"Our?" I said. "Wait. I'm confused."
"I know," she said. "Here we are."
We stopped in the middle of a forest path that didn't look any different from anything around it. Mother Summer stopped and frowned at me. "You really aren't dressed for the climate."
"Don't worry about it," I said. "I can handle cold."
She let go of my arm, looked me up and down, then put a hand on the handle of the basket she carried over one arm and said, "Something a little less . . . informal would be appropriate, I think."
I've played Ken doll to a faerie fashion adviser before, so I wasn't entirely shocked when my clothing began to writhe and simply change. When the Leanansidhe had done it, I'd sat in the car for half an hour suffering through one fanciful and undignified outfit after another. Not this time.
My clothes transformed from cloth into custom-fitted steel. Well, probably not steel, but whatever the equivalent was that the Sidhe used in their armor. The armor was plain and functional with no ornaments on it-a breastplate, vambraces, and large pauldrons for my shoulders. Heavy tassets hung from the bottom of the breastplate, protecting my thighs. My lower legs were covered with greaves, front and back. The armor was black and gleaming, and where light fell directly on it, you could see shades of deep purple and dark blue.
I realized that I was holding a helmet under my left arm, and I took it in both hands to look at it. It was a Corinthian helm, like they wore in that movie about the Spartans, only without the fancy tail. It was padded on the inside. I slipped it on, and it fit perfectly.
"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.