Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  I stood over him for a moment longer, breathing heavily, my spear gripped loosely. Blood, viscous as sump-oil, oozed from the rotten stump of his neck. His metal fingers twitched. The aegis of force around his warhammer flickered out.

  Slowly, carefully, I relaxed. The kill had been clean, with no damage taken. I was not satisfied with how far this one had penetrated, though. On another run, I would have hoped to have downed him further out.

  I felt no particular emotion as I studied the body. I understood that my cousins in the Adeptus Astartes reserved an almost pathological hatred for their Traitor counterparts. I wondered if that made them more or less effective on the field of battle. To me, the surviving members of the Old Legions were like bands of animals – feral threats to the Throne that required culling. I felt no discernible difference in my response to them than that I had experienced when hunting xenotype tyranids and eldar in these same tunnels – they were all dangerous, all worthy of study, but unworthy of expending emotional energy upon.

  I deactivated Gnosis’ energy field and stood back from the corpse. In a few moments, Palace menials would catch up and secure the body. Every atom of it would be destroyed in furnaces watched over by sanctioned priests. For the time being, though, it would lie in the dust, ruined and broken, just as so many of his kin had done ten thousand years before.

  In case you are in any doubt, let me make two things clear. This was no hololith – we were in the real Palace. This was also a real legionary, once of the IV Legion, latterly part of some warband operating in the Ophir Reach, so they told me.

  That knowledge may appal you, or perhaps strike you as ludicrous. How could we allow such a monster to get so close to the centre of our power, the one site we were sworn to defend above all else?

  I remember when I discovered the nature of this particular Blood Game, and had similar thoughts myself. And yet, recall that the Palace is the size of a continent, with many sections lost to habitation, and so we have literally hundreds of square kilometres in which to stage our exercises. If I had let the creature escape the hunt, it would have been a mark of shame against my record, but several hundred gun-servitors would have annihilated him before he could have broken the cordon we had set.

  And, of course, not one of them has ever escaped my hunt. I say that not to boast, but to demonstrate both the wisdom and the necessity of these exercises. We must fight real enemies, in the real environment we are pledged to guard. They change, as the corrupting years work their spell, and so must we.

  That leaves the question of how he came to be here at all. Remember, I told you that we are not idle. We have our ships, and we have knowledge of many gates into the Outside, and we have whole corps devoted to the recovery of suitable subjects. As for the particular place this one was taken, that shall of course remain undisclosed.

  I shook the blood from Gnosis’ blade, and withdrew from the site of the kill. As I did so, I suddenly sensed that I was not alone. I turned, and saw the approaching dark-gold profile of Navradaran of the Ephoroi.

  I smiled. ‘Were you close behind the whole time?’ I asked.

  ‘Just to observe,’ he replied.

  Navradaran’s voice was far lower than mine, a bass rumble that seemed to swell up from within the heart of his armour.

  ‘He got too far,’ I said.

  ‘Only judged against the standard of perfection,’ he said.

  ‘What other standard is there?’

  ‘Come beyond the walls with me one day,’ he said. ‘I will show you.’

  We walked together. Lingering close to the corrupted corpse was distasteful, and I could already hear the clatter and rumble of the approaching disposal teams.

  ‘Then what brings you inside, brother?’ I asked.

  ‘Dreams,’ he said.

  I stopped walking. The word alone was enough to halt me.

  Dreams do not mean the same to us as they do to others. In ordinary life, we do not dream at all. If I ever dreamed as a child, I have forgotten it. Something in our minds is changed by what we become, and whatever purpose dreaming has for the mortal psyche is made redundant by our alteration.

  But there are exceptions. Legendary ones. They are spoken of carefully, reverently, for it was in the form of dreams, long ago, that His will was made most clearly manifest to us. There are accounts, written in arcane script and buried in the deepest vaults of the Inner Palace, that tell of detailed testimony from the oldest of our order, now all long dead. The greatest of us all – Diocletian Exemplar, Thanassar, even Valdor himself – were said to have had dreams in which knowledge was given.

