Nemesis is one of those. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a tale of assassins, it’s a creature of shadows, created out of light falling on a totally different story, but still connecting to the greater whole.
Here’s how it came to be: I was at one of the regular writers’ meetings at Games Workshop HQ in Nottingham with Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett, a story conference that was taking place to wrangle the narrative between the two connected books they were working on – A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns. I didn’t have anything firm on the Heresy writing schedule at that point, and I was largely there to offer an additional voice on proceedings. But I felt a little like I was surplus to requirements, because Dan and Graham had the Wolves and the Sons cooking nicely, and while I did chip in a few ideas, it wasn’t my gig.
But here’s the thing. When you put writers in a room together, writers who are passionate about a storyline, at the top of their game, who are engaged and enthusiastic about their shared fictional world, what you get is a kind of synergy that is pretty damned amazing. Story ideas start to emerge out of nothing, and there’s a crackle of creativity in the air that can be thrilling. I hear musicians talk about the energy they get while jamming, and I know it’s the same thing.
So we were off on a little side-conversation about exactly how the Legio Custodes operated during the Emperor of Mankind’s rule, and an idea for a story coalesced right there in the middle of my train of thought. ‘What about the Officio Assassinorum?’ I said. ‘What were they doing during the havoc of the Heresy?’
We kicked the idea around for a bit, and then things went back to the destruction of Prospero – but I was frantically scribbling down ideas in my notebook, trying to get them all on to paper before they got lost in the ether.
By the time the story meeting ended, I had the outline for a book. As we were packing up to leave, Graham leaned over and asked if I was going to write “that assassin thing”... because if I didn’t, he was going to. I went away and drew up the formal pitch for what would become Nemesis.
I’d been thinking about writing something assassin-y for Black Library for a while. Editor Lindsey Priestley and I had toyed with the idea of a 41st millennium series of four novellas all set in the same city at the same time, detailing the missions of different Assassinorum operatives whose stories would cross over each other – but we just couldn’t make it work at the time.
However, using the assassins during the Heresy, now that had real potential.
And it also dovetailed with something else that hadn’t been explored in the ten or so books written up to that point: what was it like to be an ordinary person during the Horus Heresy? We talked about a hypothetical everyman character (whom we nicknamed ‘Joe Hivecity’) and wondered how his life would be under the threat of Horus’s rebellion and the darker powers massing across the galaxy. I’d later return to this theme in ‘Liar’s Due’, a short story I wrote for the Age of Darkness anthology, but in Nemesis I took the opportunity to tell it in widescreen.
The novel is made up of two threads – one follows the assassins as they assemble their ill-fated mission to terminate the Warmaster, and the second is that street-level story of ordinary folks who find themselves caught up in a war beyond reason.
Nemesis remains one of my favourite projects for Black Library, not only for the fact that it let me do something different and challenging but also because it earned me New York Times bestseller status for the first time in my career! So, six years later, I’m pleased to see it returning to print in this special hardback edition.
In a war (and a series) about primarchs and Space Marines, Nemesis isn’t really about any of them. Like the Horus Heresy itself, if you’ve seen the big picture, you already know how it is going to end.
But this book is a glimpse of the galaxy that the Horus Heresy is being fought over. Its function is to peel back the layers and present the reality behind the battle lines, and to show the origins of the Silent War – the clandestine, undocumented stratum of the conflict that isn’t all about planet-crackers and warfleets big enough to blot out suns, but one-on-one fights in dingy back alleys and the ill-lit corridors of power.
James Swallow
January 2016
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Once more, tips of the helm to Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill for that moment when the core concept for Nemesis emerged from our shared creative flux; to Nick Kyme and Lindsey Priestley for sterling editorial guidance, and once again, to the great Neil Roberts for crafting another stunning cover.
About The Author
James Swallow’s stories from the dark worlds of Warhammer 40,000 include the Horus Heresy novel The Flight of the Eisenstein,the Blood Angels books Deus Encarmine, Deus Sanguinius and Red Fury, the Sisters of Battle novel Faith & Fire, as well as a multiplicity of short fiction. Among his other works are Jade Dragon, The Butterfly Effect, the Sundowners series of ‘steampunk’ Westerns and fiction in the worlds of Star Trek, Doctor Who, Stargate and 2000AD, as well as a number of anthologies.
His non-fiction features Dark Eye: The Films of David Fincher and books on scriptwriting and genre television. Swallow’s other credits include writing for Star Trek Voyager, scripts for videogames and audio dramas. He lives in London.