Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  Ethniu knew the power of the Swords at this point, and she dodged out of the way—forcing her weight onto her wounded leg and sending her down to a knee.

  Butters, going by the other side, whipped Fidelacchius through a circle—and Ethniu struck him right on the chin with the butt end of her stolen spear with a simple lightning-fast jab while he did it.

  Which is why you shouldn’t learn fighting moves from the movies.

  Butters went flying back into the mud and didn’t move.

  Half the light on the field went out.

  Sanya regained his feet, behind the Titan, and charged as she began to rise, the head of the spear orienting on the unmoving form of the Knight of Faith. Before she could finish him, Sanya slammed into her back and smashed her down into the mud.

  Ethniu twisted on the way down and hammered an awkward blow at Sanya with one arm. The Knight of Hope caught the blow on the blade of Esperacchius.

  And again, a Titan screamed.

  Maybe two thousand individuals from both armies simply collapsed to the ground, howling in agony as a wave of psychic pain washed out of the Titan. It felt like my arm had been set on fire.

  But it sure as hell wasn’t the first time.

  This time, I’d been ready, bracing myself against the Titan’s suffering, and surged through it like a swimmer breaking through the first wave at the beach. I closed the last few yards, slammed my feet down hard to brace them, and thrust the Spear at the Titan’s face.

  Ethniu swept her stolen spear from left to right like a windshield wiper, and she was fast, way faster than she’d looked when I hadn’t been within stab range. I tried to slip the parry but was just too slow, and she batted the Spear aside, seized Sanya by a handful of his mail shirt, and threw him at me with about as much energy as a runaway golf cart.

  We both went down in a heap, hard enough to take breath and cause stars and comets to whirl in front of us.

  Esperacchius spun out of Sanya’s hands.

  There was blood on it.

  The Titan’s blood.

  Ethniu glanced at a smoldering pile of what was mostly corpses, their body fat blazing in flames where one of the bolts of lightning or flying shards of Power had struck incidental targets. With the head of the spear, she flicked the Sword of Hope, smeared with blood too red to be real, into the fire.

  And then she thrust her wounded arm into it, her expression twisting with pain as the fire scorched and boiled the wound.

  The light of the Sword died.

  Hundreds screamed with the Titan’s pain.

  And the world suddenly got a whole hell of a lot darker.

  “Trinkets of the Redeemer,” she snarled, her voice absolutely bubbling with hatred. She rose, whipping her burned arm out of the fire. The wound hadn’t been a very big one, even struck with Esperacchius, and she had cauterized it closed, apparently. Though the surface of her bronze skin was untouched, the flesh inside the wound had been charred like meat on a grill. “Maggots crawling on our beautiful world. Infesting it. Humans.”

  Hate seethed through her, vibrated off her like heat from a fire. The Titan twisted her face in a rictus of concentration.

  And the Eye kindled to scarlet life and began to brighten.

  “Damn,” Sanya muttered, as the Titan turned toward us. The scarlet warlight of the Eye let me at least see Sanya. The big man was lying on his back. Something in the area of his collarbone was . . . just wrong, under the skin. It wasn’t shaped like humans were supposed to be shaped. His voice was thready, and he panted as though each inhalation was of pure fire. “Was pretty sure that would work.”

  “Get her,” I said. “Not much of a plan.”

  “No. For next time, need better plan.”

  I blinked and looked at the Russian as the red glare brightened.

  “Next time?”

  He grinned at me, though he couldn’t move, in sheer mad defiance.

  Supercool magical pokey stick or not, I didn’t have what it took to stand up to power on the order of magnitude of the Eye of Balor. My heaviest magical punch was nowhere close to what my grandfather could throw, and that hadn’t gotten through her armor, either. Even if I was a lot better, even if I threw it out as a death curse, the best spell I had wouldn’t surpass what the old man could do.

  And I still hadn’t gotten to her blood.

  If I was going to bind the Titan, I needed that. And I needed her closer to the water.

