Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  We uttered no battle-cry then, such as the Space Marines did. We did not possess any, for we fought in silence and the roars of aggression they used to augment their prowess had no purchase for us.

  But I was moved, all the same. My brothers were moved. We felt the fabric of our world, of our species’ existence, begin to unravel, and all that remained was defiance.

  We raised our weapons. Several hundred guardian spears and longswords surged up into the air, all in silence, many etched with killing disruptor-charge, all as primordial and storied as our peerless battleplate.

  ‘By His will alone,’ said Italeo, invoking the eternal mantra.

  ‘By His will alone,’ we responded, the only thing we would say, or had ever said, before battle summoned us.

  We knew our roles. Given the vastness of the Outer Palace, each ­Custodian acted as the figurehead for a whole host of lesser warriors. I knew the name of the senior mortal officer under my command – Colonel Slan Urbo of the Katanda 143rd Stalwarts. By the time I reached my assigned destination he had already mustered his regiment, close to four thousand troops in olive-green fatigues and carapace plate, all in full order and ready for deployment.

  Our watch-sector was a few kilometres east of the fabled Lion’s Gate, site of some of the heaviest fighting during the Great Heresy and now a shrine zone full of cathedrals. The great processional avenue that led from the outer hab-regions all the way to the ­Eternity Gate itself passed through that region, overlooked by a hundred defence towers and stalked by Titans.

  By the time I arrived at the schedule rendezvous, the signs of battle preparation were everywhere. I knew that gun lines would be angling and blast shields grinding closed. The defence stations in orbit would be cycling up to full power, activating long-dormant plasma coils and feeding the energy to colossal ship-killer howitzers. Incoming void traffic would be halted, and reserve Navy forces pressed into immediate action. From Luna to Jupiter, squadrons would already be prowling, sending exhaustive augur sweeps deep into the void.

  Even before a shot had been fired, these actions doomed millions. Terra could not feed itself, and had not been able to do so for millennia. Its very existence was dependent on an endless rota of incoming cargo ships – any halt in that procession triggered starvation, and the effects would begin to be felt only a few days from now.

  That was our greatest weakness. The military installations had supply reserves for months, but for the civilian masses there was no such luxury. Once the multitudes realised that the cargo-drops were slowing due to the security cordon, an already restive populace would become ungovernable. If the authorities on this most priceless world had devoted just a tithe of the funds used to maintain their thousands of cathedrals on grain silos then our defence would have been so much less precarious, but such were the times we lived in.

  I met Urbo amid a howling gale atop one of the big dropsites north of the wall. I saw ranks of Valkyrie gunships out on the apron, all of them whining up to full power. Squads of Stalwarts were racing across the apron, their faces hidden behind rebreathers.

  ‘My Lord Custodian,’ Urbo greeted me, bowing and making the sign of the aquila.

  He was a squat, short man with piggish eyes and a nose that must have been broken more than twice. He spoke with a guttural catch in his voice, and I detected the black glint of augmetics at his neck. He was surrounded by his regimental staff, twenty of them, all decked in the same green fatigues save for the commissar in black and a bewildered looking astropath in pale robes.

  ‘You stand at full complement?’ I asked.

  ‘Ninety-eight per cent, lord,’ he said immediately, with some pride.

  ‘And you know your orders?’

  ‘Deployment complete within forty minutes, lord. The first gunships are leaving now.’

  As if to underline the point, at the far end of the long dropsite a Valkyrie boomed into the air, accompanied by two fighter escorts. Another followed it almost instantly, and the apron trembled beneath our boots.

  The defence pattern had been determined a long time ago and regularly reviewed. Platoons of infantry would be dropped into strategic firepoints commanding views across the great jumbled mass of hive-spires and Ecclesiarchy monuments. A regular overwatch of gunships would act as a quick-response force, backed up by three standing reserves of four hundred troops each equipped with heavy weapons and Sentinel walkers. All across the thousands of kilometres of the perimeter similar schemes were also taking shape.

