Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  We had grown used to keeping our fears at arm’s length, locked behind Cadia’s distant barrier. Now, with the faltering of the Astronomican and the waning of our long watch, we would never again be able to lie to ourselves about the nature of what we faced. If they could strike at us here, they could strike at us anywhere. No walls would be too high, no protection too complete, no hidden citadel beyond their reach.

  I turned away then, unwilling to see the final carnage unfold. My hands were still shaking, my cheeks moist. I felt empty, like a dried-up husk thrown from the fire.

  The Palace still stood. It was everything else that had been ruined.

  Valerian

  I did not leave that battlefield until the weak sun was high in the sky and the clouds glowed a dirty pink. Slaying the bloodthirster was only the beginning, and there were thousands of lesser daemon­kind still to contest. The creatures of the warp loathe and fear one another far more than they do us, and so the killing of their master did not daunt them. If anything, it freed them to commit even more reckless acts of ferocity. They surged up the stairs and streamed across the platform, yowling and bounding with abandon.

  We might yet have died, had we not remained close to one another. My fighting was badly hampered by my wound, although my sinews reknit and my bones re-formed even as I still wielded Gnosis, such was the resilience of my gene-wrought body. Alcuin was the linchpin in those moments, and had been given fresh vigour by the sight of the daemon’s demise. He led the counter-assault, smiting the Neverborn with a viciousness that I doubt any other could have matched just then. He truly hated those things, and I must admit that it made him brutally efficient.

  We took more losses, though, and as I looked out at that ocean of detestation I suspected our resistance would only last a finite time before it was snuffed out.

  We were lucky, I suppose. Or, as I do not strictly believe in luck, we must have been favoured yet by His gaze. I had begun to think of myself as being somewhat beyond His consideration since my failure at the Throne, and thus did not look for any especial indulgence from the ways of fate, but our duel with the bloodthirster had been noticed. Valoris had dispatched cadres of our finest warriors to engage all eight of them, and he himself had led the charge against those at the heart of the horde. Just as I began to think we would be overwhelmed at last, golden lifters braved the blood-rain and the fire-lightning to deliver Terminator-clad brethren to our side, as well as the Contemptor-entombed Ynnades, who strode from his attack craft surrounded by a glittering force aegis and waded into the daemons with disdainful majesty.

  Then I knew we would survive. I took it upon myself to protect the Sisters of Silence, whose efforts in reaching us, and then warding us, had been exhausting for them. Only three remained alive, including the one who had downed the bloodthirster and saved my life.

  I swore to myself that she would not perish, and that if I lived that day I would find a way to repay the debt of honour to her. That was, in hindsight, a strange thing for me to think. I was not used to having significant dealings with those not of my own kind, and in any case we did not generally indulge in such concepts of honour debt as I am told that the Wolves of Fenris do. Still, it gave me a purpose and a balance to my fighting.

  So we saw out those grinding hours. The platform was held, and more troops were airlifted in, and then we were able to push down the stairs again to retake the plain below. Valoris led a second counter-assault following the destruction of the last greater daemon, and after that we could hammer our way out towards the perimeter of the old void port.

  I killed more creatures of the enemy in those hours than I had done over hundreds of years previously. Despite my wounds, I found the combat – as Navradaran might have said – invigorating. It gave me pleasure to see those things crushed beneath the heel of my spear. It gave me pleasure to feel my body pushed to its limits. I felt a strange sense of release, as if long-invisible ­fetters had been lifted from my arms, letting them move with greater purpose and vindication.

  By the time the sun was high in the sky, we knew the fighting would soon be over. The daemons were fleeing, flickering back into their own realm even before our spears could plunge into their translucent bodies.

  To my surprise, I found that I almost regretted the cessation of violence. By the time I sent Gnosis hurtling into the last neck of the last kill, I felt no elation of any sort. All I felt was a curious ache of withdrawal, of something being snatched from me before I could fully understand it.

  This was the disturbing factor. I wanted more.

