Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  It hadn’t been anything like enough.

  In the center of the enemy line stood the Titan.

  Even across a battlefield, Ethniu’s sheer presence drew the eye with a terrible fascination. The ruddy light from the haze that yet surrounded everything that wasn’t the park gleamed from her armored flesh. She had shed everything that was not made of Titanic bronze, and her form was perfection of beauty, but for the smoldering glare of the Eye. Her presence was a kind of weight on my mind, a gravity that strained space around it and could not be ignored. Somehow, even from a hundred yards away, I could see the loveliness of her features clearly, too magnetic to ignore. She was a creature of sorrow turned to such rage that her beauty had become a knife that stabbed at the eyes of any who looked upon it.

  To look upon her was to look upon an older, more savage universe, a place where Titans strode the formless night and crushed mortal insects beneath their feet—to see a place so brutal and terrifying that even in our legends, humanity had chosen not to remember.

  Her hatred seethed through the smoldering glare of the Eye, in the light of fires of destruction she had brought to my city, a power far older and deeper and more deadly than I had yet known. Beside that power, the massed ranks of the Fomor around her seemed as frail and as transient as fleeting shadows.

  I tore my eyes away.

  Butters was staring at Ethniu, too. He gripped the empty hilt of Fidelacchius in both hands, white-knuckled.

  I nudged him and he jerked his chin toward me, his face pale.

  “Army doesn’t seem nearly so scary now, does it?” I said.

  He stared at me for a second. Then his lips lifted in an awful, sick-looking smile, and he exhaled several unsteady breaths that were laughter’s closest double in that moment. “Heh. Heh, heh, heh. Heh-heh.”

  Moving at exactly the same time, Ethniu and Mab stepped forward.

  “Stay behind me,” Mab murmured as the unicorn’s deadly presence brushed between Butters and me and took position between us and Ethniu. “Be ready.”

  I knew precisely how scary Mab was.

  I gotta say, it felt pretty awesome to watch that creepy unicorn plant its feet as if it intended to hold its ground before an onrushing train, bracing between that threat and us. Mab lifted her chin, faced Ethniu, and raised her slim pale hand.

  Her voice snapped out over the ground, sharp and threatening, like sudden crackling sounds from the face of a glacier. “Hold, crone. You will come no farther.”

  Ethniu faced that statement in silence and stillness for a moment.

  Then she simply smiled and strode a step closer.

  The two monsters faced each other for an endless beat, before Ethniu’s voice throbbed through the air, vibrating painfully through my bones, making my teeth buzz unpleasantly.

  “You began a mewling mortal,” Ethniu replied. Her voice was as loud inside my head as outside, infused with sheer undeniable power. When that voice spoke, reality itself would bow to suit it. “You will end the same way. Powerful as you are, you come of a younger world. A weaker world.”

  “A world that left you behind,” Mab said, mockery ringing in defiance of the power before her.

  Ethniu took a further step forward, the Eye glaring brighter, now cowling her head in scarlet light. “Treacherous little witch. The one who would not bow to my father. You will bow to me or face the Eye.”

  Mab pulled a play from my book.

  She threw back her head and laughed.

  It was a silvery sound, one that somehow shattered the stillness and closeness of the night. Scorn rang in that laughter, and genuine amusement—the cold, alien amusement of a spider. The laughter made the Fomor troops suddenly clutch at their heads. Their lines wavered as the heavily armored troops dropped their weapons and tried to wrap their long arms around their helmeted skulls.

  “You do not know me very well,” Mab said, that ear-shredding laughter still lurking in her voice, “do you?”

  Ethniu rolled another threatening pace forward. “Your pathetic alliance has abandoned you or waits for death. Your bodyguard is reduced to a pair of beasts. And the mortals will arrive only in time to mourn their dead.”

  Butters gasped at the force in that voice and staggered a step to one side. Blood had begun to trickle from one of his nostrils. I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him a little more into the shelter of Mab and the unicorn’s shadow.

  “Harry,” he whispered raggedly. “What the hell are we doing standing here? We should not be here.”

  I felt exactly the same way. These were powers older than the modern world of Chicago, beings that had seen years pass beyond the imagining of mere mortals, borne witness to events of myth and legend with their own eyes. To them, this night had simply been a skirmish, not a major metropolitan-scale apocalypse. Tens of thousands of people had died already this evening. Hundreds of thousands more might follow.