  ‘We shall survey the sector, then,’ I said to Urbo, who nodded and gestured for me to walk with him over to where a big command lifter waited, steaming on the rockcrete.

  ‘Your pardon, but can you tell us anything more, lord?’ the colonel asked, scurrying to match my long stride. ‘Our two sanctioned psykers are both in restraints and screaming. The astropath’s speechless and can’t remember his own name. And, well, you can see the sky.’

  ‘A precaution, colonel,’ I said. ‘When the situation is confirmed, you will be the first to know more.’

  The command lifter was a big machine, squat and black and bristling with close-range gunnery. Its main hold was one of the few in the regiment’s arsenal that could accommodate me comfortably, and offered a decent view from slatted armourglass panes along each flank. We embarked, the doors slammed closed and the turbines swung us up into the air.

  It was only when airborne that I fully gained an appreciation for what was taking place. We pulled clear of the wall, driving low over a banked line of lascannon emplacements, and were greeted by a vista of inferno. The horizon was aflame from north to south, the clouds burning incarnadine and weeping trails of black soot. I could feel it on my skin, even under the protection of my armour – Terra was always hot, but now it was painfully so. More lightning danced across the stricken cityscape, orange and vivid.

  Normally the skies would have been filled with traffic, but now only military vehicles were aloft. Columns of smoke rose from the carcasses of aircraft knocked off course by the bursts of static. When the Astronomican had gone dark it had blown the electrics of equipment halfway across the planet. Here, near the epicentre, most of the hive-spires were still dark.

  I cannot explain just how it felt, knowing that the beacon was gone. It was not a visible thing, of course – we did not lose a physical column of light over our heads – but the psychic loss was palpable. We had all perceived it, but until Italeo’s tidings we had not truly known the cause.

  I felt dislocated. The Astronomican was a literal lighthouse for the Navigator-mutants, but for the rest of us it also had a grounding function. Only with its withdrawal could we understand just how much its presence had been subliminally detected, a faint aura of assurance amid a galaxy that was tearing itself apart.

  And that explained the madness. As the command lifter pulled further out into the maw of the world-city, we could see the enormous crowds spilling out onto the causeways and raised plazas. They were incredible – living seas of humanity, streaming out of every crevice. They clustered in the choked spaces like locusts, and their massed cries of desperation were audible even over the drone of the lifter’s engines.

  I remembered my encounter with the far smaller crowd, only a few days ago. I remembered the nervousness of the mortal commander, the sense of impending violence in the air. Now all that was swept away, replaced by naked desperation on such a scale that it almost defied belief. Had they known then that this was coming? Was that what had driven their short-lived magus into his own madness?

  To the west lay the Lion’s Gate itself, visible as a mountainous hunk of grey amid flickering swirls of fiery air. The defences were strongest there, but we served as the portal’s eastern flank, a critical location to hold if something were to attempt to force the passage. I found myself wishing for more than twice the troops that Urbo had under his command.

  The colonel himself was subdued as we
circled the wide zone of engagement.

  ‘So many,’ he murmured. ‘Throne, they’re all going mad.’

  I had always doubted that the greater mass of humanity was sufficiently psychically attuned to detect the presence of the Astronomican, but perhaps I had been wrong. Or maybe this was a baser kind of fear here – a herd response, gathering momentum with every second.

  ‘Take us out there,’ I commanded, gesturing to the distant pinnacles of a giant basilica.

  We passed over more sites of devastation. One entire hive-spire was burning along its eastern face, exposing a skeletal lattice of hab-levels within. Another was stricken with flickering lines of neon-blue as its main power grid overloaded. Even as we swooped lower, a major viaduct arching across a deep canyon collapsed under the weight of the crowds teeming across it, sending a plume of steel-grey debris mushrooming high. Amid all the tumult, the loss seemed hardly to be noticed.

