Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  Ethniu screamed her primal fury toward the man, and in response the formation of troops began a groaning chant, moving forward toward us behind the cover of their shields. Marcone’s troubleshooters lit the tall, unbowed form of Ethniu up, but they’d brought guns to an epic mythology fight. They inflicted some losses on the troops, but to the Titan they were so many annoying mosquitoes doing nothing but proving how necessary it was to crush them.

  “Harry!” Butters called, his voice twisted with rapid breathing and rising distress. “What’s the plan here, man?”

  “Uh, uh,” I said.

  I’d never been in an epic mythology fight quite this epic before.

  The Archive gestured, the ground shook, and a sudden fissure opened in the earth, swallowing enemy troops and the bodies of our fallen allies alike, and nearly took Ethniu with them. The Titan staggered, and I could see the slight tug of exhaustion in her response, the signs of slowness that showed how much energy she had been expending.

  The biggest guns around weren’t putting her in the ground.

  But they were weakening her. Slowing her.

  This was our chance.

  “Get her!” I screamed.

  On the other side of the field, Marcone shouted something to his people that probably sounded cooler than me and meant, “Get her.” They came forward aggressively, and Marcone led the way, drawing pistols and firing them one at a time, in alternating hands—and where they struck, they smashed through shields and armor and flesh alike.

  Butters and Sanya rushed forward on either side of me. Sanya was bellowing laughter like a madman. Butters shrieked the battle cry of maybe something like a leatherback turtle—but there was a long swath of ground he had taken from the enemy in his wake. Behind them, our volunteers shouted exhausted, terrified cries and came forward.

  I used to wonder how people could run forward into things like that. I think it’s about the environment. There’s just too much confusion, too much fear, too much pain, to think rationally. It’s not a rational place. When death is all around, forward can get to looking like a pretty good way out. And humans can only bear tension, fear, and worry for so long. We aren’t built to sit quietly under such burdens. We’re built to go out and deal with whatever is causing them.

  We aren’t built to sit and take it. We were made to take action.

  Eventually, too much pressure will bring a willing fight out of anybody. Even in a nightmare hellscape. Or especially in a nightmare hellscape. Eventually, it’s better to go forward into it and have things settled than to huddle in terror for one second longer.

  I think we’d all had as much as we could take.

  It was time to settle it. One way or another.

  So I charged in and felt others following me, the light of the Swords casting an implacable, inexorable glare ahead of us.

  I had a couple of seconds to see everything, absolutely everything about the charge. Time slowed, as it does sometimes in such circumstances. I could see the interplay of the plates of armor worn by the enemy, the skill with which they had been made. I could see individual droplets of mud flying, almost floating, through the air. I could smell mud and blood and viscera as clearly and vividly as a fresh, steaming pizza put on your table. I could see dead eyes and broken bodies, shifting as they were walked upon, giving the illusion of animation.

  And then we crashed into the foe, and everything was flying weapons and screams and balance and trying to get enough air into my lungs. There was no music now—few clicks, few calls. Just panting breaths and grunts and cries of pain. Weapons hitting one another. Curses. Bodies slipping, falling into the mud, visibility of no more than a few feet.

  Absolute chaos.

  But we had the Knights of the Sword and the enemy didn’t.

  The light of the Swords blinded the enemy to everything else. If there were missiles flung, it was at the Knights. A froggy minor sorcerer tried his hand at them, to no success, his magic blocked by the light of the Sword of Faith. The Swords filled our foes with fear—as long as the Knights were coming at them, they had little thought for the most intelligent response and reacted to their fear instead.

  We cut our way toward the weakened Titan, step by step.

  I saw things. Ebenezar set a squad of octokongs on fire with an absent word and a flick of one hand. Cristos began making fists and just yanking the enemy down into the earth, right down past the tops of their heads, killing and burying them all at once, very efficient. Ramirez hustled over to the Archive, melting bad guys along the way, and covered Ivy while she kept ripping at the earth beneath the Titan’s feet in an effort to keep her stumbling and off-balance.

