Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  I tried to take a step, to move through the gate, and felt the air shimmer against me.

  I lost the vision. The gold bled out of the air, and I felt my focus shatter.

  ‘Take the step,’ said Heracleon.

  I couldn’t move. My mind instructed my body, but it didn’t obey. Every attempt to pass that doorway resulted in the same dreadful pressure. I raged against it, bringing all my strength to bear, but it was like trying to force myself through stone.

  I withdrew, and the pressure relented.

  I could see Heracleon looking at me quizzically.

  ‘You do not obey,’ he said.

  I turned shakily to face the tribune, having to concentrate just to keep my footing. I felt drained and humiliated, and could not hope for my brothers to understand it. I was not accustomed to failure, but there was no way I could cross that threshold.

  ‘I… cannot,’ I said, which was just about all I could get out.

  Then I turned my back on the Throne, for as long as I had lived the object of all my devotion, and stumbled back out into the dark.

  Aleya

  I came too late. In all that happened afterwards, the blood and the folly, I think that remains the hardest burden to bear.

  I had a sense of it from a long way out. I’d taken the interceptor back up into the hull of my transport, the Cadamara, and ordered the captain to make full haste back to Arraissa. It had been a bad journey, as they all were now, with several drops back into real space to avoid the Navigators losing their limited grip on reality.

  I seethed the whole time. There was nothing more frustrating than knowing something bad had been unleashed and being prevented from intervening. It was just a word, hissed from the mouth of a deceiver, but my soul knew it to be true.

  I say ‘my soul’, but of course I’m speaking figuratively. We still had hunches.

  By the time we finally arrived into Arraissa’s system limit, all my fears were swiftly confirmed. The beacons were gone, smashed into a belt of spinning metal. Just out from the Mandeville point we encountered the corpses of two Navy monitors. It looked like they’d got a few shots away before the end came, but not much more than that.

  Take us straight in, I ordered in battle-sign, standing on the bridge next to the captain. Full burn.

  The crew did not hesitate to comply. We were relatively lightly armed by Naval standards, and thus running a terrible risk, but if there was any chance of arriving in time then we had to take it.

  Arriving at a planet after a void-raid is always a strange experience. Unless something truly apocalyptic has occurred, there’s never any sign of trouble from the augurs – a world, even the smallest, is just too vast to show signs of pinpoint attack. Arraissa was no different – it looked just as I always remembered it from a hundred homecomings, pearl-white and banded with drifting cloudbanks.

  The orbital defences, though, were gone. Tumbling fragments circled like a planetary ring, blasted dark. There were more empty ship hulls drifting, all powered-down. Most were the kind of things I’d have expected to see – trading barges, landers and lifters, a few void-capable zeta-grade haulers. There should have been Navy ships there too, a dozen of them, but there was no sign, not even wrecks.

  ‘Do you want us to hold anchor, lord?’ Captain Erefan asked quietly.

  No, I did not. I gave him a quick flurry of battle-sign orders, then went down to the hangars to find the interceptor. Just as before, I went alone. There was no use in risking their lives on the ground, and in any case I wanted the Cadamara to scan the system for any hostiles still remaining. It looked like we’d come far too late to play any meaningful part, but you never knew what foulness might linger.

  I was feeling sick by then, mostly from frustration and fear – not for myself, but for those who manned the convent walls. There was nothing else of military value on the planet, nothing else that might have drawn the attention of the Enemy. That was why Hestia had chosen it, carefully keeping us away from the roving eyes of both Imperial and other authorities.

  I took my place in the Cull, watched the hangar bay doors creak open, and powered the ship out into the void. I pushed it hard down through the atmosphere, making the forward viewers roar with fire. As the superstructure shook, I pushed the ship harder, taking a little sour pleasure in hurting it.

  That had always been my weakness – a desire for violence that ran beyond the righteous. At that point, though, I could hardly admonish myself for it. I was worried, and keyed for battle, and increasingly sure I had missed out on the action.

