Battle Ground

by Jim Butcher

  And it terrified me.

  The real battle for your own soul isn’t about falling from a great height; it’s about descending, or not, one choice at a time.

  And sometimes, it’s about choosing to pay a price so someone else doesn’t have to. I had rarely hesitated to hazard my body in the defense of those who needed it.

  I looked back at the city behind us.

  If more is required of me, so be it.

  I offered my hand to Mab, plain soldier.

  She took it.

  Chapter

  Nineteen

  I put Sanya and Murphy on getting the arms out to our volunteers. Marcone had planned as if he’d intended a city block party’s worth of amateurs to be kitted out with the one weapon that could do the most damage in their hands: shotguns. A hell of a lot of shotguns. And, given the haze over the city, it wasn’t like anyone could see clearly more than thirty or forty yards anyway.

  Not everybody took a shotgun. Dozens had heavier weapons of their own. But by the time we were done, everyone had a firearm of some type, and everyone had pockets full of shells.

  I called Toot-Toot in and sent him with a message for Etri. Within five minutes of sending the little guy off, a squad of svartalf combat engineers had arrived, and I’d given them their instructions. They immediately turned to the open earth inside the pavilion and began shaping it into defensible earthworks beneath the enormous, arching trellis that supported the pavilion’s sound system. People stared at that in awe. It’s not often you see several hundred thousand tons of earth moving itself around thanks to the hand gestures of a crew of little grey guys.

  “Defiladey enough for you?” I asked Sanya.

  “Da,” the Russian replied. “Did not know this park was built on Styrofoam at bottom.”

  “Yeah, the whole place is technically kind of a rooftop garden,” I said. “Can you hold?”

  “Maybe, but then they go around us,” Sanya said. “We leave one-third here. The rest, we go out and find them. Draw them back here if we have to fall back. They run across all this open space? Pow, pow, video-game easy.”

  “If you have to fall back, huh,” I said.

  The big man grinned. “Da, am Russian. We are a very positive people,” Sanya said.

  “No, you aren’t!” came Butters’s protest from somewhere off in the haze.

  Sanya beamed. “I really like little Jedi man,” he confided. “Here, look.” He leaned down to scrape at loose earth with the tip of his knife. “Mab here. Us here. Enemy coming from there, there, there.” He made marks to the north, east, and south. “See? Our people will hold against north threat from earthworks. Others go out, see if we can hit the east threat from flank once they engage Mab.” He nodded toward the mark in the south. “That one, up to the Archive and Etri’s people.”

  I nodded. “You’ll just be wandering around blind out there.”

  “Da, but so are they. So it is fair.”

  “What kind of idiot wants to fight fair?” I complained.

  “This is terrible fight,” Sanya said. “But is only one we have. ‘Fair’ is many steps up ladder from where we are now.”

  “Good point,” I said with a grimace. I frowned and checked. My contingent of wicked fae, who were lurking around out of sight of the mortals, had approximately tripled in size, mainly with malks. I knew there was a big colony of them in town, and now I had a good threescore of the vicious little killers slinking around in the haze and waiting for a chance to spill more blood. None of them were near the mortals who had followed me, which was what I had mostly worried about.

  Hey, I thought, as loud as I could, in the direction of Winter. The mortals of Chicago are off-limits. Cross me on this and I’ll kill every last one of you.

  What came back to me from the creatures of Winter was a sensation of . . . Well, it wasn’t compliance. It was deeper than that. My will became their will. I felt the adjustment of their very beings, their rising fury at the suffering inflicted upon . . . The closest thing I can come up with, to explain it, was that they felt the same rage a farmer does when something is after his livestock.

  Maybe that’s as close to being protective as Winter gets. But it was hard and cold and real.

  The Winter Knight doesn’t so much lead Winter’s troops as command them as he would any other weapon in his grasp.

