Butcher, Jim

Battle Ground

p.3 – " ‘…Mortals versus the supernatural world gets bad, Murph. Ugly. For all of us.’ "
p.21 – “They were showing the flag for civilization and law, reassuring people that there were still boundaries that would be defended.”
p.28 – “I held up a finder. ‘You can run, and they’ll chase you.’ I held up another. ‘You can hide, and they’ll hunt you.’ I clenched my hand into a fist. ‘Or you can fight. Because they are coming to kill you.’ "
p.30 – “I shook myself. I was terrified for them, for the people who were my friends– but if I stood there feeling terrified and sick and worried and helpless to protect them, I wasn’t going to do them any good.”
p.33 – “The eyes, they say, are the windows to the soul. They’re right. How long it takes to trigger the soulgaze varies, but it seems to work faster for people in heightened states of emotion…”
p.35 – “No, I said back to the voice in my thoughts. Killing your way to answers is never as simple as it seems. The best way to survive is to keep it simple. I didn’t bother trying to argue right and wrong. Those are concepts beyond the scope of that kind of magical construct.”
p.38 – “The only mirrors we have are other people.”
p.46 – " ‘You can’t just go straight up against a mind like that. Not when she’s wearing Titanic bronze.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘The stuff… it affects Creation on a fundamental level,’ he said. ‘As long as it has enough will behind it, the physical world is going to have a very limited effect on her.’ I squinted at the old man. ‘So as long as she thinks she’s invincible, she is?’ The old man lifted his eyebrows. ‘Haven’t ever heard it summed up that way before. But yes, that’s accurate enough for our purposes.’ "
p.48 – “Mab gave me a look with something in it that was almost like pity. Or possibly contempt. ‘As if you could restrain yourself any more ably than he could.’ She shook her head. ‘Be comforted, my Knight: I chose you for times precisely such as these, when an elemental of destruction is what is most needed.’ "
p.53 – “Doesn’t matter where you go in the world– if you’re good at your job, people who are good enough at theirs to see it will respect you for it.”
pp.61-62 – " ‘How many feet higher do the letters need to be in order to spell it out for you, wizard?’ the Redcap asked, amused. ‘Best you learn to read the subtext, if you wish to continue in this business. Besides. It’s not as if Mab can just hand the Wild Hunt to a mortal to play with.’ He shook his head. ‘Strife between queens is a terrible thing for the rest of us. Each can lay commands upon us that we cannot refuse. If one is to hold to one’s loyalties, it requires a great deal of careful negotiation of circumstance and conversation to function at all.’ "
p.63 – “Part of what keeps your brain insulated from damage is ‘wrapping’ the concept of a given spell in verbalized phonemes– and it’s got to be done in a language that you’re not really familiar with, if it’s going to do you any good. It provides a kind of insulation for your mind and thoughts. You can do magic without using words all you like– but it has consequences that begin with twitches and disorientation and eventually result in violent seizures and death. No wizard with an ounce of sense makes a practice of doing his magic silently.”
p.70 – " ‘When a group comes together around something they love,’ I said, ‘it changes things. It changes how they see one another. It becomes a community. Something greater than the sum of its parts.’ "
p.70 – “Mab’s eyebrows went up in comprehension. ‘Ah. You found a weakness in their psychology and manipulated it. You provided them with a resource and incurred their debt.’ ‘I made them see themselves differently.’ "
p.73 – " ‘Do you remember the hardest lesson of power?’ ‘Knowing when not to use it?’
