Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  Leops Franck spoke next, the stick-thin Master of the Astronomican and the last of those who opposed the motion. ‘You are forgetting your history, my lords,’ he whispered through his rebreather, making all strain to hear him. ‘Every crisis appears to its own generation as the greatest of them all. When the Beast threatened to destroy the Imperium, we did not unleash the Ten Thousand. When Nova Terra raised its heretical head, we did not unleash the Ten Thousand. When Vandire ushered in the Reign of Blood, we did not unleash the Ten Thousand. In every case, we held firm and the wisdom of millennia was affirmed. Waver from that now, and we will deserve to perish.’

  ‘But in all those ages,’ objected the one who had started all of this, Kerapliades of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, ‘we still held the Eye’s Gate. We could suffer all other wounds in the knowledge that hell was contained. That is what we risk now. You know as well as I do that our grip is slipping. When the Despoiler–’

  ‘The Despoiler cannot break the leaguer,’ said Slyst. ‘He has failed twelve times, and this shall be no different.’

  ‘Have you undertaken a warp journey in recent months, Ecclesiarch?’ asked Kania Dhanda, Speaker of the Chartist Captains and a strong ally of ours. ‘Nature itself is under strain. If he can bend the elements, then he can break the leaguer.’

  ‘And sedition has never been greater,’ said Kleopatra Arx, the Inquisition’s Representative. ‘We have long memories in the ordos, and we know when the tide is against us.’ She passed her cool, hard eyes across the assembled lords. ‘As I have been arguing for years, we are at breaking point now. We cannot burn the heretics fast enough, and we cannot slaughter the xenos quickly enough. This is not just another phase of trial for the Holy Imperium. This is our critical moment.’

  By then, only two had remained silent. Fadix rarely spoke anyway, and busied himself making notes with a crystal stave on a bone-edged data-slate. That left Valoris.

  He had come, just as promised. If any of the others were surprised by that, they did not show it. Once in place, there was no question of his right to be there. The vote of acceptance had been a formality, though he had barely spoken throughout it. Now he sat halfway along the sunlit side of the table, far bulkier and more imposing than any save Raskian.

  In daylight his face was even more ravaged than I remembered it. I guessed one of his many battles had done that to him – it looked like acid had been left to run across his features, making them flared and angry.

  Now, slowly and deliberately, he leaned forwards and placed his gauntlets together.

  ‘Be aware, lords, what is at stake here,’ he said quietly. All listened. Even Fadix put down his pen. ‘The Custodians have always fought. We do not merely patrol the walls while others die in service. I am sure that none of you would have supposed otherwise, for you are all intelligent souls.’

  It was strange to hear him speak again. The last time had been days ago, down in the crypts, something that had come to seem more like a dream than reality.

  ‘What is at stake is this – shall we fight as we did in the Great Crusade, at the forefront, and under the authority of the Senatorum Imperialis? And that question has no easy answer, for if we are to fight, then who is to command us? The Emperor cannot lead us as He did in the lost age. We are not bound to the will of the Council as are the Astra Militarum and the Imperial Navy. Perhaps you desire us to become another Inquisition, answerable to no one but the Emperor Himself, but if so you should be wary of what you wish for, as our goals may not be the same as yours.’

  I could not tell where this was leading. His own views were still unclear to me, despite what he had said about my own role convincing him to come. I had hoped, perhaps unwisely, that the discussion here, when all was set out and the High Lords could demonstrate their own thinking, would be enough. After all, who could deny themselves more power? All we were offering was the chance for the Custodians to resume their rightful place.

  ‘There are a little under ten thousand of us,’ said Valoris. ‘That is a mote against the storm to come. Even the Adeptus ­Astartes are few in number – it has always been the uncounted masses that have won our wars. And, of course, in the Age of Wonder, we fought alongside the Sisterhood.’

  ‘They are being recalled,’ said Haemotalion.

  Valoris looked at him with sudden interest. ‘I was not aware.’

