Last time, Morgan demanded they sic the “Chinese temple dog statues” on Harry to be really sure he wasn’t evil.

This time, let’s talk about what his ability to do so means in-universe.

The other Warden frowned, but that was all the protest he made.

Continuing what I was saying last time about Ebenezar the mighty and sueishness and such…

So, this establishes Harry’s being treated unfairly very neatly. The reaction shows us it shouldn’t be happening, and wouldn’t be happening if he were someone else, but that others won’t actually stop anyone who demands it of Harry.

The problem is…we know Morgan is not in power. He just talked about how he can’t do anything about Harry and everything else we’ve seen makes it look like Morgan is a flunky with no say in the matter – again, he evidently wasn’t even allowed to resume stalking Harry despite apparently believing Harry’s evil. This is usually supposed to be that the person in charge hates you and the underlings aren’t going to argue, and can sometimes work if everyone’s of equal status because in such a case that the others choose not to step in is still rather concerning, but a key element of the “you can tell this is bad because the others are disapproving” has to be that there’s no one higher up to appeal to. Otherwise, it’s just a guy being a dick, not someone abusing the power of an institution to ruin your life.

These dogs that Harry tells us are not at all dogs are called “Wardhounds” because wizards are bad at naming things. Not just in the obvious way that we were just told they’re not fucking dogs, but because “hound” isn’t just a synonym for “doggo”. A hound is a type of dog used in hunting. They’re clearly being used in some sort of guard/alarm capacity instead – their job isn’t to chase down rogue wizards, it’s as magic detectors. Now, a number of hound breeds have been repurposed for the job of sniffing out contraband because so many of them used smell as part of hunting, but existing breed abilities are clearly not a factor with made to order statues.

We’re then told that this is actually very bad for Harry, and it’s done quite nicely:

In spite of myself, I swallowed and took a half step back from them. “Give me a break, Morgan. I’m not enspelled and I’m not toting in a bomb. I’m not the suicidal type.”

See? We know Harry actually hasn’t done anything bad (by the WC’s standards at least) so his reaction establishes that this test has some inherent cost and/or risk. And given Morgan has the ability to demand this test, it can be used to harass Harry every subsequent time he comes here. This is very similar to the first book’s dynamic where Morgan isn’t there to actually stop Harry from doing something bad, he’s there because sooner or later something bad will happen that he can pin on Harry so the council has an excuse to kill him. (Would Morgan really be allowed to do this every time? We don’t know, but I don’t think Harry knows himself – and the most likely outcome of this is simply that Harry’s convinced that yeah, it’s not worth his time showing up unless he’s forced.)

Now, I wrote all this with the assumption Morgan’s acting in bad faith, and that’s probably what’s going on, but I should add that Harry’s very defense of himself actually does a good job of outlining why Morgan might believe otherwise.

Harry says he’s not the suicidal type. After drinking deadly poison to take himself hostage so his fairy godmother had to let him walk into the ambush waiting for him at a vampire stronghold. By comparison, going in with a suicide vest is actually rather measured. Harry’s made it clear that if the WC wants him dead, he’s dead, and it sure seems like that’s what they’ll be voting on today. At that point, it just comes down to if Harry’s spiteful enough to want to get revenge on the WC if they choose to kill him. And the only reason I can’t speak to the likelihood of Harry being enspelled is it’s completely unclear what that is – but if it involves getting compromised by other magical creatures, Harry’s had his head fucked with by at least two different fairies, a wizard ghost, and vampires, plus a dragon has his truename now.

they weren’t thinking beings—only devices programmed with a simple set of responses to predetermined stimuli. Though Wardhounds had saved lives often before, there had also been accidents—and I didn’t know if my run-in with Mab would leave a residual signature that might set the Wardhounds off.

This is a terrible writing choice.

Wizards don’t program. Even aside from the more obvious fact they’re not even able to get near computers, that entire mindset is incredibly modern and this is a governing body of ancient people. Even if you could argue that wizards, having access to whatever sort of magic lets you do this, stumbled across a parallel sort of programming independently that led them to a similar place, well, why would you? It doesn’t fit at all with how we’ve seen things work. All the magic creatures we’ve seen so far have had minds – hell, even a good chunk of the inanimate objects, given the whole business with the wolf belts – and that’s not just generally more interesting than pushing a button and getting a response, in the same way talking to a person for information makes for a better scene than getting the answer off a computer, it’s also so much more in line with how we think of magic and out of the utter clusterfuck that is magic lore in this series, the closest thing we have to consistency is that it works how people instinctively expect magic to work. If Harry could have a magic robot spell index, he wouldn’t need his rapist skull.

