Marcone banner

Movement stirred around the truck at ground level.
And the Baron of Chicago led the way.
Marcone strode into the light and clarity provided by the Summer Lady and came forward as though he meant to walk through a steel wall. He had shed his suit jacket in exchange for a pair of freaking pirate bandoliers hung with, I kid you not, what looked like seventeen or eighteen flintlock weapons—and he was carrying one in either hand.
To his right was Hendricks, dressed in a mix of tactical gear and what looked like samurai armor, carrying one of those automatic shotguns in one hand and a broadsword in the other. To his left, Gard strode along in silver armor that gleamed even when there wasn’t any light shining on it, over a mail coat that flowed like silk rather than steel. She carried her battle-axe in her hands, its blade shining with the power of glowing runes, so bright they left afterimages blurred into my vision. The two champions followed Marcone.
And I could feel, from there, the banner of his will streaming behind him.
Following in his wake came hundreds of Einherjaren, including that poor bastard on guard duty whom Lara had taken out, looking furious and still a little blurry with apparent drink. With them came Marcone’s troubleshooters, cold professionals whose job it was to find trouble—and shoot it. Behind them came the svartalves, or what I presumed were the svartalves—a block of troops that were kitted out for war in some kind of armor that had a veil built into every suit, so that the figures were mostly just blurs in the air about the right height to be a svartalf.
With them marched LaChaise and his ghouls, giggling like drunks, all of them gathered like an honor guard around an open space in which whirled a number of heavy objects, as if they had been moons captured in the gravity field of some small, incredibly dense planetoid—and at the center of that deadly spinning atomic model of whirling junk marched a slim figure that I presumed to be the Archive.
They came into the open and Marcone broke into a slow jog, and, following his banner, those coming behind him fell into step in unison. More figures came. And more. And more.
Spreading out to the right of Marcone’s group came the White Council of Wizardry. My grandfather, the Blackstaff, led the way, the left side of his body shrouded in a deathly shadow that made me feel cold to look upon. On his right marched my friend Ramirez, grim and battered as hell, but keeping the pace, his silver Warden’s blade in hand. Cristos kept on his left, and the earth quivered around him as if some kind of heavy machinery was running wherever he walked. And overhead, I heard an eagle’s cry, and the sky rumbled with thunder in response. Listens-to-Wind was still in. Behind them marched a column of Wardens, grim men and women in grey cloaks, bearing staves and silver swords in their hands.
On Marcone’s other flank was a crew of ghostly white figures, covered in cloaks and shrouds of some kind of filmy white cloth and moving with inhuman grace. I felt the Winter mantle tug toward those figures in a movement of pure hunger, now that Lara and her people had also come to the fray.
And behind them came people. Just people. Hundreds of them, armed with shotguns of the exact same make as the ones that had been stored in the Bean, hundreds of them following the banner of the Baron of Chicago’s will, frightened and furious and coming to destroy those who had brought death to their homes, who had challenged their territory, their very right to be.
I stared.
Hell’s bells.
Marcone had rallied whatever troops he had left after the fight with the Jotnar. He had gathered his people together and then had to have circled down to help the southern defenses at the svartalf embassy. He must have gathered up a following much like I had—and he’d been able to arm them, and brought them sweeping unexpectedly to the aid of the southern defense.
Who had then been free to come help us in turn.
And now the enclosing arms of that force were about to spill directly onto the Fomor’s legion as they blindly encircled the Winter Lady, hungry to destroy her.

Battle Ground Chapter 31, Page 294-296


The white-shrouded forms bounded through the air in graceful arcs and suddenly blurred in all directions as the Baron’s army closed with the enemy, a dizzying display as the two masses crushed together.
“Come on!” I shouted.
“Where?”
I pointed at the clashing armies.
“What!?”
“Marcone gave us a shot,” I said. “But if she kills him, his banner falls, and the people behind him will scatter. Then it’s an army of them against a few of us. Then we all die.” I gripped his shoulder and felt myself giving him the crazy grin, the one I know I get sometimes.

Battle Ground Chapter 31, Page 298