Storm Front, chapters 16 and 17, in which true rules of power and exchange are demonstrated

Gracious, but it has been so long since a Dresden post.  There's a very simple reason for that, which is that every time I opened this file up to try to write something, I felt immediately exhausted and queasy and started asking myself serious questions about how I wanted to spend what limited time I have in this world.  But I'm feeling more fortitudinal today, ready to go a couple rounds with with this nonsense while I keep sorting out my own next writing project.

(Personal aside: I think my newest prescription is actually working?  A lot of things are still a struggle but I hate myself so much less than usual, most days.  It's nice.  I recommend it to everyone.  Except people like Harry Dresden.)

Storm Front

Chapter Sixteen: Quick, Look Over There*

I was a big fan of magic tricks for a few years when I was little; I performed for my grade three class and would test out card-forces on family members at random and keep books of tricks by my bed to read before sleep, fantasising about the glorious shows I could put on if only I could house and care for enough rabbits.  (We had two.  I never actually tried to conjure them.)  The main lesson I got out of magic was that you can do damn near anything if you can just convince people to not pay attention at the right moments.  Nothing is more versatile or powerful than misdirection.

Appropriately enough, I feel like misdirection is exactly what Butcher is trying to pull on us as this chapter begins with Dresden moping about his confrontation with Murphy.

I had lost Murphy's trust. It didn't matter that I had done what I had to protect both her and myself. Noble intentions meant nothing. It was the results that counted. And the results of my actions had been telling a bald-faced lie to one of the only people I could come close to calling a friend. And I wasn't sure that, even if I found the person or persons responsible, even if I worked out how to bring them down, even if I did Murphy's job for her, that what had happened between us could ever be smoothed over.

(Setting aside for the moment that Murphy obviously does her job because she wants to do her job and thus has no reason to be grateful that some rando sorcerer stole it from her...)

It's been a while since the last post, so let's recap the details that Butcher glosses over here: what is the lie that Dresden told Murphy, and how did that lie protect her?

According to Harry's own internal monologue, the information he's holding back is that "Linda Randall had called me earlier that evening. She had planned on coming to me, to talk to me. She was going to give me some information and someone had shut her up before she could".  He's implicitly admitted that he disobeyed Murphy to talk to Linda, so that's not part of it.  And Linda was literally murdered while on the phone with 911 announcing that she knew who the murderer was, so Murphy already knows that too.  The question I'm left asking is why Linda would make a call to Harry, take a bath, and then call 911 to give them information that guarantees they'll want to grab her first.  That sounds to me like Linda changed her plans (or that one of the calls was faked).  Either way, the fact that she was killed before she could talk to Harry seems like it could be incidental to the fact that she was killed while talking to the cops.  The only information Harry is "keeping" from Murphy is that he met with Linda, which he essentially acknowledged via fake premonition to Murphy anyway.  Everything else he mentions is obvious: Linda knew something and the killer silenced her.

So Dresden literally is not keeping information from Murphy, but he is leaving her believing that he's keeping information from her.  Which could, in its own way, be a tactical choice, offering himself up as a red herring in order to convince the killer that Murphy isn't a threat, exceeeeeeept that in the next paragraph Dresden also claimed that he's 'withholding' this information (which he isn't actually withholding) partly because he doesn't want Murphy to start thinking Dresden might be, say, Linda's jealous/spurned lover on a rampage.

But by talking about what they're talking about, instead of actually laying it out like this, Butcher allows himself to write Tragic Dresden In The Rain, forced to lie to his bestie to save her, hoping that the reader will forget that Dresden has literally created a problem out of nothing, which does not benefit anyone except the killer (who doesn't have to fear a combined wizard/cop team coming at him).  That's actually some decent misdirection performed on the author's part; whether it's for the audience's benefit depends on whether you want more man-angst or coherent narrative in your life.

Well done, Dresden.  You played yourself.

In an inadequate response from the universe, no sooner has Dresden called a cab** than he gets jumped by one of Marcone's lackeys.  From the specific tang of his "sweat and cologne" Dresden identifies this as the same guy who roughed him up the first time, even as he is pummeled into submission, and lies aching on the ground hoping that here in this well-lit parking lot "Surely, God, he didn't plan on killing me. Though at the moment, I was too tired and achy to care."  Instead, the attacker produces scissors and clips a lock of Dresden's hair, which is immediately cause for panic, because a wizard could use Dresden's hair to cast an unpreventable death spell.