And for what, anyway? “Accidents” makes sense if these are actual animals, where the downside of using them for their sensing ability is sometimes they bite the wrong person. If this is about evaluating people, why do they have responses to what they sense instead of just reporting it to the wizards for them to make the actual decision? And, of course, as is expected for a secretly ninety year old man, everything about the actual writing is that these are animals with feelings:

one of them let out a growl that sounded soothingly akin to bedrock being ripped apart by a backhoe. I tensed and looked down at the dog standing to my right. Its lips had peeled back from gleaming, dark fangs, and its empty eyes were focused on my left hand—the one Mab had wounded by way of demonstration. I swallowed and held still and tried to think innocent thoughts.
“They don’t like something about you, Dresden,” Morgan said.

See? Why the fuck would you make robots that pretend to get annoyed by things, let alone ones that then pretend to be so enraged they occasionally maul someone you didn’t want mauled?

Other Warden Dude disagrees with Morgan and points out that the dogs can be set off by the very fact Harry’s hurt. Wizard blood can be pretty potent. Moody, too. Dog could be reacting to anger or fear, through the blood.” Again, who the fuck programs their robots like this? The reason actual drug-sniffing dogs will give false positives for things that excite dogs IS BECAUSE THEY ARE DOGS. No one intentionally put that in! Apparently wizard security can be bypassed by stabbing these guys and hoping the not-dogs tear them apart!

Morgan refuses to believe Harry’s bloody bandage still oozing Harry blood actually is an injury full of wizard blood, and you know what? Actually fair. If wizard blood makes their detection system bug out then putting something under a bandage is exactly what you’d do. Mind you, that makes their detection system really shitty given all of them are full of wizard blood.

What would’ve been a better point of tension is Morgan demanding to see the wound without dismissing the dogs, who were just established to be stimulus-response robots set off by wizard blood. Harry even says doing this will probably reopen the wound – but it’s just a personal complaint, and when he does, the dogs back down.

appeared to lose interest, pacing back over to sit down beside its mate, suddenly inanimate again.

Seriously, what sort of “program” is this? Is this just an even more intense version of how ghosts are clearly conscious but Harry insists they’re only imprints, where now he’s declaring creatures completely mindless?

We then get another pass at what Morgan’s issue with Harry is:

“You’re a disgrace, Dresden. Look at yourself. Because of you, good men and women have died. Today you will be called to answer for it.”

And certainly I repeatedly made the case that the events of last book show Harry is a horrible person. But how does Morgan know about any of that?

A recurring complaint in last book’s readthrough was that the plot made no sense, largely because Harry himself made no sense. No one with access to just the barebone summaries would understand just how many opportunities there were for Harry to have prevented the final outcome. Consider just Lydia – even Morgan, thinking what he no doubt imagines is the worst of Harry, would assume what went wrong there was that Harry tried and failed to help her, not that he did a great job of avoiding having anything to do with Lydia. Morgan might think Harry was negligent or stupid about Lydia, but he would never believe that Harry was justifying leaving her to be torn apart because the little tease probably deserved it and only grudgingly managed the effort of telling her to fuck off in the direction of a church in particular. Because I mean, that’s absurd. No one would do that.

And a lot of Bianca’s plan is actually a rather generic human behavior vs vampire behavior setup. You know, “I’m a vampire and I don’t care about human life, mwhahaha, I have set up a situation where to save a human life you must break an arbitrary rule!!!” It’s the kind of situation where Harry’s faction, being at least nominally human, are going to be incredibly sympathetic to Harry’s side of things. Especially because, let’s be real here, Bianca did this utter overkill over Harry’s incidental involvement her accidentally killing someone. Everyone knows that if Harry did sit quietly and let her murder someone this time, she’d just do it again and again and again. (And even if they don’t directly feel bad about the muggles dying in the crossfire, they can empathize with Harry, a fellow real person, and how it’s wrong to expect him to put up with Bianca breaking all his stuff indefinitely.)

