The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,104

unusual then, watching her thrust those flickering signs of Thoughtmark at me. At the very least I ought to have found her presumptuous, and at the worst guilty of the gravest disrespect, but instead I found myself unable to suppress the twitch of a smile. I admired this woman. I admired her lack of deception and her genuine fervour. By the Throne, I even admired the way she conversed, not that I expected that the sentiment would be readily reciprocated.

Nothing about what she demanded was simple. We were in flux, the Captain-General was with the Emperor Himself, as was the Lord Commander Presumptive. The High Lords, in whose names the Imperium was still theoretically governed, were fully detained with the many tasks of recovery and rearmament. To do what she asked required influence that I did not possess.

But there were ways around most obstacles. Dwelling in the snake’s nest of the Palace for as long as I had done had taught me that.

‘I know a person to whom this could be taken,’ I said. ‘If we do so, may I suggest, with all possible respect, that you leave the talking to me?’

Aleya

I never for a moment believed that he would actually do it. I was merely taking out my frustrations on him in that cell, trying to make him feel as bad as I did, and yet he listened to me, and then he even did as I asked. Perhaps he really did believe all that talk about debts of honour, or maybe he saw the true danger of the map in a way that I did not – in any case, it forced me to look at him with rather different eyes.

In truth, my desire to hunt down the planets on that damned flayed parchment was as much about getting off Terra as anything else. In my short time there I found the place almost unbearably depressing. I was not seeing it at its best, of course, and I appreciated that the war had come suddenly and brutally to its walls, but even so my rancour towards it only intensified the longer I was there.

There was never an apology. No official from the High Lords ever came to us and expressed regret for the way we had been treated. We were simply thrown into that hideous fortress, given our orders and expected to form ourselves into an army that had not fought together for many thousands of years. They were fools, all of them, the High Lords – blind fools that were unworthy of our service.

My only allegiance, in those days, was to Him. That, and that alone, never faltered. I swore a vow that I would avenge my sisters in His name, but not in the name of the Council and not at their bidding. Everything I would do from that point onwards would be framed within that prism of vengeance, and I looked forward ferociously to the coming of the enemy to the Throneworld so I could visit such pain on them as they had on me.

I never thought that Valerian would give me a route to this revenge, nor that it would happen so swiftly. He stood there in my cell, with his soft, patient voice, ignoring my repeated insults and studying that infernal parchment as if it were a fascinating but harmless piece of interesting illumination. Most infuriating of all, he proved impossible to provoke. Hatred seemed to have almost no purchase on him, as if it were an emotion he simply couldn’t understand.

Later, after I had spent more time in his company, I realised just how close to the mark that judgement was. It was actually more a case, I think, of his having no conception whatsoever of pride. He had no ego to bruise. He saw his entire life as a pure expression of service, and wished for nothing more than that. His only ambition, of any kind, was to serve the Throne more perfectly. If he had been ordered to throw his armour away and stand in the path of daemonic arrows, he would have done so without complaint. That was the key difference between him and, say, a Space Marine. A Space Marine was a creature of incredible internal pride, a warrior breed of such bellicosity that they would go to war – and had done – over matters of martial insult or the resentments of their flawed primarchs. Valerian would never have done that. In that distinction, I felt, was