  And Marcone walked straight into the melee, firing flintlocks and dropping them as if he had an unlimited supply. Gard and Hendricks fought on either side of him, and his people covered his rear as they all pushed forward together, closing to range too short for even pistols to be practical. A lot of people were down in the mud, fighting and biting and gouging. Bad idea, to wrestle Neanderthals. We didn’t get the best of those fights, and once they realized it, the enemy threw themselves forward with berserk abandon, and if you didn’t have a friend to shoot the berserk trooper off you, you got slammed against the ground until you died.

  The champions got to the Titan at about the same time.

  Gard went in first.

  The Valkyrie spun full circle with her axe to build momentum, called something in a voice almost like a note of music, and the head of the axe blazed with runic power. She struck Ethniu in the ankle. In the back of the ankle.

  In her Achilles tendon.

  And for the first time in millennia, mortals heard a Titan scream in pain.

  It was like a psychic bomb went off. A wave of agony hit my nervous system with the clarity and intensity of dental pain, pure and unfiltered. The world staggered to one side. I’d have fallen if Sanya hadn’t caught my arm.

  Ethniu lurched, her foot not bleeding, but brutally broken and no longer supporting her weight—and Hendricks hit her at the hips like the linebacker he’d once been. Titan and professional bruiser went down together—and without an instant’s hesitation, Marcone drew his last and largest pistol, shoved the barrel into the Titan’s natural eye, and pulled the trigger.

  There was a howl of sound, a flash of purple light that seared my retinas, and Ethniu’s head jerked back and to one side.

  Again, without hesitation, Marcone dropped the pistol, drew a knife, and knelt to drive it into the same eye.

  Ethniu kicked. There was the sound of multiple wet sticks snapping. Hendricks gasped. Gard raised her axe again, but the Titan simply seized her leg around the knee and twisted. Bones and ligaments snapped. Gard went down screaming.

  Hands shot to Marcone, supernaturally swift, but the Baron of Chicago hadn’t waited around to see them coming and was already in a roll over one shoulder and away before she could seize him.

  The Titan sat up. There was a ring of powder burn around her natural eye, a little redness, and otherwise not a mark on her. She kicked Marcone’s legs out from under him as he began to rise, sending him sprawling to one side.

  Ethniu lifted the spear.

  “No!” I shouted. I triggered the last couple of blasts of kinetic force from my staff, emptying it, but the press was too close, and armored troopers soaked up the blasts before they could get to Ethniu.

  The spear came down.

  Hendricks took it.

  The big man, the gangster’s long-term bodyguard, threw himself in the way of the spear.

  It struck home, hard and clean. It transfixed Hendricks diagonally, going in above his collarbone, coming out around his kidneys. The resistance of his body guided the head of the spear off course. It struck into the earth beside Marcone’s head.

  Hendricks glowered up at the Titan. And spat.

  And died.

 
Eyes still open and on his foe.

  Gard screamed in simple, ancient, human anguish.

  And Marcone slid around his dead friend’s back, seized the automatic shotgun from its harness on Hendricks’s chest, swung the barrel up into the Titan’s face, and emptied the magazine.

  Ethniu reeled back, shielding her face with her arms and screaming in fury. She was showing more weakness—she had ignored fire that had come at her earlier, but Marcone’s rounds had caused her pain. She swung the spear to one side and back, slamming Marcone with Hendricks’s limp body with a hideous finality of impact. Then she whipped the spear free, sending a column of lightning tearing into the Archive’s position. Ramirez grabbed the girl and yanked her out of the way, but Ethniu had regained her footing.

  A needle of fire so bright that it hurt my eyes lashed into Ethniu’s body at the waist, where she had to twist and bend, and where the armor just couldn’t have been as thick. It drew a hiss of discomfort and annoyance from her, and she whirled the spear and smashed back at my grandfather with more lightning. The old man got a shield up in time, but Cristos had been a half heartbeat slow. He was flung to one side, burning, body going limp and rag doll in the violence of the explosion.

