Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 13

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Billy holds the pizza while Harry sets up a circle trap. When we talked about Storm Front Chapter 6, I mentioned that referring to "magic circle theory" makes it sound like it's a whole field of study, and how that reading is at least somewhat supported by the variety of circles, and the variety of uses to which they're put, throughout the series. We learn in Dead Beat that literally anyone can put up a basic protective circle - you don't have to be even a minor practitioner, and it's sort of implied in Fool Moon that Kim's difficulty in setting up and maintaining the Greater Circle she uses to help MacFinn is more because she doesn't understand it properly than anything to do with raw strength. So now I'm wondering whether anyone with the right training can create the kind of circle trap Harry uses here, and snare something in it if they have that thing's Name. Regular humans trapping faeries or similar and coercing them or making deals with them is a pretty old and widespread idea, and it sometimes even goes the humans' way, so I think it's within the realm of possibility, given that the Dresden Files is functionally an All Myths Are True setting. 

Harry asks Billy to keep an eye out in case anyone tries to sneak up on them, and Billy complains that he wanted to do more to help than just bringing the pizza. He points out that he could get the scents of Reuel's changelings, to which Harry agrees, acknowledging, although not out loud, that he's forgotten Billy could do that. There's some tasty nuance happening here. Harry did underestimate Billy, again, and didn't consider either his abilities or that he would have more idea about what to do with them than Harry would. Billy, for his part, is being a bit impetuous. He wants to do something more interesting, more exciting, than the legitimately helpful thing he's been asked to do. Hard to say what he would have done if Harry hadn't signed off on his getting the kids' scents; I honestly don't think he'd have wandered off, but I'm less sure than I'd like to be. 

We're briefly reintroduced to the idea of Names, and to how this kind of summoning is a bit of a gray area under the Laws of Magic, which Harry tries to be diligent about obeying since the Council has it out for him. The description of Toot-toot when he arrives is so similar to the one from Storm Front that I had to check whether the wording was identical in a couple places - it's not, quite. In Storm Front he's described as having a "form that echoed the splendor of the fae lords" and in Summer Knight we get "his beauty a distant echo of the lords of Faerie, the Sidhe". Toot is wearing a helmet made from a plastic bottle cap, and carrying both a spear (consisting of a straight pin secured to a pencil) and a plastic cocktail sword. He does his very best to perform a perimeter check of the pizza, then gives a whole cloud of similarly equipped small fae the okay to land. They set upon the pizza, but of course as soon as anyone takes a bite, the circle closes, trapping them inside. Toot initially thinks Harry is there to make them join Winter's side in the impending faerie war, and says he can't make them since they haven't been Called yet. Having extracted extensive assurances that Harry is not there to do any such thing, he and his people return their attention to the slice of pizza, devouring it in seconds. 

Once the all-important business of eating pizza is taken care of, he explains that the "drawing of the wildfae" has begun, and that usually fae who do nice things are called to Summer, while those who do mean thing are called to Winter, but he's not sure which side he'll be called to. Harry offers them the rest of the pizza in exchange for information about the whereabouts of the Summer and Winter ladies. Maeve is in undertown, and has been since last fall when all the local turbulence in the spirit world naturally attracted her attention. Best I can tell, every major city has at least a few spooky underground tunnels. I haven't done a comprehensive survey, but New York City, Paris, and London are all known for theirs, and Seattle has a respectable network. Baltimore is the least tunnel-y city I've ever personally looked into, with only a small set of tunnels under a single neighborhood. So Chicago isn't special in having an undercity, but it is perhaps notable in the depth and diversity of tunnels down there. You got the pedway tunnels, underground streets, sewers, some amount of abandoned subway tunnels, and of course the freight tunnels. Public facing information indicates that the lattermost are wholly inaccessible to the public, after flooding in the early 1990s, but I would be the opposite of surprised to discover that humans had found their way in, because I've met humans. Since Maeve is in Chicago, so of course is Aurora, and since Maeve is underground, Aurora is of course up on top of a "big building", although Toot is not usefully able to describe which building, and eventually agrees to send a guide with Harry - he doesn't want to go himself and miss out on the pizza. I do wonder what Harry would have done if Maeve and Aurora weren't both in Chicago - the urgency of the situation doesn't really allow for travel at the speed Harry can manage it, unless he wanted to use the Ways, which would be like, spectacularly unsafe under the circumstances. 

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Toot introduces Harry to Elidee, a red-glowing faerie so small she resembles a spark from a campfire. I don't know if she's a dewdrop faerie like Toot or if she's some other kind of small, glowing, winged fae. She can understand Harry, but is too small to speak in a way he can hear, instead communicating largely by flashing twice for yes and once for no. Harry offers to let her grab some pizza before they leave, in which context I'm not sure why they couldn't have just waited for Toot to grab himself some pizza, and had a guide who they'd met before and who can actually speak to Harry and Billy with like, words. Maybe it would have taken him longer to eat, since he's like six inches tall, I don't know. While Elidee is eating, Billy returns from scent-getting, reporting, to absolutely no one's surprise, that the kids don't smell entirely normal. Harry warns him not too spend long watching the faeries eat pizza, as looking at faerie lights can be disorienting, which helps establish their relative knowledge levels about the fae, and begins to set the tone as to just how many hidden dangers you can trip over when dealing with faeries. Elidee returns from her pizza and starts drifting in the direction of their first objective, the Winter Lady, and Harry tells Billy to stay alert and watch his back, something Billy is considerably more willing to do now that it involves going somewhere and doing something. He asks, almost hopefully, whether Harry is expecting trouble. 

Got my computer back in working order, but I'm having what feels like more than the usual amount of difficulty getting my shit together to put in the burst of extra work I usually do in September. Still have more done than I did this time last year, although we'll talk more about that at the beginning of October. Realistically I'm hoping to get maybe two more post done between now and October 1st. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things.