  I narrowed my eyes. It was becoming hard to make anything out in that murk of flame and ash. The air was behaving strangely over the basilica’s cupola. There was something there – a dancing, snaking presence, like the reflection of light from a spyglass. As we drew closer, the impression faded, and the concrete outline of the great building rose up to obscure all else – a tiered, many-terraced colossus in slate-grey adamantium, crowned with lines of skulls and tear-streaked angels.

  ‘Complete your cordon, colonel,’ I said, moving towards the hold doors. ‘I need to see this.’

  ‘Lord, there are thousands down–’ Then he remembered who he was talking to, and gave an embarrassed half-smile.

  ‘I will return within the hour,’ I said, pulling the security latch and letting fiery air scream inside. ‘Ensure all is set in place by then.’

  Then I pushed myself from the hold and out onto the lifter’s ledge. By then we were no more than ten metres from the ground, and I could smell the human stench of the throngs below.

  I dropped heavily, barely evading those directly under my shadow. The basilica’s great doors rose up before me, though the plaza was stuffed tight with labourers and menial-grade workers. Just as before, one look at me was enough to send most of them shrieking and scrabbling to get away, though some of the desperate crawled to touch my cloak or plead for protection. They all reeked of fear and frenzy.

  I pushed my way through them, climbed the steps and entered the basilica. The air inside was scarcely less febrile. A huge ­mingled congregation clustered around the mighty columns, wailing and rocking in unison. Frescoes of the Imperial saints hung in the side-chapels, dark with incense stains, and the high altar was throttled with supplicants trying to reach the reliquaries beyond. Servo-skulls zipped and bobbed through the pungent clouds, confused by the sensory overload, their augur-eyes flashing madly.

  I moved towards the high altar, a vast construction of crusted gold set below the vault where the transepts crossed. A priest stumbled past me, his eyes bleeding, seemingly blinded. Others were surging up towards the altar dais, screaming. A penitent engine walker, greatest and most grotesque of the creations of the Ecclesiarchy’s militant arm, limped down the nave with its flamers activated, but it was hampered by the press of bodies around it. I caught a glimpse of bald-headed prophets in rags occupying the pulpits and calling down the End Times.

  It was demented. No prayers were being said; the congregations were swilling around like dumb animals, lost on a tide of psychic fear. Amid all the confusion, ignored by all, something was taking shape over the altar. The air seemed thicker, more viscous, and it was rapidly curdling into something solid.

  I kicked through the altar railings and strode up the steps. One of many reliquaries hung over the altar-top – a crystal casket lined with blackened gold the length of a mortal man, chained heavily and covered in tatters of devotional prayer-strips. The casket was vibrating wildly, yanking against its bonds. Its transparent faces were cracked, and a thin whine emanated from it like glass placed under high pressure.

  A priest crawled up to me, his face covered in blood. ‘It… it…’ he gasped, sinking to his knees, gesturing weakly to the vibrating reliquary.

  They couldn’t get near it. The dais was already littered with dead or dying clerics, and blood was running down the marble steps in dark rivulets. I could hear something scratching. The air over the altar became thicker.

  I activated Gnosis’ energy field, and the snarl of plasma reacted wildly. The casket caught on its chains and shook violently. I looked inside the crystal and saw a sword suspended within – a relic of some saint imbued with ancient power, venerated no doubt for millennia but now acting as the conduit for something even older.

  I could sense the veil thinning rapidly, ready to be torn aside like so much gauze. I swung Gnosis two-handed, shattering the casket in a flash and a shriek of released energy. The entire nave shook, rocked by the shock wave, and the sword spun clear of its bonds, scything round to point itself at me. I had the fleeting impression of something reaching to grasp it – a tall creature with an animal’s grin under a crown of horns.

  I thrust Gnosis into the apparition’s heart, and the vision annihilated, blowing apart into a whirl of glistening teardrops. The sword clattered to the marble, flexing as the steel face hit. I heard the echo of a howl, then a choir of broken laughter.

  ‘I was first, though,’ I heard, like a hissed breath echoing around the nave. ‘First of Many.’

  Clanging echoes died away. The tumult in the nave went on ­unabated, but the aroma of madness at the altar faded.

