Book two in the Watchers of the Throne series, Chris Wraight’s novel The Regent’s Shadow picks up where 2017’s phenomenal The Emperor’s Legion left off, and delivers another brilliant slice of Warhammer 40,000 storytelling. In the wake of Roboute Guilliman’s departure to lead the Indomitus Crusade, Terra begins the process of returning to some kind of new normality. With a reshuffled council of High Lords and a populace still suffering, however, discontent and disorder is growing on the Throneworld. Sister of Silence Aleya, Custodian Valerian and new Imperial Chancellor Anna-Murza Jek each find their roles fundamentally changed in Guilliman’s wake, and set out in their own ways to understand what those changes mean.
Wraight maintains his first-person approach with the three viewpoint characters each looking back to tell their part of the story from their own perspective and with their own tone of voice. With the Custodes and Silent Sisterhood already reintroduced to 40k fans, this delves deeper into what the changed world means for them; for Valerian that means wrestling further with questions of authority and agency, while Aleya has the opportunity to look back into the history of her organisation and try to better understand her opinion of and place within the Imperium. They spend much of the book apart, but the unusual bond formed between them in The Emperor’s Legion is still in evidence, adding an occasional touch of warmth and humour to proceedings. Jek, meanwhile, offers a new perspective, looking at the world differently to how Tieron did and learning her way through the role he used to play.
Without her old mentor’s history, connections or political standing to rely upon, Jek offers a different angle on the politics of the Throneworld – and this is very much a political story, exploring the complex realities of how the Imperium is bound together. Jek exemplifies that, but Aleya and Valerian are caught up in the politics too, whether they realise it or not. Much like in Wraight’s other second-in-series novel The Hollow Mountain, a key theme is change, but this time the focus is on the tension between unknowable change and comfortable stasis as Terra begins to emerge from the shadow cast by Guilliman and his reforms. From hidebound institutions begrudgingly shaken up by cataclysmic events to the lives of individual characters, the varying responses reflect the fact that Terra (representing the Imperium in microcosm) was never going to have a consistent, unanimously positive reaction to the changes forced upon it.
This isn’t a book about the Custodes, Silent Sisters or High Lords – it’s about Terra as a whole, its endless complexity and what it represents to the Imperium. In many respects it’s more of the same as The Emperor’s Legion, but with its characters all coming from a place of considerable doubt and uncertainty this time around. The action takes a little more of a back seat to the politics, interspersed throughout the book rather than directly driving the plot, and it doesn’t quite have the grand scale or earth-shattering conclusion of the first book, but this is still 40k so there’s plenty of violence where appropriate, and there are a few surprises along the way too. Crucially, the narrative, character development and continued exploration of Terra are all deeply satisfying, and in typical Wraight fashion it continues to fill some of the gaps in recent 40k history in a powerful, very human way. In short, it’s another must-read.
Check out my Rapid Fire interview with Chris Wraight about this book.
Click this link to buy The Regent’s Shadow, or this one for the audiobook edition.