p.74 – " ‘Seeing you like this, all the time. In the worst of the cross fire. It was like this with your mother. Getting more and more isolated from other wizards.’ He glowered at Lara and Mab. ‘Getting caught up with a bad crowd. And I didn’t know what the hell to do. What to say to her. Either.’ He coughed and blinked his eyes. ‘Dammit, Hoss. You keep getting hurt. And I can’t stop it.’ "
pp.74-75 – “His jaw muscles tensed and relaxed several times. ‘There’s falling from grace,’ he said, finally. ‘And there’s being pushed. And you’re standing pretty far ou on a ledge, Hoss.’ ‘My choice,’ I said. ‘Eyes open.’ The old man snorted. ‘Aye. Don’t mean I got to like it.’ ‘Neither do I,’ I said candidly. ‘But it’s what I’ve got.’ "
p.76 – “I shrugged. ‘Ivy… she’s on our side. On the side of people. On a fundamental level.’ ‘How do you figure?’ ‘She’s made to record adn preserve knowledge,’ I said. ‘No people, no knowledge. Nothing to record and preserve, and no reason to record or preserve it. Her existential purpose requires… us.’ "
p.79 – “Marcone took up his suit jacket and shrugged into it. He adjusted it until the cloth fell without revealing the guns. ‘Do you know the difference between courage and foolhardiness, Dresden?’ ‘Any insurance adjuster would say no.’ He waved a hand at my banter, as though that was all the acknowledgment it deserved. ‘Hindsight,’ he said. ‘Until the extended consequences of any action are known, it is both courageous and foolish. And neither.’ "
pp.79-80 – " ‘I have no intention of dying tonight, Dresden,’ Marcone said. ‘Nor of losing what I have fought to claim. I am a survivor. As, improbably, are you.’ He nodded to me politely and spoke in a very quiet, reasonable tone that was all the more chilling for the absolute granite rumbling beneath the surface. ‘I only wish you to be aware that I mean to continue as I have begun. After tonight, I will still be here– and you, by God, will show respect.’ "
p.99 – " ‘How many can we fit in there, do you think?’ River Shoulders asked me. ‘Well. We aren’t exactly worrying about fire codes right now,’ I said. ‘Maybe three or four hundred if we pack them in?’ ‘How many people, in this city?’ ‘Eight million, all told,’ I said heavily. ‘Give or take.’ ‘Not much difference,’ he said. I pointed at a couple of half-dressed parents with half a dozen kids in various stages of pajamas hurrying inside the squatting stone solidity of the castle. ‘Makes a pretty big difference to them.’ The Sasquatch flashed a sudden, very wide, very white grin.”
p.102 – " ‘So,’ I clarified, finding myself grinning irrationally, ‘we’re going to charge into the meat grinder as fast as we can to force her to hit us as hard as she can, and then hope that we can punch her lights out before the army gets here and starts killing everybody in sight.’ ‘We…’ Ebenezar sighed. ‘Aye, fair enough.’ "
p.102 – " ‘Well,’ I said to River Shoulders. ‘Shall we?’ My grandfather lifted his eyebrows. ‘Sure,’ River Shoulders said, and climbed to his feet, lightly for all his enormity. ‘Be good fun. Bigfoot versus oktokongs.’ ‘What?’ asked Cristos, his handsome face confused. ‘You heard him,’ I said. ‘Let’s go.’ "
p.106 – “The old man scowled furiously for maybe half a minute. I let him think. It’s important to think when things are going crazy, if you want to take the smartest action to get them sane again.”
p.106 – “Ebenezar waved a grumpy had at the raven. ‘Fine. Take the Indian, too. Silence that drum.’ He put a hand on my arm and met my eyes. ‘Hoss. Do not pull your punches tonight.’ ‘That’s always been my biggest problem,’ I said, spreading my hands. ‘All this restraint.’ "
p.110 – “Warden fire teams work much like any soldiers. Any one of us can put out enough firepower to kill every one of us if we’re careless or stupid, and working together means developing trust and respect in one another’s skills.”
