Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 14

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Elidee leads Harry and Billy in more or less a straight line, rather than looking for the shortest route, at one point taking them over the top of a building. It's about a 30 minute walk, in the beginnings of a Chicago summer, so they're cranky and sweaty by the time she takes them to a door that will allow them into the pedway, which is apparently closed this time of day, and will be until six the next morning. I am once again having difficulty figuring the time here. Harry arrived at Murphy's apartment sometime between sunset and midnight. It's June 18th, so that's maybe 9 or 10pm. Too late to visit unannounced unless you're very close to someone, earlier than most adults go to bed of their own volition. Suppose he's there for a couple hours, gets home around midnight. Chapters 8 and 9 are mostly dialogue and should therefore play out mostly in real time - in the audiobook these come out together to 27 minutes 17 seconds, round up and call it half an hour, maybe 40 minutes to allow for Elaine's circuit of the room at the beginning of chapter 8 and then time Harry spends straightening the mantle and having feelings at the end of chapter 9, although the almost-fight with Morgan probably took longer to describe than it did to experience. So Harry falls asleep on the couch sometime between 12:30 and 1:00am. In chapter 1, Harry says he "hasn't slept", indicating that he may have been up for over 24 hours at that point, so it's possible he sleeps for as much as 12 hours here, although given the nightmares I honestly kind of doubt it. So let's say he gets up around noon. The conversation with Bob cannot be more than 23.5 minutes, since that's the full length of chapter 10, but showering, cleaning himself up, etc probably takes a while so let's call that an hour all-in, meaning he leaves the house at 1pm. Someone worked up a plausible looking approximate location for Harry's apartment, on the basis of which it should take 15, 20 minutes to get to the "southern edge of the Loop" where Reuel's apartment is. Call it 30 minutes to allow for traffic and parking (I may be underestimating Chicago traffic here, but it's not rush hour or anything). So he gets to Reuel's place around 1:30 pm. He wasn't actually in the apartment for that long, but he takes the stairs slowly and he's injured on the way out, so let's be really generous and call the whole thing an hour. He leaves for the funeral/viewing at 2:30. Now, unlike "midtown", River North is a real Chicago neighborhood, and at one time had the largest concentration of art galleries in the US outside of Manhattan, which may be why the changeling kids chose a funeral home there, I guess. Anyway. River North is pretty close to the Loop. Even coming from it's southernmost edge, this should be something on the order of a ten minute drive. Call it 15. So he gets Quiet Acres at about 2:45. Call it another 15 that he spends lurking around trying to spot the murderer among those in attendance before wandering into a back corridor. He overhears maybe a whole minute of discussion there before following the kids outside, has a quick scuffle, then gets thrown in the trash, and after "a minute", Billy shows up. By this time it is maybe 3:15. The pre-summoning conversation with Billy can't possibly have gone on for more than 10 minutes, it takes another 10 for Toot and his guys to arrive (this is specified), and then they have to negotiate, eat the pizza and get underway, let's say that all manages to take 45 minutes somehow, it's 4pm when they start following Elidee. It's "better than half an hour" to get to the tunnel entrance, making their arrival sometime between 4:30 and 5pm. The unfinished building is presumably the Heritage at Millennium Park, which finished construction in 2005. Now, pedway hours are a bit variable, and depend some on the businesses to which any given entrance connects. (I have looked at multiple maps in the last hour that said to assume Pedway hours were x to y "unless otherwise noted" but did not provide any notes. These maps did not agree with each other about the actual times either. I think the signs indicating pedway entrances are supposed to give hours, but like, they don't.) However, the earliest official closing time I've seen anyway is 5pm, that only appears to be after the start of Covid, and I cannot figure Harry getting there that late. He could have slept longer than I estimated, but given that he's sitting on the couch and got woken up by a nightmare, I think my guess is, if anything, overgenerous, and my estimates on the time he spent in Reuel's building and negotiating with Toot were deliberately so. On the other hand the impression I've gotten of the Chicago pedway from Reddit indicates it's possible their entrance just closed at 4pm that day for no particular reason. 

