Recorded Neutral Territory - A Dresden Files Podcast

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:08)
Welcome one, welcome all, welcome to recorded neutral territory where the spoilers go all the way through battleground. I'm Adam Ruzzo and with me as always is Bianca's party planner, it's Brian O'Reilly. Welcome, Brian.

Brian (00:21)
Okay, so on the website where it said how you want the invitations, you put potentially lethal, so I think we're going with surprising. No, no, that was literal. Okay, well, I'll talk to a guy then and we'll make that happen for you.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:40)
Kyle is at your disposal.

Brian (00:42)
Hi, Kyle.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (00:44)
All right, so welcome everybody. We're looking at chapter seven and eight of Grave Peril today. That is the chapter where Harry and Michael get bailed out of jail and then Harry has to deal with Kyle and Kelly showing up at his house invitation unknown lethality. We're gonna be discussing that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:04)
Just before we get started, one quick note. We're going to be doing a slightly longer episode than what we normally like to do here because we will not have an episode next week, the 28th, due to Thanksgiving, but we will be back on the 5th for the next couple of chapters. So save this one, cut it in half, and listen to the next half next week.

Brian (01:24)
It'll be good in the car ride.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:25)
Exactly.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (01:26)
let's jump right in So Brian, it starts in jail.

And Michael mentions that charity is not going to be happy. Harry turns back Michael's normal, like, aphorisms and things by saying, all we can do is face what comes and have faith. And Michael's response to this is that he will say a prayer to St. Jude. He says this wryly, according to the text.

I didn't realize how big of a joke this was the first time I read it. I read it as, he's saying a prayer before he has to go have this fight with his wife because it's gonna be so hard. But knowing who St. Jude is, I think, doubles the joke.

Brian (02:06)
Yeah, so Saint Jude is the patron saint of lost causes And I'll tell you, before you asked that, I was like, it just went right over my head. I didn't even pay attention to the fact that it was specifically Saint Jude. But it's you said, it's a good joke.

that he says a prayer. It's a way better joke that he says a prayer to St. Jude. Just, very meta in the humor. Gotta love that from Jude.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (02:36)
Okay, but one of the other things that I noticed about this chapter, Brian, is when it starts, Michael is surprised.

when they wind up in jail, right? At the end of the previous chapter, the end of chapter six, they pop back into Cook County Hospital after having fought Agatha and the police have shown up because of course Harry was driving like crazy to get to the hospital and the police were chasing him on the way there. And Michael says, just let me do the talking. And then when the next chapter starts, he says, I can't believe we're in jail.

That to me suggests that he legitimately thought he would be able to talk his way out of this because he probably has been able to do that many times before.

Brian (03:16)
Right, it's absurd when you look at it. mean, they essentially lead the police on a chase to the hospital where they then go run like madmen into NICU. So you can't even imagine the disorientation that the police

walked into when they got there, and then these guys just show up and, you must have caused it. Like, of course they're going to jail. They randomly ran around in a hospital with the cops chasing them a la Blues Brothers the whole way.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (03:47)
Yeah, I would suggest though that if this was a Michael dealing with the Denarians thing, there would have been some way for the cops to understand or it would have been a cop that Michael helped save their kid or something ridiculous. Like the coincidence would have been there to make it so that he could get out of this with less problems. But because, again, this is my assertion, my intuition for how we're reading this here, because Michael is off mission,

He doesn't get the perks, the benefits of that role that we've seen in other parts of this.

Brian (04:21)
So I think it's a sliding scale because I'd argue that he does in a really big way. As far as we know, they're not prosecuted for this.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (04:29)
that could be fair enough. And Harry is worried about losing his driver's license, which obviously doesn't happen. Maybe he has to go to like driver's ed school or whatever, but he has seen driving the Blue Beetle in future books. So obviously he doesn't lose his license. So you're right. There might be some extra element going on in the back.

Brian (04:48)
Yeah, and I think with Michael, when he's doing literally the job of the Knights of the Cross, basically reality is going to bend such that he is able to do that job with no negative consequences outside of the ones that can come from the direct confrontation with the Denarians themselves. When he's...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (05:08)
Right, now outside

of his choices around that confrontation.

Brian (05:11)
Precisely.

Whereas when he's doing just good things, it's not like, you know, the white god no longer cares. He does. But it's not going to be, you know, reality is literally warping itself so that you're not inconvenienced.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (05:29)
Right, I think Uriel and the White God have a lot more power when they're countering the Denarians than in situations where you have a generic evil that doesn't directly oppose their mission like the Denarians do.

Brian (05:44)
Right, and not necessarily power, right, but freedom to act.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (05:49)
Yes, exactly, sorry. That's a much better way to put it. Freedom to act, because they obviously, I mean, you really has the power to unmake galaxies. So, yeah. Now, an officer arrives a couple hours later after they have this little conversation where he's worried about dealing with Charity, and announces that they have made bail. First, Charity arrives and chastises Michael and then Harry, but especially Harry. Charity's remark about Michael

Brian (05:56)
Yes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (06:16)
only getting hurt when he's fighting evil with Harry seems to add extra evidence to this supposition that we've made about Michael going off mission. He gets less of the perks that we were just discussing, but that is something that we sort of, I think, mentioned in the past, but here is where it's explicit in the text that Charity has noticed this pattern.

Brian (06:35)
Yes, and I think it's also a reflection of the fact that Harry is, at this point, not exactly the guy you want to have coordinating your supernatural combat operations. So I think it's a combination of Michael is not literally receiving divine protection to the same extent.

And also, Harry is a reckless 26-year-old guy.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (07:00)
All right. After she comes in, and we're gonna talk more about Charity in just a minute at the end of the chapter, but after she comes in and they have that confrontation between her and Harry, and then she and Michael walk out, Susan walks in. And Harry has a little bit of banter with Susan here, and I'm specifically thinking about the interaction here where she asks, you what's the deal with Michael? And Harry says, I'll tell you, but it has to be off the record, which...

shows that he trusts her to keep it off the record, right? Because he specifically says, off the record, publicity could hurt him, he's got kids, unquote. So she says, okay, and she asks, is he some sort of eternal soldier, maybe a sleeping Arthurian knight woken in this desperate age to battle the forces of evil? And that's the sort of fun, smart-ass thing that Harry would say. And then Harry has his own smart-ass response. As far as I know, he's a carpenter, and she says, ⁓

A carpenter who fights ghosts, what? He's got a magic nail gun or something. Again, she's giving back Harry's smartassery with more smartassery. They're so good together. Like we see, obviously, it's referred to the fact they work well together. They're very passionate together romantically. But man, I do like their banter and I just never quite appreciated it as much as in this scene.

Brian (08:20)
Well, you know, I really get the sense that Susan is the kind of person who just has a way with people. It's why she's a reporter in the first place. It's why she's able to talk the cops out of the sticky situation they get into in Stormfront. She knows Harry responds to wise assery. If

Something happened with Harry and you've got to get him to talk and open up and, you know, describe what's going on. Give him shit about That's how he's going to want to engage with And their chemistry in the scene is great, not just for the banter, but I love the line. You bolded it in the text. As I stood there brooding, I sensed her presence before I smelled her perfume. Let's put the smelled her perfume thing.

aside for a moment. Dresden gives a description of Susan in this scene that isn't like particularly extra, but definitely focuses on the experience of him seeing her. But the sensing her presence thing, that gives you this idea that their relationship has advanced to this point where they

feel differently when the other one's not around. And I think that this combination of easy banter and this sort of sense we're getting from Harry that, he knows when she's there, signals something about where they are and why it hits him so hard when we get to the end of this book.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:06)
Yeah, you have to set that up because the previous books did not really set up their relationship to this level. But again, it's been about a year since the end of Fool Moon, So we're talking about an extra year of them dating and having a relationship. It makes sense that they could have gotten to this point, and you have to establish that in the text. And I think Jim does actually wind up doing a good job of it here, if you read it properly.

