Books: The dagger and the coin series

[ladyofastolat]

The Dagger and the Coin series by Daniel Abraham
The Dragon's Path
The King's Blood
The Tyrant's Law
The Widow's House
The Spider's War

Five book fantasy series (complete) about war, fanaticism and banking. Long ago, the world was ruled by dragons, who created the 13 disparate species of humanity as slaves, but the dragons are long gone now. In the first book's prologue, an apostate priest flees from the cult of a spider goddess whose initiates have the power to sense truth and lies, claiming that the goddess is going to "eat the world."

Elsewhere and some time later, an army from Imperial Antea is marching on the mercantile city of Vanai. As the army approaches, Cithrin bel Sarcour, raised by a bank, is tasked with smuggling out the bank's wealth and ledgers and getting them safely to the head office, but events take her on a very different path. Guarding her caravan is Marcus Wester, once a famous general and war hero. After a great loss and betrayal, he has sworn never to get involved in the wars of kings, but war will soon find him, after all. Back in Antea, Dawson Kalliam, a reactionary nobleman, is scheming to save the kingdom from the plots of those who want to bring change, while Clara, his sensible wife, uses the tools available to a noblewoman to try to make peace. And with the army of Antea is Geder Palliako, a bookish young nobleman, the butt of jokes, soon to be a tool for factional in-fighting that he doesn't understand. He just wants to be taken seriously, not to be laughed at. He just wants his books... books that might lead him to rediscover something that should really have been allowed to stay hidden.

High fantasy often ignores finance. As the word "coin" in the series title suggests, this series does not. How many other fantasy series can end a book not with a climactic battle, but a climactic audit? Even when the stakes get higher, and the fate of the world is at stake, it is resisted not as much by questing heroes with magical artefacts, but with banking. To be fair, there is a brief episode when two people go off on a quest for a magic sword, but it only takes a few chapters and doesn't end the way they expect. Unlike some high fantasy novels, which take many chapters on endless quests and journeys, most of the journeys in this series are similarly brief, with people setting off for a city on the far side of the continent at the end of a chapter, and having reached there the next time we meet them.

This is not a series in which all the characters are united against an unambiguously evil Dark Lord, who is feared and hated by all. As the series progresses, one of the viewpoint characters is the chief antagonist, but in their own mind, they are the hero, sacrificing their own happiness for the sake of what needs to be done. Many of the populace would agree. Much of this comes from the power of the spider cult and the certainty that it brings. The initiates can sense "truth" and therefore believe it utterly, and have a power in their voice that causes all who hear it to believe it, but as the apostate in the prologue has realised, all they are sensing is certainty, and certainty and truth can be very different things. Misconceptions become orthodoxy. Lies become the unquestioned basis for a "righteous" war and "justified" genocide.

It's not a particularly comfortable read as a result, although it doesn't revel in its grimness or delight in violence and pain. It's hard not to be reminded of real-life parallels, both in 20th century history, and in daily life - those comments you read on the internet by people who are so unshakeably certain of their own truth that they continue to assert it - and to revile those who disagree - despite all contrary evidence. I found it a compelling read as a result. Fanatical certainty scares me, so I desperately wanted this series to reach a happy, or at least hopeful, end, and needed to read on until it did. I just wish that in real life we could blame spiders.

But it's not all darkness. There is some humour in the exchanges of the travelling players, recurring secondary characters, and in the laconic exchanges of Marcus and his second-in-command. I also found some of the character arcs particularly satisfying, especially that of Clara Kalliam, the middle-aged noblewoman who has always been defined by her position as wife of a noble lord, but who ends up becoming so much more. The most complex characterisation, though, is probably the antagonist figure, part monster, part victim of lies - capable of performing monstrous deeds and blaming everyone else, including the victim ("look what they made me do"), yet capable of unselfishness and kindness, too. A villain, yes, but not just that.

I found it a slow burn at first. Throughout book one, I was merely saying "it's not bad, I suppose," when asked. I liked it enough to carry on reading, given that I had the whole series already sitting beside my bed, but it hadn't reached out and grabbed me. That didn't happen until fairly far into book 2, and it didn't really grip me until book 3. For me, the true test of how much I like a book comes in how I remember it in the months and years to come, and it's too soon to tell. I didn't fall in love with it, rather than just desperately need to know how it ended. Will I reread it? Maybe. Maybe not. But it did feature quite prominently in my thoughts and conversation for the last week, and in the end, I think it was all really quite good.

Comments

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

You had me at "fantasy" and "audit"...

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Also, Daniel Abraham is one half of "James S.A. Corey" isn't he? (Together with George R.R. Martin's IT support guy apparently.) I like their Expanse series.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's right. I only got as far as the first book of the Expanse series. I found it perfectly readable, but it didn't grab me enough to want to stick with the story through a long and as yet unfinished series. The fact that this particular series was already finished was a big draw.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Banking also features quite heavily in Joe Abercrombie's fantasy series.

[tovaglia.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I read the first of these. I enjoyed it, and really liked the banking angle, although found the story quite dark in patches. Didn't pick up the next books in the series - but might do so, after this review!

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I have to warn you that the story only gets darker in the subsequent books. The burnt city in book one is a prelude of more, and worse, to come. I don't think it revels in its darkness, like some books seem to do, and there is plenty of hope and friendship and quiet heroism to counter the darkness, but it's not a light and happy read. A good one, though, in my opinion.