Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 10

Photo by Morica Pham on Unsplash

 Harry dreams, the same dream he's been having over and over since Susan disappeared. They're kissing - the text is a lot more detailed than this, but you can go read it if you want details about how soft everyone's skin is - and when they pull apart, he asks Susan if she's okay, and she shakes her head, then turns away and tries to go into a nightclub. She wants him to go with her, he refuses, her eyes go all dark and vampirey, and hands reach out of nowhere to start pulling her inside. He is suddenly overcome with lust, and starts kissing her again, now with the addictive vampire venom. They tear each other's clothes off, with help from the hands, and start having sex up against the wall of the alley. Then she bites him, injecting him with more of the venom, until he physically collapses, mid-sex. He leaves his body, and looks down on the rest of the scene as Susan kills him, completes her own transformation into a vampire, realizes what she's done, and screams. 

Harry wakes up, upset and horny, and takes a cold shower about it. He hasn't had sex, experienced much in the way of sexual desire, or (it's sort of implied) even masturbated since Susan left, so that aspect of the dreams tends to hit him pretty hard. He starts guilt spiraling again about how everything that happened to Susan is his fault, but relies on his two best coping skill, routine and activating the drowning reflex by sticking his face in cold water, to start getting his head clear. He shaves, finally, and does all the other shower things, and by the end of it he feels enough like himself to go down to the lab and get to work. 

The lab has seen some changes since the last time we saw it. It's organized now, with most of his supplies lined up on wire shelves, in appropriate jars or boxes with labels telling now only what they are, but how much is left and when he got them. The work tables are clear except for notes, candles, and pens, and the summoning circle is completely clear, although he's been doing that since the toad demon incident in Storm Front. He wakes Bob up, and we get a brief description of who and what Bob is. He starts trying to tell Bob about the situation, but Bob cuts him off to say that they aren't going to be able to find a cure for Susan, other people have tried and the thing simply can't be done. Harry says that he hasn't tried yet, and Bob calls him Captain Ahab, until Harry explains that they're actually gonna work on something else today. He lays out the basic of the case, until Bob freaks out when Mab's name comes into it. He thinks Harry would have been better off stealing a baby to pay Mab off, and it's sort of implied that he warned Harry not to make that first deal with Lea, although I'm not sure the timeline on that works out. He tells Harry that Reuel was the Summer Knight, and lays out roughly what that entails: Knights are mortals granted power by the Queens of Faerie, they can kill people, including mortals, who aren't part of the Courts, which the Queens themselves can't do directly, and they're relatively disposable. I note here that in I think Cold Days, Harry says he's "assumed" that the Summer Knight's role was pretty similar to his own, in its emphasis on killing people for Mab, but I don't think it counts as an assumption if someone who's usually right about almost everything tells you outright that something is the case. Harry asks if that means he won't get himself killed on this case, and Bob clarifies that first of all, his debt to Mab means she can hurt him if he wants to, but also the restriction is only on killing him directly. She could, for example, trick him into walking into quicksand, which is a tidy bit of foreshadowing for the mud pit incident later. In any event, no one in Faerie is likely to be that upset about Reuel's murder per se, which means this is about power, because it's almost always about power when the Fae are involved. 

Photo by DIRK TOERIEN on Unsplash

Harry, who is a hell of a lot smarter when he's actually slept, puts the pieces together from there. Mab said
something had been stolen, Reuel's power comes from the Summer Queen, it was supposed to snap back to the Queen upon his death but for some reason it didn't, and Titania naturally figured it was Mab's doing. This puts Faerie out of balance, which could account for the rain of toads. It's also pretty bad news for anyone who has to live in earth's ecosystem, since that's gonna get all out of whack if the imbalance persists, until the Queens almost inevitably go to war about it, which could restore the balance but will more likely end up with one side or the other a clear victor, which could result in either an ice age or an era of rampant growth - presumably the latter is what happened with the Cambrian explosion and later with the Cretaceous period. Bob doesn't give examples, but does say he hasn't existed long enough to have seen the last time this happened. It's also noted here that Mab never actually said she didn't do it, although she couldn't have done it directly. Bob says a fall down a flight of stairs, or even several flights of stairs, wouldn't have killed one of the Knights, which given that Reuel is supposed to have broken his neck, may be subtle setup for Harry's becoming the Winter Knight when his back gets broken in Changes. A regular mortal could have killed Reuel, but they probably would have left a smoking crater. A wizard could have done it, but it would have taken both power and finesse to make it look like an accident. Even narrowing it to those with that kind of skill, there are too many wizards to investigate them all just yet, so Harry sets that aside, assuming for the time being that it's internal business, which he thinks leaves three suspects, the Faerie Queens and the Winter Knight. Bob informs him that there are three Queens per court, and describes the system, naming Aurora and Maeve, but not the Mothers. Harry expands the list to seven, and then, reluctantly, to eight.  He tells Bob that Elaine is alive, earning an "I told you so", and pretty directly asks Bob to contradict him and say Elaine wasn't powerful enough to do the thing, to which Bob says that while she doesn't have Harry's raw power, she's basically better at magic. He's also impressed - so am I, honestly - that Harry's willing to consider her a suspect. 

Harry figures that his next step is to learn more about Reuel, so he's gonna break into his house and then go to the funeral and see who shows up. 

As is often the case with the "confer with Bob, get the worldbuilding" chapters, this is kind of a short post relative to the length of the chapter. I've also got an absolutely bonkers week coming up, but honestly I'm liking my chances of getting another post by this coming Monday or Tuesday. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 9

Photo by Will Porada on Unsplash

Elaine tosses Harry his sword cane, and then vanishes into the bedroom. Harry opens the door for Morgan, who has changed into street clothes but still has his sword, now in a golf bag over one shoulder. Morgan asks if he's interrupting something, and Harry makes a joke about watching porn, which Morgan seems to find legitimately upsetting. Harry tries to shut the door in his face, but Morgan keeps it open. He wants to know how it just so happens that Mab had already contacted Harry, specifically, with her request, when that's the one thing that might get Harry out of being sent to the vampires. He thinks the whole thing reflects a "deeper scheme" between Harry, the vampires, and the Winter Court. I'm honestly torn on whether this is unfair or not. Like, it does look like an awfully big coincidence, but anyone who knows thing one about the Fae should be able to figure out that it's far more likely that Mab engineered the whole situation for some mysterious Mab reason, and Harry's just caught in the middle of it somehow. The Gatekeeper also obviously knew it was coming, so if the theory here is that Harry's in some kind of evil alliance with Winter and the vampires, that implicates a member of the senior council as well. Obviously there's a good chance that none of this was actually Morgan's idea, but whoever fed him his lines here is putting a hell of a lot of faith in Morgan's lack of critical thinking skills winning against his paranoia to keep him from noticing that. 

Harry, for his part, starts laughing. He makes a lot of snarky remarks in this exchange that I've left out because they're well-written but don't benefit much from line by line analysis, but I did want to observe that Harry is actually using a social skill here. Morgan's blatant hostility doesn't really leave any constructive options for a response, but deflecting and making jokes at least doesn't escalate, or really Morgan anything to work with to try to push Harry's buttons further or give himself probable cause to just kill Harry. 

Photo by GantZ Konoto on Unsplash

Anyway, Morgan punches Harry in the stomach and walks into the apartment, barely slowed down by
either the threshold or the wards, since the former aren't very strong and the latter aren't mostly meant to stop humans. I think Harry fixes that after this. He starts talking about how Harry might not be a bad person, fundamentally, which is the nicest thing Morgan has ever said to Harry on-page at this point, and probably among the top three nicest things he says to Harry in the entire series, but that he's been compromised, either working with the Red Court or being used by them, and either way he's a threat to the Council that needs to be removed. This, while inaccurate, actually isn't a bad guess, based on the information Morgan would have been able to verify. The events of Grave Peril hinged on several significant coincidences, several adversaries of the White Council knowing somewhat more about magic than they really should have, and Harry's somewhat idiosyncratic personal motivations. That he was working with them from the start to get this war underway is a much cleaner, more straightforward explanation. Harry asks what the hell he's talking about, and Morgan says that Susan is a vampire. Harry says that she's not, and they go back and forth about it a little bit, not just because Morgan's a jerk and Harry's lowkey in denial but because they're working from different definitions of "vampire". Morgan means that she has a vampire's abilities, she has the addictive venom, and she can enthrall people. Harry means that she's still a human person with a human soul. They're both right. Morgan starts picking up the card Susan sent Harry, her photograph, talking about how she's pretty, but that isn't hard to come by, and how unlikely it is that a normal human woman would actually want to take up with Harry, how it's more likely that she was working with the vampires from the beginning. Then he calls her a whore, which I know he didn't come up with himself, because Morgan does actually drink his respect women juice, and considering how offensive he finds the idea of looking at porn, I don't think he's just gonna pull out the word "whore" to be an asshole, y'know? 

