Battle Ground (The Dresden Files, #17)

by Jim Butcher

Apocalypses always kick off at the witching hour. That’s something you know now.

Shut up, me.

Whether Chicago stands or falls, it doesn’t stay the same. It can’t. This is going to be too big, too violent. The mortal world isn’t going to be able to ignore it this time. No matter what happens tonight, the world. Changes. Period.”

“Because she’s got the Eye of Balor,” I said. “Of who?” “King of the original Fomorians,” I said. “Archnemesis of the Tuatha, who I gather were some kind of proto-Sidhe. Ruled Ireland in prehistory. There was a prophecy that he would be killed by his grandson, so he locked his only child up in a tower for a few thousand years.”

But the Eye . . . it’s a weapon that is beyond what the world has seen in millennia. Anyplace we gather to fight the Fomor’s troops, we’re just bunching ourselves up for the Eye to wipe us out by the boatload. And from what I heard, we’ve got very few ways to actually hurt Ethniu. But if we stand by and do nothing, she’ll literally level the city with the damned thing.”

That tentacle flexed, distorting in shape, and the ship screamed again, rocking the other way. And a great, faintly luminous eye glimmered up at me through the waters of Lake Michigan. A colossal squid. A kraken. The Fomor had released the freaking kraken.

Then a third tentacle, this one much slenderer, whipped around my forehead, and I could feel the crackling sound as dozens of tiny teeth crunched through my skin and found purchase in the bone of my skull. That’s the kind of noise that will make you panic right quick.

Water and magic mostly don’t mix. Water is considered, in many ways, the ultimate expression of the natural world. Water restores balance—and if there’s one thing wizards ain’t, it’s balanced.

I got to see one great glassy eye the size of a hubcap, and then against the illuminated flesh of the kraken, I saw the black outline of its beak, an obsidian mass of hard, slicing armor that could snip me in half as easily as a gardener’s shears take a blossom.

What happened next would haunt me a while. The eyes are the windows to the soul. And wizards, if they meet your gaze for a moment, can sometimes get a peek in there. In the frozen dark of Lake Michigan, in the blazing, limited light of the flare, I soulgazed a kraken.

The kraken stared back at me, and its warty hide began to ripple through fluttering bands of color, the skin distorting, becoming spiky, its tentacles coiling and curling in upon themselves.

Whatever it had seen when it looked back inside me had, for that moment, terrified it utterly. And something abruptly changed inside me, like a switch had been flipped. The not-squid, the kraken, was afraid. I was still stunned by the soulgaze, and so was the squid. It never saw Lara coming.

But that was an opening more than big enough for the magnesium flare. I shoved it into the kraken’s flabby skull, all the way to my elbow. It went mad.

Lara’s eyes widened as two more sharks, fifteen-footers, came gliding out of the darkness straight toward her—and between them, gripping a pectoral fin of each, came the Winter Lady, the deputy to the Queen of Air and Darkness—my friend, Molly Carpenter.

Murphy and Molly between them had just saved our collective bacon. I closed my eyes for a second. I hadn’t even seen what was coming for Chicago, and I was already bloodied and exhausted. This was going to be a long night.

“Thank you for the assistance.” “It is no more than is due you under the mutual defense stipulations of the Accords,” Molly replied in a rather frosty tone. Lara stared at Molly carefully for a moment before inclining her head. “Ah. Of course.” Something like real anger flickered over Molly’s face for a second and then was gone. I glanced back and forth between them. I hate it when I miss things.

They say civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism. Chicago stood waiting for the first tearing sound.

Karrin and I walked over and went in. Without a word, I opened up the backpack, took out the little wooden sign, and put it down carefully on his desk. Mac saw the sign and his eyes widened. He looked at me, his face written heavily with consternation. “You know what it is,” I said. Mac rocked back half a pace. He looked from the sign to me. He didn’t quite lick his lips in nervous guilt, but it was pretty clear that he didn’t like that I’d realized what he knew.

