Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  So we achieved a small thing for them – the Chelandion cleared orbit and made the warp. Once they were away, we returned to that vortex of paranoia and disorder that passed for the Imperial administration at that dark time. The Council was riven between an increasingly despotic Haemotalion and a rump of more reasoned voices, all of them occupied with overlapping and competing attempts to claw back some level of control over the Palace’s vast and complex machinery of government.

  As the days passed and no repeat of the great daemonic incursion took place, some achievements were accomplished. A temporary defence line was re-established over the ruins of the Lion’s Gate, and rebuilding even began. Punitive raids were launched into the burned-out wreckage of the eternal city, and several hab-zones were tentatively retaken by forces loyal to the Throne. We established contact with a number of other contiguous regions where order had never quite been eradicated, and the prospect of resuming our old habits of iron control began to dangle tantalisingly before us.

  Throughout all of this, I remained preoccupied with that final conversation with Valerian and Aleya. I had little doubt that my words had been instrumental in their decision to subvert the Lex and take ship. Such a thing had never been heard of, and if the truth of it were ever to emerge then my life would likely be forfeit. I didn’t care too much about that, of course, but I did remain anxious that my intervention might not have been the right one. After all, what did I know of the Emperor’s Will? How could I even begin to offer opinions about such a subtle and obscure subject? If I had ever had any claim to importance, it was as a politician, not a scholar. I wondered often if I should have stuck to what I was good at.

  I consoled myself that, despite the precedent being broken, the possible harm done was slight. It was a single ship, no more than that, just a way for me to spite Haemotalion’s knee-jerk ban and allow those who had fought bravely the right to find their own path to death. If the Sister was right about a coming assault on that ring of worlds then they would be swept aside by it, just as Harster had been, though at least they would end their lives as he had done, on the offensive.

  Another concern made itself apparent during those days. Once the terrible shock had worn off, whispered voices began to be raised concerning the assault on the Lion’s Gate. Clearly it had been the work of some power of nigh-infinite malevolence, but if so then it was something of a mystery why it had failed. For all the terror it had inspired, the creatures had not got close to the Eternity Gate, and I felt that even in the absence of the Lord Guilliman they would never have done so. Was it merely a statement of intent, then, to show that no worlds were beyond their reach now? Many began to advance that thesis, taking some comfort in the fact that we had nevertheless endured it. I, though, continued to have nagging doubts, as if we were missing something important and dangerous, though I could not quite put my finger on it.

  I might have made more of both doubts, had two things not happened that once again turned everything inside out. The first was the great development that we had all been fervently hoping for – the Astronomican’s signal flickered, then went out again, then finally re-emerged. I heard the news first from Kerapliades, who voxed me triumphantly as the first signs of return began to flow into the astropath’s choir-towers. At first I hardly dared to believe it, but the Master of the Astronomican himself issued official confirmation soon afterwards, sending the news via secure channels to his peers on the Council and their senior advisers. The fortress lit up, and great columns of pent-up energy snarled around its iron crown as they had done before.

  Jek and I both raced to the balcony of our tower and looked up into the skies, which were already beginning to clear. It was impossible not to cry out with relief and elation at the dissipation of that oppressive curtain of bloody swirling. Never had I been so pleased to see the familiar steel-grey shroud of our old poisons return to enclose us, and we embraced and kissed and laughed like fools.

  I never discovered the cause of the Astronomican’s failure, nor understood the means by which it was eventually restored. It may be that Raskian had been able to resolve some mechanical problem, either in the Throne itself or the mighty conduits that linked it to the fortress, though he never claimed credit for it if he had. The resumption of the beacon may have had something to do with Guilliman’s sojourn in the Throneroom, although he also never spoke about what he had seen or done in there, at least with me, so that whole episode must remain pure conjecture. Whatever the reason, though, its return gave us more than a means to reconnect with a sundered galaxy – it gave us hope again. Even when we discovered the full scale of the disaster inflicted upon the far reaches of our Imperium, and truly understood the nature of what would come to be called the Cicatrix Maledictum, the very fact that we had proof of His continued presence among us was enough to banish the worst of our despair.

  In the short term, though, the Astronomican’s recovery only gave us more problems. We had already lost scores of astropaths to the effects of the Great Rift, and many weakened survivors were killed when the great psychic torrent burst back out into the universe. Information on the state of the Imperium was still scanty at best, and it took time for us to gather any data on just what had taken place during our blindness. The more we discovered in those early days, the more we realised just how bad things had become for us. There was no hope of recovering Cadia. Other warzones, such as the great meat grinder of Armageddon, had also passed far beyond our ability to stabilise. The supply of Black Ships, on which the

  Throne’s creaking mechanisms depended, had been critically disrupted both by the turmoil in the warp and Valoris’ unilateral co-option of the Sisters of Silence. Survival had been achieved, that was for sure, but it began to look as if we had done nothing much more than that.