Brian (10:31)
Yes, as we're going get to later, he has to do that because Harry's kind of shitty boyfriend. So hold that thought, we're going to talk about that in a sec.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:38)
Yeah, yeah.

we actually see, yeah, we're going to see that in a minute when he still can't tell her that he loves her.

Brian (10:46)
So Harry explains to Susan that Michael has a Holy Avenger plus three sword, you know? And they have a, the cross, the crucifixion dialogue about it. But that got us thinking about the names of the swords of the cross. So we just wanna kind of break that down for you guys here. So.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (10:59)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (11:08)
As I'm sure most of you have already realized, it's sort of ⁓ Latin derivative, amoracius, the sword of love, that's amor, right? Amor is the word for love. Fidelacius, the sword of faith. Fidelity is faith. Fidelius is a Latin word. And esper, the spur stem, is from the Latin word for hope. So, esporacius is the sword of hope.

But that got us thinking about the Akius thing. So Adam, you did some Googling. What did we get for Akius?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (11:44)
So we couldn't find any obvious, like, Akius, A-C-C-I-U-S, the A-C-C-H-I-U-S as Jim spells it in the books. Those aren't really Latin or Greek or any kind of suffixes that we find. However, there is one that is spelled,

differently that is like a Latin suffix and it's A-C-E-O-U-S or maybe A-C-I-O-U-S and that's sort of a Latin or Latinized suffix meaning resembling or having the nature of or forming or belonging to and so it's very possible that Jim was looking for something that he to inspire him and then you know because the

The most important thing is that the name sounds really cool when you read it, right? And so he wanted to change the spelling to make sure that you read it correctly, that it looked like it had the weight that he wanted it to have. So I think that may be where he got the name and the resulting sort of translation would be, this sword is like the nature of love or sword belongs to faith or something to that effect.

Brian (12:53)
Right, I mean, I don't know if you ever had to name your Valyrian steel sword in the Crusader King's Game of Thrones mod, ⁓ but those are actually great names for swords, right?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:00)
Yeah.

Brian (13:07)
Audacity, you know, those are like, that's a cool name. got a cool word that means a thing, and it's sort of the epitome of that. You know, if we call the sword Tenacity, the idea is that it's just never gonna stop fighting.

So if you were Latinizing that, well the English word tenacious is a Latin derivative using the suffix we were talking about. But amoracious, Esporacious,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:36)
Yeah.

Nah.

Brian (13:41)
Fidelacius, that's pretty good. So Jim probably took these good sword words and made them something that sounds archaic enough that it could have been around since the founding of the White Council or what.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (13:43)
Yeah!

So after they finish talking about this situation, it's apparent that Susan is a little bit disappointed by the result of this because they had made a date. They were gonna have a date night tonight. That happened in chapter two, I think, when he's on the phone with her.

instead she has to come and bail him out of jail and by the way he's so beat up all he wants to do is go home and fall into bed. He doesn't even have the time or energy to explain to her what happened and she kind of seems very disappointed and she's like yeah I know it was very important you know she's heard the stories before she knows he's literally saving people's lives here but she can't help but feel

He's like, what, what, what's the problem? What, what, what are you trying to say? And she tries to say, no, it's, it's selfish. It's nothing. Don't worry about it. And he finally drags it out of her and she sighs and says, quote, I just wish that I could be that important to you too, unquote. boy, that must hit Harry right in the feels because here's the thing, as readers, we're looking at that and going, okay, that's a little unfair.

because how are you comparing date night with my girlfriend to saving the lives of a dozen children? But of course, that's why she says it's selfish. She's accepting the fact that, hey, this is an irrational feeling. It does not make sense and it's not fair of me to say this to you, but I do still feel it, right?

Brian (15:33)
Yeah, I mean, look, I think that Susan has a legitimate gripe here, but it's not the one she's saying, because the actual gripe that she has is one that she definitely really can't say. And why is she worried that she's as important to Harry? Well, because

As happens in this chapter, the damn moron has been dating her for over a year and can't say those three little words.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (16:06)
Yeah, he almost says it here. quote, I just don't want you to feel like, I don't want you to think that I don't. What I mean to say is that I, and he can't finish the sentence, and I think she gets what he's trying to say, but the fact that he doesn't say it is still a problem. It still stings. It's like,

It's like listening to a piece of music that has a dissonance that never resolves. Like you're waiting for that resolution and he never gives it.

Brian (16:40)
I mean, look, you can tell someone I'm not ready to say I love you because that's something that for me is really hard to say with everything I've been through in my life. And, you know, once I say that, that for me is like a level of commitment that means, you know, we're on the fast track to me buying a ring and, you know, but Harry doesn't say any of that stuff right? He just never comments on his inability to express his feelings.

So when his actions don't show her that she's important, and his words don't show her that she's important, well, now she wonders, am I actually that important to you? And she can tell that she is because she can see the attention he pays to her, not just in like a physical sense, but in the sense of monitoring her, of watching her. That's just not enough.

not a romantic partner if you can't even express in the simplest terms your romantic feelings.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (17:46)
Now, another parallel I want to draw here,

So Susan says, know it's important, but I have this selfish thing about I wanna be important to you too. Now Harry, when Charity comes into him and starts chastising him and saying, every time you come nosing around, you get Michael into some sort of trouble, and now jail, what will the children think? Harry replies, look Charity, it was really impor- and she-

cuts him off and says, Carpenter, it's always really important, Mr. Dresden. Well, my husband is engaged in many important activities without what I dubiously term your help. It's only when you're around that he seems to come back to me covered in blood. Unquote. So he's not just protesting to Susan, hey, I'm sorry about the date, but it was really important. He's saying the same thing to charity. The difference here, I think, is

Charity's not chastising him for breaking some kind of confidence or trust with her the way that Susan is in a sense. In this moment, Charity is furious with him, but it's a furiousness that comes out of fear. She's terrified that someday her husband isn't gonna come home to her children. And she's seen a pattern that all these other times he goes out into danger and he's always come home fine, without a scratch in many cases.

And so that has allowed her to have faith that he will always come home. And now here's Harry coming in and screwing up the pattern, and her husband's always coming home with injuries when Harry's involved. And that really shakes her faith that he will come home every day. And that is what's causing her to be so angry in this scene.

Like for example, right after the part I just read, tries to explain himself again and quote, she grabbed the front of my dragged my face down to hers. She was surprisingly strong and she could glare right at me without looking me square in the eyes. I'll have you know that if you ever,

Get my Michael into trouble so deep that he can't come home to his family, I will make you sorry for it. Tears that had nothing to do with weakness made her eyes bright for a moment and she shook with emotion. I have to admit, at that particular moment, her threat scared me. Waddling pregnancy and all." Brian, do you feel that this anger at Dresden is justified in this scene?

Brian (20:17)
No. Which is why I'm glad that in my opinion, Jim brilliantly justifies it several books down the line. And the reason why I find Charity's own explanation to be kind of hollow here okay, you're mad at Dresden because, and I already suggested that Dresden is maybe not a good team leader for these activities, right?

But you're mad at Dresden because when your husband works with him, he gets hurt. Okay, so that suggests that whatever, you know, Dresden needed him on, he really needed him. Because this is the kind of thing that even a knight might have trouble handling. And if you really believe in what your husband does, and your husband's telling you...

Yeah, I think I'm supposed to help this guy. I mean, you shouldn't be this mad at him. You shouldn't be, we haven't spoken in five years, this is the first conversation we're having in five years where I'm screaming at you, mad at Because it seems like Charity has not liked Dresden from day one and has never considered giving him a chance, which is like really like...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (21:28)
Mmm.

