Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 18

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Harry isn't tracking well, so Bob has him go over what happened with Kelly and Kyle while he calms down. This is a classic technique for interviewing the survivors of Bad Things, and and I don't think that's something Bob knew how to do like, yesterday. We find out later in this chapter that he was reading Mort's journals while Harry was asleep, and I have to wonder if he didn't pick it up from there. Mort talks to a lot of distraught people, probably, and it would speak well of him if he learned on purpose how to make that easier on them - an early reflection of the kind of compassion and character we see most clearly displayed in Ghost Story. 

Harry does level out some, but he's still in pretty bad shape emotionally. This chapter is 14 minutes long, and while I didn't time it, I think two or three of them, cumulatively, are things like "I wanted to throw up" and "I started shaking again." This is his second psychic trauma today, for those keeping score, between which he was attacked, concussed, and drugged. Plus nearly losing his basket from leaving his Sight open too long. Dude is going through it, is what I'm saying. is what I'm saying, and of course that's only going to worse from there. 

Bob tells Harry that he got torn up badly, spiritually speaking. Harry isn't initially sure how that's possible, since while his threshold is weak, his doors and windows are all warded, and he doesn't have any mirrors. (This is actually also minor setup for Mort in Ghost Story, he too is a bachelor with no human housemates, and he's running a business out of his home - he must be warded all to hell). Bob gets very excited, which is honestly fair, because the mechanism at work here is pretty cool. See, sometimes, when a mortal dreams, especially if it's vivid, it creates a little bubble in the Nevernever, a temporary demesne not unlike the ones powerful ghosts create. Under such circumstances, your you is in that bubble, in the other world, rather than in your body on the mundane plane. Naturally, that means you're not actually behind any of the wards or thresholds that might be protecting your physical body. So someone or something in the Nevernever can attack you in your dream bubble. Harry objects that if he was attacked by a spirit in the Nevernever, it should have been able to destroy him pretty easily, but as Bob points out, it's your dream, your demesne, and that gives you the home turf advantage. If you're not prepared and don't know what's happening, you won't be able to really use that advantage, but it means it's not trivial to tear you apart like a wet paper towel. Now, ordinarily, it's pretty rare to get one of these bubbles, even if you're a wizard having an intense nightmare, but the recent disturbance in the veil between worlds works both ways. As well as making it easier for ghosts and spirits to enter the real world, it's easier for the minds and souls of mortals to slip through to the Nevernever. 

Having established what exactly happened to Harry, Bob asks if anything in the dream went differently from how it did in real life, and Harry tells him that the demon was stronger than it should have been. I note here that that that isn't actually the first thing that went wrong. The first thing was Harry's binding inexplicably turning against him. Under the circumstances, Harry can absolutely be forgiven for focusing on the big monster that took a bite out of him and killed the dream versions of his friends, but it's interesting that there's a clue here, for the astute reader, that the demon isn't the real problem. Anyway, Harry asks if a demon can leave a ghost, and Bob says yes, but you'd have to actually kill the demon, not just disperse its ectoplasmic body. Harry asks if Amoracchius could do that, and Bob tells him it's possible, although he doesn't sound that confident. 

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This leaves the question of the barbed wire spells, since presumably the demon didn't do that, and when Bob suggests that they were the work of a third party, Harry immediately jumps to Bianca. It's obvious that she's tangled up in this somehow, and while she wasn't a good enough sorceress two books ago to pull these spells off, she was a sorceress, and she could have improved in the interim. And of course, she has a grudge against Harry, blaming him for the death of one of her humans, who is referred to here as "Rachel", rather than Paula. Gah. The idea is that Bianca did the torture spells to get ghosts stirred up and, then poked the Nightmare in Harry's direction. This uh, manifestly fails to explain why Malone, who notably isn't a ghost and with whom Bianca has no particular beef as far as we know, was hit with a torture spell, or why Lydia was targeted by the Nightmare, but at least the shakiness of the reasoning is acknowledged. 

Bob promptly suggests that they kill Bianca immediately, and that's interesting. That's interesting as, uh, as heck. See, Harry's objection here is ethical. He's not wild about just up and killing Bianca when they don't know for sure that she was responsible, and he's dead set against killing the human staff who will inevitably be present and try to protect her. And that's all extremely valid. Admirable, even. Only, think what would have happened if he had. If he'd just gone out and killed Bianca right then. Bianca, maybe Kyle and Kelly, as many as half a dozen humans, based on the staffing level we see at the Velvet Room in the first book. That's...substantial, but is pales in comparison to the number of people Harry personally kills in this book alone, to say absolutely nothing of the total body count of the war with the Red Court. Here lies Harry Dresden, he died doing the right thing, yeah? Except he didn't... and a whole lot of other people did. This is one of those things you can really only catch on a reread. To be clear, I'm not criticizing Harry's decision-making here. No matter how many chilling realizations he has about Bianca's true motives later in the book, there's no way he could have reasonably seen this coming. But including the suggestion explicitly adds a great deal of complexity to the text's handling of the moral issues involved, while allowing Harry to retain his own comparatively black and white perspective. Also isn't this basically what went wrong in Hamlet? 

When Harry goes to light the candles so he can get to work, the spell, one of the easiest he knows, doesn't work the first time, and takes more effort than it should. When he asks Bob what went wrong, Bob is initially cagey, saying only that Harry didn't put enough magic into it. Harry has to ask three times before Bob will explain. That's significant, on account of Bob is a spirit, so giving him the same order three times likely more or less forces him to cooperate. (Technically this is only confirmed for the Fae, which is why I say "likely". I also don't even have any good guesses about why Bob is being vague here.) When he's finally cornered into it, he says the Nightmare took a "big bite" out of Harry's magic, and offers as reassurance that at least it didn't get Harry's penis, and his magic should be back to normal in a couple of months...or years...or decades. Harry honestly doesn't seem that worried about the loss of much of his power. His concern is that the Nightmare will be stronger now, and that this somehow makes him responsible for what it does going forward, since it will in part be doing it with his magic. I'm with Bob in thinking that this doesn't really make sense, but okay. 

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We've got a written out of order, or at least revised out of order, issue here, When discussing the Nightmare's behavior and victims, Bob says ghosts can only act on things related to their particular bailiwick, and Harry apparently needs this explained, despite having verbally reviewed nearly all this information himself like four chapters ago. It's not a huge thing, and we do get more details here, but I noticed. The important thing is that no matter what enticement Bianca might offer, the Nightmare can't affect anyone outside its scope of practice unless that person forces the issue the way Harry did with Agatha Hagglethorn. So far, the Nightmare seems to have targeted Mickey Malone, Lydia, and Harry. Harry can't figure out what Lydia has to do with anything, since he met her like, yesterday. It does not seem to occur to him, or to Bob, that she could have been one of the young people they arrested at Kravos's hideout, and I honestly don't remember if it's ever confirmed that she was. Bob suggests they try taking Lydia out of the picture, leaving them with a pattern of exactly two victims that we know about. A moment later, Harry announces that if it's the ghost of the demon, it wants payback against the people who took it down, and that he has to go find Murphy. 

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