In Gav Thorpe’s The First Wall, there’s an ongoing debate about whether religion is bad for you. On one side is Euphrati Keeler, incipient mystic and star of the rising cult of the God-Emperor. On the other is the Custodian Amon Tauromachian, one of the Emperor’s personal bodyguards and a staunch non-believer. Amon circles around Keeler for most of the novel, first tracking her location and then assigned to follow and attend on her. He repeatedly warns her that the cult of the God-Emperor is a danger to the besieged Palace of Terra, where they both shelter from the forces of Chaos, but she thinks it could do some good. The Emperor protects, she says. The more people who know, the more who believe, the stronger He becomes. The back and forth continues through to the novel’s climax, where Keeler and Amon both experience a spiritual eruption – but from different sides.

In Chapter Thirty, during a religious gathering, we’re first shown Keeler’s perspective. Her congregation is ambushed by Custodians and gunships, who swarm in and start to shoot. Keeler stands firm and unites her people, who manifest a psychic faith-shield to protect them from the gunfire. “It was then that Keeler saw the light of the Emperor shining from the congregation, spreading like a dawn from person to person. As it stretched further down the processional, she saw bolt-rounds sparking from the gleam, as though a power field had been switched on.” We’re then given Amon’s perspective. He sees the shield not like Keeler, not as “holy ambience”, but as a swarm of flies. It’s a miasma, a mire, a demonic presence, fueled by the congregation, who secretly worship Chaos. Amon resolves the conflict by appealing to Keeler’s sense of faith. He begs her to pray to the Emperor: she does, and the veil is lifted. “Below she saw the Lightbearers. Each was no longer a shining lamp but a marsh-flame, burning the decay of centuries that burbled from the underbelly of the world.” She discovers the daemon at the root of the infestation (Cor’bax Utterblight, Daemon Prince of Nurgle), and casts it out, breaking the spell and resolving the story’s conflict. Religion both is and is not bad for you, The First Wall concludes. The monstrous power of Chaos was smuggled in under the auspices of this new faith, but Keeler’s faith was also the tool by which it was defeated. It’s good and bad. It’s the sickness and the cure. Keeler confines herself under the watch of the Emperor’s Regent, Malcador the Sigilite, and the siege rages on.

The First Wall is the fifty-seventh book in the Horus Heresy, a mammoth sequence of novels and short stories based in the wargaming universe of Warhammer 40,000. Depending on how you count, it’s also the third book in the Siege of Terra miniseries, a cycle of ten books that ends the events of the Heresy and establishes the broader state of the universe in the ‘present day’ of the forty-first millennium. We’ve talked about it before, as part of our broader Horus Heresy special project – I’m sorry to keep repeating this information if you’re already familiar, but I have to assume some people are learning about this stuff for the first time. Horus is the Emperor’s favoured son, and in a Lucifer-style fall from grace, he rejects the Emperor and the Imperium of Man and dedicates himself to Chaos. The Siege of Terra is the big fight at the end of the series – Horus and his Chaos legions make it to Terra, where the Emperor sits on the golden throne, and they wage the final war. We’ve talked previously about The Solar War, looking at the role of Shakespeare in the Siege of Terra (and in the Heresy more broadly), and today we’re looking at tricks and lies.

Obviously the Keeler and Amon conflict in this book is built around a trick – not just for Keeler, but for the audience. In the ‘current day’ of Warhammer 40,000, the cult of the God-Emperor is ascendant. Keeler’s views are normal: the Emperor is worshipped as a god. In the Horus Heresy, which is set well back in the past, there’s reason to think she’s on the right track. She is one of the originating figures for the faith. Author Gav Thorpe plays a trick on our expectations by having her congregation infected by Chaos – in that moment, she’s not as right as we thought. The trick is upheld by deliberately misleading narration. The narrator never tells us overtly that Keeler is being tricked – in fact, we’re given Keeler’s perspective as if it’s the truth of what’s going on. “It was then that Keeler saw the light of the Emperor shining from the congregation.” It’s not ‘she thought she saw’, or ‘she believed she saw’. It’s simply seen. It’s given to us as the reality of what’s happening in that moment. That reality is challenged by Amon’s view on things, when we see things from his perspective, and ultimately the difference is resolved in Amon’s favour. One reality wins out over the other – it is asserted to be base reality, so to speak, the accurate version of events. But there’s a moment where we have that shift. We’re confronted with two competing versions of reality, and we have to figure out what’s really going on. We become unmoored. Maybe there’s a second where we’re not quite sure who’s right. It can be a powerful literary effect, but if it’s mishandled, it can also leave readers lost within the narrative. Let’s talk about some of the problems of The First Wall.

