Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  Inner panels punched inwards, power lines exploded, armourglass suddenly frosted with impact-patterns. I heard fresh alarms going off, and a status panel above me flashed runes indicating we were tumbling back into real space.

  We reached the room with the menials in it. One was slumped on the deck face down, a pool of blood slowly forming under her face. The other, a male, was still on his feet, twitching madly against the far wall as if impaled on it.

  The vibrations from the hull were dying down now, and the worst of the lurching subsided, but we remained in a whirling lumen-pattern of intermittent darkness. I could barely see anything with clarity – freeze-frame images of blood and terror jumped around before me.

  ‘Are we out?’ hissed Slovo, clutching at my cloak.

  I didn’t answer. I pushed him away from me and reached for my flamer.

  The standing menial was grinning at me. He was grinning so wide that it tore the edges of his mouth. Every flash of swaying light made that grin bigger and darker, and as I watched, he reached up to his mouth, pushed a hand inside, grabbed his tongue, and began to pull.

  I slipped my hand over the trigger. Something long and black and glistening came out of his mouth, and just kept coming.

  I opened up the flamer. I saw the man scream and writhe within the shaking torrent of extreme heat. His robes ignited in a burst, his skin crisped to black, but I kept up the roaring inferno. I saw something slimy and oil-dark curl up amid the flames, coiling for the strike. I heard fractured screaming as if from many places at once, none of them here.

  I reached for my sword just as it leapt for me, a mass of prehensile limbs and wicked spines. I lashed out, severing one of the tentacles, then spun around to plunge my blade into the polyp of flesh at its heart. It shrieked and clutched at me, trying to smother me in waves of sinuous gristle, but by then I was in combat-trance, beyond mortal senses, moving faster and harder and working my blade in a whirl of pressed steel.

  This was shedim. That should have been impossible, given our Geller aegis, but it was here, on the ship. I could smell its stink – the rotting of the human flesh it had taken for its own, pulled apart and remade.

  I carved it open. It lashed at me, trying to drag me down, but by then I was a tongue of flame, a howl of the world’s wind. My sword gyrated, and slops of its unnatural body thudded to the deck, still jerking.

  ‘Anathema psykana,’ it whispered to me, rearing up in obscene mockery of physical law, growing into a tentacled slab of muscle and mucus. I saw its hundreds of eyes stare at me – hundreds of identical human eyes, copied from its host, replete with lids and lashes and tears. Its mouth had never stopped growing, and was now a huge and ragged maw lined with teeth, flapping and saliva-flecked. ‘Alone? Alone, out here? I will relish turning you inside out!’

  I never listened. A mortal had to struggle not to listen to the shedim, but not me. This thing was an unbearable horror to a mortal, a temptation beyond endurance, but for me it was merely disgusting and dangerous, like a snake found under a pillow, something to stamp on.

  I plunged my blade into its mouth and snickered it across those teeth, yanking them out of black gums. I danced harder, ducking under the flail of tentacles and severing those that came close. I felt its sting on my armour, the sucking pull of warp-spun strands, and slashed myself free.

  The thing had a heart, it had lungs and it had organs, all pulled out of shape from its host but still necessary for it in this place. I delved to find them, cutting like a surgeon. When I reached my target the blade drove in deep, sending a jet of ink-black blood fountaining over both of us. I cut and I cut, wading into the belly of the creature to sever its essence before it could regenerate more.

  It screamed all the while until I sawed out its swollen lungs, grabbing the sacs of pus and foul gas and hurling them messily to the deck. I ripped its gullet from its throat and I burst its flaccid stomach with a stamp of my boot, and that finally shut it up.

  Then the rest of it exploded, blown apart by the violence of my assault, flying into scraps of torn fat and spittle. My armour was coated in it, my sword sopping, my loose hair caked.

  I endured the deluge, waiting for the rain of slops to subside. The chamber was rancid now. The corpse of the second menial was almost lost under a pile of steaming viscera. Slovo cowered in the corner, scratching at the closed door, his eyes still staring in the stop-start lumen glare.