  ‘The chancellor can enlighten you.’

  I coughed, and half rose from my subordinate throne. ‘The matter was dealt with in mandatum 786734-56, following the reported devastation of the Fenris System. The anathema psykana were never formally disbanded, and do not come under the provisions of this act. It was the unanimous decision of the Council to seek out the scattered members of the old Sisterhood and issue a recall notice where they still existed. Some are already en route. Others are yet to respond.’

  Valoris regarded me carefully. ‘This was your doing?’

  ‘It was the doing of the Council.’

  ‘An interesting time to remember them. It should have been done centuries ago.’

  I bowed in apology. ‘The war has driven much away that should have remained intact. I am told the Sisters are… hard to live with. They never had the allies here that they needed.’

  I may have been a little too candid there. In truth, the long decay in our management of those pariahs was more down to the ossified nature of our command and control structures. They had never been deliberately ignored, just gradually run down over millennia as other priorities took over, and the widely held suspicion of their esoteric natures made them easy prey for zealous enemies.

  ‘It is the restoration of something that should never have been allowed to lapse,’ said Lamma. ‘We are going back to the old structures that allowed us to conquer the stars.’

  ‘And Dissolution of the Lord Commander’s edict would complete the picture?’ asked Franck, scornfully. ‘You overstate your case, Envoy.’

  ‘It has to be done,’ urged Kerapliades, ever the most forceful of the High Lords in this. ‘While we debate, Cadia burns. Can you doubt that even a tithe of the Ten Thousand would turn the tide back?’

  ‘I can doubt it,’ said Haemotalion dryly. ‘The Captain-General says it himself – they are a grain of dust.’

  ‘One that could inspire others,’ argued Pereth. ‘If I could bring a regiment of them to the front line, just a single regiment, and the troops could see it, and know that the Emperor has not forgotten them–’

  ‘He never has,’ sniped Slyst.

  ‘But they may well believe we have,’ retorted Dhanda.

  ‘It should never have come to this table,’ snarled Raskian again, growing surlier.

  ‘All things belong at this table,’ said Arx.

  I could see then that the argument was dissolving. All those who were in favour before remained in favour now, and vice versa. My hopes for a wavering individual to settle the matter were clearly in vain, and the rancour now risked derailing the issue even further.

  I looked over to Haemotalion, and caught his eye. We understood one another instantly. Vile man though he was, he knew how things worked.

  ‘Enough, please, my good lords,’ he said, holding up his hand. The chamber settled down. ‘The first arguments have been made. Any move towards Dissolution must command a majority of this chamber. To save us from more futile debate, I propose we gauge the balance of opinion now. If there is a majority in favour, we may proceed with further discussion. If not, then there are many other matters to detain us.’

  This was the moment. With Valoris in play, I had the votes I needed. I felt a sudden lurch of fear, as if I were looking over a cliff at the waves crashing below. After so many long years of labour, we were finally at the point of decision.

  ‘Place your votes, if you will, my lords,’ said Haemotalion.

  One by one, the High Lords put their hands out before them. An upw
ard palm indicated consent, a downward palm dissent, a clenched fist abstention. Raskian and Kerapliades were first, on opposite sides of the argument. Then the others followed suit, some forcefully, some with more reserve.

  Soon eleven hands were on the table. Fadix was the only abstention, and the Master of Assassins looked at me coolly as he placed his fist on the stone. Just as predicted, five votes either way were placed, leaving only Valoris to cast his.

  I looked up at him, my heart thumping. I could already see it happening. I could see the old Legio Custodes reborn at this moment, taking the fight at last to the Enemy, and it would be my work. Even if only a fraction of them took ship, I had seen what they could do in combat – there could be nothing, surely nothing, that would stand against them.

  I felt my palms grow sweaty. All eyes turned to the Captain-General, who waited calmly, as if he were listening to something beyond our hearing. The tension became unbearable, and I had to restrain myself from blurting out something unwise.

