Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  ‘Shield-captain,’ he said, holding out both hands. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure.’

  ‘I wish it were under better circumstances,’ Valerian replied. ‘Chancellor Tieron, this is Tanau Aleya of the Sisters of Silence.’

  Honoured, Tieron signed.

  ‘I will be swift,’ Valerian said. ‘Is this chamber secure?’

  ‘Come, now.’

  ‘The Sister has evidence of imminent attack on worlds within a single warp stage of Terra. I have images to show you, ones that I am prepared to vouch for. The targets are all in close proximity, and might be reached and defended if a task force were launched soon. The High Lords should be informed, and arrangements made for immediate response.’

  ‘Have you informed your Captain-General?’ Tieron asked.

  ‘He is with the Emperor.’

  The chancellor nodded, understanding what that meant. He looked at me. Where did this evidence originate?

  Hellion Quintus, I signed back. Though that matters little. They have knowledge of the coming state of the warp, and have isolated eight open conduits leading here. All of them are so close as to be virtually on top of us.

  Tieron looked pained by that, as if those tidings could possibly have been unexpected. I don’t know what he thought the enemy would do after coming so near to destroying the Palace walls – a secondary assault would always have been on its heels.

  ‘Grave tidings indeed,’ he said, moving awkwardly over to a chair and sitting flabbily in it. ‘And they come at the worst possible time.’ He looked up at Valerian. ‘You remember our old dealings with that issue of Dissolution? You remember how that went?’ He shook his head. ‘If only that were still the most pressing matter on my table.’

  I shot a quick glance at his companion then. She had not been introduced, but I could tell that she was more than a functionary. They were a unit, these two, and she radiated a quiet, steady intelligence.

  ‘The High Lords have shut down the system,’ Tieron said, wearily. ‘They’re recalling every remaining scrap of defence to the Palace and forbidding off-world movement. The Master of the Administratum is scared. He’s scared of the enemy and he’s just as scared of Guilliman, and he somehow thinks that both can be fended off by hoarding our remaining forces. So let me give you a brief answer to your question – there will be no counter-attack, not from the Council. While the Astronomican remains dark and the balance of power here has yet to be decided, no ships will launch from Terra.’

  The fools, I signed.

  ‘An astute judgement, Sister,’ said Tieron. ‘But they’re close to losing everything now, and that makes them reach for poor policies.’

  ‘You will inform them, nonetheless,’ said Valerian.

  Tieron laughed. ‘I’ll make it a priority, though it won’t make any difference.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘The Lord Guilliman is here now, and that cannot be altered. When he emerges from his commune with the Emperor he’ll be the undisputed Lord Commander of the Imperium, and nothing Haemotalion can do will stand in the way of that. Until then, though, we’re paralysed, locked into old power games that we should have grown out of generations ago.’

  Valerian absorbed this quietly, as if he’d expected the news. I took it rather less well.

  Then damn them all, I signed. If they won’t recognise it, we’ll act without them.

  ‘They’ll come after you, if you try,’ Tieron told me.

  Let them.

  ‘And such action would, of course, be outside the law.’

  You truly think I care?

  The chancellor chuckled. ‘Careful. I’ve spent my life defending that law.’ He glanced back at Valerian. ‘See, when I tried to see the Lex changed in Council, it was the strangest thing I’d ever done. I still can’t explain why I did it, unless…’ He searched for the words. ‘Unless it reflected a greater design than mine. Perhaps my mistake was to interpret it too literally. The Lex did not need to be changed, because it’s clear now the Lex is destined to be dismantled. But the idea, the idea – that was important.’

  He looked down at his hands.

  ‘To set the Ten Thousand free,’ he murmured. ‘To unleash the Talons of the Emperor. The Council will never allow it. Guilliman might never allow it. I now think that, if it is the right thing to do, you might have to seize the chance yourselves.’

  At that point, I do not think Valerian was close to being convinced. He was still so bound to his lifetime’s devotion to duty, interpreted as the labyrinth of rules and customs that had always given him purpose. I was already preparing to storm out, to find some way of getting off-world and forcing the issue myself, but then Tieron said something else that did the seemingly impossible.

  ‘I have come to believe,’ the chancellor said, ‘that in failure often lies our best sign of truth. I failed in the Council, and only now see that I was cleaving to a doomed course. The harder I pushed, the more I was resisted. I couldn’t cross the threshold. I should have taken that, I think, as a sign to examine my instincts.’

  Valerian suddenly looked shaken. He still said nothing, though those words had clearly struck some kind of chord.

  I, though, was impatient to be going. It was clear we would not receive any help from this source, and if Valerian could merely give me the names I needed there was nothing to stop me taking matters into my own hands.

  We have to act ourselves, then, I signed, uncaring what the chancellor might make of that. We have to defy the law.

  The Custodian turned towards me slowly, and it took him a long time to force the next words out. I could see something of his difficulty even then, but now that I know more of him, and now that I know more of the world he inhabited for so long, I think I understand just how impossibly hard it must have been to express them, and that makes me admire him very much for what he did just then.