  Then, as my grandfather recovered, Ethniu bounded forward, superhumanly agile even mostly on one leg, and struck him with the butt end of the spear.

  My grandfather was a quarterstaff fighter with lifetimes of experience. And he was in damned fine condition for a man who had seen birthdays in four different centuries. But he was about five six and mortal. She was a nine-foot protogoddess. He pulled two deflection parries he should never have survived, much less made cleanly, and then she kicked him with her wounded leg.

  She didn’t break his ribs. Her virtually invincible shin hit him with a low roundhouse in the hips, the side of the pelvis.

  It was like a kid snapping a stick.

  My grandfather went down hard. Unmoving.

  The Titan’s lips twisted in disgust. She bent down, tore a head from a corpse with about as much trouble as me plucking a grape, and flung it at the Archive. Her aim was perfect. The girl was just struggling up out of the mud when the flying head hit her at the top of her sternum and hammered her back down.

  Hell’s bells.

  There was a bounding sound in the darkness, and River Shoulders flew through the air at Ethniu. She slammed at him with a bolt of lightning, but the bespectacled Sasquatch had evidently watched some home improvement videos or something. He was still airborne as the lightning hit, and he had timed it perfectly. There was nowhere for the current to latch on and ground out, and he passed through the bolt of lightning with little more consequence than some of his hair being set on fire.

  The flaming Sasquatch hit Ethniu like a runaway truck—hitting a runaway truck barrier.

  The Titan simply dug a heel into the ground and accepted River Shoulders’ charge. She arrested it completely. Then she got ahold of his good arm and dislocated it with a twist.

  River Shoulders screamed.

  Lightning struck, a hawk cried in fury, and then a goddamned grizzly bear fell out of the night sky and onto Ethniu’s head.

  Don’t care how Titanic you are. No one expects an orbital-drop grizzly.

  The bear’s fangs and claws raked at the Titan, leaving smoldering, glowing marks on her armor, but she simply hammered the thing with the butt of her spear until it dropped away, stunned. She swung the spear like a club, screaming in mindless rage, and broke the bear’s back like it was made of balsa wood.

  The bear screamed in pain and fear—and suddenly Listens-to-Wind lay where the bear had been, prostrate and racked with obvious agony.

  In seconds, she had killed or crippled virtually every other major hitter on the field.

  Hell’s bells.

  Divine combat. Heavy-duty magical combat. Physical combat.

  We were playing rock, paper, scissors with the Titan, and each of us could only do one. She could always pull scissors to our paper, paper to our rock, rock to our scissors. And if she got bored, she could always pull out Even Better Scissors, Rock, or Paper. God, from what I’d seen and heard about her, she wasn’t even an experienced warrior. She was a noob. She was simply a power an order of magnitude beyond anything facing her. And she was beating us.

  But she was breathing hard now. She was paying a price for her victory.

  How do you eat a Titan?

  One bite at a time.

  Sanya and Butters didn’t speak to each other. Simultaneously, they simply flew forward at the Titan as we finally broke through the troops and had a shot at her. Butters went right. Sanya went left. The light of the Swords could have illuminated a stadium.

  But here’s the thing about the Swords. The thing no one had told me, that I’d had to learn through years of observation.

  The Swords could work miracles when it came to facing off against the forces of darkness. But it wasn’t their job to decide the fight. The Swords, and the Knights, weren’t given power to crush their enemies wholesale. They existed to level the field—to create a choice where one wouldn’t have otherwise been possible. The Swords gave the Knights an absolute power to contest the will of darkness.

  But the Swords could not give them victory.

  Swords don’t do that. Swords have never done that.

  Victory comes from the mind, the heart, and the will. From people.

  What is the sword compared to the hand that wields it?

