Anthologies serve an important part of the Black Library ecosystem, allowing stories that were previously released in digital format to be given life in print- often centered around a particular theme.
For example, every story (save one) the recent Blood of the Imperium anthology (reviewed here) was originally released in digital. The Black Library set its theme, then grabbed applicable tales from the Black Library Celebration 2024 (Painboyz, The Reskard Purgation), Tyranid Invasion Week 2023 (The Long and Hungry Road, Blood Harvest), Advent 2023 (The Price of Morkai), Black Library Character Week 2023 (Starstruck, Memories of Broken Glass), Warhammer 40,000 Week (The Dust that Remains, The Whispering Blade), and even back to Advent 2021 (The Buried Beast).
The story that wasn’t digitally released first? That was Tome Keepers: Legacy of Defiance which had been serialized first in the pages of White Dwarf.
For another example we need look no further than the upcoming Paragon of Faith and Other Stories, which includes all five of the eShorts released as part of last year’s Daughters of the Emperor Week.
I imagine the challenge is a bit steeper for Age of Sigmar, given the diminished share of the pie the fantasy side of Warhammer gets in the Black Library. Of the four eShort Theme Weeks each year, typically only one is earmarked for Age of Sigmar- such as the most recent Raiders of the Realms Week (reviewed here).
Little surprise, then, to sufficiently populate an anthology around a given theme (here, Cities of Sigmar) the editors of the Black Library had to mine some previously-released content. Five of these stories are paper reprints, coming from several of the Inferno! anthology books as well as 2020’s Oaths and Conquests anthology.
That may disappoint longtime readers who may already have enjoyed these stories, but there is some upside here as we also get a new, never-before-published tale in Hal Wilson’s The Wanderer in addition to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s titular novella.
So how does this collection stack up? Let’s take a look!
On the Shoulders of Giants, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
At the risk of making the rest of this review seem anticlimactic, Tchaikovsky’s collection-opening novella is the best of a solid lineup of stories.
There’s little question of the author’s skill with a pen, having won both an Arthur C. Clarke Award as well as a Hugo1 for his Children of Time series. Of course, how that might translate into the Age of Sigmar setting isn’t necessarily a settled question, though at the time of writing this he’d already penned two short stories for the setting, A Taste of Lightning (2022) and Web of Ruin (2023). If the latter sounds particularly familiar, it was a chosen selection for this year’s Black Library Celebration mini-anthology.
In On the Shoulders of Giants, Tchaikovsky takes a very unlikely pair of heroes to center his tale. Fusil-Major Rosforth is a sharpshooter for the Cities of Sigmar, and rather than finding some hidden perch somewhere to snipe from he instead rides into battle atop a crow’s nest carried by the ogor warrior Slobda. Any curiosity in how that arrangement appears is, wisely, put paid by the cover illustration by Igor Sid.
Over the course of the story, Rosforth’s company must mount a fighting withdrawal from a skaven invasion, with threats ranging from underground ambush tunnels to an opposing enemy sniper. To his credit, Tchaikovsky never refers to the latter as a Warplock Jezzail any more than he refers to Rosforth and Slobda as a Fusil-Major with Ogor Warhulk. They are these things in-game, of course, but sometimes it’s better to leave tabletop names to the tabletop.
Saddled with refugees from a nearby, overrun settlement their only hope is to make it to a nearby realmgate. Tchaikovsky writes a terrific action story here, but he uses all of the extra space the novella format allows him to craft a tale with genuine heart. Rosforth’s not a mobile weapons platform by choice, but rather as a veteran soldier who lost both of his legs on the battlefield he still longs for a way to contribute to the fight.
Slobda the ogor, meanwhile, is a potentially comedic character that Tchaikovsky plays endearingly straight.
He’d shared an army with Slobda for over a year and, like most humans did, had made certain assumptions. Because Slobda, like many ogors with regular mealtimes, was jolly. Because she had put on a handful of human mannerisms, like someone might put on an amusing hat, that they could take off just as easily. Rosforth liked Slobda. She was, no lie, his closest friend in all the world. I can always count on her support had been his joke, at his own expense, at the role that fate and disability had fit him for, but it was true, too. And the heart of that friendship was knowing that she was not just a big human with a big appetite. She was a child of a different god entirely.