Harry draws his sword, which is not a constructive response but honestly, Morgan just called his girlfriend a whore and asserted that she never actually loved him, and he's already had a really long day. Morgan responds by drawing his sword, and Harry reflects on their relative capabilities, how his speed and reach, in the small space they're in, give him an advantage here despite Morgan being objectively the better swordsman. He also thinks it would be an advantage that the weight of his sword is measured in "ounces rather than stones". So first of all, last I checked, as a unit of weight, "stone" doesn't take the pluralizing "s", but also there is a zero percent chance that Morgan's sword is weighed in stone, plural. One stone is 14 pounds. Swords simply are not that heavy. The claymore, among the heaviest sword types to see actual use, topped out at about six and a half pounds. Some Zweihänders are larger, but these were still not heavier than 4kg (about 8.8lbs) and Zweihänders of this weight were not actually used for fighting. For comparison, the weights of various one-handed swords tends to cluster around 1kg (about 2.2lbs), so this is still a lot of sword. But even allowing as Morgan's blade might be a little heavier than what's generally considered usable sword range, since it's partially made of silver for Magic Reasons, it is still not within the reasonable realm of possibility for it to weigh more than about 7lbs. I suppose that could be expressed as "half a stone", but it's certainly not stone, plural. Harry would very much like to stab Morgan, but remarkably, his brain actually kicks in before he does anything irreversible, and he lowers his sword and observes aloud that this would be the Merlin's third plan, the ace in the hole. He tells Morgan that there's probably another Warden waiting outside, a witness to say Morgan was justified, before they deliver Harry's body to the vampires. I do note here that there's an outside chance Harry could have killed Morgan, but that would have justified giving him to the vampires too, so I suppose it doesn't much matter. Morgan attempts to deny this, but he's not a very good liar. Harry sheathes his sword and tells Morgan to get out unless he's willing to kill an unarmed man who isn't offering him violence. 

Photo by Ann Gogoleva on Unsplash

Morgan is not, in fact, willing to do that, and is on the point of leaving when there's a thump from Harry's
bedroom. Morgan suspects that it's Susan, but when he opens the door, Mister zooms out, startling the shit out of Morgan before taking off into the night. Morgan, visibly embarrassed, tells Harry that the senior Council will be around, but won't help him with Mab's request, and drops a business card on the floor with the number to call when he's done. (He says 'when you've failed', but I don't think there's a different number for if Harry succeeds.) Elaine reemerges, and, after confirming that Harry's okay and Morgan's really gone, essentially asks "You still want to hand me over to those people?" Harry explains that no, he wants to hand her over to other, better people on the Council, but she is very reasonably not here for that. She tells him she's leaving, that she can veil well enough to stop the Wardens who are certainly watching the house from seeing her (probably true, but how is she gonna hide the door opening and closing?), and that she'll get in touch with him, since he's the one with an office and a phone number. She kisses him on the cheek, too, and he spends a while having feelings about it after she leaves. Mister comes back and rubs Harry's legs, purring, as good as saying out loud "Aren't I a good kitty? Didn't I do a good job? Don't I deserve chicken and scritches?" His coming back so fast does give his running out just then the feel of a deliberate diversion, which I think is our first indication that Mister might be something more than a preternaturally large housecat. 

Harry observes aloud, to that cat, that he's very tired, and the sensible thing to do would be to get some rest, but of course he's not going to do that. He's just gonna sit on the couch for a minute, and then get to work. He falls asleep on the couch less than a minute later. 

Finally a chapter that wasn't 25+ minutes long! My partner's board game is very close to launch, which may affect my schedule for the next couple months, but honestly I couldn't tell you how so don't worry about it too much. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 8

Photo by eleonora on Unsplash

Harry's apartment is an absolute mess, kinda skirting the line between "just really messy" and "legitimate safety issue". There are dirty clothes all over the floor, notes and papers all over the furniture, and coke cans and pizza boxes spilling out of the kitchen trash can. I guess Harry has been getting carry-out pizza since the bomb incident. Most of the description of the apartment is old information for someone reading the series in order, but this is also when the Star Wars poster is introduced. Apparently it was a gift from Billy, which means that either he and Harry have actually started spending more time together since Susan left, or that they were already hanging out regularly between Fool Moon and Grave Peril and it just didn't get mentioned because Billy wasn't included in the plot of Grave Peril. This is reasonable, since we're still several books away from Harry treating Billy like an adult who can handle himself with the broader supernatural world (he had to have that realization with Murphy before he could even consider applying it to anyone else), but may also be an implicit refutation of the way World of Darkness associates werewolves with the spirit world, although I don't know if that was as much of a thing in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Werewolf: The Forsaken wasn't out yet. Elayne comments disapprovingly on the mess, but Harry doesn't respond to that directly since he's still pretty focused on the thing where she's alive. His first, not unreasonable assumption, is that it's a trick, or she's some kind of creature out of the Nevernever, but she points out that she was able to cross his threshold and knows his wards, and when that doesn't make the point, begins bringing up personal details. Apparently Harry failed his drivers test three times in one week. I didn't know they even let you take the test three times in a week, although it may have been different in the 1980s. She also makes reference to "our locker combination", which is a really nice little detail for illuminating how enmeshed the two of them were when they were together. At least I think it illuminates that. None of the three high schools I attended actually had lockers.

He asks why she didn't contact him, and she says that at first she didn't know where he was or if he was alive, and then she wasn't sure if he'd want to hear from her since "so much happened". Harry says that's putting it mildly, since she tried to "destroy" him, and there's a little bit of back and forth while they establish what actually happened, most especially the part where Elaine was already Justin's thrall when Justin made his attempt to get in Harry's head. I don't think it had occurred to Elaine that Harry wouldn't have at least considered the possibility that she was magically controlled, considering what Justin tried to do to Harry. That's honestly a more reasonable conclusion than that she just up and betrayed him out of nowhere, and it speaks well of her that she gave Harry credit for being able to figure it out. When she says 'so much happened", she's talking about the possibility that Harry associates her with the trauma of Justin betraying them, about the stuff he went through after with the Council, and probably her fear that Harry would blame her for hiding in the Summer Court and leaving him to face that alone, that by the time she felt ready to look for him it had been years and of course he hadn't just spent all that time waiting for his high school sweetheart to come back to him, he probably moved on. She may also be talking about the secret Mordred baby she 90% probably had by him, but we don't need to get into all that. We do, however, need to talk about the pentacle thing, because I said back in Fool Moon Chapter 20 that we would. Listen, I agree that it's unlikely that Harry and Elaine are blood siblings. For one thing they were born like 6 months apart, and for another they don't look anything alike except for their height. But there's clearly something going on there. It's possible that Justin actually gave Elaine her pentacle, maybe to discourage Harry from asking questions about his. We know Maggie LeFay and Justin DuMorne were associated somehow, so for all I know, Harry and Thomas have those particular pentacles because Maggie picked them up from an occult store near Justin's house, and either Justin got Elaine the same one as part of grooming her (it's still grooming even if the end goal isn't sexual), or Elaine got it herself from the same damn store, or Harry got it for her from there. It's also possible that Elaine is the child of a different associate of DuMorne's, although no candidates are immediately jumping out at me. She doesn't look like anyone on the White Council, or any of the minor practitioners we met, so far as I can recall. She... oh hang on a damn second. Okay this is a reach but she does have gray eyes. Is it possible the connection is that she's the child of another, ah, associate of Lord Raith? We know from what happened to Inari that her Hunger would probably never have manifested, since she and Harry were in love. On the one hand, it's a bit of a stretch, but on the other hand, this series is absolutely dripping in Wheel of Time references, and there's a pretty significant subplot there about Rand, the protagonist, needing to work out that he's not related to one of his love interests, Elayne, but that they do have a dark haired, roughly 6 foot tall, unnaturally pretty half sibling in common. Now unless Elaine is much older than she appears to be, her mother isn't in Lord Raith's portrait gallery, but it's not like, totally inconceivable that he didn't keep adequate track of someone. 

