Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

The Winter Lady shrieked over the battle again, her voice pure, contemptuous fury, as one of her dwindling bodyguard of trolls smashed its way through the blocks of ice left in her wake. Another wave of enemy magic crashed upon the battlefield around her, and if she walked through it mainly untouched, the trolls around her screamed their pain and rage as fresh waves of enemy troops, driven by terror of Corb and his coterie, flung themselves at the Winter Lady.

My heart went into my throat as I saw a sword strike her and wedge itself into the flesh of her naked shoulder as if she had been a block of ice. Molly contemptuously touched the hand holding the weapon with her blade and snapped a kick up into the ice, shattering the frozen hand. She knocked the sword casually out of her flesh. Then she leaned down and almost sensually ran the edge of her icy blade beneath the edge of the enemy’s helmet. The blade opened the trooper’s throat in a wash of blood that burst into steam as it touched Molly’s pale, cold flesh, and she bubbled into chill, hungry laughter as it did.

God.

I’d heard that laugh coming from other lips.

Yeah.

No wonder she hadn’t gone home to visit the family for Sunday dinner.

In any other circumstance I could have imagined, I would have gone charging full steam toward Molly to assist and protect her. But the Winter Lady didn’t need my help.

She was the anvil.

As long as she and her little legion held together, the enemy was trapped, forced to try to finish them off. As long as the Winter Lady stood, if the Fomor fled, the Winter Fae would be among them, cutting them down without mercy. While Molly stood, the Fomor legion would be exposed, disorganized, vulnerable to the very attack that was happening now. Professional militaries were professional because of their ability to operate in unison more effectively than militaries with less training—like armed civilian defenders, for example. Chaos and disorganization among the enemy strongly favored our team.

Charging off to Molly’s rescue would defeat the entire point of what she was doing.

She had chosen to be the anvil. It was up to the rest of us to be the hammer.

So when Butters started turning to go toward her, I shouted, “No!” and pointed over his shoulder, with my staff, at Ethniu and her embattled cohesive knot of Fomor troops.

And I left my former apprentice to fight for her life against the King of the Fomor, his elite bodyguard of sorcerers, and overwhelming numerical odds, in the hope that I could help bring down a Titan before the Fomor did the same to Molly.

Butters fought through another forty yards. I know that doesn’t sound like much. You had to be there. The mud and water on the ground made every step a slightly different trap. The lighting was worse than a dance floor’s, alternating patches of mud and shadow and brilliant white light from the whirling Swords. And fighting is the most difficult cardio there is. Ten yards on that field would have been a stiff workout.

He did forty without slowing down. And there was nothing at all that was little about the Knight of Faith that night.

The shotguns of my volunteers, coming along in our wake, were being plied more sparingly now. Ammunition was low, but we’d lost so many people that finding more on their remains wasn’t out of the question—the people who were still alive were largely ones who had been to places like this before, or been taught by those who had. When they shot, they did it smoothly and in cold blood. And they shot once and moved on. Watching them wasn’t like watching an action movie. It was like watching a well-coordinated work crew all moving to the same song. Steady, rhythmic work, as they advanced under cover of their companions, fired two or three rounds on any available targets, then covered the advance of the companion rank coming behind them, reloading.

The hard part, during that advance, was not pitching in. The air wasn’t supercharging my use of magic any longer, and that meant I couldn’t be epic for very long before collapsing. If I’d tried another leaf-blower spell, it would have dropped me unconscious in the time it took us to move forward. It was simply too high an energy requirement now. I had the magic that was available to me and nothing more—and I had to save every punch I had for Ethniu.

And that meant that people died whom I maybe could have saved.

It wasn’t like I did nothing. My staff was still charged up, as if I’d loaded it up nice and heavy, and I knocked some bad guys around who would have wounded or killed my people. But I missed some. I don’t know. Maybe I could have done more. Or done it smarter somehow. But if you weren’t there, you can’t know how desperate it was. How everyone was terrified. What it does to you to see the power of darkness, of real, genuine terror, on gruesome display. Hell, even when it’s on your side, it ain’t pretty. Witnessing wrath and death being visited upon another being, no matter how righteously, is no easy thing.

The Knights of the Sword, some of the Sidhe we’d relieved, and my volunteers cut me a path through an army.

We got there first, but farthest out.

Ethniu had positioned herself atop a mound of corpses. And incipient corpses. There were plenty to go around, and they’d piled them into a hill maybe ten feet high. It meant that she could see the battlefield all around her, ply the blasts of her stolen spear with deadly effect. When the Eye had drawn in enough energy once more, she would have her choice of targets.

But it also meant that she could be seen.

She had arrayed her troops on the mound of corpses around her in thick ranks. These were the heavy guys, strong and spooky-quick in their thick armor, with their too-thick torsos and overlong arms. I only got to see one face, behind the helmets, and that was of a hairy, rough-looking humanoid. It was hard to see much. He’d been hit with a heavy club or hammer, hard enough to shatter his helmet, and there was only so much left of the face. Neanderthal? Hell, how long had the Fomor been enslaving humans?

They faced us now in solid, disciplined ranks, and Butters slowed. Even he didn’t think he was going to just waltz through that.

On the far side of Ethniu’s defensive position, Marcone’s forces broke through the chaos.

First through was the Archive. She looked like a girl, not terribly remarkable in any way, in her early teens, wearing a formal school uniform. The objects whirling in a lethally swift orbiting cloud around her started with broken fire hydrants and got bigger and heavier from there, up to and including a big police motorcycle. They were moving so fast that it was hard to see what the object was, until it hit something. Then there was a gruesome spray and it slowed down enough for you to see a hundred-and-twenty-pound dumbbell tearing an octokong in half, or a bundle of rusty barbed wire the size of an Earthball smash its way through entire troops of Huntsmen at once. None of them got it in the face, either—when they saw the gruesome machine that was the Archive coming, they tried to flee. The ground and the chaos of the battlefield didn’t always allow it.

When it didn’t, the results looked like some kind of accident involving pressurized tanks of various colors of paint.