Eisenhorn

Eisenhorn is a trilogy of novels by Dan Abnett set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, following the adventures of the titular Inquisitor and his retinue as they combat the enemies of the Imperium of Man. Throughout the books, Eisenhorn finds himself having to use increasingly desperate and dangerous means against his foes.

The first book, Xenos, starts with Gregor Eisenhorn and his crew pursuing a heretic in a seemingly routine task when they uncover a mysterious artifact bearing the preserved mind of the heretic Pontius Glaw. In the subsequent investigation, Eisenhorn and crew find themselves embroiled in a heretic group's plan to contact aliens for a demonic text.

The second book, Malleus, begins with a major celebratory parade ruined by Chaos-linked renegades. The pursuit of these enemies leads to Eisenhorn uncovering and defeating a much-revered Inquisitor gone to Chaos.

The third book, Hereticus, sees Eisenhorn pursued by allies of Glaw and his attempt to stop Glaw from acquiring a world-ending power.

There are also two short stories available, both of which can be found in the doorstopping omnibus edition. A spin-off trilogy, Ravenor, has been published and Dan Abnett has recently been talking about a third "Bequin trilogy", described by him as Eisenhorn vs. Ravenor. The first volume of new trilogy is titled "Pariah".

In the mean time, Eisenhorn is set to appear in a set of Audio Dramas, collectively called Talon and Thorn.

Tropes used in Eisenhorn include:

As part of Warhammer 40,000, the series involves a large number of the tropes on that page, as well as employing literary and narrative tropes of its own:

