The Keeler Image (An Eisenhorn Short Story)

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining in for this Sunday mini-review. Today we’ll be reviewing the last of the short stories from Eisenhorn - The Omnibus, "The Keeler Image”.

Please feel free to check out my reviews for the other stories in the Eisenhorn series if you haven’t already. Otherwise, let’s dive right in.

STATS

Title: “The Keeler Image”

Series: Eisenhorn

Author(s): Dan Abnett

Genre: Science Fiction (Space Opera)

First Printing: 2016

Publisher: Black Library (Games Workshop Publishing)

SPOILER WARNING

Both minor and heavy spoilers for “The Keeler Image” will be provided throughout this review. I will try to keep the first paragraph of each section as spoiler-free as possible and will confine heavy spoilers to clearly labeled sections.

Minor spoilers for the Eisenhorn novels will be provided during this review. Additionally, within the sections marked for heavy spoilers, there will be heavy spoilers for the third Eisenhorn novel, Hereticus.

TIMELINE

“The Keeler Image” is set in 465.M41. This is 79 years after the events of Heretius (386.M41) and 10 years before The Magos (475.M41).

STORY (HEAVY SPOILERS)

Eisenhorn attends an auction hosted by an individual known and Medonae the Eater. While this auction hosts many fine artifacts, the jewel of the event is the titular image: a pict taken of Horus Lupercal ten millennia earlier by Euphrati Keeler, the remembrancer who would later become a founding saint of the Imperial faith. More important than the pict itself are the documents that come with it notes from Keeler that supposedly supported the “heretical” notion that the God-Emperor is not a god (and even condemned the idea of being worshipped as one). While Eisenhorn hopes to gain control of these documents, his true goal is to trap a member of the Chaos cult known as the Cognitae, whom he believes to be masquerading as an Ordos Hereticus inquisitor who is also at the auction.

Things go awry when Eisenhorn is summoned to a personal audience with Medonae. Assassins attempt to kill him during this audience. Realizing that he’s walked into someone else’s trap, Eisenhorn rushes to retrieve the pict. He catches a Cognitae operatvie in the midst of stealing it. It’s then that the reveal comes: the Ordo Hereticus inquisitor really is an Ordo Hereticus inquisitor. The Cognitae lured Eisenhorn here so that Ordo Hereticus would shift focus to eliminating Eisenhorn (who, in the aftermath of Hereticus, is now a renegade), allowing the Cognitae to steal the image while the Inquisition kills Eisenhorn.

Eisenhorn bests the Cognitae operative and seizes the image. He then summons Chrubael. The dæmonhost slaughters the Ordo Hereticus personnel while Eisenhorn and his entourage make their escape with the pict.

RATING: 6.5 / 10

I liked “The Keeler Image”. It’s a short, fun action story that updates the audience on Eisenhorn’s status after the events of Hereticus, a book that ended rather abruptly and explicitly left his fate a mystery. I think it’s worth reading if you have 20 to 30 minutes to fill.

That being said, I feel like the biggest problem with this story is that it can be read in 20 to 30 minutes.

PLOT

This story was simply far too short to effectively execute its twists. More time needed to be put into developing things and Eisenhorn figuring things out before the big reveals. I know this style of sudden revelations is par for the course for Abnett’s Eisenhorn stories, but this is really the worst case scenario. In the other short stories, the payoff to the mystery was something simple that didn’t need a huge amount of buildup; in the novels, we are at least invested in the story for reasons other than the twist, so the twist is merely a dud moment in an otherwise functional story. Here, the audience was Told one status quo, action begins, and then we’re supposed to be impressed when we’re Told the status quo is actually something else.

Still, on the whole, this is a functional story. I just hope you’re there for to action and to see Eisenhorn again, rather than because you’re invested in him solving his case.

CHARACTER (Heavy Spoilers)

The Eisenhorn we meet here is darker and more brooding than any of this previous outings. However, he remains steadfast in his convictions. He is prepared to torch Keeler’s heretical testimony about the God-Emperor while making no effort to engage with or dismiss it. No matter how radical Eisenhorn might have gotten as the series has progressed, he is still wholly committed to serving what he sees as the greater good of the Imperium. Preserving faith in the God-Emperor (even against the wishes of the God-Emperor himself) by any means necessary is exactly the sort of thing he would do.

I think that the changes in Eisenhorn’s demeanor are a reasonable progression of his character from the ending of Hereticus. At this point, he is very much alone. Yes, he does have an entourage, but the Inquisition now sees him as the enemy. He is forced to operate entirely in the shadows as he hunts this new enemy, the Cognitae, and he has a growing chip on his shoulder over being made a renegade of doing what he believes to be necessary.

WORLDBUILDING

This short story was my first exposure to the Cognitae. Apparently, they are more of a thing in the Ravenor novels (or so I assume, given all the references listed on this wiki page). I feel that this short story is an effective means to introduce them to anyone who’s only followed Eisenhorn’s story. This is important, as the Cognitae are the primary antagonists in The Magos. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Abnett absolutely had to introduce the Cognitae before The Magos, but having their story touch Eisenhorn’s before they showed up in one of his novels does make it feel like more of a natural transition.

As presented within this story, the Cognitae as a sort of Chaos think-tank, a cult that would want evidence to denounce the God-Emperor’s divinity for the purposes of destabilizing the Imperium rather that to serve any of the Chaos gods. I’m sure there’s more about them in the Ravenor novels. For now, I’ll hold off further discussion about them until we get around to reviewing The Magos.

A FINAL IMAGE

Overall, this was a fun read. I just don’t think it holds up compared to the better entries in the Eisenhorn mythos. If you manage to get your hands on the omnibus, I do recommend reading it before you start on The Magos.

This story wraps up the short stories from Eisenhorn - The Omnibus. However, it’s not the end of the omnibus as a whole. We’ll be wrapping that up with a review of the final novel, The Magos, on December 26th. Furthermore, I’ve already started reading Ravenor - The Omnibus. We’ll be reviewing the first short story from that omnibus, “Playing Patience”, on January 18th.

Thanks for stopping by. Please subscribe if you’d like a weekly newsletter with the latest post links, and please share this review with others if you enjoyed it. Take care, everyone, and have a good week.