  As I plunged beneath the clouds and levelled out over Novion Urban Primus, the damage became clear at last. Six of the great hives were on fire, sending smoke boiling out of rents in their sides. The urban lowland between them was also burning, punched through as if by massive bullet holes. Flyers were everywhere, swarming like angry and impotent wasps. My console flashed with alerts as ongoing activity – fighting? – was picked up, but I cared nothing for those signals. I drove the Cull steeply, not bothering to hide my approach as I would normally have done. As I neared my destination I could see the palls of inky smoke rising, thicker and more concentrated than anywhere else.

  Our convent was housed in what passed for a regular Ecclesiarchy basilica. The occupants looked like priests or Ministorum menials; the Sisterhood could easily be mistaken for a minor order of the Adepta Sororitas. Anyone looking too closely might have noticed that we were nothing of the sort, and that we never had visitations from the true diocesan authorities, but Hestia had always made sure no one looked too closely. We paid the tithes and bribes we needed to, cultivated the right members of the planetary Arbites fortresses, and pursued our true vocation under a cloak of semi-obscurity.

  Now, though, the entire grid had been levelled. Whole hab-towers had been demolished, their outer structures slumped into scorched piles of scree. As I wound down the engines to land I could hear the rumble of ongoing destruction, laced with the screams of thousands. The air itself was black down here, thick with tattered ashes.

  I pulled into the ruined hangar, its blast doors melted away, cut the power and leapt from the Cull’s cockpit. The interior was charred, and bodies of servitors and menials littered the apron. All the ships that had stood here before were gone, looted just as Arraissa’s standing Naval detachment must have been.

  I ran inside, leaping over the corpses, my flamer primed and ready. The corridors were thick with more ruin – bodies thrown against the walls, doorways demolished, libraries ransacked and still smouldering.

  I began to think that there would be nothing left. I raced towards the command nexus, buried deep under the false Ministorum shell. The whole place stank of blood and burning. I pushed through broken doors, expecting just the same scenes of destruction, and found a creature of Outer Hell waiting for me.

  I have no idea why this one was still there. Its comrades were long gone, fled back into the warp as was their habit, but one remained. Perhaps it had been intended as a sentinel to guard against my return, or perhaps they had fought among themselves in their base fashion and left one of their number as some kind of punishment for weakness.

  I cared not. It was there, ahead of me, hunched over the corpse of one of my precious sisters, its claws running with her blood.

  It was massive. Its black armour was thick and ether-pitted, inscribed with curls and spikes of gold over a matt-black base. It breathed like a beast breathes, condensation spilling from its ornate vox-grille. In one hand it held its prey, in another a ­spattered chainsword.

  I was screaming as I charged it – inwardly, of course, but the screams were real enough. I leapt high before it was even aware of me, my flamer bursting into life.

  It turned at the last moment, and we crashed together. My momentum was vicious, but it was as heavy as a tank and just as deadly. I punched at its helm through my flames, taking savage satisfacti
on in its roar of surprise.

  Then the chainsword geared up, swinging throatily through the fire. I pulled away, emptying my flamer into its face as it lumbered closer, slashing wildly. Its movements were as fast as mine, though much heavier. I could smell the corruption spilling from it, the long-wearing corrosion of its warp-soaked home. It was badly wounded, a long gash down one flank, which perhaps explained its exile here.

  ‘Anathema,’ it croaked, swinging at me. At least it knew what it was fighting.

  The longer this went on, the more likely it was I would die. My purpose was to blunt the shedim, the apparitions of dreams, not the physical servants of Enemy. Despite its wounds, it was stronger than I was, built for this kind of fight, and it had already ended scores of my sisters in their own citadel.

  But I was enraged. I was near-blind with it. And it made me stronger.

