Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 26

This post contains extensive discussion of the biblical story of Samson, and the geographic area in which those events are said to have taken place - the ancient states of Philistia and Judah. Lest there be any suspicion that I'm trying to sneakily work in my own opinions on the current situation on Israel and Palestine, I do so openly and explicitly here at the outset. Israel is very actively committing genocide against Palestine right now. That's bad, and they should stop doing it. The modern state of Israel isn't, realistically, going anywhere without someone committing even more atrocities, so any reasonable long term solution should probably include its continued existence. I'm not any kind of expert on geopolitics, and I don't have any specific idea what a successful resolution to this mess might look like, but it would be a good start for the Israeli government to stop blowing up hospitals and residential neighborhoods, and for the US government to stop subsidizing them in doing so. Most of the people affected by this conflict are just regular folks trying to get through their fucking day, and I bear them no ill will whatsoever. That's it, that's what I got. I'm Jewish, sort of...that's, that's part of why I'm against genocide, you know? That and I'm like, a person, I guess. If some part of that bothers you, absolutely no one is gonna make you keep reading my blog. I don't want to host a debate in the comments. This was an accident of timing, and figuring out how to navigate that is one of the reasons this post took so long to write. Okay? Cool, now we can talk about the fun little fantasy book. 

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Harry is naturally somewhat alarmed to learn that he's been poisoned, and wonders if his sudden abdominal discomfort is cause by the poison, or just anxiety because he knows about it. Michael asks what the poison is, so that's officially a pattern. Harry thinks all the time about what a good person Michael is, how he's kind and reliable and solid (and warm, and calloused, hang on I'm gonna come back to that in a minute), but what has stood out to me so far in this book is how intelligent he is, how he usually asks the most useful question in any given situation, and seems constantly to be turning around every piece of information he has, looking for how it fits together. Thomas doesn't know, but Harry, looking at he partygoers collapsing in a drugged stupor, works out that it's vampire venom, and explains that since it's a recreational drug, and they're serving the poisoned wine to everyone, it doesn't count as an attack on him, or any of the other representatives of the various supernatural factions. So Bianca is legally in the clear. Harry makes himself throw up in a potted plant, but since Red Court venom is topical and absorbs very fast, it only sort of works. I could have sworn that he also used the antidote to vampire venom that he made back in chapter...oh, never mind, I just looked it up and apparently he didn't do that until Death Masks. Suppose I can't hold it against him that he didn't violate the laws of magic by time traveling two books into the future to get it. Anyway, Michael thinks they should leave, but Harry refuses. He figures Bianca didn't expect him to show up at all, and that poisoning the wine is an attempt to scare him off. I know Harry doesn't have a lot of experience hosting social events, but there is a roughly zero percent chance that Bianca had all her wine poisoned between his arrival and his reaching the refreshments table, and it's not much more likely that she had it done ahead of time just in case he showed up. She may, however, have considered wizard deterrence a fringe benefit of what was mostly and effort to give her guests a good time, so I'll give this one a 4/10 on the contrivance scale. 

Harry says something about figuring out "who it is", but tells Thomas it's none of his business (actually, he says "beeswax") when he inquires. Thomas takes the hint and fucks off, and Harry tells Michael they need to check out the other two non-vampire guests. I guess the invitees from the Summer Court, the Wildfae, the Svartalves, the Denarians, the Fomor, and the LeChaise clan didn't show up. (I'm not actually sure the wildfae are signatories).

Before they go bother the guy dressed as a centurion, Michael reiterates his dislike for the human teenagers' being served as food. His language, "abomination before the Lord" and "consorting with these things" makes it sound like he's judging the humans as much as the vampires, which seems unlike him, but I suppose he's likely just disgusted with the whole situation. Harry reminds him that they're here for information, not to bring the house down on a bunch of nasties, so, y'know, foreshadowing. Michael responds "Samson did", and Harry says "Yeah and look at what happened to him." This is  nearly a non-sequitor, but there is so. much. going on here on a symbolism, foreshadowing, and worldbuilding level. 

