Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  I heard more noises from up above. I would have to make my way to the hangar before my route was cut off. There was nothing left to salvage here, though the scenes of destruction and the bodies encased in ancient armour would give the enforcers pause when they eventually arrived.

  I moved out carefully, keeping my dagger in hand. I’d have to get back to the Cadamara swiftly, get out of range of Arraissa, and then plan my next move. There were many possibilities, but I needed time to think, to start to make sense of what had happened. Grieving would come when I could afford it – right now, I had to assume I was hunted, as were perhaps all my kind still operating out in the void.

  He calls His daughters Home.

  I couldn’t get the words out of my mind. They echoed as I broke into a run, fleeing through the blood-webbed corridors.

  What did it mean? What did any of it mean?

  I returned to the Cadamara, hardly bothering to evade the clusters of frantic air traffic that threatened to bar my way. Civil defence assets had been fully mobilised by then, as had the matt-black flyers of the planetary Arbites units. Their enforcers were effective troops, but I shuddered to think what slaughter would have taken place had they arrived in time to disturb the true enemy.

  Even for us, I admit, there was a tendency to think of our foes as deranged and bloodthirsty, ever likely to sink into a berserk frenzy when the opportunity for slaughter presented itself. Some of them were, of course, and we had won battles on the basis of our greater discipline, but that was to underestimate the true masters of ruin, who fought as keenly and as shrewdly as they had once done as servants of Terra.

  They were taking out identified targets, moving on before discovery, making the best use of their numbers. I thought again to the star map from Hellion.

  My thoughts were interrupted by the commencement of the docking cycle. I pulled inside the hangar, secured the interceptor and made my way back to the command bridge.

  ‘Widespread damage to major planetary infrastructure,’ Erefan reported, somewhat superfluously. ‘No sign of enemy units remaining in-system.’

  There had been one, though, I thought to myself.

  My crew would need orders now. They would need to be told what to do, and how to react. In the normal run of things I would have given them what they needed without hesitation, but I was still in a state of shocked grief. Erefan must have sensed it, for he started giving commands without waiting for me.

  ‘Take us out of orbit,’ he commanded. ‘Beyond augur range, then hold for further instructions.’

  The Cadamara swung round, bumping up against some ­tumbling wreckage, then boosted clear of the upper atmosphere. As we picked up speed for system-exit, I saw the colossal outline of an Astra Militarum troop carrier emerge over the horizon. Arraissa had its own regiments, and one had clearly been scrambled already. The clean-up was beginning.

  Then we were gone, boosting clear of the debris and back out into the open void. Once the Cadamara’s engines hit full tilt, the world shrank back quickly, first a pale orb, then a spot, then nothing. I knew somehow it would be the last time I would ever see it, and so watched the viewers the whole time to ensure I would remember the sight.

  The crew said nothing to me. Most averted their eyes, though I caught a few snatched upward glances from the scanner pits. They knew I had no soul. They were probably wondering whether I also lacked a heart.

  I sent a message to the ship’s Navigator, indicated for Erefan to carry on as he was doing, then went back to my own quarters. Once there, I retrieved the items I had taken from Hellion, most of them still shrouded in null-fields. I started to go through them all, activating any comm-canisters I could find, studying the scraps of parchment and ritual prayers.

  After a while of this, the Navigator, Slovo, appeared. I could sense the extreme wariness in him. It was harder for him than it was for human-normals to be close to me. At least they were only partly psychic creatures, whereas Slovo was at the opposite end of the spectrum – a being wholly steeped in the tide of souls. I found him fairly objectionable too, but that was mostly down to poor personal hygiene.

  ‘You asked for me, lord,’ he said, bowing stiffly.

  He was a skinny man, draped in dirty robes in his House colours. He had a long hooked nose and sunken eyes. We never managed to get the best to serve with us, only those who for whatever reason couldn’t secure service with a more palatable branch of our glorious Imperium, but he was competent enough and addicted to some of the less ruinous sense-dulling narcotics.

  I gestured towards the great swath of human flesh, pinned up again between staves and now adorning the far wall of my chamber. Slovo limped up to it and looked hard across the swirls of blood.

  ‘A warp map,’ he sniffed. ‘Basic error. You can’t map the warp.’

  My fingers flickered in a series of simple responses – he didn’t understand Thoughtmark, so we were limited to cruder phrases.

  I don’t care.

  Tell me what it means.

  Keep it concise.

  He looked more carefully.

  ‘I see what they’re doing,’ he said eventually. ‘These are representations, such as you can have them, of major channels. The kind of thing you’d bring a fleet down. They’ve been getting narrower, those channels – remember I told you that? Perhaps they know why.’

  He traced a bony finger over the flayed cartograph, mumbling to himself. I let him carry on. I could never decide how much of this was for show or not – they liked to guard their secrets, did those old mutants of the warp.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said, then trailed off again. ‘Perhaps, but maybe not.’

  I sent my fingers into a Say it pattern.

  He shot me an irritated glance. I could see how much he hated me then. He understood the origin of that hatred, and for that reason kept it suppressed as best he could, but it still spilled out from time to time.

