The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,13

not a live feed, but the last stutter of whatever arcane communication had been in use before I entered. I was staring at a warrior of the greatest of all the hosts of the Enemy – the self-styled Black Legion. I saw it through veils of rising mist, but could perceive clearly enough the ebon death mask, rimmed with greenish gold. I had faced these unholy fighters before in combat only once, many years ago, and could vouch for their extreme deadliness. Of all the various warbands and mongrel battalions of the Enemy, it was this Legion that ever portended the worst days ahead for us.

I could not understand what was being said. The language was distorted by the extreme distance, or mangled by sorcery, or perhaps spoken in some guttural battle-code, but its very presence here changed the whole tenor of this action. Something necessary yet routine had just become critical – if there was any link, even the slightest, between the Circlet and the Old Legions then word of it had to be taken back to Hestia immediately.

I moved quickly, collecting the remaining canisters, intending to place both them and the mirror within a null-casket on board my interceptor. I took down the hide map and rolled it tightly. As I went, I laid charges around the chamber, giving them only a few minutes to count down before going off. Soon after my departure this whole level would be purged, leaving no hint of what had taken place within. The need for haste was pressing.

It was only as I reached the broken doorway that I heard the word that truly knocked me off balance. Amid all the growls and hisses of the still-active feed, there came a name so familiar that no distortion could disguise it. The legionnaire spoke it like an expletive, sharp and vicious, and thus there could be no mistake.

Arraissa.

I started to run.

Tieron

In those days it felt like the tasks before us would never end. The Council acted with great purpose, as far as I could ascertain, but it was scarcely sufficient to meet the growing tide of demands. We did not need Kerapliades’ counsel to know that the war was going badly, and yet the specifics still eluded us. Warp storms were rising to levels never witnessed by the living, astropathic choirs succumbed to madness, deafness or torpor, and my attempts to gain further information through the usual web of contacts yielded very little. Somehow, through that odd sense of herd intuition that always ran ahead of firm tidings one way or the other, the Throneworld began to panic.

We began to receive more reports than usual from the Palace guards, all of them complaining of sedition in the great slum-pans out beyond the gargantuan walls. It was nothing the regular enforcers couldn’t handle, but the frequency bothered me. These were not carefully planned revolts against the tyranny of the Lords, but spontaneous uprisings, confused and without purpose. When the leaders were interrogated, they could say nothing other than that a madness had seized them. They did not plead for their lives. In more than one report, it was said that they preferred death to what they thought was coming, which I found both contemptible and unsettling.

Much of what passed across my desk remained unread, such was the volume of missives that came my way, rising out of every avenue like a foetid tide of floodwater. There was a sense, I remember, of things coming apart, of seams gradually unpicking, of the levers of control no longer pulling on the machinery below.

That was hardly new. I had had the same sense many other times, and yet order had always been restored, the will of the Throne clamped back on to an unruly populace. I don’t remember thinking that this would be any different. Or perhaps I did. It’s hard now to recall, for we did not rest much then, and our dinners became less fine and more hurried, and we shuffled endlessly from citadel to citadel with our parchment bundles carried by trains of lumbering menials.

I met a general from the Cadian high command. His name was Alberich Harster, and he had been back on Terra for three months by then. I was fairly used to dealing with senior figures of the Astra Militarum, though had never quite shaken off my vague sense of inferiority in their company. You may find this odd, given the mightier warriors I was used to dealing with, such as