The Shards of Erebus is Guy Haley's first contribution to the series. It follows Erebus as he breaks up the anathame that wounded Horus (see False Gods) and hands out the shards as smaller athames to a collection of Word Bearers commanders. The story also cuts to Erebus's time learning Warp teleportation from Akshub on Davin, before ending just prior to the attack on Calth. It is a nice little intro, but nothing of significance.
Calth That Was, a novella-length piece by Graham McNeill, is essentially the sequel to Know No Fear. following Remus Ventanus and his allies as they continue their battle against the Word Bearers. However, the real force behind the action is not Ventanus but Maloq Katho, Dark Apostle to Hol Beloth, whom we quickly learn cares nothing for the outcome of the Underworld War and is instead pursuing his own path to daemonhood. Kartho orchestrates the bombing of several underground civilian centres to provoke the Ultramarines into attacking Foedral Fell, but after leveling Fell's fortress Ventanus realises too late that he has fallen into a trap. Fell and his warriors are already dead, having committed ritual suicide, but then reanimate and attack. The Ultramarines manage to fight their way out, but Ventanus barely returns in time to stop Kartho and Beloth as they attack his base with a virus bomb. Ventanus kills Beloth but Kartho escapes into the Warp just before the bomb goes off, and the day is only saved when Ventanus uses a flying speeder to knock the bomb into the Warp portal Kartho created. This is a neat novella that ties off all the loose ends from Know No Fear but cannot match it for brilliance.
Dark Heart by Anthony Reynolds is the origin story of Dark Apostle Marduk from Reynolds' 40K novels. A rogue legionary with little respect for his superiors, Marduk is uses his Warp talents to mutate a fallen Ultramarine during the orbital battle above Calth, and kills his mentor when he attempts to execute Marduk for such a blasphemous use of his power. Brought before Kor Phaeron, Marduk convinces him of his worth and joins Phaeron's inner circle. Dark Heart is an interesting portrayal of conflict within the Word Bearers with enough twists and turns to hold interest until the end.
The Traveller is David Annandale's first contribution to the Heresy series. It follows a man named Blanchot living in one of Calth's underground refugee communities who begins to hear voices and becomes a messiah for the group, directing their murderous attention towards supposed Chaos collaborators whilst slowly going mad. Eventually Blanchot is the only one left alive, and it is revealed that he became possessed by a daemon during the orbital attack. Having used him to direct the slaughter of thousands of innocents, the daemon moves on to possess an Ultramarine when Blanchot is finally rescued. This is a nasty little tale that perfectly illustrates the dark side of religion in the Warhammer universe.
A Deeper Darkness by Rob Sanders follows Ultramarine 'Honorarius' Hylas Pelion as he fights under Tauro Nicodemus in the Underworld War. Learning of a hidden cave network which the Word Bearers are using as a base Pelion leads a scouting force through submerged tunnels to reach it, but once there they discover their foes turned to stone. They then begin to fall prey to a hideous daemon, the sight of which is so horrifying it petrifies its victims. Pelion ultimately defeats the creature by deliberately cutting his visual feed then using his suit lamps to show the creature its own reflection. The references to the Greek legends of Medusa and the Cretan Labyrinth work well, and A Deeper Darkness succeeds as a chilling footnote in the tale of the Underworld War.
The Underworld War by Aaron Dembski-Bowden follows Word Bearer sergeant Jerudai Kaurtal on a pilgrimage across the devastated surface of Calth several years after the initial battle. Kaurtal's desire to commemorate the Word Bearers that fell in the surface battle becomes self-destructive as the radiation riddles his body with cancer, but as one of the Gal Vorbak the daemon inside Kaurtal rouses to heal him. Ultimately, however, the daemon abandons Kaurtal to die. The whole sequence is then revealed to be a vision of the future Kaurtal received during a failed attempt to bond with the daemon prior to the Battle of Calth, an attempt which resulted in his ignominious death. The Underworld War is not what you'd expect from its name, but it is an interesting piece regardless.
Athame by John French traces the story of a single athame dagger through history, from its primordial creation through ownership by barbarian killers and dark scholars to its entry into the series as the ritual weapon of a cultist leader in Know No Fear. The journey of the athame and the tales of its successive owners are fascinating, and there are hints throughout of a greater purpose awaiting it in the future. The story ends with the athame in the hands of Oll Persson as he uses it to escape Calth with his band of refugees, leading straight into the final short in the anthology. Athame is a fascinating and unusual take on one of the Heresy's most fascinating and unusual sub-plots.
Unmarked by Dan Abnett picks up the story of Oll Persson and his ragtag band where Know No Fear left off, following them on a journey through time, space and Oll's own past. Using Warp portals cut by the athame to move between locations and following the mysterious winds of the aether, Oll and his band journey through swamps, woods and empty cities on their way towards an unknown goal, pursued by the malevolent daemon M'kar that is destined to join with Maloq Kartho. The story is replete with references to history, from Oll's journey as one of the Argonauts to his fighting in the battles of Verdun and 73 Easting. The conclusion of the story is rather too neat and cliche, but Abnett's writing makes this short so rich and engaging that it doesn't matter. Unmarked is all of Abnett's genius distilled into one short story.
Limited-edition novella review: The Unburdened
The Horus Heresy series has enjoyed enormous success since its inception, and that success has translated into its launching a new subset of the Warhammer tabletop game. To be clear, a series based on the lore of a tabletop game has inspired a tabletop game based on the lore of the series. The mainstream launch of the Horus Heresy tabletop game was marked with the release of the 'Battle of Calth' starter set, which featured a pair of novellas as well as miniatures and rulebooks. The Honoured by Rob Sanders and The Unburdened by David Annandale are both set during the Underworld War that followed the Battle of Calth, each showing the perspective of one of two mortal enemies, Ultramarine Captain Steloc Aethon and Word Bearers Chaplain Kurtha Sedd.
Those who have read my review of The Honoured (and if you haven't you should read it first) will know that I was counting on The Unburdened to save this duology. It did, just.
I'm not a fan of David Annandale's writing (just wait for my review of The Damnation of Pythos) and so I came into this novella with low expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Annandale's Kurtha Sedd is far more complex than the moustache-twirling villain Rob Sanders portrayed him as in The Honoured, full of conflicting convictions and a desperate for vindication. His inner conflict can and does make him seem weak, at least in the eyes of some of his followers, but he still has the charisma and depth to pull off the role of main protagonist. The amount of internal agonising in this novella was a little high for me overall, but thankfully the inner conflict is matched by the outer as the battles from The Honoured play out through the Word Bearers' perspective. The match-up is not exact and there were a few times it took me a while to realise what I was reading, but overall it works and more importantly The Unburdened does a far better job of contextualising the conflict. Sedd's hatred for Aethon is explained (Aethon played in a role in the Word Bearers' humiliation on Monarchia, see The First Heretic), and yet Sedd shies away from killing him until the final realisation that only by symbolically casting off his ties to the past via murdering Aethon can he ascend into the waiting arms of Chaos. This, as we know, is exactly what he does.
The Unburdened is not a perfect novella; it begins to lose cohesion at the end as Calth's arcologies come tumbling in, but it is an engaging read that succeeds in bringing some clarity to the jerky randomness of The Honoured. Furthermore it is proof that David Annandale can write well when given the proper subject matter, and I hope to see more like this from him in future.
That's all for now, denizens of the thirtieth millenium. Apologies for the delay in getting this post up, a new job has come my way recently and gobbled up my free time. Check back in a week or two when I return to the Sons of Vulkan, with a review of Nick Kyme's novel Deathfire and novella Scorched Earth. Happy reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment