Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  Yes, the Custodians fight. Yes, we have been doing so for millennia. How else could it be that our fellowship remains prepared? Only the nature and the parameters of our warfare were at issue in those days of transition, not the essential matter of it.

  ‘The Captain-General is aware of the situation within the Council,’ I said.

  ‘It’s a delicate stage,’ Tieron said. ‘Understand me, I don’t act on behalf of any faction, but I’m beholden when any of them ask me.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘But you’re aware of the debates.’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘And that matters in the war are reaching a critical juncture.’

  I suspect that no one in the entire Imperium knew that better than us.

  ‘The Captain-General stated his opposition to taking a seat on the Senatorum Imperialis fifteen years ago,’ I said. ‘His views have not changed.’

  ‘But the seat must be filled,’ Tieron said, quietly.

  He was an effective performer. I have seen men and women enter into blind panic when confronted with one of our kind. The chancellor was afraid – that was natural – but he was neither foolish enough to hide it, nor craven enough to let it master him. He clearly knew what the settled position of the Adeptus Custodes was, yet must also have known that our master had come close to accepting the honour following the death of Speaker Iulia Lestia of the Ordo Malleus, fifteen years ago. Now that Chancellor Brach was gone too, another chance presented itself.

  ‘Is there unanimity in favour?’ I asked.

  The question was superfluous – we knew the positions of all eleven remaining High Lords – but I was interested to hear ­Tieron’s response.

  ‘I’ve served the Council for eighty years,’ he said. ‘I’ve never known it to be unanimous about anything.’ He leaned forwards in his seat, cupping his hands. ‘When Dissolution was last proposed, the vote was split evenly, six for each motion, and thus no action was taken. I can’t help but think that matters have become more desperate since then. The proposal here is simple, shield-captain – to place the question into your hands.’

  ‘That is, if all the Lords cast their vote just as they did before.’

  ‘A safe assumption.’

  ‘Nothing in this galaxy is safe, though, is it?’

  ‘Hence the need to consider this.’

  I smiled. I liked this man.

  There had been a time when I despised mortals. In the early years of my service, when my physical perfection had been achieved but I knew little of the deeper truths of the universe, I saw them as irritants, impediments, ever apt to stray into corruption or futility.

  It was Navradaran of the Ephoroi who changed my mind. He has spent more time outside the confines of the Palace than most of us, and his counsel had a great effect on me. In these darker days, I see humans as essentially children, which is not intended to belittle them. They have the potential to be so much more, but we, their guardians, will never lead them into that future if we concentrate exclusively on their inescapable failings.

  All fail, even the greatest of us. We, perhaps above all, ought to remember that.

  ‘You are troubled by Cadia,’ I said.

  He nodded earnestly. ‘Nothing troubles me more. I read the dispatches, I have nightmares. Real nightmares, ones that keep me from getting the sleep I need. That’s the background to all this. That’s what’s changing.’

  ‘It is one world.’

  ‘It’s the Gate.’

  ‘One of many.’

  He shrugged. ‘You’ll know more of that than me, but I’ll tell you truly, the High Lords have never been as anxious. They think we’ll lose it.’

  ‘Tell me this, then – what difference would Dissolution make?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not a member of the Council. My only task here is to set the options before those who’ll decide.’

  I regarded him carefully. As we had been speaking, I had been making my assessment. He was clever, that much was certain. That cleverness was damaged by a degree of ebullience, which may well have been over-compensation from some deeper-seated sense of doubt. The Imperium as it exists rewards the strong and the ­savage – this Tieron was clearly neither, and so had been forced to develop other strategies for survival. I could not blame him for that.

  My masters would want to know if he could be trusted, though. My initial feeling was that he could. It is hard to deceive us, even for the most subtle of souls, and I doubted Tieron would bother to try.

  ‘We are not a part of your Imperium,’ I said. ‘We involve ourselves within it only if we deem His will demands it. Do you really think, chancellor, that your proposed audience with the Captain-General could have any influence on his final judgement?’

  This was the question. This was where he lost or won it. I waited for the reply with some interest, and was pleased to see that he did not hesitate.

  ‘Not to be impious,’ he said, looking me in the eye, ‘but yes, it most certainly could.’

  ‘You are confident.’

  ‘I’m aware of the stakes.’

  ‘You think we are not?’

  ‘Just five minutes with him,’ Tieron said, seriously. ‘Then we’ll see.’

  Aleya

  In a time when so much was lost, we were found.

  It truly amazes me now, thinking back, knowing more than I did, that the Imperium’s grasp on us had been let slip so completely. We held within our hands the kernel of salvation, and we were forgotten.

  To be sure, we had always served, here and there – they still had to garrison their Black Ships, and there were inquisitors who understood our value – but in essence they had let us wither.

  I explained this to Valerian, a long time later, when I was still angry. He did his best to understand that, but I could not help contrast the life he had enjoyed, cloistered in his halls of gold, immersed in the finest and the oldest things of a fading empire, when we were in the emptiness, scratching for survival as horrific tides lapped at our ankles.