  Indeed so, Sister, he signed, unusually awkwardly and with none of his usual fluency. I believe, all things considered, you may be right.

  I went back to our makeshift fortress. Valerian took his leave almost immediately, offering nothing but his word that he would return with the means for me to realise my goal. Looking back, I find my attitude towards him incredibly trusting. We had been thrown together by the slenderest of chances, but already I found it impossible to imagine him failing to do what he said he would. There was something almost childlike about his attitude to truth, though it was probably reckless to rely on it so much at the very beginning.

  I was, though, consumed by the urgent need to act on what we had found. My quest to return to Terra had always been part of a greater mission – to discover those responsible for the destruction of my home – and I shrugged off any lingering fatigue to pursue it with renewed energy.

  I knew that time was short. The locations identified by Valerian were very close, almost within spitting distance of Terra itself. If the enemy had arrived at those places already then we were barely beyond the range of their guns even where we stood, and I could understand the High Lords wishing to reserve all our forces for where the final assault must surely come.

  If I had thought about things more clearly, I would have realised just what a mad game we were playing. There was little chance of us mustering more than a token strike force in the time we had available, something that could be cobbled together quickly and hurled into the face of an oncoming armada. It was all fairly suicidal, I suppose, and a part of me realised it from the beginning. I had no complaint with that – I would have died a hundred times over just for the chance of facing the Legion that had brought destruction to Arraissa – but I wondered then what Valerian’s attitude must have been. He would not, I thought, have risked his life just for the sake of a vow made in the heat of battle. His devotion to the Throne would override any sense of personal honour he might have cultivated. So why was he doing this? Something that Tieron had told him must have tipped the balance, b
ut whatever it was the sense of it had passed me by.

  Do not look for any more justification than that. Perhaps there was always an element of madness in what we planned, motivated by exasperation with the High Lords and exacerbated by my still-hot heartache. I will not apologise for it, and I would have done the same thing again in exactly the same way. I was built to fight, to be a hunter rather than the hunted, and it disgusted me that so many of our allies preferred to remain behind the walls rather than sally out beyond them.

  So when I got back to those dank and crowded cells, I sought out Reva first. We had conversed often in the days since being thrown together, and I had discovered a woman after my own heart. She was fearless, devoted to her highest duty, and was – most importantly – contemptuous of those who gave us our orders. We had even joked about stealing off-world before the true chance came, but under our sarcasm had always been an element of real desire.

  I found her in the half-built practice cages, pirouetting and thrusting with the greatblade we had both taken as our signature weapon. She had recovered her full fighting potential rather more quickly than I had, and now moved with a ferocious grace again. I watched her for a while, letting the impression of it sink in, before she noticed me, pulled her leather training-helm from her head and came towards me.

  You look serious, she signed.

  Can we discuss something? I responded.

  She looked at me quizzically, as if worried she might be the subject of a jest, but then her smile died. Any time, she signed.

  Persuading her was easier than I had feared it might be. We all knew that battle was coming anyway, and the chance to steal a march on it was appealing to her sense of adventure. The ban on off-world movement was something that chafed with all of us – until so very recently we’d been effectively banned from coming anywhere near the Throneworld, so to be shackled here was yet another indignity we yearned to throw off.

  We will likely not return from this, I signed, to be sure she understood.

  You say they are Black Legion, she countered. If that’s right, then I care not.

  We began to spread our message, working only with those we ­reckoned would be sympathetic. We avoided those who had served in the League of Black Ships, for their loyalty to the Adeptus Terra was absolute and if the High Lords had told them to remain on-world then they would do so slavishly. The most promising recruits were those like us, the cast-offs and the long-term renegades, many of whom had suffered from raids similar to that launched against Arraissa and also burned to avenge them.

  I don’t know, even now, whether those many attacks were all linked to the Circlet. It may be that the Black Legion saw us as unique threats to their general strategy and made sure to finish as many of us off as possible before we became aware of it, or it may be that we were simply there, isolated and ripe for the taking. For myself, I think there must have been a connection. I cannot think it random that those from whom I took that map were also working with those who ransacked my convent, and it was this artefact that remained our only link to what was already unfolding.

  By the end, we recruited thirty-two of our number; thirty-two Sisters who were so disillusioned with our treatment that they would willingly become involved in a raid that was both illegal and likely to result in our swift deaths. I found that both heartening and moving. We had all lived our entire lives in an Imperium defined by fear and the foolish adherence to central authority. One ironic consequence of our neglect by that authority was that we had never been infected by its most pernicious effects, and were as close as any of our species ever came to having a mind of our own.

  The hour came. We armed ourselves and marched en masse to the hangars. We were lucky that our fortress was in such disarray – there were few guards on station, and little more than an ad hoc mechanism for summoning and discharging landers. Some token resistance was offered from the garrison commander and a scattered squad of his troops, but a very gentle application of our more unpleasant null-projection techniques soon had them vomiting energetically over the rockcrete and clutching their migraine-split temples.

