Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,136
her down to a knee.
Butters, going by the other side, whipped Fidelacchius through a circle—and Ethniu struck him right on the chin with the butt end of her stolen spear with a simple lightning-fast jab while he did it.
Which is why you shouldn’t learn fighting moves from the movies.
Butters went flying back into the mud and didn’t move.
Half the light on the field went out.
Sanya regained his feet, behind the Titan, and charged as she began to rise, the head of the spear orienting on the unmoving form of the Knight of Faith. Before she could finish him, Sanya slammed into her back and smashed her down into the mud.
Ethniu twisted on the way down and hammered an awkward blow at Sanya with one arm. The Knight of Hope caught the blow on the blade of Esperacchius.
And again, a Titan screamed.
Maybe two thousand individuals from both armies simply collapsed to the ground, howling in agony as a wave of psychic pain washed out of the Titan. It felt like my arm had been set on fire.
But it sure as hell wasn’t the first time.
This time, I’d been ready, bracing myself against the Titan’s suffering, and surged through it like a swimmer breaking through the first wave at the beach. I closed the last few yards, slammed my feet down hard to brace them, and thrust the Spear at the Titan’s face.
Ethniu swept her stolen spear from left to right like a windshield wiper, and she was fast, way faster than she’d looked when I hadn’t been within stab range. I tried to slip the parry but was just too slow, and she batted the Spear aside, seized Sanya by a handful of his mail shirt, and threw him at me with about as much energy as a runaway golf cart.
We both went down in a heap, hard enough to take breath and cause stars and comets to whirl in front of us.
Esperacchius spun out of Sanya’s hands.
There was blood on it.
The Titan’s blood.
Ethniu glanced at a smoldering pile of what was mostly corpses, their body fat blazing in flames where one of the bolts of lightning or flying shards of Power had struck incidental targets. With the head of the spear, she flicked the Sword of Hope, smeared with blood too red to be real, into the fire.
And then she thrust her wounded arm into it, her expression twisting with pain as the fire scorched and boiled the wound.
The light of the Sword died.
Hundreds screamed with the Titan’s pain.
And the world suddenly got a whole hell of a lot darker.
“Trinkets of the Redeemer,” she snarled, her voice absolutely bubbling with hatred. She rose, whipping her burned arm out of the fire. The wound hadn’t been a very big one, even struck with Esperacchius, and she had cauterized it closed, apparently. Though the surface of her bronze skin was untouched, the flesh inside the wound had been charred like meat on a grill. “Maggots crawling on our beautiful world. Infesting it. Humans.”
Hate seethed through her, vibrated off her like heat from a fire. The Titan twisted her face in a rictus of concentration.
And the Eye kindled to scarlet life and began to brighten.
“Damn,” Sanya muttered, as the Titan turned toward us. The scarlet warlight of the Eye let me at least see Sanya. The big man was lying on his back. Something in the area of his collarbone was . . . just wrong, under the skin. It wasn’t shaped like humans were supposed to be shaped. His voice was thready, and he panted as though each inhalation was of pure fire. “Was pretty sure that would work.”
“Get her,” I said. “Not much of a plan.”
“No. For next time, need better plan.”
I blinked and looked at the Russian as the red glare brightened.
“Next time?”
He grinned at me, though he couldn’t move, in sheer mad defiance.
Supercool magical pokey stick or not, I didn’t have what it took to stand up to power on the order of magnitude of the Eye of Balor. My heaviest magical punch was nowhere close to what my grandfather could throw, and that hadn’t gotten through her armor, either. Even if I was a lot better, even if I threw it out as a death curse, the best spell I had wouldn’t surpass what the old man could do.
And I still hadn’t gotten to her blood.
If I was going to bind the Titan, I needed that. And I needed her closer to the water.