Treachery's Tools

3 stars, Metaphorosis reviews

Summary
Alastar and Alyna have a daughter now - a precociously talented imager with an attitude. But it's a dangerous time - bad harvests and festering resentments are leading to increasing tension between factors, High Holders, the Rex, and, of course, the Collegium of Imagers.

Review
It's a tremendous relief to be nearing the end of this slog of a series. At the same time, I was happy to find that this book was faster moving than others, in part because so much happened in it that there just wasn't time for the usual minutiae about breakfast and repetitive conversations.

It's not all plain sailing, though. We learned in the middle subseries that, 400 years ago, drinking lager was helpful in restoring imager health and energy. If you didn't get it back then, you definitely can't miss it in this book, where hardly a single imaging event goes by without someone being urged to drink lager and then dutifully acknowledging that it's helpful. It is, however, somewhat astounding that, despite 400 years of a Collegium strictly dedicated to training imagers, not only have they not developed anything better, but this exciting piece of advice has been roundly forgotten – despite the fact that it would very easy to rediscover.

While there's more action in this book, Modesitt seemingly gives up on any theory of distributed governance. Alastart, the Maitre of the Collegium, is apparently Solidar's unacknowledged master of not only imaging, but military strategy and tactics, economics, governance in general, and, of course, lager. There's no pretense that the Rex is in charge, and even the military is more than happy to defer to a magician.

That magician, in turn, sticks to his principle that no problem cannot be solved by either killing people or threatening to kill them. And behold, it all works out.