Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,131

water and dust. It wasn’t even fair.

In a war, nobody plays fair. That’s what war is.

A group of panicked, fleeing octokongs went by as Lara and her people came bounding out of the chaos, their flowing, shroudlike white robes stained in various shades of blood. None of them looked hurt, and I saw one take a panicked blow from an octokong’s emptied arquebus. The shroud material twitched and moved, gathering thickly beneath where the blow began to land, and the body beneath seemed to briefly lose mobility and stiffen as the arquebus struck—and rebounded, the shroud actively pushing the weapon away, as the White Court vampire wearing it dealt a pair of lethal blows and breezed on by in a little twirling dance step. When Lara’s people landed in the open, they did it together, coordinated, somewhere between Hong Kong cinema and Charlie’s Angels.

Ethniu raised the spear and it transformed again into lightning in her hand. She swept a baleful gaze around the battlefield, choosing which target was the most dangerous.

She focused on me for a second. Then, longer, on the Archive. But then her eyes settled on my grandfather. On the Blackstaff in his left hand. Something about it seemed to stoke the furnace of her rage.

“Little boys should not play with adult tools,” the Titan snarled.

The old man’s answer was to raise the Blackstaff, shadow engulfing his head and shoulders, and to make a sweeping, beckoning gesture.

The front rank of the line of Fomor troopers died in their tracks, clattering to the ground.

Ethniu howled and unleashed the lightning against my grandfather.

The stocky old man vanished farther into shadow, raising the Blackstaff, the weapon’s darkness devouring the lightning, drinking and drinking endlessly—until I could see actinic fire gathering in the cracks of the old man’s skin. It did weird things to the shadow he cast, twisting and distorting it until it looked like a hideously twisted old woman, complete with the classic witch nose and chin, looking somehow darkly amused.

The instant Ethniu brought her fire down upon the old man, the Archive tilted her head slightly and lifted a single finger. In that instant, the whirling screen of big heavy things went flying toward the Titan in rapid succession like stones loosed from a giant’s sling. They hammered Ethniu, striking clouds of sparks from the Titanic bronze armor over her skin, battering her back off the top of her mound of bodies, and sending the bolt of energy trailing up into the sky.

My grandfather staggered and fell to a knee, silver light seething from beneath his skin, showing the dark shadows of liver spots, the lines of the bones in his right hand. Then he lifted that hand, holding what looked like a blazing gemstone the size of a softball, and with a word and a gesture sent damned near every erg of energy he’d just received sailing back at the Titan’s position, wreaking havoc among her troops.

Just as Baron Marcone and his people hammered their way through the confused Fomor and into Ethniu’s makeshift redoubt.

The troubleshooters on either side of Marcone led the way, rifles at their shoulders, advancing with a weird, slow little shuffle that left their shoulders steady and even, even in the sketchy terrain. They fired into the mass of troops. The Fomor’s armor wasn’t up to stopping heavy fire from military-grade arms at close range. Their shields were made out of something heavier, though, and they wound up dropping into a version of the old Roman tortoise formation, shields lifted and interlocked to form a wall against them.

Ethniu bounded back into position atop the mound and lifted the spear again.

The old man shouted and hammered her with a flying wedge of raw kinetic force that struck her like the blade of a guillotine, sending a shower of fire up from the surface of her bronzed flesh and leaving a glowing, smoking line across her upper torso—but it didn’t break the armor. She ignored the blow from the deadliest wizard of the White Council as if it had been delivered with a pillow, not the foundational forces of the universe, and focused her rage on the defiant Baron of Chicago.

Ethniu screamed her primal fury toward the man, and in response the formation of troops began a groaning chant, moving forward toward us behind the cover of their shields. Marcone’s troubleshooters lit the tall, unbowed form of Ethniu up, but they’d brought guns to an epic mythology fight. They inflicted some losses on the troops, but