Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  I dropped the coach gun, turned toward the other three, and started to bring up my shield again—but one of them had rolled a higher initiative this round, and a little horn-handled knife tumbled past the hem of my duster and sank into my thigh.

  Agony seared through me as if the knife had been white-hot. Pain had been a long-absent visitor in my daily experience, and its sudden arrival sucked the wind out of my lungs. Fire pierced my leg like a bar of red-hot metal. I could feel it searing me to the very marrow of my bones.

  At the same time, my shoulder exploded in silver threads of nerve-rending torment as my rotator cuff screamed in protest at the damage.

  Iron. The bane of the Fae and their magics.

  The Winter mantle screamed.

  I staggered and fell to a knee as I seized the bone handle of the little knife and wrenched it out of my leg—just in time to catch a stomping kick to the sternum that knocked me back in a short, brutal arc to the ground. Stars exploded in my vision and something in my head felt loose and hot. The breath was gone from my lungs. I tried to gather my will again, but they piled onto me, tearing with nails and biting, for crying out loud.

  And then there was the sound of a dinosaur’s footsteps shaking the ground, and River Shoulders tackled all three of them, swept them into the circle of arms thicker than a horse’s neck, and squeezed. There was a quick series of wet, crunching sounds. River stood up with a contemptuous shake of his arms and dropped the Huntsmen.

  What was left was . . . sort of smushed together. Ever seen The Thing? Think in that direction, only more slippery.

  With the little knife gone from my flesh, the Winter mantle recovered itself pretty rapidly. I took a couple of breaths and then pushed myself to my feet, the pain once more vanishing into a vague haze. That was the great weakness of the fae, their bane. And mine, I supposed. Iron. Wow, that had hurt.

  “How many?” River demanded. “How many did you kill?”

  “Three,” I said. “You?”

  “Nine,” he said.

  Well.

  Okay, then.

  “Smoke,” River spat in the tone of a swear. “We missed one.”

  “What?” I said.

  “There are always thirteen.”

  The burning corpse and the smushed ones abruptly deflated.

  And there was a sudden crashing sound as a Huntsman half a head taller than River Shoulders just shrugged its way out through the front wall of the house, taking maybe half of the front of the house down. It raised its spear and let out a bestial roar that would have set off car alarms had any of them been working.

  It leapt toward River Shoulders, its heavy iron spear held in one hand like an assegai, and thrust it at the Sasquatch. River took a pair of quick pivoting steps that I had seen Murphy do before, guiding the spear’s tip past him with one hand and getting in close to the Huntsman where he could seize the weapon’s haft and try to wrench it from his foe.

  The Huntsman roared its defiance and fought.

  The heavy iron bent and snapped like cheap plastic before the application of that much raw physical power. The Huntsman promptly rammed the snapped end of the spear in its hand into River Shoulders’ neck.

  If River had been human, the blow would have killed him. But the Sasquatch had layers of muscle mounded up around his neck. His trapezius muscles went all the way to the bottom of his ears, and the shard of the weapon was ineffective at penetrating that much meat. Even so, the Huntsman got its other arm around River Shoulders’ waist and lifted the Sasquatch off the ground, charging forward to ram him into the old tree.

  I lunged, seized the thirteenth Huntsman’s leg with both arms, summoned my will, and screamed, “Arctis!”

  Cold, the pure supernatural cold of true Winter, flooded out of my hands and into the Huntsman. There was a horrible crackling sound as the temperature of the flesh I was touching sank to single digits on the Kelvin scale.

  The Huntsman shrieked in pain and kicked its leg in an attempt to dislodge me.

  I hung on.

  There was a crackling sound, and I took the leg from the knee down with me.

  The Huntsman screamed and fell in a shower of ice chips and a gout of blood.

  Without hesitating an instant, River Shoulders seized the frame of the sedan in the driveway, picked it up with a tectonic knotting of massive muscles, swung it overhead like a man using a sledgehammer, and brought the engine block down on top of the thirteenth Huntsman in a massive swing.

