The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,72

quite equalised to Terran-normal here, so when we moved we lurched uneasily.

I could already hear the muffled sounds of many boots marching, and the vox-grind cries of orders issued, but nothing as yet of the inferno I had feared. The sorcerous light seemed to have disappeared, but in its place I could perceive the sway and flash of lumen beams, all of them originating beyond the ridge ahead of us.

Jek drew alongside me, and our guards jogged out on either side, guns trained on the summit.

‘What do you expect to find here?’ she asked.

‘Something worth the trouble,’ I muttered, beginning the long slog up the ridge.

That trudge alone nearly ended me. The climb was more than a hundred metres in thin air, and by the time I neared the summit I was panting and sweating under my suit. I felt ludicrous. There was no reason for me to be there. I was an official, not a warrior. Perhaps I had been going mad. Perhaps the foetid air of the Throneworld had crushed my sanity entirely, and now I marched to a long-overdue death.

Then at last I reached the peak of the dusty slope. I hauled in great breaths, feeling dizzy, leaning my hands on my knees, before I was able to stand again.

I looked out. Jek stood beside me, and looked out. My guards and my officials, all in their thick suits of protective armour, looked out. Not one of us made a sound. I was, for once, entirely lost for words. Perhaps there weren’t any adequate to capture what we were seeing. We stayed like that for a long time, feeling only the heavy beats of our hearts and hearing the boom of the wind in our earpieces.

Let me do what I can to convey the scene. I fear I will be inadequate to the task, but I will try.

We were staring down a shallow incline, the curving inner face of a wide bowl. It was huge – perhaps twenty kilometres across – and I could barely make out the far side of it amid the dust and drifting smoke. More ship cadavers marked the far outline of the great crater, just as massive as the ones we had marched past, ­rising like megaliths over the depression.

The landscape was a smouldering charnel-zone, heaped with bodies and choked with the ruins of war-machines, all part-hazed by the drift of smoke. Some of the slain were human troops, clad in the grey of the Luna defence forces, but most were far huger and more ornate – Space Marines, drawn from a dozen Chapters. I saw cobalt and ebony, gold and crimson, all locked together in a vast chequerboard of livery. Amid the dead stood the living, battered and crusted with Luna’s dust, but still moving with that ponderous fluidity that always marked the Adeptus Astartes.

I had never seen so many gathered together. There must have been thousands of them, a war host beyond any I had dreamed of. Most were arrayed in the cobalt of Ultramar, that far-off kingdom I had read so much about but never travelled to. Others strode among them as equals – the Imperial Fists who until that day had been stationed on Terra, and Black Templars, Novamarines, Mortifactors… The list went on and on, testing the knowledge of heraldry I had learned in my distant youth.

It was impossible that they should be here. We had chronicled and listed every last defender on Terra for months, knowing that most of the Chapters were fighting far off in the depths of the void. The ways of the warp were blocked and burning – they could not be here.

But they were not the only ones. I saw bizarre creatures that I had no name for – arcane creations of the Mechanicus, some greater in size even than the Space Marines who stalked beside them. I saw living saints, just like those in the Ecclesiarchy frescos, hovering amid haloes of snaking energy. The thin air crackled with recently discharged plasma, as taut and tense as stretched skin. Even as I watched, three Imperial Fists Thunderhawk gunships rumbled overhead, far more massive than I’d imagined they were. Custodians, taller than all others, could be spied among the vast host, surrounded by the highest heaps of broken corpses.

The slain far outnumbered those who still walked, but these were no ordinary corpses. Even looking at them made my eyes burn – many were embellished with high serpent helms, and had armour of lapis