I just don't get the way Dresden feels about magic.  Murder is bad, but magic murder is The Ultimate Worst.  Getting killed by a lackey in a parking lot is the type of thing that you can just be too tired to care about, but getting killed by a wizard is a harrowing nightmare scenario.

The lackey flees, but Dresden tackles his legs and begins a prolonged deadly struggle with the mighty man's fist, in which we are repeatedly told that Dresden is very weak but still slowly winning.  The fight gets interrupted by a couple of bystanding dudes, and the lackey flees immediately, still with most of the hair in his hand.  He gets into his car and peels away, leaving Dresden wheezing in the rain.

One of the traditional rules of magic is that the Evil arts will give you great power at the cost of surrendering your virtues.  This applies to the real world as well, which we see among, for example, CEOs who take huge income for themselves by depriving their workers.  Or, less criminally, to writing, where you can write yourself out of a corner by introducing a new aspect of the plot that makes an earlier portion of the story nonsensical.  That's what Butcher decides to do now.

(Well, after Dresden spends a couple of pages giving us a pep rally about how he's angry and not going to take this sitting down anymore and this shadow wizard might have power but Dresden has savvy et cetera et cetera dear lord.)

But then we get to the breakthrough, when Dresden is trying to imagine how, without Bob, he can reverse-track his own hairs to find where the lackey has taken them, when he suddenly realises that he got some of the lackey's skin and blood under his fingernails during their fight, and that is all he needs to perform his own tracking magic.  Because tracking magic is absolutely a thing that exists in Dresden's world, and all you need is a bit of someone's body in order to know exactly where they are.

INTERLUDE: PHRASES THAT DO NOT APPEAR IN THIS NOVEL

• "Mrs Sells, please bring your husband's comb, pillowcase, or an item of unwashed laundry when you visit my office, so that I can cast a single spell that will instantly solve your case."
• "Hey, Murphy, I have another list of a dozen missing persons that I was able to track down for you this week, so feel free to send me the next bag of objects borrowed from the families.  I'm glad I can help with these murder cases, but I prefer saving people who are still alive, and some months I really depend on that steady income as a special consultant."
• "Morgan, I know this looks bad, but we both know that the White Council has a permanent trace on me and would have been instantly alerted if I performed magic powerful enough to murder someone across town."

Anyway.

Dresden chalks out a circle on the sidewalk and performs a ten-second ritual that instantly imbues him with the power to sense the direction of the escaped lackey by smelling for that distinctive cologne.  Dresden's cab arrives and he tells the driver they'll be making two stops, first to his apartment (to arm himself) and then (he does not say aloud) to confront the city's biggest gangsters.

Chapter Seventeen: This Is What We Have Sacrificed For

The hideout is a club called the Varsity, owned by Marcone.  The cab driver calls Dresden "Loony" before driving away.  I am not at all clear why it's so absurd that Dresden would ask a cab to take him to a still-busy club late on a Saturday night.  (Dresden specifies 1:30am, meaning that it's been at least an hour and a half since the events of the last chapter, "just before midnight".  Hell of a long drive, I guess?)

Dresden confirms that he can see Marcone and crew at a table in the back before marching up to the door, magically ripping it off its hinges, and blasting the jukebox with melting force.  Dresden specifically mentions that he doesn't want to "injure a bunch of innocent diners" when he blasts the door off, thus the outward ripping, but he apparently thinks nothing of then walking inside and casually blowing up every lightbulb with a wave of his hand, showering everyone with "powdered glass".  Not dangerous at all, clearly.

At Dresden's request, Marcone calmly dismisses everyone in the club, but when Dresden then demands his hair back, Marcone is honestly baffled.  It quickly comes out that the lackey (actual name Lawrence; Dresden only calls him 'Gimpy') has actually been working for the evil ThreeEye-peddling wizard on the side.  Things then immediately devolve into a gunfight, which Dresden survives unscathed by activating his forcefield bracelet, and Lawrence dies to three shots from bodyguard Hendricks.

Dresden tells us he's immediately nauseous, as he had hoped to win the night through macho bravado and no deaths at all.  Entering the building with explosive violence was definitely the way to minimise escalation, Dresden, you useless, useless man.  He very nearly apologises to Marcone for thinking that the mob boss might have been behind those brutal murders, since he realises that Marcone would never do something so pointlessly unsubtle and cost-ineffective.  Pretty sure that intimidation tactics are absolutely part of the mob boss toolkit, but whatever.