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So let's start with Samson himself. He was born fated to deliver Israel from the Philistines and, for that purpose, a Nazirite from birth meaning he wasn't supposed to cut his hair, consume (or even touch) grapes or grape products, or interact with grapes or corpses. Harry isn't subject to any fancy religious restrictions, but he was certainly born into some complex obligations, and as a Starborn, he certainly seems to be destined to save a whole lotta people, so there's that. Samson was also, as the Dresden Files recons these things, very probably a lycanthrope. He was periodically possessed by the Spirit of the Lord, which gave him super strength. That's a natural channel for a spirit of something if ever I did see one. I think I brought up back in my Fool Moon reread that there ought to be natural channels for spirits of things other than bestial rage/ Bu there's also a bi of uncertainty concerning whether what came and talked to Samson's parents was an angel, God, or a god, which causes me some uncertainty about what exactly was possessing Samson, and his behavior certainly seems consistent with the lycanthropes from Fool Moon. Also the Abrahamic God is a spirit of everything, bestial rage presumably included. 

Arguably, any reference to Samson foreshadows both needless fucking complication and wildly misplaced vengeance. Before he married Delilah, Samson was very briefly married to a Philistine woman. At the beginning of the week-long wedding reception, Samson poses his 30 Philistine groomsmen (dude had no friends of his own, I guess? idk) a "what have I got in my pockets" level unfair riddle, betting them 30 full sets of clothes (a huge deal in any pre-industrial setting) that they can't answer. To be clear, I have no idea why he did that, although the strongest working theory is "to start shit with the Philistines. Well, they can't answer, but they bully his wife into getting the answer from him (by threatening to burn her father's house down while she and her father are inside) and reporting back. Unfortunately, since she was the only other person who knew what it had in its pocketses precious, it's pretty obvious who told them. So he yells at them about it and then makes good on the wager by killing 30 other Philistine men and giving their clothes to his groomsmen. Then he storms off and his wife is given to his best man. He comes back and asks to see his...wife? Her father, with whom she apparently still lives, refuses to let him in, so he... gathers 300 foxes, or jackals, and ties them together in pairs by their tails, attaches a lit torch to each pair, and set them loose in the fields. The Philistines respond to this drastic escalation by burning down this house of his, again, most translations say "wife", but it said earlier that she was "given" to someone else, so I'm not sure what the situation is there, burning her and her father alive in the process. Very few of these details line up precisely with anything in this book, but it's got a lot of the same energy. A lot of fire, a lot of getting at people through their female partners, a lot of wanton destruction and disproportionate escalation. Also possibly an opening of hostilities? The beginning of Judges 13 says that the Israelites were "handed over" to the Philistines (New English Translation - other versions sometimes say "delivered"), but Judges 15:9 says that the Philistines invade Judea, so I'm not sure what the status quo was before the wedding, but bringing Samson into the conversation could very reasonably be understood as a clue that starting a war is on the table here. Certainly, things between Philistia and Judea get a lot more intense over the course of the story. 

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Most casual retellings of Samson's story focus on his time with his second wife, Delilah, and how she betrayed him but cutting his hair. They often don't mention that she was paid by the Philistines to discover and, if possible, remove, the source of his supernatural strength. See, when I was first making notes on this, I felt like Samson was an odd reference to make here. Plenty of other biblical figures faced off against armies of bad guys, or supernatural threats, and most of them aren't best known for having been betrayed by a lover. There are a lot of women in Grave Peril, a lot of them with active roles where they exercise substantial personal and narrative agency, but no one in Grave Peril is deliberately betrayed by a wife or girlfriend. Except, except, except this is the book in which Justine is introduced. I just checked Battle Ground, and she wasn't possessed by He Who Walks Beside this far back, although that doesn't actually rule out the possibility that she was infected by Nemesis, but still. I mean, I think it's as likely that Jim Butcher hit upon the idea for the thing with Justine while rereading in the course of writing Peace Talks/Battle Ground as that he really planned it this early, but in either case it's there. There is also Martin's long-game betrayal of Susan, and the Fellowship of St. Giles, several crucial prerequisites of which are also in this book, but that feels like a bit more of a stretch. 