  I had to be sure. I rooted through the remnants of the kill, blade at the ready. They were vicious things, always, and could revive after cursorily lethal amounts of punishment if you were unwary.

  The main lumens came back on, stronger this time. I heard the rapid clatter of boots from the corridors outside, and guessed that Erefan had stabilised the ship and sent a security detail to aid me.

  A bit late, I thought, but at least we’re fully into real space.

  I turned to face Slovo. I must have looked half-daemonic myself, caked in a skin of black inky blood and scales.

  He was in bad shape, but I was in no mood to go easy on him.

  Answers, I signed, and I truly think that command was the thing that scared him most of all.

  Perhaps I should have been more sympathetic. Even for a Navigator, one who stares into the abyss as a vocation, it is very hard to look upon a true instantiated shedim. Up close, they are the weft of nightmares, and they send the mortal mind into paroxysm.

  The rest of the crew were little better. Erefan’s detail skidded into the chamber with their guns drawn and were soon gagging and vomiting and trying to keep their bowels under control. They weren’t particularly cowardly or foolish, they were just human, and so weren’t designed to be confronted by a denizen of the undiluted ether.

  I understood too that we were all of us seeing very different things. I experienced the shedim, the daemon, in its corporeal aspect only – the matter it had taken and reshaped from the unfortunate acolyte and turned into its new body. That was horrific enough, in a biological kind of way, but it didn’t possess any further terror for one of my experience. The besoulled, on the other hand, could perceive its psychic aspect too, and that – I was told – was where the true fear lay. Even the smell of it could evoke that crushing sense of nausea and dread that made them lose their minds and surrender control over their bodies, and the sight was ten times worse.

  Humans found so very much in the galaxy uniquely repulsive – the pariah and daemon and the xenos. I sometimes wondered how the fragile creatures ever lived long enough to breed.

  I ordered the soldiers out, and they were just about able to understand battle-sign enough to comply. Then I wiped the ichor from my helm and dropped down to look at Slovo.

  He was coming around. I guessed that being ripped from the warp-trance made it doubly difficult, but I needed to know what was going on.

  Clean yourself, I signed to him again. Five minutes.

  I pulled him to his feet and helped him walk out of there. I sealed the doors behind us, handed him over to his own surviving House menials and went to find a hose.

  Five minutes later I was sitting opposite him in one of the ship’s lead-lined interrogation chambers, with Erefan present too. The three of us sat around a bolted-down table and tried to ignore the stench emanating from two of us.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it,’ Slovo started, his eyes flickering between Erefan and me. He had calmed down a lot, but was still febrile. ‘I don’t even know how to describe it.’

  ‘Try, please,’ said Erefan sourly. The captain had done well to bring us out of the warp so quickly without scattering the hull across a swath of space-time, but he wasn’t happy that he’d had to.

  Slovo drew in a miserable breath. ‘The warp’s growing,’ he said.

  I didn’t understand how that could be possible. The warp, I had always been told, was a mirror of reality – the one was the size of the other.

 
‘Very, very bad,’ Slovo went on. ‘Was watching it happen – tearing space like a sheet of paper. We were heading right down the fault line. It blew the outer aegis. I could hear them. Throne, I could hear them.’

  ‘Can’t you always hear them?’ asked Erefan.

  ‘Not like this.’ Slovo looked up at me. ‘They knew you were here. They were smashing up against the hull to get to you. There were hundreds of them.’ He shook his head. ‘We had to drop out of it. I don’t know how long we had – a few seconds more.’

  But one got through, I signed.

  ‘Just as we dropped to real space,’ Slovo nodded. ‘Must have done it then. Caught on the wrong side, and it was weak by then.’

  Erefan turned to me. ‘The Geller array’s in a bad state,’ he said. ‘We have a lot of burned-out relays. It’ll take a while to repower it.’

  It would have been good to have been able to use Thoughtmark then, to ask the kind of subtle questions I needed to ask. I wanted to know more about what was going on.

