by Jim Butcher
A unit of heavily armored Fomor troopers got in his way, six or eight of the enemy who had grouped together and were pounding the stuffing out of a small group of slim, armored fae brought to the fight by the Winter Lady—or at least, I was pretty sure that’s what was happening. The mud of the fight coated everyone. In the stark light and the sheer chaos, it was all but impossible to tell a friendly face from a hostile one until the subject in question was so close that there was only time to strike, block, or attempt to flee.
Butters hit the entire group like a tornado—absolute, deadly, and bizarrely selective. The angelic chorus around Fidelacchius rose to an exultant crescendo as the weapon whirled and struck down everyone who got in our path—absolutely everyone.
When the Sword of Faith struck the soldiers of the Fomor, the slaves of the Titan’s will, it did so with gruesome, precisely egalitarian effect, cleaving armor and weapon and flesh with equal precision and disdain. And where it struck the defenders of the city, that same weapon swept away grime from eyes, cleared muck from ears, and burned away some of the environment hampering our allies, leaving the ground steadier under their feet.
Butters, flowing with the grace of absolute concentration, struck what I presumed to be a friendly with the Sword, shattering the bent and stricken helmet clear off the head of what turned out to be a rather unremarkable-looking young woman with medium brown skin and the arched cheekbones and angular eyes of a native of the far northwest of North America, her face twisted with utter terror—and I saw it when the Sword passed, and its light burned that fear out of her. She blinked twice, as if waking up from a nap that had been plagued with a bad dream, set her jaw, and rose with her weapon in her hand.
“Sir Knight,” she bade me, by way of greeting, gave me a short nod, and rose to drive her sword into the throat of an enemy soldier that lay on the ground, clutching at the place where its arm had been.
I had to turn to keep pace with Butters, or he’d have left me clambering through the muck after him. But I looked behind us and saw the wake we were leaving—not only of felled enemies, but of allies, seared free of the dark pressure of Ethniu’s will, their courage renewed.
Behind us, Sanya and his people angled into that opening that Butters’s passing had left, filling it with sudden friendly forces—and others struggling in the havoc around us saw that opening and rallied toward it, toward the two Knights, as their allies called encouragement and flung themselves upon an increasingly uncertain foe. Sanya managed to meet up with Butters with a cheerful whoop of greeting, and then the big man covered Butters’s six, simply following the smaller Knight, blade whirling, and fending off attacks that came at his flanks and rear.
In that moment, I knew what Michael had meant when he said that the most powerful part of the Sword of Faith had nothing to do with the word sword. Or even with the artifacts the two men held in their hands. Neither of the Swords could have done anything without the minds and hearts and hands of the men bearing them. And now Butters was, himself, the edge of a blade that was carving its way into the enemy, filling the empty space left behind with members of the alliance, surging with renewed energy, with the big black Russian behind him, laughing in a steady roar of amused defiance.
There was no way I could have taken myself through that mess without making it a hell of a lot messier. Butters made it look easy.
On that field, in that chaos, not even the mud stuck to him. Where the light of the Swords went, everyone knew who was who—there was no confusion to be had. Only choices. And everywhere the Knights went, the enemy fell, and our allies roared back into the fight.
Having those two going before me was not like having two allies. In that terrible, desperate place, it was like having hope and faith themselves standing beside you, and that power was deeper and ultimately more meaningful than any enchantment or mystic weapon around.
Long story short—the Swords cut a hole through the chaos, leaving bad news for the enemy everywhere they walked. Granted, a lot of the beings fighting on our side weren’t exactly angels. But whatever their reasons, that night they stood in defense of life, and evidently, that was good enough for the Power behind the Swords.
The physical trauma the Knights actually inflicted on the bodies of the foe was insignificant compared to the wreckage they made of enemy morale. For every Fomor trooper that went down before them, fifty more saw their companions falling beneath blades of terrifying light, saw the enemy surging to the fight with rising ferocity. Worse, beneath the light of the Swords, the dread will of the Titan held diminished sway—and without that psychic pressure to oppose them, the troops that the Winter Lady brought to the fight came at the enemy with pure, intelligent aggression.
