Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  I found her certainty intriguing. Most invective from cultists was bluster, designed to bolster their own courage more than anything else. This was different. She almost sounded sorry about it.

  I looked back at her, and she recoiled. Her lip curled back, she took a step away almost before she’d realised it.

  Let me tell you something. You never get used to it. You never lose the wounds. You grow up, your whole life, surrounded by people who loathe you for a reason they can’t even articulate, and it gets stuck under your skin. The training helps, of course. We learn techniques. We have old mantras to recite, telling ourselves that we are in reality the greatest of His servants, which is less about boastfulness than self-preservation, but you never really believe it, and every flinch, every appalled expression, twists the old knife a little bit.

  ‘I won’t tell you anything,’ she said, defiantly.

  What a strange notion. She thought I was there to question her.

  I opened the flamer up again, dousing her in a column of heart’s-blood-fire. For a moment I watched her writhe and jerk within the hot purification, her body a black clot against the screen of unleashed energy.

  So look at me now, I thought, allowing myself a sliver of ­savage pleasure at the spectacle of this woman’s just and warranted suffering.

  I let the execution go on too long. I used up too much sacred fuel, which was a sin Hestia would not find easy to forgive. By the time I was done, her body was a steaming heap of embers, laced with the last boiling remnants of her blood and elements.

  I shut off my flamer’s promethium line. I took a long breath. I let the heavy clouds of heat dissipate.

  Then I went over to the chart. Unsurprisingly, the material was not animal hide, but something fouler. More surprisingly, it was a coherent representation of warp space, such as might be used by a Navigator or an Imperial general. I was no scholar of the empyrean, but I could understand a great deal of what it depicted. To my eye, it looked like the kind of schema used by a tactical war-planner – an almanac of systems, arranged in the esoteric order imposed by warp currents.

  I took a pict of the data for later study, and moved over to the piles of comm-canisters. Many were marked with runes of warding – smears of blood designed to invoke curses on anyone tampering with them without the proper initiation. I activated hololith-beams from their emitters, and got little back but fuzzy, scrambled images for my trouble. They were either erased, or my unsanctioned usage had automatically wiped the contents.

  I had to revise my opinions of this rabble again. They were behaving almost professionally.

  I went back to the smouldering body of the woman. She had been clutching something before I had burst in – what looked like a hand-mirror, framed in heavy bronze in the shape of a gasping mouth. As I picked it up, I felt a spark of energy curl across my fist. The flat surface was cloudy, marked with half-images that still scudded.

  I was about to shatter it, recognising a proscribed device that could be dissected at leisure on my return to the home world, when the glass suddenly clarified. I found myself looking into the dead eyes of something much, much more troubling than the burned woman at my feet.

  I will be honest – my heart missed a beat. There’s no shame in that. There are few among the living who can look upon the face of the Enemy directly and not feel a spasm of ice clutch at their hearts.

  It was rare to see one of them in such a manner. I have killed their kind before, of course. I take no greater pleasure than seeing a cursed warrior of the Old Legions die at my hands, for they are among the greatest of the foes we face, and eminently capable of ending us just as we are capable of ending them. We made the study of their ways the focus of our scarce resources, scrutinising their ancient iconography and their base heraldry for anything that might help us understand their intentions.

  So I knew what it was I looked at. It was not a live feed, but the last stutter of whatever arcane communication had been in use before I entered. I was staring at a warrior of the greatest of all the hosts of the Enemy – the self-styled Black Legion. I saw it through veils of rising mist, but could perceive clearly enough the ebon death mask, rimmed with greenish gold. I had faced these unholy fighters before in combat only once, many years ago, and could vouch for their extreme deadliness. Of all the various warbands and mongrel battalions of the Enemy, it was this Legion that ever portended the worst days ahead for us.

  I could not understand what was being said. The language was distorted by the extreme distance, or mangled by sorcery, or perhaps spoken in some guttural battle-code, but its very presence here changed the whole tenor of this action. Something necessary yet routine had just become critical – if there was any link, even the slightest, between the Circlet and the Old Legions then word of it had to be taken back to Hestia immediately.

  I moved quickly, collecting the remaining canisters, intending to place both them and the mirror within a null-casket on board my interceptor. I took down the hide map and rolled it tightly. As I went, I laid charges around the chamber, giving them only a few minutes to count down before going off. Soon after my departure this whole level would be purged, leaving no hint of what had taken place within. The need for haste was pressing.

  It was only as I reached the broken doorway that I heard the word that truly knocked me off balance. Amid all the growls and hisses of the still-active feed, there came a name so familiar that no distortion could disguise it. The legionnaire spoke it like an expletive, sharp and vicious, and thus there could be no mistake.

  Arraissa.

  I started to run.

  Tieron

  In those days it felt like the tasks before us would never end. The Council acted with great purpose, as far as I could ascertain, but it was scarcely sufficient to meet the growing tide of demands. We did not need Kerapliades’ counsel to know that the war was going badly, and yet the specifics still eluded us. Warp storms were rising to levels never witnessed by the living, astropathic choirs succumbed to madness, deafness or torpor, and my attempts to gain further information through the usual web of contacts yielded very little. Somehow, through that odd sense of herd intuition that always ran ahead of firm tidings one way or the other, the Throneworld began to panic.