Lawrence the dead lackey doesn't have Dresden's hair on him anymore, having apparently delivered it before he got to the club.  While his remaining lackeys start preparing for the club to have an accidental fire, Marcone says he knows nothing else about their common wizard-foe, but he'll let Dresden go in spite of this show of defiance, in exchange for being able to "let it be known" that if Dresden does take the villain down, he did so at Marcone's bidding.  Dresden leaves, back to zero leads.  So the sudden introduction of tracking magic is at least not vital to the plot, but that does mean that we've had this whole violent episode at the cost of coherent worldbuilding and it wasn't even necessary.  (Wasn't he planning to reverse-track his own hair?  What happened to that idea?)

I'll say this much for the last couple of chapters: by only featuring a bunch of white dudes, Butcher has coincidentally gone for pages without making his hero say anything particularly misogynistic, which makes for a much more palatable story.  Dresden might be a useless, terrible person, but his adventures alone, the action scenes and standoffs and mystery-unraveling, those are entertaining in a slapdash kind of way.  Wonder how much longer that'll last.

Next time: Weird plot contrivances continue to do Dresden's job for him.  For those of you who have felt bereft after my long absence, know and rejoice that I'll be aiming for a weekly posting schedule until further notice.

---

*I suppose I should make a consistent note that these books don't have chapter titles and I'm just making them up for funsies, lest new readers be confused that the titles are so much more entertaining and thoughtful than the text.

**How does he not have better backup methods for travel?  Why does Dresden not have an enchanted bike for those times when his car fails him?  Taxis are expensive and he risks burning them out by sheer proximity.  Surely a magic-accelerated bike and a bespelled raincoat aren't beyond the capacity of a guy who can tame storms and brew potions that turn a person to wind?

Ender's Shadow, chapter two, in which Bean is a singing muppet

These posts are actually proving a little trickier than I thought, if only because there are fewer things that agonise me in this book.  So this feels a little heavy on the recapping, relatively speaking.  We'll see if that improves in future.

(Content: violence against children, starvation. Fun content: Bean Bunny, I kid you not.)

Ender's Shadow: p. 25--39

Chapter Two: Kitchen

The featureless plane of dialogue this week is Carlotta speaking with Helga, manager of the local shelter kitchen, whom we also haven't met yet.  Helga bemoans the way the bullies prevent the smaller children from ever getting into the kitchen, or brutalising them later if they do manage to sneak in, but reports that this has suddenly changed.  It's a glimpse forward into the middle of the chapter:

"I mean, can civilisation suddenly evolve all over again, in the middle of a jungle of children?" 

"That's the only place it ever evolves."

That's deep, dude.

Bean spends the next few weeks being unobtrusive in the crew, because he has no more brilliant ideas despite being an ultra-genius and the only child capable of grasping how much better life could be in the slums.  He knows Achilles is still watching him, and suspects he plans some revenge for the way Bean originally told Poke to kill him, but he also figures he's powerless enough that there's nothing he can do about that if Achilles does decide to get his murder on.  Bean can even be pragmatically dismissive of his own life, which is something I haven't seen often in a protagonist.

Achilles keeps them up until last light practicing their bully-swarming tactics, advising them on how bullies are likely to fight back and react.  Poke continues to act as crew boss, which Bean thinks is a further indication of her stupidity, because she fails to recognise how powerless she is, unlike Bean does.  No consideration given to whether, maybe, Poke is also acting in the way she thinks will best protect her by keeping the matriarch position that she's held.  (Spoilers: when Poke dies, the kids do in fact grieve for her, indicating that she did still have their support and they may have been one of the factors keeping her alive until then, since no one wanted to risk provoking her crew and their bricks.)

The next morning, they deploy in soldierly fashion, with Poke's 2IC Sergeant taking the most dangerous role as bait.  They head to the kitchen lineup and Sarge slips into line just in front of a bully that Achilles points out, and Bean reverse-engineers the decision to determine that Achilles picked the strongest bully without any friends around, so they won't get into a brawl when they take him down.

The bully is shocked that Sarge would provoke him, gives him a shove (to the side), and Sarge intentionally sprawls into the next bully in line, then pulls the cunning "He pushed me into you" maneuver.  He bluffs well enough that the two bullies snap at each other ("Watch yourself, skinny boy"), and Achilles chooses that moment to leap in and start berating their target for pushing "my boy" into "my friend", and before the second bully can say he's not Achilles' friend, the crew hits their target's legs and pass loose cobblestones to Achilles, who bricks the downed bully.