  All around us, the battle hung in the balance, poised. It could have gone one way or the other, and a feather’s touch could have made the difference in which way it fell.

  I lifted a hand. I had retooled the top of my staff weeks before. It had been fit very closely, so close that you couldn’t see the seam when it was closed. The svartalves had used lasers when I commissioned it. I unscrewed a four-inch section from the top of the staff, where a simple bolt and socket had been set.

  Then I drew the dagger from my belt.

  My heartbeat thundered in my ears.

  The handle of the dagger had been set with the same size socket as the cap of the staff. I set it on the end and spun it, and the well-oiled bolt whirled into place and locked with a simple hinged hook over one side of the dagger’s hilt, to keep it from unscrewing.

  Then I gathered power. The runes of the weapon’s haft flared into green-gold light that pulsed in intensity along with the thunder of my heart.

  The knife at the head didn’t burst into flame or anything. It just became . . . colder. The edges harder, sharper, more real—so real that anything that you looked at in the background beyond the spear seemed . . . blurry. Symbolic. Transitory.

  That weapon carried reality woven into it, dark and hard and unalterable. I felt my will and the weapon’s head vibrating in harmony, along with my heartbeat.

  I slammed the butt end of the Spear of Destiny on the ground, and green and gold fire leapt up in a ring around me.

  The impact vibrated against my hand and I felt it go out into the ground through the soles of my sneakers. I could sense the substance of the Spear stirring, forming, almost awakening. It drew some of its energy from me. My heart rate started to climb.

  “Hey! Regina George!” I called, and my voice echoed over the field as if on loudspeakers.

  Thrum-thrum, went the power of the Spear. Thrum-thrum. Thrum-thrum.

  Ethniu’s head whipped toward me, her eye focused on the Spear, wide and alarmed—while Butters and Sanya rushed to flank her.

  “Yeah,” I said, and started wearily forward. “Enough foreplay. Time for the main event.”

  Chapter

  Thirty-three

  Sanya and Waldo and I rushed the Last Titan, and Chicago hung in the balance.

  Around us, armies clashed drunkenly. Marcone’s amateurs fought like hell beside mine. They didn’t fight well, but they fough
t hard—and when they went down, they did not go alone. Etri’s people were simply terrifying—blurs that moved across the battle, striking from almost complete invisibility, and could sink into the earth and emerge from it anywhere they wanted, at will.

  If we’d had a legion of svartalves, we wouldn’t have needed anyone else. But they weren’t a numerous people—and they were directing their efforts to spearheading the attack of the relief force, to join up with the Winter Lady’s cohorts.

  Lara’s people fought beside them.

  Watching the two groups work together was like some kind of bizarre outtake from the Cirque du Soleil. Lara’s fighters sailed through the air with the greatest of ease, taking thirty-foot strides in great, leaping bounds, moving almost weightlessly, their shroud-armor fluttering and snapping. As I watched, the wavery figure of a svartalf emerged from the earth and dragged a minor Fomor’s ankles into the ground. Even as it did, a white figure flashed by, spinning a blade on the end of a pole in a smooth arc, and killed the enemy sorcerer as easily as a beast at slaughter, and I saw the unmistakable silvery eyes of Lara Raith as she went by. She snapped the weapon up in a salute to the svartalf warrior as she passed, then engaged a band of war-beasts and their handlers, only to have half a dozen more wavery figures emerge from the ground behind her foes as they surrounded her, a counterambush that annihilated the bunch.

  Lara’s eyes and mine met for a dangerous second—and she immediately shifted her direction, bounding across the savage battlefield like a fluttering pale spirit, toward Ethniu’s back.

  Sanya, as tough as Butters and more athletic, got to Ethniu first.

  The Titan lashed out with the spear’s head, sending it whipping through an arc that would have severed Sanya’s neck if he hadn’t dropped into a slide. He came through with the old cavalry saber held in both hands and struck at the Titan’s other foot.