by Jim Butcher
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.
Then octokongs and Huntsmen reached the fight, following in the wake of the Jotnar’s charge. Massive fire poured down from the skyscraper across the street, but it couldn’t stop them from coming forward. Momentum turned against the Einherjaren. Three more of them went up in explosions, laughing like madmen as the blasts took foes with them into death.
But there were more Fomor than there were Einherjaren.
The tide turned.
Just as it did, the world suddenly went silent, as if reality had taken a deep breath and held it. There was a low quiver in the concrete beneath my feet, a hideous pressure in the air, and then, from the direction of the lake, a column of red-white energy, pure power, hammered into the skyscraper where Marcone’s fire teams were wreaking havoc on the enemy and slewed across it in a path of utter ruin.
The building shattered like a toy.
I stood staring in pure shock as the power of the Eye of Balor tore apart a modern skyscraper as if it had been built from balsa wood. Windows shattered. Steel melted and ran like water. The building groaned in agony and then simply collapsed in upon itself in a roar and a wash of fire and smoke and a vast storm of rising dust.
In seconds, an edifice that had required the hands and wills of thousands of men and women had been reduced to smoke and rubble.
Ethniu had taken the field.
The Last Titan had come for Chicago.
I staggered as the cloud of dust billowed over us, and then recoiled again as, seconds later, the broad, ugly form of a Jotun congealed out of the dust and let out a roar, raising its axe high over the parking garage in both hands.
“Run!” screamed the old man.
And then the vast flaming axe crashed down into the ceiling above us and shattered the world.
Chapter
Sixteen
There was no time.
I gave Ebenezar a push, getting him out of the way of falling stone. Ramirez had had the same idea, pulling from the other side, and had more momentum than I did. They got clear.
Several tons of concrete plus one Jotun-sized axe came crashing down toward me.
Someone hit me in the hip like a linebacker, legs driving. The impact lifted me off my feet and carried me to one side as the roof came down with a roar and a wash of dust and smoke. I covered my head with my arms and rolled in the direction that seemed away from all the falling stuff, dimly aware of someone else with me doing more or less the same thing.
By the time I had wits enough to look around me, I found myself at the edge of a ragged hole in the parking garage’s floor leading to the level below.
Next to me, covered in grey dust and a white cloak, was Butters in his sports goggles. The wiry little guy wore tactical gear and one of Charity Carpenter’s armored vests, this one made with titanium scales fixed to a Kevlar undergarment. His shock of black hair stood up every which way, dust coating it almost entirely.
“Holy smokes!” he said. “Was that a giant with a flaming axe?!”
“Butters!” I said.
The little guy blinked at me through the dust on his goggles and flashed me a huge and sudden grin. “Hey,” he said, “I just straight up saved your life! That’s Sir Waldo to you, buddy.”
Outside the parking garage, the Jotun roared. Shadows shifted through the dust and smoke as the thing drew back that axe and swept it around in a horizontal arc. Both of us threw ourselves as flat as we could, still shielding our heads with our arms as the weapon smashed through the parking garage like a wrecking ball.
Chunks of concrete zinged around like shot from some unthinkably large cannon. One piece hit my thigh, through the spell-armored leather of my duster. It was like taking a glancing blow from a sledgehammer, and not even Winter’s disregard for pain could block all of it, and I let out a shout that was at least fifty percent pure surprise.
“Fall back!” Ebenezar was roaring in the background. “Regroup at the next block!”
Butters bounced back to his feet. The little guy was never going to be physically intimidating, but the past few months of training with the Carpenters to be a Knight had made him quick and tough as nails. “Come on!”
One of my legs was just sort of hanging there uselessly, but I managed to struggle to the other one, holding on to my staff with both hands, coughing and choking on the dust in the air.
The world gasped and went scarlet again, red light flooding through the haze of war. The air screamed with unnatural power as the Eye of Balor unleashed raw destruction upon the city, and my heart took a terrified flutter. I had only once before witnessed destructive power on that order of magnitude, and that had been at the will of the Fallen Angel himself—and even then it had been carefully constrained, used for a purpose.
Ethniu had no such restraints.
The air and the ground shook as another building, out there in the haze, came crashing down.
Butters staggered over to me and got enough of himself under my arm to help me move forward. “What was that?”
“Magic superweapon,” I gasped. We hurried for the ramp down to the first level. I couldn’t tell who was left in the garage—the choking haze was just too damned thick. “Bunch of us came up here to back up Marcone’s people. Guess we provided enough resistance that Ethniu had to break out the big guns.” I coughed, spat, and said, “What are you doing here? Mister Sunshine arrange for you to be where you’re needed?”
“Uh . . .” Butters said, drawing the sound out. “Now, don’t be mad, Harry.”
“What?” I asked, and I might have sounded a little grumpy.
“Me and Sanya kind of wound up by Mac’s place,” he said.
