Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,63

Einherjaren met horrible fates.

And then it was their turn.

Huge the Jotnar might have been, but the Einherjaren knew how to fight them. As some warriors engaged a Jotun’s weaponry, sacrificing their lives to do so, others followed through the openings their companions’ deaths had created. Their great swords and broad axes began to swing and to hack the trapped Jotnar. Einherjaren thrust their blades between enormous links of mail where necessary and hacked at Jotun thighs and groins wherever possible. The giants were huge, but they were made of flesh and blood.

The fight became brutal beyond anything you could see in a movie theater. Small rivers of Jotun blood flowed. One gout caught the leader of the Einherjaren full in the face, and the man went up like the Human Torch—and as he burned, he continued hacking away with his axe until finally a charred black mannequin fell to the earth. A dozen Einherjaren together leapt against a Jotun’s chest. Two of them were crushed to death on the way in, but the others overbore the giant, sending it crashing to its back in the quicksand, where they hacked at its face and neck with their weapons, screaming—until another Jotun’s sword scythed across the ground at thigh level and ripped every single one of them in half.

Another Einherjar leapt up to sink a knife into that Jotun’s thigh, held on, and with his other hand slammed the detonator into his brick of explosive compound. It went off with a great cough of sound that slammed against my chest—and severed the Jotun’s leg at midthigh, sending it crashing and dying to the earth.

The Jotnar were killing the Einherjaren in job lots—and the Vikings just did not care.

They died, shouting and laughing and singing as they met fates more horrible than I want to think about or could easily describe.

And, by God, they took Jotnar with them.

The leader of the Jotnar, with his horn, thrashed his way to the edge of the quicksand and gained solid ground with one foot. A hawk shrieked defiance and plunged from the sky, sweeping along parallel to the ground in a burst of speed—and becoming a freaking fourteen-foot African elephant as it reached the Jotun.

Listens-to-Wind hit the Jotnar’s leader with the speed of a hawk and the mass of a pachyderm, and tree-trunk-sized ribs snapped with cracks of miniature thunder. The Jotun fell back into the waterlogged earth, while the elephant’s tusks ripped at his face and throat, gouging and tearing holes in flesh with raw strength and savage power.

Then octokongs and Huntsmen reached the fight, following in the wake of the Jotnar’s charge. Massive fire poured down from the skyscraper across the street, but it couldn’t stop them from coming forward. Momentum turned against the Einherjaren. Three more of them went up in explosions, laughing like madmen as the blasts took foes with them into death.

But there were more Fomor than there were Einherjaren.

The tide turned.

Just as it did, the world suddenly went silent, as if reality had taken a deep breath and held it. There was a low quiver in the concrete beneath my feet, a hideous pressure in the air, and then, from the direction of the lake, a column of red-white energy, pure power, hammered into the skyscraper where Marcone’s fire teams were wreaking havoc on the enemy and slewed across it in a path of utter ruin.

The building shattered like a toy.

I stood staring in pure shock as the power of the Eye of Balor tore apart a modern skyscraper as if it had been built from balsa wood. Windows shattered. Steel melted and ran like water. The building groaned in agony and then simply collapsed in upon itself in a roar and a wash of fire and smoke and a vast storm of rising dust.

In seconds, an edifice that had required the hands and wills of thousands of men and women had been reduced to smoke and rubble.

Ethniu had taken the field.

The Last Titan had come for Chicago.

I staggered as the cloud of dust billowed over us, and then recoiled again as, seconds later, the broad, ugly form of a Jotun congealed out of the dust and let out a roar, raising its axe high over the parking garage in both hands.

“Run!” screamed the old man.

And then the vast flaming axe crashed down into the ceiling above us and shattered the world.

Chapter

Sixteen

There was no time.

I gave Ebenezar a push, getting him out of the way of falling stone. Ramirez had