  The Spear quivered with power, and I could feel the sheer metaphysical mass of the thing, its utter reality. It was, in many ways, just a spear. But it was a spear to everything. If I could stick it in the Titan, she would bleed.

  But she was twenty rough feet away. And I’d have to get close enough to even have a shot at hitting her. And she’d have to be so slow that merely human reflexes could manage the task.

  None of which was going to happen before she unleashed the Eye.

  But I shoved myself to my feet, Spear in hand, brought forth my shield, and stepped forward, in front of the fallen Knight of Hope. No particular reason to do it. Not a lot of hope to be had.

  The enemy had come at us, out of nowhere, far stronger than we had expected, and we’d done everything we could.

  It hadn’t been enough.

  I faced the Titan’s hate and fury and acknowledged that I couldn’t beat it. But I figured I could die as well as Hendricks had—on my feet, face to the foe, between her and my friend.

  And, twenty yards away, the swirl of battle stirred, and I saw One-Eye’s shadowy form on the ground where he’d fallen.

  He lifted his head.

  He opened his eye.

  It gleamed like a smoldering coal in the shadow.

  And Odin, Father of the Aesir, spoke, his voice a deep resonance that shook the air with gentle power. “Gungnir.”

  I knew the translation of the weapon’s name, a bit of useless trivia that had stuck in my head.

  Swayer.

  A rune burst into scarlet light upon the Spear’s blade.

  And, like a snake, the weapon of the gods the Titan had stolen turned in her hand, whipping about with lightning speed. As it did, runes burst into light all along the length of the blade and haft alike, suddenly blazing with energy.

  And the weapon plunged with vicious, absolute precision into the Eye of Balor.

  A wall of light hit me. I don’t mean it was bright. I mean I got hit with a physical force the likes of which I had seldom experienced. If I hadn’t had the shield up and ready, it would have obliterated me.

  Shield or not, I was flung to the ground, and I fought to keep myself between the torrent and the fallen Knights. The world was white. Sound was just a high-pitched, endless tone. Reality was pain.

  When the world came back again, Ethniu was on one knee. Her right hand rested on the ground. Half of her skull was burned to the bone. Black. The Eye glowered within its socket, flames and semisolid plasma gathered around it. The arm that had been holding Gungnir was gone. Just gone, right around the elbow, the flesh burned to a withered stump. Blinding light seethed from what looked like cracks on the Eye’s surface.

  And.

  Stars and stones.

  The damned creature lifted her maimed head. Half of her face was untouched. And she focused her gaze, equal parts mind-numbing beauty and screaming horror, and brought the Eye to bear on me.

  Lara rose from behind that hideous head, leaping from a good fifty feet off. She sailed through the air with a grace that was more like that of an insect than a bird, spun as she came, and delivered a kick that could have inspired poetry to the back of the Titan’s skull. She put everything into it as she came, the full power of a White Court vampire unleashing her stored strength all at once. Lara could have driven that kick through a battleship’s hull.

  She hit the Titan in the base of the sk
ull.

  The kick couldn’t hurt Ethniu.

  But the Eye, the Eye flew out of its socket and landed on the muddy ground, a little bigger than a softball, glowing with sullen rising fire.

  A fire that had the potential to consume anything that was.

  Including Ethniu.

  The Titan clutched at her maimed face and her expression suddenly became subsumed with terror.

  She lurched for the Eye.

  So did I.

  So did Lara.

  We hit in a tangled confusion of bodies. The Eye skittered away.

  It bounced and rolled and came to a stop against the boots of Hendricks’s corpse.

  And John Marcone popped out of the shadows near Hendricks’s body, seized it, gave me a ferocious glare, and sprinted toward Lake Michigan.

  Ethniu thrust her good hand at me, but Lara was quick. She kicked at the Titan’s arm, deflecting some of the power of the blow, and it only sent me rolling across the muddy ground.