  ‘Suppose they knew what was going to happen,’ he said. ‘Suppose they knew which way the tides were pulling. They might know that some channels would close, and some would open. Then they’d have to keep control over the ones that were open. There would be worlds, sitting at the mouths of those conduits. They could pour their filthy craft down those ways. It’d be difficult. They’d have to coordinate strikes over a huge span of space. And they’d have to be right, about it all. I don’t think this is a sensible scheme, though. I don’t think it’s possible.’

  We had all got used to things thought impossible suddenly turning into reality, so I didn’t place much confidence in that judgement.

  I looked at the map myself. It wasn’t easy to study, for the shapes slid and baffled, like optical illusions. I saw systems picked out in a script I didn’t recognise – some foul tongue of the Eye, no doubt. Their arrangement was not as it was in real space, or I might have been able to identify them from our cartographic records, but instead showed their ether-relationship – the way they stood set against the currents of the unseen realm. As this was forever in flux, so they told me, no static maps of it could be produced. The only use this had, then, was as the Navigator said: if they somehow knew the future alignment of things.

  I drew closer to the centre of the diagram. The nearer I drew to that point, the more the circles and pentagrams overlapped, drawing the eye down towards a single world. Even I could see the significance of that one, lodged like a jewel at the nexus of so many interwoven lines of blood.

  Terra? I indicated.

  Slovo shrugged. ‘You can read this rubbish, can you? I can’t. There are other cardinal worlds – Cadia, Hydraphur, Mars. I wouldn’t want to make that judgement, not from what I see here.’

  I pushed down my irritation. The man did not mean to be insolent, but he was doing what every mortal always did when talking with me – fighting against repulsion. He wanted to get out of this room, and that instinct coloured everything
he said.

  All the same, I signed.

  He shrugged. I felt that I’d got everything out of him I was likely to. He’d be needed soon. He’d require at least some rest before I ordered us into the warp again.

  So I sent him away. Then I looked over the marks again, as if a final look could give me what I needed.

  I didn’t derive any great inspiration from it. Those signs had been made for corrupted eyes, steeped in significance that mine would miss. Nonetheless, I could at least tally up the names of the worlds, for that would give me something. There were places of scholarship where I might be able to decipher that list, which would then go some way towards deciphering the map.

  But in truth there were now very few places to go. We had been operating alone, sundered from the rest of our Sisterhood – if indeed any still remained. I couldn’t just set course for the next convent and hope to find refuge. I would have to make a choice.

  He calls His daughters Home.

  I went back up to the bridge, feeling the tremor of the decks under my boots as the ship burned out into the deep void. By the time I arrived back at station, Erefan was waiting for me.

  ‘Your orders?’ he asked.

  Run silent, hold once out of system range, I signed.

  Then I looked up at the real-viewers above me, already black and scattered with stars.

  ‘But we’re heading into the warp,’ Erefan said. ‘That’s the intention?’

  I gave him no signal. I looked at the stars, and I tried to imagine how they would overlay onto that map.

  It is, I signed. To the Throneworld.

  That was a long way. The routes would all be perilous, clogged with pilgrim traffic and watched by the Enemy.

  I was certain, though. As certain as I was about anything in those confused times. Some of it was established protocol in the event of a catastrophe, some of it was a vaguer sense of the way things were going, but most came from Lokk’s blood-scrawled message, something he had meant me to find, I remain sure of it.

  Having seen that, I could hardly have done otherwise. If He had truly called us, after so many millennia of painful silence, then I was surely bound to answer.

  Tieron

  I had been so fixated on the problem of Cadia. We all had. That was perhaps why we all missed Fenris.

  I had barely even thought about the Planet of the Wolves. To me it was a semi-mythical place. I had heard plenty about its fearsome Chapter, of course, but even then I had never met one of its members.

  Space Marines of any description were not common on Terra. I find it almost amusing to remember now, but the ancient prohibition on their presence here was one of the things that lingered after the old rationale for it had long since faded. It was said that the Throneworld still carried the scars of the Great Heresy, and so had kept its distance from the Chapters out of a lingering sense of remembered terror.

  There was a little truth in that, and much nonsense. The visible scars of that old war were all still there, all the way from the highest domes of the Palace down to the slum-pits of the equatorial zone, but very few of the ordinary people, even many of the priests, had any clear idea what they represented. In the face of all that forgetfulness, the Angels of Death had long since ceased to be any kind of terror for the great mass of the population here. Indeed, if they read their Ecclesiarchy catechisms they probably near-worshipped them as mythical saviours.

  What lingered was the wariness of the ruling classes. They knew their history, such as it still existed for us. They knew that even after the great reforms of the first Lord Commander, the combined strength of the Adeptus Astartes was still phenomenal, and that if those hundreds of miniature armies ever made common cause then they would be by far the most powerful single bloc within the Imperium. And so the High Lords worked hard to maintain a distance between the Throneworld and the Chapter Masters. The Inquisition was not above sanctioning any that got too close for comfort, though in any case the antipathy was generally mutual – the Chapters themselves preferred to be out in the void, able to fight the enemy where it persisted.

