We’re right in the midst of Damocles Month here at Goonhammer! We’ve had a number of Lore Explainers covering the events of the supplements to the game, such as the Taros Campaign, the Taros Air War, and most recently the battle for Agrellan. Today we’re shifting gears from the wargame to the Black Library, for a story-driven look at the events of this colossal campaign.
Published in March 2014, Damocles contains a quartet of novellas focused on some of the events and characters prominent in the campaign. While it would later be reissued under the Space Marine Battles banner, as we’ll see there’s a nice variety in the stories beyond just depictions of combat.
Blood Oath, by Phil Kelly
Phil Kelly is the Black Library’s preeminent writer of the T’au, with multiple novels bringing characters like Farsight and Shadowsun to life as well as being a designer for Games Workshop as far back as the third edition of the game.1
In Blood Oath, Kelly uses the occasion of the battles between the T’au and the Imperium to cleverly illustrate the T’au approaches to warcraft. It’s a subtle approach he never overtly states, but smoothly snaps into place as the story progresses.
In order to understanding what he’s pulled off here you need to understand the concepts of mont’ka and kauyon. These widely disparate military doctrines guide the T’au in shaping their strategies to their greatest advantage.
Mont’ka, or the “killing blow,” seeks to deliver a maximal concentration of force into single, overwhelming strikes. Once the enemy’s points of greatest resistance are eliminated, it’s a far easier matter to mop up what’s left.
Kauyon, the “patient hunter,” is a doctrine more given to ambush and cunning. Use lures, baits, and misdirection to focus the enemy’s attention, then strike while they are at their most vulnerable from a direction they didn’t anticipate.
These doctrines aren’t just tools in the toolbox for many fire caste strategists, but rather philosophies that guide them in times of war. As we are introduced to Shadowsun in this story, her abiding preference for kauyon is made plain in an early vignette:
Kilometres below the peak of Mount Kanji, Shadowsun had sat shrouded in snow at the side of a beast-trail for days. Her skin had been as cold as death, and her breathing as shallow as the tiny sighs of a hibernating mouse. She had remained so still that a large family of arctic spiders had used her as a frame for their tickling webs.
Inert as stone, at one with the mountain, when the one-eared snow lynx had finally wandered past her, she had simply lunged out and broken its neck.
Shadowsun’s kauyon finds its foil in the fiercely mont’ka-like approach of her nemesis, Kor’sarro Khan of the White Scars, who has been dispatched to help head off the T’au assault of Agrella Prime that forms the story’s narrative thrust. Khan is as subtle as a punch in the nose, gleefully leading the White Scars to attack head-on with their assault bikes once the T’au come knocking on the hives.
Here’s where Kelly weaves this study in contrasts, as each side’s approach reveals the shortcomings of the other’s. Shadowsun’s clever feints and traps fail to snare the belligerent White Scars, while Khan’s full-throttle approach looks more like shadowboxing against an enemy as deft and fleet of foot as the T’au battlegroup. “A foe with the power of flight,” observes a Raven Guard commander, “is not easily slain by an earthbound blade.”
Ultimately, both Khan and Shadowsun are led to attempt the opposing doctrine to find success, and while I won’t spoil the outcomes Kelly does a terrific job of guiding the reader to see this as a natural evolution of tactics rather than just a plot change.
Overall Kelly’s prose is direct and workmanlike, making this a strong opener to the anthology.
Broken Sword, by Guy Haley
Fresh off the heels of Kelly’s T’au war doctrine examination, we get a surprisingly introspective tale from Guy Haley. Broken Sword is a tale told through testimonial2, with a gue-vesa (human) auxiliary being interviewed by his T’au superiors. At the same time, the other narrative strand of the book is told as a mind-scan interrogation of a captured Space Marine.
Through both perspectives we’re able to see the events leading up to the attack on a T’au water caste diplomat through both sides of the conflict, and the result is a story with a great deal of emotional depth that’s surprisingly moving as it concludes.
A lot of this is down to how Haley leans into the relationship between the T’au diplomat, Skilltalker, and a human member of his security retinue and former Imperial Guard Captain, Jathen Korling. Haley gives each character plenty of space to develop the genuine affection between them, and as a result when he goes for a more emotionally-charged ending to the tale he’s able to stick the landing.
There isn’t really a happy ending here- it’s Warhammer 40,000, after all- but if (like me) you’re one of those who can find a flash of optimism a treat in amongst all the grimdark then you’ll really enjoy this one.
Black Leviathan, by Ben Counter
This is the third of these novella narrative reviews I’ve done here at Goonhammer, and Ben Counter’s Blood on the Mountain was a standout in the first one (Sanctus Reach). “Counter uses every page to craft a tight, focused adventure,” I said at the time, “featuring a Space Wolves raid on an Ork facility on Alaric Prime that ends in a controlled retreat up a sacred mountain.”
Unfortunately, I didn’t find that he captured the magic quite so well in this go-around.
Black Leviathan depicts the struggle for Briseis, a planet near one of the conflict’s central flashpoints of Agrellan. Unlike their more prosperous hive-world neighbor, Briseis had remained a tribal and barbarous world that only in the last millennium or so had begun to centralize around a capital city, Port Memnor.
Briseis being late to the party meant that there was no great depth of affection between its citizens and the Imperium, so when the T’au arrive bringing hushed whispers of freedom and comparative self-determination, they fertilize very receptive soil.
The Space Marines have their work cut out for them, with forces of the Ultramarines and Jade Dragons assigned to pacify the nascent rebellion and bring Briseis firmly back into the fold of the Imperium.
Jade Dragons? One can be forgiven for ignorance here, with this Chapter appearing to be a creation of the author for the purposes of the narrative.