  There have not been dreams for millennia. Many, including myself, had begun to doubt that they would ever come again.

  ‘What did they tell you?’ I asked, eagerly.

  ‘The dreams were not mine. I have been occupied with lesser things – witches, xenos and their hunters. They were Heracleon’s. He wished to speak with me about them.’

  The tribune Heracleon was still within the inner sanctum, fully occupied with the hieratic duties that were the most sacred calling for us all.

  ‘And what did he dream of?’ I pressed. I found myself burning to know, with the kind of almost juvenile curiosity that should have been driven out of me a long time ago.

  ‘You have been a fine shield-captain, Valerian,’ Navradaran said, starting to walk again. ‘You must have considered where your fate would lead you.’

  ‘I serve at His will,’ I said, following close behind.

  ‘No one doubts it. But this is a time of change – you see that more clearly on the other side.’

  ‘You speak in riddles.’

  Navradaran laughed. ‘You wish for it plainly? Heracleon dreamed of a name. Your name. The Hataeron Guard are depleted, and he has taken this as a sign. Having spoken to him myself, I am in agreement.’

  The words made my pulse rate pick up. The Companions were never more than three hundred strong. It was the highest ­honour to be chosen for duty within that brotherhood. There would be sacrifice, of course – I would have to leave my precious books behind – but that counted as nothing besides the opportunity to serve in the most profound way imaginable.

  I hardly knew what to say. Only a short time ago I had been dealing with matters of political protocol with short-lived mortal scuttlers of the High Lords’ hierarchy. Now the prospect of taking my place behind the Eternity Gate and never leaving, spending the remainder of my life in the radiant aegis of His immanent presence, rose up instead.

  ‘A surprise?’ Navradaran asked, looking wryly amused at my stupefaction.

  ‘You might say it.’ I attempted to collect myself. ‘He has mentioned nothing to me of this.’

  Navradaran placed his hand on my arm, halting me.

  ‘That is why he sent me to find you,’ he said. ‘Come, the Throne awaits.’

  The Throne.

  Such a simple word, used across every world of the Imperium as a curse, a blessing, a vow or a mere preposition. Almost none of those who invoked it knew anything about it. They imagined a simple golden chair, I suppose, like something a princeling of a barbarian world might occupy. They imagined a chamber around it, glittering with the riches of our interstellar domain, and maybe courtiers drifting across fine floors, murmuring to one another about high matters of state.

  I cannot blame them for their lack of imagination. They are taught what to think by the priests, and the image does no harm and some good. They can fix their minds on it in times of darkness, and their faith in its power may stiffen their resolve. That does not prevent them from being so very badly wrong.

  Whatever it might once have been, the Throne is no longer a ­single object, nor is it housed in a single room. Its mechanisms spread out like roots throughout the entire Inner Palace, worming down into the forgotten crypts and climbing up into the highest peaks. Its power coils are the si
ze of cities, its foundations the remade mountains themselves. The adepts of the Mechanicus who toil without rest to maintain its workings have added so many accretions over its ten millennia of life that the planet around it has been utterly changed – bored away, ground down and raised up again.

  You might say that Terra itself is little more than a holding vessel for the Throne. Certainly, if one takes the mighty psionic transmission conduits leading to the Fortress of the Astronomican as part of its structure – which would be a reasonable judgement – then the Throne’s mechanism is far more massive than the Outer ­Palace itself. It is woven into the strata of the planet like an internal organ, pulsing and arterial. In truth, I doubt that any living soul, save the one who ordered its construction and dwells at its heart, has any true understanding of its full extent.

  And yet, the unschooled men and women of the Imperium are not wrong in every particular. There was once a room at the heart of it all – vast enough, to be sure, but a room nonetheless. It has not entirely disappeared, though its inner faces are now scored with the detritus of Mars and its roots have been replaced by pits clawed into the heart of the world. The air in that place is hard to breathe. The temperature is astonishing. The ground trembles, and the vaults ring with the grind of immense machines that have been in ceaseless operation for millennia.

