The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,75
what it would have cost our Captain-General to make the request, and it was hard to think that the slight was not an intentional one.
It was many days before I was to encounter one of the new arrivals myself. I had been occupied prosecuting the defence of my wall sector in conjunction with Urbo’s forces. Despite our efforts, the unnatural tide of violence had only grown worse. Demagogues surfaced, once buried fast in the heart of the world-city, now raising whole hosts of disciples. Some were truly corrupted, seeded many years ago and now bursting into fruit, but others were merely deluded and desperate, their minds turned by the terrors in the sky and their stomachs empty. Soon the walls were attacked nightly, and our troops were busy emptying their lasguns at the charging hordes.
It was sickening work, and even Urbo became deadened by it. My services were called on to eradicate the masters of this disorder, and I found myself at the heart of wearying fighting, slaying those freely who I had once protected from a distance. Some of the corrupted had become dreadful by then – semi-human creatures with the marks of the traitor on their flesh. The greatest of them had accepted foul gifts, making them both lethal and persuasive to the masses. I slew men with embryonic wings sprouting from their spines, and women with fangs, and half-human-half-beasts.
In time it became clear that the zones south of the Lion’s Gate were deteriorating rapidly. Aside from punitive raids, we lost effective control of most of the populated regions outside the wall, and the old cathedrals became wells of depravity. I hunted freely in those places, as did my brothers, but soon Urbo’s patrols had to be doubled, then doubled again, and still they were ambushed and destroyed by the growing mobs of the damned.
I looked into the skies and saw only the blood-curdle now, a skein of crimson that flecked the skies and made it lurid. We had neither sunlight nor proper nightfall, just a constant glow of madness that chased out sleep and made the holy places seem like the haunts of ghouls. We could neither feed nor protect the innocent who remained in those vast regions of the city, and our inquisitors stalked among the seething hive-spires as if lost on some long-forgotten death world.
Such were the circumstances in which I met Justicar Alcuin. It would have been better, I am sure, had our paths crossed in other times. As it was though, the circumstances of our encounter were very far from ideal, taking place on the night that none can forget – only the second time in history that the Outer Walls were breached by the Enemy, an event which would later be called, by its survivors, the Sack of the Lion’s Gate.
I led an attack company drawn from the best of Urbo’s remaining forces. They were becoming hardened to what they saw by then, and were now able to give me useful support when we encountered creatures of the ether. Two hundred of them took off with me from the high landing stages, exiting the wall under the watchful cover of the defence batteries before heading out into the city beyond.
Our target was the manufactorum zone east of the grand processional, within sight of the Lion’s Gate itself. Once a proud thoroughfare three hundred metres wide used to hosting military parades, it had become a haunted semi-ruin, overlooked by eyeless rows of scorched terraces. We launched repeated missions to keep it clear, mostly to provide a route for ground forces retreating to the walls from positions further out. During the nominal daylight hours we drove the corrupted hosts back into the shadows, but as night fell and the flames danced more darkly, they always slunk back.
So here we were again, roaring out into the eternal city, clearing the filth from sight of the walls. It felt like trying to scoop the tide away, handful by handful.
I took a Talion gunship in the lead, and the bulk of Urbo’s soldiers followed in their Valkyries. Once beyond the walls we dropped down low, skirting no more than fifty metres over the deserted transit canyons. Vast hive walls loomed up on either side of us, many still sullenly burning, most as dark as pitch. Billions still dwelled inside those sarcophagi, though I did not like to think on how many still retained their sanity. Ragged banners hung from burned-out windows, all inscribed with signs of ruin.