  We began to receive more reports than usual from the Palace guards, all of them complaining of sedition in the great slum-pans out beyond the gargantuan walls. It was nothing the regular enforcers couldn’t handle, but the frequency bothered me. These were not carefully planned revolts against the tyranny of the Lords, but spontaneous uprisings, confused and without purpose. When the leaders were interrogated, they could say nothing other than that a madness had seized them. They did not plead for their lives. In more than one report, it was said that they preferred death to what they thought was coming, which I found both contemptible and unsettling.

  Much of what passed across my desk remained unread, such was the volume of missives that came my way, rising out of every avenue like a foetid tide of floodwater. There was a sense, I remember, of things coming apart, of seams gradually unpicking, of the levers of control no longer pulling on the machinery below.

  That was hardly new. I had had the same sense many other times, and yet order had always been restored, the will of the Throne clamped back on to an unruly populace. I don’t remember thinking that this would be any different. Or perhaps I did. It’s hard now to recall, for we did not rest much then, and our dinners became less fine and more hurried, and we shuffled endlessly from citadel to citadel with our parchment bundles carried by trains of lumbering menials.

  I met a general from the Cadian high command. His name was Alberich Harster, and he had been back on Terra for three months by then. I was fairly used to dealing with senior figures of the Astra Militarum, though had never quite shaken off my vague sense of inferiority in their company. You may find this odd, given the mightier warriors I was used to dealing with, s
uch as Valerian, but in my mind these were an entirely different category altogether – almost beyond human. Men like Harster were what I might have become, had I been made of harder stone, and the lingering suspicion never left me that I somehow hadn’t tried enough, and that my world of scholars and expensive wines was an insult to those who died daily in the trenches.

  If Harster felt the same way, he gave no sign of it. He was of the old school – calmly deferential without giving much away. He respected my rank, like all the military did, and was diplomatic enough not to betray what he thought of its bearer.

  I received him in the same chamber where Kerapliades had spoken with me. By day it looked much the same as it did by night – Terra’s sludge-grey sunlight did little to leaven the oppressive gloom hanging over all my fine furniture.

  ‘General,’ I said, offering him a drink and taking a seat.

  ‘Chancellor,’ he replied, refusing it graciously and doing likewise.

  He was a big man, his neck corded and tight up against his dress collar. A long scar ran down his right cheek, bisecting an augmetic eye socket. His flesh was tanned tight, solid like old leather, and his grey-white hair was cropped short.

  ‘When do you go back?’ I asked.

  ‘Two weeks,’ he replied.

  ‘You take the hopes of us all with you.’

  His expression did not flicker. ‘I take half a million soldiers, in fifty fresh-raised regiments. It has taken ten years to muster them, and only now do I have the commission to depart. I pray to the Throne they will not arrive too late.’

  I absorbed the implied insult. The wheels of Imperial bureaucracy grind slowly, and he could have no appreciation of how difficult a task it was to raise such an army over such a short span of time. Truth be told, ten years was nothing – I have known it take five times as long to gather less potent forces together.

  ‘You have been fighting a long time,’ I said. ‘Tell me of it.’

  ‘We endure,’ Harster said, stiffly. ‘The line will not break.’

  ‘Come, general,’ I said, placing my ring-heavy hands in my lap. ‘If I wanted a catechism I would have gone to a priest. Tell me how it truly stands.’

  For the first time, a shadow of unease fell across his features. He hesitated, knowing that it might be a test of fidelity to the public line we spun to the masses. After only a moment, though, the uncertainty passed. He had been fighting too long to be worried about what I might do to him.

  ‘Half a million will not do it,’ he said. ‘Ten times that would not do it.’

  I nodded. ‘We’ve not heard from Cadia for a long time now.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘That’s making all sorts of rumours fly around. The Gate might already be breached, they say.’

  ‘I’ve heard those rumours.’

  ‘You’ll still travel there?’

  Harster’s grey eyes – one natural, one ringed with iron – stayed steady. ‘It’s where our duty lies.’

  Despite myself, that caught me. I looked at this man, who had many years of natural life left to him, and no doubt had the coin and influence to find a less suicidal posting, and saw what those brutes at the schola could become, once the edges had been knocked off them. I will admit it – I felt shame.

  ‘What can be done?’ I asked.

  He understood what I was getting at. I wished to know what the Astra Militarum would make of our great undertaking, and whether they could countenance it.

  ‘I’ve seen things no sane man should see,’ he said, taking a kind of rough pride in that, though it hollowed out his expression. ‘I’ve seen the Angels of Death defeated. You think that possible? I didn’t, but I’ve seen it. There’s strength in the universe greater even than theirs. Some of it dwells here, they tell me, held fast by the ancient law.’ His gaze, steel-hard, simply didn’t change. I’d have followed this one into battle, if that had been my calling. ‘They’re old laws. They’re old habits. I might say, if I were asked, that we can’t afford them any more.’

  I pursed my lips in thought. I wanted to thank him for that, but I supposed he had little use for thanks from such as me.