  And so I had never laid eyes on a Space Wolf. I had never laid eyes on a Dark Angel or a White Scar. The only ones I had ever witnessed – from a distance – were the golden warriors of Dorn’s Imperial Fists, who still maintained a monastery on the world they had once garrisoned alone, and who were now the most frequent visitors to the glittering halls of the Inner Palace.

  Just like everything else, that would change. On that day, though, the tidings of strife were still coming in from a long way away.

  ‘Fenris?’ I asked, for a moment assuming Jek had made a rare mistake.

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ she replied, calm as ever. ‘Something happened. There’s talk of the Inquisition. Other Chapters too. I hear things I can scarcely believe, if I’m honest, but the sources are impeccable.’

  Knowing what we know now, it seems inconceivable that we found out so late, and yet that was always the greatest burden we carried – the paucity of communication across our scattered and stormy domains. There were familiar stories, some apocryphal, many true, of entire wars beginning and ending before we on Terra ever became aware of them. Standard communication conduits were incredibly slow, relying on physical transport between worlds sundered by thousands of light years. Psychic communication was little better – unreliable, prone to madness and disruption, gnomic in its utterances.

  So do not blame us overmuch for the disaster of Fenris. It was not as if the Wolves themselves had ever been eager to involve us in their many battles.

  ‘We gain a grip in one place, another slips into danger,’ I muttered, already wondering what this would mean for our great under­taking. The Imperium, for all its faults, could act decisively and well when confronted with a single grand issue. When the warzones multiplied, that was when paralysis set in. ‘Who else knows?’

  By ‘who’, I meant the High Lords. Only they had access to better intelligence than we did.

  ‘Not all of them,’ said Jek. ‘Not yet. Haemotalion, certainly. Arx, probably. Kerapliades, we can assume, was the first to get tidings, but I’ve had nothing from our agent there. I don’t think the Navy is informed yet, but if they start needing mass fleet movements then Pereth will be next in line.’

  ‘It’s not an isolated event, though, is it?’ I said, thoughtfully.

  Jek waited for me to go on. She knew I wasn’t asking her.

  ‘You know, I never really listened to all those prophets of doom in the pulpits,’ I went on. ‘I told myself they’ve been predicting the days of darkness for a thousand years, and it never quite gets that bad. But first we have Armageddon, bleeding us white, and then this damned endless war at the Eye, and now this. They keep ­piling up. I could learn to get religious.’

  Jek laughed. ‘You’d have plenty to atone for,’ she said.

  I didn’t feel like laughing back. I tried not to think about the number of files I’d passed over bearing the galactic orientation for Fenris – there was always so much else to keep us busy.

  I began to think harder.

  ‘Shocking as it is, it can help us,’ I said. ‘If true, it’ll be another argument to use in camera. Why are we keeping forces held back here, when the threats increase? Throne, we have ten thousand of them here. That’s ten Chapters. It’s insane.’

  We only had days then before the great conclave of the camera inferior.

  ‘Anything back from the Captain-General?’ Jek asked.

  That was the one remaining problem.

  ‘I can’t get close.’

  ‘I don’t think you will, now.’

  I hated to admit defeat. It was the one fault I admitted readily. Back in the old days of schola bullying, when I was beaten bloody by men who would go on to command regiments, I would lie in the dark, aching, and plot how best to come back from the humiliation. I would have tear
s still wet on my juvenile cheeks, but I would already be considering how to weaken the standing of my enemies, to spread the rumours that would isolate them, to call in the favours that would eventually see them humbled and in debt to me.

  Knowing when you’re beaten – that’s the route to certain defeat. I had heard so many high-ranking officials whisper to me over the past few years, ‘It’s over, we’ve had it, we just can’t raise the troops we need’, and I had never believed a single one of them. The only true question was the one I had asked Harster – ‘What can be done?’

  But at that point I could see no way forward. I had failed Fadix’s test, and could not guarantee bringing the Captain-General to the High Lords’ table. In his absence, nothing would change, and we would remain passive as our defeats multiplied.

  ‘You might be right,’ I muttered, hating the sound of the words, but unable to see past them.

  I woke up to the sound of the highest alarm-level going off inside my ear. For a moment I had no idea where I was or what was happening – all I could hear was the tinny shriek of my cochlear alert blazing.

  I shut it down and sat up, the silk sheets of my bed sliding from sweaty limbs.

  ‘Lights,’ I said, and three pearly suspensors glowed into life.

  My room was in disarray, and for a moment I thought it had been ransacked. Then I remembered the events of the evening, the entertaining company and the copious wine we had all sunk, and discounted that.

  I got up blearily, pulling on a robe and twisting the sash around my fleshy waist.

  ‘Report,’ I ordered, speaking into the comm-bead implanted in my wrist.

  ‘Violent incursion in sector lamba-sept of the Inner Palace,’ came the voice of the duty officer, a man named Rivo Jemel. ‘Counter­measures enacted, but severity required notification.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said, slipping on shoes and reaching for a heavy cloak. ‘Send me the coordinates.’