The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,74

I said, using both the given name and the ceremonial one, united in this one soul ten thousand years before.

‘You speak for the High Lords?’ he asked.

I nodded. I could hardly bear to look into that face – there was something both beatific and horrific about it, an abundance of power that was almost obscene.

He was of another age. He was a myth that had died.

He took a single step towards me, extending a vast gauntlet chased in gold and cobalt in order to lift me to my feet.

‘Then it is good you are here, chancellor,’ Roboute Guilliman said. ‘I have been away a long time. Perhaps, if your offices still extend to such things, you would be good enough to show me to your masters.’

Valerian

They came. The Grey Knights, whom we had always had uneasy relations with, answered our summons. I do not know if it was my request that prompted the order, or if Valoris had been petitioned by others. In any case, we were not so proud that we could not ask for help when it was needed.

There is a profound distinction to be made here. We could both – Custodian and Grey Knight – slay daemons. We were both to all intents and purposes immune to their temptations, and we were both effective against their many strategems. There are two great repositories of lore against the daemonic in the Sol System, our own archives in the Tower of Hegemon and the far greater librarium lodged on Titan itself. We are, as orders, steeped to our very cores in the fight against the Great Enemy. Perhaps, you might say, Chaos is the reason for both of our existences.

And yet we are different. Remember I told you that we were never warriors, not exclusively. We are certainly not an army, and we were intended, in the original scheme, for service in an empire that never came to be. Our cousins in the Chamber Militant of the Ordo Malleus, by contrast, were forged exclusively for this singular war against our most powerful and enduring foe. They have no other purpose. Just like the Space Marines from whose template they were drawn, they are an army, complete and self-sufficient.

We always knew of their existence. There are records, held privately in the depths of our archives, which chronicle their creation. We watched, ten thousand years ago, as He embarked on His last gambit. As the Great Enemy drew close to Terra, we observed the darkening of Saturn’s moon, and knew that one day it would return, its purpose fulfilled.

Consider what this history means. We know that they came after us, the more junior creation, and yet they were as closely associated with Him as we were. We both of us look to Him and Him alone as our progenitor, and share the same sense, cultivated over the wearing aeons, that we enact His designs when all others falter.

There are some among my brothers who do not see the sons of Titan as much more than specialised Space Marines, to be regarded with suspicion as part of that schismatic breed that caused us so much anguish in the past. A Space Marine may always fail, they believe, given enough time and enough reason, and thus they are all part of the same potentially aberrant strain.

Some think that. Others, and I myself have often speculated in such a vein, cultivate a different misgiving. We know well enough that they were designed as His last great weapon, fitted to an age that He foresaw near the end of His earthly embodiment. What if it were they, not us, who most faithfully embodied His final ­legacy? You will never hear one of us say as much out loud, but that does not mean the suspicion does not exist. It skulks around the corridors of Hegemon like a foul odour, faint but hard to eradicate.

From the speculum certus we know we were the finest and the most faithful. In the speculum obscurus there is, as always, more doubt.

Such, then, is the cause of the uneasiness between us. In practice this rarely proved an issue, since they were not generally on Terra and we were never on Titan. Now, of course, that had changed. They sent fewer warriors than we asked for – less than half of one of their brotherhoods. Many of the Grey Knights were stationed far from the Sol System, it is true, but still the response felt somewhat paltry. They must have known