  And then he moved, lifting his massive arm from the stone and extending it outwards. With a lurch of pure horror, I saw his heavy palm turn over to face the tabletop.

  But he never placed it. Just as he moved, every one of the High Lords suddenly received the same burst of tidings from their own private comm-feeds. Adjutants leapt out of their seats, frantically checking and then double-checking what they had just heard, before racing to confer with their masters.

  The doors at the far end of the chamber slammed open, and robed officials raced in, ignoring the shouts of the Lucifer Blacks.

  For a moment I genuinely had no idea what the commotion was about, until I saw Kerapliades shouting out in dismay and suddenly knew, with terrible certainty, what must have happened.

  Only one piece of news could have halted that Council in mid-session, for the astropath relayers would never have dared to disturb them for anything less. By the time I had activated my own external channel and heard Jek’s frantic voice at the other end, I already knew what she would tell me.

  ‘My lord!’ she cried, her voice cracking with anguish. ‘It’s gone! It’s gone.’

  ‘Tell me plainly,’ I snapped. I could feel everything collapsing around me, everything I had worked and risked so much for, gone in an instant, and it made me desperate.

  ‘Cadia,’ Jek said, already in tears. ‘It’s fallen. It’s over, my lord. It’s all over.’

  Valerian

  It happened so quickly.

  Time, space, matter, thought – we had known for so long that they were a seamless weave, but perhaps we had not fully understood just how close the bonds were between them. A great plan, thousands of years in the gestation, came to its completion, and we were the generation to witness hell being freed from its boundaries.

  I remember looking up at the skies, and seeing them change. The skyscapes of Terra are grey and occluded, forever churning in a soup of drifting smog. Those who live there learn not to look up. Why would they? There is nothing to see but the filthy evidence of our own destructiveness.

  But then, on that day, those clouds became the red of arteries – vivid and virulent, their innards glowing as if lit by fire. Mortals ran to the ramparts of the Palace, staring wide-eyed into the burning atmosphere, crying out to the God-Emperor to save them from the madness they were seeing.

  I stood where I was, high on the parapets of the Tower of Hegemon, and witnessed the sky burn. The air was filled with screaming. I saw great arcs of electricity, as bloody as the skies above, slam and skip across the reeling cityscape. A thousand war-horns were going off, sending spikes of clamour into an already reeling firmament. I saw aircraft lose power and collapse into the towers below, their systems scrambled by punishing bursts of electrostatic. One big hauler, a kilometre out over the Xericho hives, took a long time to impact, its pilots desperately gunning their faltering engines as the hull ploughed slowly into a thicket of hab-units. I watched it all happen. I watched the inferno kick off as the plasma drives detonated. All across that wide horizon, more fires swelled into life, adding to the heat-flare of the heavens above them.

  My helm-feed skittered with incoming signal runes. I assessed them instantly, disregarding the thousands of alerts in favour of the truly essential order – Italeo had summoned us all to the muster chamber.

  I ran. I was already armoured, and paused only momentarily to retrieve Gnosis from my armoury. By then fresh warning klaxons were shuddering through the citadel’s cavernous interior. Many of those had not been sounded since the Great Heresy itself when the False Warmaster had besieged the walls, and their croaking din sounded like the battle-trumpets of another reality.

  I was among the first to respond. Within minutes of the summons there were more than three hundred of us in the grand hall, overlooked by statues of Valdor and the long golden roll-calls of the Glorious Dead, and more arriving all the time.

  There was no air of panic. I think we were made to be incapable of panic. But there was expectation there, seething in the gilded confines of that chamber and waiting for its outlet. We all knew by instinct that something fundamental had broken, but as yet we did not know just what, or how much by.

  Looking back at that moment, I find my strongest memory was a strange and unbidden sense of excitement. You must remember that we were lone hunters, and that it was rare, even for us, to see so many of our order gathered together. As I ran my eyes across the gathering battalions of auramite, I had a sudden vision of invincibility. This was how it must have been, I thought, before the Secret War – the last time we had been drawn together as a single army against a single enemy.

