Book Review: The Spider's War | Daniel Abraham (The Dagger and the Coin #5)

WARNING: SPOILERS. Schisms begin to divide the empire, and despite conquest after conquest, the final victory retreats like a mirage, and the great war threatens to collapse into an endless conflict of all against all.

Published in 2016 by Orbit Books, The Spider's War is the fifth and final book of The Dagger and the Coin, written by Daniel Abraham, which I have been reviewing. The previous books were 2011's The Dragon's Path, 2012's The King's Blood, 2013's The Tyrant's Law, and 2014's The Widow's House.

Once again, we are greeted with a mediocre cover - a dragon which doesn't take center stage and what I can only assume is meant to be the Kingspire (displacing the letter "I", something that no previous book has done) set against a repeating cityscape. Look closely - two of the buildings are the same!

None of the covers have really had much to do with anything in the series: sword, axe, cauldron, spear and shield. This one, at least, matches something that happens in the books, but my did they do it poorly! Solidly middling. Orbit generally has a talent for coming up with a distinctive identity for its series' - and I suppose they did that with The Dagger and the Coin, a distinctive color, a weapon - but none of the designs have been particularly stand-out.

Dragon's Path and Widow's House easily had the best designs, Tyrant's Law the worst, and King's Blood making a solid third with Spider's War coming out above Tyrant's Law by avoiding CG dragons with bad flame texture wraps. Again, if ever the series is reissued in hardcover, I hope they bring back Stephan Martiniere to do some new cover designs.

For this review I've added a spoiler tag as avoiding them as greatly reduced what I've been able to say about the previous books. Not so here. If you do not want the book (or series) spoiled for you, do not read this review. You have been warned.

It all leads up to this, the magnificent conclusion to Daniel Abraham's The Dagger and the Coin.

So much of the series placed Geder and Cithrin on opposite poles: male and female. Pure Firstblood and Half-Cinnae. It's baked, even, into the very name: dagger and the coin. Seeds laid down throughout the books come to roost here, if you'll pardon a mangled metaphor, as they meet for the third and final time.

If The Widow's House left you thinking that Spider's War would be an easy ride to the finish, you would be mistaken. There are satisfying twists and turns as Cithrin deftly maneuvers everyone into position for the climactic moment.

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Geder's war has spread across the globe: Asterilhold, Elassae, Sarakal. But the empire is beginning to crack. The army has been at war for well over a year, and despite the promise that "cities with a temple are under the goddess's protection," enemy armies begin retaking cities.

For about half of the book, Geder begins to fall into a depression: he loses his appetite, his enthusiasm for life. But he doesn't know it. He believes that he is ill, and can not understand why. The world is being purified, perhaps for the first time ever. And yet he can not bring himself to be happy.

If Geder had not crossed the moral line before, he does so now: cruelly slaughtering hundreds of Timzinae children, because Antea must appear to be strong, because its word must be reliable, and because they were forced into it.

Cithrin, Master Kit, and Marcus all relieve this: the truth of the spider priests, the knowledge that he is allowed to disagree, it frees him.

But then comes one of the book's scariest moments. All throughout the series, Geder has blamed anyone and everyone around for his problems: the burning of Vanai. the taking of the Timzinae. the faltering war. But he finally has a moment where he understands. It's his fault. It drives him into a moment of terrifying madness, one of the most powerful in the book.

That, of course, isn't all:

Cithrin concocts a plan to get rid of the spider priests. The goals have shifted: not defeating Antea in war, but getting rid of the causes of that war. Making sure that Karol Dannien's army doesn't take 'justice' into their own hands and thereby setting the stage for the cycle of war to continue.

And, further, paper money. War gold. The invention of central reserve banking - the greatest financial scheme in history.

Not merely economics but also important is Cithrin's continuing development. In Barriath Kalliam, whom she has a brief affair with, she discovers that maybe one day she might grow to love someone. It's an important development, as she has sometimes struggled to connect with people and often too has been manipulative of others to get what she wants.

Marcus, meanwhile, pieces together the mechanics of the plan, the nitty-gritty details. But even before that he's there in the battlefield, trying to hold off Karol Dannien's angry and energized army with the battered, beaten, worn-down Antean troops.

Clara, of course, pieced together the resistance, and it is she, re-entering society, that brings the first spark of hope to a post-Spider world.

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The dagger and the coin. Such grand auspices, but like the best of stories, in the end it boils down to the human level. Only by Geder's own essential nature can the threat posed by him be ended. His desperate craving for affection, respect, and love.

The book ends not with a massive battle, a glorification of violence and of war as so many fantasy has. The aims become preventing war, ending this one, and trying to ensure that there are fewer in the future. Instead it is the removal of the spider priests, the 'taint'. It's a conclusion that's far, far more powerful for its smaller scale.

"Love, war, betrayal, and vengeance shall spill out now upon these poor boards, and I warn you, not all that are good end well. Not all that are evil are punished. Come close, my friends, and know that in our tale as in the world, anything may happen..."

These words have greeted us before in The Dragon's Path, introducing Marcus to Master Kit, in The Tyrant's Law, where to Clara they seemed not merely a thread but a promise, and finally, one final time in The Spider's War, recalling all that had happened, bookending it all.

And yet those that were evil were, in some way, punished. The good did come out well. But a happy ending needn't be a fairytale ending, and there still are moments of sadness: the acting troupe departs for Far Syramis. Marcus leaves, resuming his role as mercenary. Cithrin is still young and has many years of experience to gain at the Bank. Clara has returned to the court and the signs say she will important in the future. Aster now is King, but even with the war ended, there will be grudges on both sides. Inys still has a workshop to find, leaving room open for "what comes next?"

It's an epic conclusion to a fantastic fantasy series, one that's great the first time around and jaw-dropping the second go. Like The Long Price Quartet, it's fantastic fantasy on its own, it provokes thought, and more then that, it takes inspiration not just from the medieval ages, or the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment, or the dark ages, but from this century, from last century.

The characters are all well-rounded, practically walking off the page. The prose is often beautiful. The world could be just as real as our own. And the matters of truth, of certainty, of the morality of war, of the awful power of self-delusion on a vast scale, of the need for there to be disagreement and dissent in a healthy society... It's an unusually deep set of themes, of modern themes, for epic fantasy, a genre which, as mentioned, typically roots itself in the medieval ages.

It is an epic conclusion to one of the best epic fantasy series' ever written.

Please keep an eye out in the coming days for an overview/analysis of some of the major themes within The Dagger and the Coin.