  Tieron

  Even then, there was no rest. In the hours that followed the battle for the Lion’s Gate, the prudence of the Arx Doctrine became fully apparent, as our preparations meant we could readily ferry thousands of battle-hardened troops to staunch the gaps left by the Custodians’ sortie. We could mobilise our Titans to hold sentinel within the Inner Palace, and airlift even greater numbers to hold the line inside the gate’s remains.

  It became clear we would endure. The greater daemons were destroyed, the lesser still hunted down. We had taken fearful losses – we would be assessing the damage for weeks afterwards – but the unthinkable had been averted by the narrowest of margins. Soon activity within the Palace shifted, and there were suddenly inquisitors everywhere. I saw vulture-like ships hovering over the fields of slaughter, and strange figures wearing uniforms even I didn’t recognise stalking through the drifting smoke. We were doing what we always did after such events – trying to smother them, to erase them, to push them out of our minds.

  That exercise was more futile then than it had ever been, and so there was an even greater unreality to the days that followed. Our labours remained intense, but the focus shifted. We rebuilt as best we could. Huge teams of reclamators and enginseers were sent to the defence lines, only to be held back from the worst of the combat sites by Inquisitorial agents, and fresh fighting broke out between rival hoarders of secrets.

  There was a mood in the Palace that we had fallen as far as it was possible to go. The Astronomican remained dormant, limiting our communication with the wider Imperium. Our planetary defences, so painstakingly constructed over so many centuries, had shown they could be bypassed with trivial ease, and so covetous eyes began to be cast over the millions of troops locked up in the ranks upon ranks of high-orbit defence stations. In the shock of the assault on the wall, very few remembered the plight of the immense world-city beyond, which remained restive, fearful and starving.

  Even within the hallowed precincts, every face was grey and every back was hunched. I saw men and women who had once worn chains of pearls and cloaks of platinum-thread who now looked little better than over-dressed beggars, wandering through the empty halls as if they had forgotten their own names. The cavernous refectories were empty, the chapels echoing.

  At the time of our worst crisis we had not needed to worry about the chain of command, since the Captain-General and Lord Guilliman had seized the initiative so forcefully. Now, though, those matters suddenly became pressing. The High Lords had failed in their most sacred duty of all – protecting the heart of power – and in centuries past that had always resulted in swift punishment and a change of personnel at the high table.

  I avoided contact with my masters at that time, though, and immersed myself in doing what I could to help with the restoration of the Palace systems. I issued requisition commands and lent my services to those commanders still retaining regiments capable of deployment. I signed warrants for resupply and passed on execution mandates to the Arbites. I think, looking back, I was in some kind of shock. Jek said later that I was like an automaton, moving from one task to another and barely saying a word to her or anyone else. I lost weight, which in normal circumstances might have been welcome, but back then just made me look haggard.

  My memories of that period are fuzzy, and I do not recall much of the detail. One episode stands out, though. Irth
u Haemotalion had ever been a thorn in my side, and so it was with much irritation that I responded to a summons from his much-diminished private staff and travelled halfway across the Palace to find him.

  He had always been a sallow figure, but now he looked positively ghostly. I tried to imagine how he felt about the recent disasters. He was the Master of the Administratum, that stupendously vast edifice that controlled the flow of information between systems and the centre. More than any of us he traded in communication, the endless tide of parchment that was our empire’s oxygen. Now, though, he was blind and near powerless, cut adrift from his own servants by the madness of his astropaths and the impossibility of void travel. Other High Lords, like Arx or Fadix, could still use their curtailed networks of control and subterfuge, but Haemotalion’s realm was the visible Imperium, its scholars and its scriptoria, and that had been revealed as perhaps the most fragile Adeptus stratum of them all.

  We walked together in the cloister of an old oratory set within his sprawling private estate, its stonework caked in spidery lichen. The skies above us still burned with that mournful ember-glow, and every so often we would look up at it, fearful that the blood-rain would start again. Haemotalion, a tall and gaunt figure beside my waddling frame, twitched as he walked, a nervous tic I had never noticed him suffer from before.