p.118 – “Something ugly flickered in that smile for a few beats. Then Drakul shook his head. ‘I would tell you to ask of your own White Council what they aren’t telling you, what they bred you for, and what they expect you to do.’ He considered. ‘Well. Except that it seems unlikely you’ll have the chance on this side of the veil, I’m afraid.’ "
p.119 – " ‘I’ll be open with you, starborn. At this point of conversations like this one, I often offer the dark gift of immortality to someone in your position. It’s occasionally a way to obtain a useful tool, but mostly I just want to see how they react. One sees people for who they truly are when they face death… but, honestly, five minutes of you in my life has been quite enough. You’ve no… gravitas. No decorum. No style at all.’ "
p.131 – " ‘I’m a wizard, Hoss. Which means I’m arrogant.’ He smiled a little. ‘But not that arrogant. That’s how big this is, boy. I, a senior wizard of the White Council, don’t think I’m smart enough to make this call alone.’ "
p.136 – " ‘Lamar,’ I said. ‘Long time no see.’ ‘That’s because I don’t want nothing to do with you and your weird shit, Dresden,’ Lamar said. Lamar is one of the more sensible people I’ve ever met. “Then what are you doing here?’ I asked. Lamar shrugged. ‘What I do.’ He pulled back an eyelid on the girl, checked her pulse with a stethoscope, and rummaged in a medical kit beside him.”
p.154 – " ‘Just curious. How long did you stay at Mac’s?’ I asked. ‘Long enough to get everyone organized,’ she said. ‘There’s no point discussing things with you once you get all chivalrous.’ "
p.154 – “It was just for a moment, and for that moment I let myself feel. Intense relief at seeing her well. Intense fear at knowing that she was in danger. And pain. Loss. Terror. Confusion. Bewilderment. For a moment, I struggled against the sense that what was happening, all around me, could not be happening, could not be real. But it was real. Karrin found my hand and squeezed, hard.”
p.160 – “Pandemonium means ’the place where all demons dwell.’ And the demons were out tonight.”
p.161 – “A lot of civilians, hard-faced and armed and determined, standing shoulder to shoulder with officers: the fighters. Veterans. Bikers. Parents. There were fewer people on the street now– those who could flee had already done so. Those who remained were the invalids, those determined to fight– and the dead.”
p.162 – “Winter called to me, the whole time. the cold would numb pain, swallow my sickness, leave everything calm and sharp-edged and rational and clear. I could lean into that power. Forget this pain, at least for a time. But somewhere deep down inside my guts, there emerged a solid unalterable realization of truth: Some things should hurt. Some things should leave you with scars. Some things should haunt your nightmares. Some things should be burned into memory. Because that was the only way to make sure that they would be fought. It was the only way to face them. It was the only way to cast down the future agents of death and havoc before they could bring things to this. The words never again mean more to some people than others.”
p.162 – “And wrath gathered around us. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. Wrath became something real, a tangible presence in the air, as real and as observable as music, as the sharp, clean scent of ozone. The men and women we passed looked up us and knew that we were on the way to deliver retribution upon those who had come to our city. And those who felt it followed.”
p.166 – " ‘I hate that you’re here with me,’ I said. ‘I know.’ ‘And I’m glad that you’re here with me.’ ‘I know.’ "
p.167 – " ‘Then,’ I said, exasperated. ‘I’m kind of counting on the Big Guy making things work out so that you’re in the right place at the right time. Figure if I put these people with you, they’ll be there, too.’ I looked back at the bleak, frightened, determined faces following me. ‘If God is going to be on anyone’s side today, I want Him to be on theirs.’ "
p.172 – “They would test me– predators always test potential prey for weakness– but as long as I made them think it would be more trouble than amusement to push me, they would press no further.”
p.173 – " ‘If you want me to fight for you, quit making it more difficult to fight for you. You and Marcone have been thick as thieves lately. I know you both. There are more weapons around here somewhere. I need them.’ "
p.175 – “I glanced aside at Mab and frowned. Did she feel it, too? her command of her subjects? Of… me? Did she feel it when they died? Did she carry their pain, their rage, their terror, upon the back of her own soul, or whatever it was that passed for one now? Did she even have a soul anymore? I was mortal once…”
p.176 – “The real battle for your own soul isn’t about falling from a great height; it’s about descending, or not, one choice at a time.”