Photo by Habila Mazawaje on Unsplash

Harry tells Elayne that he looked for her, that he scryed for her and sent spirits looking for her, but found no sign that she was alive. Which is, of course, why he spent the last like, decade assuming she betrayed him. If she turned out to be evil, and he killed her, that's horrible and tragic but it's still basically something that happened to him. It's a manageable amount of guilt.  If Justin enthralled her, if she was a victim like he was, even if he didn't realize that at the time, and he killed her, that's... that's not a manageable amount of guilt. That's the kind of thing that destroys you. But it might be asking a bit much for Elayne to have put all those pieces together while she was hiding out among the fae and trying to get through her own trauma about the whole betrayal and enthrallment thing. Anyway, Elaine says she's in trouble, and Harry volunteers to help literally on reflex. The whole chivalry reflex thing is still weird and misogynistic, but at least it isn't belabored here. Elaine explains that she found asylum in Summer, and that now she has to pay off her debt. She says there's been a murder in faerie, and Harry figures out that she's the Summer Emissary before she has a chance to say it, letting her know that he's Winter's Emissary in the process. I might be alone in this, but I tend to remember her as just having shown up at his place like "Hi, I'm alive and also the Summer Emissary!" but that is not, in fact, what happened. She had zero idea when she broke into Harry's house that he was already mixed up in the same trouble she was. She honestly just came to him for help. Which I think really cements that she did not expect Harry to still believe that she'd willingly betrayed him. She expected him to figure it out eventually, even if he didn't know while it was all happening. And honestly, if it weren't for all the fucking emotions and guilt and trauma tied up in the situation, that's a pretty fair estimation of Harry's reasoning abilities. If he hadn't needed to believe that she was a villain, he would have figured out years ago that she was compelled to do what she did. 

Harry's in a bit of a spot now, of course, because he and Elaine need different outcomes from the investigation to succeed in their respective missions. Elaine is expected to prove Mab's culpability, Harry is expected to prove her innocence, and whichever of them fails to produce that result is going to be in for a very bad time. After a minute of desperate and ineffectual thought, Harry's best idea is that they go to the White Council and ask for help and protection. I'm gonna go ahead and chalk that one up to the sleep deprivation, because dude, they literally just tried to feed you to the vampires like, six hours ago. They're not gonna suddenly be reasonable about you, or about DuMorne's Other Apprentice, apparently returned from the dead. Among other things, she's an even better suspect than Harry for what happened at Archangel, and since she's not One Of Their Own even to the limited extent that Harry is, there would be no political ramifications to punishing her for it, nor any need for a fully investigation. It wouldn't immediately buy them peace with the Red Court the way handing Harry to the vampires would, but honestly if he wanted to take some of the pressure off of himself around this whole mess, presenting Elaine to the council would be a pretty solid way to do it. Elaine, who trusts Harry a fuck of a lot more than he trusts her, or maybe just doesn't know all the relevant details, does not seem to consider this possibility, but does ask Harry if he's crazy. Harry tries to argue that there are good people on the Council who will help them, even if the Council as a whole kind of sucks, and Elaine points out that those people mostly don't want anything to do with the Council. I do notice that McCoy is probably still in town, and they could approach him directly. I don't think he ever interacts with Elaine, and I'm not entirely sure he knows she exists, much less what he thinks about her if he does. Harry's cognizant that if the Council finds out about Elaine, it will put her under suspicion, and if they find out he knew, it will put him under suspicion, although there's an odd bit here where says she might be "a violator of the First Law". I don't know where that's coming from. Who, exactly, does he think Elaine might have killed with magic? He assures her that he won't report her if she really doesn't want to talk to them, but is on the point of persuading her anyway when Warden Morgan starts pounding on the door. 

Man, I wish I wrote fast enough to do cliffhanger chapter endings like that in my fiction. I am trying to get these posts out faster, I promise, but I still have to do at least some work for like, money. If you want me to spend less time working for money and more time writing about urban fantasy for your education and enjoyment, you are welcome and indeed encouraged to support me on Patreon. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 7

Photo by Anna Evans on Unsplash

The Merlin instructs the wizards in attendance to disperse as soon as the meeting is over, and to check in with their local Wardens every few days. If the Wardens per square mile we see for the US are at all typical, this seems like a lot for the Wardens to deal with, even if they just need to keep a log of check-ins so we have a "last heard alive" for everybody, but I suppose there were more Wardens at this point in the war than we see later, and this is the kind of thing that can probably be handed off to apprentices, if they have them. A "grizzled old dame Warden" give a presentation on wards, including a few new types thought to be particularly useful for vampires. I do wonder if this is Luccio. Various allies of the Council (frustratingly unspecified) make speeches announcing their support, and Wardens begin escorting wizards to the beginnings of their routes home. I suppose many of them will be traveling through the Ways, despite the risk, although the meeting was scheduled at the end of Grave Peril, so it's possible some of them are traveling by ship, although that's kind of a pain from Chicago if you live overseas. 

McCoy tries to catch Harry's eye after the meeting, but he's tired and about to be very busy and drives off as quickly and angrily as he can. For reasons passing my understanding, he brought the dossier on Reuel's murder with him in the car, rather than leaving it at either his office or his apartment, and so is able to go straight to Murphy's house. We get a detailed refresher on what SI is and does, any why Murphy has lasted as director when so many others failed within a few months. We get refreshers on a lot of things in this chapter, actually, including thresholds, psychic trauma, and ectoplasm. Murphy's door is reinforced steel, just like Harry's, and she opens it holding a crucifix and a gun that's referred to here as an automatic, but I'm going to assume that was an error on Butcher's part since those are illegal, and at this point in the series Murphy still holds the law in pretty high regard. She looks pretty bad, and refuses to invite Harry in, forcing him to very literally leave his power at the door before entering. Harry thinks this is a bit silly given how bad he looks, but does it. The threshold on Murphy's house, which we haven't seen before this, is very strong. The interior looks, although of course Harry does not make this comparison, like it was decorated by Anaiya from Wheel of Time, frothy with lace and draped with doilies. The only touches Murphy has put on the place herself are the katana and wakizashi on a stand on the mantle (a matching katana and wakizashi like this are called a daisho, apparently - there does not seem to be any special term for the stand), and her gun cleaning kit. Despite Harry's having crossed the threshold, thereby demonstrating that he's not some kind of spooky from the Nevernever, Murphy remains sullen and withdrawn. Even as exhausted and preoccupied as he is, Harry can tell that as much as he needs her help, she needs his too, which is honestly better insight than he usually gives himself credit for. When Harry asks her what's wrong, by means of sarcastic charades, she indicates the photo album she's been looking at, open to wedding pictures from her marriage to her first husband. She was 17, so as best I can tell she would have needed written consent from both parents in order to get married, even if he wasn't like ten years older, and I'm honestly a little surprised she was able to get it, given what we know about Murphy's parents. Like, I believe she could have convinced one of them, but both seems like a stretch. This may be our first observable instance of Jim Butcher failing to account for the differences between Missouri state law and Illinois state law, as in Missouri you only need the consent one one parent to get married under 18. At present, people over 21 can't marry anyone under 18 in Missouri (honestly this is one of the most eminently sensible approaches to age of marriage laws I've ever seen), but I would readily believe that this was not yet the case in the late 1980s, although it's remarkably difficult to look up changes to age of marriage laws that are not either very recent or before 1900. In any case, the ex husband just died of cancer, age 43. 