The chemistry between the two is terrific, and the result is a story with a lot more heart and pathos than I’d had any right to expect. This one’s top-tier reading.
The Wanderer, by Hal Wilson
We go from an action novella to a mystery short story in the next pages of the book, with Wilson delivering a tale with a gripping premise: men within a Freeguild are mysteriously killing themselves in groups, and there’s no apparent reason why or even connection between them. It’s up to the crusade’s whisperblade- think a sort of cross between shadowy spymaster and 40K commissar here- to get to the bottom of the mystery.
A terrific setup, Wilson opens the story with the discovery of one set of…murders? Killings? Well, deaths for sure, and you’re pulled right into the hunt for whoever- or whatever- is behind it.
Unfortunately, it also proves just a bit too ambitious for Wilson to pull off in the short story format. The mystery never really gets a chance to breathe as the dots connect far too quickly for any real suspense, and ultimately the mystery unravels a bit too conveniently to feel organic. It’s a bit like a detective story where the hero finds all the incriminating evidence he needs in the desk drawer of the villain, and then when confronted the villain gives a complete recounting of their dastardly plans and how they’d have pulled it all off.
Thankfully, there aren’t any references to “meddling kids,” but it was pat enough to distract me from the narrative. In another world where perhaps Wilson got to use this terrific idea to pad out a novella, it would have better realized its potential.
Hounds, by Christopher Allen
So many (many) years ago when I was in high school, I had an English teacher knock a full letter grade off of a paper I wrote because of an excess of “pompous diction.” I was absolutely incensed- pompous diction, moi?- and confronted him after class.
He let me know that writing was an act intended to convey ideas and information from the author to the reader, and if instead I used it as a vehicle to show off my cleverness I risked lessening the effectiveness of what I was trying to convey. Perhaps he was right or perhaps he was wrong (regarding me, with the hindsight of decades I suspect it was more of the former), but I couldn’t help but be reminded of that when I read Allen’s Hounds.
The story itself was intriguing- a pair of witch hunters seek to unravel a murderous mystery in a town within Ghur, the Realm of Beasts, as the townfolk prepare a very bloody annual festival. But too often some of the word choice itself seemed to get in the way of the tale.
For example, in describing the town as the witch hunters ride into it, “the crooked ways were sclerotic with detritus.” A light in the stable “ignited into warm effulgence,” a snakeskin decoration “sloughed skins from some iridescent serpent’s ecdysis.” (Ecdysis, incidentally, was the ensilage that fragmented the artiodactyl’s vertebrae.)
Don’t get me wrong, I am very much enamored of language and the boundless depths afforded an expansive vocabulary for rich expression, but there’s a limit to how many times I need to pause my perusal and hit up the Merriam-Webster before it has a deleterious effect upon my enjoyment of the tale.
As always, your mileage may vary.
Roadwarden, by Liane Merciel
Back in 2020 the Black Library released a Daughters of Khaine novella anthology called Covens of Blood. Featuring a portmanteau structure (where multiple stories by different authors were blended into an overall narrative framework), two of the books three authors were making their Warhammer debut. One of them was Liane Merciel, the author of Roadwarden.
Merciel would go on to write her best-known Warhammer work three years later with Blacktalon, and would go on to see these elite Stormcast Eternals get their own animated series on WarhammerTV. Between those two milestones, however, she penned the story Roadwarden for Volume 6 of Inferno! Tales from the Worlds of Warhammer.
In this tale, a roadwarden (think travel guide) is hired to escort a motley band of adventurers through the Wastes, on the hunt for a precious artifact known as Eshael’s Font. But the journey isn’t what they’d expected- nor, for that matter, is the Font.
This story’s enjoyably crafted, offering a mystery that it’s able to tease out economically given the length of the format and still pull off an engaging conclusion.
Murder by Moonlight, by Noah Van Nguyen
Another story, another mystery! 2023 was a breakthroiugh year for author Noah Van Nguyen, with his first two novels (Godeater’s Son, Yndrasta: The Celestial Spear) seeing publication. He also produced this story, released as part of the Age of Sigmar eShorts Week in October of that year.
