Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  It wasn’t running, really, in any typical sense. It was more like a series of alternating single-leg broad jumps, covering thirty feet at a stride. River went from zero to maybe fifty miles an hour in three steps, and damned near gave me whiplash doing it.

  The gunfire swelled rapidly as we reached Montrose and Clarendon.

  On the left side of Montrose was a large art deco office building, shining glass and steel. The first two levels of the structure were an open-sided parking garage. The Einherjaren had taken it and gunfire roared out of the garage on both levels, flashes of light and bursts of thunder, all directed toward Clarendon Park. On the right side of the street was another office building, nearly the size of its opposite, and I could see teams on the roof firing big, big single rounds down toward the park with those huge sniper rifles Barrett makes.

  Shadow and motion filled the park. Huntsmen and octokongs rushed forward in swift dashes—faster than any human could have done it. The city’s defenders concentrated their fire on the Huntsmen, and with good reason—there were several large holes blown in the low walls of the parking garage, and ugly scorched remains were visible. Assault rifles did an excellent job on the first several Huntsmen of any given pack—but by the time the last few of them had gone all Hulk, it was up to the Barretts.

  The octokongs weren’t as much of a threat—until they got closer. The ape-squid things had the upper body of a gorilla mounted on the lower chassis of an octopus, hence octokong. Good thing they hadn’t used chimps, or I’d have had to call them octopongs. And that just sounds silly.

  The octokongs could slither along the ground at great speed, and when they climbed, tentacles flailing, they didn’t really slow down. Each bore a large, crude-looking weapon that made me think of those old blunderbusses, but they were fed by a magazine of some kind. The octokongs weren’t exactly snipers. They didn’t really aim. They just pointed the weapons in a general direction and pulled the trigger, sending out sprays of what must have been buckshot, if the chewed concrete around the parking garage was any indicator.

  “Dresden!” River said sharply. The Sasquatch set me roughly on my feet and pointed.

  I looked. The building on the south side of the street, where the Einherjaren snipers were set up, was mostly shrouded in darkness, but I could see well enough to glimpse the shapes of dozens of octokongs that had somehow circled the brick building and were climbing toward the roof, from the rear side, their tentacles probably leaving giant sucker marks on all the windows.

  “Think you can handle them?” I asked him.

  River set Ramirez down more carefully, his dark eyes just a ferocious gleam beneath his heavy brows, and bounded off in that direction, vanishing behind a veil as he went. A minute later, something grabbed one of the lowest octokongs, whirled it in a circle, and smashed it like a water balloon against the ground. I could see the blur of a form as it leapt a good fifteen feet up the side of the building, and dust exploded from the bricks, presumably from River Shoulders digging his fingers into them to get a good grip. He started climbing the building, seizing octokongs from behind and either smashing their skulls against the bricks or simply throwing them off and letting them fall to an ugly death.

  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch.

  “Hoss!” shouted Ebenezar’s voice.

  I turned to see my grandfather on the second level of the parking garage, waving at me. He beckoned, and I held up a fist in acknowledgment.

  “Can you move?” I asked Carlos.

  The young Warden gave me a sour look and started limping along at his best pace, clutching his broken arm to his body to keep it from swinging. I went with him.

  By the time we reached the second level of the garage, the old man was at the front of the garage, facing the park. Shot rattled around him, but the Blackstaff was the White Council’s dedicated killing machine. There were rumors among the Wardens that the old man’s shield had completely held off a round from a German battleship’s main guns in World War I. I didn’t know if that was true or not, but buckshot scattered off it in little fluttery sparkles that had no chance, at all, of getting through.

  The old man stared down at the park thoughtfully, heedless of the incoming fire, then nodded once, held out a fist, spoke a word, and gathered a sphere of white-hot light into the palm of his right hand. He flicked his wrist, and the sphere of light streaked over to the park and set the nearest tree there violently ablaze.

  Octokongs screamed and poured out of it—to where they were well-lit by the fire on open ground.