And somewhere along the way I realized that the Winter troops Molly had brought to the battle were kids. They were a batch of goddamned kids, even younger than the Wardens. Kids fighting like stunt doubles in martial arts movies.
There had been rumors on the Paranet that the faeries had begun stealing children again.
Maybe they had. God, given what was in front of my eyes, I wasn’t even sure it was a bad thing.
The Winter Lady shrieked over the battle again, her voice pure, contemptuous fury, as one of her dwindling bodyguard of trolls smashed its way through the blocks of ice left in her wake. Another wave of enemy magic crashed upon the battlefield around her, and if she walked through it mainly untouched, the trolls around her screamed their pain and rage as fresh waves of enemy troops, driven by terror of Corb and his coterie, flung themselves at the Winter Lady.
My heart went into my throat as I saw a sword strike her and wedge itself into the flesh of her naked shoulder as if she had been a block of ice. Molly contemptuously touched the hand holding the weapon with her blade and snapped a kick up into the ice, shattering the frozen hand. She knocked the sword casually out of her flesh. Then she leaned down and almost sensually ran the edge of her icy blade beneath the edge of the enemy’s helmet. The blade opened the trooper’s throat in a wash of blood that burst into steam as it touched Molly’s pale, cold flesh, and she bubbled into chill, hungry laughter as it did.
God.
I’d heard that laugh coming from other lips.
Yeah.
No wonder she hadn’t gone home to visit the family for Sunday dinner.
In any other circumstance I could have imagined, I would have gone charging full steam toward Molly to assist and protect her. But the Winter Lady didn’t need my help.
She was the anvil.
As long as she and her little legion held together, the enemy was trapped, forced to try to finish them off. As long as the Winter Lady stood, if the Fomor fled, the Winter Fae would be among them, cutting them down without mercy. While Molly stood, the Fomor legion would be exposed, disorganized, vulnerable to the very attack that was happening now. Professional militaries were professional because of their ability to operate in unison more effectively than militaries with less training—like armed civilian defenders, for example. Chaos and disorganization among the enemy strongly favored our team.
Charging off to Molly’s rescue would defeat the entire point of what she was doing.
She had chosen to be the anvil. It was up to the rest of us to be the hammer.
So when Butters started turning to go toward her, I shouted, “No!” and pointed over his shoulder, with my staff, at Ethniu and her embattled cohesive knot of Fomor troops.
And I left my former apprentice to fight for her life against the King of the Fomor, his elite bodyguard of sorcerers, and overwhelming numerical odds, in the hope that I could help bring down a Titan before the Fomor did the same to Molly.
Butters fought through another forty yards. I know that doesn’t sound like much. You had to be there. The mud and water on the ground made every step a slightly different trap. The lighting was worse than a dance floor’s, alternating patches of mud and shadow and brilli
ant white light from the whirling Swords. And fighting is the most difficult cardio there is. Ten yards on that field would have been a stiff workout.
He did forty without slowing down. And there was nothing at all that was little about the Knight of Faith that night.
The shotguns of my volunteers, coming along in our wake, were being plied more sparingly now. Ammunition was low, but we’d lost so many people that finding more on their remains wasn’t out of the question—the people who were still alive were largely ones who had been to places like this before, or been taught by those who had. When they shot, they did it smoothly and in cold blood. And they shot once and moved on. Watching them wasn’t like watching an action movie. It was like watching a well-coordinated work crew all moving to the same song. Steady, rhythmic work, as they advanced under cover of their companions, fired two or three rounds on any available targets, then covered the advance of the companion rank coming behind them, reloading.
The hard part, during that advance, was not pitching in. The air wasn’t supercharging my use of magic any longer, and that meant I couldn’t be epic for very long before collapsing. If I’d tried another leaf-blower spell, it would have dropped me unconscious in the time it took us to move forward. It was simply too high an energy requirement now. I had the magic that was available to me and nothing more—and I had to save every punch I had for Ethniu.