  Though it was crushed flat, there was still a horrible vitality in the Huntsman. It let out a burbling, hissing sound that somehow conveyed the same impotent fury as a shriek.

  And then it spasmed and died. The car rocked and snapped and groaned in the Huntsman’s death throes.

  I pushed the frozen leg away from me and got slowly to my feet. I’d lost my staff at some point. I recovered it. While I did that, River pulled the iron bar from his neck. He let it fall by the last Huntsman. The body began deflating just like the others, and as it went, the shard of the iron spear crumbled with it.

  “What,” I breathed, “in the hell was that?”

  River poked the spear. “Welsh creatures. The Huntsmen of the Land of the Dead. Whole pack makes their spears from their blended blood over years. Forges them together.” He shook his head. “Bad news. Very bad.”

  “These things are the scouts?” I demanded. “That’s not fair.”

  We heard bestial screams coming from the east and south. “Hell’s bells,” I muttered. I coughed, gagging on the smoke. There was enough of it. More houses were on fire now. People were running out. “Come on. We can’t leave them out here.”

  I strode up to the door of the house, shield bracelet raised and ready. Someone had been shooting here, after all. I didn’t plan on getting cooked by some panicked normie.

  “Hello, the house!” I said. “My name is Dresden! I used to live down the block in Mrs. Spunkelcrief’s old place.”

  There was a pause. Then a male voice with a Hispanic accent asked, “With the dog?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The big grey dog.”

  “Mouse,” the man said.

  I couldn’t ever remember actually doing more than waving at this guy as I went past. I was pretty sure I hadn’t ever introduced my dog. How did he know Mouse’s name?

  Damned pooch is more a of people person than I’ll ever be.

  There was a clattering sound and then a slim, medium-height man in his late thirties emerged from a back room of the house. Behind him came a woman who matched him well, and a little girl holding a stuffed animal of some indeterminate but well-loved kind.

  “It is you,” he said.

  “Hey, man,” I said, lifting my chin. “Things are crazy, huh?”

  He stared out at the night and the flames and the smoke, and at the remains on his front lawn. He nodded numbly.

  “Okay,” I said. “Come on. I need your help. We’re gonna get all these people into the castle they built at the old place. There’re people sitting on their asses there with nothing better to do than protect you guys. Okay?”

  The man looked numbly at the street, then at me. There was shock happening. He stared for a blank second and then nodded jerkily. “Castle. Get everyone in the castle.”

  “And hurry,” I said. “Oh, and never mind the Sasquatch. He’s with me.”

  “¿Qué?” said my neighbor.

  “Just roll with it,” I said. “Get them rounded up. Go!”

  He staggered toward a man who had emerged from the house across the street and was watching it burn. The two talked, then grabbed another neighbor. People started getting herded toward the castle.

  “Come on,” I said, “before Marcone does something stupid.”

  I strode forward, back to the castle, several yards ahead of the first stragglers to stumble that way. I marc
hed up to the base of the wall where everyone had been observing things and shouted, “Marcone!”

  There was a muttered conversation above. Marcone leaned out and peered down at me a moment later. “What?”

  “These people need shelter,” I said. “Let ’em in.”

  Marcone glowered at me. His pale green eyes tracked past me to the stragglers coming in.

  “I am not a charitable organization,” he replied.

  “You want to be Lord of Chicago?” I spat, contempt in my voice. “Talk is cheap. Act like it.”

  Up on the wall, I saw Mab put a hand on Marcone’s arm in restraint and say something.

  Marcone locked eyes.

  With Mab.

  Then he simply looked at her hand and arched an eyebrow.

  Mab withdrew it, her eyes narrowed.

  Marcone inclined his head to her in a small bow and turned back to me.

  More Huntsmen let out shrieks. They were not in the distance. More of those howling blasts from their spears lanced through the night. I heard someone else scream, maybe a couple of blocks away.

