The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,14

Valerian, but in my mind these were an entirely different category altogether – almost beyond human. Men like Harster were what I might have become, had I been made of harder stone, and the lingering suspicion never left me that I somehow hadn’t tried enough, and that my world of scholars and expensive wines was an insult to those who died daily in the trenches.

If Harster felt the same way, he gave no sign of it. He was of the old school – calmly deferential without giving much away. He respected my rank, like all the military did, and was diplomatic enough not to betray what he thought of its bearer.

I received him in the same chamber where Kerapliades had spoken with me. By day it looked much the same as it did by night – Terra’s sludge-grey sunlight did little to leaven the oppressive gloom hanging over all my fine furniture.

‘General,’ I said, offering him a drink and taking a seat.

‘Chancellor,’ he replied, refusing it graciously and doing likewise.

He was a big man, his neck corded and tight up against his dress collar. A long scar ran down his right cheek, bisecting an augmetic eye socket. His flesh was tanned tight, solid like old leather, and his grey-white hair was cropped short.

‘When do you go back?’ I asked.

‘Two weeks,’ he replied.

‘You take the hopes of us all with you.’

His expression did not flicker. ‘I take half a million soldiers, in fifty fresh-raised regiments. It has taken ten years to muster them, and only now do I have the commission to depart. I pray to the Throne they will not arrive too late.’

I absorbed the implied insult. The wheels of Imperial bureaucracy grind slowly, and he could have no appreciation of how difficult a task it was to raise such an army over such a short span of time. Truth be told, ten years was nothing – I have known it take five times as long to gather less potent forces together.

‘You have been fighting a long time,’ I said. ‘Tell me of it.’

‘We endure,’ Harster said, stiffly. ‘The line will not break.’

‘Come, general,’ I said, placing my ring-heavy hands in my lap. ‘If I wanted a catechism I would have gone to a priest. Tell me how it truly stands.’

For the first time, a shadow of unease fell across his features. He hesitated, knowing that it might be a test of fidelity to the public line we spun to the masses. After only a moment, though, the uncertainty passed. He had been fighting too long to be worried about what I might do to him.

‘Half a million will not do it,’ he said. ‘Ten times that would not do it.’

I nodded. ‘We’ve not heard from Cadia for a long time now.’

‘I know.’

‘That’s making all sorts of rumours fly around. The Gate might already be breached, they say.’

‘I’ve heard those rumours.’

‘You’ll still travel there?’

Harster’s grey eyes – one natural, one ringed with iron – stayed steady. ‘It’s where our duty lies.’

Despite myself, that caught me. I looked at this man, who had many years of natural life left to him, and no doubt had the coin and influence to find a less suicidal posting, and saw what those brutes at the schola could become, once the edges had been knocked off them. I will admit it – I felt shame.

‘What can be done?’ I asked.

He understood what I was getting at. I wished to know what the Astra Militarum would make of our great undertaking, and whether they could countenance it.

‘I’ve seen things no sane man should see,’ he said, taking a kind of rough pride in that, though it hollowed out his expression. ‘I’ve seen the Angels of Death defeated. You think that possible? I didn’t, but I’ve seen it. There’s strength in the universe greater even than theirs. Some of it dwells here, they tell me, held fast by the ancient law.’ His gaze, steel-hard, simply didn’t change. I’d have followed this one into battle, if that had been my calling. ‘They’re old laws. They’re old habits. I might say, if I were asked, that we can’t afford them any more.’

I pursed my lips in thought. I wanted to thank him for that, but I supposed he had little use for thanks from such as me.

‘I see,’ was all I said.

He was getting impatient. I knew when his lander was scheduled to take him up to the fleet hanging in orbit – a thousand slab-hulled troop carriers, escorted