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In any event, they take the pedway to a section that's gated off with a sign reading "DANGER KEEP OUT". For the life of me I cannot figure out where this is supposed to be. The only reference to any abandoned section of the pedway that I could find anywhere, and I looked, is to a tunnel connection what is currently Chase Tower with 70 W Madison, but that isn't connected to the "main tunnels of the pedway" in the first place. Based on the description, this should actually mark a connection between the pedway and the old freight tunnels. If you're aware of where the heck this closed off section is supposed to be, or could be, you are welcome and encouraged to let me know in the comments. A short way in, the tunnel walls become rough and uneven. I don't know if I'm supposed to be picturing natural stone or crumbling brick here, although if they're in the freight tunnels it should be the latter. Harry pulls out his pentacle for light, and we're given an explanation of what it represents (to him), the five elements held within a circle of human will and intent. Elidee leads them to an apparently blank wall panel which Harry starts fiddling with to find their way into Undertown. When Billy says he doesn't know what Undertown is, Harry explains that Chicago was built on a swamp and that initially, buildings and even streets would gradually sink into the mud, and they started building streets and building entrances a story up, so they would be at ground level after sinking, creating an entire level of the city that was underground and mostly buried in mud. This is... not entirely accurate. Chicago was, an in fact still is, slowly sinking into the swamp upon which it was built, but I can find no evidence that buildings were constructed to sink a full story into the muck, and the buried streets, while real, have a more complex origin and are not still down there somewhere waiting to be walked. Due to constant, lethal outbreaks of typhoid, dysentery, and cholera, Chicago implemented the first comprehensive sewage system in the US. This process involved moving a lot of central Chicago about four feet up, which required the existing streets to be covered with several feet of soil and relaid higher up to correspond with the new entrance level of the surrounding buildings. Those old streets presumably still exist under the new ones, but they don't connect to anything and the space between them and the surface is about four feet high and full of dirt. Seattle actually did end up with an undercity in parts of downtown as part of a similar "we're too close to the water level" regrading process, but as they did it after their big 19th century fire, rather than before, renovation was able to be a little more comprehensive. You don't have to elevate buildings that are currently smoking piles of rubble. I'm skipping over some of the absolutely bonkers feats of engineering involved in both the lifting and the management of its aftermath because they have no bearing on the story we're trying to talk about here, but you can find most of this on Wikipedia - start with the Raising of Chicago and maybe take a look at the one for the water cribs as well. According to Harry, the undercity created by this sinking process was, for a time, home to both vermin and criminals. Again, there was a lot of crime in Seattle's undercity for a while there, and if I remember rightly there were some speakeasies and things in Chicago's freight tunnels, but Chicago never had a secret undeground level of the city proper the way this book describes, although a lot of its rat population is contained in its various tunnels. He asserts, accurately, that there are a lot of tunnels under Chicago, and that the Manhattan project was housed there at one time, which is...complicated. Chicago Pile-1, the first artificial nuclear reactor, was in Chicago, was part of the the Manhattan project, and was underground, but it was housed in a squash court at the University of Chicago, by whose Metallurgical Laboratory it was developed, not in the city's tunnel system(s). It's also hard to say that the Manhattan project was "housed" any particular where - it was a multi-site operation, and work at the Metallurgical Laboratory continued at least through 1944, well after Los Alamos was established, although Pile-1 was eventually dismantled and reassembled in Argonne forest preserve, where the Argonne National Laboratory continues energy research operations to this day.  At some point, vampires and other... Things moved in and ate a lot of the humans and rats down there. A lot of what lives in Undertown are strictly subterranean creatures that don't have a lot of contact with humans, even wizards, in the usual course of things, and about which Harry therefore doesn't know a whole lot. Apparently there might be "wyrms" down there, although I don't think it's ever established what that means in this setting. Billy is less than enthusiastic about this proposition, but Harry reminds him that he wanted to come along. He also runs Billy through the basics of dealing with the sidhe - no gifts, no bargains, be careful of sensual temptation. Billy is a little impatient, leaving Harry uncertain whether he's gotten his point across, but he recognizes that it's hard to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it. 

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After a little more walking in the dark, the tunnel opens out into a low-roofed cavern, and Harry almost
immediately picks up bad vibes. Grimalkin has arrived to guide them to Maeve's court. This is the first time in the series that we encounter a malk, and I don't think we actually see Grimalkin here, just hear his voice and watch his glowing footprints on the floor. He's initially reluctant to introduce himself, although it's not clear if that's the result of nefarious intent, the natural fae reluctance to answer direct questions, or a personal desire to be a butt. Harry explains, for Billy's benefit and the reader's, that the fae are bound by anything they say three times, so if Grimalkin was lying when he initially expressed his intent to get them to Maeve unharmed, he's stuck with it now, but that they don't like being bound that way, so if you do it to a faerie who was actually trying to be helpful, they might reasonably get upset. I'm not actually sure why this was necessary. Elidee hides in Harry's hair when Grimalkin shows up, but she's still there, and the bargain with Toot was for her to guide Harry to Maeve, not just to someone who could. If Grimalkin tries to lead him off a cliff or into an ambush, presumably she would know they were going the wrong way and communicate as much. Granted, this has failure modes, but so does seriously infringing on the autonomy of a virtual stranger who hasn't yet done anything worse to you than sound creepy in the dark. Grimalkin, still apparently invisible, leads them by means of glowing footprints deeper into Undertown, where the stone begins to look like it's been...swirled? "Smoothed into place like soft serve ice cream". I'm only like, 70% sure that I understand what I'm supposed to be picturing here, but it's sufficient to illustrate the level of control that a Faerie Queen has over a place she's claimed as her own. 

