The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,80
hissing blood-channels. Two-handed axes swung into being, clotting from thick smoke before extending into twin-faced plates of warp-cursed steel, etched with runes of ending and glinting with the reflected stars of another plane. Barbed whips rippled through the flames, vast and curling and lashing with infernal acumen of their own.
Bloodthirsters. Eight of them. Forged in the image of mankind’s oldest fears, the embodiments of battle-rage and the avatars of blood-lust, these were myth-born titans of ruin. When they strode out, the horizon shuddered. When their pinions snapped, the flames thundered back greater. Wreathed in lightning, garlanded in black-edged flame, cloaked in the storm’s surge, the mightiest of the mighty vassals of the Blood God raised their vast jowls skywards, and roared.
The clouds above us erupted, sending hammering channels of crimson rain slamming earthwards. The Neverborn army screamed, lashing out with their hooked blades, a chorus of feral ecstasy unleashed on a world they had coveted since the dawn of history. For a moment it seemed as if the heavens themselves had formed the image of a giant horned face, as vast as the Palace itself, leering in incipient triumph, before the vision was obliterated by the driving blood-rain.
The wall stood beyond them, gigantic and battle-scarred, towering higher than any hive-spire and surmounted by the heaviest concentration of defences in all the Imperium. For the first time ever, I looked at it and saw in truth how fragile it was. It was a creation of men set against the infinite malice of gods. The instantiated host of the Neverborn, the immortal intelligences of the eternal ether, surged towards it now, thirsting to break apart the parapets they had foundered on before.
Before I knew it, I was running again. I was tearing down new stairwells and leaping from platforms, ramping up to full speed. My blade was snarling, setting golden flames dancing amid the bloody dark. Around me came the Grey Knights, silver ghosts in the gloom, their own weapons glittering sapphire.
I knew every one of my brothers would be doing the same. All those on the wall and all those in the eternal city would be racing to face this, to bring their blades to bear, to cut into the warp-flesh that now rose up to extinguish all we had been born to preserve.
And as I ran, only one thought possessed me, animated me, drove me onwards into the opening maw of living perdition.
We cannot fail again.
Aleya
The Black Ship Enduring Abundance burned through the void, having taken its intended cargo on board. The Cadamara came along in its wake, flanked by a mini-fleet of similar warp-capable ships, a battered collection of largely ramshackle hulls that laboured to remain in the larger vessel’s wake.
I didn’t realise just how close we’d come. I’d been so consumed with survival that I’d never appreciated how remarkable our progress had been – by the time we were intercepted we were within a warp stage of the Sol System. I had to hand it to Slovo. Despite his carping and moaning and physical frailty, he’d steered us superlatively, although whether he’d have been able to negotiate that last treacherous leg was hard to know.
Our proximity to the goal, though, was what had saved us. The Enduring Abundance had been on its home world arc, brought back to the centre just ahead of the full impact of what Navradaran, in an echo of Slovo’s words, was calling the Great Rift, the catastrophe that had scissored the galaxy in half. The Black Ship had not been originally scheduled to return to the Throneworld for another three years, but Navradaran had boarded it and given the captain new orders – its most precious cargo was no longer the shackled psykers that raged and sobbed in its holds, but the wardens who guarded them.
But he had not been merely content with that, and had steered the ship on an erratic course back to Terra, taking in every known or rumoured convent of witch-hunters in the subsector before setting the straight course home. The ship had never made it as far as Arraissa, but others had told them of our existence, and so their astropaths had put their minds out into the ether, searching for the last scraps to recover before they would be buffeted back to their origin. Somehow they latched on to us, and took the chance to reel us in. If we’d outrun them and tried to go it alone, I suspect we’d be dead by now, our skeletons