  I shoved the flamer into its outstretched chainsword, and the whirring teeth caught fire and spiralled madly. Then I was ducking under the flailing attack, using my size and speed and reaching for my rondel dagger. I pushed up, two-handed, driving the tip into the creature’s jaw line.

  The tip pierced, and I drove it in deep. Blood as black as pitch slopped over its gorget, and it caught me in a bear-hug, crushing me against it.

  I felt it squeeze, and my armour flexed. The stench made me gag, and I struggled to breathe. All the while I pressed the dagger home, twisting, churning through flesh and bone. I felt something burst, and a cascade of stinking pus streamed over both of us. It crushed me further, and I heard the first crack in my breastplate.

  We were face-to-face. I was looking into its filmy helm-lenses. Just below the surface of that grotesque armour I knew that a once-human was looking back at me, matching my hatred with its own. The pressure grew worse. It was crushing me to death.

  I was losing consciousness. I screwed my eyes closed, gathered all my remaining strength, and pushed upwards. Its vox-grille shattered, and I propelled my blade up into its cranium. For a moment longer it clutched at me, hissing bloody spittle, and then the terrible pressure finally fell away.

  It collapsed, crashing into a heap of armour-plates, gauntlets falling limp. I dropped to my knees on top of it, hauling breaths into my crushed lungs, barely able to see for the spinning stars crowding my vision.

  I clawed my way across its breastplate, back towards the opening at its neck. I ripped the helm from its head, and gazed on the monster. Its flesh was white, like gristle. Its eyes were bloodshot and swollen, its black tongue lolling from pierced lips. Its last expression was one of derangement and agony, which gave me some measure of fierce recompense.

  I took my own helm off to look at it unfiltered. Then I hawked up a gobbet and spat into its unseeing eyes.

  For my sisters, I told it, silently.

  I would have liked to mourn for longer, to immolate the bodies with the proper rites, but I knew time was already short. The entire grid-sector had been ruined in the attack, but soon reinforcements would arrive from elsewhere on the planet, looking for a reason for the attack and digging down to its epicentre. That would bring unwelcome eyes to what remained of the convent, potentially undoing all we had built in secrecy.

  I got up from the corpse of the monster. The command nexus, an arched chamber placed like a crypt at the base of an old nave, had been thoroughly smashed. Bodies littered the cracked floor. Many were out of armour, perhaps dragged from their meditations or studies. One by one, I saw the faces I knew, all battered and lifeless.

  I limped through the nexus and into the network of chambers beyond. The raiders had torched the archives, and the data coils were still acrid and smoking. The armoury was empty, its contents either destroyed or looted. We did not have our own chapels, only the sham ones in the levels above, but our private cells where we trained and rested were ransacked.

  All were dead. The raiders had not come to seize anything, simply to destroy. Somehow, despite all our efforts, they had found out where we were based, and assembled a force strong enough to nullify our defences and gut our citadel.

  That thought alone troubled me greatly. Our order was clandestine, but we were not undefended. The lower halls were shielded and augur-resistant. We had heavy weapons and the crew to handle them. Any one of my sisters had been trained to fight the greatest dangers of the Imperium, and on their own ground were more than a match for those that had come after them.

  The fact that there were no bodies of the Enemy did not mean that many had not died in the assault. Aside from the crippled one they had left behind, there was evidence of other casualties having been taken away, dragged heavily along the ground for retrieval of armour and gene-seed. It was almost unheard of, even in those straitened times, for a sizeable band of such warriors to assault a world like Arraissa. There must have been so many monsters here, acting in such brutal, concentrated force.

  Perhaps that was the true reason they had left one behind – as a marker of things to come, to let the citizens of the Imperium know just what was now stalking them.

  My rage still burned as I kicked through the remnants, partly directed against myself. Perhaps it had been unwise to leave for Hellion, I thought, despite the fact there had been no warning. Would my presence have changed anything? Probably not. I might have downed one, maybe two, but it was clear that the battle had been horribly one-sided. My ignorance of the coming attack was what had saved my life.