“Butters,” I said warningly.
“We took a vote,” he said.
We had just made it to the bottom of the ramp when I heard a sound behind me and I looked back to see a trio of octokongs come . . . sort of slurping across the ground, teeth bared in a furious mutant-gorilla grimace, weird weapons in hand.
I threw up my shield bracelet, rammed my will through it, and brought up a dome of sparkling green-gold light, easily seen in the haze and dust, just as their weapons began to fire.
I had been questioning the enemy’s wisdom in handing all the octokongs what amounted to shotguns. But I hadn’t been thinking. In the chaos of a city on fire, within the limited visibility of the smoke and darkness, nobody could see very well—and certainly not well enough for reliable precision shooting. “Firing thataway” with a shotgun was probably just about as close to accurate as it would be possible to get.
I dropped my staff, reached for my own coach gun in its scabbard, remembered that the staff had been helping support me, and fell hard against Butt
ers, who grunted and crashed to a knee.
The octokongs kept relentless fire against my shield as I went down, and to my shock another dozen of the things came swarming along the walls and roof of the ramp, staying out of the line of fire of the original trio as they kept shooting.
Behind them came a sphere of wavery aqua light. In the haze, I could make out a tall, slender, frog-faced form at the center of the sphere. One of the Fomor themselves, then, driving his charges forward. The shape lifted a hand and sent a crackling bolt of green lightning crashing against my shield.
That one was some serious sorcery. I held it off, but it took a gasp of effort and energy to keep the shield in place.
My leg twitched when I tried to make it work, which was better than a moment before, but not good enough to get me out of this one. “Butters, get clear!” I screamed.
“Not yet!” he said. “Hold the shield!”
My ears picked out running footsteps from up the ramp—no, from the opposite ramp, the one leading up the other side of the parking garage.
I saw the shielded Fomor abruptly turn, just as an enormous, friendly voice boomed, “Hello!”
And the haze of battle vanished, burned away by an aurora of silver-white light around a curved, gleaming Sword. Sanya, Knight of the Cross, six and a half feet of muscle, dark-skinned and graceful, whipped the shining form of Esperacchius through an arc, and it was as if the Sword itself cleared and cleaned the air before it as it moved. It struck through the Fomor’s arcane shields as if they had not existed, and before the foe could shriek, its head had jumped from its shoulders.
The big man’s teeth shone white against his dark skin as he lobbed something calmly down among the octokongs and darted smoothly to one side in a sweep of white cloak.
“Grenade!” I screamed, and sent more power into the shield.
A second later, there was a sound you could chew, it was so thick, and a wash of power smashed against my shield, overloading what the bracelet could handle and scorching my wrist.
Octokongs tumbled from the walls, wounded, stunned, some of them dying.
Sanya let out a roar and reappeared, charging them, flanked on both sides by a pair of enormous wolves—Will Borden and the Alphas.
“Now, you stay down, Harry,” Butters snarled.
And with a clarion shriek of choral fury, Fidelacchius’s blade of pure light sprang to life in his hands, and Butters zipped up the ramp, his cloak flying behind him.
Between the werewolves and the Knights, it took maybe ten seconds.
Then there was a low rumble behind me, and Karrin Murphy appeared, wearing her motorcycle jacket and riding her old Harley, sticking out her good leg to support it as she brought the bike to a growling halt.
I eyed the motorcycle. Then her. “How?”
“Like I don’t keep this old baby behind wards,” she said. “The Ordo Lebes did it for me years ago. And bikes are the only things that can get through the streets.” She checked around her and then up the ramp. “Come on. There’re more of them coming up from the lake.” She drew a radio out of her pocket, turned it on, and said into it, “This is Valkryie. I’ve got Booster Gold.”
“Hey,” I objected.
“Roger that, Valkryie,” came a calm voice over the radio. Marcone. “Be advised that Winter One has chosen her ground. All remaining forces in the north will rally at Wrigley. The enemy command has turned south. I recommend—”
The world went red again. Scarlet light flooded the night and left us in deep shadow. Murphy’s radio went up in a shower of sparks. The quivering roar that followed the blast of the Eye was less savage this time. Ethniu was farther away.
“Son of a bitch,” Murphy swore in annoyance. She tossed the radio aside and reached into her coat pocket for a second. “My bike is old enough not to care much about magic, and our radios at command and control are shielded, but the field units aren’t lasting long.” She took a battery out of her other pocket and started popping it into the unit.
“I told you,” Butters said. He shrugged out of a backpack that he’d been wearing under the cloak. “They don’t have enough vacuum tubes.”
“We can’t stay here,” Sanya said, nodding to the corpses of the octokongs and the Fomor.
Even as he did, I saw one of the dead octokong’s wounds begin to . . . bubble. Its dark blood began to boil up out of the wounds with little hissing sounds, and a stench, dizzying in its intensity, began to fill the air of the ramp. The corpse actually quivered with the intensity of the chemical reaction, bits of flesh liquefying and sloughing off.
