evidently been the signal to charge. The Baron of Chicago and his forces broke into a run, their voices rising in fury as they came, the earth trembling, white-shrouded vampires leaping as if on wires through the tide of light and resolution flooding from the Summer Lady’s beacon, the unseen battle of minds and wills being waged every bit as viciously as the physical conflict unfolding before me.

If the newly arrived allied force hit the Fomor legions before order had been brought upon them, Marcone’s charge would shatter them.

“Don’t let her get to the Fomor!” I shouted.

Ethniu swept the spear at the earth between her and Butters, and another bolt of lightning howled from it—not at Butters, but at the ground itself, rending the earth between us and sending a truckload of torn ground flying at Butters and me. I covered my head with my arms and felt glad I was wearing the spellbound coat. It meant I had just collected a new round of bruises instead of broken bones. By the time I lowered my arms, Ethniu was on the last few degrees of arc on a fifty-yard leap that had carried her to the rear of the Fomor army, where she slammed the haft of her stolen spear into the ground and instantly arrested the attention of the surrounding Fomor troops. Her will flared out to enfold all of those around her, and they turned at once in lockstep, hundreds of the heavily armored warriors of the Fomor turning to face the Baron’s charge.

The return to myself had meant the return of input from my own banner. I had one hundred and eighty-seven people still in the fight, most of them wounded.

And, from the battered ruin of the earthworks around the auditorium, there was a sudden flood of light, as Esperacchius appeared on the walls, along with a sudden ragged roar of defiance, and I realized with a start that when I had swamped Listen and his troops, I had also taken the pressure off the fortress.

I shoved myself to my feet, found my staff, and shouted, “Butters!”

“Here,” came his voice, panting and pained but game.

The white-shrouded forms bounded through the air in graceful arcs and suddenly blurred in all directions as the Baron’s army closed with the enemy, a dizzying display as the two masses crushed together.

“Come on!” I shouted.

“Where?”

I pointed at the clashing armies.

“What!?”

“Marcone gave us a shot,” I said. “But if she kills him, his banner falls, and the people behind him will scatter. Then it’s an army of them against a few of us. Then we all die.” I gripped his shoulder and felt myself giving him the crazy grin, the one I know I get sometimes.

And with my other hand, I grabbed the handle of the knife.

It was time.

The heartbeat of the city, panicked and furious, flooded through me.

Butters’s eyes got a little whiter.

I pointed at the army and said, “Cut me a way through there.”

Butters looked at me. Then at the armies clashing. Then at me again.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why not?”

We didn’t charge into the fray so much as aggressively shamble.

But into the fray we went.

Chapter

Thirty-two

What came next was . . .

Look. I’ve been in a few fights. I even did my bit in a war.

None of it was like this.

What I remember most was how unsteady the ground was. The earth had been torn to dirt by the forces brought to bear upon it, and then doused in rain so dense it needed a new word to describe it. Then thousands of beings started fighting to the death on top of it.

The ground was a mixture of terrain so slippery you couldn’t get your foot planted, terrain so boggy you couldn’t tear your foot back out of it again, blood, and the fallen bodies of the wounded, the dying, and the dead, mixed liberally together.