Brian (21:35)
You know, I know a lot of people who profess to be Christian who behave that way, but it's not something that you really expect from the wife of Michael Carpenter, who is literally named Charity,

That is literally the virtue of being giving to people.

think the explanation and I think it's brilliant because of things that Michael says in this book, that had magic gave it up order to have this life with Michael, where she was good with God after all the things she went through and what she was a part means of course, she assumes

that anybody who is walking around actually using magic is basically the cult leader Michael rescued her from.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (22:30)
Yeah, that's the only association she really has. So you can kind of forgive her for making that connection and assuming that Dresden is, even if on the surface, tricking Michael by seeming to be good, that he's still nefarious in some way, because that's the only thing she ever saw. She never met anyone from the White Council necessarily. She never really saw what a wizard could be that wasn't using dark magic or black magic or anything like that.

So it does make sense that she would be extra suspicious of Harry, and then she sees this pattern where Michael only gets hurt when he's fighting evil with Harry, that's just gonna exacerbate an existing sort of bias that she has running there. Now, I would say even if you discount that, but I 100 % agree with you, addition that we get in proven guilty about that information really does...

come back and echo back to this moment and make it make even more sense. But I think even without that, it's unfair the way she treats Harry here, but it's really understandable because of the way that Jim has written these emotions that she's having.

Brian (23:41)
I agree with you, but I also think that's just Jim becoming better as a writer, as he did with Murphy. He got better at handling other characters as he went along, because that detail he throws in here of Charity not having spoken to him for five years suggests that yes, this is an extraordinary experience where the, and I also don't love that, like, so yes, the woman's having her first outburst at this character in five years when she's pregnant. Like, that's...

not necessarily a stellar way to introduce this female character. okay, sure, that makes sense, but again, that makes me feel like I don't like this person. So this is the first time she's spoken to you in five years, and she's shouting at you, and she's literally kind of going against her name. Why is this character so two-dimensional? And that's not necessarily ineffective writing.

The fact that Jim is able to make you not like Charity and then later humanize her to the extent that he does is frankly really impressive. I just think that in this scene, it sets up Charity to me as a character who is unreasonable in a way that's not a moment of hot tempered, I'm so upset, but is self reflectively unreasonable.

I can't handle that as well as can handle characters who are only that way in the heat of

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (25:08)
So, Charity's introduced in this chapter. Overall, I liked her introduction here. It sounds like you're a little more lukewarm. After that happens, Susan shows up, she bills Harry out, and they go into her car, and they head back to his apartment, and when they get there, Mr. doesn't run up to meet him when he arrives. Susan makes a joke that maybe the cat has a date, but then Harry senses them.

vampires. Kelly and Kyle are here to deliver an invitation.

And that brings us immediately to chapter eight.

So Harry immediately wants to get Susan back in the car and leave.

Now, the next thing that happens here is we're introduced to Kelly, who shows up next to Kyle and they're in like matching tennis outfits and

She says, she implies that she is here to eat them, right, after Kyle has just said, we're not here for your blood. And then he says, my sister hasn't eaten tonight, she's on a diet. And then you hear Susan say, vampires on a diet? Yeah, I said, so do Voce. Make hers a blood light. And then Susan made a choking sound, unquote. This I am submitting for one of the best lines of the book.

Make hers a blood light is a laugh out loud line every time. I love it, I cannot get enough of it, but it makes me ask the question, Brian, is she really on a diet? Is Kyle just messing around? What is going on here? I'm so confused.

Brian (26:40)
So I think there's a lot of possibilities and I want to get into this a little bit more deeply later. But I think one interesting thing to speculate is that because the big shots of other supernatural nations and higher ups in the Red Court are going to be in town.

Vampires that maybe were a little sloppy sometimes have to be on their best behavior. So when Kyle says Kelly's on a diet, I think that's what he's actually talking about. She has to be a little bit more restrained than she usually is because we can't have anything messy happen when Duke Ortega is gonna be around.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (27:31)
I was thinking something very similar, except that what we've seen is that Kyle is obviously more in control of his hunger than Kelly is. She seems really just completely given over to the hunger insofar as he has to restrain her physically several times from getting closer to Harry. And I get the impression that if he doesn't do that, she snaps and just tries to eat him.

at some point during this conversation and other conversations in the future. I think she's the one that puts her hand on Michael and gets burned at the party because she can't resist it or something to that effect. So to me, that suggests that she doesn't have as much control. And we've seen that this is a problem in the red court, right? In changes, they have this whole cast of like,

low level members that just like lick the blood up off the ground because they're so animalistic and just giving into their desires. So we know the red cord has a huge problem. We've even seen it with Bianca, right? He cut himself shaving and she's like almost unable to restrain herself from jumping across the table and eating him. In fact, she's not able to restrain herself. Only the little pocketful of sunshine that he has saves him in that moment. So.

If we take that to be the case, then how do you gain more control over your hunger? You deny it and impose your will over it. So I think what's happened here is Kyle appears to be, if not Bianca's number two, then one of her lieutenants. She's sending him out on this important mission. She sends him out to go get Lydia. to me, that makes him important. But his sister, she's so close to being wild that she's not useful.

So the only way that he can keep her around is if he gets her to get stronger, to control her hunger. And the first step of that is go on a diet and get better at imposing your will over your hunger so you're not as animalistic and wild

Brian (29:37)
I think that is brilliant and it actually I think is a better explanation than the one I sort of had been developing for their behavior, which is that it's a good cop bad cop routine. Because if we kind of put those two things together, I think we really have our answer. Yes, Kelly has almost for all you world of darkness fans fallen to a sale. But because

Because she's so barely contained, it makes Kyle seem like a real reasonable guy by comparison. So if you're gonna have somebody be your cheap diplomat, might as well be somebody who's walking softly and carrying the rabid sister vampire, so to speak.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (30:14)
Yeah,

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. So then, of course, Harry tries to say, you know, I don't want anything to do with you, get the hell out of here. And then Kyle says, hey, I'm here on official business. And Harry's like, whoops, okay, ⁓ all right, then hand over the invitation. of the invitation is he gives the whole thing here, celebrating the elevation of Bianca St. Clair to the rank of Margravine in the vampire court.

Those of you who don't play Crusader Kings or don't look deeply into hereditary nobility titles in the medieval age, Margravine is the feminine version of Margrave, which is the Germanic name for a marquee or marques, which is the French slash English way to say that. If you're familiar with Hamilton, Marquis de Lafayette, that was his title. Now,

the generalized peerage went King, Duke, Margrave, Count, Baron, and here we're using the Germanic name, which I thought was interesting because we know that South America was mostly by Portuguese and Spanish-speaking people, so I was surprised that we would see a Germanic name rather than a Latinized name, but don't know. Brian, do you have an explanation for this?

Brian (31:49)
So I think there's a few things that could be going on.

First, it's important to keep in mind that a lot of the sort of ranking of noble titles that we do in the modern age doesn't actually reflect the medieval era at any one given time. So you could be a baron who was more powerful than a margrave or a count who is more powerful than a duke and that didn't actually correspond to

some set of rules about how powerful or important you are allowed to be. It is literally just the name that is associated with whatever title you are, and that title could encompass a lot of land, a little bit of land, a lot of nobles below you, a few nobles below you. It's just sort of casting back on it. We find these commonalities where, yeah, dukes tend to be pretty high ranking. We tend to reserve that one for special people.

who get a big fiefdom as a result, et cetera and so So it's not necessarily weird that Jim plays a little bit fast and loose with the noble titles. As for why it's German, there could be a few reasons, but I think the simplest one is it just sounds cooler.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (33:09)
he looked and said, Earl doesn't sound good and there's not really a feminine version of that. So, ⁓ Baroness is what she already seems to be because Duke Ortega calls her Baroness at the end of this book when presumably she hasn't officially had the ceremony to gain the rank of Margravine. I assume that that's happening separately outside of this specific celebration that she's having. So presumably she's a Baroness now. She's gonna be raised to something.

