Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,106

the sheer power of her mind against a supernatural legion—and she was winning.

As long as the enemy couldn’t find and target Mab herself among all the duplicates, we weren’t fighting an army: We were holding a narrow pass where only a single unit of the foe could see us in the haze and engage us at the same time. Chaos and confusion and terror filled the minds of her enemies, and from them she built a fortress where their numbers counted for nothing.

If left unchecked, Mab and her killers could destroy the entire enemy legion, one unit at a time.

She let out another cry and the Winter unicorn leapt lightly into the haze, the rest of us following her like a comet’s tail. She hit a second group of abominations, and if they hadn’t been monsters, there to kill us, I would have felt sorry for the things. We dispatched that band, and then a third before the enemy gathered enough wits about them to respond.

A bolt of purple lightning came down out of the haze like the hammer of God and struck Mab squarely.

There was a flare of light so intense that I staggered and fell, dropping to a knee and barely staggering up again before the Sidhe warriors behind me trampled me to death. There’s a reason he fell became synonymous for he died. Losing your feet on a battlefield is an all-but-certain death sentence.

Blinking my eyes against the dazzling leftover image of the lightning bolt, I saw Mab’s slender body arch into a bow, curling around the spot where the lightning had struck her, her long, thin-fingered hands clenched around a ball of white-hot light, the edges of her nails blackening and smoking with the heat. Then, with a banshee wail of pure, terrifying scorn, she straightened again and sent the bolt of lightning raging ahead of the unicorn, plowing an even wider and more fearfully murderous path through the enemy ranks, blasting a burial-deep furrow in the earth as she went.

Hell’s bells.

I gave myself a stern reminder not to piss her off.

We plunged out of the wreckage of the third unit of abominations, and Mab, her face splattered with deep purple-maroon blood, let out a scornful snarl. “Corb should have shown his hand by now, the coward.”

“Fine by me,” I panted. There is no more difficult cardio than fighting, let me tell you. “The longer he lets us fight small groups one at a time, the happier I am.”

“That part of the dance is done,” Mab said, her eyes searching the haze. “These piteous lifespawn are helpless to us. But his other troops carry the Bane.”

The Bane, by which she meant iron. For reasons no one I know of has ever figured out, the Fae—and the Sidhe in particular—were vulnerable to the touch of iron and many of its alloys. It burned and sickened them, simultaneously acting as a branding iron and radioactive uranium. I knew the faemetal armor they wore would offer them some protection from the wounds—but the mere presence of too much of the stuff in their proximity would grind away at their endurance and mental cohesion. The Sidhe might be able to fight it for a while—but long-term, it was a losing proposition.

Don’t get too worked up about the phrase cold iron. Sometimes people insist that it means cold-forged iron. It doesn’t. The phrase is poetic metaphor, not instructions for building a chemical model. Sufficient iron content is what does the trick.

If I was fighting the Sidhe, I’d want dump trucks of the stuff. And also the dump trucks. Plus any machines and tools that had been used to load said trucks. Hardly a shock, then, that Corb had so equipped his troops.

Mab had just wheeled in preparation to charge again when there was a deep, ugly note in the air, almost below the range of my hearing, the kind of sound that you hear during disaster movies that have a lot of buildings collapsing, and maybe during earthquakes.

At the same time, my wizard’s senses were assaulted by a serious, heavy-duty pulse of earth magic.

There wasn’t even time to shout a warning. I called upon the Winter mantle for strength and speed and dove at Mab. The unicorn whirled to try to keep her away from me at the last second but wasn’t quite quick enough, and its movement was impeded by several abomination statues.

I was airborne when I saw the attack coming—jagged spears of metal, made from what looked like rebar