Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  ‘Do not fire,’ I told Werrish, bringing the flyer ever lower and making the dust skitter in the downdraught. ‘Kill these thousands today, and there will be tens of thousands tomorrow. Tell your troops to hold position.’

  I set the flyer’s machine-spirit to override, opened the cockpit blister, pulled free of the seat and leapt earthwards. We were only a matter of metres from the ground by then. I dropped to one knee on impact, then rose up smoothly and began to walk.

  I was surrounded on every side. For a few moments, I went unimpeded. The closest of the mortals stared at me, open-mouthed. Then the more perspicacious, recognising slowly what I was, started to shout in alarm, then to run, to fall on their faces, to stumble and panic. More turned and fled, shoving their way through the rest to get away. The vast crowd began to fold in on itself, suddenly riven by inexplicable terror at its heart.

  I paid them no attention. They were like a swarm of insects – huge but incapable of doing me harm. Many were not even properly armed, just carrying machine tools or improvised spears, and their screaming turned swiftly from anger to terror. Some even cried out words of desperate repentance, sobbing frantically and trying to touch my cloak, though the bulk of them merely wished to get away from me as fast as they could.

  I knew the Angels of Death had an expression for this pheno­menon – transhuman dread, they called it. If anything, our order possessed the greater power in that regard, amplified by our stature, our rarity, the esoteric imagery of our golden armour. I could have killed so many of them then, if I’d wanted to. I could have waded into those reeling ranks and handed down the judgement of the Emperor until the many thousands were all broken at my feet.

  I did none of those things. Killing is easy. Our Imperium has stagnated in many ways and yet we have become such experts in the application of violence that to end a life has become as trivial and as commonplace as clearing a throat. I had no compunction over using my power when it was necessary, but neither did I share the zeal for destruction that so many of the Throne’s own servants exhibited. If it had been possible to solve our many problems through the continual application of unrestrained force, then you would have thought that over ten thousand years of trying it we might have had some rather better outcomes.

  I reached the location of the one who controlled them, the man with the eye-mark. His bodyguards fell away from him as I approached, scrambling to get clear. One of them choked on his fear, others voided their bladders even as they ran.

  The man himself was shaking, barely able to remain in position to face me, his face convulsing jerkily with an attempt at defiance. He carried some kind of staff bedecked with feathers. I had no idea where he might have obtained feathers – real ones were not generally to be found in the slums of Terra.

  ‘Here to kill me then, golden one?’ the man cried, and his strained voice gave away his crippling terror.

  It would have been the work of but a moment.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked, quietly.

  He could barely meet my gaze. His skin was glossy with sweat.

  ‘The end is coming for you!’ he blurted, wild-eyed now. ‘I have been shown it!’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked again, with just the same inflection.

  He started to lose his last slivers of self-command. ‘Because you can’t protect us,’ he hissed. ‘They’ll sweep you away. They’ll sweep it all away!’ His eyes lost focus. ‘What did he tell me? The… path. It is opening now.’

  I was aware of a hundred things around me. Men and women were running, surging around us, trying to get back into the hab-zones. The braziers had toppled. The flyers still hovered, their guns trained but silent. The entire offensive had dissolved into panicked retreat, testament both to its fragility and to the residual authority of the Throne.

  ‘The Gate has already fallen,’ he went on, raving now in both fear and excitement. ‘You know that? Has it got back to your deaf and blind masters yet?’

  ‘Who told you these things?’ I asked.

  He started to laugh, and the sound had an edge of frenzy to it. ‘What does it matter to you? You are deaf to those voices. You are deaf to all living voices. The dead cannot stand against the living. You hear me? The dead cannot stand against the living!’

  The two of us were like a small island of stability amid a world of motion. This amateur assault was over, but that meant little in the wider scheme of things. More mobs would come, larger ones, stirred up by madness such as this, and there were not enough of us to break them all. We needed to discover more of their origin.

  ‘Come with me,’ I said.

  He stared at me, horrified. ‘No,’ he said, in a smaller voice.

  ‘You have committed great sins.’

  I never lifted my voice above a murmur, but he lost what little composure he’d had, then. Tears started in his eyes. ‘I have, though,’ he confessed, wonderingly, as if only just seeing it. ‘I have committed great sins.’

  ‘There are ways to atone for them,’ I said.

  He took a faltering step towards me, blinking, staring. ‘Oh, by the Throne,’ he mumbled, dispirited. ‘But all these things are ended.’

  I summoned the flyer, and a moment later heard its engines overhead. Werrish was still on board, and looked startled to see me conversing with the heretic.

  I gestured towards the open cockpit door. Meekly, haltingly, the man let his staff fall from his hands, then made his way to the compartment at the rear, moving as if in a stupor. I sealed the door behind him, then went back to Werrish.

  ‘The machine-spirit will take you back,’ I said. ‘Deliver him to the Ordo Hereticus watch division in your sector. Explain the manner of his capture. Tell them I wish to study their report on him when it is done.’

  Werrish nodded. His eyes flickered to the retreating crowds, still out in the open, all within range of his guns. ‘And the rest?’ he asked.

