Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,130
atop a mound of corpses. And incipient corpses. There were plenty to go around, and they’d piled them into a hill maybe ten feet high. It meant that she could see the battlefield all around her, ply the blasts of her stolen spear with deadly effect. When the Eye had drawn in enough energy once more, she would have her choice of targets.
But it also meant that she could be seen.
She had arrayed her troops on the mound of corpses around her in thick ranks. These were the heavy guys, strong and spooky-quick in their thick armor, with their too-thick torsos and overlong arms. I only got to see one face, behind the helmets, and that was of a hairy, rough-looking humanoid. It was hard to see much. He’d been hit with a heavy club or hammer, hard enough to shatter his helmet, and there was only so much left of the face. Neanderthal? Hell, how long had the Fomor been enslaving humans?
They faced us now in solid, disciplined ranks, and Butters slowed. Even he didn’t think he was going to just waltz through that.
On the far side of Ethniu’s defensive position, Marcone’s forces broke through the chaos.
First through was the Archive. She looked like a girl, not terribly remarkable in any way, in her early teens, wearing a formal school uniform. The objects whirling in a lethally swift orbiting cloud around her started with broken fire hydrants and got bigger and heavier from there, up to and including a big police motorcycle. They were moving so fast that it was hard to see what the object was, until it hit something. Then there was a gruesome spray and it slowed down enough for you to see a hundred-and-twenty-pound dumbbell tearing an octokong in half, or a bundle of rusty barbed wire the size of an Earthball smash its way through entire troops of Huntsmen at once. None of them got it in the face, either—when they saw the gruesome machine that was the Archive coming, they tried to flee. The ground and the chaos of the battlefield didn’t always allow it.
When it didn’t, the results looked like some kind of accident involving pressurized tanks of various colors of paint.
The Archive hadn’t come here to fight.
She was just mowing the lawn.
A few yards down the line from her, a block of enemy troops fifty yards deep and thirty yards across abruptly contorted—and then they just died, falling like broken puppets. One moment, chaos raged. The next, there was a sudden block of absolute stillness and silence.
The Blackstaff strode into the vacuum, Ebenezar McCoy in the fullness of his power, the left side of his body buried in a shadow so deep that it had to be taken on faith that he still had that half of his body at all.
Beside him strode Ramirez and Cristos. Cristos was doing something to the ground that solidified it into hard clay about a foot in front of Ebenezar’s toes, and the old man strode forward with dust coating him and a bleeding wound on the side of his mostly bald pate, his jaw set at a pugnacious angle.
A Fomor officer, probably one of their lesser nobles, had been pressured toward the old man by the inexorable power of the Archive and had the choice of the lawn mower or the tiger. He chose tiger, howled, and flung himself and his personal retinue at Ebenezar.
I had never seen Ramirez cut loose before.
Maybe a dozen froggy Fomor warriors came at them. He gathered his good hand in across his body, like a farmer drawing seed from a seed bag, and unleashed it with a ringing word and a flash of dark, dangerous eyes. A wave of translucent pale blue energy washed across them and . . .
And they just fell to wet, mushy dust. To their component molecules, maybe, as if the bonds of energy that had held them together had somehow been broken. Taken apart. Disintegrated. I noted, somewhere in the academic vaults of my head, that magic like that was like unbaking a damned cake back into its original components. Where would you even start?
Even more impressive, from an academic standpoint, was that breaking the energy of those bonds must have provided most of the fuel for the spell, because Ramirez never so much as broke limping stride. He could pull that one over and over again.
Ramirez was good. Better than me, on a technical level, by a considerable margin.