  “Go!” Lara screamed, her eyes as bright as mirrors. She whipped her weapon—I think the Japanese called it a naginata—at the Titan, to no more effect than leaving sullen red lines of heat upon the Titanic bronze coating Ethniu’s form.

  Ethniu batted Lara aside like a rag doll and rose—only to stumble, as Lara’s shroud-armor writhed off the vampire like a living thing, like some kind of bizarre invertebrate from the deep sea, and wrapped around the Titan’s knees, binding them together. Ethniu fell back down again and was forced to briefly struggle against the living cloth.

  Lara, naked as a jaybird, her pale skin gleaming, almost glowing, scrambled to one side and thrust her weapon at the Titan’s fingers, trying to keep them from getting hold of the binding armor.

  “She wants the Eye!” Lara screamed. “Go, Harry!”

  The Spear felt heavy in my hands. It still had the power to hurt the Titan. But even with the backup of the Winter mantle, I was too battered and slow to get through to her.

  And I needed to get her to the water anyway.

  Marcone knew the plan. And he’d been thinking about it harder than me.

  So I flung myself after him, plunging out of the clear air around the battlefield and into the choking, smoky haze over the city.

  It was getting hard to tell where the park had been. The ground had been torn apart by the forces unleashed there. We got to where the footbridge had stood and found that Ethniu had used the Eye to facilitate the crossing of the avenue below for her army. She had blown the bridge and the retaining walls into slopes of rubble. And the area beyond was even worse. Streets, buildings, trees, light poles, everything that had not been able to flee had suffered destruction as if she had risen from the lake and pounded everything in her line of sight to rubble with the power of the Eye. The retaining wall beside the water was . . . just kind of a really, really rocky beach now.

  I caught up to Marcone as he scrambled across the rough ground, running wherever possible. When I finally drew up beside him, he increased his pace, and I was hard-pressed to stay with him. Granted, he didn’t look like he’d been through as much physical discomfort as I had that night, but even so he moved damned well, and like he’d been to places like this before.

  “Can we use the weapon?” he asked in a terse tone as we ran.

  Behind us, Ethniu let out a scream of rage, and there was a sound like metal cables tearing.

  Then she screamed again. And it was closer.

  “Maybe I could,” I panted. “If I had a lifetime to study it. But probably not. Something like that isn’t meant for mortals.”

  “Then we have no other option,” Marcone said. “What do you need for the binding?”

  “Her blood,” I said.

  And I started tearing at the bag I’d carried tied shut on my belt for most of the night.

  Ethniu screamed again, closer. She wasn’t moving much faster than we were. She’d had one hell of a night, too. Hell’s bells, for all I knew she was using echolocation. She had every other damned advantage.

  “I take it your weapon can accomplish that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. We’d reached the beach by then, and clambered down the slope of broken rock to the edge of the water. “But it was good enough for the Son of God. I figure it’s in the right league.”

  Marcone’s eyes widened. One of his hands twitched. “And the adults let you have it?”

  There was a clatter of rock on rock behind us.

  “There’s not much justice in the world,” I said. “This thing might work. It might not. Takes some pretty serious power to hurt her. Like, angel-level power.”

  “The Swords,” he said.

  “Butters is new,” I said. “He did something without thinking. This is what we’ve got.”

  In the haze, in which visibility had dropped to maybe thirty feet, I heard something breathing, the bubble of a slight snarl on every exhale.

  Marcone crouched, tense.

  “Do you at least have a gun?” I asked. “Maybe you can distract her.”

  “I have a knife,” Marcone said.

  “Jusht like a gangshter,” I said. “Bringsh a knife to an apocalypshe fight.”

  Marcone gave me a level look and then said, in a much more conversational tone, “Honestly, Dresden. If you used your mind half as much as your mouth, you’d be running the place by now.” He held up the Eye and spoke patiently. “I have what she wants. I will distract her.” He clambered over several yards away from me and fell silent, watching the murky shadows.

