Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  I had a quick glimpse of other craft on our trajectory – tear-shaped interception landers, bulkier armoured caskets like our own, even steeply angled Naval gunships – before the burning clouds raced up to envelop us.

  The lander kicked and jumped as it hit the turbulence, and we were thrown about like straw in the thresher. My head slammed against my restraints, opening up a cut that ran from my eyebrow to my cheek.

  First blood to this rust bucket, I thought grimly, reaching to wipe it away.

  We screamed earthwards, and the lander’s guidance thrusters pulled us down and down into a near-vertical dive before eventually kicking into an arresting counterblast. The vibrations became bone-bruising, the noise deafening, the deceleration crushing.

  We hit the ground with a mighty crack, and immediately the crew doors blasted open. My restraints shot back into their grooves, and we were moving, springing from our seats and reaching for our weapons.

  I was first out, running down the ramp with Reva at my shoulder.

  It was then that I first set eyes on Terra, for so long the distant inspiration for all I had ever done. Holy Terra, the home of saints and the seat of He Who Preserves. The destination of all pilgrims and the origin of our species.

  I could have vomited. I could have wept, and I would have done both, assuredly, had the madness and the devilry around me not reached out with both hands and tried to kill me.

  So I did what I had been brought for. I killed right back.

  Tieron

  I do not remember much of that first meeting, high up in Luna’s thin air, surrounded by the starship tombs. I was overwhelmed by his presence, I suppose, as well as by my age and frailty. All I have from that first, brief encounter are the impressions it left on me.

  I do not know how long it had taken him to reach us. I never found out later, either. I heard snatches from those who would become the great powers in our new Imperium, and I could scarcely believe them even though I had no reason to doubt the speakers.

  In future years our scholars may piece together just what the sequence of events was and assign official date-signs to them. My own supposition is that Cadia fell months before we became aware of it, and that the Great Rift opened long before its effects reached us on Terra. Rumours have come to my ears of the links between the events at the Eye and the resurrection of the primarch on distant Ultramar, though I cannot make proper sense of them, and there is much that I suspect would damn me as a heretic were I to pursue it.

  All this notwithstanding, it became clear to me that the journey undertaken by the Lord Guilliman had been arduous in the extreme, a crusade that had taken him halfway across the galaxy even as it tore itself apart. Time may have passed for them very differently, I suppose, for when they spoke of that pilgrimage they gave the impression of months adrift on the ether’s currents, fighting enemies I could scarcely comprehend, let alone picture.

  He did not speak of that when we met, of course. None of his captains or advisers did. They had just fought a terrible battle in that place, and their speech was heavy with weariness. I never discovered who exactly it was they fought there – no one who knew would tell me, and I understood enough of Imperial law and custom not to press the matter.

  We must have exchanged a few words more. I must have told him who the Lords of Terra were, and what had transpired to bring such turmoil to the world of his creation. I must have tried to tell him something of what we had been trying to do – to bring the ­Adeptus Custodes into the war, to reform our armies into something that might oppose the Despoiler more effectively – though I wonder if he found such scant musings comical or irritating.

  It was hard to look directly at him. I don’t know why that was. It was as if the light reflecting from his face came from a source denied to us, a sun that none who beheld him could see.

  He spoke softly. He was reasonable, even solicitous. Every command he gave was issued in the same calm, authoritative manner. All obeyed him instantly, not just the Space Marines who shared his lineage, but the Mechanicus constructs, the living saints who accompanied that strange cavalcade, even the Custodians sent from Terra. It felt then as if we had been waiting for him for a long time without knowing it. Now that he was here among us, a terrible doubt began to lift, for a time at least.

  And yet I could not envy him. In rare moments, I would catch a phenomenal degree of pain present in those steady blue eyes. I might catch him looking at the grotesquely over-militarised docks of Luna, or the battle-battered ships hanging in orbit above us, and see a shadow of astonishment passing across a front of patrician reserve.