Photo by Oscar Ochoa on Unsplash

Harry says the usual sympathetic things, including that he knows how Murphy feels. Murphy asks if he
really does know, if he lost his first love, and he says "Yeah." which has a very different tone than a lot of the other things he could have said. Murphy asks for details, prompting Harry to explain about Elaine. This is a really textbook example of getting a scene to do more than one thing. See, for the purposes of what's going on with Murphy, it doesn't matter all that much what she's upset about. One of the things this scene, this interaction, is supposed to do is to showcase the psychic trauma Murphy experienced, and we could do that with almost anything that she might be validly but a bit disproportionately upset about. It would even be reasonably possible to just have her dealing with the night terrors that are described later, although that would be less effective. But because it's her ex husband, we can use this to lead into a discussion of what happened with Elaine, which needs to happen, and in fact needs to happen now, before she appears at the end of this chapter. This is one of the most crucial techniques in fiction, to try and make sure that every moving part, every scene, every character, every substantial aspect of the worldbuilding, is doing at least two things for the story. So Harry explains about Elaine. Some of what Harry explains here was covered in Fool Moon, including her involvement with Justin's attempt to turn Harry to the dark side, her death (her apparent death - Inner Harry suspected she was alive in Fool Moon), and that Justin and Elaine were both also wizards. I believe it's new information that they were both adopted by Justin. He says here that they were ten, but I think in Proven Guilty Harry says he was 13, not really sure what's going on there. He also says they were 16 the last time he saw her, while she's 18 or 19 in Inner Harry's image of her back in Fool Moon, but this may be Inner Harry aging her up enough that being attracted to her isn't weird. That an enemy of Harry's sent He Who Walks Behind after him was established all the way back in Storm Front, but I think this is the first we hear that Justin, specifically, sent a demon after him, although Harry doesn't name the demon here. He explains that Justin tried to enthrall him, and that Elaine put a binding spell on him to facilitate it, which of course is going to be important later. Murphy tells Harry that she and Greg tried to talk a few times after they split up, but always ended up fighting, apologizes for being a mess, and goes to change into real clothes. This gives Harry the opportunity to look at her prescription bottle, a "moderate" dose of Valium that she's apparently been mixing with alcohol. Alcohol and benzodiazepines suppress the central nervous system in the same way, making it very dangerous to mix them, especially since benzos are much less systemically toxic than alcohol, so you're less likely to vomit before becoming lethally poisoned than you would be with alcohol alone. 

When Murphy comes back, Harry, still holding the pills, rather awkwardly asks if she's okay, and something that starts with "do you need". It's possible the rest of that sentence was going to be something to the effect of "medical attention", but Murphy cuts him off and says she's not suicidal. While we're doing PSAs, if you think someone you care about is planning to kill themselves, or thinking about it, the best thing to do is straight up ask "Are you considering suicide?" We learned about the warning signs, and what to do if someone shows them, in my sixth grade health class, and I didn't find out until much later that this isn't part of the standard middle school health curriculum. For the next couple weeks, the kids who didn't take anything seriously (which was most of them on account of us all being 11 and 12 years old) would just ask each other randomly, like "Good morning, Ben, are you considering suicide?" or if someone experienced a minor mishap, "Ah, crap, I spilled my soda." "Are you considering suicide?" But y'know what, I'll bet every one of them still remembers the lesson. I like that Harry and Murphy's friendship is finally really being established here, after she was so awful in the first two books and essentially absent from most of the third one. I like that they do actually try to take care of each other, even though they're awkward and masculine about it. Harry points out that mixing alcohol with drugs is a good way to get dead even if you're not trying to, and Murphy says it's not his business and, when he says that he's worried, that if he came to lecture he can leave. He says he's just trying to understand, and she explains that she has night terrors, and that neither the alcohol nor the Valium are sufficient for her to stay asleep through them. She's frustrated, feeling like she should be able to handle this, aware that she shouldn't be so upset about her ex-husband's death either. Harry, who has been around the Run Ins With Mind-Affecting Monsters block a few times, correctly guesses that she's dreaming about her encounter with Kravos. She keeps going over the events, trying to figure out what she could have done differently, even though there isn't anything. She's still afraid, even though he's dead and can't hurt her again. To be fair, Kravos was already dead when he hurt her the first time, so I don't know how inclined I'd be to trust that to keep me safe in her position. Psychic attacks are inherently traumatic, and we'll talk about that more in a little bit, but obviously part of Murphy's thing here, and this is kind of explicated, is that she can't really say "Oh, he caught me off guard, but I'll be ready next time." She doesn't have any way to defend herself from things like this. She's also probably not used to her emotions acting up without what she considers a good reason, which is gonna compound her sense of having lost agency. 

Harry describes, in narration, how psychic trauma can sensitize you to things like unexpected bad news. One of the fun things about this series is that Harry, while he knows a great deal about the setting, and a decent amount about how people work generally, is not terribly self-reflective. So when he tells us something about how a magical phenomenon affects people, in the abstract, or is affecting some specific other person, he's unlikely to tell us whether or how that might also apply to him. We have to be on the lookout for it. In this case, Harry experienced a pretty substantial psychic trauma of his own in Grave Peril, when the Nightmare took a bite out of him. We already looked a little at how his reactions to events in that book might have been skewed, but there was so much else going on that it's hard to isolate the effects of psychic trauma from all the other things impairing his judgement. But we should be looking out for what bad news or sudden emotional shocks Harry experiences here, and how his ability to handle them might be affected by the Nightmare's attack. Although of course we still don't really have a clear picture, because there was also the more mundane trauma of what Bianca did to him. 

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Murphy asks what Harry's doing there so late, and he tells her that he needs to see the file on Ronald Reuel, to see if there are any clues the police might have missed.  I'm not at all sure what he thinks is going to be in the police files that Mab didn't already give him, especially since he hasn't actually looked at most of what Mab gave him yet. This feels like it might be an editing issue, like there might have been an earlier version where he didn't resist taking the case quite so hard, and therefore had already looked at the case materials before visiting Murphy, and where for the same reason it made sense that he had the file in his car. There's also a little bit of an oddity here - Harry says he got the pictures in the folder from the client, and that he doesn't know where she got them, and later that a "magical faerie" told him Reuel's death wasn't an accident, but he doesn't actually confirm here that the magical faerie is the client, and I can't tell if he's obscuring this on purpose or not. Murphy agrees to get him what he needs, on the condition that if this is a murder, Harry brings her in on it. He's reluctant, not wanting her to get hurt again, but actually recognizes that keeping Murphy out of this, denying her agency and trying to protect her in ways she doesn't want to be protected, is going to hurt her more. Growth! 

Harry takes a quick nap while Murphy goes to use the computer in another room. When she comes back, she notices his hand injury, and insists on seeing to it while Harry reviews the material she printed out for him. This too is about reclaiming agency, and I think insisting on seeing to someone's injuries because it's something you can do might be a proper motif in this series, for it's in this very house that Butters will do the exact same thing, albeit with more discussion, in Dead Beat. He dodges a question about why he had to unwrap it after bandaging it the first time, but we can take comfort that this ridiculous secrecy about the existence of the White Council will end during this book. The security guard at Reuel's building didn't see anyone come in, and the cameras didn't pick anyone up either, nor do they show any bursts of static that would indicate magical interference. I really like that Murphy checked this herself, because it cements that Harry's willingness to include her is not misplaced, and is one of the first signs the reader gets of her growing fluency with the supernatural world, since prior to this, almost all the information about magic that we've seen her act on has been stuff Harry told her earlier in that book, specifically regarding the particular case he's consulting on. Same thing with her already having a rough idea what the Nevernever is, even though she didn't know that humans can enter it. The first officer on the scene reported slime at the top of the stairs, although no one who investigated later saw it, and Harry notices a damp spot on Reuel's sleeve in one of the photos. This goo could be ectoplasm, which Harry explains to Murphy here, which may indicate that something from the Nevernever attacked Reuel, or that someone, human or otherwise, used the ways to get in and out of the building unseen. I note here that the lack of interference on the cameras actually tells us that this was probably not a human wizard, since opening a portal the way humans do it is pretty big magic. Neither Harry nor Murphy brings this up, but it's something an attentive reader could catch, even on a first read. They also don't really explore the possibility that something from the Nevernever could have been visiting Reuel for some other reason, and he might really have just slipped in a patch of left-behind ectoplasm. I'm pretty sure this happens to Harry at least once in a later book. 

Murphy is pretty close to asleep at this point, but she asks Harry if he's heard from Susan, and says that she must be okay since her columns are still coming in at the Arcane. Harry says he hasn't made any progress in finding a cure, and Murphy says that Harry's a good man, and that if anyone can figure it out, it's him. Honestly I always forget until I'm rereading this part how seriously the series wants us to take the possibility that Susan will get de-vampired so she and Harry can be together again, up until she reappears in Death Masks. Once Murphy is all the way asleep, Harry tucks a blanket around her and drives home, intending to try and get some proper rest so he can actually think clearly about the case. Unfortunately, when he does get home, Elaine is in his apartment, described in sufficient detail that we can recognize her from his memory in Fool Moon even before Harry says her name. 