  ‘I see,’ was all I said.

  He was getting impatient. I knew when his lander was scheduled to take him up to the fleet hanging in orbit – a thousand slab-hulled troop carriers, escorted by every Navy frigate the Praeses Command could scrape together. After a meagre two weeks of no doubt understaffed preparation, they would be gone, so I got up, and watched him do the same. We walked to the doorway together, me shuffling under my heavy robes, he striding awkwardly, carrying old wounds.

  ‘May He preserve you out there, general,’ I said, standing at the threshold.

  He gave me a curt nod. We were both observant, but neither of us thought that it really worked like that. I knew with perfect clarity that the man was going to his death, as were the half a million souls he took with him. Whether that would achieve anything, whether it would even slow the collapse, was another question.

  ‘We fight out there,’ he said, making the sign of the aquila, then looking at the over-fashioned pillars of gold around him. ‘You fight in here. I don’t know which of us has the worse job.’

  Then he was gone, turning on his boot heel and limping down the corridor.

  ‘I do,’ I murmured, watching him go.

  The engagement put me in a foul mood. For the first time in a long while, I found the bottomless mire of Terra’s slow-working procedures pointless and frustrating. I was as much a master of those mazes as any who had ever lived, and yet the wheels turned with agonising slowness in the face of annihilation. Everything told us that the walls would be breached, that the flood would rise to engulf us, and yet we did what we had been doing for ten thousand years – raised fresh regiments, sent entreaties to wilful Chapter Masters, argued over precedence and sector commands in Council.

  I strode down the corridors towards my secure command hall, ignoring the many staff who attempted to get my attention.

  All but one. I could never refuse Jek, who was as much a part of me as my synthetic lungs. She wasn’t as old and broken as I was, and yet had the quick mind and steady intelligence needed to thrive in this old fen of competing rivalries.

  ‘How was he?’ she asked, walking briskly beside me. That’s what we always seemed to do – conduct hurried conversations while on the move to some fresh crisis.

  ‘It breaks my bloody heart,’ I growled.

  ‘It’s his duty.’ That word again – duty. Perhaps, once, there had been more than that.

  ‘Tell me how we stand,’ I said.

  ‘We have an agreed date,’ she said, letting a note of triumph slip into the statement. This was what we’d been working for – slogging for days and weeks with the offices and sentinels and gatekeepers of the Twelve – and I finally looked up at her. ‘The Ninth of Decimus. All have agreed.’

  ‘Even Raskian?’

  ‘Even Raskian.’

  Oud Oudia Raskian was Fabricator-General of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the hardest of all the Twelve to pin down to a general assembly at the Senatorum, since his physical form was more building than body and required extensive modification to travel from Mars at all. It would take eight Basilikon megalifters to get him to the Palace, and all that required tedious orbital clearance.

  Still, he’d agreed. We’d done it.

  ‘At last, some good news,’ I muttered, still walking. Ahead of me loomed the heavy bronze doors of my command hall, flanked by gun-drones and a brace of house guards in purple livery. ‘It doesn’t give us much time to organise the orders of inquiry. Arx has been pushing for her damnable intra-ordo summit madness, and it’s got to stay off the agenda.’

  You’ll understand, I hope, the need for the flurry of names here, for the politics was complicated – Kleopatra Arx was the Inquisitorial Representative, and had been
agitating for a grand reorganisation of the labyrinthine layers of cells and cabals within her purview, something that required a majority of the High Lords to warrant. I wanted this tortuous and largely administrative proposal nowhere near the table, for it could only delay the truly important matters at hand.

  ‘I’ve put out feelers, chancellor,’ said Jek. ‘The Provost is opposed, so we should be able to defer until the next scheduled session.’

  As the doors opened, revealing the vast dome within, my mind was working hard. I barely saw the hundreds of menials and savants toiling over their comm-stations and scholaric pedestals. Through high windows above us the towering profile of the Inner Palace could be seen against the sky, all of it grey and monolithic.

  For some time, virtually the entire set of mechanisms at my command had been devoted to a single goal – to place the issue of Dissolution before the Twelve, and get them to meet to consider it. At the start, I had done so out of a sense of duty to Kerapliades; as I had learned more, and spoken to those like Harster, I had come to see it as the only tasking that made any sense at all. And more than this – I wanted it to succeed.

  Remember this: history records the warriors and the sword-bearers, but there were always those who did what was necessary to get them to battle. That was my role now, the one contribution I could make.

  ‘My mind is sluggish,’ I said, making my way up to my strategium platform – a hexagonal plane of rippled marble overlooking the great expanse of workers, studded with a mighty polished stone table and encircled with floating picter lenses and hololith casters. ‘I need to set things in their right place.’

  Jek joined me at the table’s edge. I summoned a read-out of our running tactical situation, and lithcasts flickered into translucent life around me.

  Every member of the Council had an entry there, scored in vivid red runes. I had a team attached to each one, shadowing their movements and reporting on their conversations. It would have come as little surprise to them to know that their inner courts were infiltrated by my spies, for no doubt my own organisation was similarly riddled, but my people were better.