The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,107

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, but 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