I'm thinking of playing with the blog theme a little, since I have to go in there and make the Patreon button reasonably visible anyway. Don't know when I'll get to it, but don't be alarmed if the look changes. I'm also gonna try to update the progress bars so you can get an accurate picture of how I'm doing on my goals for the year. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 6

Photo by Wesley Tingey on Unsplash

The Red Court, according to LaFortier, claims that Harry is a criminal, and wants to extradite him for trial. That this is taken seriously by anyone on the Senior Council, even LaFortier, suggests to me that there are probably limits on what they can do to him at such a trial, but either Harry isn't thinking about that, or those limits are not sufficient to keep Harry alive. That the word "extradite" is used implies that the Reds are exercising some agreed upon arrangement, maybe some part of the Unseelie Accords, but it isn't really made clear. LaFortier says they should consider this, and several Wizards immediately start shouting. Several other wizards start shouting at them, and the entire room devolves into noisy chaos for a few minutes, until the Merlin uses some kind of mild but large scale flashbang spell to shut everybody up. The Merlin also thinks this is worth considering. McCoy objects, both because Harry was maneuvered by the Red Court into the actions they're now claiming are criminal (he doesn't use the word "entrapment" but that's the idea) and because handing one of their own to the vampires sets a bad precedent. LaFortier argues that if Harry was outmaneuvered politically, he should live with the consequences, which I think utterly overlooks the fact that Harry wasn't trying to do politics. Listens to Wind says that peace can't be bought, and that LaFortier should know this, referencing both what happened to Native Americans and various European states, in this case most notably France, trying to compromise with Hitler. LaFortier initially pretends not to know what he's talking about, which, y'know, speaking of playing politics and losing, would have made LaFortier look stupid more than it compromised Listens To Wind's credibility even if Harry hadn't explained for the rest of the class. 

The Merlin snaps at Harry for speaking out of turn. Harry says he thought they had a responsibility to protect people, and the Merlin says they can't protect anyone if they're all dead, which I cannot help but notice is sort of at odds with "even in victory they would pay too high a cost." In point of fact it's sort of at odds with framing the Red Court as the kind of enemy who would even consider the cost of victory. There are reasons that most wars don't end with one side wiped out in its entirety, and that wholesale slaughter is pretty much always more expensive than negotiated surrender is pretty high on that list. Although this sorta gets back to that whole "what does war even mean in this context" thing, because another reason that's way up there is that usually you want most of the occupants of your newly conquered territory to keep farming or going to work or whatever they were doing before you won the war, just with you running things and collecting taxes instead of whoever was in charge previously. Like most things, this picture gets a little fuzzy when you get to industrialized warfare, but the Red Court and the White Council aren't industrialized states either. I suppose an ideal victory for the Reds here might involve killing a couple of the people they particularly dislike, like Harry and Simon, and then negotiating a surrender from the Council on terms that enable them to turn a lot of the rest of them. I don't know what guarantees the Council could, or would have to, make for this to be like, viable, since half-turned vampires who don't want to be vampires have a tendency to take up with the Fellowship of St. Giles, and the Red Court's own internal politics would likely preclude their allowing their newly turned wizards to become full vampires right away. 

LaFortier goes on to explain that DuMorne was Simon Petrovich's apprentice, and that since Harry was DuMorne's apprentice, he could have learned about the defenses at Archangel from him. Okay so just how much of a role did Bob have in Justin going over to the dark side anyway? If Simon was aligned with the forces of evil, he was damned subtle about it, sufficiently so not only to hold a place on the Senior Council but to be liked and respected by McCoy. Whatever happened, it was almost certainly after Justin completed his apprenticeship, and the only thing we really know about the time between his becoming a full wizard and his adopting Harry is that he was a Warden, which is not something they let you do if they can tell you're evil. As it happens, of course, Justin deliberately isolated Harry from the Council, didn't even tell him that there were other Wizards, so he certainly didn't show Harry around Simon's fancy magical defenses. Also, we may talk about this more later, but Justin absolutely did not have to go to the restraint and enthrallment place to turn Harry evil. He didn't know anything about the normal boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable uses of magic. He loved Justin and was desperate for his approval. "Yeah so there's this body of old dudes who don't like me and might eventually come after us. They hate me because I'm stronger than them/willing to innovate/teach kids like you and Elaine rather than keeping all the power for myself/whatever. Anyway let's learn some mind control." It wouldn't have been hard to persuade him. 

Anyway, Harry laughs out loud at this suggestion. LaFortier says this shows his contempt for the Council, and that even if Harry didn't tell the vampires about Simon's defenses, he still bears personal responsibility for the deaths at Archangel and should face the consequences. Harry points out that he's a full Wizard, and hasn't broken any of the laws of magic, so he's entitled to a full investigation - the Council can't pass a summary judgement.  LaFortier, who may have been angling for exactly this, says Harry might not be a full Wizard, since he never passed a formal Trial, which is apparently a thing. Again I ask what exactly were the circumstances of Harry leaving McCoy's farm. It's not like he didn't know about facing a Trial, and from his lack of surprise I think Harry knew too. The Merlin grants LaFortier's motion, but McCoy gets the vote restricted to just the Senior Council, on the basis that there's a lot the White Council as a whole doesn't know about the situation, protecting Harry from the fear of a few hundred Wizards who are distressingly willing to believe that handing Harry to the vampires might mean this whole war thing will go away. While this was not explicated in what LaFortier proposed, the Merlin specifically called for a vote on whether to return Harry to the rank of apprentice. I find this more than a little troubling, because while I can sort of understand apprentices not having the right to a full investigation, this ought to be because they're not really legally independent, and can't be held entirely responsible for their actions. Honestly, while obviously frightened people might do almost anything, I would expect at least as many wizards to resist the precedent of being forced to hand their own apprentices over to such a fate as would oppose the proposition of having it done to one of their peers. 

Photo by Dneale52 via Wikipedia

The Merlin votes for Harry's being reduced to an apprentice, in the best interests of the council and
humanity as a whole. LaFortier votes the same way, and for the same reasons. This makes me Extremely Curious how a vote of the full council actually works, and whether each member would have a similar opportunity to speak about their reasons for voting the way they did, or simply say that they agree with someone who spoke before. The Roman Senate worked like this, in the Republic, where each Senator, in descending order of age, with younger Senators typically aligning themselves with older ones rather than taking their own positions. Although, of course, the Senate had no formal powers, and only made "recommendations" to the actual voting bodies (that were nearly always followed). McCoy says that he knows Harry, that he's a Wizard, and Listens to Wind essentially seconds this, saying that Harry comports himself as a Wizard should. Martha votes with McCoy and Listens to Wind, but on the basis that stripping Harry of his stole and handing him over to the vampires won't really solve anything, it's just action for the sake of doing something. Ancient Mai votes against Harry, saying that he misuses his magic and his status as a member of the Council, which like, that first thing is at least arguable but I have no idea where she's getting the second thing. The Gatekeeper, who has not been mentioned up to this point because Harry didn't notice him, and who is briefly described here, sort of, votes that it rained frogs this morning. When pressed to elaborate, he says he needs to wait for the messenger. LaFortier claims not to know what he's talking about, which is apparently his signature move, but of course at that moment, two Wardens come in, basically dragging a 3/4 frozen apprentice, very obviously the courier sent to Winter. So I guess maybe apprentices really are just that disposable after all. He was dumped out of a moving car just outside, and the Wardens didn't get the license plate number, or even consider that they ought to, which Harry attributes to the license plate being too modern an invention for them to know about, but I think it's worth considering that glamour may have been involved. 