So about bringing the house down on a bunch of nasties. Notably, Samson did not actually lose his powers, he just had to ask politely to have them restored, but this apparently did not occur to him until after he was taken captive, had his eyes put out, and and was forced to spend an unspecified amount of time grinding grain. Or he was just waiting for his moment. Either way, the Philistines throw a party about his capture, including a major sacrifice to Dagon, or Dagan, a stressfully complicated ancient Syrian god, referred to in the Tanakh as the head god of the Philistines. Samson is called in to entertain them, asks for permission to lean against the two load bearing pillars, prays for God to restore his super strength, and then...yeah, brings the house down is as good a way as any to describe it. He collapses the temple, killing himself and about 3000 Philistines, many of them civilians, in the process. Thing is, the Philistines weren't vampires, or demons. They didn't even consort with creatures of the night like the human guests at Bianca's party. Constructing Dagon as a demon here would be wildly ahistorical - the notion that the gods of other people are demons is, as far as I know, as strictly Christian notion, and not invoked in either the text of, nor, so far as cursory research suggests, Christian exegesis on, this passage. Philistia was a real confederation of cities in what is now the Gaza strip and a chunk of southwestern Israel, plus I think a little bit of northeastern Egypt. The Philistines were, and I cannot stress this enough, just people. This suggests three possibilities, and I don't like any of them. 

1. In the Dresden Files universe, the Philistines were, or worked with, demons, and either that information is recorded in their version of the Bible, or Michael knows about it someway else. That would reflect really, really badly on Jim Butcher. Like, I thought it was kinda cool on a first research pass, until I caught that we're talking about an event that's supposed to have happened in Gaza. (The words Philistine and Philistia do not always seem to refer to Palestine in the Bible, but in this instance it seems unambiguous). Yeah, no, bad things. 

2. Michael considers the Philistines, as the bad guys in this story, to be basically equivalent to vampires and similar, which reflects badly on Michael and seems rather out of character. 

3. Neither Michael nor Jim Butcher thought about this anything like as hard as I did, which would reflect badly on both of them but not as badly as options 1 or 2. 

Either way, not a good look for anyone involved. 

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Anyway! They approach the man dressed as a centurion. Harry remarks very quietly that his armor looks real, but apparently "Mr. Ferro" has supernatually good hearing, because he confirms that is is real. (He's also described as a man of "indefinite" years, and I'm honestly not sure if Jim Butcher was being clever there or if he meant "indeterminate".) Harry says it must have cost a fortune to put together, to which Ferro responds only with a smirk. I know this is probably meant to convey that he's so old he just kinda had a centurion outfit lying around, but the sheer rudeness of basically opening a conversation with a stranger by talking about how much his clothes cost makes his silence read more as a polite failure to notice a serious faux pas, and it's distracting as hell because Harry knows better. He isn't always polite, obviously, but when he isn't it's generally either a deliberate choice or a response to heightened emotion. This is neither.  I will forgive this on the basis that he's drugged and had three concussions in the past like, 48, maybe 60 hours, during which time the only sleep he got was the other time he got dosed with Red Court venom, and in the course of which he got a chunk of his life force eaten. Harry introduces himself, and when Mr. Ferro repeats his name, it hits Harry like a slap in the face, physically staggering him. We get a quick refresher on the nature of true names, which I thought were already discussed when Harry first got ahold of Kravos's journal, bu with a stress on how unusual it is to be able to hit someone that hard, or at all, with only part of their Name. This is an Elder Scrolls reference. While the physical force dragons can exert by speaking gets the most attention in Skyrim, the concept was introduced all the way back in Elder Scrolls: Redguard, which came out in 1998. I don't know if it originated somewhere external to the games. I'm not sure what Ferro did to Harry even operates on the same mechanism as the sympathetic magic with which Harry is familiar, much less that it plays by all the same rules. So when Harry asks how he did it, I don't think Ferro is just being a dick in saying Harry wouldn't understand. 

