Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,103
out of my way.
“Stay close and keep mum,” I muttered to Butters over my shoulder. “Especially with Mab. Don’t get caught making anything that could sound like a promise. Don’t accept anything that could be construed as a gift.”
“That include advice?” Butters asked.
I glowered at him. He grinned at me—and then his face suddenly went slack as we emerged from the troops and he faced the Queen of Air and Darkness on her Winter unicorn.
“Well done, my Knight,” Mab said to me without preamble. “You wounded them enough to plant the seeds of doubt.”
Mortar shells continued to fall on the pavilion. Occasionally, small bits of dirt and debris would plunge down from overhead, pinging off Sidhe armor or clattering against the concrete. My skin felt as if someone had slapped it with a large grid of barbed wire and then dragged it several inches. The earthen fortress was down to six hundred and twenty-two defenders, with more than two hundred of them wounded, and I could feel each and every scratch. I buried the sensation behind a wall of pure mental discipline, hard-earned over my entire lifetime.
But I was feeling grouchy. I assure you.
“Oh good, doubt seeds,” I said. “If we water them and wait and eat all our vegetables, maybe they’ll grow into doubt saplings.”
“Do not be ridiculous,” Mab said. Her lips peeled slowly back from her teeth. “They grow into fear.”
“Which makes them angry,” I said. “Fear always becomes anger.”
“Precisely,” Mab said. “An angry foe is predictable. Easily manipulated.”
“Well, you’ve manipulated Corb and Ethniu into coming right at you,” I said.
A chorus of chirruping clicks erupted from the far side of the park and began to grow steadily louder.
Mab cast a gaze across the field that on most females would have been reserved for their lovers. “Yes. Corb will whip his people into a frenzy. They will charge us, howling for blood, blind to anything but our deaths.”
I eyed her and said, “Oh. Good.”
Mab glanced at me and said, “Do not be afraid of Corb, my Knight. He and his were destined to be sacrificed from the moment Ethniu conceived of this plan.”
“I know the Sidhe are dangerous,” I said. “But there’s not enough of them. Not for what is coming at us.”
The clicking grew louder.
The Queen of Air and Darkness cast back her head, her eyes going wild, her smile widening to inhuman proportions. “The numbers stand at one Mab to none. That advantage shall be sufficient.”
Suddenly I was aware of the creatures of Winter beneath my command, racing to join us. The temperature around us abruptly plummeted. White winter frost began to crackle across the face of the Bean, and Mab shuddered and arched her back, her eyes closing, as the breath of Winter itself gathered around us. White mist began to thicken the grey haze of the city. The air suddenly became close, intimate, as the cloud of cold vapor enveloped the cohort.
The faemetal weapons of the Sidhe began to creak and moan as deathly frost formed upon them.
And I realized that I could suddenly see no farther than maybe fifteen feet, tops.
“We won’t be able to see them coming,” I said in a low voice.
“Irrelevant,” Mab replied.
In the shadows of the Bean behind us gathered the malks and Black Dogs, the rake and the ogre, the gnomes and double dozens of the viciously mischievous Little Folk of Winter.
Before us, the Sidhe abruptly began to chant and sing, gesturing with their hands as they did. Flickers of light glittered over the cohort in a dome. Shapes and sigils, runes and formulae, crackled briefly in the air, as two hundred sorcerers gathered their power from the hyperenergetic air.
What the hell? I held up my staff, opening the channels to the energy storage structures inside, and drew that energy down into it. The task normally took an hour of intense concentration and exhausting effort, when I had to provide the energy for the staff myself. With the air gone mad with power, the staff charged in seconds, which should not have been possible, not without the excess energy overflowing into waste heat and burning the thing to a crisp.
Instead, it simply let out a low hum, the runes carved into glowing green-gold, and the faint, excellent scent of scorched wood edged the night.
Mab surveyed her troops, evidently waiting as the various shields and wards and charms and abjurations were assembled from mystic energy. She glanced aside and said, “This is the new Knight of the Sword?”