They reach a set of tall wooden doors, which initially seem to depict a garden scene, but on closer examination... I mean, it is a garden, but it's a garden with a lot of human corpses and skeletons, and people having sex, and the fae watching from between the branches. This vaguely evokes Mab's ice garden from Proven Guilty, although there were fewer obvious corpses there, and more human ice sculptures. Slightly more tasteful than a big sign that says "Beyond these doors lie beauty, sex, and death, not necessarily in that order", but it conveys the same information. There's a little bit of an audiobook glitch here, where the description of the doors opening is repeated, apparently because James Marsters stumbled a little over a word and redid it, and then the earlier version wasn't removed. Inside, they find big band music, a 1920s ballroom tilted slightly on its side, with a creepy pond at the lower end and a throne on the higher, and about 40 of the sidhe, dancing in period accurate World War 2 era dresses and military uniforms. The description here is very good, but it's also, and I suspect this is deliberate, distracting. We spend as much time on one young woman's hair being sapphire blue, somewhat inappropriate to the setting, than on the period outfits. We're told that the sidhe are in "dress uniforms of both the army and the navy that looked authentic to the month and year". No one speaks of "the army" or "the navy" when they're not referring to to the army or navy of their own country, and uh, not to put to fine a point on it, if any of the Winter Sidhe were in Nazi uniforms, Harry would have said. This pretty much tells us that no one in Winter killed Reuel or stole his mantle, that they didn't initiate hostilities and that to the extent that there are good guys and bad guys here, they are not among the latter. Also, I suppose, that despite their not having picked this fight, a victory here could give Winter a substantial and lasting boost to their power and prestige within the supernatural world. Which, in the event, is pretty much what happens. 

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The human musicians are exhausted, underfed, and shackled, but they seem unbothered by this and entirely focused on their music. They're also very good. As Our Heroes watch, the trumpeter goes into a very impressive solo, while the other musicians just kind of collapse, until he suffers, I'm not sure, a heart attack or something, and dies, right there on the stage. The Sidhe dancers, who stopped to watch as well, part to allow Maeve through. She looks like a younger Mab - maybe 17 if I'm reading this right, with dreadlocs in the white, lavender, pale blue, and green that comprise Winter's signature colors. Now, the idea that white people shouldn't mat their hair into an approximation of dreadlocs was not anything like as well known, at least to white people, in 2002 as it is today, and certainly I don't think Maeve is above committing a little cultural appropriation, but this is once again making me wonder how the Mantles of the Queens interact with the bearers' racial features. We know the Mantles change the color of the Queens' hair and eyes (the Mantle of the Summer Knight turns Fix's hair white eventually as well, but he was already a changeling, and taking up the Knight's Mantle presumably constituted Choosing - which raises all kind of questions about the nature of the damn thing since Knights are supposed to be mortal, but we'll get to that in later books when it actually matters - I don't think Harry will undergo the same physical changes). We also know it changes skin color at least a little, since the Queens are all somewhere on the spectrum from very pale to inhumanly pale. So like, Maeve could be black, or at least mixed? We've seen her twin sister, and Sarissa's skin tone is described as as a "medium olive tone", which could mean almost anything. "Olive" is what writer's say when they don't want to commit to anything. Sarissa also seems to have fairly straight hair, but that can happen. Obviously, given that Maeve is, y'know, violent, predatory, and hypersexual, I really hope she's not supposed to be black, since that would be super, super racist, like, well out of parameters for what we usually see in this series, which is already pretty racist. But I've been thinking about how the Mantles would work with people of color since the second time I read Cold Days. Anyway, speaking of being predatory and hypersexual, Maeve straddles the trumpeter's corpse, kisses it on the lips, and makes a remark about how he said he'd die to play like that, which probably does more to clarify for Billy the hazards of making deals with the Fae than anything Harry could say on the subject. The other Sidhe applaud, for the death or Maeve's remark or both, which is kinda unsettling, but like, unsettling applause seems to be part of Winter's Thing. 

Maeve announces that they have a visitor, then resumes her throne so that Harry can approach. They go through the absolute minimum formalities, and then Harry just up and asks her whether she arranged the murder of Ronald Reuel. She says she can't just tell him something like that, he'll have to pay for it. He correctly reasons that she wants something in particular or she wouldn't have sent Grimalkin to escort him. She tells him to sit down so they can make a deal. 

Okay, so what happened was, I made a mistake on my spreadsheet and spent a lot of the past week trying to get caught up to where I thought I already was on fiction writing. Needless to say it's unlikely that you'll see another Dresden Files post before the end of the month, which also marks the end of the year in which I track my progress. In the next little bit here I'll be getting all the trackers and things up to date so everything will be tidy and ready to go for the Goals post sometime in the first few days of October. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!