Michael points out that Ferro, who still hasn't introduced himself, is a dragon - his cigarette isn't lit, yet smoke issues from his mouth. While this is a fun and well-structured reveal for the reader, I don't know what it's supposed to be doing on a worldbuilding or characterization level. From whom, precisely, is the cigarette meant to conceal Ferro's draconic nature? Certainly Bianca knows, as would most of the other nonhuman guests, no one was expecting Harry to show up, and even if he did, he's bound by the same rules of conduct as everyone else here, to say nothing of the fact that if he gets uppity Ferro can just squish him. Ferro does introduce himself, as Mr. Ferro, and Michael says "Why don't I just call you Ferrovax", which seems to both impress and annoy the dragon. Harry objects that dragons are supposed to be big, with scales and wings. Ferro says, "We are what we wish to be," and I'm not sure if that's a general statement of philosophy, or information about how dragons, specifically, work. Or rather, it's certainly the latter, but I don't know if it's also the former. He also addresses Harry as "Mr. Drafton", to which Harry objects, apparently overlooking that this is probably an act of (pointed) consideration, given what just happened when Ferro used Harry's name. Actually, this may put some context on the cigarette thing. Dragons are big, aggressive apex predators, and if Ferro is anything to go by, deeply concerned with power. (In other words, a magnification of the species-level character flaws to which humans are inclined, but we don't need to get into all that). While this is never explicitly established to be the case in The Dresden Files, conventionally their biggest conflicts are with humans or with other dragons, and unlike humans, they're typically solitary, meaning that survival-level fear of conflict probably only kicks in when they might lose, rather than as soon as there's a risk of rejection by the group. Openly existing as a dragon in a space full of non-dragons, most of whom are also predators, but smaller ones who are unlikely to be a threat except as a group, may, as draconic etiquette recons these things, simply be too big a flex to be appropriate in polite company. Establishing that he can bat Dresden around like a cat toy just by addressing him directly makes the balance of power between them clear enough that it should prevent Harry from trying anything that could get messy, and pointedly failing to do so a second time signals that he's doesn't actually, y'know, want to fight, only Harry's a fucking primate (rather than, say, a cat) and gets upset because us social monkeys don't like it when someone opens a conversation by announcing, apropos of nothing, that they could beat us up if they felt like it. 

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Ferro reveals that he's the oldest of his kind, and the strongest. Just how big a deal is this party? Or what kind of situation are the dragons in? Lord Raith sent Thomas, probably as an insult - he doesn't like the Red Court and he can afford to offend them a little to make the point. Mavra's here for the opposite reason - she's the strongest, and very likely the oldest Black Court vampire in the series, probably in the Americas, possibly in the world. The Black Court is weak and needs to curry favor, so sending the most impressive person they have makes sense, and because they're weak, it's reasonably obvious that her attendance is a compliment, not a show of force. Harry's here because he's local, because they need him, specifically, to start the war, and because he's probably among the most powerful wizards of the White Council who would actually show up - being refused might represent a loss of face for the Red Court, or for Bianca specifically. Even Lea makes a fair amount of sense, she's a lot more important in Winter's hierarchy than Harry is in the White Council's, but not actually much higher than Bianca is about to be in within the Red Court, and if the invitation was directed to her, or one of the Queens, she was a very reasonable person to send - Winter doesn't seem to like the Red Court, but erring on the side of politeness isn't gonna hurt them any, they're secure in their power, and Lea is such a menace that no one could reasonably take her presence as a gesture of placation. But why is Ferro, the oldest and most powerful dragon alive, apparently, personally attending this thing? One certainly gets the impression that there are not a lot of dragons left, but they don't seem to be in such a spot that they'd need to cultivate an alliance with one of the most numerous and least pleasant bad guy factions currently signed to the Accords. The Red Court are...common. He's an independent signatory, but he could have sent a representative, or just...not shown up. (Word of Jim is that there are only two dragons left in the world, which would account for Ferro attending in person, but that's extracanonical and in any case makes his claim to be the oldest of his kind considerably less impressive.) 

Harry takes this villain monologue in the spirit in which it was intended, and informs Ferro that he's not all that impressed. So Ferro, who is clearly not into people being unimpressed with him, squishes Harry, apparently using his pure, directed will, although there may be some magic in it, as Harry is able to deflect it with a shield spell once Michael distracts Ferro. I don't remember if we see anyone do this between here and Changes, but either way it's interesting that this is our first look at this trick, and Harry's ability to respond to it. First of all, it situates Ferro as potentially in the same league as Mother Winter and Odin, if not necessarily as truly on their level. Which in turn causes one to wonder if his anger at not being taken seriously might reflect a similar vulnerability to disbelief.  Gods and faeries need people to believe in them, not just in their existence but in their power, or they can dwindle, fade, something - the books aren't terribly specific, but it's not good for them. And under those rules, the 1990s were not a great time to be a dragon. The Hobbit hadn't had a screen adaptation for 20 years. Pern was still going strong, but places a heavy emphasis on draconic interdependence with humans. Recent (if they were out at all yet, the exact year in which this book is set being somewhat uncertain) animated films like Mulan and Quest for Camelot situated their dragons as somewhat ridiculous. Eragon and Temeraire, both dragon-human partnership stories, were still a few years off, as was Reign of Fire, which might have been more to Ferro's liking, although its use to a belief-powered would be somewhat limited by not that many people having seen it. Pagemaster, Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, and the first two Spiro games may have been some help, but the consensus of the time, at least at my elementary school, was that dragons were extinct. 