Duchess sounds too simple and like everybody knows that. Margravine, lots of people haven't heard that. It sounds a little bit weird, it's a little bit out there, so maybe that's what, you you want them to seem a little bit alien. If you just use a very common like Duchess, then that's not gonna be as cool for your weird vampire lady.

Brian (33:43)
Exotic.

And it might be the case that if she was in South America, it would be Marquesa, but because English is a Germanic language, in English, they render it Margravine, even though historically the English adopted the French nomenclature due to the Norman conquest. So it...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (34:14)
Because

I believe Harry in the very next scene says, you know, they could be 400 years out of date and not even notice.

Brian (34:23)
Right. However, there's one other interesting thing I started wondering, and I'm gonna spring this on you, Adam, because I started thinking about it as we were doing this. it might actually be that Jim is using these titles in a slightly

more historic fashion because Margrave or Marquis is really a title for a marcher lord. That is a lord who is getting special privileges and sort of some additional concessions because they're on the borders of your territory. So maybe there are lots of barons and baronesses of the Red Corps.

But Bianca, because she's on the very edge of their territory in North America, has this special title of Margravine, she is a border lord, which also comes with a little bit of extra cache, because of course when you're operating far from central control, you have a little bit more independence.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (35:25)
and a little more responsibility because now you're part of the wall that's keeping other people out, either as a deterrent or actually doing so. And we know that she is involved in starting a fight very soon. So that is definitely going to be something that fits. So let's move on a little bit here. After that invitation is delivered, Harry then tells them, out of here. And they're giving him some shit and he uses

to a servitas, to blow them backwards a little bit, and they eventually do leave. And at that point, Susan sort of helps him in, and they spend the night together. But before we end this chapter, Brian, I wanna talk about the motivations of Kyle and Kelly in here. As we just spoke, it seems to us on the surface that Kelly's motivations are very clear. I want to eat them.

please Kyle, let me eat them. I don't think that's an act based on what we see throughout the rest of the book. I'm just taking that at face value. But Kyle, Kyle's an interesting case. He starts off laughing at them from the shadows and saying, Bianca told us you'd be nervous. And so he's trying to intimidate them, right? He's leaning into that intimidation that he already has just from being a vampire. And then we get

his goal to deliver the invitation. Obviously that's why he's here, right? Except when Harry says, not her, a designated herald, you're required not to hurt me, and so you can come close. She's not the herald, she has no restrictions. And here's the quote, Kyle kept his smile.

but his eyes had changed from blue to a shade of angry black that was rapidly expanding to cover the whites. Well, he said, his voice tense, aren't we the little lawyer, Mr. Dresden, unquote. This sounds like Harry just dodged a trap, right?

Brian (37:31)
Well, maybe. There's a couple ways we can read this. One way to read it is, yeah, you're right, Dresden, Kelly's actually gonna totally eat you right now if you don't stop her. So, ⁓ well played, my enemy, right, could be that.

It could be that Kyle, and this is like a surface level reading, Kyle doesn't want to acknowledge how far gone his sister is. He still sees her as somebody who can go on a diet and everything's gonna be okay when she is, you know, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. And by pointing out that I won't let her near me, Dresden is insulting him because he's insulting his sister's con...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (38:02)
Hmm.

Brian (38:16)
control. So those are two surface level readings. I got another one for you though, Adam. So, wants Dresden to come to the party. I mean, she really wants him to come.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (38:29)
Right, that appears

to be the case. Harry, like, in the middle of her speech says, ⁓ I hate when I don't figure out the enemy's plan until it's too late. And he explains to Michael, like, she wanted us here the whole time. Everything she's done is to get us to be at this party. And that, to me, rings true, right? He's certain that that's what she wanted, and that seems to be what she wanted. But that's why I was very confused in this scene when it seems like

Kyle is pissed that they missed an opportunity to assassinate Harry in this moment. So I was thinking like, Bianca, like, well it would be great if we could assassinate him and then blame it on her loss of control. And then, aw, Trixie, Trixie Wizard, you saw through our assassination attempt. Oh well, we'll get you at the party instead. Like, I'm having a hard time figuring out which of those is what's really happening behind the scenes.

Brian (39:22)
So, okay, let me play a couple options out for you. So, one, this actually does happen. Kelly kills Dresden in broad daylight. Well, what happens? Well, one, right. Well, Dresden looks like an idiot, right? So, she kind of gets her revenge to a certain extent. Yeah, it's anticlimactic, but he looks like a fool. And as we're gonna talk about later, this does...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (39:33)
Well, broad moonlight in this case, probably.

Brian (39:50)
sort of create a big enough incident that could spark a powder keg that, you know, shot her around the world kind of potential. So she might get everything she wants anyway.

or other option. Okay, what if they don't do this? What if Bianca's party planner says, darling, I think we should just have a singing telegram deliver it. Okay? And they send Dresden a wonderful e-vite that, you he never gets because he doesn't use a computer, but just a scented envelope, you know, and it's,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (40:15)
Yeah.

Brian (40:29)
It's hand delivered by the pope, you know

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (40:33)
Yeah, with

the gold leaf that's on there, yeah.

Brian (40:36)
And a vampire comes by to just ask, hey, you know, don't wanna scare you, but I am a red cord vampire. Didn't wanna surprise you, just walked right up to your door. I figured I'd knock and just let you say hi so you know that I'm me. So we just wanted to check in about the invitation, because we're really trying to smooth things over and we want you to really feel welcome. Is there anything that would put Harry on higher alert?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (40:59)
⁓ Is there anything that would put Harry on a higher alert than someone trying to show that they're not going to kill him? Yeah, vampires that are trying to be as conspicuous as possible. That is true. Yeah, so you're saying maybe.

The whole thing with Kyle getting angry over Harry being the lawyer and smartly figuring it out. Maybe that's an act to make Harry think that he's, ⁓ good job, wizard, you saw through our dirty trick. ⁓ no, here's the envelope. And yeah, that might be it.

Brian (41:39)
Right. Because

if they're willing to kill him when they deliver the invitation, they don't really want him to come. They just have to invite him because it's a court's thing.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (41:47)
I do see that as like a mavera-style Xanatos gambit, right? If we gets killed by Kelly, like everybody knows she's a loose cannon and we can just sacrifice her and say whatever, we'll send her to the White Count, but you know what we can do is we can then show the Red Court, look how weak they are, right? So they could use that, or if Harry avoids getting killed by Kelly,

Brian (41:52)
Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (42:17)
then they also have a plan to deal with him at the party. And they're probably good with both if they can deal with him sooner all the more effective, right? They don't want to take the risk. There's so many other things, important things going on at the party, which we're about to talk about, but why risk those with this unknown of Harry? Is he gonna show up? What's he gonna do to mess up our plans? He has a tendency to do that if anybody's been paying attention.

better to take him out here in a, whoopsie, one of our lesser controlled vampires couldn't control herself. Too bad, So that seems to me to be.

A more fun interpretation is the Mavra Xanatos Gambit I'm gonna call

Brian (43:02)
And I think it's especially good because if Harry felt like they really, really, really, really wanted him to go, he absolutely would not go. So they have to make it feel like they kind of have to invite him and they don't really want him to come. That's why he shows up in vampire tuxedo costume because he thinks he's

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:15)
right.

Mm-hmm.

Brian (43:30)
thumbing his nose at them by being there at all. And his revelation is they got one over on me. So maybe that starts here.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (43:38)
Yeah.

Yeah, that could very well be it. Okay, so that's the end of our discussion for these two chapters, seven and eight. Next week, we're talking about nine and 10. That's where Harry and Michael check in with Fort Hill about the ghost attack where Lydia was held inside the church, protected there until she wasn't. And then...

We're talking about chapter 10 where Harry visits Mortimer Lindquist for the first time to get some more information on the ghosts. Those are two good chapters, looking forward to talking about those, but before we go there, we've got our question for Bob.

