The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,87

at us, many of them greater in stature even than me. By then their witch-birth was complete – their heads had elongated sickeningly, their claws had extended, their legs had firmed into glossy reverse-angled, hoof-terminated striders. They had the mania of victory in those black eyes, fuelled by the legions of their own kind around them. A musk of pure bloodlust clotted the air, heady and overpowering.

Already I could see lesser daemonkind scrambling up the lower reaches of the walls, freezing their grip onto pitted adamantium, forming bridges with their own bodies to allow greater warriors to vault above them. The horde was endless, merged with both heaven and earth, a liquid mass of writhing malignance rammed hard onto the plane of mortal experience.

We both knew what they were, Alcuin and I. We knew, as ­others could not, that these things were our own psyches made into flesh. We knew that our rage, any rage, fuelled them and made them stronger. They fed from our basest instincts, and so we were doing nothing so much as fighting ourselves. All we had left were the things that remained once rage was purged from us – duty, commitment, resolve.

I punched my fist through the heart of a bloodletter and yanked it from its swelter-chest, then swung around to lance the tip of Gnosis through the neck of another, then crunched my elbow into the spine of a third before spinning to slam my glaive’s hilt into a fourth. I was lost in numerology by then, reaching into the near future, scrutinising everything as I moved, calm at the epicentre of the hurricane. Alcuin forged a path beside me, driving the Neverborn back and slicing them apart with psy-laced blows from his mighty daemonhammer. His troops stayed close, locking and swaying in concert, crying words of denunciation as they struck their blades home.

The daemon was harmed by the weapons of eternity, this we knew. The heavy barrage of las-fire from the parapets, cutting through the blood-rain in boiling volleys, could slow or inconvenience them, but to kill a daemon one had to return to the primordial methods of fist and blade. They had been spawned from our oldest wars and our oldest hates, and we would never drag ourselves away from that primal genesis.

The gate itself was still a kilometre distant, shrouded in burning palls and screened by heavy curtains of inundation. Its summit was aflame, cut open by the massed reports of macrocannons and las-emplacements. Flyers swarmed over it, launched from pads within the Palace, and battle was joined in the skies. Heavy bolters opened up, driving long furrows into the already deep-scored terrain and sending daemons smashing back into their ravening kind, who tore them open and devoured them before turning back to the assault, their lolling maws dripping with black ichor.

The wall itself was a false protection – the daemons would not halt at it, but given time would swarm and wrench and claw it down. They needed to be met on the field of battle, their hate matched with zeal.

I swung my blade and sent its tip whistling through the midriff of a racing bloodletter, then pivoted to drive the shaft into the jaws of another. They had not laid a claw on me yet, but the numbers were beyond comprehension, and more were being spun from the flames, vomited out into reality, tumbling into instantiation to launch into us.

I saw one of Alcuin’s squad reel as he was struck, his psychic defences momentarily breached, and I interposed myself between him and his attacker, slicing its head from its shoulders before spinning back to face the next one. That left me a fraction of a second shy of where I needed to be, and the first blow cracked into my pauldron, knocking me into the embrace of a fanged and winged terror.

‘Exsilium daemonica!’ cried Alcuin, hurling his hammerhead at the creature.

The air cracked open, sending a searing beam of silver light crashing into the monster’s chest, throwing it deep into the advancing horde where its own kind tore it to scraps before bounding on to reach us.

Then we were fighting again, no time to issue a word of thanks, our limbs blurred, our hearts flooding us with hyperadrenalin, our eyes fixed on the myriad and shifting goals.

All this was the work of seconds. That was all it took for the greater forces on the wall to perceive the danger and react to it. Even in the midst of my