Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 5

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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. 

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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. 

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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!