by Jim Butcher
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.
There was an enormous exhalation, and the Winter unicorn suddenly stood in front of me, stamping its spiked hooves impatiently.
Mab took the psychic phone back, her thoughts mildly reproachful. Have I ever asked you to accomplish an easy task, my Knight? Tonight seems an unlikely place to begin.
Well. She had me there.
Butters, evidently, was not privy to Mab’s conversation with me. He was staring at the unicorn. “Uh. Harry?”
“Dammit,” I muttered.
I swallowed and took a deep breath. Then I seized the unicorn by the mane, hoped to God it didn’t notice how much my hands were shaking, and leapt onto its back. I turned back to Butters and offered him my hand. “No time. Trust me.”
“Ah hell,” Butters said in a note of open complaint. But he’d already put his hand in mine before he began speaking, and I hauled him up onto the unicorn’s back with me.
If our weight was any burden to the unicorn, it wasn’t obvious from the way the creature moved. I could feel the thing quivering in its desire to spill blood. No sooner had Butters swung up behind me and gotten settled than the beast took off. If I hadn’t ridden a supernaturally powerful equine earlier that year, both of us would have fallen off on our asses—and even so, Butters had to cling to me hard to keep from taking a tumble. The unicorn forged through the little sea of blue- and purple-armored allies who glided from its path, and then we were on open ground and racing toward the enemy.
I’ve ridden horses more than most, and I feel qualified to say that riding a unicorn in battle is an experience I was unlikely to forget.
In the first place, there wasn’t really a sense of up-and-down to the way the creature ran. In that sense, it felt more like riding a motorcycle, though I had more experience with horses. The only times I’d been on a motorcycle had been with . . .
Murph.
The pain hit my heart.
Power flooded into me, more than I’d ever felt, all of it in the space of a couple of seconds. My heart rate skyrocketed, my hair stood on end, and my body temperature had begun to climb. My brain took note of those things while my heart kept aching and more and more power rushed in.
Magic and emotion are intertwined so strongly that it can be hard to tell where one begins and the other ends. Emotion makes the most immediate and ready fuel for magical power, though it can have some odd effects on what you’re trying to do. Fuel a love spell with rage and you’re likely to get some odd side effects, for example.
But for causing pain, there wasn’t better fuel than pain itself. So, though it hurt, viciously, I fought to take hold of that power and started shaping it with my thoughts as the unicorn rushed forward. But I’d never had that much energy rush into me that quickly before.
Hell’s bells, what had just happened to me?
Flickers of green-gold light began to gather along the unicorn’s central horn, and I suddenly understood.
I had various tools, like my staff, created to help me gather, focus, and direct power.
As did Mab.
It was everything I could do just to hold on, and the unicorn had more acceleration than a Maserati. We started closing the distance to the enemy with alarming rapidity.
I shoved my staff at Butters and shouted, “Hold this!”
He fumbled and managed to take it, and I leaned forward and laid my right palm on the unicorn’s neck.
The creature’s horn flared with pure power, became incandescent with gold-green light, and I felt the humming channels of power rushing through the body of the immortal creature, just like when I sent energy into my staff—only that was like comparing a drinking fountain to a firefighting company’s equipment. I might have been holding more energy than I ever had before, but this creature had been designed to focus and enhance Mab’s power. I couldn’t have overloaded it if I’d tried.
So when we were about fifty yards from the enemy, I sent that stored energy through my right hand into the Winter unicorn, focused my will and intent, modified the shape of the spell on the fly, and howled, “Forzare!”
By the time I’d done that, we were upon them.
A wave of pure kinetic energy, amplified by the unicorn’s horn, rushed out ahead of us like a fast-moving river and broke upon the enemy in a tsunami. Bodies flew from our path as if swatted away by God’s
heaviest driver. I don’t mean they flew back, either. I threw them up, like thirty feet up, and before they could come down again we’d sprinted underneath them, so that the unicorn’s hooves were constantly coming down on open ground. From a distance, it must have looked like some enormous gardener had taken a hurricane-force leaf blower to the enemy.
“Holy moly!” shouted Butters.
