The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,120

slicing him almost clean in two then kicking him over the edge. More piled in after that, and I switched back to hauling my blade two-handed.

We were dying. There were fewer than twenty of us left by then, clustered around that burned-out mooring, our backs to one another and fighting hard. Dozens more legionnaires crashed down from the fully extended gantries, and beyond them came dozens more – the tide was never-ending, a storm surge that would overwhelm us sooner or later, no matter how many of them we slew first.

And then came the strangest thing of all. As I swung my greatblade to meet the next challenge, I heard Valerian chuckling softly. He had already dispatched another legionnaire and was wading straight into another. I had never heard him laugh before. Even as I locked blades with my own enemy, I found the whole thing strikingly surreal.

‘Hold fast, anathema,’ he told me, his spear whirling around him in those glorious golden parabolas. ‘This is where it ends. Let us make it a stand for the ages.’

He was elated. I could hear the battle-joy in his voice. Everything I had thought about him was wrong, it turned out – he was capable of moving beyond himself, of escaping that infernal tomb on Terra and becoming so much more.

This was a new age, I thought then. We had lived to see it dawn, and had fought for its survival. Death in that cause was not a ­tragedy; it was a privilege.

So I spoke. I did it. What use were vows then? They had never helped me before.

‘By His will alone,’ I said out loud, fighting hard, relishing my final words as they slipped from my lips.

Tieron

Let me tell you what manner of commander the Imperium now had.

The safest course of action, once we had burned through the warp into the Vorlese System, would have been to destroy the enemy fleet instantly. We had the guns for it, and we knew what its purpose was. As we emerged into orbit and saw that ruinous squadron at geostation over the cleared site below I fully expected the lances to be ignited.

That’s not what he did, though.

‘If they live yet, they deserve more than martyrdom,’ he said, making ready to lead the first of many boarding parties into the grand cruiser.

And so he went into combat himself, a primarch leading his own force of Space Marines, the like and profile of which I had never seen before. Our battleships scattered the enemy escorts and zeroed their mighty cannons onto the main prize. Once the grand cruiser’s shields were crippled, hundreds of them teleported into contact, sweeping through that corrupt old hulk like a storm wind and scouring it down to the metal. Their orders were to seize the vessel and retrieve any of our own who still survived within it.

I understood then why so many would follow this leader. You may have heard of his reputation for calculation and cold strategic mastery, but that only tells part of the story. In an inhumane age, he reminded us of what we had lost.

I was permitted to take a shuttle over once the enemy ship had been secured and the worst of the fighting was done. I never wish to find myself in such a place again – every rivet of it was sickening, resonant with the same latent horror that the daemons had brought to us on Terra. I had to cover my mouth as I was escorted down through those dark, humid corridors, choosing not to look into the many chambers that we passed lest I see something that would turn my mind.

Guilliman wanted me to see the site of the final battle for myself. He wanted me to see the great shaft, and the remnants of that pylon hanging from its heavy chains, just so it would be clear how close we had come. Had the device been deployed, warp transit through the Vorlese node would have been impossible, crippling the crusade before it could have begun and delaying it for years.

At that stage we did not fully understand how they were able to do it, and the shard’s origins would only be discovered later. For aeons, it turned out, these objects had been embedded in the soils of Cadia, part of a poorly understood network that had held the Gate open since time immemorial. The Despoiler’s seizure of that world had finally destroyed its great pylons, allowing the Eye to spill