  • Adventurer Archaeologist: A villainous example is a minor character in Xenos, though more of a Punch Clock Villain.
  • Alien Geometries: The saruthi "tetrascapes" in Xenos, and in a different way, the world of Ghul in Hereticus.
  • And I Must Scream: Ravenor, as a result of the Thracian Gate massacre in Malleus. He's basically the main character in Johnny Got His Gun, except that his psyker ability allows him to function through his force chair.
  • Anticlimax Boss: A relatively minor villain in Xenos is shown to be an ungodly powerful psyker. Not only could he force the submission of a Chaos Space Marine, he was able to tear a cipher for the Necroteuch from the walls of the saruthi tetrascape. He forced a wall to divulge its secrets with the power of his mind. It left him largely burned out, though, too weak to stop Heldane from just shooting him.
    • At the end of Hereticus, a Daemonhost that belongs to Glaw was thought to be stronger than Cherubael by dint of being less bound. Cherubael was apparently strong enough that, although more bound than its counterpart, still wiped the floor with it anyway, though we don't get to see it. He does make a note about being nastier than Eisenhorn ever imagined.
  • Anyone Can Die: By the end of Hereticus, much of the main cast are either dead or severely incapacitated.
  • Armour Is Useless: Unusually for this setting; it saves someone's life only once in the trilogy.
  • Attack! Attack! Attack!
  • Bad Dreams
  • Badass: Several. Harlon Nayl, both Betancores, Eisenhorn himself has moments (to the point where a Space Marine is scared of him), Cherubael, Commodus Voke, Brother Guilar takes a level, and Librarian Bryntoth (implied).
    • For non-40k familiar tropers, a "Librarian" in 40k is a genetically engineered super-soldier with the power to tap into a primal chaotic force in battle. "Librarian" is their day job.
  • Badass Grandpa: Technically, Cherubael qualifies, as he is thousands of years old. A more literal example is Commodus Voke - Eisenhorn describes his psychic powers as "legendary". He even stands up to a daemonhost and saves Eisenhorn's life.
    • The best example is Lord Inquisitor Phlebas Alessandro Rorken - he banishes an Eldritch Abomination by charging it with a holy flamethrower and yelling prayers.
  • Badass Cape: Pontius Glaw, in the final encounter with him, wears one made of many small, very sharp blades.
  • Badass Longcoat: Eisenhorn is fond of billowing overcoats, although, cover picture be damned, he's never actually mentioned as wearing two at once.
  • Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Alisebeth Bequin, who manages to be glamorous and alluring even while exchanging gunfire with enemy heretics.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Pontius Glaw's apocalyptic plan is foiled...but most of Eisenhorn's companions have been killed in the process, and he is considered a rogue and a heretic.
  • Brown Note: The utter, incomprehensible scale of the daemon-king's tomb on Ghul in Hereticus drives a hired gun to tears.
    • In Malleus being an ordinary human attending the parade...
  • Camp Straight: Rogue Trader Tobias Maxilla. A flamboyant dandy, he flirts with every woman he encounters. Somewhat ambiguous; he is implied to be a machine fetishist, perhaps exclusively.
  • Captured Super Entity: The Psykers whose kidnappers were responsible for the Thracian Gate atrocity in Malleus. Also, the daemonhosts Cherubael and Prophaniti, to an extent.
  • The Chessmaster: Both Big Bads fall handily into this. Eisenhorn himself flirts with the trope; in many ways, he is like a Cold War spymaster, only with Psychic Powers and a way with a sword.
  • Clear My Name: Pretty much the entire plot of Malleus.
  • Cold-Blooded Torture
  • Combat Pragmatist: Semi-subverted, Eisenhorn starts a pointless swordfight, then shoots his opponent when he starts to lose.
  • Come to Gawk: The parade included displaying captives.
  • Compelling Voice: Eisenhorn and other Inquisitors, through what Eisenhorn refers to as "the will", a manifestation of their psyker abilities. Agents of Chaos display this power as well.
  • Continuity Nod: Inquisitors Heldane and Ravenor both appear in Abnett's earlier Gaunt's Ghosts novels. Titan Princeps Hekate is also mentioned in Malleus, albeit as an old man near retirement, which was a pleasant surprise for fans wondering if he had survived.
    • One of Battlefleet Scarus' ships is named Defence of Stalinvast, after the planet subjected to Exterminatus in Ian Watson's Inquisition War Trilogy.
    • A slightly knotty one in Malleus. Eisenhorn mentions his plans to meet with a group of other inquisitors, one of which includes Defay, from the Inquisitor comic series in Warhammer Monthly. Confusingly, Defay as also mentioned in Gaunt's Ghosts, which is set many hundreds of years after Eisenhorn.
      • Not necessarily an error - in the Warhammer 40,000 universe medical technologies, cybernetics, a better diet, and drugs can keep the well-heeled alive for centuries.
      • Could also merely be another inquisitor by that name. It is, after all, a vast organisation.
  • Converse with the Unconscious
  • Crapsack World: For the most part averted. Although Eisenhorn visits many deeply unpleasant places during his adventures, this must be taken in context with the larger Warhammer 40K universe. Yes, there is still galaxy spanning war going on, but Imperial society is shown as functioning and, in the case of the planet Gudrun, can be extremely pleasant or at least tolerable.
    • Taken straight with Hive Worlds like Thracian Primaris and Sameter.
  • Cross-Melting Aura: Cherubael does this to an Imperial aquila.
  • Cryonics Failure
  • Divided We Fall
  • Dreaming of Things to Come
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: Midas Betancore gets this treatment between Xenos and Malleus.
  • Due to the Dead
  • Eldritch Location: Saruthi tetrascapes. In the coastal regions of a tetrascape, waves break backwards, and that is the least weird thing about them.
    • It's implied that the Saruthi intended them to be unnerving, as they were created for the aliens to meet and bargain with other races—the Saruthi wanted to intimidate visitors to establish that they were in control.
  • Empathic Weapon: Eisenhorn's force sword, Barbarisater.
  • Evil Is Deathly Cold: Frost formation often accompanies use of Warp powers.
  • Eyes Do Not Belong There: In Malleus, they must infiltrate muties. One mutant woman winks at them—with an eye at the end of one tongue.
  • Faux Affably Evil: Pontius Glaw is a charming, erudite, and refined gentleman. Eisenhorn notes that were he not also a Chaos-corrupted Complete Monster, the two of them would probably have been the best of friends.
  • Five-Man Band
  • Friendly Enemy: Cherubael to Eisenhorn, at least at first, because Eisenhorn can free him from his servitude to Quixos. He becomes much less friendly (and somewhat less of an enemy) later on, after Eisenhorn re-binds him and sticks him in storage, occasionally pulling him out to battle powerful opponents.
