The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,53

punishing bursts of electrostatic. One big hauler, a kilometre out over the Xericho hives, took a long time to impact, its pilots desperately gunning their faltering engines as the hull ploughed slowly into a thicket of hab-units. I watched it all happen. I watched the inferno kick off as the plasma drives detonated. All across that wide horizon, more fires swelled into life, adding to the heat-flare of the heavens above them.

My helm-feed skittered with incoming signal runes. I assessed them instantly, disregarding the thousands of alerts in favour of the truly essential order – Italeo had summoned us all to the muster chamber.

I ran. I was already armoured, and paused only momentarily to retrieve Gnosis from my armoury. By then fresh warning klaxons were shuddering through the citadel’s cavernous interior. Many of those had not been sounded since the Great Heresy itself when the False Warmaster had besieged the walls, and their croaking din sounded like the battle-trumpets of another reality.

I was among the first to respond. Within minutes of the summons there were more than three hundred of us in the grand hall, overlooked by statues of Valdor and the long golden roll-calls of the Glorious Dead, and more arriving all the time.

There was no air of panic. I think we were made to be incapable of panic. But there was expectation there, seething in the gilded confines of that chamber and waiting for its outlet. We all knew by instinct that something fundamental had broken, but as yet we did not know just what, or how much by.

Looking back at that moment, I find my strongest memory was a strange and unbidden sense of excitement. You must remember that we were lone hunters, and that it was rare, even for us, to see so many of our order gathered together. As I ran my eyes across the gathering battalions of auramite, I had a sudden vision of invincibility. This was how it must have been, I thought, before the Secret War – the last time we had been drawn together as a single army against a single enemy.

One of the Revered Fallen entered the chamber then – a mighty leviathan of the Contemptor-Galatus pattern, just like those interred at the portals to the Throne itself. I did not know how long it had been since his machine-spirits had been provoked from long stasis, but simply to witness the hallowed form of my still-living brother only amplified my sense of exhilaration. The entombed warrior lumbered out of the shadows, his huge shell glittering as if newly forged.

And then Tribune Italeo entered, flanked by two honour guards. His armour was heavily scored, as if raked over by claws, and his long black cloak was torn. He removed his helm, and his features were smeared with ash. I do not know where he had been fighting, or against whom, but the evidence of his trials was all too visible.

‘My brothers,’ he called out, coming to a halt atop the high dais at the far end of the chamber. ‘You have heard the tidings from the Cadian Gate. I come to confirm the truth of them – the world is lost to the Imperium. The survivors are fleeing ahead of the storm. The Despoiler has broken the ancient leaguer, and now his armies march unopposed into the void.’

He spoke carefully, weighting each word, but I could see something in his grey eyes that I had never witnessed before. It might have been combat weariness, but that was not something I would normally detect. I wondered again where he had been before coming here, and what he had seen.

‘Our star-dreamers, those who live still, tell me this is only the beginning,’ Italeo went on. ‘The Eye is growing. Space around it is tearing. We have lost contact with large regions of His realm beyond a growing chasm of darkness. And amid all of this, and most grave, the Astronomican has failed.’

We were transhuman, all of us, conditioned to respond with stoicism to even the worst tidings, but we were not machines. A ripple of disquiet passed through the assembled ranks. I heard a muffled ‘it cannot be’ slip from more than one pair of lips.

The Astronomican was more than the beacon by which our starships sailed. It was the single most significant marker of the Emperor’s continued presence among us. We might hope for mystical signs from time to time, or inspiration from the Tarot, but in truth the greatest proof that