Necessary Evil by Rob Sanders is a short story about paranoia and apocalyptic dread set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. The main character of the story is Inquisitor Bronislaw Czevak, an agent of the Imperium tasked with hunting down and eliminating alien influences. In this story, he crash lands on a world perilously close to the wraithgate, and he's desperate to locate a long lost relic of evil to keep it out of the hands of the Chaos Space Marines pursuing him. The description from the back of the book:
Inquisitor Bronislaw Czevak – scholar, adventurer, fugitive. Since fleeing the fabled Black Library of the eldar with the Atlas Infernal, he has been hunted by xenos, heretic and sorcerer just as he once hunted them.Guided and protected by this ancient tome bound in human skin, he has now found his way to the daemon world of Nereus in search of a powerful Chaos artefact. With Ahriman and the Thousand Sons racing to claim it for themselves, Czevak must scour the colony of Perdition's Landing if he is to outwit his old enemeis...but might this bedraggled outpost hide an even darker secret of its own?
This review contains MAJOR spoilers. My short review is that it's a very good Inquisition story, so if you're familiar enough with Warhammer 40,000 to know what that means then you ought to read it for yourself.
To reiterate: This is a VERY (witness my use of capital letters for emphasis!) good story.
Inquisitor Czevak is an interdimensional refugee. In the words of the story, he's being "hunted by the Ruinous Powers for what he could do; by the Imperium for what he had done; by the alien eldar for what he might do." That's the kind of Inquisitor we're dealing with.
This story, as some of the best fiction involving Agents of the Imperium do, has a sense of space opera to it. Czevak crash lands on a planet, quickly integrates (by Inquisition standards) with the local population, befriends and enlists a civilian woman for assistance, and pursues the MacGuffin to the bitter end. This is very much the subset of 40k fiction I want to exist in the form of a whole series of 120-page paperbacks.
In Necessary Evil, Czevak finds himself on Nereus, a daemon world where the human settlement of Perdition's Landing has impossibly survived. Maybe more impressively, Perdition's Landing remains staunchly dedicated to the Emperor, despite physical deformities that reflect the settlement's proximity to the corruption of warp powers.
Wounded by his crash landing, Czevak is cared for by a medicae named Myra. As devoted as anyone else to the Imperium, Myra believes that the Emperor will deliver the colony from the evil that surrounds them, even though Nereus is largely inaccessible and forgotten by the rest of the galaxy. When Inquisitor Czevak tells her that he has come to warn Perdition's Landing of an approaching warband seeking a relic called the Dreadsceptre, Myra finds it difficult to believe that a warband could even locate Nereus, much less that Nereus is home to an evil relic of any significance.
Czevak isn't a very good hospital patient and hurries out into the settlement to find somebody who will listen to his warning. Myra is pregnant, and she holds another baby in her arms, but she nevertheless dutifully follows after the Inquisitor to help.
Czevak's search leads him to a museum that houses artefacts thousands of years old. The curator is impressed and pleased with Inquisitor Czevak's great knowledge of history. But when Czevak starts talking about the approaching warband, and demanding to search the archive's collection for the Dreadsceptre, the curator becomes offended. Only those who lack faith would fear an approaching warband. You don't have to be a genius to know that the Emperor is going to save everyone on Nereus, so obviously they don't have to worry about a warband attacking them. If anything, the warband is probably actually angels sent from the Emperor. The curator ends the conversation there, and disappears into the depths of the archive.
Obviously this doesn't slow Czevak down, but unfortunately there don't seem to be any crates in the Apocalyptically Evil Artefacts section of the museum. By the time Czevak accepts that the Dreadsceptre could be literally anywhere on the planet, a Thousand Sons detachment makes planetfall. The slaughter promptly commences, so Inquisitor Czevak grabs his new and only friend, Myra, and hurries to a warp portal thing that'll take them to safety.
And that's, of course, when the reveal happens. I won't spoil it here, and if you've spent time with the Inquisition you probably already have your suspicions. I didn't, but I should have and I feel stupid for not figuring it out. Or rather, I feel stupid for taking the narration at face value. The story's setting is a daemon world, after all. Obviously there's more than meets the eye.
Necessary Evil is clever because it disguises intrigue for urgency. For the duration of the story, you believe you're in a chase scene. Inquisitor Czevak is Cassandra, with a warning that could save an entire population that he expects to find corrupted and beyond salvation. What he finds instead is a population so devout that they refuse to heed his warning for its apparent lack of faith. But in the end, the actual story isn't even about that conflict. The real problem is faith.
This is a good example of great Warhammer fiction, although it is that kind of 40k fiction that requires a baseline knowledge of the setting. Almost none of this story makes sense without understanding the role of the Inquisition and the major factions of the setting. Being specialised fiction is hardly a problem, though. This is an extremely effective short story, sneaking up on you and all your in-depth lore knowledge and then stabbing you in the back. It's well worth a read.
All images in this post copyright Games Workshop.