Let's Read Warhammer: The Night Lords

The First Heretic inspired me to read more Dembski-Bowden, and more about the Night Lords' Primarch, Konrad Curze; then Shadows of Treachery made it worse. To be honest, I knew next to nothing about the Night Lords before this reading project, except that their colors are dark blue and red, and they like skulls. They also have a potentially hilarious legion trait in Legions Imperialis where if they kill an enemy HQ unit, everyone close enough takes damage.

I started with the short story The Abyssal Edge. A grievously wounded Imperial Navy officer is assigned to the Night Lords as an archivist, and comes across some disturbing information about a clash between the Night Lords and the Thousand Sons and their Primarchs. It's a good little story, written well and effectively. There were also good Night Lords short stories in Eye of Terra, and a whole ADB novella in Shadows of Treachery, as well as a Graham McNeill story where Curze kicks Rogal Dorn's ass. Curze was also just about the only good thing about Unremembered Empire. So suffice to say that at this point, I'm becoming a fan.

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The obvious next step was to pick up the Night Lords omnibus, and read it while waiting for my copy of Master of Mankind. However, in the foreword to the omnibus, Dembski-Bowden waxes lyrical on Simon Spurrier's Night Lords novel Lord of the Night (2005), which, it turns out, is available as an ebook. So I started there.

Lord of the Night follows two characters: Captain Zho Sahaal of the Night Lords, and Interrogator Mita Ashyn, a sanctioned psyker of the Ordo Xenos. Zho Sahaal drops out of the warp and crashes on a hive world where Ashyn is rooting out xenos cults, and all sorts of hijinks ensue.

It's an unexpectedly excellent book! Both protagonists are great characters. Sahaal is as insufferably emo as his primarch, but also does an excellent Predator impression. Ashyn's travails in her Inquisitor's entourage sometimes feel a bit too hackneyed, but overall it's a good story, and I like how on some level, I at least kept rooting for the Night Lord. So in that respect, this isn't helping. But I definitely recommend Lord of the Night.

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The omnibus itself collects Dembski-Bowden's Night Lords trilogy and a couple of short stories. They're all good, and the trilogy itself is superb. I think it's probably the best 40k fiction I've read.

The Night Lords omnibus follows former Apothecary Talos, who's inherited his Primarch's gift and has visions of the future, and is therefore known as the Night Lords' prophet. At the start of the first novel, he's the de facto squad leader of First Claw, Tenth Company of the Night Lords, aboard the strike cruiser Covenant of Blood. The company and cruiser are commanded by the Exalted, who used to be Tenth Company's commander, captain Vandred, but is now a daemon of some kind.

Talos is the main character, but we're equally here for his human slaves, especially his long-suffering pilot Septimus, and the marines of First Claw. As new slaves are captured and new marines join the squad, there's a sort of found family vibe that's one of the main attractions of the story. The other is Talos, who's an excellent character.

The first novel follows Tenth Company as they join Abaddon's current project and participate in an assault on forge world of Crythe, while dealing with schemes and plots both outside and inside the company. Abaddon is still basically the same guy he was in Horus Rising: someone you'd be quite happy to have leading an assault, but not necessarily planning one. The story is great, with some special highlights like the Night Lords fighting a Warhound Titan and the flashbacks to the legion after the Heresy and the death of their Primarch.

The second part of the trilogy has Tenth Company join Huron Blackheart and his Red Corsairs for an attack on a loyalist fortress-monastery, and it's good stuff, with Talos and the gang going fully Night Lords on the Imperials, and trying to steal back a Night Lords cruiser from the Corsairs and still scheming and struggling for power among themselves.

While both of the first two novels are threaded through with flashbacks to the Night Lords' past after the Heresy, in the third they return to Tsagualsa, where Curze died, and fight some elves. It's high drama, and an appropriately epic ending to the trilogy.

Dembski-Bowden deserves particular respect for making Talos and his gang genuinely sympathetic characters whose adventures you want to follow, while never letting you forget that they're Night Lords Chaos Marines, and therefore utterly horrible monsters. It all adds up to a surprisingly wide range of emotions to feel for a Warhammer 40,000 story. So, y'know, highly recommended.