Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  ‘Try using the real-viewers,’ Jek suggested, knowing my weakness.

  It didn’t help. All I could see through the heavily fortified slats was a wildly spinning disc, marked by great streaks of fire. I did note just how different the face of Terra looked to how it had done before, its uniform pall of sludgy grey now wracked with the flames raging in its upper atmosphere. I tried – foolishly – to glimpse something of the Fortress of the Astronomican, hoping against hope that it would ignite again and banish the swaths of destruction that now ceaselessly circled the globe.

  Soon, though, even those details disappeared as my home world shrank back, blurring from the lifter’s heavy progress into the void. The howl of the atmosphere ripped away, leaving only the internal roar of our engines. We began to be assailed by challenge-bursts from the hundreds of Naval installations on our route, all of them now watching the approaches to Luna like psy-hawks. I could see approaching void-fighter wings, and guessed just how jumpy those pilots would be.

  ‘Boost broadcasts of our exempted status,’ I voxed to the pilot. ‘Any trouble, route them direct to my audex and I’ll explain precisely how fast I can have a kill-team locate their families.’

  The RE-45 was a blunt instrument, but a fast one once it got going. The dense network of defence stations swam past us, turning slowly under the flickering lights of Luna’s distorted reflective face. Space itself seemed to be alive, lit with ghostly strands of witch-light that scampered across the void.

  ‘There it is,’ murmured Jek, peering into one of the vid-feeds linked to the forward augur banks.

  I had seen Luna many times, and had always been somewhat impressed by its faded grandeur. Unlike Terra it was a quiet, dark realm, dominated by the vast docks that jutted out from its equator. It was a colder place, and had always felt somehow purer to me too, if you ignored the huge volume of contraband passing through it every hour.

  Looking at it now, much of it was the same as it had always been, save for a sector high up over our prow. The light came from there, winking like sunlight from a lens. The effect looked less violent than it had been, though it was still incredible that something so powerful could have been generated so quickly.

  ‘Take us down as close as you can,’ I told the pilot, swallowing the bile that clogged my throat. ‘Immediate visual range, unless we come under fire.’

  By then I could already see other voidcraft looming up ahead – twelve Naval monitors with their guns ranged on the terrain below, a strike cruiser in the faded yellow of the Imperial Fists, two larger craft in silver-grey livery, even a grand gold-and-black cruiser bearing the eagle’s-head device of the Adeptus Custodes. Luna was not short of its own defences, but the response from Terra had nonetheless been significant.

  We powered on through the perimeter, our status and credentials enough to run the gauntlet of challenges from the bigger vessels. Luna’s eerie dark grey landscape filled the forward viewers, swelling first into a great curve of spires and manufactoria, then racing towards us in a new horizon of ancient grime-streaked towers.

  We touched down in a cloud of kicked-up dust. Fearful that my nausea might overwhelm me completely, I pulled the restraints from my chest and staggered down the lowering ramp first.

  The pilot had done well, taking us close to the edge of a huge crater set out in the wastelands of Luna’s ship graveyards. We were down among the carcasses of ancient voidcraft, beached long ago and still pored over for scrap. The hulls were titanic, swelling hundreds of metres into the crystal-clear air, their blackened spars skeletal against a screen of clear stars. Above them all, far away from us on a dark horizon, rose the colossal plates of the docks themselves, huge black bars drawn vertically across the firmament.

  The air was thick with grit, the product of venerable Mechanicus terraformers burning away at the world’s core. Gravity had never been quite equalised to Terran-normal here, so when we moved we lurched uneasily.

  I could already hear the muffled sounds of many boots marching, and the vox-grind cries of orders issued, but nothing as yet of the inferno I had feared. The sorcerous light seemed to have disappeared, but in its place I could perceive the sway and flash of lumen beams, all of them originating beyond the ridge ahead of us.

  Jek drew alongside me, and our guards jogged out on either side, guns trained on the summit.

  ‘What do you expect to find here?’ she asked.