  ‘It’s like… a rift,’ Slovo said, his voice full of foreboding. ‘A crack. A canyon. It’s growing.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ said Erefan.

  Slovo barked a hoarse laugh. ‘I don’t know either, captain. I’m trying to make sense of what I saw.’ He pressed his hands together, trying to stop them shaking. ‘It felt… as if the whole galaxy were breaking apart down the middle. I saw the edge of it, dropping into a deeper void. I saw the light running out of the universe. Leaking out of it.’

  I leaned forwards.

  The Beacon? I signed.

  ‘The Astronomican? It’s damned faint. Damned faint. We lost it for a while, back there, but I could just about lock on before the aegis started to crack.’

  I felt impatience growing. Slovo was in shock, that was clear, but I had little patience for his weakness. He had a task, and I needed him to fulfil it.

  I turned to Erefan.

  How long? I signed.

  ‘I can get the warp drives back online in a few hours. We’ve taken some hull damage, but nothing the servitors can’t patch. It’s the Geller field that worries me.’

  ‘We can’t go back in there,’ said Slovo, vehemently. ‘They’ll tear us apart. They know you’re here, and they hate you.’

  I remembered the star map, with its lines of snaking warp channels. It felt then as if the universe were falling into some long-arranged configuration, its tectonic plates shifting, and we were caught in the heart of it.

  ‘And they know what we’re doing,’ Slovo went on, rambling now. ‘They know where we’re going, and they’ll break us open to prevent it.’

  I could have silenced him. Some battle-sign gestures were physically painful for an untrained recipient, and I could have gummed those lips together easily, but I thought it best to let him get it out of his system.

  ‘I think it’s the Gate,’ he said, his eyes flickering from Erefan to me and back again. ‘I think something’s broken and the balance has gone. We can’t go back in there.’

  I turned to Erefan.

  Four hours, I signed.

  ‘I can do it in five,’ he replied.

  Four, I told him.

  Then I got up. I needed to clean myself properly, wipe the stench of daemon from my armour and boil-wash my hair. Then I needed to refuel the flamer, attend to my blades and begin the process of drilling the crew.

  We would have to barricade the most vulnerable sections – the Navigator’s blister, the command bridge, the exposed enginarium chambers. The Cadamara had a standing garrison of a few hundred, and if they were prepared for combat they might be able to hold their ground for long enough for me to do what was necessary.

  I was sure Slovo was right. I was sure that the empyrean was rupturing, and that the inhabitants of the warp would be on to us as soon as we cleared the veil again, and that the chances of us emerging unscathed were zero. But if his visions were correct, then this growing rift risked stranding us forever in the void, or at least on the wrong side of where we needed to be.

  So we would do it. We would fight our way through.

  The Navigator was looking at me, appalled. At least he wasn’t talking any more. Erefan was a professional and kept his feelings to himself. I had no idea whether it would be possible to get us back on course within four hours, but at least he had something to work towards now.

  I left them in the chamber and walked briskly to my own. I could worry about the Navigator’s state of mind later, when crossing the veil was a possibility again. For now, though, I had a defence scheme to plan.

  Tieron

  ‘And so we come to the heart of the matter,’ said the Master of the Administratum, Irthu Haemotalion.

  He sat at the head of the long black granite table, his grey face a picture of studied mournfulness. He was wearing his heavy ceremonial robes, just as all the other High Lords did, though his were perhaps the most ostentatious, as befitted his role as first among equals.

  It hadn’t always been thus. In other ages our military commanders might have assumed an unofficial pre-eminence, but this was an age of bureaucracy and inertia, in which the greatest power now lay buried within the unknowably complex rules of procedure, and so the master of bureaucracy was also the de facto master of the Imperium.

  I watched it all unfold from my place at the foot of the table. The Twelve were gathered in their various finery, attended by their robed officials who sat behind them on smaller thrones. We were high up on the northern face of the Senatorum Imperialis, and thin light lanced down from high stained-glass windows. Two armed Lucifer Blacks guarded the heavy doors, and many more were stationed in and around the Council chamber’s perimeter. I could hear the gun-drones as they circled endlessly above us, as well as the whine of seeker-turrets in active service.