  The Einherjaren let out whoops of excitement and approval as their weapons roared, absolutely withering every octokong on the ground.

  “Do it again, seidrmadr!”

  “Let them have it, wizard!”

  The old man obliged them, and another tree went up with similar results.

  I heard the cry of a hawk, and then a bolt of lightning descended, crashing into several parked cars along the road, providing cover for the enemy. The cars exploded into flame with a number of whumping sounds.

  Screeches of rage and pain rose from the park, but the enemy pressed closer and closer. One of the Einherjaren set down his rifle, picked up one of those grenade launchers with a rotary magazine, and quickly sent half a dozen grenades into the park, each with a report and a phoont sound. He had used white phosphorous rounds. The carnage was impressive, but the octokongs kept pouring mindlessly forward—

  —and a sudden sound split the air.

  It sounded like a call from a horn—if the horn was the size of a Buick. It was a deep, brassy, throaty sound. And it was loud. Loud as a thunderstorm. Loud enough to shake the concrete beneath my feet.

  And then I saw him.

  Striding forward, toward Lake Shore, his black hair soaked with lake water and clinging to his skull.

  A giant.

  A genuine, honest-to-God giant. A Jotun.

  His features were crude, rough, his beard and hair were woven in enormous braids, and he wore the armor and kit of a Viking warrior—just on a much larger scale. In his hands he bore a horn made from God knows what kind of animal, and as I watched he lifted it to his lips and blew again, shaking the city.

  I thought of footprints on the beach and started cackling.

  And then . . .

  More giants.

  They came forward, in a straight line from the lake, two by two, each armored and tattooed and bearing swords and axes of enormous, rough design. One of the giants got caught up in the branches of a tree, and with a snarl he turned, and his twelve-foot-long sword burst into flame and swept clean through the tree, as if it had just been a weed in need of whacking. That not being enough, he turned to a car parked near him, split it in half with another swing of his sword, and kicked the separate pieces forty yards.

  The first giant blew the horn again.

  The others answered with a roar and began a basso chant, a war song, in some language that sounded thick and sludgy.

  The gunfire had stopped.

  I looked around me to see the Einherjaren staring at the incoming behemoths, mouths open, eyes bright.

  Then the big guy with the grenade launcher screamed, in freaking joy, “JOTNAR! JOTNAR OF MUSPELHEIM!”

  And the goddamned madmen roared their excitement and began their own war song in answer. The Jotnar focused on the parking garage and bellowed pure rage at the sound of that song.

  Then they started sprinting right at us.

  Chapter

  Fifteen

  From the top deck of the parking garage, we were at eye level with the Jotnar. It didn’t make me feel any better. All it meant was that I could see the distinct expression of rage on each face as they either climbed and vaulted over the Lake Shore Drive bridge over Montrose, or else dropped under it, duckwalking under the bridge and rising as they emerged.

  The scary part about
it was that they were fast. Their walking speed would have been a fairly serious run for me. Running, they were moving at vehicle speeds.

  I felt my hands shaking in pure, unadulterated fear. Doesn’t matter how good you are in a fight—mass matters, and I had more sheer tonnage of angry bad guy coming at me than maybe ever before.

  “Hoo boy,” I said.

  Ebenezar stumped forward to stand beside me, his eyes bright. Light from a flare shone off his bald, smooth-shaved pate. “Now, that, Hoss,” he said, “is something you don’t see every day.”

  All around me, Einherjaren were ditching their rifles. Instead, they started pulling out axes and swords, laughing and singing as they did. A crew of several others came running in with crates made of heavy composite materials and opened them to reveal bricks of what I assumed to be explosive compounds of some sort. They started passing them out, along with small tubular detonators, which they clutched between their teeth as if they’d been passed a Cuban cigar.

  “Okay,” I said. “What the hell are these guys thinking?”

  “They’re thinking those giants are about to ram into this building and bring it down around us all,” Ebenezar said.