  I sent the malks out in a circular screen around us. I wanted to know when the enemy got close, and the little killers were as silent and swift as any wraith.

  Murphy was demonstrating to a group of volunteers how to load a shotgun. It’s not real complicated. When it comes to firearms, shotguns are about as basic as it gets. She finished showing a number of drawn, determined faces how to handle the weapon.

  “For what we’re doing,” she said to the volunteers, “you’ve got about the best weapon you can reasonably get. It’ll shoot farther than you can see, and it will be hard to miss. Tuck it in tight to your shoulder and aim down the barrel. You have four rules. Never point your weapon at anything you don’t want dead. Know your target so you don’t shoot your neighbor. Know what’s behind your target so you don’t shoot your neighbor by accident. And for God’s sake, keep your finger off the damned trigger until you’ve followed rules one through three.” She held up her right forefinger. “You put this on the trigger, assume you are a deadly weapon and a threat to anything you’re facing, period. Clear?”

  There was a round of murmured affirmatives.

  I walked up behind her and said, “I need your advice.”

  Murphy passed a shotgun to a nervous volunteer, a young man who said, “That’s all we get?”

  “Plenty of soldiers have gotten less,” I said to him. “You want to run, head west. The enemy is coming in from all around us everywhere else.”

  The kid swallowed, nodded, and carefully kept his finger off the trigger.

  Murphy clapped him on the shoulder, and then we turned to walk a little distance away.

  “What do I do?” I asked her quietly. “How do I arrange this so that I don’t get all these people killed?”

  “Trust Sanya,” she said frankly. “He’s had some military experience. Neither of us does. That’s the best we’ve got.”

  I looked over to where the Russian was talking to some guys in uniforms, laughing, his deep voice, the laughter itself, clear and somehow silvery. The air around him seemed less hazy than elsewhere, and I could read the faces of the people around him well enough to see that the Knight of the Sword’s presence was combating the supernatural fear and frenzy in the air around them. They . . . just looked more like people, when they stood near Sanya.

  “Right,” I said.

  I walked forward to stand next to Sanya, cleared my throat, and spoke out in what I hoped was a clear, firm voice. “All right, people. Gather in.”

  They did. I was tall enough for everyone to see. Hadn’t ever really occurred to me why everyone thought military leaders should be tall. It simply offered a small practical advantage, for much of humanity’s history.

  They could see my face, my eyes. They could see me.

  “This city has gone to hell in a handbasket,” I declared. “And then a bunch of monsters showed up.”

  There was a rumble of nervous laughter. Chicagoans love their city, but they also have few illusions about how screwed up it can be. They live here.

  “I know you’re scared,” I said. “I know you’ve all . . . seen things that nobody should have to see.” I pushed the image of that damned crib out of my head. “I know you don’t know who I am, and this is all weird. So, let me introduce myself. My name is Harry Dresden. I’m a wizard of the White Council. And I mean to fight to the death to defend this town.”

  “What?” came an incredulous voice from the crowd. “You think you’re a what?”

  I turned to that voice, identified the speaker throu
gh my link to the banner, and strode directly toward him. People got out of my way. He was a skinny guy, late thirties, holding a hunting rifle. He drew back half a pace, apprehensively, as I approached.

  “What’s your name, man?” I asked.

  “Uh . . . it’s Randy.”

  “Okay, Randy. I’m only going to do this once.”

  I dropped my staff on the ground, held up my hands in front of me, palms facing each other, drew in a whisper of will, and murmured, “Eggus Chennus.”

  Green-gold lightning, not a ton of it, exploded from my palms, forming a current of energy that snapped and crackled in the sultry summer air, contained within the space between my hands.

  I had thought through the spell before, but I’d never really tried it. It worked pretty well—except that rather than just going away, the power was cycling up one arm, around my shoulders, down the other arm, and then out between my hands again. It was a cycle that fed upon itself, and between that and the power-laden air of the terrified city, the energy built a whole hell of a lot faster than I would have liked. It had to go somewhere.