But before I could look up, Mac pressed my hand gently against my face, making it impossible to open my eyes. “Don’t,” the mostly mute man said gently. “Hurt yourself.” He didn’t let me move my hand until I’d released my Sight—and there was no way he should have been able to know that. But he did anyway. Which put him in a relatively small pool of beings—those with a connection to divine knowledge, to intellectus, and given what the Outsiders had called him, I was pretty sure I knew what Mac was now. Or at least what he had once been.

But we dont' get to know?!

“What is it?” Murphy asked as he worked. “The placard from the Cross,” I said. “The one that said, ‘Here is the King of the Jews.’”

“What does it do?” “It’s embodied intercession. . . . It focuses energy on an individual,” I said. “Something about pouring out the accumulated sins of humanity onto Christ, maybe. Hang it up and it puts up a kind of threshold that will hold off just about anything supernatural, as long as the property’s rightful owner is alive.”

“Harry . . .” she said. “Be careful of the big bad Titan?” I said. Her eyes wrinkled at the corners. “You’re not going to do that,” she said. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed, her eyes intent and ferocious. “Kick. Her. Ass.”

I’d find something useful to do. But I couldn’t do it here. I couldn’t watch over my friends. I couldn’t be the one to protect them. I had to trust that what they’d learned from me, and from the community I’d helped to build, would see them through. Well. That and an artifact that had been literally stored on the same shelf as the goddamned Holy Grail, and what was left of an ex-angel.

So I got to See Bradley, and where he stood was not only a man in a modest custom suit, but also the spreading trunk of some oak tree so enormous as to look squat, rising to branches that cast far more shade than its source occupied. It didn’t take a genius to realize that I was looking at the man’s character—that he bore the burden of his duty with stolid responsibility.

I don’t know what I look like in a soulgaze.

Rudolph drew the gun and aimed it at me, his voice panicked. “Goddammit, what did you do?!” His finger was on the trigger.

Rudolph and his weak trigger discipline can fuck right off.

He came down the stairway to me on his cane, looked at the knife on my belt, then up at me, and lifted an eyebrow. “Ritually purified,” I said.

Yeah, that's one thing to call it. "Ritually purified."

“Can you imagine trying to bind Mab?” I shuddered. “Well, she’s an order of magnitude beyond that in power and will,” Ebenezar said. “You can’t just go straight up against a mind like that. Not when she’s wearing Titanic bronze.” “Why not?” “The stuff . . . it affects Creation on a fundamental level,” he said. “As long as it has enough will behind it, the physical world is going to have a very limited effect on her.” I squinted at the old man. “So as long as she thinks she’s invincible, she is?” The old man lifted his eyebrows. “Haven’t ever heard it summed up that way before. But, yes, that’s accurate enough for our purposes.”

“She could have chosen any city and accomplished her greater goal. But instead she is here.” I tilted my head and frowned before I understood. “Because you’re here,” I said. “It’s personal.” Mab’s mouth ticked up at one corner. “It is an old score, between her people and the Sidhe. An old hatred. The hardest kind to resist.”

“Given the power of her will,” I said, “I’m not so sure the island is that big a threat. It’s still got to be me who shoves her in the bottle.” Mab gave me a look that reminded me of why she was the Queen of Air and Darkness, and her eyes were as cold and grey as chains. “Any will can be broken.”

“Be comforted, my Knight: I chose you for times precisely such as these, when an elemental of destruction is what is most needed.”

Mab did something more frightening than most monsters could. She smiled. It was genuine. “Harry,” she said, her voice almost warm. “From the first time I laid eyes upon you, I saw a being who had the potential for true greatness.” She laid a slim, cool hand on my forearm, and pride joined the smile already on her face. “It is almost time for you to begin to understand it yourself. And once you do, once you understand, we will do great things together.”

“He is not your weapon, Mab.” Mab’s smile gained a hungry, wolfish edge. “He is exactly my weapon,” she hissed.

