Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,62
protest at the sudden, wild shift in temperature, with steam and mist boiling off me in a cloud. The beam struck the ground before the oncoming Jotnar—and where that beam struck, a wall of absolutely crystalline ice formed, twenty feet thick, thirty feet high, and curving forward like a breaking wave.
Howling in time with the wailing air, I slewed the beam from left to right across the path of the oncoming Jotnar—who collided with my barrier with all the power and momentum of a freight train. There was an enormous roar, a series of impacts, and cracks exploded through the clear ice in a spiderweb of crazed lines.
But the wall held.
I sagged as the last of the spell’s energy washed out of me and would have fallen if Ramirez hadn’t steadied me. My vision blurred for a second, and I swiped a hand at my eyes, where frost crystals had frozen throughout my eyelashes and dragged them down in a wintry veil over my vision.
By the time I’d cleared it, Jotnar were roaring. Swords and axes exploded into flame as though they’d been coated in napalm and set alight. The flaming weapons were brought crashing down upon the Winter ice with echoing cracks like the bellow of cannons. Light rushed through the prism of the slowly shattering wall, dancing through hectic spectrums of color. Fragments of ice exploded outward in deadly showers. Screaming jets of steam erupted from each strike, some of them whistling like a haunted hell-bound train.
I dragged my gaze over to my grandfather, who stood with his legs planted solidly. Ebenezar held his hands at his sides, fingers wide, palms toward the ground, and the very air around him shivered with multiple forces of energy.
My wall of ice cracked and fell within seconds, the Jotnar hammering and hacking it down, heedless of the deadly jets of steam.
But a few seconds had been enough.
The old man abruptly opened his eyes, lifted his upper lip in a snarl, turned up his palms, and raised them, slow, shaking, as though they were carrying a weight too unthinkable to be readily quantified as he growled, “Plimmyra.”
The Jotnar plunged ahead, screaming, their boots hammering the ground—
—and then the very earth bubbled and without ceremony simply swallowed them. Jotnar fell, with blaring shouts of confusion and rage, thrashing in ground that had a moment before been solid and was now, I could see, so inundated with water that it had become something very much like quicksand.
The giants thrashed and struggled, and I turned to see the old man gasp and waver as the energy of the spell left him. He braced a hand on the concrete edge of the parking garage, traded a look with Cristos, and then the pair of them started cackling, half in exhaustion and half in satisfaction.
The leader of the Einherjaren stared gleefully for a second, as the Jotnar thrashed and stumbled over one another, wallowing clumsily. Then he let out a howl of glee, raised his axe, and just vaulted over the railing to the street level twenty feet below him. The rest of the revenant warriors followed him in a wave of joyous howls. I thought I could hear ankles breaking as they hit the ground.
They just didn’t care.
What followed was . . . one of those things I still have dreams about sometimes.
It was like looking at something straight out of mythology. Warriors with their axes and spears went screaming for the Jotnar. Their weight was utterly insignificant compared to that of the giants, and they ran over the surface of the inundated earth with no more difficulty than they would a moderately muddy field.
Flaming Jotun weapons rose and fell, and if the giants had been quick to cover ground, they were just too damned big and too damned shackled in their movements to respond with sufficient speed. The Norse warriors ducked and leapt and weaved as enormous weapons came scything toward them. Mostly, they were successful. But I saw one man crushed like an insect by a blow from the flat of a Jotun axe. Another was spitted like a damned pig, and the man screamed as the flaming sword lifted him high and burned his guts into a cloud of black ash. Still another was seized by a Jotun’s meaty, thick-fingered hand, and the giant simply lifted the man’s head and shoulders to his broad mouth—and bit them off with about as much effort as I would use on a chocolate bunny.