Now, we do have the bit where Bianca explicitly says “hey, there will be zero repercussions and nobody more has to die if you just let me keep the vampire I’ve already made” but does anyone know that? Good odds Harry didn’t include it in his report and good odds nobody would believe the vampires about it because it was so ludicrous. Morgan might hate Harry, but that doesn’t mean he’d believe vampires are crazy, stupid, and incredibly tolerant of getting their houses wrecked and baby vampires murdered – and if Bianca wasn’t prone to disproportionate retribution and never ever ever being willing to stop, she wouldn’t have kicked off this plan in the first place. No one would believe Bianca said it, let alone think Harry should’ve treated it as an actual offer.

So yeah, at most it would look like Harry was short-sighted, and given Bianca was clearly pushing for this and appears to have done so with the backing of at least two of the three vampire courts, there’s a good case to be made that the vampires were going to do this regardless. Now a great wizard might’ve been able to avert such a catastrophe – the sort of hero worthy of having books written about him, say – but there’s no way Morgan would think so highly of Harry.

Ironically, I think Bianca’s plan actually works better if you remove her motivation. If this wasn’t supposedly a plot to designed to trick/force Harry into getting involved, it’s way less sympathetic of Harry to throw himself into it. (And Harry’s a fucking idiot with a chip on his shoulder, you don’t need to manipulate anything. There was no master plan to get him to try to throw down with a random dragon and guess what he did!) Let’s say Bianca’s motivation was just Get Power Because Vampire. The events of the party are about that, where her gifting the sword to the Black Court rep for destruction is cementing an alliance, and her going after Susan is 50% because hey, free food and 50% that she thinks she can use it as leverage to control Harry just because he’s a powerhouse who’s estranged from the WC proper. (And certainly we’ve seen nothing from him suggesting he’d have a moral objection to working for someone other than them.) Ideally, I think losing the sword would then would make most sense as well – Michael claimed that, as a paladin, he was going to act with integrity rather than keeping his head down. Sure, that didn’t actually happen at all, but it could’ve and should’ve. So let’s say that what really happened is Harry stupidly drags a paladin to a vampire party and stupidly doesn’t keep his girlfriend out. Michael gets tricked into doing something that forfeits the sword, Susan gets straight up grabbed, Harry nukes the place, vampires go on retaliatory murder spree, wizards blame Harry for bringing people he cares about to a vampire party in the first place. (What would be best would be the invite being an empty formality and he shouldn’t have even been there himself – given Harry’s talk of vampires and wizards having nothing to do with each other in the first book, it may be the official rules that you do not answer the invites of enemy factions because fucking obviously you shouldn’t Harry, what the fuck.)

But the thing is, like I said at the start, Harry really did screw the vampiric pooch on this. I’m not going to feel bad for Harry over how Morgan is presumably unfairly blaming him for lack of detail when the facts of the matter are that it’s incredibly fair to blame Harry and those deaths absolutely are on him.

Anyway we’re finally at the council so we’ll be finding out what that official story is in a minute. But first, we learn that part of why wearing robes is important is that there’s a color hierarchy…

black-robed wizards, variously sporting stoles of blue, gold, and scarlet. Apprentices in their muddybrown robes lurked at the fringes of the crowd, standing along the walls or crouching on the floor beside their mentors’ chairs.

(I think the bit about apprentices sitting on the floor very much validates my speculation that they’re probably still beating kids.)

and also there’s, uh, color.

The variety of humanity represented in the theater was startling. Canted Oriental eyes, dark, rich skins of Africa, pale Europeans, men and women, ancient and young, long and short hair, beards long enough to tuck into belts, beards wispy enough to be stirred by a passing breeze.

So. That sure is a thing.

Putting aside all the other things, this reminds me of Harry’s book one slur about witches and how they appeared to be something distinct from wizards. One suspects the “diversity” has women as one of the smaller minorities, explaining why the description implies most people have some form of beard. (And the wholly unintended but subtle implication that the group is also majority straight hair given other hair types produce things that aren’t on the belt-tucked to wisp spectrum.)