  I had still not heard from Valerian. I never doubted his honesty, but it occurred to me that he would have run into far stiffer resistance than I would have. Perhaps he had failed in securing the void transport that he’d intended to. I began to consider whether we would have to make use of the semi-ruined Cadamara, which still hung in high orbit but was only barely void-worthy. Erefan would still take an order, I knew, though Slovo might be a different matter. I didn’t even know for sure that he remained on board, or even if he were still alive.

  I voxed the Custodian over the classified channels he had given me, then took my place in the lander. We boosted the thrusters and took off, clearing the open hangar exit and pulling steeply up into the atmosphere.

  I looked out of the armourglass portals as we ascended, watching the spoil-grey sprawl of Terra spread out beneath us. The scars of the battle were clearly visible, a black straggle of burned earth that spread out for many square kilometres. For a brief moment I had a perfect view of the Palace itself, that colossal accumulation that was more continent than city, and realised only then just how vast it was. The place must have housed millions upon millions of defenders, against which our hastily assembled band was almost infinitesimally unimportant.

  But it wasn’t, of course. A part of me knew that even then.

  We pulled into orbit, and the view from the portals sank into inky black. Voidcraft were clustered there in huge numbers, more than would normally have been the case, since so many had been pulled back from outer-system patrol. Immediately Adeptus Arbites system runners began to hail us, and a Naval destroyer bearing the ident Superlative began to turn towards our locus.

  I saw the challenge-hails multiply on our forward augurs, all of them demanding a full-stop and transmission of exemption credentials.

  We were a long way from the Cadamara. Reva looked at me, and I knew what she was thinking.

  Maintain course and speed, I signed to the pilot.

  The destroyer fired up its engines and began to glide towards us. I saw its gunnery panels lever open, and detected seven more enforcer gunships enter the vicinity of our sensors.

  We had seconds before those hails turned into shells. Reva looked at me again. I began to speculate on whether this would be the shortest raid in Imperial history, calculating whether we could boost our way to the Cadamara before we were hemmed in and turned into atoms.

  Just then, though, something much bigger swam into our visual range – a ship of such outrageous, vulgar ostentation that it could only originate from the Adeptus Custodes. It was arrayed like a land-based fortress, piled with crenellations and outsized thruster housings and glinting with dirty gold.

  Valerian’s voice crackled over the comm.

  ‘Recommend coming aboard with all haste, Sister,’ he said. ‘They won’t fire on us yet, but we do not have forever.’

  We guided the lander into the voidship’s open hangar, slipping under a lintel of heavy brass. Every surface of that ship was ornate and gilded, broadcasting the majesty and heritage of its occupants. It was huge too, covered in weaponry the like of which I had never seen before, and which I guessed dated back a long way. That ship might have been the oldest thing in orbit, though it must have been among the least powerful of the Adeptus Custodes’ formidable arsenal.

  Valerian met us at the hangar, clad in full armour and accompanied by nine of his brothers. It was a paltry band in terms of numbers, but in truth more than I had expected.

  ‘The sodality of the Palaiologian Chamber,’ he announced. ‘My brothers of war. They have vowed to aid me.’

  I bowed to them, unsure what that meant. Had they been ordered to accompany us? Or did they choose to follow their shield-captain? Surely it was the latter, for this went against everything they had sworn to uphold. I wondered what he had said to c
onvince them.

  Ten, I signed, almost without thinking.

  Valerian smiled. ‘It will be enough.’

  In anyone else, even a Space Marine, I would have called that arrogance; with him, it was never possible to be sure.

  I felt the ship’s walls rumble as the plasma drives kicked in. We began to move, heading towards the inner core of the vessel.

  ‘This is the Chelandion,’ Valerian told me. ‘A ship under my authority. Not the greatest in armament, but it will serve to get us there. We have the service of three Navigators, and they understand the risks while the beacon remains silent.’

  Have you studied the map further? I signed, knowing that there was little I could do to decipher it. I was reliant upon him to dictate our course, given that of all of us only he understood the script and could make the link to the real planetary systems.

  ‘Vorlese is closest,’ he said, reaching the blast doors and opening them on to a bright-lit corridor beyond. ‘I consulted the almanacs, and engaged the Tarot for guidance. It is a well-defended world, the home of three regiments and a Naval battle group. It may stand yet, and if so we will aid those who yet resist the enemy.’

  And if it’s fallen already?

  ‘Then we will die, extracting what cost we can before they move closer to the Throne.’

  How far, then? I signed, anxious to get into the warp. Now that we had launched this thing, I would not be at ease until we reached our destination.

  ‘We still have to clear orbit, and that will not be easy, even for us.’ He gave me a tolerant look, one that spoke of forbearance. Naturally enough, I found that infuriating. ‘But we will achieve it, Sister. And after that, we are in the hands of fate.’

  Tieron

  I did what I could to aid them. I called in a few favours from those I could still trust – a dwindling band by then – and prevailed on High Lord Pereth to look the other way as they boosted clear of Terra’s clogged local space. Jek was as diligent as ever, working furiously behind the scenes both to hide our involvement and to ensure that the right palms were greased. Our union of convenience, which had originated on a professional basis, then deepened through a mutual terror, had now become something more profound. We were certainly no longer master and adjutant. Perhaps right and left hand would have captured it more accurately.