  I followed his gaze. I could see them scampering, stumbling, their eyes wide with fear. According to the Lex Imperialis, all of them were traitors.

  ‘Let them go.’

  ‘Their executions are warranted,’ he ventured, carefully.

  ‘They were fools and weaklings,’ I said. ‘Do not become too fond of killing such, captain.’

  Then I flicked a finger, and the flyer rose up, twisting on a column of superheated air, before heading back towards the still-open egress gate, taking Werrish and the weeping heretic with it.

  I turned back towards the eternal city, a place I had barely ventured into since my ascension. I could not quite believe how dirty it was, up close. It smelt of confinement. They were still running from me.

  I remembered Navradaran’s words. There is some advantage to spending time outside this place.

  Then I looked back over my shoulder at the wall, soaring high above even the greatest of the city’s towers. Its outer surface, dark as jet, was still scored with antiquated wounds. Even the newest sections were almost nine thousand years old; some parts were as old as the Imperium itself. They looked utterly indomitable, the kind of barrier that armies would shatter against for eternity.

  I could just make out the greatest of the structures housed within. The Sanctum Imperialis itself, the apex of our entire existence, was like a distant mountain, hazy with mist. The Tower of Heroes was a slender vertical line of grey against a stormy horizon.

  It is a curious thing, to witness one’s home from the outside, to see it as they did. I had always supposed that they must have felt excluded, the masses of Terra, shut out from the magnificence and forever scratching up against closed doors like famished waifs.

  But just then I suddenly saw it in a different aspect. They had been terrified of me. I was the closest living embodiment of the Emperor’s soul, and they had run from me screaming. Perhaps they saw the walls not as the barrier that kept them from getting into the P
alace, but the barrier that kept us from getting out. Perhaps they saw it not as an impediment to their movement, but as our necessary cage.

  I could see that now. I could see the high walls and the age-darkened towers, and it looked like nothing quite so much as a prison, vast and old, sealing its terrible heart closed like layers of rockcrete thrown up over a lethal reactor.

  I had to go back inside. My duties were many, and already I could detect mind-impulse queries and commands from the Tower of Hegemon. When I turned to walk back, though, my boots felt heavy, as if I were walking through sand.

  The sense was easy to shake off, and I started to move.

  But I had felt it, all the same.

  Aleya

  I had never known the warp like it. Travel had always been difficult between the stars, and over the past few years I had been told many times by many different Navigators that it had been getting steadily worse. Most of the things they told me about, the ether eddies and the surge-tunnels, made no sense at all to me, but I could certainly feel the hammering our vessels took as they rattled through the empyrean.

  On previous journeys I had often wondered what would have happened if I’d lifted the warp shutters and gazed at it, like the Navigators do. A normal human would have been driven mad in seconds, they said. But then normal humans had souls, and thus the psychic realm was intelligible to them. What would I see? Nothing? Legions of daemons? The true essence of the warp itself?

  I’d never been sufficiently curious to find out. The chances were that the sight would have been fatal to me in one way or another – pariah or not, the empyrean was no place to linger in or gaze upon, not if you wanted to keep your sanity.

  Now, though, I was half tempted again. The decks of the ­Cadamara were like drumskins, resonating in a way that put my teeth on edge. We’d already lost one of our secondary drivetrains, dropping our speed through the galactic mire and amplifying every crash and slew that the unquiet abyss imposed on us.

  I staggered down teetering corridors, feeling queasy from the weeks-long incessant movement. There was some irony to that – I spent most of my time making others nauseous, and now had some sympathy for how that felt.

  My sense of dislocation had another cause. For a while after returning to the ship I had refused to mourn, preferring to channel my energy into activity. As the strange days in the ether had lengthened, though, my thoughts had turned increasingly to what had been lost.

  I had loved my sisters. It was a fierce, almost desperate kind of love, born of the fact that we shared such a unique bond. All of us could remember the time when we had been dragged into the convent, filthy and starving, more used to blows than words of explanation, and then slowly realised that this place was safe, and that it had been made for us, and that we were not alone in the universe.

  It was not a comfortable existence. We were trained, sometimes brutally. Hestia was not motivated by any benevolent sense of care, but by a pitiless vocation rooted in ancient doctrine. Some who found their way into the convent died soon afterwards, at times from exhaustion, at times by taking their own life. Those who survived became stronger in both body and mind. We learned secrets about the universe, ones that would have been our death sentence if ever uttered outside the walls of that place.

  Before we took our vow of tranquility, we spoke and chattered and gossiped just as all juveniles did. We even laughed, whenever our regulated days would allow, sharing private jests about our humourless instructors. Even once the time for spoken words had passed, we still shared those bonds. Thoughtmark, in its fullest form, was an expressive language, in some ways more so than standard speech, and the friendships I made were all the stronger for the adversity in which they had been forged.

  Now I could only recall their faces – Erynn, Catale, Ruja – bloodied by their untimely deaths. The memory of that was like a wound, gaping and blood-raw, taking me right back to my earliest days as a hunted infant, unable to understand why the whole world seemed intent on causing me harm.