p.179 – " ‘For what we’re doing,’ she said to the volunteers, ‘you’ve got about the best weapon you can reasonably get. It’ll shoot farther than you can see, and it will be hard to miss. Tuck it tight to your shoulder and aim down the barrel. You have four rules. Never point your weapon at anything you don’t want dead. Know your target so you don’t shoot your neighbor. Know what’s behind your target so you don’t shoot your neighbor by accident. And for God’s sake, keep your finger off the damned trigger until you’ve followed rules one through three.’ She held up her right forefinger. ‘You put this on the trigger, assume you are a deadly weapon and a threat to anything you’re facing, period. Clear?’ "
p.179 – “Murphy passed a shotgun to a nervous volunteer, a young man who said, ‘That’s all we get?’ ‘Plenty of soldiers have gotten less,’ I said to him. ‘You want to run, head west. The enemy is coming in from all around us everywhere else.’ "
p.182 – “But it was a human world. It was our world because we were the cleverest, most resourceful, and most dangerous things in it. Maybe my little army wasn’t the most martial representation of humanity, but people fighting for their homes had, historically, done incredible things.”
p.182 – “Sanya turned to the uniformed men and women. ‘You guys get to give one of three orders. Stand, retreat, and follow me. Keep it simple. Communications in battle are hard, even for professionals.”
p.182 – “Another laugh at that. But he was playing to an easy room. People who are scared need to laugh, and the scarier things are, the more they need it.”
p.192 – “He heaved a breath. Then set his jaw, nodded, and said, ‘Got it.’ ‘Good man,’ I said. ‘You’re handling this well.’ ‘I am not,’ Bradley said without slowing his steps. ‘I am not.’ ‘Then you are freaking out in the most useful way possible,’ I said. ‘Keep it up.’ "
p.202 – “The gun went off. The emptied rocket launcher fell to the street with a metallic clatter, splattered with scarlet. Murphy dropped like a stone.”
p.204 – “Her eyes were on mine, and I couldn’t look away. I felt the soulgaze begin. And I saw the flame of a candle go out. Her eyes emptied. Just emptied, like the windows of an abandoned house. One moment, her body had been gasping for breath, straining, her face full of pain and confusion. Then… It was just an empty house.”
p.206 – “I leaned down and kissed her forehead, closing my eyes. Felt the pain rising in me. And I embraced it. Welcomed it. I watched the futures I’d hoped we would have die before my eyes. I let the pain burn away everything nonessential.”
p.211 – " ‘He’s not the one I’m trying to protect,’ he snapped back. Something hard came into his eyes, and the trembling vanished. he rose, the broken hilt of Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, in his hands. ‘I’m trying to protect my friend.’ "
p.212 – “I felt Rudolph. Felt his terror. His agony. His confusion. His humiliation. His remorse. His sick self-hatred. I felt them all as if they were my own. I saw myself through Rudolph’s eyes, huge and vicious and deadly, implacable as an avalanche.”
p.213 – “The scream of pure pain that came out of me wasn’t loud. It was hardly human.”
p.213 – “Butters’s arms tightened on me. ‘He took her from all of us,’ he said. ‘And he’ll answer for it before the law, Harry. But it can’t happen like this. You can’t let it happen like this.’ He abruptly hauled me upright to face him, and his expression was intent, hard, though tears ran down his cheeks. ‘We need you. You, the good man. I can’t let you hurt that man. Too many of us need him. Your daughter needs him.’ "
p.215 – “And after that, after they saw with their own eyes that the enemy could bleed and die, things changed.”
p.216 – “I’m not saying pain is what defines us as human beings. But it is, in many ways, what unites us. We all recognize other people in pain. Damned near all of us are moved to do something about it when we see it. It’s our common enemy, though it isn’t, really, an enemy. Pain is, at least when our bodies are working properly, a teacher. A really tough, really strict, and perfectly fair teacher.”
p.217 – “I nodded at him. I didn’t know where Rudolph was, or what Butters and Sanya had done with him. I didn’t want to know. Rudolph wasn’t my problem. He couldn’t be. I had too much responsibility to the city, to my friends– to my family.”