  “Dammit, man!” I snarled.

  Marcone leaned an elbow on a merlon and considered me for a moment. Then the people again. He nodded his chin once.

  “Talk is cheap,” he confirmed. “Send them in.”

  I blinked.

  Marcone glared out at the smoking, howl-haunted, firelit night and clenched his jaw. The granite of the castle seemed less substantial. “Hendricks. Gard. With me.”

  Then the Lord of Chicago spun on his heel and went to see to his people.

  Chapter

  Ten

  So, I and River Shoulders and the Einherjaren and Marcone’s troubleshooters started clearing the way for people to get to the castle. There were a number of short, vicious clashes with the enemy’s Huntsmen, and Marcone’s people acquitted themselves like professionals—which is to say that the fight never even came close to being fair.

  Even so, they had a couple of their people taken out with injuries, and the foe just kept coming—until one of the Einherjaren matter-of-factly started hanging up the flapping empty skins of the fallen foe across the street on a ghastly improvised clothesline.

  Once that gruesome warning marker was up on the streets surrounding the castle, the foe started giving the area a wider berth. Marcone got snipers onto the rooftops to handle anything that approached along the street, and they taught the enemy to keep back. It was all accomplished pretty much by the numbers.

  Of course, I noted, that was the point of sending out disposable light troops to attack the city: have them go everywhere, causing havoc, until someone started killing them. Then all Ethniu would have to do would be to go to wherever the bodies were piling up and engage the enemy—or she could avoid those areas and wreak havoc unopposed, throwing more and more troops between her and us while she smashed the place.

  It was a bloody price to pay for the map of the town’s defenses. Apparently they thought they could afford it.

  The Erlking himself came down to oversee the downing of a last towering Huntsman. A couple of the largest Einherjaren fought the thing with six-foot claymores and made a bloody mess of the street, laughing uproariously the entire time.

  I’m not kidding. Laughing. The freaking eternal soldiers were having a ball tonight. That poor lunkhead Lara had left unconscious in the basement was missing Viking Christmas.

  “So what’s the name of the place the Huntsmen are from again?” I asked.

  “Annuvin,” River Shoulders said. “Welsh Land of the Dead, ruled by Arawn, once upon a time. But the Tuatha settled his hash back in the day, just like Ethniu did poor Gwyn ap Nudd.”

  I had picked up one of their black metal spears. They felt cold and greasy to the touch, and just holding one made my joints ache a little. They quivered with a kind of stone-flake, primitive enchantment that had been shaped into them with hours of throbbing drumbeat and primal screams. “Some kind of iron alloy. I think the damned thing runs on hate. That’s how you shoot it. You’ve just got to hate hard enough.”

  “Seems about right,” River Shoulders rumbled. He had one hand wrapped around my forearm, my entire freaking forearm, gently. The other was braced against my chest—my entire chest. “Okay, on three. One,” he said, and he put my arm back into its socket.

  There was an explosion of static and then a bunch of the white noise cleared away. River Shoulders released me carefully and arched an eyebrow. I tried my shoulder. It functioned much more smoothly, and I nodded my thanks at him.

  “Yes,” agreed the Erlking, turning from the last throes of the fallen Huntsman. “It makes them easy to lure forward and impossible to drive away.” He paused to nudge the deflated remains of a Huntsman with the toe of one boot. “It is not possible to contain more than a handful of such creatures for any length of time. The enemy has been breeding this batch up of late.”

  I grimaced. “Yeah. They’ve been taking people since the Red Court fell.”

  “Now we know why,” River Shoulders said.

  “Wait,” I said, feeling sick. “They . . . breed more of these things from people? Or they make more of them from people?”

  “The process is . . . somewhat distasteful,” began the Erlking.

  “Wait,” I said again. “Stop. Just stop. I don’t want to know.”

  “This,” he said, “will not be the worst of it.”

  “Cheerful,” I said.