  I picked a tree and unleashed a stroke of green lightning that smashed into the trunk about five feet up and brought the tree crashing down. It started burning with green flame, green flame—all hell was breaking loose. I could only attribute that to the breakdown in reality that Bob had warned me about.

  My volunteers had fallen silent.

  Randy looked like he’d swallowed multiple bugs.

  “Wizard,” I reiterated. “Any questions?”

  “Are you on our side?” Randy asked.

  “If you’re here to defend the innocent, damned skippy I’m on your side,” I said. I grabbed his shoulder and squeezed a little. Then I turned to look at everyone else.

  “The monsters are coming,” I said. “And they’ll kill everyone in this town if they can. Unless we kill them first.”

  The crowd let out a sound that was a lot like a hungry growl.

  I found myself smiling, more and more widely. Yeah, the world was full of monsters and demons. But it was a human world. It was our world because we were the cleverest, most resourceful, and most dangerous things in it. Maybe my little army wasn’t the most martial representation of humanity, but people fighting for their homes had, historically, done incredible things.

  Time for history to repeat itself.

  “Sanya, raise your hand.”

  He did.

  “This is Sanya. He’s a Knight. He fights monsters for a living and he knows what he’s talking about. Sanya is your commander. Sanya . . . hey, where the hell did you get a freaking Kalashnikov?”

  Sanya shouldered his rifle by its strap, grinning. “Found it.”

  I waved a hand at him. “Whatever. Take charge, man.”

  “Da,” Sanya said, and raised his voice to a bellow. “Hello. First of all, da, I am Russian. Cope. Second, you see these men and women in uniforms? Easy to recognize even in haze, da? They are your officers. I will make groups of about thirty. Each group get one officer. Officer tell you what to do, you do it.”

  Sanya turned to the uniformed men and women. “You guys get to give one of three orders. Stand, retreat, and follow me. Keep it simple. Communications in battle are hard, even for professionals.”

  There was a round of nods. The military folks looked grim. They knew what a clusterfuck they were about to march into. And I knew about how hard it is to convey even simple ideas in a fight. We’d be lucky if the volunteers could follow even those limited orders reliably.

  Sanya turned back to the crowd. “Everywhere we go tonight, assume that you have orders to kill the enemy on sight. If standing, and enemy comes, kill enemy. If retreating, kill enemy. If following officer and enemy comes, kill enemy.” Sanya considered. “Basically tonight we are always killing enemy.”

  Another laugh at that. But he was playing to an easy room. People who are scared need to laugh, and the scarier things are, the more they need it.

  “Okay!” Sanya called. “Officers will divide you into groups! Everyone keep quiet so you can hear them!”

  Sanya and his officers started getting them sorted out.

  I shivered a little and stepped over to one side, where I could close my eyes for a second and try to process everything that was happening.

  I felt Murphy come up behind me and then lean against me. I leaned back.

  “This is going to be ugly, isn’t it,” I said quietly.

  “Yes,” Murphy said simply. “Just remember whose fault it is.”

  There was a horrible shrieking sound, and the haze flared red. This time, I could hear the building falling again.

  Ethniu was walking straight down Lake Shore, knocking down buildings like a kid kicking over anthills. She was coming for Mab.

  Who was in essence using herself as bait to keep the Titan from noticing me.

  I found Murphy’s hand and squeezed gently. “What’s going to happen after this, do you think?”

  “I don’t,” she said. “Because I’m doing today first.”

  I snorted quietly.

  Murphy squeezed back. “Harry. You can’t fix tomorrow until it gets here.”

  “Which is weird, because you can screw it up from decades away.”

  I heard her laugh gently. “I got used to weird. It’s not so bad.”

  “Flattery is unworthy of you,” I said.

  “It’s definitely unworthy of one of us.”