I wonder what happens to the women. Do they have a higher rate of attrition from Wardens abusing their power? Do they not bother showing up as they realize their voices aren’t heard? Are they just not let in in the first place? I mean, we know Kim failed to do the binding circle and died, but we also know that’s because Harry refused to tell her how – there’s no evidence that she actually didn’t have the power to pull it off, and the fact Harry was so sure she was going to summon something especially nasty once she got it down suggests he was in fact pretty sure she could manage all three layers of circles, he just didn’t trust her to keep it contained in a more general sense.

And does this play out differently on racial axises, or much the same? The thing about women is that men generally want them around in some capacity, but also are much more invested in precisely what that capacity might be. It could be there’s a glass ceiling effect playing out based on race while women can rise pretty high in the ranks before someone gets weird about them and orders them killed for using their sultry lips to willbind their fellow wizards, or it could be everyone agrees that women are too emotional to be trusted with much power but too valuable for their sexy sex to be killed left and right while black dudes are the ones who can get to pretty high positions before someone suddenly goes, “Hey wait, black dude, black magic, that’s probably why he’s such a powerful wizard…” and they’re dead.

In either case I think you’d see the disadvantaged wizards forming their own groups. Racially, you’d likely get people segregating themselves- between how isolated from ordinary mortals they are, and how long they live, if people in Europe are being a pile of dicks why not move to India with your fellows instead? (…why the seat isn’t someplace like India in the first place would still be a plothole, but…) If women do the same – and we don’t see any sign of inter-wizard marriages, which suggests they’re relatively free agents – you’d either have various secondary councils coexisting that someone like Harry might not be aware of, or else they intentionally picked certain countries to congregate in but there’s no way of knowing where.

Personally, I think both the most likely and the most interesting answer is that the WC’s official stance is that they’re international, and they do not respect anyone else’s territory, but in practice there are numerous countries where they functionally have no presence. And Harry just doesn’t know this because he doesn’t pay attention and the WC sure doesn’t have reason tell their new recruits about their limitations.

The theater buzzed in dozens of languages

Would it, though?

While there’s presumably multiple speakers of dozens of different languages, talking takes at least two, so this would require people to be grouping up by language first. Possibly they do, if people in the WC are really badly factionalized and don’t want to be here, so everyone immediately looks around for whoever speaks their native language and hurries over to complain about how awful everyone else is, but Harry’s claimed there are political factions as well since he was speculating on vote-selling, which suggests people are grouping up across geographical boundaries.

It’s very likely people aren’t all talking in Latin, but they’re probably going still going to have their own established shared languages. So a good chunk should be conversing in Latin because it’s the language everyone’s familiar with, then most of the others are going to be using some other common language that both are familiar with – English and Mandarin, for example, and I’d think Spanish too. Maybe French because it may not be big now but there should be a lot of wizards who learned it earlier, but at the same time I suspect there’s a lot of overlap between people who’d learn French and people who’d just skip to chatting in Latin.

I guess if we interpret “dozens” as “only twenty-four”, and assume that Harry’s got a good enough ear he’s classifying mutually intelligible related languages separately, and that a lot of wizards are semi-fluent in other languages from being around so long and have practice holding a conversation in two separate languages, and assume that wizards are cranky and xenophobic so they’re largely grouping up with people they recognize, and also that a bunch of them go out of their way to speak in less used languages when possible to reduce eavesdropping, and that there’s an awful lot of wizards all crammed into this single conference hall that does not have any magical extra space properties…

But also, if nobody actually wants to use Latin to talk it’s stupid to introduce it as the official language. There should just be a translator spell.

The scents of spices and perfumes and chemicals all blended together into something pervasive, always changing, and the auras of so many practitioners of the Art seemed to be feeling just as social, reaching out around the room to touch upon other auras, to echo or strike dissonance with their energies, tangible enough to feel without even trying. It was like walking through drifting cobwebs that were constantly brushing against my cheeks and eyelashes—not dangerous but disconcerting, each one wildly unique, utterly different from the next.

OH MY GOD THEY’RE BEING SOCIAL, SAYS LOCAL SHUT IN.

I may need to reassess my assumptions of the wizard norm being hermits in towers.

You know, given Harry’s first fridged girlfriend was also a fellow apprentice, maybe it’s Ebenezar that’s the outlier. Like, most wizards have other people around and when faced with what to do with Harry, all the other wizards were like “I refuse to let my five other apprentices anywhere near this possible psychopath” so they were like, right, who’s living in isolation and can’t use the excuse of not wanting Harry to be a bad influence on their other wards?

