Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,72
move around pretty quick.” I bumped my elbow on a black composite-material box that had been strapped to the back of the Harley. There was a printed label on it that read, CAMPING SUPPLIES.
“What’s in here?” I asked her.
“My dancing shoes.”
“Right.” I looked over at Will, who was watching me with serious wolf eyes. “And I need you guys to run interference for me. When the enemy figures out what I’m doing, I’ll”—I swallowed—“be target number one.”
The wolf stared steadily at me for a moment and then nodded once, sharply. Will knew exactly what I was asking them to do: take bullets for me, of one kind or another.
“Bob,” I said, “if anything useful comes over the airwaves, I want to know about it.”
“Got it, boss,” Bob said. “Um. But right now, there’s a repeating message from the castle’s command post, for any surviving forces to meet at Wrigley.” He was quiet for a second and then said, “I don’t think there’s anybody left over there.”
Somewhere in the distant haze ahead of us, a Jotun’s horn blared out, a long and mournful wail, a sound that somehow encapsulated bleakness and rage, despair, the end of all things.
And, somewhere in the distance behind us, another horn answered.
I could feel uneasiness ripple through my friends, and through the crowd behind me. Not even the monsters of Winter could hear those horns without feeling a sense of slow, inevitable dread.
I didn’t feel it, of course. I was a mighty wizard of the White Council, monarch of mental mastery, pharaoh of fickle fear.
I didn’t pucker up at all.
So. The enemy was playing head games, too.
“Bozhe moi,” Sanya murmured. “Are there enough of us?”
“Enough to do our country loss,” I said. “Steady.”
And we kept moving forward as the city once more turned the color of blood beneath the glare of the Eye.
Chapter
Eighteen
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the Bean. Probably you have, on a TV show or in a movie. It’s this big silvery sculpture that’s supposed to look like—I don’t know—an air bubble underwater or something. It has an arch in the middle that you can pass under, and it was originally named the Cloud Gate, because from far overhead you can look down and see it reflecting the sky and the clouds.
But if you don’t have that very privileged viewpoint, if you look at it from the perspective of everyday people, it looks like a big old bean lying on its side. So Chicagoans called it the Bean, much to the artist’s apparent disgust. It casts a distorted reflection of the city skyline on one side, and of the concrete and trees of the park on the other.
Tonight, on one side of the Bean was a hazy reflection of a city on fire.
And the other side showed the backs of maybe a couple of hundred of Mab’s soldiers, who were facing east, toward the lake, standing in their armored ranks, and waiting.
Before we rode into the hazy park, we heard a couple of sharp, high-pitched, twittering whistles. The Sidhe could communicate like that if they wished, in whistles and birdsong. They had a complex musical language, too, and for some reason the Winter Sidhe absolutely loved human music. No idea why, but it was a genuine thing with them. I’d rarely seen a gathering of Winter that didn’t include mortal music, and mortal musicians where possible, though I had come away with the impression that one really, really didn’t want to be chosen to perform for the Sidhe. Bad things tended to happen.
You know all those brilliant musicians who wound up dead way sooner than they should have? Call it maybe a fifty-fifty chance that the Sidhe were involved along the line. It was part of how my godmother had made her bones with Mab.
Mab stood behind them, in her battle mail, her pale hair glowing with starlight, mounted upon a freaking unicorn.
Don’t get the wrong idea. The unicorns who serve Winter aren’t like the ones you’ve maybe seen in books or movies or cartoons. These things aren’t silver and white and pretty. They look like a unicorn as designed by H. R. Giger. They have exoskeletons in creepy variants of black that sort of nodded at other colors in the shining highlights. And they have no eyes. I’d seen exactly one of them, once before, and even that one had been only a glamour around a different creature.