Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 9

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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. 

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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. 

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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!