  I could share that grief with no one. I was as alone as I had ever been, surrounded only by the besoulled, who could never understand that it is hard for our kind to be isolated. We have less to draw on internally than others, and the great irony of our self-imposed seclusion is that we need human fellowship more, for it temporarily fills the void lurking within our own hearts.

  I began to dread what I would find when we finally arrived at the Throneworld. I was under no illusions that the journey would be easy, or even that we would make it at all. Hestia had once told me that the pilgrim-route was only for the deluded, and that the chances of reaching Holy Terra as an individual were tiny. Now that the High Lords seemingly wished to forget all about the Sister­hood of Silence – how I hated that name! – we could be sure of no special­ treatment to ease our passage.

  But I pushed the ship onwards, keeping it at the limit of its power, ignoring the warnings of Slovo and his acolytes to respect the turbulence of the warp.

  In my mind, the three things were surely linked. The Old Legions making their return, the targeting of the convent, the gathering storm in the ether. You did not need to be a seer to realise that some new alignment was in progress, and that we had struggled on for too long with the old ways when their efficacy had long since ceased.

  I subsumed everything else to this new goal. I took my grief and I made it into a weapon, just as we had been trained to do. If I had to break the Cadamara apart to do it, I would still make it to the golden spires of the shrine world and discover just what Lokk had seen before he died.

  Perhaps I should have listened to Slovo’s warnings, but then temperance had never been my strong point, and, as Hestia had always told me, there is greater power in righteous wrath than in meek acceptance.

  I staggered. Something had hit us hard. That, I thought, was impossible. We were deep in the warp, and there were no physical objects to hit.

  Then I saw the alert rune, and started to run. I was in my armour, as we all were – void passage was so perilous now that I had instructed the crew to remain battle-prepared at all times.

  We were hit again. It felt like some enormous closed fist had rammed us amidships, sending the ship swinging round its centre of gravity.

  As I closed in on Slovo’s sanctum, high up in the spine of the ship, I heard the screams. His chambers were entirely sealed off from the main structure during warp passage, the better to insulate him during the arduous process of guidance. I reached the first of the heavy doors and punched the access codes hurriedly. All the while I could hear booms shuddering down the superstructure, loud and getting louder.

  The doors heaved open, and I smelt the stale air of the sanctum’s interior as it washed over me. The lumens were erratic, blinking across dirty bulkheads. I plunged inside, and saw a pair of acolytes holding their temples and weeping what looked like blood. They were menials from House Rehata, ungifted with the Seeing Eye, and they were wailing like slaughtered porcines.

  I heard Slovo crying out from further inside. The chambers were low-roofed and braced with heavy bands of adamantium. The whole place looked like a military bunker, solid and unbreakable.

  But it was breaking now. Cracks had already shot up the inner walls, shivering with released energy. I ran through the maze to Slovo’s inner domain, a sphere of iron lodged within the ship’s hull, accessible only by a single metal gantry over a moat of oil. As I crossed, I could see more breaches, popping with lightning that curled and danced across the void.

  As I neared the portal it blew open, sending a cloud of noxious gas boiling out at me. Slovo himself staggered into view, his skin wet with whatever fluids he’d immersed himself in, cables still trailing from intravenous lines in his arms.

  ‘Get us out!’ he gasped, his mortal eyes staring and bloodshot. Thankfully he’d managed to wrap up his deadly Seeing Eye, though the rest of his robes were only loosely hanging from his
scrawny body. ‘Get us out!’

  I punched the runes through to Erefan – Immediate crash out of warp – and moved to help Slovo. He pushed me away, teetering on the gantry’s railing. He was wild, barely seeing what was around him, and he too had lines of blood running from his nostrils.

  ‘They’re getting in,’ he hissed, drooling. ‘The field’s breaking down. Get us out!’

  Looking over his reeling shoulder, I could just make out the disarray in the sphere – the nutrient tank he floated in was filthy and leaking, and the cables hanging like spider’s limbs from the roof were sending spears of electricity scattering across the interior. I grabbed him by the shoulder and hauled him away from it, backing up along the gantry. I could already hear the alert klaxons as Erefan did as he was asked. The ship shook wildly, blowing more lumens, then seemed to drop vertiginously, as if falling through a place where gravity still existed.

  I gestured furiously at him – What happened? – but he was blind to me.

  Then I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. More lights shattered, plunging the space into flickering shadow. It looked – but this was impossible – as if the walls were draining down like viscous fluid, sliding off the ship’s substructure and pooling into a slough of molten steel.

  I dragged Slovo the rest of the way, back to the blast doors and into the warren of chambers beyond. He clawed at me, jabbering something about the impossibility of a Geller field losing integrity and just what took place if that happened, and how they were coming and they were getting inside and they knew who we were and where we were going.

  My heart was thumping hard. There were noises echoing up from the bilges below us, distorted and shrieking. For a moment I thought this might be what the warp itself sounded like, some terr­ible snapshot into an infinity of agonised souls, before the ­Cadamara bucked again, thrown away from its ventral axis.