Dresden Files Reread - Storm Front Chapter 25

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Dresden takes another minute to really experience how magically gross the house is. There are dark spirits everywhere, feeding on the evil magic, the lust and greed within. He just kind of keeps his sight open for a good portion of this chapter, and these things are everywhere in the house, practically carpeting the walls and floor, and oozing out of Harry's way. 

The front door is unlocked, so Dresden is able to skulk right in, down the long dark hallway. I gotta say, I genuinely love the layout of this house, both as a vacation spot and as a setting for a big climactic showdown. The living room is actually below the ground floor entrance, and the kitchen and dining room are on a mezzanine above, with an exterior door opening on the elevated back deck. The whole thing is connected by a spiral staircase. The ritual is going on on that top level, with the stereo down in the living room, close enough to be heard but too far away to immediately get hexed up by the ambient magic. It must be expensive as hell to heat, but it sounds like a very attractive space, and it's got a lot going on tactically. Jim Butcher's experience with tabletop role-playing games shows to advantage here - I would absolutely play this combat. 

What is on the ground floor, is the supplies to make the 3-eye potion at like, a semi-industrial scale. Obligatory absinthe inaccuracy - with his sight active, Dresden can apparently see "madness" swimming in its depths. As a potion ingredient, this is a perfectly reasonable thing for absinthe to do, given the cultural narrative around it, but that isn't really the context in which it's presented. There are also apparently "peyote mushrooms". Peyote. Mushrooms. I can't. For anyone who didn't know, let me take a moment to spare you some future embarrassment. Peyote is a cactus. It is a cactus which contains mescaline. Aside from the fact that both are naturally occurring hallucinogens, it has very little in common with psilocybin mushrooms, which, as the name suggests, are mushrooms, and contain psilocybin rather than mescaline. They're completely unrelated, and this is an inexcusable failure of research. Other ingredients in the potion include alum and glitter. 

There's nothing Dresden can really do with those potion ingredients though, and time is short, so he sets the CD player on fire, and then uses a column of wind to levitate himself up to the kitchen mezzanine. I'm torn between recognizing that he'd have made an absolutely epic target of himself taking the stares, and being aware that this is a huge expenditure of energy, heading into a fight where he's gonna need every available resource. 

Victor is in a small circle, holding a rabbit and a sharpened spoon, while the Beckets have sex in a second circle, providing additional power for the spell. I'd love to know how the energy is getting between the two circles. I don't think we see anything quite like this setup in the later books - nested circles, yes, but not linked ones like this. I'm really hoping to find out at some point who, exactly, trained Victor Sells in sorcery, because he has a lot of tricks that we don't see even full wizards use. The language he casts in is, according to Harry, either Sumerian or Ancient Egyptian, which implies a possible connection back to either the ghouls or whoever DuMorne learned from, but I really want specifics here. Even Thorned Namshiel, one of the most experienced wizards in the entire setting, and possibly the most skilled magic user who has to deal with a mortal body, hasn't displayed this level of technical sophistication in thaumaturgy. 

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Harry throws Chekhov's Empty Film Canister at Victor, breaking the circle, interrupting the ritual, and releasing a whole bunch of built up magical energy. Victor, understandably, tries to set him on fire, which Harry deflects, igniting the ceiling beams. It's worth noting here that this fight is part of what established Harry's reputation for burning down buildings, and it was not actually his spell that set the house on fire. 

Victor calls an object to his hand, and Dresden doesn't pause to figure out what it is before switching the fight to physical violence. Victor is as caught off guard by this as magic users somehow always are, and that might have been the end of that, except that the Beckets have by this time had the chance to stop having sex and get their guns out. Mr. Becket only manages to fire once before his weapon jams, but that's enough to disrupt the fight, and give Victor the opportunity to get the scorpions out of what was apparently his scorpion holder. I don't know why he needs a special bone tube to hold his scorpions, or where he get such a thing, and I would love answers to both of those questions. Harry manages to get out of the way, but now he's cornered, facing Victor, two armed Beckets, and three rapidly growing scorpion constructs. But at least he has a broom?

We are very close to the end of the first book now - only two chapters left. I might take a week or something between the end of Storm Front and the beginning of Fool Moon, maybe write up a retrospective thing of the whole book, looking at patterns both within this first installment and as part of the series. The writeups for Chapters 26 and 27 will be coming out as usual on this coming Saturday and Wednesday. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things.