“Much better,” said Mother Summer. “Stay near me at all times.”
I looked around the perfectly serene forest. It was a bit of an effort, since the helmet kept me from turning my head very smoothly. I looked up, too. I’m sure the armor made me look goofy. “Uh, okay.”
Mother Summer smiled, took my arm again, and stretched out one foot. She used it to brush a layer of dirt and fallen leaves from the pitted surface of a flat stone, like a paving stone, maybe three feet square. She tapped it three times with her foot, whispered a word, and drew me along with her as she stepped onto it.
No drama ensued. The landscape simply changed, as swiftly and drastically as when you turn on a light while in a darkened room. One second we stood in an autumnal megaforest. The next . . .
I’ve seen movies and newsreels about World War I. They didn’t cover it as thoroughly in my schools, because America didn’t have a leading role in it, and because the entire stupid, avoidable mess was a Continental clusterfuck that killed millions and settled nothing but the teams for the next world war. But what they did show me I remembered. Miles and miles of trenches. A smoke-haunted no-man’s-land strung with muddy, rusty barbed wire and lined with machine guns and marksmen. There was a pall of smoke that turned the sun into a dully glowing orb.
But the movies couldn’t cover all the senses. There was a constant rumble in the sky, thunder born of violence, and there was everywhere the smell of feces and death.
We stood atop a small, barren mountain, looking down. Near us, only a few hundred yards away, was an immense wall, the kind you’d use to hold out the Mongols if they were the size of King Kong. It was built entirely from ice or some kind of translucent crystal. Even from here, I could see that there were chambers and rooms in the wall, rooms containing barracks, hospitals, kitchens, you name it. There were dim and indistinct forms moving around in them.
The walls were lined with what had to be tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of soldiers. I peered, trying to get a better look, and then realized that they were armored Sidhe.
All of them.
They all wore armor similar to mine, its highlights throwing back the cool, muted shades of Winter.
Out beyond the wall was a land made of dust and mud and loose shale. It was covered in hillocks and steep gullies, and the only plants that grew there looked like they were certain to poke, scratch, or sting you. Though the land was somehow lit, the sky was as black as Cat Sith’s conscience, without a single star or speck of light to be seen—and it was an overwhelming sky, enormous, like in the open, rolling lands of Montana and Wyoming.
There were more bodies of troops moving out there. Some of them looked like they might have been giants, or maybe trolls. Larger groups containing smaller individuals were likely Winter’s gnomes. Things flew in the air. Bands of what appeared to be mounted cavalry rode back and forth. Some of the soldiers looked suspiciously like animated snowmen.
From this vantage point, I could see two major engagements happening, each containing maybe forty thousand Winter troops. And they were fighting. . . .
I couldn’t make out the enemy. There didn’t seem to be any unity of form. They were creatures—creatures whose physiologies made no sense, were utterly without order. I saw what appeared to be tentacles, enormous mandibles, claws, fangs, clublike limbs and tails. They weren’t bipedal. They weren’t quadrupeds. In fact, they seemed to have no regard for bilateral symmetry at all.
I peered a little closer and felt a sudden, horrible pressure inside my head. I felt dizzy for a second, nauseated, and at the same time part of me was screaming that I needed to ditch my escort and go look at these things for myself, that there was something there, something I wanted to see, something I wanted to stare at for a while. A cold, somehow greasy tendril of energy slithered around inside my head, something I had felt before when . . .
I jerked my eyes away with a short grunt of effort, closed them, and left them closed. “Holy . . . Outsiders? Mab’s fighting Outsiders?”
Mother Summer said nothing.
“I don’t . . . I don’t understand,” I said finally. “White Council intelligence always estimated Mab’s troop count at around fifty thousand. There are freaking formations out there with more troops in them than that.”
Mother Summer said nothing. But she did lift a finger and point off to the left. I looked, and saw a pair of towers the size of the Chrysler Building rising up over the wall. Between them was a pair of gates.
The gates were something amazing to look at. They were huge, bigger than most Chicago apartment buildings. They were made of a darker shade of the same ice or crystal, and there were designs and sigils carved into them, layer after layer after layer. I recognized a couple of the ones I could see clearly. They were wards, protective enchantments.
There was a sudden sound, a rising moan, like the wind shaking trees or surf striking a cliff wall—and the horizon outside the walls was suddenly lined with dark, grotesque figures, all of them charging forward, toward the Winter troops.
Faint horn calls sounded, clear and valiant. Winter’s troops began to retreat back toward the gates, gathering into a great arch on the ground outside them, locking their formation into place while cavalry harassed the oncoming Outsiders, slowing their advance. Then the cavalry streaked from their engagement, passing safely through the lines of infantry to come riding back through the gates.
The Outsiders came on and crashed against the Winter lines. Battle ensued. From this far away, it just looked like a big, confusing mess, with everyone jostling for a better position, but I could see a few things. I saw an ogre go down when an Outsider spit acid that started eating through his eyes into his skull. I saw the Winter lines falter, and the Outsiders began pouring reinforcements into the weakness.
Then a small crew of goblins exploded out of a pile of shale at precisely the right moment, when the Outsiders were pressed almost into the Winter lines, but before reinforcements arrived. The surprise attack drove the Outsiders forward, when I could see that the “weak” regiment had been playing the Outsiders for suckers, falling back, but doing so in good order. The Outsiders had overreached themselves, and were now surrounded on all four sides by the savage troops of Winter.
The would-be invaders didn’t make it.
And that was only a tiny fraction of the battle. My senses and mind alike simply could not process everything I was seeing. But my heart was beating very swiftly, and frozen fear had touched my spine like Mab’s fingers.
The Outsiders wanted in.
“When?” I asked. “When did this start?”
“Oh, Harry,” Mother Summer said gently.
“What?” I asked. But I had noticed something. Those layers and mounds of shale? They weren’t shale.
They were bones.
Millions and millions and millions of fucktons of bones.
“What the hell is going on here?” I breathed. “Where are we?”
“The edge of Faerie,” she said. “Our outer borders. It would have taken you a decade to learn to travel out this far.”
“Oh,” I said. “And . . . and it’s like this?”
“In essence,” Mother Summer said. She stared sadly out over the plain. “Did you think Mab spent all her days sitting in her chair and dealing with her backstabbing courtiers? No, Sir Knight. Power has purpose.”
“What happens if they get in?” I asked.
Mother Summer’s lips thinned. “Everything stops. Everything.”
“Holy crap,” I muttered. “Does Summer have a place like this, too, then?”
Mother Summer shook her head. “That was never its task. Your Council’s estimate was fairly close, counting only those troops protecting the hearts of Winter and Summer. Mab has more than that. She needs them—for this.”
I felt like I’d been hit repeatedly in the head with a rubber hammer. “So . . . Mab’s troops outnumber yours by a jillion.”