  They were paranoid, all of them, insisting on incredible levels of security even within the most secure of all locations of the Imperium. But I could sympathise with that – they weren’t truly concerned about external threats here, they were concerned about each other.

  We had already been in session for several hours, and the watery sun was high in the sky. A whole raft of measures had been addressed, with much consensus. Now we were getting to the real business.

  ‘I must thank the cancellarius for his diligence in bringing this issue to Council again,’ Haemotalion went on, looking at me with sardonic eyes. ‘It seems that nothing could deter him from doing his duty on this occasion, even if it took much… persuasion to ensure that all views were taken account of.’

  I despised the man. His intellect was possibly the greatest of all of them, and he was a master of figures and ledgers, just as he had to be, but there was a savage coldness in him that I had always found repellent. Of course, I merely smiled and bowed in acknowledgement.

  ‘It’s a weighty issue,’ the Master went on, intent on telling his peers what they already knew. ‘For ten thousand years the Lex has held the balance between our forces, all deriving from the original Lord Commander’s precepts. It was he who imposed the Codex on his Legiones Astartes brothers, keeping the peace between the Space Marines and the Adeptus Terra. And it was he, in consultation with the great Valdor, who issued the Edict of Restraint, under which the Custodian Guard were expressly enjoined to remain on Terra as guardians of the Enthroned Emperor. Many times, voices have been raised against this edict, and every time they have been quelled. But now, with the war at such a delicate stage, it comes to us again.’

  ‘It should never have done so,’ growled Raskian through a vox-filter. The Fabricator-General was a vast presence at the opposite end of the table, and took up almost as much room as the rest of the chamber combined. His nominally human-form body was locked into a whole series of stacked machines, all coughing and flickering amid a jungle of thick power lines. His head was the most unchanged part, though even that w
as bronze and emerald-eyed and hairless. ‘We’ve had a hundred crises, and never gone against the old pacts. What’s next – you dissolve the Treaty of Olympus?’

  ‘The Lex Imperialis is inviolable,’ agreed Aveliza Drachmar, the hatchet-faced mistress of the Adeptus Arbites. ‘It is unacceptable to modify its provisions at the first sign of military setback.’

  So far, so predictable. I was happy to let the opposed parties make their cases.

  ‘Hardly the first sign,’ replied Merelda Pereth, Lord High Admiral of the Imperial Navy. She was a quietly cool character, used to giving orders under extreme pressure. I liked her. ‘You might argue we’ve shown considerable restraint.’

  ‘It’s still heresy,’ said Baldo Slyst, the ancient Ecclesiarch, and after Haemotalion the most absurdly over-embellished. He placed his many-ringed fingers before him on the stone table and fixed the rest of the High Lords with the bleak stare of a prophet. ‘The God-Emperor’s Will was reflected in that Edict. To erode it now is weakness of faith.’

  ‘It is weakness of mind to change nothing when the facts demand it,’ countered Uila Lamma, the Paternoval Envoy of the Navigators. Alone among the High Lords, Lamma was a representative of the real power behind the Houses, the vast and bloated mutant who occupied the Paternoval Palace of the warp scryers. I liked her too – as a servant like me, albeit an exalted one, she had retained some sense of proportion in life. ‘How many times have we seen the Lex bind our hands, when the Enemy has no law at all? We have held back from creating thousands more Chapters because we are held in thrall by the Lord Commander’s ancient doctrine. I say the day has long since passed for this. Let us unleash the Ten Thousand. Let us unlock the gene-labs and create new Space Marines to serve under our direct command. Let us re-form the Imperial Army, arm the Ecclesiarchy and end these divisions that cripple us.’

  That was dangerous talk, and risked making the argument unwinnable. The first rule of political change was to limit what was being asked for – they would never go for a wholesale revision of the Codex Astartes.