  ‘You may find Terra… different to how you remember it, lord,’ I said to him before we made planetfall. Looking back at that, I cringe. Of course it would be different. He had already seen enough of the Imperium to know that, but of course I was extrapolating into a past I only knew from half-understood historical records. I envisioned the world he had come from as a paradise of accomplishment, and of course I might have been wrong about that. Perhaps his pain came from a different source. Perhaps I mis­interpreted him entirely. After all, who was I to judge the mind of a primarch? He was as far above me as I was above the spine-roaches that we had allowed to infest the Throneworld’s sewers.

  A little later, the Custodian Shield-Captain Adronitus led our delegation to the warship that would carry us back to Terra. I was honoured to travel with them, one of very few mortals who did so. I was surrounded by figures I found daunting to look at, let alone address – Space Marine lords, Mechanicus magi, Grey Knight commanders. I took my place among them, ignored by all, and silently watched what unfolded.

  At that stage, the brutal assault on the Lion’s Gate had not even begun. Before we set off, I thought of the unrest on Terra, the terror in the skies and the visions in the night, and assumed then that we would finally see it all quelled. We passed swiftly from Luna’s orbit, escorted by many ships from the task force sent in haste. Tidings were passed in the strictest confidence to the Sanctum Imperialis and landing permits arranged for the Eternity Wall void port. It felt surreal even to be there. It felt surreal that any of it was happening at all.

  Of course, the Lord Guilliman’s procession into the Palace is now a story well known and told many times by many souls. The Ecclesiarchy has issued more vids of this single event than they did over a thousand years previously. Everyone has heard tell of the enormous crowds of well-wishers lining the streets, crying out for joy and reaching out to grasp the hem of his cloak.

  Well, it didn’t quite happen that way, at least not as I witnessed it. There were crowds indeed, against all our intentions, for somehow the rumour managed to scamper ahead of us. We came down inside the perimeter of the Outer Palace, far from the worst of the unrest, and so the primarch’s first sight of his subjects was the most favourable it could possibly have been – the scholiasts, the Palace guards, the priests and the ministers of state.

  And yet, I could barely look at him during that terrible time. We could not hide just how desperate things had become. He could see for himself the unnatural storms raging in the atmosphere, and witness the darkened profile of the defunct Astronomican fortress. He could see the walls stuffed with defenders and the smouldering, half-derelict stretches of the city beyond the walls. Perhaps worst of all, even when we got him inside the intact precincts, to the holiest and the most immaculate of our citadels, he looked at them as if they were some kind of insult.

  I watched it from a distance, my stomach churning to witness a great soul dragged into such a cesspit. I looked around me, at the grime-chocked aquilae, at the racks of guns defiling the angel-crowned parapets, at the piles upon piles of heavy defensive works and the squalor that crusted over it all, and the shame of it made me nearly sick.

  This was the world we had made. This was the world he had fought for and preserved, and we had made it diseased.

  By the time I was reunited
with Jek I could not hide my disquiet. She looked at me with concern, and we retired to my chambers alone.

  ‘Did you speak to him again?’ she asked, desperate for news despite her anxiety on my behalf.

  ‘A little. Not much.’

  ‘Then you were right to go.’ She became animated, trying to make me feel better. ‘This is the start of something new. You’re placed well to benefit. He’ll need counsellors, ones who understand how things work now.’

  But that was the problem. I had done more than understand it. I had contributed to it. I was part of the decay. We all were.

  ‘He needs no counsellors,’ I said, sinking onto my fine couch miserably. ‘Really, truly, he needs none of us at all.’

  I must have slept, perhaps for only a few hours, perhaps for much longer. I had awful dreams, even worse than I had had over the past weeks and months, and I could feel myself thrashing in my sleep. In the most vivid of them I felt that the chamber around me was burning, the flames streaking up the drapes and crashing into the high ceiling. I saw faces in those flames, inhuman faces with stretched jaws and long fangs.

