The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,49

to plan.

Tieron

‘And so we come to the heart of the matter,’ said the Master of the Administratum, Irthu Haemotalion.

He sat at the head of the long black granite table, his grey face a picture of studied mournfulness. He was wearing his heavy ceremonial robes, just as all the other High Lords did, though his were perhaps the most ostentatious, as befitted his role as first among equals.

It hadn’t always been thus. In other ages our military commanders might have assumed an unofficial pre-eminence, but this was an age of bureaucracy and inertia, in which the greatest power now lay buried within the unknowably complex rules of procedure, and so the master of bureaucracy was also the de facto master of the Imperium.

I watched it all unfold from my place at the foot of the table. The Twelve were gathered in their various finery, attended by their robed officials who sat behind them on smaller thrones. We were high up on the northern face of the Senatorum Imperialis, and thin light lanced down from high stained-glass windows. Two armed Lucifer Blacks guarded the heavy doors, and many more were stationed in and around the Council chamber’s perimeter. I could hear the gun-drones as they circled endlessly above us, as well as the whine of seeker-turrets in active service.

They were paranoid, all of them, insisting on incredible levels of security even within the most secure of all locations of the Imperium. But I could sympathise with that – they weren’t truly concerned about external threats here, they were concerned about each other.

We had already been in session for several hours, and the watery sun was high in the sky. A whole raft of measures had been addressed, with much consensus. Now we were getting to the real business.

‘I must thank the cancellarius for his diligence in bringing this issue to Council again,’ Haemotalion went on, looking at me with sardonic eyes. ‘It seems that nothing could deter him from doing his duty on this occasion, even if it took much… persuasion to ensure that all views were taken account of.’

I despised the man. His intellect was possibly the greatest of all of them, and he was a master of figures and ledgers, just as he had to be, but there was a savage coldness in him that I had always found repellent. Of course, I merely smiled and bowed in acknowledgement.

‘It’s a weighty issue,’ the Master went on, intent on telling his peers what they already knew. ‘For ten thousand years the Lex has held the balance between our forces, all deriving from the original Lord Commander’s precepts. It was he who imposed the Codex on his Legiones Astartes brothers, keeping the peace between the Space Marines and the Adeptus Terra. And it was he, in consultation with the great Valdor, who issued the Edict of Restraint, under which the Custodian Guard were expressly enjoined to remain on Terra as guardians of the Enthroned Emperor. Many times, voices have been raised against this edict, and every time they have been quelled. But now, with the war at such a delicate stage, it comes to us again.’

‘It should never have done so,’ growled Raskian through a vox-filter. The Fabricator-General was a vast presence at the opposite end of the table, and took up almost as much room as the rest of the chamber combined. His nominally human-form body was locked into a whole series of stacked machines, all coughing and flickering amid a jungle of thick power lines. His head was the most unchanged part, though even that was bronze and emerald-eyed and hairless. ‘We’ve had a hundred crises, and never gone against the old pacts. What’s next – you dissolve the Treaty of Olympus?’

‘The Lex Imperialis is inviolable,’ agreed Aveliza Drachmar, the hatchet-faced mistress of the Adeptus Arbites. ‘It is unacceptable to modify its provisions at the first sign of military setback.’

So far, so predictable. I was happy to let the opposed parties make their cases.

‘Hardly the first sign,’ replied Merelda Pereth, Lord High Admiral of the Imperial Navy. She was a quietly cool character, used to giving orders under extreme pressure. I liked her. ‘You might argue we’ve shown considerable restraint.’

‘It’s still heresy,’ said Baldo Slyst, the ancient Ecclesiarch, and after Haemotalion the most absurdly over-embellished. He placed his many-ringed fingers before him on the stone table and fixed the rest of the High Lords with the bleak stare of a prophet. ‘The God-Emperor’s Will was reflected in that Edict. To