  And my daughter was somewhere behind me.

  The fear and rage I’d been keeping safely bottled all evening, all centered around that one little figure, probably sleeping in the safe room at Michael’s house, flickered with the most infinitesimal of sparks. That spark found ample fuel and began to burn like a tiny star inside me.

  Maggie.

  This bitch was not going to hurt my little girl.

  And with that flicker of knowledge, the kindling of will inside me, the knife at my hip throbbed with a slow, steady, quiet pulse.

  It had a heartbeat.

  “Steady,” I growled. “We’re right where we’re supposed to be.”

  Ethniu began striding forward, her giant form taking steps that would have made mine look like a toddler’s. “Yield!” she bellowed, and the force of it sent the skirt of Mab’s battle-mail dress flying backwards along with the unicorn’s unreasonably silken mane and tail, and Mab’s bloody starlit hair. “Bow!”

  The force of will that condensed on Mab in that word was so dense that I thought it was going to break something. Like maybe the universe. It was a sphere of pure psychic pressure so intense that I knew that if it had been directed at me, it would have compressed my mind into something too dense and inert to function, like a tiny diamond formed from crushed coal.

  I’m what you might call oppositionally defiant to authoritarian figures. Someone who doesn’t always do as he’s told. Maybe even a little bit of a troublemaker.

  That will would have crushed mine, flat.

  Period.

  It wasn’t a question of weakness or strength. This was simply power orders of magnitude beyond my ability to contest. The force of that will wasn’t even directed at me, and it was everything I could do not to fall to my knees and beg for forgiveness in the face of that terrible rage.

  Butters had an excellently ordered mind, but he hadn’t had the training I had in mental defenses. He let out a sob of utter despair and would have fallen if I hadn’t had his shoulder. I dropped to a knee with him, steadying him as he swayed, his entire body trembling violently.

  Except for one hand. It stayed steady on the Sword.

  I do not know what power she had won, what knowledge she had gained, what experience she had suffered, or what sacrifices she had made that enabled Mab to defy the absolute force of the Titan’s will.

  But though her shoulders bowed as if under enormous weight, though the Winter unicorn staggered beneath her, Mab was Mab. She steadied the beast, and her expression locked into a cold, steady mask. She drew in a breath, barely visible as a blur in the air compressed by the Titan’s will, and said, simply, “No.”

  The word rang out in pure silvery truth, her breath condensed into a Wintry plume.

  Ethniu’s will recoiled, shattering like a sphere of immaterial glass.

  The Titan roared her fury.

  And with a shriek of power meant to unmake the world, Ethniu turned the Eye upon Mab.

>   Chapter

  Twenty-nine

  I felt it in my guts and in my soul when the Eye struck Mab.

  She sat ramrod straight on the dark unicorn. Even as Ethniu screamed, Mab lifted her left hand, slim and pale, fingers spread evenly in a defensive gesture. Frost gathered upon her, upon the flanks of the unicorn, crusted the ground all around her, even as the horrible power of the Eye washed over Mab.

  The sound alone, as those two sources of power met, was enough to drive a strong mind mad. I couldn’t have told you what it sounded like, specifically. It was too huge a noise for that. I can tell you that I started screaming out in pure reflexive protest against that sound, and that my voice was lost in the din. The Winter unicorn reared, trumpeting its defiance, and the dark saber spiraling from its forehead almost seemed to drink in a portion of that fury, while Mab flawlessly adjusted her balance upon its back. The concrete beneath her buckled and shattered into sand. Fire and lightning and wind whirled in a cyclone centered upon her. Bits of her hair, blown wildly by the wind, blackened and disintegrated. The fine mail covering her body was riven by the flood of energy, turning from bright mail to the dark of verdigris, and then tearing as individual rings changed from metal to some kind of blackened residue, leaving smudges of soot over pale skin.

  Butters and I were like two men before a flood taking desperate shelter behind a stone.

  On pure instinct, I had gathered my shield around us in a half dome that enveloped us entirely. The energy wasn’t even being directed at me—I was just trying to stop some of the random splatter that got past Mab and came in our direction.