As book three of ten, The First Wall is still early in the Siege. The traitor forces surround the planet by the end of the first book, The Solar War. In The Lost and the Damned, they fight their way up to the walls, sending beastmen and traitor soldiers against hastily conscripted Terran soldiers, and then The First Wall is concerned with the capture of the Lion’s Gate spaceport, which will allow Horus to bring in his heavy mechanised units. At the start of the book, we’re told that the capture of the Lion’s Gate spaceport is going to be based on a trick. The logistics of the siege are orchestrated by two opposing primarchs – Perturabo, for the traitor forces, and Rogal Dorn for the loyalists. The pair are consistently framed as equal and opposite, as immovable force and unstoppable object. They are both great siege masters, fortifiers, tacticians, mighty strategists. Much of the early siege has them playing essentially 4D chess against each other. They’re portrayed as making moves and counter-moves, doing all this sophisticated work with troop deployments and artillery to alternately defend or prosecute the siege. The other books I think are generally better at showing that process at play – for example in Saturnine, the fourth book in the series, Rogal Dorn describes how he’s managing thousands of interlocking battles. Perturabo says the same: “Sixteen thousand, four hundred and eighty-six individual engagements, as of the last hour mark.” Other characters express disbelief at what they’re seeing, the amount of data he’s processing. “This is clarity?” one asks. “It is,” Perturabo replies. He offers some mundane comments about differences in siege doctrine between the two primarchs – Dorn’s number of battles would be lower, he says. “I measure by twenty thousand troops per element, he by thirty thousand. It’s merely a difference in doctrinal tradition.” It’s a mundanity that speaks to his control and understanding – he’s at ease where others are overwhelmed. Similarly in The Lost and the Damned, Perturabo works out this complicated bombardment pattern that will pierce the Palace’s shields. He calculates how power is being drawn between different sectors during bombardment, and then engineers a bombing pattern to short out the power. We aren’t just told these characters are smart. The authors have them say and do things that show their intelligence.

In The First Wall, by contrast, Perturabo’s big plan is to put an idiot in charge of the assault. Dorn has built the defenses anticipating Perturabo would prosecute the siege, and so Perturabo responds by stepping aside and letting a moron attack the Lion’s Gate spaceport. One of his lieutenants, Forrix, summarises the plan thus: “Dorn protects the Palace with the most complex lock ever devised, so you have given life to a sledgehammer to break it to pieces.” Perturabo agrees: “Kroeger [the idiot] will blunder and bustle and hurl my warriors at the enemy without relent, and Dorn… my brother will try to pick out my will from the anarchy, try to dissect intent from Kroeger’s pitiful strategies. He will be looking for every sign of me, and I will not be there.” This plan is obviously terrible, even just on the face of it. The context for the Siege is that the traitors have overwhelming firepower, but limited time. Loyalist relief is on the way, and Horus needs to defeat the Emperor quickly, or he’ll be overwhelmed and consumed by the Chaos power that he’s holding within himself. That’s the jeopardy of the siege: loyalists have to hold out against a much greater force, but only for so long. They know they cannot win, so their tactics are distraction and delay. Dorn just straightforwardly is not able to mount any meaningful resistance to the traitor attack. He can slow things down, but he can’t win outright. There are too many bad guys. In that sense, all of Perturabo’s mind games are secondary to the fact of blunt numbers – throw enough meat into the grinder, and the spaceport will come down.