Second, there's a bit of a throughline of character development here. Harry obviously has no idea what's happening in this moment, and he needs both Michael's assistance and a spell to get out from under it. Nine books later, when Vadderung does the same thing, he gets it almost immediately, and recognizes that he can't do anything about it as he is, not against something with that kind of power. Two books, and a disproportionate amount of character development after that, he not only understand what Mother Winter is doing, he responds quickly and effectively. It's not actually clear whether gods and similar can do the pure-will-squish because their will, or the force it exerts, is in some meaningful sense stronger than that of mortals, of it it's simply that, as their will is the means through which they exert power in the world ("let there be light", etc) they have a great deal more practice focusing and applying it. But it shows meaningful growth in Harry's understanding of himself, his abilities, and the world in which he lives. Harry, in the early books, clearly likes to think of himself as anti-authoritarian, but he still views the power and authority wielded against him by other as inevitable. He's just determined to make doing so as unpleasant for its wielders as possible. And when that's all you can do, you should do that. Add friction. Make them work for it. There's power to be had there. But it is nothing on the power of realizing you can just straight up say no, just refuse, and then doing that. In Peace Talks, Harry tells Ebenezer "no" in a pretty serious way, and I don't know that he could have done that if he hadn't already told Mother Winter "no" two books earlier. Come to think of it, given the Mothers' established history of leading Harry into importation realizations, it wouldn't surprise me if that's why she stuck him to the floor in the first place. 

Once Harry's no longer being squished, we find out that Michael's the one who killed Siriothrax, and then Ferro vanishes. Poof. Michael chides Harry for being provocative, and they agree that Michael will take the lead on any subsequent dragon encounters. So far as I can recall, this gun remains unfired. People are starting to thin out as the vampires grab their human meals and withdraw to less public areas of the house. Michael doesn't like it, of course, and this time Harry doesn't bother asking him not to start a fight, just that they wait to do so until they can check the Hamlet guy and Bianca herself. There's some (more) good setup in this chapter with how Michael, hitherto the more cautious and even-tempered of the pair, is getting more and more upset as the evening wears on, even though nothing as happened, at least as far as the behavior of the vampires is concerned, that he didn't already know about. Presenting through his perspective, established to be reasonable (except where his own family is concerned), what an outrage this is, and, crucially, letting Harry be the voice of moderation, situates us to understand, when Harry "cuts loose" later in the book, that while his actions may have been unwise, they were not excessive, immoral, or unjustified. Hell, in another nine books, he's going to effectively commit genocide against the Red Court, and this helps situate that as acceptable too. Which, to be clear, it is. The reds are monsters, at minimum a 2.5 on the Mind Flayer Scale. That justifies genocide. But oh wow does it ever make me even less comfortable with the comparison of Red Court vampires to Philistines. Like, this is good setup, very strong series writing, but did you have to bring real world religious conflict into it? 

Michael asks if it might not be one of the other vampires, but Harry doesn't think it's likely. A vampire powerful enough to pull this off would have overthrown Bianca by now, unless they were part of her inner circle. But that apparently consists solely of Kyle and Kelly, who have both been ruled out, Kyle directly and Kelly for not having the necessary "presence of mind". I would very much like to know how Harry is so sure that there's no one else in Bianca's inner circle, but maybe Red Court vamps always only have two trusted lieutenants, so even though Harry didn't know Kelly and Kyle existed until...night before last, now that he's aware of them he can fill out the organizational flowchart from there. Presumably he assumes that Bianca's "shadows" are other vampires. And I suppose his failure to consider that as Bianca's elevation must have had the signoff, if not the active support of someone who standards above her in the Court, there may well be a higher ranking vampire currently in Chicago, if not in attendance at this shindig, to the head trauma. 