Brian (44:14)
So, Bob, Bianca's Party is an event in this series that is still having ramifications, and I mean, the ones that it has that we already know about are enormous. So whose idea was it? Who was the masterminds at Bianca's Party?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (44:36)
Yeah, there's so many different players which all have different potential motivations. Some have many different motivations for what's going on there. It's gonna be very difficult to unravel them. So we're gonna start trying to figure that out here when they invite Harry Dresden. Like what's going on at this party that's behind that motivation? Unfortunately, Bob can't make it, but he has a pretty good excuse this time. Apparently Harry has one of those mandatory quote unquote

that he has to go on with Lara, and Bob is staying at the castle just in case he gets lucky.

Brian (45:12)
what, so we can like perv out on them?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:14)
Well, he didn't say, he said he was gonna protect Harry, though in retrospect, I don't actually know how that would work. But in the end, I didn't think that it would be like, I mean, Harry's not gonna let that happen, right? And Bob even agreed. He said the odds were approximately 3,720 to one, but he wasn't willing to take that risk, so he didn't wanna come.

Brian (45:27)
Right.

Wait,

wait, aren't those the odds from like the scene in Star Wars with the asteroids feels like 3720 to one?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:45)
Yeah, yeah, never tell me the odds. Okay, over on us tonight, but we're gonna do our best to look into the question, so.

Brian (45:54)
⁓

Never play word games with the spirit of intellect.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (45:57)
That's true, that's true, he'll get you every time. So who are the masterminds at Bianca's party? Well there's a lot. I'm just gonna quickly list them off before we go into them. We've got Bianca, we've got the Lords of Outer Knight slash the rest of the Red Court, which are factional, so they have different, sometimes competing motivations about what's going on here. We don't even know which faction Bianca necessarily belonged to. Then we've got Cowl and Kumori, we've got Lord Raithe we've got Mavrah and the Black Court, we've got Leah, we've got

Theravax, and someone suggested that Uriel had a hand in what's going on here through Michael. So let's get into all of that, but first, let's talk about the ultimate mastermind behind Bianca's party. That's Jim Butcher. Elphich 47 says, Jim's agenda is to get the various gifts presented to the audience so that they can be used as touch points later in the series. He gives Excalibur, Amarokius,

To Mavrah, this was resolved in grave peril and it was the kickoff for the middle of the book. The Athame, Morgana's Athame, which is a sort of knife or dagger, a ritual dagger if you're not familiar with it. Morgana's Athame was given to Leah, declared loudly in Deadbeat and basically done by changes. Harry's gravestone is alluded to in Deadbeat and then in real use in Ghost Story, done by the end of Battleground.

Thomas's tickets to Hawaii and the matching condo, I think this one's underway with Thomas and Justine and the child. It's sort of introducing that concept. Farrow Vax's chest of treasures, I think this is in the Kaiju book that Jim keeps alluding to, unquote. So those were all what Elphich 47 was suggesting. Jim's main motivation, okay, part of the thing of this party is get all of these different gifts that I'm gonna be using through the rest of the series and sort of introduce them here.

and sort of call back to them later. And I think that's a really cool point, because a lot of them do get used throughout the rest of the series.

Brian (48:01)
That's interesting, Adam. It's almost like this collection I have right over here.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:06)
A collection of what?

Brian (48:08)
McGuffins.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (48:12)
I do want a shelf that has nothing but MacGuffins. It has like the Holy Grail and this that the other thing.

Brian (48:14)
Aren't

you guys gonna ask me what a MacGuffin is? Famously, somebody asks Hitchcock what a MacGuffin is, and he says, it's device for hunting lions in the moors of England. And the person asking him says, but there are no lions in the moors of England. And then Hitchcock goes, well then that's not a MacGuffin, is it? Because the point is that a MacGuffin is the Maltese Falcon.

Right, it's just the thing the story is about, the blue carbuncle, right? It's not necessarily important exactly what it is. It's just some treasure that is kicking off whatever the action is. So it's possible this is just Jim's giving us a list of a bunch of future MacGuffins he wants to use. know, Shroud of Turin equivalents that are gonna show up in later books. ⁓

And he definitely is doing that, but I do think that there's more going on than just, and this is smart that Jim does this also, but it's not just him introducing some things now so that when he brings them up later, you're not surprised.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (49:29)
So let's move on to the actual characters here. And we're going from our Doyleist perspective into our Watsonian perspective now. We're looking at it from inside the book's universe rather than outside. Bianca is our first contestant. Obviously, she has a lot of different motivations for this. The first one and the one expressly listed in the text is Vengeance Against Harry. A lot of this is a setup specifically to deal with

what she blames Harry for as the death of her assistant all the way back in Stormfront. So that seems like the most straightforward, obvious explanation and motivation for what she's doing in this party. Do you think there's anything else to her besides that one?

Brian (50:14)
I do, and I think that Harry kind of lands on that as that's what this whole thing is about. as, well, but as far as it concerns him, it is. There's other people at the party though, and Bianca didn't just invite them as window dressing. So part of what she's doing is simply gloating over being promoted. You know, if you're a Red Court vampire and you don't throw a giant masquerade ball,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (50:23)
He's being a little egocentric there, right?

Yeah, well that's fair.

Brian (50:43)
when you get a rank up in the nobility. mean, people are gonna think you're like weak and socially maligned and not worthy of respect. She's gotta do this, right? She's gotta gloat that she's being promoted or nobody's gonna take her seriously within the court.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (51:01)
Now, we don't know for a fact, I don't think, what side of, which faction of the Red Court that she was on, because we learned later, I think for sure in changes, but maybe even earlier than that, that there were different factions in the Red Court that some of them wanted to go to war now, and some of them said, no, we're definitely going to war, but we just need to prepare a bit more. We're not ready for the war with the White Council yet.

So we know that this was seen as premature by some of them. I think it's in Death Masks during the duel with Ortega that we learn that concept of what's going on in the Red Court.

So is she on the faction that wants to start a war and she's trying to use this right now? Or is she on the faction that just is laying the groundwork for a war, getting her side riled up about an offense from the White Council to get them prepared for

Brian (51:57)
So I think there's one of two possible answers here. I think she's either trying to start the war post-haste, or what I actually think is true is that as of right now, there are not two factions, war now and war later. There is one war faction. And the war faction wants to put us on the road to war. And in the wake of Bianca's party, the question becomes, okay.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:14)
Hmm.

Brian (52:23)
given what that moron in Chicago did, do we start the war today or do we continue on the road to war and let it play out a little bit longer? So I don't think Bianca's really around for the formation of those factions because it is in fact her death that breaks the war party into those two groups.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (52:39)
Hmm.

Okay, yep, I could buy that. That makes sense to me.

and I think the last sort of motivation for Bianca is that she wants to demonstrate to the wider audience. Obviously the red court feels that she deserves this promotion, but she wants to demonstrate to the greater supernatural community.

that she is now a member of higher status, right? That she deserves this promotion. And part of that is doing some Machiavellian things behind the scenes and getting revenge on your enemies is a good way to do it. Now.

Brian (53:12)
And that's

probably because the White Court is based in Chicago, as we find out later. So if you're going to have people take you seriously as like the other vampire, right? The Pepsi Cola of Chicago Vampire Society, you wanna make sure that you have a nice impressive debut.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (53:32)
Yeah, and he actually references, you know, this is what Vlad the Impaler did on his inauguration where he brought a bunch of his political enemies into a party and then murdered them all. And we'll talk about that when we get to the party itself. But now we have to ask the question, we're gonna ask this question for each of these masterminds. Did they get what they wanted? Now, I think the answer is yes and no, right? She did get some revenge on Dresden insofar as his girlfriend got turned into a half vampire and it-

really ruins his life for like a year. Now, obviously, she didn't really get what she wanted because she didn't live through this experience. But I think that's ⁓ still a partial victory in the end.

