Battle Ground (The Dresden Files 17)

I turned and saw the Winter Lady step from a particularly dense swirling cloud of frost crystals at street level, at the head of her army. Her long white hair streamed before her like a banner, hiding her face above her smiling lips, and she was clad in sparkles, a few patches of frost, and little else. The serpent tattoo that wove from one of her ankles to her wrist writhed and swirled inside her skin, slithering wildly in animated excitement. In one pale hand she bore a slender white sword. A squad of freaking trolls, each one a twelve-foot-tall, leathery, warty monstrosity with more muscle than the NFL, emerged from the suddenly swirling ice with her. Each of them held a sword as long as I was tall, which they lifted with dull-minded eagerness as they stepped out of the sleet and took position around the Winter Lady.

Power surrounded her, violent and lightning quick to my wizard’s senses, the power to turn heads and bend minds. To look upon her was to want, desperately, to throw yourself upon her sword, if that was what would please her, and the Winter mantle in me thrummed in pure primal resonance to her presence. The pure emotional need to either kill or die for that presence washed over me in a flood.

The Winter Lady let her head fall back and let out a banshee shriek that could have been heard from one end of Chicago to the other.

It was answered from thousands of throats, a great, baying chorus of screams.

Ah. So that’s what had been keeping Molly so busy lately.

She’d been building an army.

She lifted the pale white sword, and thousands of gleaming weapons rose in response. Then she dropped the sword, and the army of Winter went abruptly silent and rushed forward across the sleet-riddled ground.

Ethniu took this in without expression for several seconds and then whirled toward Mab, striding forward, as if intent upon finishing her—only to draw up short as Mab was surrounded by her bodyguard again, and as Grimalkin and the contingent of local Winter Fae appeared with them and fell in around Mab, adding their mass to the group protecting the Winter Queen.

Mab was not strong enough to do much more than lift her own head, as the Sidhe warriors surrounding her picked her up and drew her back into the solidity of the formation.

But she did that much and gave Ethniu a smirk of pure defiance.

The Titan screamed, and the Eye flared brighter for a second—before dying down again almost instantly.

Apparently, using the Eye before it was ready was inadvisable. Ethniu’s scream of rage turned into a shriek of pain, and she clamped both hands over the Eye and staggered.

Meanwhile, behind Ethniu, I finally spotted Corb, in the center of the Fomor legion and at the rear. He was shrieking orders, and the clicking along the enemy lines became frantic as they attempted to wheel their force to face the army of the Winter Lady.

But Mab wasn’t going to stop there.

ONE-EYE! called Mab’s psychic voice.

And the sky began to growl.

Lightning crashed down to the earth in a sudden curtain of spears of light, setting half a dozen of the trees in the park aflame, and then leapt back up into the sky, burning the air clean and clear as it went. There it formed a blazing cloud of electricity that suddenly flattened into a line that split open in a ragged tear, as, maybe four thousand feet up, the sky burst open and a rider emerged, mounted upon an eight-legged steed. The rider surged out of the hole in the sky.

And the Wild Hunt followed him.

Horns blew, wildly, a sound of haunting beauty and pure terror, as from the rip in the sky came scores of dark mounts and dark hounds, running as if on solid ground and ridden by the darkest talents of Winter—and they all followed the leader of the Hunt, an eight-legged horse half again as big as any of the others, and ridden by a dark, terrifying shadow bearing a bolt of living lightning in one mailed fist.

Beside the great rider, the Erlking himself lifted his horn to his lips and blew, and on that wailing note, in time with the percussion of Guns N’ Roses, the Wild Hunt dove down toward the earthbound forces of the Fomor, and terror went before them.

The enemy’s voices lifted in wails of dismay, and one of the cohorts of octokongs simply started scattering, turning upon their Fomor masters when they tried to restore order. And it got worse for the Fomor: The whole army had been in the midst of attempting to adjust to the presence of the Winter Lady’s cohorts, and they looked waddling and clumsy compared to the Winter cohorts, like . . .

Like seals or sea turtles caught on land.

In a flash of insight, I realized that Corb’s forces were used to operating and practicing underwater. Down there, stumbling into a comrade in arms during maneuvers was no big deal because it wouldn’t make anyone fall down, or trip up the following troops. Down there, there was about triple the physical space to operate within, and an extra dimension of possible movement to boot.

Dry land was a less forgiving place for imprecision. And they hadn’t been able to practice on land—not while maintaining their centuries-long seclusion underwater. As a result, the Fomor army couldn’t react or maneuver anywhere near as quickly as they should have been able to. They were too used to the sea.

If we’d fought them down there, I expect we wouldn’t have had a chance.

But we weren’t down there.

This was a realm of Air and Darkness.

The Wild Hunt swept down upon the most vulnerable and exposed troops in the enemy line—the poor saps on the very outside of the wheel—and it was like watching automated machinery in a meat-packing plant. Down swept the Wild Hunt in a great vertical wheel led by that monstrous eight-legged steed. There was a huge humming tone, like the buzz in the air around active Tesla coils, but bigger and more eerie, and a continuous lightning bolt as wide as a lane of traffic lashed out from the right hand of the shadowy leader of the Wild Hunt as he soared along the enemy line, wreaking carnage and chaos among them.

While the rest of the Hunt did not wield weapons so spectacular, their swords and spears, gripped by hands with centuries of experience, were plied to deadly effect. At the speed of their dive, the lightest brush from the edge of a blade carried terrible, focused power. Heads and limbs flew. Blood sprayed.

My Knight, came Mab’s psychic voice. We have perhaps sixty seconds before the Eye is once again loosed upon us. You must call her by then.

“There’s an army between me and there,” I protested. “Literally, an army.”

Gee, thanks, Sir Obvious, came the Winter Lady’s merry, excited, somehow panting psychic voice. I caught a glimpse of Molly across the battlefield, watched a heavy axe shatter upon the frost glittering upon her skin even as she flicked her white sword left and right with almost delicate motions, the lightest touch of the blade engulfing each of her foes in the obdurate ice of Winter’s heart. The smile on her face made her look wild and terrible and delighted, as the mountainous group of trolls behind her shattered each frozen foe to ice cubes with vast sweeps of their crude weapons.