  I awoke to find Jek shaking me.

  ‘Only a dream,’ I mumbled, coming to slowly. I could see the intact outline of my bedchamber, and the walls were not burning.

  ‘No,’ she said, her expression terrible. ‘Not any more.’

  She dragged me from the couch. My robes were sticky with sweat but she gave me no chance to change them. I noticed as we hurried through the corridors that the light from outside was even redder than before – arterial in intensity, and flashing wildly. The air was hotter than it had ever been, hard to breathe and full of choking grit.

  ‘What is this?’ I blurted, still disorientated. ‘How long was I out?’

  She didn’t answer, but hauled me to a high balcony. We stumbled into the open, and the curtains flapped wildly about us.

  I could see the Lion’s Gate void port laid out far below. It was a long way away, screened by shifting palls of ash and dust, but I could see enough.

  I staggered, catching hold of the railing. Jek reached for me, holding me up, but she was already trembling, her whole body rigid with shudders.

  I had no words. I had no thoughts. I felt like I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. From somewhere, some old instinct that wouldn’t quite leave me, I wanted to ask where Guilliman was, where Valoris was, where the High Lords were, whether we could get our forces into place and do what needed to be done, but my lips would no longer move.

  I just stood there, paralysed, rooted with fear, and said nothing.

  We no longer needed to worry about Cadia. We no longer needed to worry about anything. It had happened at last, everything that the prophets had foretold and that we had ignored.

  The Eye had come. The Eye had come to Terra.

  Valerian

  I had never moved as fast. I had never cleaved as strongly. My muscles, sanctified and gene-wrought, had never responded as perfectly.

  Killing is an art, just like the others we excel at. When it becomes necessary, we do not treat it as a duty, we treat it as a vocation. We learn the ways of our opponents just as a painter studies her model, observe the light and the shade, the form and heft, the threat and the opportunity.

  I was alone in that hour, as alone as I have ever been. The Grey Knights were always close by, and fought as an unbreakable unit, and therein lay the essential difference between us.

  Do not think that we ignored one another – far from it. We saved one another from death many times in those first few decisive moments. This still remains, though – I fought in the way I had been bred to, driving my superlative physical form to its limit, gauging every threat with a microsecond’s precision, relying on the absolute integrity of my equipment.

  They, though, were a brotherhood. I had learned their names by then – Alcuin, the Justicar, led the squad. They covered one another’s backs, they roared encouragement, they watched for a momentary slip from their battle-comrades. I witnessed this even as I tore into the heart of the daemonkind, and even as the defence lasers on the wall flooded the eerie scene with dazzling light, and even as the golden attack craft roared overhead to strafe and bludgeon.

  I could sense their psychic overspill as they waded into the enemy, blades and hammers whirling. Every physical blow was matched by a corresponding thrust of the mind, and their esoteric halberds flared with the increase in velocity.

  Thus we entered the arena of the enemy, like and yet unlike to one another, a lion set beside angels. They screamed at us, many of them greater in stature even than me. By then their witch-birth was complete – their heads had elongated sickeningly, their claws had extended, their legs had firmed into glossy reverse-angled, hoof-terminated striders. They had the mania of victory in those black eyes, fuelled by the legions of their own kind around them. A musk of pure bloodlust clotted the air, heady and overpowering.

  Already I could see lesser daemonkind scrambling up the lower reaches of the walls, freezing their grip onto pitted adamantium, forming bridges with their own bodies to allow greater warriors to vault above them. The horde was endless, merged with both heaven and earth, a liquid mass of writhing malignance rammed hard onto the plane of mortal experience.

  We both knew what they were, Alcuin and I. We knew, as ­others could not, that these things were our own psyches made into flesh. We knew that our rage, any rage, fuelled them and made them stronger. They fed from our basest instincts, and so we were doing nothing so much as fighting ourselves. All we had left were the things that remained once rage was purged from us – duty, commitment, resolve.