Brian (54:14)
Yeah, I mean,

I think the interesting question is, if Harry takes the deal at the end of the book, does Bianca get what she wanted total? Does she end up where she thinks she's going to be? And I think the answer is probably yeah, and that's probably what Mirror Mirror is gonna be about. But there's the, you know, sort of second prize. First prize is you get everything you ever wanted. Second prize is orbital drop satellite.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:44)
Right, it's a set of steak knives. So that's Bianca. Let's move on.

Brian (54:50)
Should I

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (54:51)
Lords of Outer Night and The Red Court are the next up on my list here. Now, Govinda S says, quote,

Red Court wanted to test the waters for their planned war against the White Council, the Council being the only one supernatural force that does not consider humanity prey, and they are a problem for every predatory supernatural entity." Unquote. So I think I buy that. This seems like, hey, we're going to support Bianca doing this plan. It might also be like Bianca was going to do one of those, I'll ask forgiveness.

rather than ask permission for this, but she was expecting them to be like, okay, that's fine, because there is this war faction that wants to start the preparations, and one of those things you do is recon. You gotta test. How is your enemy responding to provocation? Because if they respond in a very weak way, well, that tells you if they respond with strength, that tells you something too. Information is very important at the start of a war.

Brian (55:24)
Mm-hmm.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (55:51)
and you gotta have it. So I think that makes a lot of sense to me. Do you think the Red Court and or the Lords of Outer Night beyond the ones we've talked about with Bianca, do they have any other motivations behind this?

Brian (56:01)
⁓ yeah, I think they've got one really big one. And it seems to be the case that the Red Court is in some way, form, because they are as a party platform or because there are elements within it that are heavily compromised, they're on Team Black Council very heavily. If not Team Outside, they're really playing for Team Apocalypse.

to a big extent in these proceedings. And is partially maybe why, right, the Merlin's response to the provocation is so anemic. He knows there's a cycle coming and he doesn't want to spend wizard resources on, you know, a war when we could have an apocalypse tomorrow. So these Red Court provocations are not just because, well, if we get rid of those wizards, we'll be able to eat all the humans we want. The Red Court's doing fine.

Sure, maybe they're being really ambitious now and this is, you they finally want to conquer Russia or whatever, but seems to me like there's at least some faction of the Reds that believes that they're gonna kind of have their cake and eat it too. If they start this war and they win, great, we got what we wanted. But if we just start the war in the first place,

Well, we're actually working for this greater plan about reordering the world around this apocalyptic event.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (57:37)
with you, I could definitely see connecting the dots. The red court is in some way on Team Black Counsel or Team Outside, but my interpretation is a lot of that is them being manipulated by their ambition. I think there's maybe a few.

Brian (57:55)
Yes.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (57:56)
infected members of the Red Court or members of the Red Court that have been like fully converted into the Team Black Counsel or Team Outside thing and they are working behind the scenes to manipulate everyone else by using their ambition. That seems to be the one thing that all Red Court vampires have in common is ambition. And I think they've been slowly growing their power and that they're using that, you're strong enough now to take on the White.

So I think that's definitely part of it. Do you think the Red Court in general got what they wanted out of this party?

Brian (58:32)
Yeah, absolutely. Is there any question?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (58:36)
I don't think so. think they got enough. I think it would have been better if Bianca hadn't been destroyed and therefore their power base in Chicago sort of beheaded more or less. We don't really ever learn that there was a replacement of any high rank sent to Chicago. I mean, there's still obviously problems with the red cord in the future, but we never have a Bianca level enemy in Chicago as a permanent replacement. So this probably did put a small

Brian (58:43)
Sure.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (59:04)
dent in their plans, but on the whole, they're probably writing it off as, generally, we got what we wanted.

Brian (59:11)
Yeah, mean, cost of doing business. And if Chicago was really important to the Red Court, they would have sent somebody. So now, obviously, hard to send somebody to Dresden's backyard who he's at war with. The man does have a thing for burning buildings, right? But if they really wanted to kick Dresden out of Chicago, they could have moved in in force. It's just not worth it to them to expend all those resources in holding this far-flung outpost.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (59:13)
Essentially, yes.

Mm-hmm.

Brian (59:38)
They have their core territories, they're gonna go after the White Council using some stratagems they've already figured out, and yeah, we gotta trade some minor noble we were gonna promote to get the war we wanted, no problem.

I think a better question is the people working with the Red Court during this party, literally acting as Bianca's helpers, chamberlains, Cowl and Kumori presumably the people in the black cloaks. What are they doing here?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:00:11)
Yeah, so there's a lot of speculation that they may be the ones that gave Morgana's Athame to Bianca. Because you gotta ask yourself, where did she get something like that, that A, a conduit for Nemesis to get into Leia, and B, Morgana's Athame. That's a very important like relic that.

probably has power on the level of those items that Harry rescues from Hades vault, right? So to me, that is like, where did those come from? And an easy answer is, Cowl and Kumori provided them because we already have reason to suspect that they are working with or collaborating with Nemesis in some way. So they get it to Brionca.

Bianca maybe gives them something in return that they need, whether it's information or a promise that they can use her resources when they're in town, something like that. And then she plans to swap that with Leah and get Almeracius, take that out of the picture because she's got a knight of the cross living in her town where she wants to put more pressure on mortal. You can't have that. So if we can unmake this sword, that's perfect.

and Cowling-Kamore are offering her the opportunity to do that.

Brian (1:01:33)
Yeah, it might be that simple. It might be even a little bit more complicated than that because, so to be clear, the reason why people suspect that it's wizards like Kal and Kumuri who would be giving Morgana's Atheme to Bianca for the couple people in the audience who aren't catching the Arthurian reference, that's the original Lefay, Morgana Lefay, the, you know,

sister of King Arthur in most tellings who is a sorceress or a witch or a druidess or whatever version of the mythology you're following. An Athame is a ritual dagger, right? So this is something that she used in rituals. So it's Well, we already know the person who literally founded the White Council was Merlin of the Arthurian stories. So.

wizards and Morgana le Fay, it's a fairy-associated thing because what else do we know came out of sort of the Arthurian medieval English milieu? The fairy courts, which are obviously borrowing a lot from various Celtic mythologies, including the same Welsh mythology as the Arthurian lore. So,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:02:50)
Mm-hmm.

Brian (1:03:00)
that's highly associated with both the Winter Court, Leia's people, and wizards. It doesn't really make sense that Bianca is, you know, hanging onto it. see... Right, right. So if you see this as a couple wizards giving it to a winter fairy, that makes a lot more symbolic sense. Okay, but...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:03:12)
finding it in an estate sale.

Brian (1:03:26)
I can tell why Nemesis would love to affect Leia. Do Kal and Kumuri just want the world to end? Well, one thing that we just want to introduce as a notion here is that people like Bianca and Kal and Kumuri and Ariana or Mavra or Lord Raithe or whoever is in your personal Black Council rogues gal-

may not be just mindlessly doing the bidding of Nemesis. They might be trying to use the conflict with the outsiders to sort of make the world more the way they want it. And if you want to ensure that the Winter Court is no longer a big deal after this cycle, well,

A really good way to do it would be to sabotage them from the inside so they barely survive.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:04:24)
and like you said the rogues gallery of the Black Council any of them they're not explicitly on team outside they are probably just playing that very dangerous game of We'll help them. They'll help me I'll backstab them before they get a chance to do what they want. Of course, but if they're

all saying that and they're all helping the outsiders, the outsiders are like, well, we got a lot of power from a lot of little transactions here and now we're gonna win the game, whatever this cycle turns out to be.

Brian (1:04:59)
Right, it's the sort of making a deal with the devil. You know, if one person did it in order to achieve their own personal goal, okay, maybe it doesn't make the whole system come crashing down. But when everybody's doing it, that's Nemesis' whole plan, right?

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:05:16)
Yeah, the devil

gets a lot of power if everybody makes a deal with him.