  It was all so stupid. That’s the great danger that condemns us – not daemon blades, but dumb ignorance. We’ve become a stupid race, glorying in the easy goals of anger and piety.

  Then again, I’m aware my perspective is unusual. You see reality differently, lacking a soul. It’s a harder place, I think. Its edges are sharper.

  There are no gods in my world. The things other people see, I do not. Even He is not a god to us, though saying that out loud would soon see me in a gaol and on the racks.

  Not that I’d ever say it out loud. Not that I’d ever say anything out loud.

  I don’t talk much these days.

  I called myself a witch-seeker long before the rank became established again. That was what we did, hunting the soul-weak from the long shadows. It was like an instinct. That was all we had, for Throne knows we had little else.

  Our chamber was nine-strong. Seven of us had taken the vow, two more were undergoing trials. In the ancient past, it was said that the vow was taken in the presence of the Emperor, but that was obviously impossible for us – we could not even reliably get to Terra, let alone negotiate an audience with the guardians of the Throne. We observed the old rites as best we could, convening in our draughty old tower on Arraissa with our chipped armour and blunted swords. None of us knew, when we spoke the words, if we did so correctly, but we maintained the faith, and the binding effect was as strong for us as it had been for our sisters in generations past.

  The last audible words to pass my lips were, ‘I so vow it.’

  Actually, that’s not true. At the time, though, I certainly believed it to be. After that, it was all gesture and nuance and Thoughtmark. I preferred it. The clarity I have always sought came more easily when not distracted by the twitter of pointless, fleeting utterances.

  If I had to make one
change, one single change that might restore something like spine to this decaying Imperium, it would be this: say less, do more. A battle-sign gesture is the thing itself, the first movement of the sword-thrust or the trigger-pull, not the spoken command, which is a different act.

  So much talk, so little action. Now that I’ve seen Terra itself I’ve seen how bad it can truly be. There are humans who spend their entire lives drowning in words written and spoken, bleeding their limited existence out over pointless verbal jockeying.

  And they say we have no souls.

  My name is Tanau Aleya. I am of the anathema psykana, what used to be called a null-maiden, or – even stupider – a Sister of Silence. Who came up with those titles? Not one of our order, that’s for sure. Probably a High Lord. They’re mostly idiots.

  We didn’t have organised ranks back then. I served under the one who had kept things together for a long time, a woman whose memory I revere. I still hope to meet her again, for I don’t think she can possibly be dead. It would have taken a whole tide of the shedim to keep her down, and they’d be shrieking the whole time while she pulled them apart. Her name was Sister Atarine Hestia, and she was the one who found us all, back when Terra had all but forgotten we existed, pulled us up, beat some sense into our hive-trash heads and made us warriors.

  I think it must have been like that on a hundred worlds, sometimes with official blessing, sometimes under active persecution, but always there, gathering in the dark, doing what we had been made to do.

  Who made us like this? I don’t know. I don’t think He did. I think we were always waiting, playing different parts, waiting for our time to come again.

  We’ll all have our versions of when it started. For me, it was out in the void, running silent, closing in on the benighted staging post of Hellion Quintus, where I had reason to believe there was a woman who had sold her soul to damnation for a brief escape from the hell of living.

  I was right about that. I was just wrong about everything else.

  I entered the Hellion orbital zone on a single-person Cull-class interceptor. In those days we rarely used fully crewed sub-warp vessels. Even highly trained cadres of human-normals found it hard to work with us, so in many cases we opted for servitor-equipped ships. Those thought-dead drones were still capable of twitching when I walked past them. Somewhere deep in what remained of their limbic function a vestigial horror of me still squatted, which was annoying. You could slice half their brains open, tie their nerves into loops, and still they could barely remain in the same chamber as us.

  It would be worse in the staging post, but I might be able to get in and out without attracting much attention. Hellion was one of those throwback stations, built sometime in the very distant past when traders would still attempt to make warp jumps without properly sanctioned Navigators, then find themselves stuck in scream-space and having to abort rapidly. The vagaries of warp conduits being what they were, the station grew up around what old-time captains used to call a bail-shaft – a safe well in real space squatting at the base of a whole cluster of capillary exits. For a time, so our intelligence told us, the place had done well, even attracting some military spending from the sub-prefect’s resilience commander to beef up its guns. The usual hangers-on turned up – permanent traders, thieves, missionaries, pleasure-bringers. They said it was quite the place back then, if rough around the edges.

  Not now. No one flew a warp-hull now without a whole team of Navigators to guide it. Even contemplating making a jump without many days’ preparation and the Geller fields at full integrity was madness – the ether was like boiling oil, and rumour said more ships were being lost now than were being built.

  That was bad news for Hellion, and all the other half-cocked ­stations spinning within the old bail-shafts. Hardly anything dared to make the passage. The bulkers stopped coming, as did the Navy tenders. The only ships that plied such routes now were the ones that had a reason to stay hidden, and that diminished the quality of Hellion’s occupants further. Respectable people drifted away, leaving whole sections of its spiral structure echoing and empty.