  • Frozen Face: Eisenhorn is left unable to make any kind of facial expression after the extensive neurological damage he suffers during Locke's Cold-Blooded Torture.
  • Full-Frontal Assault: Cherubael and Prophaniti.
  • Generation Xerox: "So very Betancore... Just like her damned father." The title for that chapter is "Something Typically Betancore."
  • Gladiator Games: Eisenhorn and company are forced into one.
  • Glamour Failure: The Daemon-possessed suffer from this.
  • Great Escape
  • Guns Akimbo: Midas and Medea Betancore fight with a pair of needle pistols, and Interrogator Inshabel is armed with a pair of laspistols.
  • He Who Fights Monsters: Eisenhorn falls into this rather badly, starting out as a "conservative" inquisitor unwilling to accept that using Chaos against itself is a viable strategy. A combination of compromise and desperation, however, eventually leads him to summon a Daemonhost of his own. Ravenor is of the opinion that Radicalism is inevitable for Inquisitors, and the only hope for them is to do as much good as they can and hope they die before Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
    • Harlon Nayl puts an interesting spin on the concept. He tells Eisenhorn that sometimes you've got to bend and break the rules in order to win. Eisenhorn assumes that this is equivalent to "the end justifies the means". Nayl denies this, noting that confusing the two is what leads to the slippery slope.
      • Fridge Logic kicks in when you realize that both of them are trying to self-justify. The series gives us several Inquisitors of long service who don't turn radical, such as Rorken, Voke, Bezier, Neve and Ricci.
  • Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Bequin when we first meet her.
  • In Harm's Way
  • Involuntary Suicide Mechanism: A captured mercenary has a Your Head Asplode variant of this that goes off when Eisenhorn attempts to interrogate him.
    • Later on, after Eisenhorn has been captured, he tries dropping the same phrase that made the lackey die when in the presence of the higher-ups. He didn't expect it to work, and was right.
  • It's All About Me: Cherubael.
  • Laser Blade: Eisenhorn initially owned one of the extremely rare pure energy blade power swords before he wrecked it in combat in the second book.
  • Light/PureIsNotGood: In Hereticus, Cherubael. Eisenhorn lampshades it.
  • Lawful Stupid: You'd be astonished how easily Inquisitors get caught by this.
    • And Christ, does the witchhunter in Malleus fall under here. His first appearance is him trying to execute Eisenhorn for heresy (though saving his life in the process) on absurdly stupid charges. Eisenhorn shortly thereafter recounts a mission where twenty-odd newly discovered psykers, all under 14 years old, were abducted by raiders before the Black Ships could pick them up. Seeing that psykers are extremely rare, and even rarer to find at such young ages, Eisenhorn launches a mission to rescue them...while the witchhunter decides that kidnapping classifies them all as witches that are in dire need of execution.
      • Not only are psykers very uncommon but the reason that the Imperium sends Black Ships to collect them in the first place is because they're literally necessary for space ships and the Emperor to continue to function. They're distinctly worth rescuing for all sorts of warm and cold hearted reasons.
  • Mercy Kill: Invoked as Eisenhorn explains why he could not do it to the dying victims at the opening of Xenos.
  • Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Done as only 40K can do it. The first chapter has Eisenhorn hunting a traitor with thousands of murders on his record, not to mention innumerably more acts of smuggling, sabotage, and theft, who is nevertheless only a tiny cog in the grand scheme. It gets much bigger from there.
  • New Meat: Subverted in Xenos
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Eisenhorn arranges for Pontius Glaw to be given a mechanical body in return for his guidance on how to create a daemonhost. This turns out to be a very, very, VERY bad move.
    • A milder example in the audio dramas. Master Immus, a clerk who has been used as a pawn in a heretical scheme, goes to a young Eisenhorn and confesses. After a long night of interrogation and mild mind rape, Eisenhorn comes to the conclusion that Master Immus is completely innocent of any involvement in the scheme and is grateful that a man did his Imperial duty by coming forward. The sentiment is decidedly one sided though because it results in the man's place of work being permanently shut down, every employee without a reference or any means of social support.
  • N-Word Privileges: Mutants being called "twists."
  • The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: While he can hardly be accused of "not doing anything," Eisenhorn is The Ordo Xenos Inquisitor Who Doesn't Deal With Aliens Very Often. Mostly because he keeps getting distracted by heretics, daemonhosts, other Inquisitors, and his own past decisions come back to bite him in the ass. Is there a variant for "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything Related to Piracy"?
  • Obviously Evil: Discussed in-story with regards to the Necroteuch and Malus Codicum. The Necroteuch is obviously dangerous from the get-go, overtly attempting to take control of its user's mind and force their submission to Chaos. The Malus Codicum, on the other hand, is just a small black book. A nondescript, unremarkable book that one might find anywhere. Naturally the latter is much more dangerous.
  • Punny Name: Prophaniti.
  • Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Eisenhorn's retinue. Included in their number: a gunslinging pilot, an aging scholar who's literally addicted to knowledge, an ex-cop, an anti-psychic prostitute, and a flamboyant cyborg starship captain. And that's just the first novel.
  • Revenge
  • Right Hand Versus Left Hand: Eisenhorn regularly finds himself pitted against other Inquisitors with ideological stances either more conservative or liberal than his own.
  • Scars Are Forever: The torture in Xenos produced permanent and noticeable nerve damage. Suffice to say, Gregor cannot smile anymore.
    • Also an example of Cursed with Awesome - it comes in handy when Eisenhorn is trying to conceal his emotions.
  • The Smart Guy: Deconstructed with Aemos' meme-virus, which leads him to memorize the whole of the Malus Codicum.
  • Spin-Off: Interrogator Ravenor, a supporting character in the Eisenhorn books who was pretty much developed from a namedrop in the Gaunt's Ghosts series, later became the protagonist of his own novel series. Eisenhorn itself is a spinoff of the Inquisitor Gaiden Game to Warhammer 40,000, and the first novel was released concurrently with the game itself.
  • Star-Crossed Lovers: Eisenhorn and Bequin.

Eisenhorn: I was a psyker, she an Untouchable. That way pain and madness lay.

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