  It is hard for me to convey what it is like to be there. I have walked through its halls and its vaults, surrounded on all sides by the holiest of all human physical creations, and have been brought nigh to my knees by the magnitude of it all. Save for the greatest savants of the Red Planet, who are human only in the most nominal sense, only we pass through its portals. There used to be others, the silent daughters of the anathema psykana, but for many years they had not been fully part of the Adeptus Terra and did not come into the precincts as they once had done.

  So only we remained, clad in the black of our penance, stalking among the snaking cables and clustered power lines, listening for any slight change in the heartbeat of the machine that surrounded us, lost in its burnished shadows.

  Navradaran and I went swiftly, walking the long and winding stairs down to the deepest operational levels. For a long time the only witnesses we had were red-eyed Martian automata, scrabbling in the dark, tracing ritual routes through the mazes and mumbling words of forgotten process-languages.

  I looked up briefly, and saw a childlike angel flap across the face of the high arches, leaking a messy trail of incense. The creature looked vaguely lost.

  My heart was still beating fast. I had been told, a long time ago, that even the Space Marines feared this place. Everything living feared this place. It was said that humanity could not bear to be close to the source of both its creation and destruction, and so we were like moths to the candle here, burning ourselves as we approached the engine of souls.

  I saw a cadre of Mechanicus magi processing across a walkway hundred of metres above us, their passage lit by the candle-like flicker of arc-welders. We kept moving, gliding deeper into the underworld.

  In time we came to the Astral Gate, marked with the Emperor’s own original thunderbolt sigil over the lintel. The first of the Hataeron Guard were waiting for us there with their guardian spears in hand. The tribune Heracleon stood among them, his helm removed to reveal his severe, blunt face.

  ‘Tribune,’ I acknowledged.

  He looked at me for a long time. ‘Shield-captain,’ he said. ‘Navradaran told you everything?’

  ‘He said you had been dreaming.’

  ‘It seemed… the right word to use,’ he said.

  I looked beyond him, through the portal and into the heart of the Throne’s inner workings. A long corridor ran onwards, ridged with bands of iron, glinting from tiny lumens implanted in the metal. The floor was lost in an ankle-deep soup of condensation, and slender sparks of static danced across the serrations.

  ‘I am not the only one,’ Heracleon said. ‘All of us here, little by little, we have begun to see things.’

  ‘You are honoured.’

  ‘If they are true visions. But the Throne is not what it was.’

  Even as he spoke, I saw a hiss of steam burst from an overhead coolant line, high up in the tangled heights. Immediately a little skull-drone swept up towards it, isolating the leak and hovering below it, dendrites flickering.

  ‘As you see,’ Heracleon remarked, dryly. ‘Come, this way.’

  We passed under the Gate’s arch. The guards remained at the portal, leaving the three of us to make our way further in.

  ‘I had little idea you were considering me for this, tribune,’ I said.

  ‘Neither did I. There were other names ahead of yours.’ Heracleon looked over at me. ‘I mean no disrespect. There are many roles to fill on the walls too.’

  ‘For myself, I did not foresee my fate here. Not yet.’

  ‘No. But then we live in an age of surprises, do we not?’

  At the terminus of the long corridor, we emerged out onto the floor of a colossal hemisphere, filled with glowing power exchangers. The air itself thrummed with electric force, and mighty beams of plasma danced above us, making the reflective metal of the machinery flash vividly.

  ‘There will be trials,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ Heracleon said. ‘Many of them. But this is the first test.’

  From the chamber of light, we crossed over a single-span bridge flung over a cloudy gulf that seemed to go down forever. The noises became heavier and deeper, and I felt the torment of the earth below. It was forever cracking, I knew – prised apart by the forces barely contained within the Martian groundwork of buried iron. On the far side of the chasm soared a wall, entirely man-made, a dizzying patchwork of pipes and riveted panels. Ancient standards hung against the ticking dials and shackled vacuum-pods, most etched with binaric litanies, a few inked with High Gothic purity rotes.