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They're looking around for "Hamlet" when Harry catches sight of a red-cloaked figure approaching quickly and stealthily from behind the ferns. Michael pulls a knife, and Harry grabs them, but when the hood falls back, it's Susan, dressed as Little Red Riding Hood. The picnic basket full of weapons may be a reference to the 1999 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Fear Itself", in which Buffy did the same thing, but the idea is straightforward enough for two people to have had it independently. But we need to talk about symbolism and foreshadowing again. Fortunately, Little Red Riding Hood's story is much shorter and simpler than Samson's, and I feel comfortably assuming that my readers are familiar with the basic details. I will note here only that in the oldest written versions clearly identifiable as Little Red Riding Hood or Little Red Cap, there is no woodsman, no rescue, but that rescues do feature in many of the older stories which (may) comprise its precursors. 

Conventional interpretations of Little Red Riding Hood often focus on maturity and sexuality, noting elements like the disobedience, or going astray, in stopping to pick flowers, the symbolism of the red hood or hat, the fear of being consumed, and the symbolic rebirth of emergence from the wold's belly. Some modern analysis envisions the wold specifically as a rapist, and revisionist retellings often feature either Little Red Cap and/or her grandmother defending themselves from the wolf, or the girl embracing her own wildness (typically but not exclusively sexual) and engaging with the wolf on her own terms. This set of interpretations is probably out most useful in reading the immediate foreshadowing presented by Susan's costume. Harry and Susan will both experience violent, sexualized, traumatic shifts in the trajectory of their characters in this book. Susan, of course, ends up as a half-vampire, and while both her entry into that state and its ramifications are clearly rough on her (and end in her death, eventually), the Susan we see two books from now is more mature, perhaps more comfortable in her own skin and certainly better contained by it (in the sense that she has firmer boundaries and internalizes more of what she feels, although the tattoos serves as something of a literalization), and stronger in most conventionally accepted senses of the word. Harry, on the other hand...kind of breaks. We'll get into that more when we get there, not least because this post already needs a lengthy disclaimer and I'd rather it didn't need a lengthy content warning as well. I will, however, note briefly that it radically alters his relationship with his own sexuality. It also prompts him to embrace, if not unreservedly, his own power, his own wildness, his own destructive capability, and seems to shake him, a little, out of the deny-ignore mentality he's displayed towards how own raw strength. He also, y'know, starts a war, a thing the participation in which has been regarded as a mark of or prerequisite for adult masculinity by a lot of humans for at least the past several thousand years. To be clear, as with a lot of the foreshadowing in this book, someone reading it for the first time could not reasonably predict what's coming, but it helps make things feel earned, effective, and natural when we do realize it. 

There is also the fairly central image of the wolf wearing the grandmother's clothing. Lea is gonna be explicitly associated with that in a few pages, so let's take that and run with it. Lea is a mentor to Harry, however messed up their relationship might be, and quite possible to Maeve as well, given her closeness to Mab. And by the end of this book, Nemesis will be using her as a disguise to infiltrate Winter and infect Maeve. None of the other Nemesis carriers we know about are notable mentor figures, much less female mentor figures to Harry specifically, but notably three of them do have white hair, which is a grandmother sort of thing to have. Four if you count Tessa's "silvery gray", and if she's infected, which if I remember correctly has not been confirmed at the time of this writing. So there's that. 

Anyway, Harry asks Susan what she even got in, and she explains, rather complacently, that she had a copy of Harry's invitation made. He starts trying (badly, but like, concussions, sleep deprivation, drugs, panic) to explain how much danger she's really in, but she tells him, essentially, that she's going to be fine because she knows the rules for vampire safety. (She does, in fact, know them). Harry tells her she doesn't understand, she demands to know what she doesn't understand, and Lea cuts in to explain that without a legitimate invitation, she has no protection from the laws of hospitality. 

Holy shit, okay, I think we're setting a new record here for Late Post, Long Post. Of you want the next post that unexpectedly rivals some shorter Master's theses to not take like three months, please consider becoming a Patron so I can spend more time on this and less on the work that pays the bills. Next chapter won't take this long, I swear. It will also, I sincerely hope, be considerably shorter. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things!