  “What are we gonna do about it?” I asked.

  There was a soft set of footsteps and then Senior Councilman Cristos stood beside me, staring hard at the oncoming Jotnar. He was breathing hard, and his face looked grey and exhausted. “It’s ready,” he said to Ebenezar.

  “Right,” my grandfather said. He leaned forward, staring intently at the ground on the near side of the park. “Hoss, buy me a little time to work.”

  “Me?” I squeaked.

  “Mmm. Or we’ll die,” he said calmly. “Those are fire giants. We don’t stop these things here, they’ll run right through us and turn the city into a kiln while the Titan sits back and laughs.”

  By this time, I could feel the shock when their feet, stumpier and wider than human feet would be, proportionately, struck the ground like an earthquake’s vanguard.

  “Carlos, shield me,” I said. “I’m not going to have anything to spare.”

  Without a word, Ramirez lifted his left hand and the air in front of me quivered with a pale greenish disk of light that rippled like water. It wasn’t more than a second before enemy fire struck it on one side, evidently with shot from the octokong weapons. The ball hit Ramirez’s shield and in the act of passing through, it was ripped into a fine spray of metallic grit.

  The Jotnar closed to two hundred yards.

  I lifted my right hand, staff gripped in it, and gathered my power, reaching out to the cold, vicious core of Winter that now resided within me.

  One hundred and fifty yards.

  From deep within, I touched upon the reservoir of Soulfire that I’d been gifted with many moons before. Soulfire was the purest force of Creation in the universe, left over from the birth of the universe itself. Angels wielded Soulfire, and one of them had given me enough to last a lifetime. Soulfire didn’t make magic more potent, precisely—but it made it more real. As the power of Creation itself, Soulfire was best used to create and protect, and what I had in mind was going to take a lot of it.

  One hundred yards.

  Cold blue light began to shine from me. That was enough to draw the fire of every octokong on the field, and Ramirez’s shield glowed brighter and brighter. I struggled not to flinch as an increasing spray of fine grains of lead washed against my chest and face.

  “Harry,” Carlos gasped. “Hurry.”

  Fifty yards.

  Within my thoughts, I merged the power from the heart of Winter with Soulfire.

  My head exploded with raw agony as the energies met—and fed upon each other, growing into a thunderstorm in my thoughts. Frost formed over my fingernails and spread out along a couple of feet of my quarterstaff on either side of my gripping hand. Steam boiled off me in small clouds as Winter frost met the sultry summer night.

  “Infriga!” I roared, pointing my staff at the ground to one side of the charging line of Jotnar.

  Power coursed out of the heart of me, into the ancient oak of my wizard’s staff, focused and concentrated within its length by the runes and sigils carved along it. The tool leapt in my hand like a firefighter’s high-pressure hose, and I had to clamp both hands on it and strain every muscle just to hold steady, runes glowing the same bright green-gold as Alfred’s eyes on Demonreach.

  A howling lance of glacier-blue, coherent, observable, utter cold flooded into the night. The very summer air screamed in protest at the sudden, wild shift in temperature, with steam and mist boiling off me in a cloud. The beam struck the ground before the oncoming Jotnar—and where that beam struck, a wall of absolutely crystalline ice formed, twenty feet thick, thirty feet high, and curving forward like a breaking wave.

  Howling in time with the wailing air, I slewed the beam from left to right across the path of the oncoming Jotnar—who collided with my barrier with all the power and momentum of a freight train. There was an enormous roar, a series of impacts, and cracks exploded through the clear ice in a spiderweb of crazed lines.

  But the wall held.

  I sagged as the last of the spell’s energy washed out of me and would have fallen if Ramirez hadn’t steadied me. My vision blurred for a second, and I swiped a hand at my eyes, where frost crystals had frozen throughout my eyelashes and dragged them down in a wintry veil over my vision.

