The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,22
Now the prospect of taking my place behind the Eternity Gate and never leaving, spending the remainder of my life in the radiant aegis of His immanent presence, rose up instead.
‘A surprise?’ Navradaran asked, looking wryly amused at my stupefaction.
‘You might say it.’ I attempted to collect myself. ‘He has mentioned nothing to me of this.’
Navradaran placed his hand on my arm, halting me.
‘That is why he sent me to find you,’ he said. ‘Come, the Throne awaits.’
The Throne.
Such a simple word, used across every world of the Imperium as a curse, a blessing, a vow or a mere preposition. Almost none of those who invoked it knew anything about it. They imagined a simple golden chair, I suppose, like something a princeling of a barbarian world might occupy. They imagined a chamber around it, glittering with the riches of our interstellar domain, and maybe courtiers drifting across fine floors, murmuring to one another about high matters of state.
I cannot blame them for their lack of imagination. They are taught what to think by the priests, and the image does no harm and some good. They can fix their minds on it in times of darkness, and their faith in its power may stiffen their resolve. That does not prevent them from being so very badly wrong.
Whatever it might once have been, the Throne is no longer a single object, nor is it housed in a single room. Its mechanisms spread out like roots throughout the entire Inner Palace, worming down into the forgotten crypts and climbing up into the highest peaks. Its power coils are the size of cities, its foundations the remade mountains themselves. The adepts of the Mechanicus who toil without rest to maintain its workings have added so many accretions over its ten millennia of life that the planet around it has been utterly changed – bored away, ground down and raised up again.
You might say that Terra itself is little more than a holding vessel for the Throne. Certainly, if one takes the mighty psionic transmission conduits leading to the Fortress of the Astronomican as part of its structure – which would be a reasonable judgement – then the Throne’s mechanism is far more massive than the Outer Palace itself. It is woven into the strata of the planet like an internal organ, pulsing and arterial. In truth, I doubt that any living soul, save the one who ordered its construction and dwells at its heart, has any true understanding of its full extent.
And yet, the unschooled men and women of the Imperium are not wrong in every particular. There was once a room at the heart of it all – vast enough, to be sure, but a room nonetheless. It has not entirely disappeared, though its inner faces are now scored with the detritus of Mars and its roots have been replaced by pits clawed into the heart of the world. The air in that place is hard to breathe. The temperature is astonishing. The ground trembles, and the vaults ring with the grind of immense machines that have been in ceaseless operation for millennia.
It is hard for me to convey what it is like to be there. I have walked through its halls and its vaults, surrounded on all sides by the holiest of all human physical creations, and have been brought nigh to my knees by the magnitude of it all. Save for the greatest savants of the Red Planet, who are human only in the most nominal sense, only we pass through its portals. There used to be others, the silent daughters of the anathema psykana, but for many years they had not been fully part of the Adeptus Terra and did not come into the precincts as they once had done.
So only we remained, clad in the black of our penance, stalking among the snaking cables and clustered power lines, listening for any slight change in the heartbeat of the machine that surrounded us, lost in its burnished shadows.
Navradaran and I went swiftly, walking the long and winding stairs down to the deepest operational levels. For a long time the only witnesses we had were red-eyed Martian automata, scrabbling in the dark, tracing ritual routes through the mazes and mumbling words of forgotten process-languages.
I looked up briefly, and saw a childlike angel flap across the face of the high arches, leaking a messy trail of incense. The creature looked vaguely lost.