  So there we had it – a half-deserted void station full of contraband runners and slavers operating off the major warp routes as the empyrean fizzed madly all around it. You didn’t need to be a seer to guess that it was a weak link, a place where mortal fallibility would find plenty of hooks to get entangled with.

  That wasn’t all, of course. We had our methods, our informers, our hunches. We’d seen a pattern of events develop over the past few decades – cells of shedim-worshippers had grown more numerous, and we couldn’t burn them fast enough, especially considering the need to remain out of sight of the jumpier units of the ­Adeptus Arbites. Hestia herself had immolated a secret society called the Circlet locked deep down under the shipyards orbiting Eyrinan V. Before they had all died, we got some garbled information that led us to other associated beds of heresy, among them Hellion Quintus.

  So here I was, clad in my old armour, my charred flamer in my hand, watching the dark twist of metal turning slowly in the abyss. I let the servitors handle the comm traffic for docking, which involved them shunting binaric response codes to similarly lobotomised creatures at the other end. We came in low, under a heavy supporting beam for one of the station’s big spokes.

  I finalised suiting up, and opened the airlock doors into a place that stank of human urine. There was no one waiting for me, not even automated guard-units. The corridor’s lumens strobed uncomfortably on low power levels.

  I activated my helm’s cartographic scanner and isolated the chamber I needed. There was a direct route through the lower strata, avoiding the station’s populated zones, which made my task a little easier. I went quickly, hugging the plentiful shadows.

  Most of the living things I encountered were servitor-grade, blind and limping creatures of metal and pulled-flesh that ignored me. A few human-normals lingered in those wells of darkness, and as soon as they laid eyes on me they looked even more nauseous than they had before, before hurrying away. I caught sight of flashes of grey in the dark, and filmy eyes, and emaciated hands clutching at ragged cloak-ends.

  Humanity, I thought to myself. Master of the stars.

  Soon one of those wretches would get a message up to what passed for the authorities in that place, alerting them to the strangely armoured interloper skulking along in the gloom, but by that point I planned to be long gone.

  I reached my destination – a locked door set amid a whole row of locked doors. The plasteel was pitted and spotted with rust, and in the centre of the panel was a small armourglass slide-viewer.

  I might have chosen to depress the summon-chime and wait for someone to pull the viewer’s shielding back, but long experience had taught me that my unique repulsiveness could be detected even through a solid mass, so I seized the mechanism with my gauntlet, activated a freeze-grip and shattered it.

  Then I was through, kicking the door aside and scanning beyond it. I detected movement from six warm-bodies within – two up close, four more further off. Las-fire criss-crossed out of the gloom, aimed immediately and accurately. I ducked under the worst of it, letting my armour deal with the rest. The hot stench of scorched auramite filled my nostrils as I opened up with my flamer.

  I caught the two closest in that inferno, and soon heard the counter­point of their screams. A lasgun’s power unit blew, showering the confined space with a burst of static, but by then I was already pushing through the shimmering flame-curtains to the ones beyond.

  They fired back, and I perceived outlines of armoured bodies trembling in the heat-shake. Nothing they possessed could harm me. My presence alone was enough to make their flesh rebel, and I could smell panic in their gestures. I used my flames like a flail, pulling them round and melting their crude armour plates.

  Even as they were dying I learned something of them. They were better equipped and better armed than the
cult members I had expected, which was good, as it indicated we’d found a higher breed of degenerate. I glimpsed snatches of bare flesh as their armour crisped away – pale and diseased – before it too was consumed. They did not run, despite their fear. Never let it be said that hatred had blinded me entirely to quality – I could appreciate a foe who stood their ground.

  Soon, though, only one remained – the woman I had come for, backing away from me. She was portly, swathed in a layer of fat that was probably synthetic and designed for endurance during void transit. She was wearing the slack uniform of a maintenance supervisor, marked with pale grey runes of relevant expertise, but she was no maintenance supervisor.

  Even one of the ungifted, even one of the very stupidest of our species, ought to have been able to spot it – the wrongness, hanging over her like foul flatus. There were no visual cues, just a certain manner, a certain bearing, and it shrieked out moral squalor.

  I let the flamer gutter out. She looked at me, her eyes half-steady, holding a lasgun two-handed. She had dark hair, matted with greasy sweat.

  She grinned at me twitchily. I could see she was terrified. Perhaps she knew better than most what I lacked that I should have possessed.

  ‘They told us you’d be a danger,’ she said.

  I don’t know what she expected me to do then. Talk to her? I wasn’t even remotely tempted. Talking, like most things, is a skill built on repetition. After a while, you lose even the motivation to practise.

  I looked around the chamber. Documents were spread out across dark iron tables, among them data-slates and secure comm-canisters. On one of the walls was a great chart made of what looked like animal hides, only part burned away by my flamer. It contained symbolic representations of planetary systems, connected by a skein of warp routes etched in a dark brown fluid.

  ‘Too late, anyway,’ she said, tracking me with her weapon, a standard-grade item that had no chance of troubling my armour. ‘Doesn’t matter now. It’s all ending, and very soon.’