And that meant that people died whom I maybe could have saved.
It wasn’t like I did nothing. My staff was still charged up, as if I’d loaded it up nice and heavy, and I knocked some bad guys around who would have wounded or killed my people. But I missed some. I don’t know. Maybe I could have done more. Or done it smarter somehow. But if you weren’t there, you can’t know how desperate it was. How everyone was terrified. What it does to you to see the power of darkness, of real, genuine terror, on gruesome display. Hell, even when it’s on your side, it ain’t pretty. Witnessing wrath and death being visited upon another being, no matter how righteously, is no easy thing.
The Knights of the Sword, some of the Sidhe we’d relieved, and my volunteers cut me a path through an army.
We got there first, but farthest out.
Ethniu had positioned herself atop a mound of corpses. And incipient corpses. There were plenty to go around, and they’d piled them into a hill maybe ten feet high. It meant that she could see the battlefield all around her, ply the blasts of her stolen spear with deadly effect. When the Eye had drawn in enough energy once more, she would have her choice of targets.
But it also meant that she could be seen.
She had arrayed her troops on the mound of corpses around her in thick ranks. These were the heavy guys, strong and spooky-quick in their thick armor, with their too-thick torsos and overlong arms. I only got to see one face, behind the helmets, and that was of a hairy, rough-looking humanoid. It was hard to see much. He’d been hit with a heavy club or hammer, hard enough to shatter his helmet, and there was only so much left of the face. Neanderthal? Hell, how long had the Fomor been enslaving humans?
They faced us now in solid, disciplined ranks, and Butters slowed. Even he didn’t think he was going to just waltz through that.
On the far side of Ethniu’s defensive position, Marcone’s forces broke through the chaos.
First through was the Archive. She looked like a girl, not terribly remarkable in any way, in her early teens, wearing a formal school uniform. The objects whirling in a lethally swift orbiting cloud around her started with broken fire hydrants and got bigger and heavier from there, up to and including a big police motorcycle. They were moving so fast that it was hard to see what the object was, until it hit something. Then there was a gruesome spray and it slowed down enough for you to see a hundred-and-twenty-pound dumbbell tearing an octokong in half, or a bundle of rusty barbed wire the size of an Earthball smash its way through entire troops of Huntsmen at once. None of them got it in the face, either—when they saw the gruesome machine that was the Archive coming, they tried to flee. The ground and the chaos of the battlefield didn’t always allow it.
When it didn’t, the results looked like some kind of accident involving pressurized tanks of various colors of paint.
The Archive hadn’t come here to fight.
She was just mowing the lawn.
A few yards down the line from her, a block of enemy troops fifty yards deep and thirty yards across abruptly contorted—and then they just died, falling like broken puppets. One moment, chaos raged. The next, there was a sudden block of absolute stillness and silence.
The Blackstaff strode into the vacuum, Ebenezar McCoy in the fullness of his power, the left side of his body buried in a shadow so deep that it had to be taken on faith that he still had that half of his body at all.
Beside him strode Ramirez and Cristos. Cristos was doing something to the ground that solidified it into hard clay about a foot in front of Ebenezar’s toes, and the old man strode forward with dust coating him and a bleeding wound on the side of his mostly bald pate, his jaw set at a pugnacious angle.
A Fomor officer, probably one of their lesser nobles, had been pressured toward the old man by the inexorable power of the Archive and had the choice of the lawn mower or the tiger. He chose tiger, howled, and flung himself and his personal retinue at Ebenezar.
I had never seen Ramirez cut loose before.
Maybe a dozen froggy Fomor warriors came at them. He gathered his good hand in across his body, like a farmer drawing seed from a seed bag, and unleashed it with a ringing word and a flash of dark, dangerous eyes. A wave of translucent pale blue energy washed across them and . . .