  ‘Something worth the trouble,’ I muttered, beginning the long slog up the ridge.

  That trudge alone nearly ended me. The climb was more than a hundred metres in thin air, and by the time I neared the summit I was panting and sweating under my suit. I felt ludicrous. There was no reason for me to be there. I was an official, not a warrior. Perhaps I had been going mad. Perhaps the foetid air of the Throneworld had crushed my sanity entirely, and now I marched to a long-overdue death.

  Then at last I reached the peak of the dusty slope. I hauled in great breaths, feeling dizzy, leaning my hands on my knees, before I was able to stand again.

  I looked out. Jek stood beside me, and looked out. My guards and my officials, all in their thick suits of protective armour, looked out. Not one of us made a sound. I was, for once, entirely lost for words. Perhaps there weren’t any adequate to capture what we were seeing. We stayed like that for a long time, feeling only the heavy beats of our hearts and hearing the boom of the wind in our earpieces.

  Let me do what I can to convey the scene. I fear I will be inadequate to the task, but I will try.

  We were staring down a shallow incline, the curving inner face of a wide bowl. It was huge – perhaps twenty kilometres across – and I could barely make out the far side of it amid the dust and drifting smoke. More ship cadavers marked the far outline of the great crater, just as massive as the ones we had marched past, ­rising like megaliths over the depression.

  The landscape was a smouldering charnel-zone, heaped with bodies and choked with the ruins of war-machines, all part-hazed by the drift of smoke. Some of the slain were human troops, clad in the grey of the Luna defence forces, but most were far huger and more ornate – Space Marines, drawn from a dozen Chapters. I saw cobalt and ebony, gold and crimson, all locked together in a vast chequerboard of livery. Amid the dead stood the living, battered and crusted with Luna’s dust, but still moving with that ponderous fluidity that always marked the Adeptus Astartes.

  I had never seen so many gathered together. There must have been thousands of them, a war host beyond any I had dreamed of. Most were arrayed in the cobalt of Ultramar, that far-off kingdom I had read so much about but never travelled to. Others strode among them as equals – the Imperial Fists who until that day had been stationed on Terra, and Black Templars, Novamarines, Mortifactors… The list went on and on, testing the knowledge of heraldry I had learned in my distant youth.

  It was impossible that they should be here. We had chronicled and listed every last defender on Terra for months, knowing that most of the Chapters were fighting far off in the depths of the void. The ways of the warp were blocked and burning – they could not be here.

  But they were not the only ones. I saw bizarre creatures that I had no name for – arcane creations of the Mechanicus, some greater in size even than the Space Marines who stalked beside them. I saw living saints, just like those in the Ecclesiarchy frescos, hovering amid haloes of snaking energy. The thin air crackled with recently discharged plasma, as taut and tense as stretched skin. Even as I watched, three Imperial Fists Thunderhawk gunships rumbled overhead, far more massive than I’d imagined they were. Custodians, taller than all others, could be spied among the vast host, surrounded by the highest heaps of broken corpses.

  The slain far outnumbered those who still walked, but these were no ordinary corpses. Even looking at them made my eyes burn – many were embellished with high serpent helms, and had armour of lapis lazuli and copper, finer than any luxury I had wit
nessed in the Palace itself. Among them were scraps and slops of unnatural flesh, steaming as if cooked on the frigid air. I was no scholar of the arcane, but I could guess what those things must have been, and there were so many of them – a legion of the corrupt, lying entwined with the corpses of their victims.

  In the centre of the crater was a mighty gate shaped into a high arch. There was nothing human in that thing’s construction – it was a mere twist and a skein of bone, glimmering like cold flesh, and yet high enough for a Warhound Titan to have walked through. I could not imagine that it had been there for very long – even in such a desolate place it would have been discovered and investigated long ago – and so this too must have been some construction of sorcery, linked to the residue of the daemonic that littered the crater floor.

