Dresden Files Reread - Summer Knight Chapter 24

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Harry finishes extinguishing the Blue Beetle, and takes a few things from it, including, though we aren't told this until much later in the chapter, one of the air valve cover thingies for the tires. Then he walks to a gas station, and calls a tow for the car and a cab for himself. He goes home, drinks a coke, feeds the cat, changes the litterbox, and is in the process of gearing up to do some dishes when he realizes he's stalling. There's dust on the dish soap, so probably this needs to happen, although honestly if I were stall-cleaning I would have started with bagging up some of the coke cans and pizza boxes, maybe get the laundry together. I still don't know how he does laundry. Maybe he uses a service? They're often perceived as a rich people thing, but they're not really that expensive. Wash and fold services typically charge by the pound, and in Chicago the price per pound seems to usually be about $2.00 for a weekly service (on-demand is a bit more expensive), with minimum order sizes running anywhere from 17 to 25lbs. The service with the 25lb minimum claims this is about two loads of laundry, and Harry can't possibly be going through clothes faster than that, so that's $50/week in today's money, so if I'm reading the Consumer Price Index thingy for Laundry and Dry Cleaning Services correctly, that would have been about $20/week in 1997, maybe a scooch higher by Summer Knight if it's set the same year it came out, but also maybe a bit lower? When Harry's actually working regularly, I think he can probably afford that? Of course, we never see him when he's been working regularly, at least not in the early books, and in this case we know that's been the status quo since the end of Grave Peril, but it can't be the status quo all the time or he'd have been evicted by now, so it's likely that there's been quite a lot of time since start of series where he could afford a laundry service. Clearly he can't afford it now, but note that the laundry is not, in fact, getting done. 

In any event, he gets his shit together and calls the Council. Well, he tries to. He gets the receptionist, and asks to speak to McCoy, but Morgan gets ahold of the phone and is a hostile, obstructive ass. Harry does manage to tell Morgan the basic shape of the situation, at least enough to convey why it's so dire that he's calling for backup rather than abiding by the terms of his Trial, but Morgan doesn't do anything to indicate that this information will be passed along. I don't remember anything happening that would suggest that he did, but it would be well within Morgan's character to tell Harry that he's on his own and doomed to fail, and then pass the information to the Senior Council, or at least to Luccio, anyway because of that pesky sense of honor. Oh, hang on - the Gatekeeper finds Harry in the tree a couple chapter from now, doesn't he? But I don't remember if that's related. He also says someone very dear to him was at Archangel, and I don't think this ever gets any follow up? The only person we're told in any other context is important to Morgan is Luccio, and she definitely didn't die at Archangel. Morgan hangs up, and Harry throws the phone at the wall, shattering it, which is understandable, but counterproductive. We're in an active situation here, he might need to make other phone calls. He considers asking Murphy for help finding another way to contact Ebenezer, but decides against it because even if he can find him, the Wardens won't actually let him see Ebenezer. I love this. Big fan of reasonable ideas that go nowhere.

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After a shower, and what sounds like probably his very last clean clothes, Harry feels substantially less awful, and packs a bag with his staff, blasting rod, basic ritual gear, a claw hammer, and a box of iron nails. He tracks Elaine down at a hotel near the airport, using the air valve thingy to magically trace the other air valve thingy that she used to find his car back in Chapter 16. She's eating breakfast, and she's got airplane tickets in her bag, and Harry notices out loud that she's running. She confirms this, acting like it's obvious that she's going to get out of the blast radius while she can, which is sort of valid, although in the long run this seems likely to make more problems than it solves. Harry kinda dangles that he thinks he knows who attacked both of them, so she goes to get him some breakfast while he gets over being smug. Harry asks for her version of what happened to her, of which the only relevant new detail is that she threw fire at her attacker, and then he tell her that it was Lloyd Slate. I don't even remember if this is true - I really thought Elaine was at least partly complicit in the attack, but Maeve seemed genuinely annoyed that the blood on Slate's dagger had been burned too badly to use, so maybe I'm getting that wrong. Could also have been a performance though. She said it was useless, and she sounded angry, but the thing that stops the Sidhe from lying doesn't apply to tone, so it could be true that it was useless, but not that she was upset. Also still not sure if she could lie at this point in the series. Harry tells her the broad strokes of the attack on him and Murphy at the Walmart, and says he thinks it was Maeve, although it doesn't fit her well, and Elaine cuts him off to ask if he really fell for her act. I gotta note here that Maeve is basically Like This in every book we see her in, and that every good plan (here meaning "coherent" and "effective", not "constructive") she's had has been accomplished in cooperation with someone else, usually the Summer Lady, so I think Elaine may be deliberately misleading Harry here, trying to fulfill her own obligations to Summer. Harry says he needs more information, and Elaine, in a display of having known Harry since they were like 15 and knowing how he thinks, immediately guesses that he wants to talk to the Mothers. She doesn't like this plan at all, both because the Mothers are extremely powerful and dangerous and because this is almost the opposite of getting out of town. She says he doesn't understand the risks, he says that he does, but he's doing it anyway, and there's a little bit of handholding, after which she calls him several kinds of stupid and agrees to call in a favor to get them a visit with the Mothers. 