And they just fell to wet, mushy dust. To their component molecules, maybe, as if the bonds of energy that had held them together had somehow been broken. Taken apart. Disintegrated. I noted, somewhere in the academic vaults of my head, that magic like that was like unbaking a damned cake back into its original components. Where would you even start?
Even more impressive, from an academic standpoint, was that breaking the energy of those bonds must have provided most of the fuel for the spell, because Ramirez never so much as broke limping stride. He could pull that one over and over again.
Ramirez was good. Better than me, on a technical level, by a considerable margin.
He blew them into water and dust. It wasn’t even fair.
In a war, nobody plays fair. That’s what war is.
A group of panicked, fleeing octokongs went by as Lara and her people came bounding out of the chaos, their flowing, shroudlike white robes stained in various shades of blood. None of them looked hurt, and I saw one take a panicked blow from an octokong’s emptied arquebus. The shroud material twitched and moved, gathering thickly beneath where the blow began to land, and the body beneath seemed to briefly lose mobility and stiffen as the arquebus struck—and rebounded, the shroud actively pushing the weapon away, as the White Court vampire wearing it dealt a pair of lethal blows and breezed on by in a little twirling dance step. When Lara’s people landed in the open, they did it together, coordinated, somewhere between Hong Kong cinema and Charlie’s Angels.
Ethniu raised the spear and it transformed again into lightning in her hand. She swept a baleful gaze around the battlefield, choosing which target was the most dangerous.
She focused on me for a second. Then, longer, on the Archive. But then her eyes settled on my grandfather. On the Blackstaff in his left hand. Something about it seemed to stoke the furnace of her rage.
“Little boys should not play with adult tools,” the Titan snarled.
The old man’s answer was to raise the Blackstaff, shadow engulfing his head and shoulders, and to make a sweeping, beckoning gesture.
The front rank of the line of Fomor troopers died in their tracks, clattering to the ground.
Ethniu howled and unleashed the lightning against my grandfather.
The
stocky old man vanished farther into shadow, raising the Blackstaff, the weapon’s darkness devouring the lightning, drinking and drinking endlessly—until I could see actinic fire gathering in the cracks of the old man’s skin. It did weird things to the shadow he cast, twisting and distorting it until it looked like a hideously twisted old woman, complete with the classic witch nose and chin, looking somehow darkly amused.
The instant Ethniu brought her fire down upon the old man, the Archive tilted her head slightly and lifted a single finger. In that instant, the whirling screen of big heavy things went flying toward the Titan in rapid succession like stones loosed from a giant’s sling. They hammered Ethniu, striking clouds of sparks from the Titanic bronze armor over her skin, battering her back off the top of her mound of bodies, and sending the bolt of energy trailing up into the sky.
My grandfather staggered and fell to a knee, silver light seething from beneath his skin, showing the dark shadows of liver spots, the lines of the bones in his right hand. Then he lifted that hand, holding what looked like a blazing gemstone the size of a softball, and with a word and a gesture sent damned near every erg of energy he’d just received sailing back at the Titan’s position, wreaking havoc among her troops.
Just as Baron Marcone and his people hammered their way through the confused Fomor and into Ethniu’s makeshift redoubt.
The troubleshooters on either side of Marcone led the way, rifles at their shoulders, advancing with a weird, slow little shuffle that left their shoulders steady and even, even in the sketchy terrain. They fired into the mass of troops. The Fomor’s armor wasn’t up to stopping heavy fire from military-grade arms at close range. Their shields were made out of something heavier, though, and they wound up dropping into a version of the old Roman tortoise formation, shields lifted and interlocked to form a wall against them.
Ethniu bounded back into position atop the mound and lifted the spear again.
The old man shouted and hammered her with a flying wedge of raw kinetic force that struck her like the blade of a guillotine, sending a shower of fire up from the surface of her bronzed flesh and leaving a glowing, smoking line across her upper torso—but it didn’t break the armor. She ignored the blow from the deadliest wizard of the White Council as if it had been delivered with a pillow, not the foundational forces of the universe, and focused her rage on the defiant Baron of Chicago.