  But then, just days after those events, came the second great turn of fate. The Lord Commander returned at last from the hidden Throne, ready to resume the work of his great commission. In years to come that day was marked with nearly as much reverence as the long established Sanguinala, signalling the very beginning of the Indomitus Crusade and the titanic effort to recover what had been lost. At the time, though, we had little inkling of any of that. Indeed, the entire enterprise was almost derailed before it had even begun. Despite what had taken place on Luna I had not expected to be a part of any of it. Once again, in a development that perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised by, I was entirely mistaken.

  I had gone to visit the man who had started it all, Kerapliades, in his citadel of dreams.

  The Master of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica dwelt in one of the stranger domains within the Palace, a haunt of warp eddies and psy-shunts set under a great dome of black glass. Many of those within the structure were blind, a result of the soul-binding that scarred all astropaths, and most of the rest were tainted in some way by the wearing effects of the empyrean. Uniquely among the Palace’s many fortresses, the hundreds of heavily armed guards within Kerapliades’ realm were chiefly there to keep an eye on those inside, rather than out.

  As I hurried to meet the Master, I could see the toll that had been taken on this enormous and secretive kingdom. Most of the cells were empty, there was blood on every deck, and the sound of repeated screaming could be made out coming from the pit-levels below. Those I passed in the narrow, turning corridors regarded me with the hostility of the besieged from under heavy cowls.

  Kerapliades met me in his command nexus, a blister of armourglass and Geller-shielding placed high up on the north rim of the Scholastia Psykana’s curving outer perimeter. Hundreds of scribes, many hard-plugged into baroque stations of wheezing complexity, worked away in near silence, their augmetic fingers clattering on runeboards. Black-armoured sentinels with beast-snarl face masks prowled across galleries and bridging gantries, watching every move the scribes made, forever poised for the first twitch or spasm of possession.

  ‘So here we are again, chancellor,’ the old man said dryly. Li
ke all of us, he looked preternaturally decrepit, even more so than he had before.

  I bowed. ‘You were right,’ I told him. ‘About Cadia.’

  ‘We get signals from it now.’ He shuddered. ‘You don’t want to know what’s in them.’

  We walked across a long curving span that vaulted over lines of scribe-pits.

  ‘And the anathema psykana are back,’ he croaked, limping and leaning heavily on an iron cane. ‘They were part of my purview, in the old times.’

  ‘Perhaps you should have fought to keep them,’ I said.

  ‘No doubt. Though we struggle to hold on to what we still have, and I am not stupid enough to pick a fight now with Valoris.’ He shot me a cynical glance. ‘I don’t really like to see Custodians on the High Council, Tieron, despite the necessity of it. They have strange ways.’

  You can talk, I thought.

  ‘You’ve studied the data I sent to you?’ I asked.

  I’d kept my promise. I’d made facsimiles of the information Valerian had brought me and distributed it to all those I could still trust on the Council. I had little hope of countermanding Haemotalion’s cordon openly, but there was still the chance of building a coalition against it, and in any case it needed to be seen. If the next invasion was coming via those routes then we were wasting precious time in power plays when we should have been racing to prepare.

  ‘I did, and found it most absorbing,’ Kerapliades answered, leading me to a high curved doorway. Everything in that place was elliptical and elusive, just like its occupants. ‘In fact, that’s what I wished to speak to you about.’

  He made a gesture with his bony right hand, and the door swished open. Beyond was another dome, twenty metres high and windowless. A great iron orrery clanked and wheeled inside it, driven by concentric mechanical tracks. The interior of the hemisphere glowed with lumen-points and the trails of hololith projections. It was a planetarium, of sorts – a mystical representation of physical space, enhanced, I guessed, by psychic augmentation.

  I barely noticed any of that, though. Waiting for us in the centre of that infernal machine was Guilliman, alone and dressed in the ancient robes of his office. Even out of armour his aura of command was effortlessly and absurdly dominating, and I found myself dropping to one knee before I was even aware of it.

  ‘Chancellor,’ the primarch said in acknowledgement, then nodded at Kerapliades. ‘The Master tells me this thing originated with you.’

  At first I didn’t realise what he meant, but then noticed how the planetarium had been calibrated. The hololithic lines strung out before us looked very similar to those on the image Aleya had discovered, and I recognised the eight nodes surrounding Terra at the centre.

  ‘I still don’t understand it,’ I said. ‘Not really.’

  ‘We are no longer blind, chancellor,’ said the primarch. He looked different to how he’d been before – his noble face was heavily lined now, as if rapid ageing had somehow taken place. When I had first encountered him he had looked like a prince, full of furious energy. Now he had the grizzled aspect of a warrior-king, a monarch weighed down with understanding that was no doubt dreadful. ‘These are the eight cardinal nodes of a warp circlet around Terra. They describe the only channels safely usable for sizeable fleet movements at this point in time.’

  ‘And the enemy plans to use them,’ I offered, going on what Aleya had believed. ‘They will approach through them, strike at us here.’

  Kerapliades shook his head. ‘It’s too late for that,’ he said, flicking a finger at the swirling diagrams circling overhead. One by one, the nodes went out, fading from red to black. Seven were lost immediately. Only one, the closest of them, remained faintly present. ‘Those worlds have already been taken, seized from us while we were blinded.’