The others in line backed away from the fight. This was a violation of protocol. When bullies fought each other, they took it into the alleys, and they didn't try for serious injury, they fought until supremacy was clear and it was over. This was a new thing, using cobblestones, breaking bones. It scared them, not because Achilles was so fearsome to look at, but because he had done the forbidden thing, and he had done it right out in the open.

Once again, we've got a character astonishing their enemies so badly that they're incapable of even speaking a word of protest against his magnificence, but this still bothers me less than Ender wowing Battle School, again because Achilles is supposed to be scary to us.  Evil wizard; yes good.

Achilles signals Poke to bring the crew into the line (but she's still totally not important or a leader, y'all) while he rants at the other bullies about how they can disrespect him all they want but if they harm his family "some truck's going to come down this street and known you down and break your bones", a"s he has declared just happened to the downed bully, "right here in front of my soup kitchen!"  The "my" is a challenge, Bean tells us, and as he continues to rant, the other bullies say nothing, keeping their eyes too much on the little kids who tripped the first kid.  We don't really get a sense of numbers here, although there are apparently bullies enough that they can eat all the food the kitchen offers.  And no one homeless over age 13 comes here either, because this must be as close a parallel to Battle School as possible.  I'm not sure how I feel about that; maybe if they specified that there were other shelters around but this one was just for children it'd fly smoother for me.

They at least don't win with a single ambush and rant; Achilles gets right up in the face of the most-belligerent-looking bully and then they floor the next-ranked-down bully.  Achilles doesn't brick this one, just threatens to and then sends him to the back of the line as a show of dominance.  Before anything else can happen, Helga opens the door and Achilles is there to thank her for feeding "my family".  They get in, they eat their soup as fast as possible, stash their bread, and prepare to book it before any of the bullies start thinking about retribution, but not before Achilles can talk about how terrible the 'truck accident' was, and the need for a guard and a light at the door to keep the kids safe.  Bean can see that Helga is waffling, so he turns on maximum Adorable Street Urchin to thank her for feeding them and keeping them safe.

Then they book it to avoid the bullies, and while Helga puts in new precautions (lights, a guard cop), the bullies do not in fact embrace Achilles' new world order, that day or in the weeks that follow.  Although Achilles can still bluster his way into the kitchen every day with the crew, they still have to hide afterwards.  Something else that the first Ender books could have done with more of: the brilliant character makes a prediction about things, pulls off an audacious feat, and doesn't actually get the result they claimed.

So Bean pulls another Adorable Street Urchin move in line one morning: he asks another bully, in front of Helga, why he doesn't bring his family to the shelter.  Helga is delighted by the idea that other bullies keep 'families', and agrees it's a new rule that 'families' eat first.  Achilles is displeased with Bean for taking this initiative, but buys the argument that they'll be safer if the other bullies are busy trying to win over their own kids, and Bean thinks the probability he'll get murdered some day drops a little.

Bean subtly persuades Helga.

So now we properly meet Carlotta the nun, who's come to find the great civiliser.  She's a Nun On The Edge; her order doesn't like that she works for the I.F., but she's threatened to try to revoke their tax/draft-exempt status if they stop her, and she fully expects to get kicked out when the war ends.  Carlotta gives Card the desperately-needed opportunity to gets lots of theological references in the books, opening with stuff about God putting strength in humble places, Jesus the son of a carpenter, et cetera.  She's never yet sent anyone to Battle School, but she's got some kids into school and her early successes are graduating from college, so that ain't bad for a vocation.

Without getting into Shadow of the Hegemon too much, the things about Carlotta are thusly: I actually really like her character.  She's a good person, she's got a sharp mind, and she is never, ever awed by Bean or anyone else.  She's a woman whose attractiveness will never be discussed at all, unlike the gratuitous hot nun of Speaker's first chapter.  But she is also Bean's 'mother' (not literally) and she will never in these books be important for any reason except as a satellite to Bean's story: she nurtures him, sends him off, investigates him, rescues him, guides him, and eventually (ongoing spoiler warning okay y'all) dies in the next book literally because the villain wants to hurt Bean.  She gets some great dialogue, but her treatment is 100% devaluation and marginalisation of women as accessories for men.