  He shrugged, hunting leathers creaking. “Incoming,” he noted calmly.

  A great grey owl swooped quickly down from the night air, backwinged in a thunder of feathers, and landed in a heap. The heap kind of quivered and then resolved itself into the shape of Listens-to-Wind. The old man shimmied his shoulders a little, then winced and rolled one arm while grasping at his shoulder with the other hand.

  “Need to do more yoga,” the old man muttered with a grimace. “Hey, River.”

  “Mobility routines are important for a human your age,” River Shoulders said, his tone clearly worried.

  Listens-to-Wind broke out into a boyish grin that took a couple of centuries off the old man’s weathered face. “Ain’t been your apprentice in a long time now, tanka.”

  “Never listened when you were.”

  “What of the enemy?” the Erlking asked.

  “Our boys getting hit pretty hard,” Listens-to-Wind said. “They got these gorilla-squid things—”

  “Octokongs,” I interjected.

  Everyone stopped to eye me.

  “Hey, it’s important to have specific language, isn’t it?” I complained. “I went to all the trouble to give them a usable nomenclature.”

  “And,” River Shoulders rumbled, “you named ’em octokongs, huh.”

  “It fits,” I said.

  “Fits,” Listens-to-Wind acknowledged.

  “Goofy-looking, right?” I said.

  “Goofy-looking and they can carry rifles and crawl on the sides of buildings,” Listens-to-Wind replied. “Hell of an advantage in a city. Things can’t shoot much, but if you get enough of them, they don’t have to be good. Plus, some teams of them fellas in turtlenecks are back there providing fire support. They sniping at anyone with a radio, trying to kill communications.”

  “That’ll be Listen,” I said. “King Turtleneck. Way I hear it, the enemy got good help.”

  “Annoying when they do that,” the Erlking noted.

  “About time we thought about going to help our people, if we’re going to go at all,” the old man said. “They’ll get cut off soon.”

  The Erlking nodded sharply and started walking. “Let us tell One-Eye.” Listens-to-Wind fell into pace beside the Erlking, who paused and then added, sotto voce, “If we go without him, you know how he gets.”

  “Lot of guys like that got control issues,” the old man opine
d. “To be expected.”

  “Kringle suits him better,” the Erlking muttered.

  “Kringle would suit anyone better. Even you.”

  The Erlking looked shocked.

  The two of them vanished back into the castle.

  A fire team of Einherjaren went by, escorting a stunned-looking group of civilians inside, where they would be waved through by the various sentries to the castle’s interior. Out in the night, there was a constant background of crackling gunfire and shrieks and the howling screams of those dark metal spears like the one I held—at least until it started flaking and turning to rust right in front of my eyes.

  There was more ambient light now. And more smoke.

  Chicago was burning.

  “How many can we fit in there, do you think?” River Shoulders asked me.

  “Well. We aren’t exactly worrying about fire codes right now,” I said. “Maybe three or four hundred if we pack them in?”

  “How many of your people, in this city?”

  “Eight million, all told,” I said heavily. “Give or take.”

  “Not much difference,” he said.

  I pointed at a couple of half-dressed parents with half a dozen kids in various stages of pajamas hurrying inside the squatting stone solidity of the castle. “Makes a pretty big difference to them.”

  The Sasquatch flashed a sudden, very wide, very white grin. It might have been charming from a safe distance. From right there, it was imposing as hell. “Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

  “Stars and stones, River,” I said. “I’m glad you’re on my side.”

  “Means you got good taste,” the Sasquatch said. “Besides. You stood with me when I needed it.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Those situations weren’t ever exactly of this magnitude.”

  “Be kind of a lousy friend, I counted the beans between us that close,” the Sasquatch said.

  I blinked at that. “Friend, huh.”

  “Helped me with my kid,” River Shoulders said. “With family. You been my friend. Now it’s my turn.” Again he showed me the terrifying smile. “Besides. This is kinda fun, eh?”