The unicorn let out a bellowing sound that would have been more appropriate to maybe a bear or a tiger or a low-flying Concorde, and for several seconds the world became a confusing blur of bodies twirling into the air, screams, and flying thunderbolts of excess energy bleeding into the night.
The unicorn blew past the enemy lines and into the clear on the other side—and we started taking gunfire almost instantly. The unicorn didn’t slow down but started running serpentine, snaking left and right with what felt like enough g-force to give me whiplash. Targets moving like that are difficult to hit even in a practice scenario, much less in adrenaline-charged real life, but I was so busy holding on for my life that I couldn’t possibly have brought a counterattack to bear. I couldn’t even see where the fire was coming from.
I looked over my shoulder and caught a frenzied glimpse of King Corb bearing a staff of what looked like coral, pointing a finger at the ground ahead of us and shrieking.
And I realized that the problem with having all that power to work with was that the enemy got to work with it, too.
The ground ahead of us suddenly darkened. The unicorn tried to twist and evade it, but Corb had timed it perfectly and the creature was moving too fast.
I poured my will into my beleaguered shield bracelet, bringing it up in a tight sphere around Butters and me.
The unicorn hit the patch of darkened earth and plunged into it as if it were liquid. Salty brine had mixed with the earth, rendering it into the next best thing to quicksand, arresting the unicorn’s momentum abruptly, and Butters and I flew over its head, hit the ground on the other side, and started rolling.
We were heading straight for Columbus, bouncing like a cannonball. If we hit that concrete wall along the upper level of the park, we’d be splattered against the inside of my own shield, so I started layering its interior with kinetic force and letting the outer layers be ripped off by our impacts with the ground, slowing us and shedding our energy in the form of heat. We left a trail of bouncing ball prints in scorched earth and concrete, and by the time we hit the wall, we’d shed enough momentum that it didn’t feel much worse than a moderate traffic collision—which is to say it was loud and terrifying and painful, but we survived.
It left me and Butters lying on a sidewalk against a concrete wall, alone at the rear of the enemy lines.
And it also left us staring at Listen and a platoon of his turtlenecks, not fifty feet away, operating several infantry mortars and holding enough guns to invade Texas.
Listen and I moved at the same time.
His gun snapped up.
I thrust out my hand at the earth and snarled, “Forzare!”
My intention had been to use the spell to bulldoze a berm of earth into place between us. But I still wasn’t used to this turbocharged magic thing.
Oops.
The energy I’d sent out formed a berm all right—and then it kept on pushing and building it, like a rogue wave on Hawaii’s North Shore. Maybe eighteen or twenty tons of earth hit Listen and his people and swamped them.
And at the same time, someone punched me in the belly on my left side, right under the floating ribs, and drove the breath out of me. The whole left side of my abdomen suddenly felt wet.
Harry! screamed Molly’s psychic voice, full of alarm.
I felt the gaze of the Titan as her head swiveled toward me like a machine-gun turret, and her features, her presence, became suffused with pure rage.
I managed not to foul my underwear and fought to draw a breath as Ethniu kicked a panicked octokong out of her way and began striding toward me.
“Oh boy,” Butters breathed. He crouched over me and ripped my shirt open. His eyes widened as he stared down at me; then he shot a glance over his shoulder at the Titan, who was rapidly drawing nearer.
Butters drew my hands to the spot where I’d been punched and pressed them down. “Hold them here, Harry. Keep up the pressure. I’ll be right back.”
And then the little guy stood up, his limbs shaking, his face ashen, and put himself between me and a goddamned Titan.
I felt my teeth stretch into a wolf’s smile. Hell. If Butters could do that, I could do my part. It was hard. But I drew in enough breath and focused my will, infusing my voice with Power.
“Titania,” I wheezed. “I summon thee.”
Maybe half a dozen of the armored foot soldiers around Ethniu, confused and looking for direction, sensed her intent and went flying forward like hounds on a trail.
I labored for another breath, and to hold my hands where Butters had put them.
Butters lifted Fidelacchius and brought the blade to life in a buzz of angelic choral fury.
“Titania!” I rasped, louder. The Name echoed weirdly, or it seemed that way to me. “I summon thee!”
The first of the heavily armored ape-armed troopers reached Butters.