  I punched my fist through the heart of a bloodletter and yanked it from its swelter-chest, then swung around to lance the tip of Gnosis through the neck of another, then crunched my elbow into the spine of a third before spinning to slam my glaive’s hilt into a fourth. I was lost in numerology by then, reaching into the near future, scrutinising everything as I moved, calm at the epicentre of the hurricane. Alcuin forged a path beside me, driving the Neverborn back and slicing them apart with psy-laced blows from his mighty daemonhammer. His troops stayed close, locking and swaying in concert, crying words of denunciation as they struck their blades home.

  The daemon was harmed by the weapons of eternity, this we knew. The heavy barrage of las-fire from the parapets, cutting through the blood-rain in boiling volleys, could slow or inconvenience them, but to kill a daemon one had to return to the primordial methods of fist and blade. They had been spawned from our oldest wars and our oldest hates, and we would never drag ourselves away from that primal genesis.

  The gate itself was still a kilometre distant, shrouded in burning palls and screened by heavy curtains of inundation. Its summit was aflame, cut open by the massed reports of macrocannons and las-emplacements. Flyers swarmed over it, launched from pads within the Palace, and battle was joined in the skies. Heavy bolters opened up, driving long furrows into the already deep-scored terrain and sending daemons smashing back into their ravening kind, who tore them open and devoured them before turning back to the assault, their lolling maws dripping with black ichor.

  The wall itself was a false protection – the daemons would not halt at it, but given time would swarm and wrench and claw it down. They needed to be met on the field of battle, their hate matched with zeal.

  I swung my blade and sent its tip whistling through the midriff of a racing bloodletter, then pivoted to drive the shaft into the jaws of another. They had not laid a claw on me yet, but the numbers were beyond comprehension, and more were being spun from the flames, vomited out into reality, tumbling into instantiation to launch into us.

  I saw one of Alcuin’s squad reel as he was struck, his psychic defences momentarily breached, and I interposed myself between him and his attacker, slicing its head from its shoulders before spinning back to face the next one. That left me a fraction o
f a second shy of where I needed to be, and the first blow cracked into my pauldron, knocking me into the embrace of a fanged and winged terror.

  ‘Exsilium daemonica!’ cried Alcuin, hurling his hammerhead at the creature.

  The air cracked open, sending a searing beam of silver light crashing into the monster’s chest, throwing it deep into the advancing horde where its own kind tore it to scraps before bounding on to reach us.

  Then we were fighting again, no time to issue a word of thanks, our limbs blurred, our hearts flooding us with hyperadrenalin, our eyes fixed on the myriad and shifting goals.

  All this was the work of seconds. That was all it took for the greater forces on the wall to perceive the danger and react to it. Even in the midst of my combat, lost in a press of strike and counter-strike, my spirit soared to see the response from my beleaguered Palace.

  Egress-points opened, wreathed in coronas of heavy bolter protection, exposing the red-raw innards of the wall-fortress, and down from those openings streamed the force that had been kept hidden for ten thousand years. In phalanxes of black and gold, my brothers streamed from the Lion’s Gate in numbers not seen since the War of Shame, their spears glinting in piercing ranks of tempered steel.

  I saw banners hauled aloft, the same golden standards we had borne into battle in the Age of Wonder, still unsullied after the passage of millennia. Heavy gunnery platforms dropped from the innards of hovering transports, opening up with spinning clouds of destruction. Land Raiders in gold and black trundled out from cover, spitting arm-thick beams of las-fire. Italeo was there, leading a charge down the right flank directly into the path of one of the greater daemons. Valoris surged down the very centre, his spear flaming as it cut deep into the enemy hordes. I saw warriors in burnished Terminator plate lumber into contact, their claws cutting the air around them into slivers, and behind them the Revered Fallen, swaggering from the bellies of steaming drop pods, wielding sword and shield and towering over all but the greatest of the Neverborn.