  The next portal was guarded by two Contemptor-Galatus Venerated Fallen, both static and silent in the flickering gloom. They didn’t move as we passed them by, their armoured helms gazing in eternal vigil out into the shadows.

  There were more gates, more chambers, all passing in stately procession as we wound our way inwards. Some were vast, burning with shackled star-fires and pulsating like hearts; others were frigid, grave-like and lined with crystal fusion vanes. Most were empty of the living. A few held conclaves of red-robed magi poring over open workings while tech-savants whispered sequence-prayers to the Omnissiah, though they paid us no heed.

  Eventually we came to the heart of it. Companions were waiting for us, twelve of them. The gold of their auramite was blackened, as if charred by fire. I had heard that proximity to the source did that, turning our pride into ashes. I had always thought the symbolism appropriate.

  The door ahead of us was the largest yet, a gothic arch of banded basalt columns. Electricity snapped and fizzed openly through the air now, briefly dazzling in the otherwise near-black interior. Over the Last Door, carved in Archaic Gothic, were the ancient words Conservus, Restituere, Revivicarem.

  During the journey, I had been feeling steadily more oppressed. It was not the monolithic architecture, for I had ventured almost as far on previous occasions. Like all my order, I knew the twisting ways of the Inner Palace perfectly. I could not place the source of my unease, but it had grown with every step, and that troubled me.

  Now, poised on the threshold of the final gate, I could feel cold sweat-lines running down my neck. My blood was pumping in my temples.

  ‘The Hataeron are with the Emperor,’ said Heracleon, speaking the words as if they were some rite of ascension. ‘They alone see Him with mortal eyes. Once inducted into the brotherhood, they never leave His side.’

  I understood that. I had known it from the very beginning. Such a sacrifice would have been worth it a thousand times just for the certainty that it was His desire for me to serve there.

>   But I felt nauseous. The air was thick, shimmering with heat and psychic afterburn. The very stones were swimming in it, blazing with it. For a moment, it felt as if they were screaming at me.

  ‘Brother?’ asked Heracleon. ‘Do you hear?’

  I nodded, working hard to remain focused. This was all part of the first trial. I had to remain calm. If it were not difficult to pass the threshold, then all might do it.

  ‘And so the first step is the greatest,’ the tribune went on. ‘Take it, and witness the most profound sphere of duty.’

  The Companions parted. For a moment, I saw the Last Door ahead of me. Its surface was black and pitted, fused together from old ceramite. In the centre, where the two doors met, an ebon face had been carved. It was a human face, austere, mournful, encircled with a halo of fire.

  Then the image split in two, and the doors swung inwards. I saw what lay beyond – ranks of pillars, marching into a mist-thick distance. I saw the energy-feeders, each one the size of a Titan, hanging from the stalactites of the unseen roof. I saw the power lines, ribbed and massive, coiled across every surface like engorged serpents. The air was golden, thick as milk, spilling out of the doorway like a tarnished sunrise.

  Through the haze, the swimming motes of power, I laid eyes on the nexus itself. It was hard to gauge size in there – everything shook in a heat-tremor of psychic intensity. I saw impossibly old panels, fluted like organ pipes, rising up and up through the mist, webbed with patina and repeatedly repaired. I saw arcs of lightning snap and twist, and blood-cyclers wheezing, and smelt a pervasive stench as sweet as rotting meat.

  And somewhere in the heart of that titanic construction, somewhere in the midst of the stacked terraces and the baroque platforms and the gantries and the forests of cabling, lost like a pearl in the heart of some obscene mechanical clamshell, I glimpsed just a slip of flesh, a shred of hairless grey, perhaps a scalp, perhaps the fragment of a face, buried under it all, slaved to it, dominating it, dominating everything.