Murphy nodded, her nose wrinkling, and said to me, “Can you walk?”
“Kind of,” I said. My leg muscles tightened when I told them to, but when I tried to stand on it, the limb still buckled limply.
She nodded and said, “Get on the bike. We can’t stay here. CPD is bringing everyone they can get to the heart of the Loop and trying to evacuate.”
I got to my feet and staggered to the Harley. I swung my hurt leg over in a burst of tactile white noise, and Murphy turned the bike around toward the exit on the back side of the parking garage, opposite the lake.
“Just curious. How long did you stay at Mac’s?” I asked.
“Long enough to get everyone organized,” she said. “There’s no point discussing things with you once you get all chivalrous.”
I opened my mouth in annoyance and then closed it again. “You shouldn’t be here,” I said.
“Yeah, well, tough.”
I leaned my chin down onto her hair and closed my eyes. I felt her weight shift as she pressed her shoulder blades against my ribs. It was just for a moment, and for that moment I let myself feel. Intense relief at seeing her well. Intense fear at knowing that she was in danger. And pain. Loss. Terror. Confusion. Bewilderment. For a moment, I struggled against the sense that what was happening, all around me, could not be happening, could not be real.
But it was real.
Karrin found my hand and squeezed, hard.
I leaned my cheek against her hair and whispered, “Yoshimo and Wild Bill are dead. Probably Chandler, too. Black Court. And I don’t know if Ramirez or my grandfather made it out of the garage.”
She let out a breath and whispered back, “Oh, Harry.”
My stomach quivered. My eyes burned with tears that could not be given form if I was to hold it together. Which I had to do. There was no time to break down, no time for tears.
War leaves you precious little time to be human. It’s one of the more horrible realities about it.
I nodded, just enough so that she could feel my chin move, and the moment was over.
The four wolves loped easily forward, two taking places on our flanks, and two more ghosting silently out ahead of us, and Sanya and Butters came trotting along behind, keeping the pace, while I worked on preventing my hurt leg from just bouncing along the ground. It was recovering from the blow, stunned muscles sluggishly regaining sensibility, but for the moment I was pretty gimpy.
There was no way to ride the Harley at proper speed, not with all the dead cars as obstacles. I was surprised the thing kept on rumbling at all. Murphy rolled us slowly and carefully through the parking garage and didn’t ease out of the building until one of the wolves appeared from the haze ahead of us, evidently signaling the all clear.
“Harry,” called Butters from behind me.
I turned my head and took the backpack he offered me. It was light.
He nodded at the pack, grinning.
I opened it.
Inside was a human skull, bleached and ancient and battered—and an old friend.
The skull’s empty eye sockets suddenly flooded with light the color of campfire embers, and the thing shook as though awakening from a sleep. Bob had been my assistant for most of my adult life. “Oh, hey there, Harry! Long time no see!”
“Terrified!” Bob piped up. “How’s about we all pick a direction and run?”
“No can do,” I said. “I’m working. What the hell is happening here?”
The world went red again. This time I saw the beam tear a building apart, farther south of us, bringing it crashing down like a sandcastle before the tide, and the light lingered in the air, tinging the haze an ugly shade of scarlet.
We all just stared at that for a second. No one made a sound.
“Big bad mojo,” Bob said. His tone was . . . worried. “I haven’t ever seen anything on this scale, boss. The amount of power flying around out there is more than it can handle.”
“More than what can handle?” I demanded.
“Reality,” Bob said. “That’s partly why the Tuatha fought the Fomor to begin with. Balor and his stupid Eye.”
“Whoa, wait,” I said. “Reality can break? That can happen?”
“Obviously it can happen,” Bob said, annoyed. “There’s . . . a structure to the universe, right? And like every structure it has limits. And a point of catastrophic failure.”
“So when Ferrovax the dragon is bragging about cracking the world . . .”
“He’s not kidding,” Bob said, nodding vigorously. “And it’s a process that feeds on itself. Like, you got about eight million terrified humans running around town right now, providing more and more energy for available use.”
Murphy rolled out onto the street and turned west. I felt weirdly like the subject of a presidential motorcade, what with the Knights and werewolves running escort. “So what can we expect?” I asked.
“Chaos,” Bob said.
“More specific?”
“Impossible! Widespread insanity for the mortals, maybe. Maybe transmissible insanity. Hallucinations, tulpas, and outright unintentional creation of things right out of people’s imaginations. Animals and people changing form or nature. The breakdown of Newtonian physics. Hell, even the quantum-level rules might change, with consequences that are literally unimaginable. Two plus two might equal five. Twilight Zone stuff. I don’t know. No one knows. You can’t predict chaos because it’s chaos, Harry.”