The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,117
the anathema psykana. Every step became bloody and laboured. The oncoming legionnaires clogged the narrow corridors, barrelling into us and dogging our movements. I felt my muscles burn, my auramite flex under the blows, my spear shiver at every impact.
The Sisters slew with hatred in their eyes. Their speed and force came from anger now, just as it had done on Terra. They were giving themselves no quarter, risking all just for the chance to hurt those who had hurt them. In such confined spaces they were formidable, almost elemental, able to use their lighter frames to race into gaps and pull away from danger.
We were different. We fought as we had always fought – methodically, precisely, falling into the numerology of the near future and racing ahead of mortal thought. These warriors were used to slaughter, either in the Eye against their own kind or against the mortal defenders of His realm, but we had been made to hunt them. That was perhaps the darkest of the many secrets we carried – that from the very beginning, from even before the Great Crusade itself, we had been prepared for this and engineered to surpass them. To the galaxy at large these warriors were the greatest of His created weapons, the apogee of His martial genius. We considered them only as our natural prey.
So I laid them low. I tore through them and I ripped them apart. I cracked their armour open and I pulled their flesh into ribbons. My brothers did the same, working in perfect silence, each consumed with his own study of murder. The legionnaires cursed us in tongues long dead, repeating mockery that had been old even at the time of the Siege, but we made no response, and their fell weapons ground up against our shimmering auramite blades in cascades of thrown disruptor-light.
More were arriving all the time to repel us, coagulating like cells in a bloodstream. I guessed that even greater numbers were being summoned back from the surface. There might already have been hundreds on that ship, and after a certain point those numbers would tell.
But not yet. I had the signal on my augur, and it drove me onwards. Deck by deck, corridor by gore-drenched corridor, we burned our way towards the goal.
That was the only thing that existed for us then. We were lost in that cloying dark, burrowing even deeper, going so far that soon light itself became a memory. I felt the entire structure close in around me, sensed the malign resonance of its tonnes and tonnes of corrupted metalwork, its ancient devices and its warp-infused chambers, and for a brief, heretical moment was reminded of that other catacomb, the one where I had been repelled.
But there was no threshold that could bar me here. I was out, I was free, and now vengeance slavered at my heels.
Aleya
I let Valerian guide our path within that ship. All I wished to do there was cause as much damage as possible.
We took losses from the very beginning. The first of our number fell in that rib-sparred hall, caught by heavy bolter fire and sent spinning into the murk. Even once we gained the corridors we were hard hit, for those enemies were relentless. They stank of blood and they were brutally hard to down. If we had not had the Custodians with us we would have fared much worse, but even they were tested by what they fought.
It mattered little, for I had what I wished for in those moments. I could look my foe in the eye and test my blade against his. There were no duels of honour in that desperate struggle as there might have been in another age, for we only desired to inflict hurt. We ganged up on them, swamping them in those tight, claustrophobic corridors before taking them apart in combined enactments of revenge. Our relative lack of bulk was even an advantage then, as we could crowd in close, cutting at their airways and smashing their eye-lenses.
The Custodians set a punishing pace, and soon we were delving deeper, forging a path down into the engine-levels where heavy machinery thrummed and yammered. The entire ship was a haunt of semi-fused shedim, locked into the molten metal and spitting blasphemies at us as we ran. When I could, I shattered those fixtures, enjoying the shrieks as we cleaved daemon-iron from its mounting. I had no concern for my own safety, for I knew well enough we