  It was both the great strength and the great weakness of our kind, that we had no ready access to the warp. Our counterparts in the Adeptus Astartes employed the services of Librarians and the finest astropaths, seers and mystics, and thus could often detect threats before they arose. We, on the other hand, were blind to that aspect of the universe. Our own Navigators and astropaths were stunted things, barely able to operate in our presence, and thus we had no means of scrying the paths of the future by ourselves.

  It had been different, once. We had been part of the grand machinery of the Adeptus Terra itself, able to draw on its near-infinite resources to bolster our unique martial expertise. That was how we had been designed, as interoperable parts of a greater whole. The Space Marine Legions were self-contained armies capable of doing everything, whereas we and the Custodian Guard had been complementary, just elements of a unified capability under the Throne’s combined gaze.

  But that was all so long ago. I had no idea if the Custodian Guard still existed as they once had. Everything had decayed so much, falling steadily away from its original purpose. We were like children stumbling in the shadows, trying hard to remember old lessons before they were lost forever, and now the nightmares were coming back.

  The rooms marched past me, each one more decrepit than the rest. The raiders had been thorough. Every corridor brought a fresh brace of bodies, wedged and broken into the corners. Here and there I could see my sisters had attempted to form bulwarks against the tide, barricading themselves behind strongpoints and fighting hard. I hoped they had extracted a heavy toll before the end.

  There had to be a specific reason for this. It couldn’t have been a random raid – the resources required were too enormous, the intelligence too precise. I remembered the crowing words of the woman on Hellion – Doesn’t matter now. It’s all ending, and very soon.

  What was the Circlet? Was it a creation of the Old Legions, then? Had our uncovering of its activities provoked this response, or had we been marked for destruction for some other reason?

  There was no sign of Hestia. Some of the other Sisters were missing too, though I had no idea whether they had been absent on other missions. I reached the comm-station with its annihilated transmitters. Crunching across a floor of broken crystal, I managed to find a local-range emitter, which was still just about functional. I restored power to it from a half-empty cell and instructed it to broadcast a ciphered warning to stay away. I had no idea how long it would last, but at least it was something.


  From far above, I heard heavy crashes, and the distant sound of human voices shouting. A search team, perhaps, finally making its way into the basilica. I would have to move on before they found me, but there were still some chambers to search.

  The last was that of Lokk, the old astropath who had served Hestia faithfully for nearly twenty years. He had been a weakened man for much of that time, drained by his proximity to our foul, soulless ways, and yet he’d remained to do his duty. His body wasn’t there, though there was a long slick of blood along the far wall. His cot had been smashed and his books torched, leaving trails of soot across the crumbling plasterwork.

  I pushed my boot-tip through the mess, sifting for anything retrievable. He’d been a writer of copious texts, had Lokk, forever scribbling down his dreams before they drifted from his memory. Most of it had never made much sense, and had only limited value for guiding the convent, but Hestia had valued his loyalty, and on occasion his visions had proved both true and valuable.

  Very little of his stock of parchment had avoided the flames, and the few scraps that had survived were scrawled with endless lists of runes and astrological charts. I couldn’t make any sense of them, and let them flutter back to the ground.

  It was only as I turned to leave that I saw the phrase, written across the door itself in what looked like blood. The language was our own, the private script we employed for the most secret matters, and which to an untrained eye hardly looked like writing at all. Even I almost missed it. Once I saw the patches of dark red, I wondered how they could have been made – had Lokk written them before he’d died? Or even before the attack?

  In any event, it was unusually concise.

  He calls His daughters Home.

  I looked at it for a long time. I didn’t quite believe it. I wished Hestia were there to give me confidence in my judgement, but of course she couldn’t be. I felt very alone then, stalking through the ruins of the only home I had ever known, now a haunt of corpses.