Brian (1:05:19)
Right, so that suggests that Cowl and Kumori are playing this very dangerous game of trying to destabilize the supernatural world enough that they kind of get to run things when it's but not so much that the walkers can just stroll into Earth and, you know,

turn it into a black.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:05:47)
Okay, considering all that, do we think that Cowell and Kumori got what they wanted out of the party?

Brian (1:05:53)
I think they absolutely did. mean, Leia ends up infected. yeah, Mab gets her over that, that just spreads and is the reason why Maeve is later nearly throwing the world into a maelstrom of fire at the end of cold days. And they, of course, kick off this war to weaken the White Council.

the one force in the supernatural community that really would take exception to a bunch of rogue wizards running around trying to reorder the world.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:06:30)
Yeah, I think they definitely got exactly what they wanted. As you pointed out, the Athame didn't get all the way to Mab, maybe as they had hoped, but you can't blame the party for that. The party did its job, right? They got what they wanted out of the party. It's just that the long-term gambit didn't necessarily play out quite as they wanted, mostly because Harry keeps intervening and stopping all these things when Mab doesn't. So next up, we've got Lord Raithe. On the surface, Barkir reminds us, quote,

Lord Raithe has Thomas sent to the party so that he can potentially die there since he himself doesn't have the power to kill him." And I would add that, again, the White Court has that whole thing where they don't ever want to be seen as doing something directly. That loses face, that loses prestige. You want to arrange things so that they wind up your way without you being directly tied to it. So having Lord Raithe send Thomas here,

and then Thomas dies with everybody knowing, well, Lord Raithe wanted him to die and he got his political enemy to do it for him, that increases his prestige. And So I think Barkier has this stated exactly correct as it is in the text, but...

Do you think there's more than that? Is there something beyond that that Lord Raithe was trying to accomplish by sending Thomas here?

Brian (1:07:50)
Yeah, I mean, I'm not convinced that Bianca is Lord Raithe's political enemy. Now, the Red Court and the White Court might not be best friends, but we know that Raithe is certainly involved in Black Council-adjacent stuff. And we know that Bianca is at least involved in Black Council-adjacent stuff. So where would you send both of...

Margaret Le Fay's kids to get killed? Bianca's party. Like, that's everything Lord Raithe wants.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:08:22)
Yeah, I don't know if he's figured it out.

I don't know if he's figured it out by this point, but he absolutely could have, We see that's mostly his plan by book six is he's trying to get them together, get them killed to try to deal with the curse. So that could be something that he's trying to do right now without showing how weak he is at this point.

Brian (1:08:41)
and he

might not act, I think the thing is that he doesn't know at this point that that's what's powering the curse. I mean, Thomas turned out to be a little bit too much like her and not quite enough like him anyway, and he kills, yeah, exactly.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:08:55)
And he's killed all of the sons, right? He only keeps the daughters, because I guess

he, so he was planning on doing this anyway. I think Thomas mentions he's the oldest one that's ever survived and it's because of the curse, right? We know that already. So no need to rehash that. We'll talk about all that when we get to blood rites. Did he get what he wanted? I think obviously not. I don't think anything at this party worked out in Lord Raithe's favor. It introduced Harry and Thomas, got to the point where they could trust each other a little more and set up

the events of blood rites, which ultimately is undoing.

Brian (1:09:27)
with one because as we know, though it is a Red Court versus White Council war, sort of randomly later in the series, it happens to be the case that, yeah, since we're vampires, technically you're at war with the White Court too. And that's just sort of thrown in. And maybe that's not as much of just a throw in as it seems.

and Lord Raithe is also part of this broader destabilize the White Council war party, in which case he gets one thing he maybe kind of ancillary wanted. Okay.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:06)
Yeah,

and I think he would be much more full-throatedly in favor of the war were he able to be physically involved without this curse thing. I think that's what keeps him from really getting behind it.

Brian (1:10:20)
Yeah, he probably became a lot less of a hot shot black council guy when he realized that he couldn't actually be the person standing on top of the pyramid at the end because a stiff breeze would knock him over, But since we're doing our roundup of vampires and their opinions on Bianca's party, let's talk about somebody who might actually really be the master.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:10:29)
Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and it pretty explicitly stated in the text that Mavrah helped orchestrate all this.

is working directly with Bianca. She is teaching her. So there's a lot to suggest that she is helping pull the strings, suggest things here and there So to me, her beef is with the White Council partly because

They are the thing standing and helping humanity understand what's going on. She also has a beef with the White Court for publishing Stoker's book and basically wiping out her court. So she probably wouldn't mind seeing Thomas die here, even if technically it's helping out the White King. She's happy to see any of them die, would be my guess.

Brian (1:11:31)
Mavra and the Black Court have been sort of deliberately allowed to become extinct by like the entire supernatural community because they, right, they're horrifying, noxious, predatory psychopaths.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:11:42)
Yeah, nobody likes them, right? They're pariahs.

but they're also probably the strongest of like all of them. That's why everybody's okay with them being mostly obliterated.

Brian (1:11:53)
Pound for pound, absolutely.

And I think that Mavra isn't necessarily working with Bianca. I think Mavra views what she's doing as manipulating Bianca. And I think Mavra might actually be sort of the point of contact between specifically and the Black Council people as a whole.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:12:10)
Yeah, 100%.

Brian (1:12:25)
Not saying that Mavra is members of the Red into doing black council-y but it seems like she is directly the person who is teaching Bianca how to do magic

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:12:40)
Yeah, so the other thing that came to mind here is that there must be vampire hunters out there, right, in this world. Because we know that Stoker published the book and it almost wiped out the court, but the court has been trying to reestablish itself. We see that literally happen in Blood Rites and Harry is the one that goes in and does the vampire hunting. So if Mavrah and the other, let's say,

dozen most powerful Black Court vampires that survived the Stoker Purge are out there, why can't they rebuild the court? Because there are people hunting them. Who are those people? Maybe members of the White Council, but more likely members of the Venatori Umbrorum and the other sort of White Council allies. And what happens?

Brian (1:13:29)
Fellowship of Saint Giles

probably doesn't discriminate too much between red and black.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:13:32)
Exactly, the fellowship

of St. Giles. Those allies of the White Council, what happens to them when the war starts? They get dragged in and they have to go immediately underground. I could see this as a great time for Mavrah and her court to go and start new vampire nests, get new blood, so to speak, into their court.

Well, everybody else is super distracted and doesn't have time to hunt down and stake all the newbies.

Brian (1:14:02)
And you know what, I was 1000 % lockstep right there with you thinking, ⁓ that's what's really going on. Until Battlegrounds. Because Battlegrounds made me think, wait a second, Mavra is not a free Mavra works for Dracul. And that guy, he doesn't even get out of

unless it's gonna be the apocalypse tomorrow. Dracul doesn't care about shit like how many black-court vampires are there. That guy cares about, am I going to be able to insert massively evil, horrifying, reality-changing thing here? He is a seriously scary dude. So

Mavra, who seems to be Dracul's not most powerful, but maybe most cunning henchperson, is at this party. What does that make me think? That makes me think that Dracul is also on team, let's bring this apocalypse right up to the brink. And a great way to do that is to get the White Council completely,

at war with itself and weakened and distraught, and also start going after the Winter Court, both of which happen at this party.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:15:27)
Yeah, so I think there's a lot of ways that you could argue that the White Council being at war with the Red Court benefits the Black Court slash Black Council slash So we haven't had a lot of information on that route. I think we'll learn more about it. Battlegrounds has helped to elucidate that there's something else that they want going on in the background. We just don't know what it is yet. Let's move on. Leah is here. What are her goals?

Protecting Harry seems to be one of them. She does help him escape.