  Again, I was operating out of my weight class. The mere backwash from the Eye was almost more than I could handle. My shield bracelet heated again, and I knew I was going to have a fresh band of burn scars to go along with the old burns on the hand itself. The effort I put forward to protect us would have killed me on another night. Tonight, the power in the air made it simple, and a dozen layers of my best shielding took the brunt of the wild expenditure of energy without faltering.

  I could feel the power of the Eye as it touched my shield, feel the pure, raw, undiluted hate that drove whoever wielded it. This hate wasn’t any mere mortal emotion. This was hate of the original vintage, hate as old as the universe itself, hate as hard and sharp and cold as steel, hate as hot as the fires of Hell, hate so vital, so vicious, so vitriolic, that it surpassed the understanding of my merely mortal mind.

  Ethniu hated me. Me, personally, though she did not know me. The Titan hated me, hated me on a level I could not begin to understand. That I walked the earth and drew breath was enough to earn her everlasting fury.

  But that was just a shadow of what she felt toward Mab.

  That was personal.

  Mab, slender and beautiful and deadly on her black unicorn, defying the power of the Eye as it blasted away bits of her hair, as it rent and rendered her armor. Her will manifested around her as cold, pure light, a sphere of diamond radiance that dispersed the most vicious efforts of the Eye, sent power spilling out from her and around her, like a fast-flowing river crashing into an obdurate stone. In that withering light and fury, she was a being of distilled intellect and will, pure determination and cold defiance. In that fury, she was a shadow, an outline, dark and terrible and undeniable, standing against the tide unmoving.

  In that moment, I saw with my own eyes why she was called the Queen of Air and Darkness.

  And, somehow, she did it. She stopped the Eye. She stood before that undeniable power and was not moved.

  The red glare of the Eye faded.

  For a long moment, Mab was still, her body clad only in remnants of her mail, in blackened residue and scarlet streaks and burns, her left hand raised and extended in defiance. Smoke rose from her.

  Then she fell, suddenly boneless, from the unicorn’s back, collapsing to the ground as if too weak to remain upright.

  Ethniu stared forward for a moment before lifting her face to the sky and crying out in vicious, spiteful triumph. She raised her hands and threw them forward, and like puppets directed by her will, the entire Fomor legion groaned and began to pace forward in stomping unison, gathering momentum like a single massive beast.

  The silence gave way before the sound of boots tromping upon the ground. Like a tide, the Fomor advanced across the field, eerie signal clicks coming before them like rain before a truly terrible storm. They crossed the open field and there was nothing further to stop them.

  And, I realized, nothing to shelter them.

  They had marched into the open field.

  And in the vaults of my mind, Mab’s voice rang out in sudden exultation. NOW, LADY MOLLY.

  From the north, a fresh, chill zephyr swirled down through the city and into the park. Somewhere along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, a gull cried out in sudden excitement.

  And music began to play.

  At first it was just a few electric guitar notes, almost at random, bouncing among the buildings and echoing over the haze-covered city. Then I recognized the song.

  The opening notes of the Guns N’ Roses hit “Welcome to the Jungle” began to echo from the buildings behind us, Slash’s guitar sending those tones bouncing around the concrete and towers, somehow resonating with the steel and stone of the streets and buildings of the city. Chicago herself became the speaker, music ringing off every surface, setting the ground to quivering in resonance.

  Chicago. The place that invented the phrase “concrete jungle.”

  Molly had chosen just the right song.

  The enemy hesitated, eyes shifting left and right, scanning above and below. Fear hit their ranks like a slow, powerful wave, causing steps to falter, formations to stretch and warp.

  And then the primal opening vocals and the lead guitar line came in.

  And Winter came with them.

  Mab’s cohort of personal guardsmen came flying out of the night, as nimble and graceful as if they’d been on wires, and they landed around us, congealed into a formation, and locked shields.

  The northern sky split with a sudden rush of wind that carried the dry, frozen clarity of the arctic, and with it came a rush of . . . not snowflakes, so much as frozen chips of arctic clouds, hurled forward in a blinding wave. I had to lift a hand to shield my face and eyes, and when I lowered my arm, figures in armor of blue and green and deep purple hues had appeared in ranks on the street, on low rooftops, crouching on the frozen corpses of automobiles. Each succeeding gust of wind seemed to blow more of them into reality. First by the dozen. Then by the score. Then by the hundred.

  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 gre
at, 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.