A tale of the Officio Assassinorum, Robert Rath’s short story Divine Sanction (his first 40k story) offers a close look at the dangerous final stages of a Callidus assassin’s mission. The city of Veridian is wracked by unrest as the sermons of Confessor Illsandor spread the insidious influence of the xenos T’au and set the city’s factions against each other. Sent to infiltrate the city and find a way to remove and impersonate the Confessor, the assassin Sycorax closes in on her target only to face a last-minute challenge that forces her to improvise and start to question her mission.
There’s something innately cool about the shape-shifting Callidus assassins, and Rath does a great job of tapping into this while throwing in some twists to what could otherwise have been a pretty straightforward story. He starts things off as Sycorax is almost ready to strike, taking the time to introduce key characters before revealing the assassin and ramping up the action. There’s a lot more to the story than just the fighting, and Sycorax’s viewpoint allows for interesting observations on the nature of her work and the background to her mission even while she’s thinking on the fly and dancing with death. It definitely feels like an introduction to a wider story, but taken on its own it’s pacy, cleverly constructed and brilliantly entertaining.
This was released as part of the 2019 Black Library Advent Calendar – click here to see the main page for the Advent Calendar on Track of Words, with links to all of the reviews.