  ‘You’ve been hard to reach, chancellor,’ he said.

  ‘Apologies, Master. There’s been much to attend to.’

  ‘No doubt. But this is a time for the Council to remain strong. We must rebuild, and swiftly. And yet, there have been disturbing rumours.’

  I looked at him. I genuinely didn’t know what they might be. ‘Oh?’

  Haemotalion pressed his lips sceptically together. ‘You want me to say it? You want me to say the words? Very well. Your friend, the primarch. That’s the problem. What are we to make of him?’

  I had no idea. No one had any idea. There were no precedents. The last living primarch had disappeared into myth thousands of years ago, and even the great archives of the Lex did not stretch back that far.

  ‘He is the Lord Commander,’ I ventured.

  ‘He was the Lord Commander. He was many things. He was part of the rebellion that brought us so close to annihilation he curtailed his own power to prevent it happening again.’ Haemotalion sniffed. ‘They’re still saying this brings us a new dawn. I fear it only brings the old night back.’

  I didn’t have an argument. Just as it had been before my mad obsession with the Adeptus Custodes, I had reverted to being a cipher for the views of the powerful.

  ‘Do the others feel likewise?’ I asked.

  ‘Some do. There’s been too little time to form a consensus.’ He stopped walking and drew closer. ‘He’s no longer within the great halls. They tell me Valoris took him down to the heart of the ­Sanctum. I’m informed he’s still there. They say he’s descended into the Throneroom itself.’

  I looked at him steadily. ‘If any can do so, surely it’s him.’

  ‘None of us ever ventured it.’

  ‘Did you ever wish to?’

  The Master was in no mood for humour, however bleak. ‘He’ll take control,’ he said. ‘That’s the danger. We’ll win this battle, only to see Terra taken from us. And what then? Another Great Crusade? A purge of all we’ve striven to build? You can see it, I trust. The danger.’

  I remembered how I had felt on Luna, witnessing that pain of recognition in Guilliman’s eyes. I found myself thinking that a purge of all we had striven to build might be no bad thing.

  ‘Now, perhaps, you understand the folly of what you were trying to engineer before,’ the Master said, starting to walk again. ‘You would have sent the Custodians into the inferno at Cadia, just when they were needed here. Without them, we’d have lost the Lion’s Gate. The enemy might have breached the Inner Sanctum. You’ve played a reckless game, cancellarius, and need to remember where your loyalties lie.’

  Perhaps he sensed my shell-shocked state and so felt able to speak to me thus. I would never have tolerated it before.

  ‘The Council must remain strong,’ he repeated. ‘While the Lord Guilliman remains within the Sanctum, we have our chance to act. I have already agreed with Pereth to forbid all fleet movements off-world. Arx has instructed those close to her to cordon off the sites on Luna and begin to limit the fallout from the Lion’s Gate encounter. We can have a million more troops here within days if the orbital defences are now deemed overmanned. They all owe their allegiance to us. The Titans are within Raskian’s purview, as are the skitarii maniples in-system, and he’s with us.’

  I could hardly believe what I was hearing. We had been reduced to this, it seemed – squabbling over the conduits of power even as the Throneworld disintegrated into starvation and lawlessness and our walls were heaps of daemon-infested rubble.

  ‘With respect, lord, I do not think this is the time to–’

  ‘This is the only time we will ever have. He is a primarch. You know your forbidden history – they were fratricidal lunatics, prepared to tear the entire galaxy apart to pursue their feuds. We designed the Lex – he designed the Lex – precisely to stop them doing it ever again. He cannot take control.’

  I smiled grimly. ‘And how would you stop him? He was once the commander of a Legion.’

  ‘The Legions are no longer here, though, are they? They’re gone into history, just where they ought to be.’

  ‘Not all,’ I said.