  I wanted to say something back, about how he was a running mouth, but instead I fell silent, gathered up some of my power, and shaped it into the mildest, softest veil I could around me. Too much power in it, and Ethniu might become aware of the energies in motion.

  She was wounded now. Hunting. Hurting. Furious. Frightened.

  Like one of us.

  She’d be focused on retrieving the Eye, focused on securing its power, on wiping away her enemies, who were everyone, forever.

  I wouldn’t matter unless I got between her and the Eye.

  So I stood still and silent and let the haze of the battle and the more subtle effort of my will gather around me. And waited.

  It wasn’t long.

  Ethniu came down the slope on all fours, crawling with perfect grace and mangled limbs, like a wounded spider, holding herself up on the stump of her arm as easily as if she’d been born that way. Her burned face was . . . sort of seething, with some kind of thick mist or steam, as her body fought the injuries Odin had inflicted.

  Her eye locked on Marcone and she let out a low, cackling exhalation.

  “The mortal who thinks himself a lord,” the Titan purred.

  “Fool,” Marcone replied by way of greeting, his tone polite and pitched to carry loudly.

  “What?” Ethniu demanded.

  “If you had a mind,” Marcone said, “you would have used restraint. You would have arisen from the water with no warning to anyone. You would have unleashed a wave of expendable troops on the city, blown down a building or two, and returned to the sea to watch the havoc unfold.” He shook his head. “I will simply never understand the need some people seem to feel to be proven correct in front of their enemies. It’s quite childish.”

  I blinked.

  Was Marcone . . . talking smack?

  “Give me what is mine, mortal,” Ethniu snarled. “And I will kill you swiftly.”

  “Your negotiating skills would seem to need work as well,” Marcone added.

  Behind us, there was a series of roaring detonations, from back by the park. Sorcery, maybe.

  I was an idiot. An exhausted, terrified idiot. Marcone didn’t do anything just to be doing it.

  He was providing cover for me.

  So I started moving whenever they spoke, as soft
and quiet as I knew how. It wasn’t as quiet as usual. I’d just been too battered. Even now, I didn’t feel pain, exactly. Mostly my body just seemed very confused about what the hell was going on. One moment it would be too hot, the next freezing, and nothing felt like it was moving quite right, so my balance kept wobbling. The Winter mantle had been stretched to its limits. Or rather, it had stretched me to mine.

  It felt like I was getting closer to Game Over than I had before.

  “You aren’t anyone,” the Titan said. “You’re nothing. Just an animal. An animal near the top of its class on one little world.”

  “And yet, I walk where I will,” Marcone said. “I sleep where and when I please. I eat when I hunger. I choose what to make of my life. I am free.”

  I crept closer.

  “Who are you?” Marcone asked back, his voice ringing defiance. “A daughter unloved by her monstrous father? Sold and traded like a horse? Hiding in a dark cave with her useless hangers-on for millennia? And now lashing out with her daddy’s gun.” He shook his head and bounced the Eye in his hand. “It appears that it is better to be a mortal than a Titan, these days.”

  She crept closer, vibrating with tension. “Give me,” she seethed, “the Eye.”

  Marcone stared at the Titan and appeared to choose his words the way a surgeon would his implements. “Be a good girl,” he said. “And go get it.”

  With an expression of absolute nonchalant contempt, he tossed the smoldering Eye over his shoulder and into the waters of Lake Michigan.

  Which instantly began to boil.

  I was close.

  The Titan bared her teeth in a hideous grimace, enraged beyond making a sound, beyond even attempting communication, and came at him.

  A rock rolled beneath my ankle.

  Without an instant’s hesitation, Ethniu spun and flung a rock at me with her good hand.

  I saw it coming and felt like a moron. Ethniu had had no reason to have a conversation with Marcone. She’d known I was there all along, but she hadn’t known exactly where. So she’d been using the slight sound of my own movements to get a fix on my location. The rock was enough to give me away.