[Werthead]

The Rose in Darkness by Danie Ware

Opal, a gleaming beacon of the civilisation of the Imperium of Man. A peaceful world deep within the Imperium, where vast crowds pay homage to the Emperor and his great hero, Saint Veres, in a glorious celebration held once every eight hundred years. The Skull of Saint Veres is a great relic, one which has been ordered to be moved to a shrine world, but the local leaders are reluctant to part with it. Sister Superior Augusta of the Order of the Bloody Rose arrives to expedite the process, only to find bubbling cauldrons of discontent and heresy waiting for her. She realises that Opal's opulence and tranquillity is a facade, one that is dangerously close to breaking.

My prior explorations of the Warhammer 40,000 universe have mostly been through the works of Dan Abnett and Sandy Mitchell, not to mention Paul Kearney's two books in the setting, which have meant reading a lot about Space Marines, Imperial Guard and Inquisitors. The Rose in Darkness was an appealing read as it meant switching focus to another one of the Imperium's orders, the Adepta Sororitas or the Sisters of Battle. The belligerent death-nuns of the Emperor, the Sisters step in to situations which local militias can't handle but sending in the Space Marines would be massive overkill, with the addition that their religious rites and devotion to the Emperor give them an insight that some of the other orders lack.

This book is a good exploration of what kind of situation requires the Sisters' attention, as they have to respect local traditions, honour the local Saint's day but also be firm in their objective of removing the planet's most holy relic, which the local leaders are understandably upset about. The negotiations are interrupted when it becomes clear that some outside force is stirring up trouble on Opal, and it's up to the Sisters to identify the threat. When it is identified, all hell breaks loose, resulting in lots of crunchy battle sequences of the kind that make up the backbone of most Warhammer 40,000 fiction.

Danie Ware paints Opal in all its Imperial splendor. Most 40K fiction takes place on the ragged frontier, where the Imperium is fighting some kind of conflict against an exterior threat, but here the trouble is much harder to pin down. Unleashing a storm of bolter fire to take care of an Ork invader is one thing, but when the threat is more insidious and you cannot tell friend from foe, it's a more nuanced challenge, something that Augusta and her troops struggle to initially engage with. The author is operating with a constrained page count here but deftly characterises figures so even briefly-appearing players (like the planet's governor and military commander) are given at least some depth and flavour.

The book's main success is this idea of a world deep inside Imperial space, blessed by the Emperor, relatively rich and opulent, but whose workers are poor and downtrodden, sometimes even starving when the rich nobility sits in comfort just a few miles away, creating a sense of natural anger and resentment even without strange cults or xenos interference. The feeling of tension ramping up through the book is remarkably successful. It also helps the book gives us POV characters both in the Sororitas and in the local population, so we get both an insider and outsider's perspectives as events on Opal reach breaking point.

It is worth saying that The Rose in Darkness is bleak as hell, even by 40K standards. Most other 40K fiction I've read takes the view that, sure, things are bad, people die, a lot of things blow up, but the most positive - or least-negative, anyway - outcome is infinitely preferable to the worst-case scenario. The Rose in Darkness instead evokes the idea of fighting against the dying of the light, of fighting a long defeat for the sake of fighting it, and true heroism is counted by people making a stand for the right reasons in the dark, where nobody will ever see or hear.

The Rose in Darkness (****) does what good 40K fiction does well - chunky action sequences, mixed in with moments of supernatural horror - but it does it with an air of melancholy and futility that I had not previously encountered in the setting (despite its reputation), which is interesting, but I suspect won't quite be for everybody.