One of a number of whodunnits in this anthology, here Lord-Celestant Gardus of the Steel Souls learns that a series of murders have been happening wherever his crusade has gone. Upon each body is a Sigmarite token, the kind his chamber have been distributing to the locals. Could a Stormcast Eternal be behind the killings? And if so, for what purpose?
While Godeater’s Son and Elemental Council (review here) have been some of my top reads in the past year, I confess I wasn’t taken with this story from Nguyen. The premise is intriguing; whether or not one of Sigmar’s chosen could have developed a murderous bent after an imperfect reforging is a great question that I imagine could drive an entire novel.
Alas, the central tension of this story is driven by characters who take things too much at face value. Lord-Celestand Gardus puts an unreasonable stock in the possibility the accusations could be true, while his right-hand-man Feros the Heavy Hand seems to take it much too personally that Gardus didn’t just dismissively reject the possibility without even consideration it.
The end result is that it feels a bit contrived. Nguyen’s actually very good at this sort of thing (Elemental Council in particular excelled here, with the characters having very nuanced and realistic conversations with one another about the story’s unfolding events), making this a rare miss.
The Manse of Mirrors, by Nick Horth
In an anthology full of mystery stories, a straightforward crime caper comes like a breath of fresh air. This is about as classic a setup as you can get, with four intrepid rogues working a break-in job in the uninhabited mansion of a long-dead wizard. In Shyish, the Realm of Death.
I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Of course we already know the answer is, what couldn’t, right? Horth, author of a number of Callis & Toll takes, keeps this one moving at breakneck pace as the four (soon to be fewer) mine the mansion for its hidden secrets. He may not break any new ground here, but this mid-book story does exactly what you’d want it to do.
Past Returns, by Hal Wilson
A washed-up colonel given over to the drink gets one more shot at redemption in this quick read by Hal Wilson. Looking to raise funds for a new Freeguild company at a ball for the rich and decadent, he stumbles into- surprise!– a cult of Slaanesh operating right beneath their noses.
Wilson has written three stories for the Black Library, and all three are included within On the Shoulders of Giants and Other Stories. Past Returns was originally part of 2023’s Dawnbringers Week.
I always enjoy a good redemption story, and Wilson’s fits the bill here well enough with a very tight focus.
False Dawn, by Christopher Allen
Given my earlier experience with Hounds, I feared I might be in for more of the same when, in the opening paragraph of this one there is reference to light catching “on every outcrop of nacreous rock.” Instead, Allen writes this one much more straightforwardly and we end up with a terrific little story of the consequences of hubris.
A Freeguild Captain seizes her opportunity for glory when misfortune strikes her crusade, only to find that the cost was far more than she expected to pay. I particularly enjoyed how Allen depicts the realm of Hysh here, with the story’s orruk antagonists making clever use of the terrain. This helps give the world a genuine, lived-in feel, and with Hysh being one of the less-featured realms in these stories it was welcome to see it get its (forgive me) turn in the spotlight.
Like the one preceding it, False Dawn was originally released as part of 2023’s Dawnbringers eShorts Week.
The River of Death, by Anna Stephens
I mentioned earlier that Covens of Blood served as the launching point for two of today’s storytellers, and in addition to Liane Merciel we saw Anna Stephens make her Black Library debut. What’s particularly interesting about Stephens is that she was sought out by Games Workshop rather than the more common, other way ’round2. On the back of the success of her Godblind Trilogy, she was asked to do some work for Warhammer and had her choice of either Age of Sigmar or Warhammer 40,000.
She opted for the former and here we are, a novella, a novel, and some short stories- two of which are featured here.
In The River of Death, we’re treated to one of my favorite kinds of Warhammer stories, the ones that show a little slice of life for the common reed-harvesters of Ghyran. Sure the protagonist Brida isn’t quite ordinary- she’s managed to catch the hand of a wealthy young suitor after all- but Stephens draws her characters with a sincerity and earnestness that pays off in the story’s second half.