  It was a place of terror and amazement, an anomaly beyond any I had witnessed in my long career. I might have simply stood dumbfounded before it, drinking in the spectacle, but in truth these marvels soon left little impression on me. The Custodians, in whose presence I had been so cowed on Terra, did not inspire their previous awe. The thousands of Space Marines, our Imperium’s great defenders, gave me only a passing sense of majesty.

  That had nothing to do with them. It had everything to do with the presence at their heart.

  I started to move again, stumbling down the far slope, moving like a sleepwalker. I heard Jek calling out, trying to hold me back, but I didn’t listen. I was hardly aware of anything around me, and only dimly noticed the blurred outlines of the giant warriors as they laboured. They paid me no attention. I was just one of many functionaries and technicians now descending on the site to study it and make it secure. They could have no conception of whom I served, and even if they did I guessed they would pay it little attention.

  I don’t know how long it took me to reach the centre. Probably a long time, dragged out by stumbling. Eventually, though, I saw the xenos gate soaring up before me, and I saw the stars under its arch blur and tremble, and knew I was close.

  He was there, waiting. I had no idea then just how far he had come, nor what perils he had mastered, but he was there. He was surrounded by his great and austere counsellors and champions, none of whom so much as looked at me. They conferred among themselves, looking to their weapons, every movement thick with fatigue.

  I knew who he was. I recognised the pictures from the devotional tracts. We had been served with those images from childhood, told to meditate on them incessantly, even to pray to them, instructed never to let them out of our mind. Quadrillions had seen those templates of heroism and reflected on the glory that had been, using them as exemplars of the human spirit and hoping, perhaps even heretically, that they would return one day.

  I never thought it would happen. I did not believe it possible. I thought the masses were ignorant and weak, and that our salvation could only come from those powers we still retained, not the legends of a half-remembered past.

  Alone of all those assembled there, he noticed me limping amid the giants. He looked past the Custodians who stood there, their spears streaked with blood. He looked past the captains of the Space Marines and the grotesque lords of Mars, and fixed me with cold blue eyes.

  I could feel my heart racing out of control. The whole place was like an intoxicated dream, a phantasm sent to drain the last sanity from our tortured bodies, and yet I could not deny its reality. When he spoke, the voice was accented strangely, almost unintelligibly, the voice of another age. Despite my attire, he knew instantly who I was from the sigils of office on my environment suit, and was careful to address me with the utmost precision.

  ‘Cancellarius Senatorum Imperialis,’ he said.

  It was only then that any of the others turned towards me. There was a shield-captain close by in burnished gold, one I should perhaps have recognised, but by then it was a challenge merely to remain conscious.

  I fell to my knees.

  ‘The Lord Guilliman,’ I said, using both the given name and the ceremonial one, united in this one soul ten thousand years before.

  ‘You speak for the High Lords?’ he asked.

  I nodded. I could hardly bear to look into that face – there was something both beatific and horrific about it, an abundance of power that was almost obscene.

  He was of another age. He was a myth that had died.

  He took a single step towards me, extending a vast gauntlet chased in gold and cobalt in order to lift me to my feet.

  ‘Then it is good you are here, chancellor,’ Roboute Guilliman said. ‘I have been away a long time. Perhaps, if your offices still extend to such things, you would be good enough to show me to your masters.’

  Valerian

  They came. The Grey Knights, whom we had always had uneasy relations with, answered our summons. I do not know if it was my request that prompted the order, or if Valoris had been petitioned by others. In any case, we were not so proud that we could not ask for help when it was needed.

  There is a profound distinction to be made here. We could both – Custodian and Grey Knight – slay daemons. We were both to all intents and purposes immune to their temptations, and we were both effective against their many strategems. There are two great repositories of lore against the daemonic in the Sol System, our own archives in the Tower of Hegemon and the far greater librarium lodged on Titan itself. We are, as orders, steeped to our very cores in the fight against the Great Enemy. Perhaps, you might say, Chaos is the reason for both of our existences.