Ancient Mai talks to him a little bit, until he collapses, and then relays that Mab has agreed to allow the White Council safe passage through her lands, provided one request is granted, and that she's already conveyed this request to a member of the Council. Harry, displaying his usual subtlety and discretion, starts banging his head gently on the table. The Gatekeeper puts his hand on Harry's arm, confirms that Harry knows what the frogs mean, then secures them against eavesdropping, and asks if Mab has chosen an Emissary. When Harry confirms that she has, he tells Harry that this is all about balance, and to restore the balance and "prove [his] worth beyond doubt". Then he returns to the stage, and spends a while validating everyone's feelings, except the Merlin's, which he says are understandable but not reasonable. McCoy gets impatient before he gets to Martha or Listens to Wind, and demands to know how he vote. The Gatekeeper says he will base his vote on whether Harry can fulfill Mab's request, which should also function as a proper Trial for him. McCoy fusses a little until Harry explains that he already knows what Mab wants, he just didn't plan on doing it, and says he'll do the thing. He's not happy about it, but some part of him feels like this is just comeuppance for the things he did last fall. I'm like 85% sure that's the trauma talking. 

This ought to have been part of the previous post, but I did want to note here that the stone lions from Chapter 5 are another instance of the series's difficult relationship with laws and law enforcement. That they have saved lives before suggests that the system whereby either of the Wardens on gate duty for an event can bring them out based on like, vibes, does at least sort of work, but that there have been accidents (implicitly ones involving the constructs violently attacking innocent wizards) does not speak well of the system as a whole. In light of the publication date, it's difficult not to see this as a commentary on the then newly formed TSA and other draconian (and largely performative) security measures implemented after 9/11, but I'm not sure what that comment is, unless it's "doing effective security without hurting people who didn't do anything wrong is hard and complicated". 

Anyway, that's what I got for now. Gonna try to have the next post ready within a week, but as usual, no promises. Also I noticed recently that the patreon button is all weird and hard to see, so I'm gonna try and fix that. I promise it still works, if you want to make it so I can spend more time on blog posts and less on any of my other half a dozen jobs. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!  

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 5

Photo by HY ART on Unsplash

With Simon dead, the Merlin is going to want "one of the Germans" to take his place on the senior council. McCoy points out that he has at least 50 years seniority on all of them, but Martha Liberty says it won't matter because the Merlin thinks there are already too many Americans on the Senior Council. By my count, there are two, Martha herself and Listens to Wind. We will revisit this in a little bit. 

On the way in, McCoy asks Harry how his Latin is, if he's going to need translation, and Harry says he's got it. I cannot readily determine whether it was previously established that Council meetings are conducted in Latin, although if it was, it wasn't in this book. It's an... interesting conceit. I believe we're told at some point, possibly in a later book, that they use Latin because with such a range of languages present among the White Council, it would be unreasonable to use anyone's native language, but it sure doesn't escape my notice that this is going to make full participation in the Council easiest for people whose native language is, or whose native or comfortable languages include, a Romance language like Spanish, French, and Italian, and to a lesser extent people whose native language or languages include English, which is a Germanic language but has a lot of Latin influence, and hardest for people whose native language or languages are off the Indo-European map entirely, like, oh, much of east Asia and a fair amount of Africa. (The latter is complicated - lots of people in lots of parts of Africa speak an Indo-European language as a first or fluent second language, largely, but not exclusively, because of colonialism and imperialism). Or, for that matter, older Wizards from Australia and the Americas. It does not escape my notice that five of the White Council's seven members definitely or probably have an Indo-European language as their first language, and that Ancient Mai is the only one who I would confidently say probably doesn't. (It's... really hard to say, with Listens to Wind. I'd need to know how old he was.)  Harry suggests that McCoy go in ahead of him, so they're not obviously arriving together, as this might cause problems for McCoy given Harry's reputation and the charges that are about to be leveled against him. 

When Harry does go in, it's dark and hot; with so many wizards in one place, the lights and air conditioning didn't stand a chance.  There's a security checkpoint with a pair of Wardens, both wearing red stoles. One of them, perhaps inevitably, is Morgan, whom we haven't seen since the end of Storm Front. The other Warden scans Harry with a crystal that lights up at each of his chakra points - no attempt is made to explain what or where these are - and detects nothing out of the ordinary. Morgan, of course, is not satisfied with this, and instructs the other Warden to get "the dogs", a pair of threat-detecting magical constructs modeled after Chinese guardian lions, and which Harry refers to as "wardhounds". They are, and I cannot stress this enough, not dogs. Like, I'm not wholly unsympathetic to the confusion here - their posture is often very canine, and if I'd seen like, a chow-chow or a Tibetan mastiff but had never been told that those statues are meant to be lions, I might guess that they were dogs, yeah? But it was not hard, in 2001, to find out that they're lions. Like, I readily buy Morgan not bothering to keep it straight, and that the term "wardhound" has too much traction to easily be replaced at this point, but either Harry or the other Warden could have told the reader that they're lions. Anyway, they circle Harry for a minute, and then one of them alerts on his hand. Morgan is very ready to take this as a reason to turn Harry away, but the other Warden points out that if Harry's bleeding, they could just be reacting to the magical power of his blood, especially if he's also upset. Morgan makes Harry unbandage his hand before he can go in, which hurts and makes it start bleeding again, after which the constructs lose interest. 

Once Harry's inside, we get a description of what the White Council, as a group, looks like. The emphasis here is meant to be on the diversity, but there's some truly unfortunate phrasing, most notably "canted Oriental eyes". Don't use "oriental" to describe people, please? If you're at all uncertain, maybe don't use it at all unless you're talking about like, oriental shorthair cats or something. The "variety of humanity" present is apparently "startling", which is a bit odd since Harry lives in Chicago, not exactly a bastion of heterogeneity. Chicago's population is almost 30% black and about 7% Asian. Not only has Harry seen black and Asian people before, he's seen both like, most times that he left the house, probably. More than 35% of Chicagoans speak a language other than English as their main language. This should not be a "startling" experience for Harry. Again, this could have pretty easily been addressed with a sentence to the effect of "I mean, I live in a city, seeing a lot of different kinds of people in the same place isn't exactly new territory, but this was on another level." if there was really a need to stress the diversity here. We also learn that there are gold stoles, in addition to the red, blue, and purple, although we still aren't told what this means, and that wizards are supposed to wear black robes, but apprentices wear brown, and apparently don't get to sit in chairs. The apprentices are also mostly around Harry's age, which by this point in the series approaches late 20s, which puts some context both on his own construction of himself as unusually advanced for his age and the tendency of older wizards to treat him like he's basically still a child. There's a roped-off section for representatives of the White Court's allies, but we get no details on who they actually represent, or even whether these are other groups of human practitioners or nonhuman powers within the supernatural world. 

Photo by Camille Roux on Unsplash

The space the Council rented out for this meeting is a dinner theater, so most of the assembled wizards
are sitting around small tables, while the Senior Council does their thing from the stage. At the moment, the Merlin is saying, in Latin, that he moves to skip many of the usual formalities and go straight to talking about the war with the Red Court. I would very much like to know what those formalities usually are, but I don't think we ever find out. There's a general murmur of assent, and no direct call to see if anyone is opposed. This general assent with no request for opposing voices comes up repeatedly in this chapter, and I don't know if they've got something magical set up to actually count the "aye"s, or if they're just going off of "eh, sounds about right" and assuming someone would speak up if they were really opposed. When he sees Harry, the Merlin calls him out for being late and wearing a bathrobe. Harry resists the impulse to be snippy, and attempts to apologize and explain that he meant to have his other robe. When the Merlin doesn't understand, or pretends not to, he tries again to apologize for his lateness and appearance. I gotta note here that while Harry's Latin is in fact pretty bad, the Merlin is apparently fluent, and is definitely a native English speaker, so unless what Harry said was a lot less grammatical than McCoy's translation makes it sound, it shouldn't have been that confusing. Like, "a long, sad day held me" is an unusual way to express that it's been a long, stressful day, but not unclear, and while "I need me a new laundress" is grammatically incorrect and doesn't mean what Harry meant to say, if someone said that to me, especially in a language I knew they didn't speak very well, I would figure they meant there was a mistake at the dry cleaner, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to bring up in this situation. Which leads me to conclude that the Merlin's confusion here is at least partly feigned, in order to make Harry look stupid and give him a chance to say something even more embarrassing while trying to clarify. That's just mean. I'd also love to know more about how exactly the power dynamics of the Council actually work, that the Merlin gets to be as rude as he initially was to Harry here. This is not the only time he does that, and he pulls something similar with Ramirez in Proven Guilty, but we don't see any other wizard try it in a formal setting, even when they're talking to Harry, and the Merlin and McCoy both use English when they insult each other a little later in this chapter, so he's clearly not just like this with everyone. I also think it's worth observing here that Harry doesn't point out that he got needlessly held up at security. Maybe he just doesn't have the Latin for it, but he's being more professional than the Merlin here, bad Latin notwithstanding, and that's interesting. Harry finally accepts McCoy's offer to translate, and he apologizes on Harry's behalf, which calms everyone down.  

