Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,120

in the air began to melt away like a sandcastle before the tide. The water sluiced down over the city, washing the air clean once more. Magic began to bleed out of the air and sink back into the earth, drawn along by the heavy rain.

It couldn’t come down that hard for very long. It was maybe thirty seconds. Definitely no more than sixty. And then the rain abruptly stopped, as if a switch had been thrown, and only a few light, sporadic raindrops continued to fall. The city went from a roar to almost complete silence. The quivering reservoir of concentrated dread, ready to be collected and used, had withered and melted away.

And with its energy supply abruptly missing, the sullen fire of the Eye guttered and nearly went out.

Ethniu let out a short, sharp exhalation and lifted her left hand to the Eye.

Titania lowered her face, gleaming from the flood, and focused bright green feline eyes upon the Titan, her expression as set and immovable as the earth.

Sleipnir screamed and reared again, the great beast straining against the reins, eager to fight, while the blue-white fire of the living lightning in the hand of its great rider cast flickering nightmare shadows upon the ground all around them.

The Erlking gave her a wolfish smile.

And then the immortals went to war.

It happened fast. Everything was a blur of motion and energy. Sounds tumbled one upon another so rapidly that it was impossible to pick out or identify any given portion of it. Lights flashed so brightly that I had to cry out against the intensity.

None of them bothered with physical weapons. They all threw Power at one another. They all had been using it for century upon century. They were all better than me, with minds capable of shaping and forming multiple workings of Power simultaneously. I couldn’t have tracked that duel, not even if I’d been at one hundred percent and had signed guarantees of safety. Participating in it? Laughable.

There was so much power there that my Sight started picking up images, like a light so bright that it hurt even through closed eyelids. Each of the combatants blurred, as if multiple layers of the same image had suddenly started performing multiple separate actions. I was struck by the sudden overwhelming perception that I was looking at potential realities, possible realities, all overlapping while immortal minds fought to see into the future and adjusted and counteradjusted their actions based upon what they could perceive there. So not only were they all doing multiple things at once; they were all thinking through every available possibility. That was like . . . simultaneously playing an entirely mental game of 3-D chess while juggling a running chain saw, a lit torch, and a bowling ball, all while balancing on a slack rope.

And then they took all of that vision and Power and potential and condensed it into a single instant. When they cut loose, the immortals fought one another all at once: They brought the totality of their being to the table, expending their energy all in the smallest area and time frame possible, concentrating their enormous Power with inhuman precision.

So there was light that tore at my eyes and sound that clawed at my ears, a nauseating ripple in the air caused by so much energy being unleashed in so small an area, and a clap of thunder.

And then there was a smoldering crater in the ground where the four of them had been standing faced off against one another.

Where the Erlking had been there was only a burned shape. Half of it was a skeleton, charred black. The other half looked like a lot of melted metal and cooked meat.

Sleipnir lay on his side, stunned, several yards away. Beside him lay his rider, his dark cloak and hood smoldering.

And Ethniu stood in the center of the smoking crater, her feet planted wide and confident, holding a limp, apparently unconscious Titania by the throat, the Summer Queen’s feet dangling six inches off the ground. Ethniu’s Titanic bronze skin-slash-armor had been scorched but not dented. She was breathing hard and looked unsteady, her eyes wide.

“Pathetic,” Ethniu purred to Titania. “I don’t need the Eye of Balor to deal with a goblin with delusions of grandeur, a starved, emaciated old god, and a little girl playing at being a queen.”

And with a casual motion, she slammed the Summer Queen’s head into the earth at her feet, leaving the rest of her limp body