Other Chapters might rely on a chain of command and deference to rank, artificial constraints on the souls of men. The Jade Dragons organised themselves according to the rules of nature, to the apparent capacity and willingness for one to kill another. Other Chapters would not understand such bonds, at once brotherhood and predation. It was one of the many secrets the Jade Dragons kept.
Counter plays in a space here where author Robbie MacNiven shines, writing obscure Chapters with esoteric rituals and secretive customs like the Exorcists (Oaths of Damnation, review here) and Carcharodons. Indeed, the overlap with the latter extends even further given that both the Jade Dragons and Carcharodons appear to share a common Pacific Islander theming.
Unfortunately, Counter’s story is somewhat hampered by two things. First, a novella has less space to let the imagination roam in when compared to a novel, particularly when your newly-introduced Chapter has to share a stage with the Ultramarines. We don’t know a lot about this mysterious Chapter, but it’s established early that they’re a rare sight.
‘Jade Dragons,’ said Thaxos, an impressed note in his voice. ‘I never thought I’d see them in the flesh, either.’
As a result, the Dragons are more or less relegated to a plot device, and it’s one that perhaps strains a bit of credulity. As it turns out, this rare and secretive Astartes Chapter has an obsession with portents and omens as they hunt the Black Leviathan across the cosmos.
This was the Black Leviathan. It had been there from the start, since the murky time when the Jade Dragons Chapter was founded. It was the darkness within them and the treacherous enemy without, it was deceit and perfidy incarnate. It was, above everything, betrayal. The Black Leviathan was the shadow of the Great Adversary, of the gods of the warp, of the corruptive and infinite enemy that men called Chaos.
Chaos by another name isn’t too farfetched, but things quickly go off the rails as the dark secret of this most mysterious of Astartes Chapters is exploited by… the T’au? Crafty water caste operatives arrange to place a strip of Black Leviathan hide in the possession of the planet’s senior Adeptus Mechanicus, which leads the Jade Dragons to go full murderhobo on their fellow servants of the Emperor- and the Briseis campaign to go pear-shaped.
This struck me as the culmination of unlikely events, as not only did the T’au manage to uncover intel on this obscure Chapter that allowed for their manipulation, but in short order also managed to procure the precise red cape to wave in front of the bull.
Blood on the Mountain was tightly focused and paid off. Alas, Black Leviathan didn’t quite stick the landing.
Hunter’s Snare, by Josh Reynolds
There’s something deeply resonant about the idea of enemies at war trading in- even for a moment- their mutual enmity for something approaching amity- or at least a begrudging respect. Take, for instance, the tale of the soldiers during World War I who, on Christmas Eve, put down their guns and picked up a soccer ball (the basis for the film Joyeux Noël).
It doesn’t have to go full Enemy Mine (“Enemies because they were taught to be. Allies because they had to be. Brothers because they dared to be.”) to be meaningful. Indeed, sometimes it’s a simple salute before departing the battlefield, such as in the the classic moment in the GI Joe comics3 where enemy pilots Ace and Wild Weasel, both out of ammo, extend a gesture of respect before returning to their respective bases.
Reynolds works this theme into his story, and in so doing makes it a natural and fitting conclusion to the anthology. We were introduced to the rivalry between Kor’sarro Khan and Shadowsun in the collection’s opener, Blood Oath, where each side had to learn to understand and embrace the tactics of the other in order to secure advantage on the battlefield.
Now we’ve moved a little further into the conflict. Their enmity isn’t new anymore, but rather a struggle that has played out over a number of battles with neither appearing to hold the upper hand for long. Frustrated at the lack of a decisive blow, Khan looks to force the issue by using himself as bait, knowingly springing a trap set for him to pull Shadowsun into a direct confrontation.
But whereas the opening tale highlighted their differences, Reynolds looks to close on their commonalities. Khan and Shadowsun, you see, aren’t all that different from one another, and this realization dawns between them as they engage first with guns, then more intimately with blades.
She tossed aside her remaining blaster and tore her crushed and mangled helmet from her head. A topknot of hair, as crimson as a Chogorian sunset, unspooled and snapped out as a slate-blue face with large, dark eyes glared at him. He recognised the look in those eyes, alien as they were. ‘Maybe we are alike,’ he said, drawing his combat knife.
As they battle to still another stalemate, a reflection of how evenly matched the two of them are, there’s that final farewell of grudging respect.
In a world where “suffer not a xeno to live” is the default, this is a delightful- and dare I say more human– conclusion that makes this story stand out.
Hunter’s Snare is also notable for the character of Thursk, one of the Dark Hunters. A White Scars successor chapter, the Dark Hunters novel Umbra Sumus would be slated for release the following year until the threat of legal action turned it into one of the most sought-after books in the Black Library (covered more in-depth in our kickoff feature Black Library Bibliophiles). Thursk is attached to the White Scars as a kind of foreign exchange student, and the cross-chapter banter delivers much of the story’s light humor.
So there you have it, a nice cross-section of the many events unfolding across the titanic struggle between the T’au Empire and Imperium of Man. This was a solid collection both individually as well as thematically, with the contrasts between the book’s opener and closer being particularly well-executed in that “mix tape” sorta way.4
Footnotes
- Notable mention to Noah Van Nguyen as a rising star here, as his Elemental Council is incredible work (review here).
- If you enjoy this approach, it’s also leaned into heavily by Gav Thorpe in the recently-reviewed Luther: First of the Fallen.
- Issue #34, to be precise.
- The term is a bit dated, but then hell, so am I. But I enjoy looking at story placement in anthologies as an element of the editor’s craft, and have done so previously here and here.
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