She does help him sober up to a degree from the narcotic ⁓ venom that he drinks. she also, I think, wants to attain power here, right? That's her secondary goal is get Morgana's athame and get it for her person. Now, we don't know exactly, and we'll speculate more about why she wants this. Does she know that it has nemesis? And she thinks she can...

know, deal with it, or is she being duped into accepting this thing that's infected? We'll talk a lot more about that when we get to the party, but I think, generally speaking, those are her two main motivations. Protect Harry, her investment, more or less, and attain power. Do you think there are any more things that Lea's doing here?

Brian (1:16:38)
Well, we're gonna get it, as you said, into more detail on this when we get to the party. But I think Leah is like a quadruple agent or something, where the, she's at the party, specifically her, because she's not like the Chicago Winterfae, she's just number two in the Winter Court, is at the party because she's let it be known that...

she maybe isn't best friends with Mab anymore or something. That's why she's seen as a little bit more of a free agent. She's doing that in part to power to maybe like get stuff that actually makes her more powerful. Not because she's trying to have a coup against Mab, but because that's one thing that she just does as a general rule.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:17:28)
yeah,

that's how she got to be number two, is she just acquires more power. She's very ambitious.

Brian (1:17:34)
but she's also probably paying really close attention to these people that Mab's had her eyes on for literally years because she knows they're trying to mess with the whole Outer Gates operation. So Leia has the plausible deniability to be someone from winter who shouldn't be here. This is a gang of people who are effectively anti winter court getting a gift that is

Maybe Leia has let them think that, ⁓ I'm gonna use this to coup Mab. Or maybe she said, I wanna be a nemesis agent. Who knows? But Leia's running a bit of a long con here because she is kind of the odd person out. She is neither a neutral party with regards to these. Now, from Dresden's perspective, she is. But on a grander scale,

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:18:24)
Mmm.

Brian (1:18:32)
She is not a neutral party with regards to these people or somebody who is in any way aligned with their larger goals. Dresden just kind of lumps them all together as, you know, wicked and therefore they can play on the same team. But I mean, we literally see Mab sick Leia on the Reds in about 10 years. So there's definitely some...

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:18:44)
Mmm.

Brian (1:18:58)
shenanigans going on for Leia to even be at this party at the first place and it goes beyond just being a godmother.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:19:08)
Yeah, I think that she's definitely here on some kind of mission. She's very cunning, and I think I can agree with you that she might be on a mission from Mab, but convincing everybody else that she's on the outs with Mab is how she gets here. That might very well be it. And we think she probably does get what she wants, but it turns out to be more than she can handle. More on that in future books. Vax is also at this party. He, what is he doing here?

I don't know, it's kind of unclear. What's your speculation?

Brian (1:19:40)
Yeah, that's such a good question, right? Because again, from Harry's perspective, this all makes sense. All of these people are wicked. Not necessarily evil, but they're all wicked. Faravax is a fire-breathing dragon. He will have you literally for lunch, right? But Faravax is like an elemental force in some ways akin to an archangel who...

shapes the way that time and the elements and seasons move. What the heck is he doing going to a mid-tier Red Court Nobles Masquerade ball? Presumably it has something to do with the fact that he was told in advance he was going to get a very nice party favor.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:20:29)
Yeah, and the way that he responds to it indicates that it is up to his standards. But much like pulp fiction, they never show us what's in the briefcase. We just have to take everybody else's reaction to help us speculate on what might have been in there. My own personal speculation is that it was some kind of relic of power, again, on the order of Morgana's Athame or the Holy Grail or...

the Spear of Destiny, something like that does seem like something that a dragon might covet as treasure beyond simple gems and jewels and value of that nature. Something with magical value. I think you're right on with the experience, you know, what's my motivation? Receive expensive bribe.

But the other one is maybe information gathering. I mean, he's probably doesn't go to these very often. He's maybe trying to keep tabs on what's going on in these worlds. This is gonna be a lot of people here that he can sort of talk to and try to gauge,

So maybe that's why he's here. It's very hard to suggest what his actual motivations are. Maybe we'll learn more of them later.

Brian (1:21:37)
And we say that in part because we assume that Faravax gets invited a lot of places because you definitely don't want to offend him by not inviting him.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:21:52)
Always invite the dragon even if you don't think he'll show.

Brian (1:21:53)
Right.

Yeah. But he probably very rarely, I mean we literally know he cannot actually step into reality. So the fact that Farravax attends in a lesser guise has to be something of a rarity. And he must have a reason for That is a little bit extraordinary.

And it might be as simple as, wow, this is a weird group to be at this party. You guys have a Black Court vampire and the Lananshi? That's crazy. So it might just be as simple as that.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:22:35)
Yeah, so we don't know a lot about him, but it's fun to speculate. The last one I wanted to add here, answered our question on the Reddit by saying, Uriel could have sent Michael there to force Harry into starting a war, ruining the Red Court's plan for a surprise attack on the White Council later. Without Michael being there, there would be no war and Michael doesn't do coincidence, unquote. And of course we know that

whole chain of events eventually leads to Murphy speaking with like the voice of an archangel, the proclamation against the Lords of Outer Night in changes. So that suggests that the white god does want that chain of events to happen. Now, how much can Uriel or the white god intervene in matters to get that chain of events in motion?

I'm not sure they had a part in Michael being at the party specifically, but maybe they nudged him here or there to meet Harry in the first place that led to him being at the

Brian (1:23:42)
I think that, it's Uriel or Gabriel the messenger, who is presumably the voice coming out of Murphy in Chichen Itza, there's definitely a reason why Michael is at the party beyond the fact that Amorachius is there. The Knights of the Cross don't do coincidences, but they also literally just don't do coincidences. They are like the fist of God.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:23:50)
Hmm.

Brian (1:24:09)
right, so they go where the Lord directs them. But I don't think that that's what Uriel or Gabriel or the white God is actually trying to execute here. One step in both

achieving the kind of more just world that the White God and the Dresden Files seems to work for is eliminating forces like the Red Court and protecting the innocent like Lydia. So these are all things that Knight should sort of be there to do. But if the White God is making ultimate plans right now, I can't emphasize enough, it's not

really about the Reds. It's about people like Cowl and Kumori who are trying to bring down all of reality.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:25:05)
Yeah,

I think that's true, but I think the Reds are standing in the way because they've been compromised As we theorized before, they're in infected somehow being manipulated part of whatever. They're part of anti-reality and obviously the white God.

opposes that. So getting rid of them takes an important pawn off the board when it comes to the great game of what's coming in the B.A.T., the big apocalyptic trilogy.

Brian (1:25:35)
I completely agree. And what I'm trying to say here is not that AGD 25 is incorrect. I'm trying to say Uriel is not thinking in terms of, we'll send Michael here, which will get Susan half turned, which will cause this war, which will later lead to Chichen Uriel is thinking Red Court.

is one of the agents of the people we're working against, our agents must be in a position to counter them. The plan is not exactly as structured as it's being laid out there, though the effect of what Uriel or the angels in the swords themselves are doing is what he is saying.

Adam “Bridger” Ruzzo (1:26:17)
Yeah, I could definitely see So, we'll talk a lot more about the party when we get there. We sort of laid the foundation for the motivations behind it here. That's where we're gonna end our show today.

but next week, we will not have a show we're taking Thanksgiving week off, and the week after, we'll be back with our fifth Grave Peril episode covering chapters nine and 10. Really looking forward to those Mort Lindquist, and the question we wanna ask on that show, if you recall, in the chapter with Mort Lindquist,

He says when he's talking to Dresden, did you read They Shall Rise? This is Mort's book and Mort then describes, then you've read my theory on the barrier between our world and the never never, that it's slowly being torn away, unquote. So Mort wrote this book well before Mavra and Bianca started turning out the never never.

So I want to ask you guys, is that book still taking place? And is that book part of the big apocalyptic trilogy? I want to hear your theories. I think it's something that hasn't been discussed enough and I want to talk a little bit more about it.

Brian (1:27:26)
Yeah, and I can't wait to ⁓ address that potential dangling plot thread when we come back during Donar Vatarrung's favorite month on December 5th for our next episode.