And because two (counting Petra) Strong Female Characters is the extent of the weight Card can bear, she is introduced in contrast to Helga, who runs the soup kitchen and is a babbler.  Helga talks like a one-scene witness in a police procedural who needs to establish the 'realism' of her character immediately with run-on sentences and bad diction and then get out of the way to make room for the protagonists.  She recaps events from her own perspective, how Achilles has brought order and compassion to the streets right in response to seeing bullies fight in the kitchen line, since she doesn't think he could possibly have been involved in Ulysses' savage bricking.

We also get this self-righteous gem, the first of the Shadow retcons:

"...little Bean, it was true, I didn't know how he had muscles enough to walk, to stand, his arms and legs were as thin as an ant--oh, isn't that awful? To compare him to the Buggers? Or I should say, the Formics, since they're saying now that Buggers is a bad word in English, even though I.F. Common is not English, even though it began that way, don't you think?"

Shazam, the aliens are henceforth evermore referred to as formics.  I wonder if Card would tell us that this, too, was not about 'bowing to the prudes' who noted that he named his evil alien horde with a homophobic slur, but to improve the clarity of the intent of his artwork by preventing misunderstandings among new readers who wouldn't grasp the subtlety of whoops I've stopped caring.

Carlotta comes to see the children line up, sees Achilles' injury, and knows Battle School won't take him unless it can be repaired.

Few adult men were good fathers. This boy of--what, eleven? twelve?--had already learned to be an extraordinarily good father. Protector, provider, king, god to his little ones.

Carlotta's standards could use some improvement.  I mean, 1) Achilles hasn't protected them from anyone for weeks, if ever; 2) we've heard about no shows of affection towards the kids, only worshipful rituals where they offer him shares of their bread each morning; 3) the kids are used to getting beaten and otherwise abused by adults, so their own standards for 'good fatherhood' are pretty fricking low.

 Achilles refuses to leave his family, ever, so Carlotta agrees to meet them in the alleys to teach them a bit.  Achilles agrees, noting that none of the kids can read, and she reflects that he probably can't either.

But, for some reason, [...] the smallest of them all, the one called Bean, caught her eye. She looked at him, into eyes with sparks in them like distant campfires in the darkest night, and she knew that he knew how to read. She knew, without knowing how, that it was not Achilles at all, that it was this little one that God had brought her here to find.

She shakes this notion off immediately, and I continue (as I have from the beginning) to find it all needlessly twee.  Nice phrasing, no idea how to picture that imagery, nothing added to the story from this incident.

Bean stays quiet during 'school', hiding his multilingualism and math skills, luxuriating in just listening to her, "in the sound of high language well spoken", because Bean is a street kid and therefore still absolutely buys into the hierarchy of appropriate grammar and punctuation that sets the academically-educated apart from slum dialects.

After a week, he screws up; she passes out a multiple choice 'Pre-Test' and he starts circling answers before she's begun guiding them through, thus giving away his reading and other skills.  Carlotta catches him, looks it over, and demands that he finish, though he tries to backpedal.

"You did the first fifteen in about a minute and a half," said Sister Carlotta. "Please don't expect me to believe that you're suddenly having a hard time with the next question."

Carlotta is my favourite.  (Though, really, she might consider why Bean is hiding his brilliance and not call him out where everyone can here him

After the lesson, Sarge confronts Bean about knowing how to read, about not teaching the rest of them, and rather than explain that he didn't want to get murdered for being a danger to Achilles, Bean takes off for a day.  He's vulnerable, as a known 'son' of Achilles, since most bullies are having a hard time keeping children loyal to them and so are still resentful of the new hierarchy.

Bean nevertheless sneaks around to watch other families and realises that Achilles doesn't make the common mistakes, ruling through fear and punishment instead of being their smiling god.  (Not an intentional WTNV reference.)

Poke had chosen right, after all. By dumb luck, or maybe she wasn't all that stupid.

DO YOU THINK, BEAN?  This is the only time he considers this; forevermore he will think of poor sweet stupid Poke who was kind instead of smart.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Because she had picked, not just the weakest bully, the easiest to beat, but also the smartest, the one who understood how to win and hold the loyalty of others. All Achilles had ever needed was the chance.

Poke has realised that Achilles still bears a grudge against her, and she loves him the way all the kids do, so Bean hopes that maybe the emotional rejection Achilles shows will be 'revenge enough'.  (Nope.)  But while he mulls this, Bean overhears some bullies talking about how Ulysses is out of the hospital and looking for revenge, and how they hope he kills Achilles outright and they can leave his kids to starve, so he heads back homeward to report on the danger and we out.

Next week: Poke gets fridged and everyone is still smarter than Bean thinks they are.