But okay: the trick has been set. Perturabo seeks to trick Rogal Dorn by sending an idiot to lead the attack. That’s the premise of the book, taking up most of the second chapter. Perturabo gives us the book’s basic reality. He sets the scene, gives us the jeopardy, shapes the nature of the book’s core battleground. Purely in terms of narrative design, you expect some sort of response or reaction – this setup needs a payoff. Will the loyalists be confused? Will Dorn sit around scratching his head, trying to figure out why the attack suddenly seems really stupid? In short: no. Dorn immediately delegates the defense and moves on. He sends one of his lieutenants to take command in the field and goes back to monitoring the overall conflict. It happens in the very next chapter. The assigned lieutenant, Rann, doesn’t get confused either. He never expresses any bewilderment at the attack. He never searches for Perturabo’s intent, he’s never unclear about what’s going on. He communicates back and forth with Dorn throughout the book, drawing in reinforcements in Chapter Seventeen, and then in Chapter Twenty-three, Dorn describes the situation in the spaceport accurately and concisely. Nobody is confused or unclear at any moment. The trick falls flat. It’s a one-person mind game where nobody else cares. That’s a little embarrassing for Perturabo, but more importantly, it means the jeopardy and drama of the book never takes off. It’s set up in Chapter Two and undermined in Chapter Three, and nothing else gets put in its place.

Similarly, throughout the invasion of the spaceport, Dorn’s supposedly meticulous defense never comes into view. There’s no sequence where the invaders rush down an alleyway and realise they’ve been led into a killbox. There are no traps, no well-planned defensive maneuvers. Kroeger attacks the spaceport from three directions – from underground, from above (via the space elevator), and at ground level. He throws soldiers into the grinder, and many of his comrades die, but their numbers prevail. It’s essentially what we described before. The traitors take horrific losses, but they don’t care. They have the soldiers and they’re in a rush. In other words, there was no need for any of Perturabo’s 4D chess. He could have taken the spaceport by enacting the exact same plan. To be clear, that’s not a problem with Perturabo – more immediately it’s a plot problem, an editing problem. It’s again a setup with no payoff. It’s almost the opposite: there’s a setup, and then the rest of the book systematically rejects the premise. We’re told that the spaceport is well-defended, that it has this meticulous, deeply considered defensive strategy (“the most complex lock ever devised”), but that strategy never comes into view. Kroeger’s sledgehammer finds no lock to shatter. He just moves in a bunch of soldiers and they win. That’s it. The setup is refused by everything that comes after.

We’ve talked before about these sorts of writing problems in the Horus Heresy. They are not necessarily super well-constructed stories. They’re often portraiture, where events serve first as a vehicle for describing characters and only after as an internally consistent sequencing of cause and effect. That’s the case here. Perturabo’s plan doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t have to make sense. It’s not a plan, it’s a portrait. It’s an opportunity to depict his character through this bold, crazy-but-also-genius monologue. It doesn’t matter that his plan doesn’t bear any relationship to the actual events of the book. It’s a portrait of an unstable tactical genius, where the narrative technique is impressionistic rather than realist. It also – you know, honestly I just don’t know that these writers are up to writing some grand tactical science fiction. I don’t think that’s in their creative toolbox. The main category of trick, throughout the entire Heresy series, is instead the trick of the secret traitor.

There’s a short story by Graham McNeill, ‘The Kaban Project’, collected in the 2012 anthology Shadows of Treachery (#22). In this story, a low-level mechanical engineer (Pallas Ravachol) realises that his masters are creating artificial intelligence, the titular Kaban Machine – against all laws of the Imperium. Ravachol runs from his master, Lukas Chrom, who he realises has fallen to Chaos. Chrom is a secret traitor. Ravachol escapes an assassin and flees to a previous master, Urtzi Malevolus, where he claims sanctuary – but there’s a twist: Malevolus is also a secret traitor! Ravachol flees again, only to run into the Kaban Machine, the artificial intelligence. It recognises that Ravachol’s loyalty to the Imperium is a threat to its continued existence, and executes him on behalf of the Chaos forces. The Kaban Machine is also, ultimately, a secret traitor. That’s the primary form of narrative twist in the Heresy. It’s the unexpected fall, the shocking betrayal. That first key betrayal, Horus’s fall from grace, echoes down through the series, manifesting over and over in all these different scenarios – betrayal, betrayal, betrayal. It’s what we saw with Keeler and her Chaos-worshipping congregation. That’s where these writers are typically most comfortable, exploring the repeated moment of treachery through portraits of different characters and communities. Planning out and communicating the strategy of a complicated spaceport siege – not so much.