  One of the Revered Fallen entered the chamber then – a mighty leviathan of the Contemptor-Galatus pattern, just like those interred at the portals to the Throne itself. I did not know how long it had been since his machine-spirits had been provoked from long stasis, but simply to witness the hallowed form of my still-living brother only amplified my sense of exhilaration. The entombed warrior lumbered out of the shadows, his huge shell glittering as if newly forged.

  And then Tribune Italeo entered, flanked by two honour guards. His armour was heavily scored, as if raked over by claws, and his long black cloak was torn. He removed his helm, and his features were smeared with ash. I do not know where he had been fighting, or against whom, but the evidence of his trials was all too visible.

  ‘My brothers,’ he called out, coming to a halt atop the high dais at the far end of the chamber. ‘You have heard the tidings from the Cadian Gate. I come to confirm the truth of them – the world is lost to the Imperium. The survivors are fleeing ahead of the storm. The Despoiler has broken the ancient leaguer, and now his armies march unopposed into the void.’

  He spoke carefully, weighting each word, but I could see something in his grey eyes that I had never witnessed before. It might have been combat weariness, but that was not something I would normally detect. I wondered again where he had been before coming here, and what he had seen.

  ‘Our star-dreamers, those who live still, tell me this is only the beginning,’ Italeo went on. ‘The Eye is growing. Space around it is tearing. We have lost contact with large regions of His realm beyond a growing chasm of darkness. And amid all of this, and most grave, the Astronomican has failed.’

  We were transhuman, all of us, conditioned to respond with stoicism to even the worst tidings, but we were not machines. A ripple of disquiet passed through the assembled ranks. I heard a muffled ‘it cannot be’ slip from more than one pair of lips.

  The Astronomican was more than the beacon by which our starships sailed. It was the single most significant marker of the Emperor’s continued presence among us. We might hope for mystical signs from time to time, or inspiration from the Tarot, but in truth the greatest proof that our master still held sway against the tides of unreason was the light He guided through the empyrean. While that endured, He endured. If that failed, we would
know that He had failed.

  Italeo raised a gauntlet to still the murmuring, and I saw that the metal glove had been mauled and twisted out of shape.

  ‘As I speak, savants of the Red Planet are attending,’ he told us. ‘A Level Eight delegation from the Adeptus Mechanicus will be making planetfall within the hour, and the Fabricator-General will attend to repairs in person. I have spoken with Tribune Heracleon, who remains within the presence of the Emperor, and who reports that the operation of the Golden Throne is within normal parameters. We do not yet know the cause. Until it can be resolved, our fleets are blind and our armies are becalmed.’

  I stole a glance at my brothers as the news sank in. In those who went without helms I saw a range of emotions playing across normally impassive faces – shock, a swift-kindling resolve, even anger, which was rare with us. I saw the varied vocations represented there – the artisans, the theologians, the sentinels and the lore wardens – and saw them all slowly assume the aspect of the warrior.

  ‘The Captain-General remains with the High Lords in High Council,’ Italeo said. ‘As of this moment, the Throneworld is declared in a state of extremum bellum and all provisions of the peacetime Lex are suspended. The Hataeron will remain within the Sanctum Imperialis, and all others are commanded to secure the Outer ­Palace according to the defence patterns laid down by precept.’

  He looked out across us all. More of my brothers had arrived by then, swelling in number until the chamber floor was almost hidden under a field of gold. A second Dreadnought clanked into position, his blade swimming with simmering energies. Above us hung the banners of our ancient campaigns, their livery sealed behind stasis fields and the bloodstains still vivid.

  ‘The day is dark, brothers,’ Italeo said, clenching his damaged gauntlet into a fist. ‘But we are the sons of Unity, the immaculate talons of the Emperor, and no enemy has ever crossed a threshold that we guarded. Remain true, remain indomitable, and He will guide you as He did before.’