  Haemotalion nodded. ‘You are right. One remains. One Legion, the Emperor’s Legion. You did what you could to bring it under our control, I suppose.’

  ‘That was never my intention.’

  ‘Valoris is one of us now, and he must be made to see reason.’

  I remembered how the Captain-General had been, back in the crypt when I had dared to try to impose my will on his. He would not suffer himself to be a pawn in our games. That was why they had resisted being dragged to the table for so long. He must have known of this danger, or seen something like it coming. We had prided ourselves on all our activity, rushing around with our edicts and our policies and thinking the Custodians moribund relics of a long-gone age, but they had played the quiet game more perfectly than us and now held the balance of power in their etched gauntlets.

  I remembered what Valerian had told me.

  We are not a part of your Imperium. We involve ourselves within it only if we deem that His will demands it.

  ‘They won’t work for us,’ I said. ‘Not now, not ever, and I was never trying to achieve that. All I wanted was to see them set free.’ Harster’s face still haunted me. ‘I wanted to see them take the fight to the enemy.’

  ‘Then you’ll give him all he wants,’ said Haemotalion. ‘You’ll give him the crusade he lusts for, and the blood-tide will rise so high we’ll all drown in it.’

  ‘I’ll give no one anything,’ I said, growing impatient. ‘You see anything in my hands, Master? I’ve lost it all. We all have.’

  He grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to face him. ‘He’s only one soul, and he’s not been here long.’ He twitched heavily, and I felt his body spasm through my robes. ‘They say that this Imperium is a rotten corpse, a shell of what it once was. I’ve never believed that. We’re greater now than we’ve ever been, and these trials are no different to the ones we overcame before. We’re hardier, we’re tougher, we’ve faced the dark for longer than he ever did. His age is over. We’re the inheritors of the mantle.’

  I looked into his eyes, and saw how poorly they focused now.

  ‘He can’t take this from us,’ he said. ‘He can’t be allowed to.’

  When I next spoke, I did so carefully.

  ‘Then what do you wish me to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Support us. Keep the cordon in place, resist the Adeptus ­Custodes being dragged into this. If he wants to launch a crusade of his own, let him
kill himself alone out there. He must not become the new Lord of Terra. Valoris must remain with us.’

  I don’t know whether he believed all of that. Perhaps he truly thought that Guilliman would usher in yet more destruction, or maybe he only feared for his own standing in this new Imperium. All I knew was that I had been convinced of something back then, driven by a force that it took a long time to recognise.

  Haemotalion had done me some service, albeit unintentionally. As I listened to his desperation, I felt some of that resolve return.

  I hadn’t been wrong. Not entirely. This was not about the Council, and not about the primarch. This was about what Valerian had said. This was about His will.

  ‘I serve the High Lords, as I ever have,’ I said, looking the Master of the Administratum in the eye, knowing that it was now a lie and unable to feel a shred of guilt.

  Valerian

  In the days after that, we counted the cost.

  Close to four thousand of my brothers had been committed to the fighting at the Lion’s Gate, and more than half of them had perished. Those were staggering losses for us. We had not absorbed such pain since the Secret War of ancient memory, and I remember reading the tally of the fallen with astonishment. Tribune Italeo was one of those who had perished, falling even as he slew one of the greater daemons. Other names I knew well were on those lists, some I mourned greatly for in the months that followed. A few of the gravely wounded were taken to the Tower of Hegemon to be interred into Dreadnought sarcophagi, though the practice had become so rare for us that there were not enough chassis for all those who needed one, and thus we lost souls who might have still served.

  The grief was real, but our capacity to fight, as well as our resolve for it, was undiminished. In this we were not like the Adeptus ­Astartes – we did not have settled companies and Chapters that were led by irreplaceable individuals. To a certain extent we were islands, able to work together when the war demanded but otherwise entirely self-sufficient. We retrieved the armour of our fallen comrades, we gave them honour as we took the bodies down into the hallowed tombs of remembrance, and then we turned our minds to what came next.