p.218 – “One of her curls had fallen over her eye. I moved the curl back. It promptly fell over her eye again. I smiled, through tears. Even dead, I couldn’t make her do a damned thing.”
p.222 – “It wasn’t that I didn’t feel anything. I felt plenty. I just couldn’t care too much about it, in the face of my loss. That was dangerous, both for me and for the people I was protecting. Battles are not graded on a curve, ever. You survive or you don’t. And everyone you’ll ever face in a battle to the death is undefeated.”
p.223 – “The Alphas fell in around me as I came to the volunteers, and Butters appeared from the haze to silently take up a position behind me and to my right, where he could watch my back. Or stab me in it if I went all monstery, I supposed.”
p.224 – " ‘We all must die, Dresden. There is no shame in dying for something worthwhile.’ "
p.231 – “But Death plays no favorites and makes no exceptions.”
p.238 – " ‘Well,’ I said. ‘That makes it pretty simple. But that’s not the same thing as easy, is it.’ "
p.245 – “I buried the sensation behind a wall of pure mental discipline, hard-earned over my entire lifetime.”
p.246 – “The Queen of Air and Darkness cast back her head, her eyes going wild, her smile widening to inhuman proportions. ‘The numbers stand at one Mab to none. That advantage shall be sufficient.’ "
p.251 – “Chaos and confusion and terror filled the minds of her enemies, and from them she built a fortress where their numbers counted for nothing.”
p.261 – " ‘How tough is Corb?’ I asked. ‘I have heard it saaid that it is not his destiny to perish before the deepest ocean meets the sun.’ ‘Fuck destiny,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll free will his ass. How tough?’ Mab’s teeth showed. ‘He is you better in power, your better in experience, and your better in treachery.’ ‘But I bet he doesn’t have as many friends as me,’ I said.”
p.262 – " ‘Mortal wizards,’ Mab sighed. ‘Forever meddling in things you do not comprehend.’ I dredged up a quote from someone I rarely agreed with about anything. ‘What’s the point of free will, if not to spit in the eye of destiny?’ "
p.263 – “Somehow, even from a hundred yards away, I could see the loveliness of her features clearly, too magnetic to ignore. She was a creature of sorrow turned to such rage that her beauty had become a knife that stabbed at the eyes of any who looked upon it.”
p.265 – “And my daughter was somewhere behind me. The fear and rage I’d been keeping safely bottled all evening, all centered around that one little figure, probably sleeping in the safe room at Michael’s house, flickered with the most infinitesimal of sparks. That spark found ample fuel and began to burn like a tiny star inside me.”
p.269 – “In that withering light and fury, she was a being of distilled intellect and will, pure determination and cold defiance. In that fury, she was a shadow, an outline, dark and terrible and undeniable, standing against the tide unmoving.”
p.275 – “Magic and emotion are intertwined so strongly that it can be hard to tell where one begins and the other ends.”
p.286 – “The fight had cost her something. Though she might be powerful and well equipped and tough as hell, the Titan still had limits. And if she had limits, then she could be pushed beyond them.”
p.288 – “When you’re in that kind of condition, your brain does weird things. I didn’t feel scared or angry or upset anymore. I felt like a bystander, a member of the audience. Once you realize your ticket has been punched, you see things differently. I could see everything that was happening around us. It didn’t really involve me any longer.”
p.290 – “Combined with everything else about her, her aura, her power, her grace, her armor, her height, her beauty, the war and ruin and mad-lit, dying city behind her… Butters didn’t even look like a human being. He looked more like a badly animated marionette standing next to a human being. He looked small. Dirty. Tired. Bruised. Frightened. The little guy glanced back at me, his face sick and pale. Then he turned to face the Titan. And he squared his shoulders. And he raised the Sword, a sudden white, pure light in that place, an unseen choir providing hushed music around it.”
