First published in 2003 in Inferno! magazine, Dan Abnett’s short story The Curiosity offers the first glimpse of Valentin Drusher, magos biologis. After seven years of determined study, Drusher’s work to create a complete taxonomy of Gershom’s indigent flora and fauna is almost complete. Dispatched to a bleak, distant province to investigate sightings of an unknown beast that’s left a trail of corpses behind it, it’s not long before he realises this is more than just an apex predator he somehow missed. Caught up in the hunt for the beast, Drusher is out of his league and in terrible danger.
While not an Inquisition story, tonally and structurally this fits nicely alongside Abnett’s Eisenhorn series – Drusher may be an amateur sleuth rather than an inquisitor, but that just makes the situation that bit more dangerous. It’s a nicely self-contained story, complete with all the descriptive scene-setting and strong, effective characterisation that you’d expect from Abnett, and the slightly baffled, eccentric Drusher is instantly engaging. In the grand scheme of 40k the stakes are small, but away from the battlefields and in context of a simple, rural community there’s more than enough drama for this to be gripping and entirely satisfying.
Click here to buy The Magos & The Definitive Casebook of Gregor Eisenhorn.
One comment