And the little guy went full Jedi on his ass.
Fidelacchius sliced the trooper’s weapon in half and took part of the arm with it. A second swing split the trooper’s heavy shield in half with the rest of him, and the pieces fell in separate directions. The other five hesitated—and Butters went up the middle like a human Cuisinart, striking down three more in less time than it would have taken to call his name.
Ethniu strode closer, shouting something in a tongue I did not understand, seized the corpse of one of my volunteers from the earlier engagement by the calf, and flung it overhand at Butters and his remaining opponents, smashing all three of them out of her way.
But the little guy had bought me time enough.
I drew in my third wheezing breath as the fire of the Eye began to kindle, poured my will into my voice, and screamed, “TITANIA! I SUMMON THEE!”
Chapter
Thirty
Titania doesn’t like me on the best of days.
It’s hard to blame her; I killed her child.
So when I completed the summoning, without anything like any kind of control over the being I was calling in, I wasn’t really expecting roses and chocolate.
Neither was I expecting to get struck by a bolt of lightning.
But here we are.
There was an enormous sound, a flash of light, a shock against my body like a spray of frozen fire. And the next thing I knew, I was lying flat on my back, wheezing, with chunks of concrete and other debris pattering down around me. I tried to get up and I think my legs and shoulders twitched. But other than that, nothing much happened.
I lived static interference for a while, waiting for my brain to start tracking again. The next thing I knew, Butters was helping me sit up and saying something like, “. . . lucky that the bullet didn’t puncture the abdominal wall. The lightning actually cauterized it, or you’d still be bleeding.”
“Tough love,” I gasped. I got a look at my bare chest. I had a lot of blood and what looked like a horrible burn along the entire horizontal length of flesh beneath my ribs on the left side, shaped vaguely like the spreading branches of a tree, or maybe wave patterns in sand. At least that would be kind of a cool scar. Everything I could feel was encased in fuzzy white static, and I was grateful for the insulation the Winter mantle was giving me against the pain.
I couldn’t feel it, but I knew my body was taking a terrible beating. While I could keep driving it forward, this kind of thing was taking a toll. I still had limits, even if it didn’t feel like I did. If I didn’t respect that, I could tough-guy myself right into a grave.
I lay there quietly for a moment, staring
up at the sky. It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. Everywhere around us was smoke and dust, lit only by smoldering fires. But from where I now lay, it was like looking up from the bottom of a well, a long column of clear air that stretched up into the night sky, where clouds were boiling into existence out of nowhere, while thunder rumbled with low menace.
When the Queens of Summer and Winter took to the same field, there were always storms.
And then my awareness rushed back together again and I got my head back into the game, looking wildly around to determine what had happened.
Battle was raging in the park. The incoming charge of the Winter Lady and her troops had hit the wobbly lines of the Fomor like a wrecking ball, centered around a point of silver-white light and hulking trolls. I could hear the haunting shrieks of the Winter Lady, and the answering screams of her troops, as their offensive punched deep into the enemy formation and devolved into the pure chaos of frantic hand-to-hand combat.
Except that Molly’s troops were cheating: They’d brought pistols and submachine guns and plied them to devastating effect along with swords and axes. Though the enemy still outnumbered them, the Winter Lady’s charge had been potentially deadly, threatening to cleave the enemy lines entirely.
King Corb and his retinue of sorcerers and their bodyguards charged frantically toward that threat, to pit their sorcerous might against the Winter Lady—and to entrap her charge in their own superior numbers if she could be stopped from breaking through their lines.
The great wheeling death machine that was the Wild Hunt rolled over the Fomor legion with frantic abandon the whole while, too frenzied in its lust for blood to care which particular targets it struck, terrifying in the absolute random fatality of its selections.
And standing ten feet off, facing away from me, the Queen of Summer, Titania, faced Ethniu, eye to eye, standing as tall as the Titan. The Summer Queen wore leather armor, all in flickering shades of green, like sunlight passing through fluttering leaves on a warm spring day. Her silver-white hair was braided with ivy and flowers. She carried no weapons, and she stood alone—but the legion of the Fomor, it seemed, could hardly bring themselves to so much as look at her, much less approach.