p.293 – “The Titan’s eyes narrowed in sheer hatred. ‘Little. Man. Do you thing you can stop me alone?’ ‘It’s not about me,’ Butters said. ‘And I’m not alone.’ "
p.297 – “In a way, it wasn’t her fault. Ethniu was an elemental being, a primal force of the universe. Such beings had been meant to shape worlds from raw matter, not to cope with their wills being frustrated.”
p.302 – “In that moment, I knew what Michael had meant when he said that the most powerful part of the Sword of Faith had nothing to do with the word sword. Or even with the artifacts the two men held in their hands. Neither of the Swords could have done anything without the minds and hearts and hands of the men bearing them.”
p.303 – “Having those two going before me was not like having two allies. In that terrible, desperate place, it was like having hope and faith themselves standing beside you, and that power was deeper and ultimately more meaningful than any enchantment or mystic weapon around.”
p.311 – “I used to wonder how people could run forward into things like that. I think it’s about the environment. There’s just too much confusion, too much fear, too much pain, to think rationally. It’s not a rational place. When death is all around, forward can get to looking like a pretty good way out. And humans can only bear tension, fear, and worry for so long. We aren’t built to sit quietly under such burdens. We’re built to go out and deal with whatever is causing them. We aren’t built to sit and take it. We were made to take action.”
p.316 – “But the Swords could not give them victory. Swords don’t do that. Swords have never done that. Victory comes from the mind, the heart, and the will. From people. What is the sword compared to the hand that wields it?”
p.325 – “Marcone gave me a level look and then said, in a much more conversational tone, ‘Honestly, Dresden. If you used your mind half as much as your mouth, you’d be running the place by now.’ "
p.326 – " ‘I will simply never understand the need some people seem to feel to be proven correct in front of their enemies. It’s quite childish.’ "
p.327 – " ‘You aren’t anyone,’ the Titan said. ‘You’re nothing. Just an animal. An animal near the top of its class on one little world.’ "
p.335 – “Wizards are the gatekeepers, the defenders of this world. Or at least we are when we’re at our best. And if some immortal thing rolls in here from Somewhere Else, we can say something about it. We can pit our will against them. We might not win, but with a proper channel and a circle of power, we can make them stop to fight us.”
p.336 – “There was a horrible pressure, a whole-body crushing agony, as if I had suddenly blinked to the floor of the sea. And that was what it was like, with the force of that mind pressing against mine– like trying to hold off the weight of the tide.”
p.340 – “I had to get an image, a moment, that was mine. Me. That was strong enough to hold all the rest together. I found one image. Maggie, holding on to me with all four limbs, her little heart beating against my chest, while Mouse leaned against me, a solid presence of utter faithfulness and love. And that was enough.”
p.350 – " ‘We are too alive to not be cheerful, eh, wizard?’ "
p.350 – “Well. The living repository of the accumulated knowledge of mankind probably had a real good idea of the most appropriate measures to take in any given emergency. If she told me what to do in this situation, I’d probably listen and pitch in as well.”
p.351 – " ‘I’m not asking,’ I said. ‘My fealty is a two-way street. I have gone above and beyond my duty to Winter, right in front of God and everybody, by doing what no one else could. Now Winter will respond in kind, by helping as no one else can. You will help them. Every one of them. Do it in secret, no connections. We’ve interfered in their lives enough. This will happen.’ "
p.352 – " ‘My will causes enough trouble,’ I said wearily. ‘Until I get the sense to use it wisely, why don’t we just let sleeping gods lie.’ "
pp.356-357 – “You don’t exactly sleep, in situations like that. You close your eyes and stop moving, and then a lot of complicated things happen in your brain. Mine started replaying the tapes of the evening. Not in order. Not even a highlights reel. Just… random images of the past couple of days. Murphy, gasping. Not in a bad way. Murphy, at peace. In the worst way. Maggie, her eyes worried. I thought of Butters, tense and in pain– and victorious. I thought of Chandler, just vanishing. Of Yoshimo and Wild Bill, maybe worse than dead.”
p.361 – " ‘Apocalypse isn’t an event,’ Nemesis murmured. ‘It is a frame of mind.’ "