Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

“Infriga!” I roared, pointing my staff at the ground to one side of the charging line of Jotnar.

Power coursed out of the heart of me, into the ancient oak of my wizard’s staff, focused and concentrated within its length by the runes and sigils carved along it. The tool leapt in my hand like a firefighter’s high-pressure hose, and I had to clamp both hands on it and strain every muscle just to hold steady, runes glowing the same bright green-gold as Alfred’s eyes on Demonreach.

A howling lance of glacier-blue, coherent, observable, utter cold flooded into the night. The very summer air screamed in protest at the sudden, wild shift in temperature, with steam and mist boiling off me in a cloud. The beam struck the ground before the oncoming Jotnar—and where that beam struck, a wall of absolutely crystalline ice formed, twenty feet thick, thirty feet high, and curving forward like a breaking wave.

Howling in time with the wailing air, I slewed the beam from left to right across the path of the oncoming Jotnar—who collided with my barrier with all the power and momentum of a freight train. There was an enormous roar, a series of impacts, and cracks exploded through the clear ice in a spiderweb of crazed lines.

But the wall held.

I sagged as the last of the spell’s energy washed out of me and would have fallen if Ramirez hadn’t steadied me. My vision blurred for a second, and I swiped a hand at my eyes, where frost crystals had frozen throughout my eyelashes and dragged them down in a wintry veil over my vision.

By the time I’d cleared it, Jotnar were roaring. Swords and axes exploded into flame as though they’d been coated in napalm and set alight. The flaming weapons were brought crashing down upon the Winter ice with echoing cracks like the bellow of cannons. Light rushed through the prism of the slowly shattering wall, dancing through hectic spectrums of color. Fragments of ice exploded outward in deadly showers. Screaming jets of steam erupted from each strike, some of them whistling like a haunted hell-bound train.

I dragged my gaze over to my grandfather, who stood with his legs planted solidly. Ebenezar held his hands at his sides, fingers wide, palms toward the ground, and the very air around him shivered with multiple forces of energy.

My wall of ice cracked and fell within seconds, the Jotnar hammering and hacking it down, heedless of the deadly jets of steam.

But a few seconds had been enough.

The old man abruptly opened his eyes, lifted his upper lip in a snarl, turned up his palms, and raised them, slow, shaking, as though they were carrying a weight too unthinkable to be readily quantified as he growled, “Plimmyra.”

The Jotnar plunged ahead, screaming, their boots hammering the ground—

—and then the very earth bubbled and without ceremony simply swallowed them. Jotnar fell, with blaring shouts of confusion and rage, thrashing in ground that had a moment before been solid and was now, I could see, so inundated with water that it had become something very much like quicksand.

The giants thrashed and struggled, and I turned to see the old man gasp and waver as the energy of the spell left him. He braced a hand on the concrete edge of the parking garage, traded a look with Cristos, and then the pair of them started cackling, half in exhaustion and half in satisfaction.

The leader of the Einherjaren stared gleefully for a second, as the Jotnar thrashed and stumbled over one another, wallowing clumsily. Then he let out a howl of glee, raised his axe, and just vaulted over the railing to the street level twenty feet below him. The rest of the revenant warriors followed him in a wave of joyous howls. I thought I could hear ankles breaking as they hit the ground.

They just didn’t care.

What followed was . . . one of those things I still have dreams about sometimes.

It was like looking at something straight out of mythology. Warriors with their axes and spears went screaming for the Jotnar. Their weight was utterly insignificant compared to that of the giants, and they ran over the surface of the inundated earth with no more difficulty than they would a moderately muddy field.

Flaming Jotun weapons rose and fell, and if the giants had been quick to cover ground, they were just too damned big and too damned shackled in their movements to respond with sufficient speed. The Norse warriors ducked and leapt and weaved as enormous weapons came scything toward them. Mostly, they were successful. But I saw one man crushed like an insect by a blow from the flat of a Jotun axe. Another was spitted like a damned pig, and the man screamed as the flaming sword lifted him high and burned his guts into a cloud of black ash. Still another was seized by a Jotun’s meaty, thick-fingered hand, and the giant simply lifted the man’s head and shoulders to his broad mouth—and bit them off with about as much effort as I would use on a chocolate bunny.

Dozens of the Einherjaren met horrible fates.

And then it was their turn.

Huge the Jotnar might have been, but the Einherjaren knew how to fight them. As some warriors engaged a Jotun’s weaponry, sacrificing their lives to do so, others followed through the openings their companions’ deaths had created. Their great swords and broad axes began to swing and to hack the trapped Jotnar. Einherjaren thrust their blades between enormous links of mail where necessary and hacked at Jotun thighs and groins wherever possible. The giants were huge, but they were made of flesh and blood.

The fight became brutal beyond anything you could see in a movie theater. Small rivers of Jotun blood flowed. One gout caught the leader of the Einherjaren full in the face, and the man went up like the Human Torch—and as he burned, he continued hacking away with his axe until finally a charred black mannequin fell to the earth. A dozen Einherjaren together leapt against a Jotun’s chest. Two of them were crushed to death on the way in, but the others overbore the giant, sending it crashing to its back in the quicksand, where they hacked at its face and neck with their weapons, screaming—until another Jotun’s sword scythed across the ground at thigh level and ripped every single one of them in half.

Another Einherjar leapt up to sink a knife into that Jotun’s thigh, held on, and with his other hand slammed the detonator into his brick of explosive compound. It went off with a great cough of sound that slammed against my chest—and severed the Jotun’s leg at midthigh, sending it crashing and dying to the earth.

The Jotnar were killing the Einherjaren in job lots—and the Vikings just did not care.

They died, shouting and laughing and singing as they met fates more horrible than I want to think about or could easily describe.

And, by God, they took Jotnar with them.

The leader of the Jotnar, with his horn, thrashed his way to the edge of the quicksand and gained solid ground with one foot. A hawk shrieked defiance and plunged from the sky, sweeping along parallel to the ground in a burst of speed—and becoming a freaking fourteen-foot African elephant as it reached the Jotun.

Listens-to-Wind hit the Jotnar’s leader with the speed of a hawk and the mass of a pachyderm, and tree-trunk-sized ribs snapped with cracks of miniature thunder. The Jotun fell back into the waterlogged earth, while the elephant’s tusks ripped at his face and throat, gouging and tearing holes in flesh with raw strength and savage power.