  And yet we are different. Remember I told you that we were never warriors, not exclusively. We are certainly not an army, and we were intended, in the original scheme, for service in an empire that never came to be. Our cousins in the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Malleus, by contrast, were forged exclusively for this singular war against our most powerful and enduring foe. They have no other purpose. Just like the Space Marines from whose template they were drawn, they are an army, complete and self-sufficient.

  We always knew of their existence. There are records, held privately in the depths of our archives, which chronicle their creation. We watched, ten thousand years ago, as He embarked on His last gambit. As the Great Enemy drew close to Terra, we observed the darkening of Saturn’s moon, and knew that one day it would return, its purpose fulfilled.

  Consider what this history means. We know that they came after us, the more junior creation, and yet they were as closely associated with Him as we were. We both of us look to Him and Him alone as our progenitor, and share the same sense, cultivated over the wearing aeons, that we enact His designs when all others falter.

  There are some among my brothers who do not see the sons of Titan as much more than specialised Space Marines, to be regarded with suspicion as part of that schismatic breed that caused us so much anguish in the past. A Space Marine may always fail, they believe, given enough time and enough reason, and thus they are all part of the same potentially aberrant strain.

  Some think that. Others, and I myself have often speculated in such a vein, cultivate a different misgiving. We know well enough that they were designed as His last great weapon, fitted to an age that He foresaw near the end of His earthly embodiment. What if it were they, not us, who most faithfully embodied His final ­legacy? You will never hear one of us say as much out loud, but that does not mean the suspicion does not exist. It skulks around the corridors of Hegemon like a foul odour, faint but hard to eradicate.

  From the speculum certus we know we were the finest and the most faithful. In the speculum obscurus there is, as always, more doubt.

  Such, then, is the cause of the uneasiness between us. In practice this rarely proved an issue, since they were not generally on Terra and we were never on Titan. Now, of course, that had changed. They sent fewer warriors than we asked for – less than half of one of their brotherhoods. Many of the Grey Knights were stationed far from the Sol System, it is true, but still the response fe
lt somewhat paltry. They must have known what it would have cost our Captain-General to make the request, and it was hard to think that the slight was not an intentional one.

  It was many days before I was to encounter one of the new arrivals myself. I had been occupied prosecuting the defence of my wall sector in conjunction with Urbo’s forces. Despite our efforts, the unnatural tide of violence had only grown worse. Demagogues surfaced, once buried fast in the heart of the world-city, now raising whole hosts of disciples. Some were truly corrupted, seeded many years ago and now bursting into fruit, but others were merely deluded and desperate, their minds turned by the terrors in the sky and their stomachs empty. Soon the walls were attacked nightly, and our troops were busy emptying their lasguns at the charging hordes.

  It was sickening work, and even Urbo became deadened by it. My services were called on to eradicate the masters of this dis­order, and I found myself at the heart of wearying fighting, slaying those freely who I had once protected from a distance. Some of the corrupted had become dreadful by then – semi-human creatures with the marks of the traitor on their flesh. The greatest of them had accepted foul gifts, making them both lethal and persuasive to the masses. I slew men with embryonic wings sprouting from their spines, and women with fangs, and half-human-half-beasts.

  In time it became clear that the zones south of the Lion’s Gate were deteriorating rapidly. Aside from punitive raids, we lost effective control of most of the populated regions outside the wall, and the old cathedrals became wells of depravity. I hunted freely in those places, as did my brothers, but soon Urbo’s patrols had to be doubled, then doubled again, and still they were ambushed and destroyed by the growing mobs of the damned.

  I looked into the skies and saw only the blood-curdle now, a skein of crimson that flecked the skies and made it lurid. We had neither sunlight nor proper nightfall, just a constant glow of madness that chased out sleep and made the holy places seem like the haunts of ghouls. We could neither feed nor protect the innocent who remained in those vast regions of the city, and our inquisitors stalked among the seething hive-spires as if lost on some long-forgotten death world.