While the Merlin informs the Council as a whole about Simon's death, and how it's an escalation by the Red Court, McCoy explains that the Merlin will want to fill the open seat on the Senior Council with someone who will reliably vote with him, and that he'll have three plans for taking Harry down: a plan, a backup plan, and an ace in the hole. Moments later, the Merlin does in fact move to appoint Wizard Schneider to the Senior Council. Martha and Listens to Wind both object, Martha to the lack of debate, Listens to Wind to Scheider's age. McCoy moves that the appointment of a Senior Council member is too important to leave to consensus, and they begin going through the registry in descending order of age. This is also where we get out first sight of Wizard Peabody, here using magic to sort through his files to find the wizards who have first refusal on the newly opened seat. The first one called is Wizard Montjoy, who's apparently on a research trip in the Yucatan. That's... not a very safe place for a wizard of the White Council to be right now. Like, that's where Chichen Itza is. White Council intelligence on the Red Court is apparently piss poor right now, because it's established a little later that they believe the Reds' center of power to be "somewhere in South America" but have apparently not been able to narrow it down any further, but I sure did notice that Wizard Montjoy, who is never mentioned again in the series so far as I can tell, is on a "research trip" in Red Court territory during an important Council meeting about the war with the Reds. (In my efforts to confirm that he doesn't come up in a later book, I found a pretty compelling Reddit thread suggesting that Cowl is Wizard Montjoy). They spend 15 minutes going through senior wizards, most of whom are not in attendance, before getting to McCoy, and shortly thereafter, to Klaus Schneider, who declines the nomination, saying that McCoy will serve the Council more ably. This refusal suggests to me that the Merlin's preference for Scheider in this position is less a question of alliance or political agreement than of patronage. Prematurely elevated to a position he could not have hoped to reach on his own for decades at least, Wizard Schneider would have been forced by existing social norms to vote with the Merlin, and he doesn't much like the idea of being used that way. The Merlin asks if anyone else would like to put themselves forward, but no one does, and McCoy joins the rest of the senior council on the stage. 

Photo via Smithsonian Open Access

Morgan reports next on the status of the war, using a crystal to project an image of the earth marked with
the locations of attacks. They're clustered in Western Europe, where secrecy norms still carry a lot of weight. While no one says it explicitly, this means that in addition to the obvious concerns about loss of life, the Reds are threatening that secrecy, and that the wizards being targeted may be reluctant to use all available options to defend themselves. The attack on Archangel gets particular attention, not only for being recent and relatively largely scale, and involving the death of a Senior Council member, but because their ability to get through Simon's defenses indicate a greater understanding of magic than the Reds are believed to have possessed. Additionally, there have been attacks on or harassment of wizards using the Ways though the nevernever. Wizards can't easily use things like airplanes, or even cars, to travel quickly, but vampires can, putting the White Council at a serious disadvantage, so securing access to safe passage is a priority. Unfortunately, Titania intends to remain neutral, as is apparently usual for her, and the courier sent to Winter did not return, although history suggests that Mab will choose to involve herself eventually. The Merlin stresses the need to maintain good diplomatic relations with Winter until she does, or until the conflict is "resolved", which makes Harry all kinds of uncomfortable since he annoyed her like, this afternoon. Martha Liberty doesn't much like this either, but her issue is with the word "resolved". The Merlin seems to think this can be resolved without open aggression, and that the Reds will sue for peace without serious hostilities, because the cost of victory would be too high. Martha thinks they won't sue for peace as long as they're, y'know, winning. They're both wrong, but the Merlin is like, completely wrong, whereas Martha is only a little bit wrong. As long as the White Council basically isn't fighting back, it makes sense for the Reds to keep poking at them, strengthening the position from which they will eventually negotiate the Council's surrender, but they will want to negotiate eventually. The Merlin's "stand there and take it" strategy is not going to credibly establish that the cost of attacking the Council is too high to bear... kinda the opposite. Of course, they have already proposed a peace agreement, with an accompanying ceasefire, although as Harry points out they already broke it by attacking Harry like, maybe six whole hours ago. Wizard LaFortier, who received their missive, waves this off as like, of course they can't control everyone who works for them, which strikes me as rather thin when they can use like, cell phones.

There's some extended reiteration of what Harry did in the previous book, including some suggestion by LaFortier that "burn the building down" is like, Harry's signature move, and therefore indicates his culpability in starting the war, even though the last two times he's did that before Bianca's place, he was actively fighting an evil wizard, and those cases were deemed by the Council to be justified self-defense and sufficiently heroic to have the Doom of Damocles lifted, respectively. Not to say that "burn the building down" isn't Harry's signature move, but that just indicates his involvement, which is hardly a secret in any case, not his guilt. LaFortier says that they should consider giving the Reds what they want, and when Harry asks what exactly that is, after making some sarcastic suggestions, he reveals that what they want is Harry. 

I'm honestly intrigued by the amount that Jim Butcher isn't explaining or explicating here. This is our first look at the White Council and in some ways we haven't actually learned a lot. But Our Hero is properly in the soup now. If I keep up the current pace, I might be able to get you the next post in like, 5-7 days? Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!   

Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 4

Photo by Ryan Ancill on Unsplash

Harry stands in the doorway of his office for a minute, processing. He's scared, "a rational sort of fear that puts a lawn chair down in the front of your thoughts and brings a cooler of drinks along with it." which is too specific and clear an image not to just quote directly. He compares it to waiting for the results of a medical test, which is interesting inasmuch as it implies that Harry has at some point had the kind of access to healthcare necessary to get medical tests and experienced a health problem that warranted testing with potentially frightening results. He's entered a bargain with Mab, whom he initially describes as the queen of wicked faeries, although he almost immediately corrects himself - not all the unseelie, the winter court, are evil, any more than all the seelie summer court are good. Wizards can live a very long time, but Harry's pretty clear that this doesn't entirely apply to him, since he has a habit of starting fights with people and things way the heck outside his own weight class, and while that's gone okay so far, it's not, realistically, going to keep going okay indefinitely. He did have a choice, technically, in whether to accept Mab's bargain or not, although the consequences of refusal were unlikely to be pleasant, or survivable.  He considers the possibility that he took Mab's bargain because he needs to live long enough to help Susan, but Inner Harry, or some other voice in Harry's head, thinks it's more likely that he just wanted to live, full stop. He figures Mab wouldn't have offered him the Reuel case if it wouldn't somehow get him in deeper with her, and more entangled in fae politics generally, which isn't a bad thought, although it doesn't escape my notice that by this reasoning, he can't safely accept any task she offers him, which is going to prove something of a complication if he ever wants to get out of her debt. 

He also has the council meeting tonight, which is enough of a stressor for one day, honestly, and for which he still needs to get ready. And if that sounds like a blunt, awkward transition, I assure you it has nothing on the one in the text itself. He also has the sense that he's forgetting something, and after a moment realizes that he still needs money, and Mab didn't actually offer to pay him for any of this. It's confirmed in Blood Rites that he did not, in fact, get payed for the work he did in this book, and I don't actually remember how he gets out from under the money situation here. He stops by his apartment long enough to get the things he'll need for the meeting, or as close as he can manage, but doesn't have time to shower, and the only food left in the house is half a candy bar, which he puts in his pocket. There's bad traffic on the way to the meeting, and of course the air conditioning in the Blue Beetle doesn't work - we're given a refresher on the way technology tends to misbehave around wizards. 