Of course, this has its own issues of how you can have wizards living hundreds of years and apprenticing being apparently a decade or less, but it could be most wizards don’t have the skills to handle apprentices at all, or have better things to do. After all, it sounds like a lot of people were involved in poor Simon’s anti-vampire compound. Also, I think we can still safely assume Harry’s apprenticeship was a lot shorter than it should’ve been, or else that a full apprenticeship is normally supposed to transition into further education.

Anyway, Harry also complains nobody looks as shitty as he does, which I find kind of hard to believe given there’s an awful lot of people here and, even if this is a social event, the whole vampire thing is actually pretty big news and should have a whole lot of normally hermit wizards showing up.

I garnered offended looks from nearly everyone I walked past—mostly white-haired old wizard folk.

Okay now I have no idea at all how this works.

So, “nearly everyone” is white-haired old wizard folk. So, do wizards age normally up to a point and then spend their hundreds of extra years stuck in old age?

Hm. What if wizards stop aging on the final day they’re supposed to live? Some people are relatively spry and then keel over of a heart attack, some people go through a long slow decline. And if wizards know this, it could explain why Harry doesn’t know what vegetables are. Wizards are actually aiming for the “good-looking corpse” result because it’s what they’ll be spending most of their lives as.

The only issue is how “supposed to live” works – is not Harry living off steak and Coke but a way of killing himself that takes longer? Maybe it’s any death – you always have to kill wizards twice, it’s just when you’re stabbing them to death you don’t really notice they survived one stab longer than they otherwise would’ve. Or, given it’s magic and as I said earlier, the closest we have to a consistent magic system is this works the way we intuitively feel it should, no matter how little sense it overall makes, and you just have to have a couple steps between you and your death. So you can’t just overdose on heroin, but you can decide that fifty is a great time to start doing heroin.

Alternatively, wizards have an absolutely atrocious mortality rate. Normal humans are very much K-selection types, with few offspring you’re heavily invested in. Wizards must instead be r-selecting, with most of the apprentices dying, most of the adults dying as well, and only once you’re, say, over a hundred, do you have much chance of surviving to the next year. (This would suggest the council’s issue with Harry really does just boil down to “why the fuck isn’t he dead yet, this is creepy”.)

Of course, that doesn’t fit at all with the fact everyone should be incredibly traumatized from that, but that can be explained with the whole using emotions to power spells, everyone’s metabolizing it. The fact there’s only a few apprentices here is because most wizards don’t get attached enough to bother bringing them anywhere.

At the center podium stood the Merlin of the White Council, a tall man, broad of shoulder and blue of eye, with hair falling past his shoulders in shining, pale waves and a flowing silver beard.

Alright, so, “the Merlin” (god that’s stupid) is presumably European. I mean, that was already pretty likely, but given blue eyes are rare even in Europe and they’re way rarer outside…

Latin phrases gliding as smoothly from his mouth as from any Roman senator’s.

I’m torn.

On the one hand, this seems like a dumb comparison. If he’s trying to say that the guy sounds like a native speaker, it’s really unlikely the WC is using Roman Latin, because that’s thousands of years back. If they picked Latin because it was in use as a common tongue throughout Europe, they’re probably using the more modern pronunciations. And it’s even more unlikely that the style of speaking the present day WC favors would match up with Roman senators.

On the other hand, I can completely believe that for Harry, the only thing to come to mind when he thinks “Latin” is “Rome”.

The Merlin spoke, and though I knew he spoke perfectly intelligible English, he addressed me in Latin

Yes yes, how dare he make sure everyone involved can understand what he’s saying, surely this is a personalized act of dickery.

He let silence fall afterward and it was left to me to answer him. Also in Latin. Big fat jerk.

God damn it Harry you’ll complain about literally anything, won’t you?

Harry attempts to reply and also apologize for wearing a bathrobe. He does badly. This is pointed out to him. He continues and does worse. This is pointed out to him.

“Goddamned correspondence course. Maybe you should translate for me,” I said.
Ebenezar’s eyes sparkled, but he nodded with a grave expression. “Happy to.”

Why did Harry learn by a correspondence course, though?!

It really does seem like Ebenezar must be extremely happy to, given he appears to have engineered the situation so Harry would never have a choice otherwise.