  By the time I’d cleared it, Jotnar were roaring. Swords and axes exploded into flame as though they’d been coated in napalm and set alight. The flaming weapons were brought crashing down upon the Winter ice with echoing cracks like the bellow of cannons. Light rushed through the prism of the slowly shattering wall, dancing through hectic spectrums of color. Fragments of ice exploded outward in deadly showers. Screaming jets of steam erupted from each strike, some of them whistling like a haunted hell-bound train.

  I dragged my gaze over to my grandfather, who stood with his legs planted solidly. Ebenezar held his hands at his sides, fingers wide, palms toward the ground, and the very air around him shivered with multiple forces of energy.

  My wall of ice cracked and fell within seconds, the Jotnar hammering and hacking it down, heedless of the deadly jets of steam.

  But a few seconds had been enough.

  The old man abruptly opened his eyes, lifted his upper lip in a snarl, turned up his palms, and raised them, slow, shaking, as though they were carrying a weight too unthinkable to be readily quantified as he growled, “Plimmyra.”

  The Jotnar plunged ahead, screaming, their boots hammering the ground—

  —and then the very earth bubbled and without ceremony simply swallowed them. Jotnar fell, with blaring shouts of confusion and rage, thrashing in ground that had a moment before been solid and was now, I could see, so inundated with water that it had become something very much like quicksand.

  The giants thrashed and struggled, and I turned to see the old man gasp and waver as the energy of the spell left him. He braced a hand on the concrete edge of the parking garage, traded a look with Cristos, and then the pair of them started cackling, half in exhaustion and half in satisfaction.

  The leader of the Einherjaren stared gleefully for a second, as the Jotnar thrashed and stumbled over one another, wallowing clumsily. Then he let out a howl of glee, raised his axe, and just vaulted over the railing to the street level twenty feet below him. The rest of the revenant warriors followed him in a wave of joyous howls. I thought I could hear ankles breaking as they hit the ground.

  They just didn’t care.

  What followed was . . . one of those things I still have dreams about sometimes.

  It was like looking at something straight out of mythology. Warriors with their axes and spears went screaming for the Jotnar. Their weight was utterly insignificant compared to that of the giants, and they ran over the surface of the inundated
earth with no more difficulty than they would a moderately muddy field.

  Flaming Jotun weapons rose and fell, and if the giants had been quick to cover ground, they were just too damned big and too damned shackled in their movements to respond with sufficient speed. The Norse warriors ducked and leapt and weaved as enormous weapons came scything toward them. Mostly, they were successful. But I saw one man crushed like an insect by a blow from the flat of a Jotun axe. Another was spitted like a damned pig, and the man screamed as the flaming sword lifted him high and burned his guts into a cloud of black ash. Still another was seized by a Jotun’s meaty, thick-fingered hand, and the giant simply lifted the man’s head and shoulders to his broad mouth—and bit them off with about as much effort as I would use on a chocolate bunny.

  Dozens of the Einherjaren met horrible fates.

  And then it was their turn.

  Huge the Jotnar might have been, but the Einherjaren knew how to fight them. As some warriors engaged a Jotun’s weaponry, sacrificing their lives to do so, others followed through the openings their companions’ deaths had created. Their great swords and broad axes began to swing and to hack the trapped Jotnar. Einherjaren thrust their blades between enormous links of mail where necessary and hacked at Jotun thighs and groins wherever possible. The giants were huge, but they were made of flesh and blood.

  The fight became brutal beyond anything you could see in a movie theater. Small rivers of Jotun blood flowed. One gout caught the leader of the Einherjaren full in the face, and the man went up like the Human Torch—and as he burned, he continued hacking away with his axe until finally a charred black mannequin fell to the earth. A dozen Einherjaren together leapt against a Jotun’s chest. Two of them were crushed to death on the way in, but the others overbore the giant, sending it crashing to its back in the quicksand, where they hacked at its face and neck with their weapons, screaming—until another Jotun’s sword scythed across the ground at thigh level and ripped every single one of them in half.