Ebenezer McCoy arrives at the convention center where the Council is meeting at almost the same time Harry does, and we get descriptions of the truck, and the rack where he keeps his shotgun and his staff. This is foreshadowing of a sort. I don't remember how much of it is established in this book, but we're going to hear a lot between here and the end of Blood Rites about how McCoy taught Harry that magic is a creative force, that it's wrong, even blasphemous to turn it to destructive ends, and almost the first thing we learn about him is that he keeps his staff and his shotgun on the same rack, a staggeringly unsubtle indication that he thinks of magic as a weapon first, and whatever else it might be second. McCoy himself is described as well, and Harry asks why he's here, since he never comes to Council meetings if he can avoid it. McCoy says that the last time he missed a meeting, they saddled him with a teenage apprentice. This goes into their backstory together, which we'll get to in a second, but I did want to note here that this means he was at the council meeting Morgan called after the events of Storm Front. Which may help account for the council having decided to lift the Doom of Damocles. 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

We learn about how, after DuMorne's death, after Harry was tried and found guilty of breaking the First Law of magic, Harry, as he was still a minor, couldn't just be left to his own devices, and so he was sent to live with McCoy, on his farm in Hog Hollow, Missouri, to keep an eye on him and teach him how to control his power. He didn't teach Harry much actual magic, but he did make him do a lot of farm work, and taught him about patience, and about the importance of creating things, making something worthwhile. It was a good place for him. "A good place for me then," (my italics) it says, which I double checked to make sure it wasn't "at the time" or any more similarly loaded phrase, because this kinda drew my attention to the fact that we don't actually know exactly when or why Harry left. Harry says he wasn't that bad, and McCoy retorts that Harry burned down his barn, and alludes to a noodle incident involving the laundry that frightened McCoy's cat so badly it left and never returned. He asks about the toad blood stains covering Harry's car, and the bandage around his hand. He tells McCoy about the toads, but describes the hand injury as the result of an accident in the office. He says he's okay, but won't meet McCoy's eyes, fearing to see disappointment there, which... literally why? Like I understand why he doesn't want to disappoint his former mentor, the only person he regularly addresses as "sir", but it's not immediately clear why he thinks he would have, or might have, done so. It's possible this is about his having, from his own rather skewed perspective, put Susan in danger, but the evidence kinda points against his protectiveness being something he picked up from McCoy. I think here especially of how surprised Harry is by McCoy's insistence that Maggie must be sent away until she's old enough to show magical potential. Could just be a trauma thing, though. It's not like, unusual for people who've been through something awful and violating to feel like "Oh, I've failed everyone whose opinion I care about" even though nothing of the sort has actually happened. 

McCoy observes that the Senior Council is pretty annoyed with Harry, and that he's not going to make a stellar impression when he walks in wearing a blue flannel bathrobe. Harry points out that he's supposed to wear a robe, everyone is, and more seriously that Mister used his good robe as a litter box, so this is his only option. He's also got a blue silk stole, which does not go with the bathrobe. McCoy, who brought proper robes but isn't wearing them because it's too hot, has a red stole, although the significance of the colors is not explained, and I honestly don't remember what they all mean, except that blue is for regular wizards and purple is for members of the senior council. Red might be for wizards who have been part of the Council for more than a century? He tells Harry that a few members of the Senior Council want to talk to him, before they "close the circle", an extremely neopagan phrase which suggest that there may have been a time when the Council's meetings were primarily for the purposes of group workings, rather than governance. Harry is unenthusiastic about this idea, and goes all the way to angry when he realizes that McCoy is risking social capital to arrange this meeting. He goes on a bit about his unwillingness to suck up to the Senior Council, and expresses surprise that McCoy would suggest such a thing, considering he has in the past spoken about the Senior Council in vivid and disrespectful terms. McCoy denies this, and vaguely threatens Harry, to which Harry says to go ahead, threats don't impress him like they used to. This is not hugely surprising considering he told Mab essentially the same thing.

Photo by Allison Batley on Unsplash

McCoy starts laughing, and asks what appears to be an empty parking space if it's satisfied. From under the best veil Harry's ever seen, two members of the Senior Council emerge. The first is Martha Liberty, the second of the approximately five named black characters in this entire series. She says that Harry's arrogant, which he points out applies to every wizard ever, and that he's bitter, angry, and obsessive, which McCoy points out he has every reason to be. Martha says "You know what he was meant to be." which I think is the first hint we get in the series that Justin had some specific plan for Harry beyond "recruit a relatively powerful young wizard to the side of evil". She tells McCoy to look at the destruction Harry has caused in his conflict with Bianca, but McCoy's not having it, saying that Harry was right to stand up to her. I'm not like, wholly unsympathetic to the White Council's position here, but I do think McCoy has the right of it here, inasmuch as a policy of "let them do whatever they want so they don't get upset" is not gonna result in less shitty behavior from the vampires. Martha tries to bring up something the Merlin said, but McCoy cuts her off. She shifts gears pretty abruptly, asking Harry if he remembers her (he doesn't - the only time they've been in the same room previously was at his trial, and he had a bag over his head for that), and then kind of feels his aura, observing that he's hurt, emotionally. Apparently this is what she was looking for, because she agrees to support McCoy. She steps back to the side of the other Senior Council member, and we get our initial description of Wizard Listens to Wind. 

This next part is really goddamned racist. The "Injun Joe" thing is weird and gross and I don't know why it's presented as funny. The "How" thing I actually had to look up - I knew it was a Thing in racist, stereotypical depictions of indigenous Americans, but not the particulars; per the first paragraph on Wikipedia, it's a "pop culture Anglicization" of the Lakota word "hau", but the source link leads to a 404 error, and the paragraphs below give two different linguistic origins and three different meanings, all provided by old dead white people. I think most people who could reasonably be expected to be reading Dresden Files probably mostly know this one as a stereotype, so I think the joke here is supposed to be "Harry accidentally said something that could be misinterpreted as racist" but like, it's not funny? I'm also pretty sure you're not supposed to describe people of color as "inscrutable". Harry getting the shit startled out of him by a baby racoon is funny, obviously, but I'm not sure "Here's the first native American character introduced in the series (one of like, one to four depending on whether you want to count Tera, who isn't human, and whether you want to count Anna Ash and Fitz, both of whom are described as looking like they might have native ancestry), and here's his animal friend that he can talk to" is a good look either, although I'd probably be more forgiving if it weren't in, y'know, this context. Anyway, we're told here that he's an Illinois "medicine man" (this term is also racist, but I will grant some leeway here on account of that was harder to find out in 2002 than it is now, and would have been harder for McCoy, who can't use a computer, to find out in 2002 than it would have been for me in 2002, notwithstanding that this entire area of cultural practice is super private and even asking directly might not have gotten McCoy, much less Jim Butcher, the correct term to use - I probably would have settled on "traditional healer" or "ritual specialist", but I'm not like, confident those are good choices). Anyway, the Illinois Confederation was an organization of 12 or 13 different mostly Miami-Illinois language-speaking peoples in the Mississippi River Valley, most of the surviving descendants of whom are now part of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, although some of the Mitchigamea merged with the Quapaw Nation. I should note that trying to get even this much detail nailed took about the maximum time and effort it's reasonably possible for me to put in for a blog post. Kept running into walls of "Yeah we don't know, because genocide" and "Yeah someone probably knows but we don't care enough to put it on the internet, because racism". If I have avoided dangerous oversimplification and outright inaccuracy, I will take that as a win. The baby racoon is cute though. 

McCoy asks where Simon Peitrovich is, which brings the others around to the news that he's dead, along with everyone else at his compound in Archangel. That's presumably Arkhangelsk (Архангельск, Russian for Archangel), a city in Russia and the administrative center (I believe this is comparable to a state capital in the US) of the oblast of the same name. Arkhangelsk, the city, is a modern port city, if rather closer in scale to St. Louis than to Chicago, and I'm not really sure where you could put a "tower" and an associated compound that could reasonably be described as a "fortress" without its attracting some notice. This suggests to me that Simon's compound may have been somewhere else in the oblast, maybe in the border security zone, where restricted access kind of inherently makes things harder to notice because fewer people have the opportunity to see them. McCoy is visibly distressed by Simon's death in and of itself, but the Red Court's attack on his compound presents another, more immediate difficulty. Someone let the vampires in, past a substantial portion of Simon's formidable defenses, and some in the White Council, including the Merlin, are going to think that Harry either did this or orchestrated it. Martha says "master to student" - I think it's established later that the master in question who was familiar with Simon's defenses was Justin, but I'm not 100% sure. Bottom line, the Merlin is going to accuse Harry of starting this war, and try to have him held responsible for "a number of deaths", and without Simon, they don't have enough people in the Senior Council on Harry's side to stop it from going to a general vote, which is unlikely to go Harry's way. 

Hey, look, I actually got one of these done basically within the timeframe I was hoping for. We'll see if I can keep that up as we head into the summer, yeah? Until next time, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!