Hm. I wonder if it’s less about actually translating and more about ensuring that Harry would crash and burn unless another wizard chose to support him. If Ebenezar didn’t want Harry to survive this, he just had to not show up. He knows he didn’t teach Harry the language needed to defend himself before the council.

It might not be entirely malicious but more about keeping his thumb on the scale. If Ebenezar doesn’t think much of the council’s decisions, that could go in both directions – maybe he also thought it a risk that they might let Harry off when he shouldn’t be. And in fairness…well, what are the odds that Harry would be on trial before he was even old enough to know decent Latin, but not completely deserve to be put down like a mad dog?

And it occurs to me that while we’ve heard a lot about how unfair and trigger-happy the WC is, well, that’s been almost all Harry’s viewpoint with a dash of Morgan’s – and Morgan is now retroactively unreliable given he was apparently shocked by the WC’s last Harry decision (also the other Warden we saw didn’t seem to have anything against Harry – maybe Morgan waving his naked sword in Harry’s face all day was not actually supposed to be part of his job). Maybe the WC is a lot better at sounding very stern when it’s time to say this is your last chance to stop fucking up than they are at actually pulling the trigger.

I slipped into my seat while Ebenezar stood up and made an apology for me, his Latin terse and precise, his voice carrying easily throughout the hall. I saw the gathered wizards’ expressions grow more or less mollified as he spoke.

Now, I still think it’s a bit unreasonable everyone is this uptight about proper protocol but, especially now that we know a whole lot of wizards are already dead, it probably does look very bad for Harry to seem like such a pile of incompetent failure.

Harry being a bumbling idiot is a point against him being a secret black magic user who needs to be put down before he kills again, but Harry being a bumbling idiot is a point for him having unnecessarily bumbled them into a vampire war they are apparently completely unprepared for and needing to be put down before he also trips and falls into aggroing another faction too.

The wizards are informed that Pietrovich died. A gasp and a low murmur ran through the theater.

Ooh, and here we learn the WC is not a particularly responsive organization. It takes two days for the majority of them to learn a major part of their government is dead, when he was assassinated by the group they’re currently at war with. And this wasn’t just Pietrovich, this was a massacre of his entire faction.

The very fact people showed up means they’re entirely capable of communicating information when they need to. So either it didn’t occur to them that this should’ve been mentioned, or they deliberately chose to keep it under wraps as much as possible and most wizards have little/no ways around that.

Then he continues, “Past conflicts with the Red Court have not moved with this kind of alacrity, and this may indicate a shift in their usual strategy.

Which…doesn’t give much to go on. The problem is that “conflicts” doesn’t have to mean “declarations of war”. If the vampires are usually slow-moving even during an all-out wizard vs vampire war, then yeah, that’s weird. If he’s including spats where the vampires are just saber-rattling about how they might maybe do a thing, unless… then this just tells you that this isn’t one of those situations, and that should’ve been already established by the fact it kicked off with a vampire repeatedly trying to kill a wizard.

That said, Bianca did plan out her revenge very elaborately. I wonder, what if they’re not aware of the fact Bianca hated him? Everything we saw last book suggested that she was working with the Red and possibly other vampire courts, who were going to use her revenge as an excuse to bait the wizards at large into a conflict, but nothing that’s been said this book sounds like the other wizards know what actually went down, and obviously the vampires have no reason to clarify that this is absolutely a political action they’ve been plotting for several years.

But if that’s normal for vampires, you’d think the wizards would consider that. And that suggests past conflicts with the vampires went differently. Book 1 established Bianca was terrified of Harry and generally suggested wizards as a group were able to throw their weight around enough that the vampires didn’t want to mess with them. Perhaps it isn’t that the Red Court doesn’t move with “alacrity” so much as in previous conflicts they didn’t want to move at all, and so went as slowly and carefully as they could without outright losing face and looking like they wouldn’t defend themselves at all.

We know magical creatures are getting more active. It hasn’t been explicitly stated that already active magical creatures are getting powerups as well, but last book also got that Nevernever critters have more power if the border between there and our world is already weakened.

And this would fit perfectly with the fact the vampires just slaughtered a compound full of people who should’ve known how to kill them, as if those expert wizards were drastically underestimating vampire capabilities.

In conclusion, the wizards are fucked.