There they find the source of the pollution that’s been tainting their waterways- and threatening their livelihoods- or perhaps its fairer to say it finds them. A terrific and refreshing entry in the anthology.
The Siege of Greenspire, by Anna Stephens
I was delighted to find that we were back with Brida in the very next story, albeit a Brida twenty years older. There’s only the slightest callback to the events of the previous story- a nice touch that could easily be missed if it wasn’t for having read them back to back.
Brida is now Captain of her own Freeguild Company, stationed at a watchtower along the Emerald Line between Fort Gardus and Hammerhal-Ghyra. This Brida has been well-weathered by the soldiering life, guiding her company with the discipline needed to survive in a hostile posting.
That hostility comes mainly from the area’s tzaangor infestations, rapacious warflocks continually probing for weakness up and down the line. The story’s main narrative thrust is another whodunnit, but the twist here is that there’s a traitor sabotaging the watchtower’s defenses.
Much like The Wanderer, things resolve just a bit too quickly to really get hooked by the mystery, but it does manage to make the culprit at least a little harder to guess.
The Book of Transformations, by Matt Keefe
It wouldn’t be a proper anthology without at least one ‘seduction of Chaos” yarn, and Keefe delivers here with a tale that leans into the familiar trope of scientific curiosity becoming damning obsession.
Mehrigus runs an apothecary but has dreams of overcoming the limitations of his art- and the lesser minds of his peers- as he chases the vision of healing through transformation. No points for guessing which of the five Chaos Gods this is catnip to, and if a few ethical boundaries get crossed along the way, well, it’s a small price to pay for the advancement of knowledge!
I’ve found the key to these sorts of stories lies in two areas. First, how sympathetic the character is prior to their descent, and second, how realistic that descent is portrayed. Keefe does a good job here walking Mehrigus down the path of good intentions, and it makes for a very solid inclusion.
The Nameless, by Hal Wilson
Third time’s the charm for Wilson as he sees out the anthology with another tale set in Shyish. This one is significantly different from The Manse of Mirrors, providing another look at life in the Realm of Death. And what a look it is!
The story begins with the nameless narrator waking up in the street, no idea of where or even who he is. His only clue is a pistol beside him that’s engraved with a name- a name that might not even be his. As packs of nighthaunt gather at the edges of the town, the race is on to uncover the secrets of his identity to learn who he is- and what he must do.
The amnesiac hero trope tends to be common in RPG video games as a way of keeping the player’s character a cypher, though by being central to the plot it tacks towards the Planescape: Torment end of that spectrum. It is used to good effect here by Wilson as we learn that it’s not just the narrator who is impacted- it’s the entire town. This has the effect of making him feel a lot less ‘special’ and more ordinary- one everyman amongst a multitude- and in so doing keeps the tension high as the story unfolds.
I’ll leave it at that to preserve the story for those wishing to read it, but it’s Wilson’s strongest contribution of the three, and one of the highlights of the anthology overall. This one kept the pages turning to the end, closing the book on a high.
Conclusion
Overall, I found On the Shoulders of Giants and Other Stories somewhat ironically named, given how much of the value of the book rests on its titular novella. Tchaikovsky’s contribution here is wonderful storytelling, one which is unmatched by what follows in the rest of the anthology. To be completely fair that’s not an apples-to-apples comparison given that he has the room to really flex his chops with a novella while the rest are short stories, so take that with a grain of salt.
Still, I didn’t find this collection wowed me quite in the way that, say, Blood of the Imperium recently did (review here). There were no bad stories in the lot, but neither did too many jump out and really grab me the way I’d hoped they would after getting off to such a strong start. Anna Stephens The River of Death and Hal Wilson’s The Nameless were the two real standouts.
When I reviewed Blood of the Imperium I concluded that given the price of short stories on the Black Library website ($4 apiece), the anthology’s cover price of $18 was easily exceeded in value. Because On the Shoulders of Giants and Other Stories has to date only been released in hardcover, that’s a higher bar to clear. It’s a nice, weighty hardback that looks great on the shelf- but it’s also twice as expensive.
Footnotes
- Tchaikovsky has subsequently disavowed it
- According to an interview she gave with Arbiter Ian’s Youtube channel