Five minutes later, she comes back from wherever she went to call in the favor, and leaves her tickets on the table along with payment for her food. So I guess it's before 9/11, because after that, transferable plane tickets that you could just offer to someone else weren't a thing anywhere in the US, although my understanding is it had been getting less common for quite a while before that. Honestly the cash is more puzzling, because this is very clearly described as a self-service buffet, and usually you pay for those when you come in and have no reason to leave a tip. Maybe she's just leaving the cash so whoever clears her table will know she left them on purpose and won't waste time and energy trying to track her down and return them. That would be very considerate of her. Then she starts gearing up, mostly with presumably-enchanted Jewelry, including what's described as a "slave ring". Honestly, genuinely, I initially thought this was one of those metal ring "day collars" that some 24/7 submissives wear at work because they think it's subtle, even though literally no one else wears them in any context and a regular dog collar would be more discrete because some people do wear those as fashion accessories. I have seen actual federal employees wearing these to work in a federal building, and apparently I'm still not over it because this really has nothing to do with anything except that I couldn't initially work out what a "slave ring" was. To be clear, I have no problem with someone visibly advertising aspects of their sex life in a professional environment. I think people should do that more, if anything. I just think it's embarrassing when someone is trying not to advertise their sex life at work and failing that badly. But this thing connects to a bracelet, so I figured that couldn't possibly be right, because that would get caught on everything ever. As it turns out, "slave ring" is a spectacularly insensitive term for either a hand chain or more specifically a haathphool (also spelled hathphool, haathphul, or haath phul), a piece of bridal jewelry generally thought of as Indian, though one source claims they originated in Persia and were brought to India by the Mughal, and an article on the website of a diamond company quotes Cynthia Meera Fredrick, whose credentials appear to check out, as claiming that it "was popular across Persia, Caucasia, Russia, Arab countries and even China", although no indication is given of when or in what context she said this. For whatever reason, maybe just the enshittification of Google, I can't find anything about these things anywhere on the internet that isn't trying to sell me something. In any event, it's a piece of bridal jewelry with a bracelet connected to one or more rings, differentiated from hand chains (or from other hand chains?) by the chain or chains typically being fairly heavy or ornate. Puzzlingly, in a short article listing everything that "slave bracelet" can refer to, Wikipedia refers to these as "panjas bracelets", but about half the search results for that phrase, and wikipedia itself, associate this term specifically with the Tiger Miraculous from Miraculous Ladybug. There is yet another jewelry website that indicates a haathphool may also be called a hath panja, but identifies it as specifically Rajput or Rajasthani, and claims it can "revert escaping energy" back into your body, so like, grain of salt, although for all I know that's exactly what Elaine is using hers for. Clearly there's something going on here that I don't understand, and I really wish Butcher had just called the damn thing a hand chain. I was not successful in figuring out why this is ever referred to as a "slave ring". 

As they're heading outside, Elaine gives him a hard time about "still" using "phallic foci", and Harry holds the doors open for her, reminding us that they've got a lot of history, even if there was like a ten year interruption there, and helping set up that Elaine is getting ready to use that history, both to manipulate and entrap Harry and to give him a way out of it. A Victorian-looking carriage pulls up in the porte-cochère (that's the covered area in front of a hotel where you can pick people up or drop them off - if you've ever had occasion to refer to one, or heard someone else do so, it was probably called a "carport", but technically a carport is closed at one end), drawn by two horses, one of them the blue white of a drowned corpse, the other grassy green. Their ride is here, and they're going to see the Mothers. 

See what I can do if I just apply myself? If I manage to keep up this pace, you should get to see the next post maybe Thursday or Friday. Until then, be Gay, do Crimes, and read All The Things!