  I turned to Lord Guilliman, suddenly anxious. ‘Then why do they not push on?’ I asked. ‘They’re so close, a mere warp stage away. They’re looking right down at us – why do they wait?’

  ‘Because attack is not their intention,’ Guilliman replied. He turned away from the orrery and fixed me with those frigid blue eyes, and as ever I found it almost impossible to return the gaze. ‘They know I am here. They know what I intend. Now that the Astronomican burns again, they know I will launch the crusade that will liberate the stars. Time is of the essence now, for every hour we delay leads to more worlds lost, and yet time is precisely what we do not have.’

  ‘They’re taking those worlds, not to use as staging points, but to turn into the bars of our cage,’ said Kerapliades. ‘You see what those signals represent? They’ve done something there, used some device to shatter the warp conduits. Once they control the planets they’re making the ether go dark.’

  Guilliman looked back up at the wheeling points of light. ‘Those are not the routes they need to get in, chancellor,’ he said. ‘They are the routes we need to get out. They are throttling us before we can even begin.’

  I suddenly understood it. The daemonic attack – it had been to keep our attention here, to make us believe that Terra was the target, and that the enemy already had the power to assault our walls directly. But they didn’t, not yet. They still feared Guilliman, and now bent all their efforts on keeping him hemmed in, preventing the coming counter-stroke that still risked throwing their wider plans awry.

  ‘Then what can be done?’ I asked, looking from one to the other urgently. ‘What can be done?’

  ‘One world remains,’ said the primarch, his face grim. ‘While it holds out, we have a path to the open galaxy. You see it yourself, chancellor. That world is Vorlese. When it falls, we are trapped here. The crusade will be critically delayed, and a thousand other worlds will fall before we can overcome the barrier.’

  ‘Then we must launch! Launch everything!’ I cursed myself then for not doing more – the need had been there for days, but as ever we had been too slow, too cautious.

  ‘It is already too late,’ said Guilliman, looking at me carefully. ‘Vorlese cannot hold for long enough, even if we launched our ships this very moment. We know who assails it, and there are no defences there capable of resisting them. Unless, of course, you know different?’

  Of course they knew. They knew about the Chelandion. They knew about everything I had done and were merely waiting for the confession.

  ‘They cannot be enough,’ I murmured, suddenly realising what Valerian had travelled into. ‘They cannot possibly hold.’

  ‘You would have earned death for your actions, chancellor, were the Lex still in force,’ said Guilliman, breaking into that long stride of his and beckoning for me to follow. ‘But it is not, and the Council itself is now dissolved. There are forces under my command that even the gods remain unaware of, and I am anxious to show what they can do. We depart within the hour. If you still hold my father to be divine, you might pray that your Custodians are as proficient as they themselves believe, for they are now the thread on which our fate hangs.’

  Everything had already been planned. Everything was already in motion. If I had needed any further proof of the Lord Guilliman’s power, here it was, and Haemotalion had been right to fear his intentions. The crusade was already under way, and any attempt to frustrate it was now entirely pointless.

  ‘But, lord, why tell me these things at all?’ I asked, scampering to keep up.

  He never broke stride. I don’t think I ever really saw him at rest from that point onwards, for his soul was a soul of fire, voracious and dynamic, and he knew the penalty that would be paid for inaction. I guessed then that even as the Lion’s Gate was under attack he had been planning this response, though I would later discover that he had been formulating the broad strokes of it for very much longer than that.

  ‘Our crusades have always required the services of mortals, chancellor,’ he said by way of an answer, offering me one of those flinty half-smiles. ‘I will need a remembrancer for this, just like
the old days. Consider yourself fortunate – I choose you.’

  Valerian

  I had time to reflect on my decision during our travel within the warp. I drove myself hard, aiming to recover my full spectrum of physical movement and banish the last evidence of my injury, but even so there were still moments of unavoidable reflection.

  I never doubted my choice. That is the surprising thing to me. I never doubted that I had done what I needed to. Everything on Terra prior to the Great Rift had been pushing me away from proximity to the Throne. I do not just mean my failure at the threshold, which was the most dramatic manifestation, but also the increasing distance I had felt from the Sanctum itself, from its laws and its history and its rituals. Heracleon told me my name had figured in dreams. I had no reason to doubt that now, but I, and he, could have been mistaken about what it meant, just as Tieron had said.

  To leave was a kind of madness, perhaps, but the sages of our species have always known that truth and madness are close relations. I never regretted what I did then, even though I remained certain that it would be the end of my mortal existence.

  My brothers of the chamber came with me out of duty, and did not share my vision. I gave them the choice to remain on the walls, but they were content to take my command. As Aleya would remind me many times afterwards, our breed were not given to flights of imagination – we required a clear sense of purpose, of rightness, and only within those strictures did we aspire to the status of demigods. I no longer think of that limitation as weakness, even though I suspect she does. We are what we are, the guardians of the flame, not its kindlers.