Mab plays the slowest game, and she knows the changes Harry has unwittingly weathered.

“Immortality offers a significant advantage, but it is no substitute for intelligence. Remember that, young wizard.” Ebenezar scowled and opened his mouth. “Should it for some bizarre reason ever be necessary,” Mab said smoothly, before he could speak.

“Wait!” I said. Mab’s eyes turned to me like gun turrets. The Redcap stared at me with wide eyes and shifted his weight slightly away from me, as if he was getting ready to dive for cover. Even Ebenezar gave me a look that doubted my mental capacity. “Uh, please,” I added hurriedly. “There’s a better way.”

Doesn’t matter where you go in the world—if you’re good at your job, people who are good enough at theirs to see it will respect you for it.

“But if we need to move people in a direction, we can send them that way and be pretty sure that the frogs are going to be real slow to chase them.” Vadderung looked up at me sharply. A small, grim smile hit his face for an instant and was gone. “The frogs?” “Fomor, whatever,” I said. “I mean, we can stop being diplomatic with these assholes now, right?” The other men at the table huffed out low, nervous laughs. “Frogs,” Ebenezar agreed. “Frogs,” echoed the Erlking. Vadderung’s eye gleamed.

“Question from the classroom floor. What is that, exactly?” “A unique alloy of Olympian bronze and mordite,” Vadderung replied. “Kinetic weapons will be of very little use against her. Elemental energies will do little more. It will take a being of divine status to physically penetrate the armor.”

“Once we have engaged her we must grind her down and, when we have weakened her as much as possible, drive her to the water.” Her huge, luminous green-grey eyes turned up toward me. “Where we must hope that the will of my Knight is sufficient to contend with hers.”

Damn right, Harry. Do. Not. Fail. “First things first,” I said. “I’m going to need pizza.”

Marcone’s gunman thrashed and flailed so hard that I could hear the snap and crackle of breaking bone and tearing cartilage. He emitted a single-tone, high-pitched scream that went on and on, growing rougher and rougher—until the venom in the myriad tiny wounds just dissolved the flesh of his throat and it erupted into a small fountain of gore. And that was the first death of the night.

“What is it, my Knight?” Her eyes had changed. They were a deep, glacial blue-green. And her pupils had changed shape. They had become feline, like most of the Sidhe.

“Best you learn to read the subtext, if you wish to continue in this business.

“Lacuna adores me!” Toot shrilled. “We are comrades in arms,” Lacuna said. “Then I will kill you.” “It is love!” Toot insisted. “When you’re dead,” Lacuna said, “I get your teeth.” Toot beamed broadly. “See? She loves me for me!”

“We must fight!” he called, and his shrill voice rattled from the stones of the castle. “WE MUST FIGHT!” came his tiny roar, echoing down the streets. And something happened that I had not expected. The stars fell on Castle Marcone.

I realized that I was watching something that I had never seen or even much heard of before. The Little Folk were mobilizing for war. For pizza. Hell’s bells. Well. You always find support for your causes by making them relatable to people where they live, I guess.

“Where’d they get the armor?” I asked. “Lady Molly had it and the new weapons delivered with the pizza, at the solstice,” she said.

I looked down to see Mab and the Ladies regarding me with small, knowing smiles. Everyone else, from ghouls to White Council to svartalves to Sasquatch, just stared up at the sky and then at the focus of the whirling mandala of Little Folk, at the kneeling formation of warriors, awaiting my word. They all stared at me. Mab’s eyes glittered with fierce, bright pride.

“Exactly, General,” I said. “Can you do it?” Toot shot to his feet and up to my eye level, and the rest of the Guard came with him. He shouldered his lance and slammed a little fist over his heart, making the faemetal chime again, and whirled to begin giving orders.

Mab’s eyebrows went up in comprehension. “Ah. You found a weakness in their psychology and manipulated it. You provided them with a resource and incurred their debt.” “I made them see themselves differently.”