  I opened my mouth to fire back like Sir Benedic would have wanted me to, but instead I had to deal with a sudden harsh, twisting feline voice radiating through my skull.

  Sir Knight, mewled the unsettling voice of a malk, this is Grimalkin.

  Right. Grimalkin was Mab’s . . . personal aide, in some ways. He was an Elder of the malks, which meant he was bigger and stronger and meaner than most, and had access to a number of powers, foremost of which was the ability to creep me out with his damned weird voice.

  The enemy comes from the north, Sir Knight. I am also advised, by this irritating pixie, to inform you that there is a still-occupied child-care center in its path with a number of young mortals inside.

  I clenched my jaw so hard that I chipped a tooth.

  I looked around. Sanya was ordering the volunteers, but it would take time for him to get it done. If I shouted, “Follow me!” and started moving, I’d probably just walk them into a meat grinder. Sanya needed more time to get the volunteers organized.

  “Harry?” Murph asked.

  “Get the bike,” I said.

  She swung around and did. “Butters, Alphas, on me,” I barked. “Sanya, incoming from the north. Get them organized first, then bring them after me. I’ll try to slow the Fomor down.”

  “Da, go!” Sanya shouted. He turned and started bawling at the troops in a voice that could have been heard a quarter mile away.

  Murphy rumbled up on her bike, and I swung a leg over. Will and Georgia loped out of the darkness and took up position on one side of the bike, and Andi and Marci took the other. Butters came trotting over. You’d never have guessed the little guy had been galloping all over the damned town all evening, from the spring in his step. I had to give it to him—Butters was never going to be a powerhouse, but the little guy didn’t have an atom of quit anywhere in him.

  From the north, maybe two or three blocks away, I heard the scream of Huntsmen’s spear blasts, and a sudden sonic razor blade of ripping, tearing sound that was the simultaneous war cry of a dozen malks going into battle.

  And then, flattening that sound was the bone-shaking blare of a Jotun’s horn, the same one from before.

  And my stomach fell out. Because shotguns were not going to help against something that big, no matter how many of them we had. They’d only make it mad.

  Hear me, Winter, I thought. Converge on that engagement. Kil
l anything that tries to harm those children.

  The air was suddenly split with the screams and battle cries of ogres and gnomes, malks and Black Dogs, the wild ululations of a couple of Wyld Sidhe, the strangled moan of a freaking Rawhead, and the chittering screech of some of those damned big spiders that had been such a pain in my ass on several occasions, as they all leapt forward at their fastest pace to find and destroy the enemy.

  Murphy gave me a wide-eyed look, glanced down and back, and then set her jaw.

  “Go!” I shouted.

  The Harley roared.

  And with monsters as our vanguard, off we went to be Jotunslayers.

  Chapter

  Twenty

  We heard the sound of gunfire ahead, a lone pistol firing measured shots. Its defiance sounded thin indeed against the shrieks of the Huntsmen’s spear blasts.

  “Cut the engine,” I said.

  Murphy goosed a little more power out of the throttle and then cut the Harley’s engine. The heavy bike rolled forward almost silently on momentum and we had time to see what was happening.

  A single man defended the doorway of a staircase that led up to the second level. A sign posted beside him read THIRD WATCH CHILD CARE. He wasn’t terribly tall, was almost unbelievably stout, and with a shock I recognized Detective Bradley from Internal Affairs.

  A howling blast from a spear blew an inch of stonework off the doorway next to Bradley, and though chips of stone cut into his scalp, he didn’t flinch as he sighted down the barrel of his service pistol and squeezed off a shot.

  One of the Huntsmen’s heads jerked back and the creature fell to join three others on the ground—and those remaining screamed and swelled in size.

  The slide of the pistol locked back, as the Huntsmen charged the doorway. Bradley calmly discarded the weapon, reached for his ankle, drew his backup, and put three rounds from a little revolver into the lead Huntsman’s chest as it charged.