  I knew what I had seen. The daemon had almost entered the world of flesh, just a breath away from becoming real. Whatever resonance it had taken on had been connected to the relic, stored here under the watch of the Ministorum for generations.

  I looked down at the blade. The metal was still hot, but cooling now. A terrified cleric approached it warily, holding up his staff as if it could protect him.

  ‘Leave it,’ I commanded, drawing closer to the fell blade. I could see writing etched along the steel in a language I did not understand. I guessed that it hadn’t been there before.

  This was Terra. This was the shrine world of the Imperium and the temporal seat of the Master of Mankind. For all its corruption and all its many sins, there had not been daemonkind treading on this world since the cataclysm of the Great Heresy. Powerful wards had been constructed since then, consecrated and renewed by each generation, tended by an entire culture geared to endlessly watch the dark. It shouldn’t have been possible, not here, not under the gaze of so many priests and saints and Ordo Hereticus agents.

  The world was awry, cast loose from its moorings.

  The thing could not remain here, lost amid these crowds of half-mad and terror-stupid. I took it up, knowing the danger, and felt its wasp-sting touch even through the auramite of my gauntlets.

  In the blink of an eye, I saw another reality. I saw the skies torn open and legions of the Neverborn striding across the burning arc of Terra’s ruins. I saw the Imperial Palace besieged as it had once been before, and heard the soul-scraping cry of vendetta tear the wind, and knew that the vision was close.

  I turned from that place and made haste. I could not summon Urbo – the relic had to be taken out of the reach of mortals, destroyed if possible, locked away if not, and there were those whose entire lives were devoted to such exigencies. I found myself wondering how many such artefacts existed across the thousands of shrines on Terra, accumulated over long and patient millennia, and the thought chilled me.

  I moved down the long nave and out into the red glow of the smouldering sky. Ahead of me stretched a towering, many-layered labyrinth of gathering confusion.

  ‘Shield-Captain Valerian,’ I voxed, feeling pain grow in the palm that held the sword. ‘Priority message for Tribune Italeo. Request immediate dispatch of Talion lifter to my location. Daemonspoor located on Terra, within sight of the walls.’
r />   I could hardly believe I was speaking the words.

  ‘Recommend also summons be sent for assistance,’ I said. ‘It is time, I think, that we spoke to Titan.’

  Aleya

  They got in.

  Every time they broke through, I destroyed them. Every time I destroyed them, they inflicted more damage. We were being killed, slowly, taken apart as we raced through the crumbling vaults of creation.

  I had prepared as well as I could, given the constraints I was working under. I would have given anything to have had some of my sisters with me, but Erefan’s troops did better than I might have expected. They were far better trained and conditioned than the average trooper of the Astra Militarum, of course. Their drills had been taken from the guard manuals of the Black Ships, and so they knew how to respond to an order in battle-sign. They were psycho-steeled against all but the worst creatures of the Enemy, and so given appropriate warning could hold their nerve against much that a regular soldier would have balked at.

  But that was the limit of it. When the nightmares clawed their way inside our cracked and leaking hull they could only hold position for a few seconds before they were forced into a bloody retreat. We adopted a terrible pattern of fight and flight – Erefan would keep us in the warp for as long as he possibly could. That might be several days, other times just a few hours. As soon as Slovo detected a break in the Geller field the order would be given to crash back into real space. Sometimes we would avoid a full breach then, and would slam back into the world of the senses unharmed. Other times we would smash a critical system and have to scramble madly to keep the plasma drives from overloading. And sometimes, worst of all, we would emerge into the physical void carrying new ­passengers – soulless like me, dragged up from the etheric swamp of the empyrean and ready to slaughter.

  The last time had been the worst. I had been at my station in the very centre of the vessel, waiting like an ambush hunter at the major intersection of a dozen transit arteries. The Cadamara was not a big ship – less than a kilometre long, and with only a few dozen inhabited levels – but that still left hundreds of metres to traverse once the alarms started to sound.