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• WATCHERS OF THE THRONE •
Chris Wraight
Book 1: THE EMPEROR’S LEGION
Book 2: THE REGENT’S SHADOW

Warhammer 40,000

For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.

Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.

This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.

There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

Prologue

PROLOGUE

AFTERWARDS

I

Queues of warp-transports stretched out for hundreds of miles in the skies above Malouri, files of rusting steel freight ships chained nose to tail like the long mukaali caravans that trailed between underground hab-domes on desert worlds such as Goru-Prime.

Each shipmaster waited for their assigned turn to unload their cargo of war materiel, in fulfilment of hereditary treaties and planetary tithes. Failure could bring swift retribution upon their worlds. A purging crusade. A mob of frateris militia. A precision warhead taking out the upper mile of a hive, allowing a new, more compliant elite to be formed with Munitorum approval. But as the queues of warp-craft grew longer and the wait stretched out, the crews of each ship were faced with a terrible choice.

Some dumped their cargos and turned rogue, fleeing into the black rather than face justice at home. Some abandoned ship. The dutiful starved to death, their ghost-ships hanging in space until gravity slowly tugged them down into a fiery death.

At the orbital unloading depots, penal serfs were worked to death. But the continent-wide subterranean warehouses on the planet’s surface had long since surpassed capacity. There were towering silos of blood plasma, columns of Baneblades, mountains of munitions, millions of troopers stuffed into increasingly cramped and foetid conditions.

There was nowhere to unload and no way shipmasters could go back to their homeworlds with their tithes unfulfilled. And yet more freight-craft were arriving, their hangars packed full of war materiel for a battlefront that had already been lost.

Until a few years earlier, Malouri had been a critical hub in the web of supply routes that equipped the eternal warzone of the Cadian Gate. But Cadia had fallen. It was as if a drainage pipe deep in some hive had been blocked. Sewage was backing up by the hour while the arthritic wheels of the Imperium of Man ground on regardless, trapped in ruts worn ten thousand years deep.

There was no official news, of course. No word of the calamity that had befallen the worlds of the Cadian Gate. But there were always rumours. They spoke of the rout of whole sectors of Imperial control. An Imperium both rotten and decayed. The abject failure of their masters.

The truth of these rumours meant they had to be suppressed mercilessly. There were draconian punishments for even knowing someone who might have heard such dreadful whispers. Each morning, more offenders were strung up along the lines of barrack gibbets. But, as pus seeps from a wound, the truth was getting out.

The Cadian Gate had fallen. Malouri was a depot world without a war to supply.

Father Eris Bellona, a short, bearded priest attached to an Imperial Guard regiment of Elnaur Chasseurs, changed all that.

It should be clear: Father Bellona was no heretic seduced by whispers and lies. He was a veteran of many years and many battlefields. He had bled many times for the Emperor of Mankind. He knew enough of the Imperium to know that what he was being told was a lie.

The scale of the catastrophe froze his blood. The future of humanity hung by a fraying thread.

Sometimes, isolation from the madness brought clear thought. He withdrew to his cell, meditating on the perilous state of the Imperium of Man. A solution began to make itself clear to him. Nebulous ideas solidified. The logic of his reasoning led him to a cold understanding.

He spent a further fortnight in bouts of extreme fasting and devout prayer. On the last night, a glowing yellow light appeared in the air above his head. It was a golden skull, gleaming as if brightly polished, the inset diamond eyes radiant with an inner light. It spoke to him with words of sublime portent and meaning.

There was only one way that the Imperium could survive this calamity. Mankind would break free at last from the shackles that bound its mind and faith. The words he was to write would be the seed from which a new Imperium would grow.

The enormity of this endeavour chilled him. It made his hand tremble with fear and exhilaration. The responsibility was like a hab-block pressing down upon his shoulders. He was an unworthy vessel for the Emperor’s love.

But he had been given the sign. The Emperor had come to him. From disaster, a new dawn might arise.

With tear-filled eyes, Father Bellona drew up a sheet of parchment and began to write.

He was inspired. He was honest. He was well-intentioned.

His ideas would cost the lives of billions.

II

The Astra Militarum headquarters on Malouri were located on the island fortress of Crannog Mons. That morning, black carrion birds squabbled over the rotting cadavers that hung in ranks of gibbets thousands strong. The stink of death hung in the air, and in the vast square before the towering Cathedral to Saint Helena Richstar, the Elnaur Chasseurs stood in their polished breastplates, plumed helmets and ceremonial cloaks, waiting for the morning’s execution.

It was a matter of great pride to their commander, Lord-Marshal Holzhauer, that none of his Chasseurs had been gathered up in the purges of wrong-think. The Chasseurs were a proud regiment drawn from their home world’s nobility. They lived by their own rigid code of honour and he had turned any heretic-catchers away from their camp. If there was any crime in their midst, they dealt with it themselves, as they were doing so this morning.

The convicted trooper had been found guilty of theft – a minor misdemeanour for other regiments, but to the Chasseurs it spoke of dishonour. The only way to deal with such a crime was execution. The condemned man no longer had a name. He had eschewed that when he committed his crime. But even now, as a non-person, he stood to attention, conscious that the manner of his death would affect the future of his brothers and nephews back on their home world of Elnaur.

As the executioner pulled the knotted thongs of the wire scourge through his gloved hand to loosen them, the thief’s silver-braided uniform was cut in strips from his body, to symbolise how the whip would flay the skin from his back.

‘In the name of the Holy Emperor,’ the executioner called out, looking to the commander, Lord-Marshal Holzhauer, for permission to begin the ritual flaying.

‘Commence,’ Holzhauer declared.

He stood apart from his officers to watch the man’s slow and bloody execution. Holzhauer was a staunch veteran, and he looked down on the convicted trooper without pity or regret, only the hard stare of reproach. It was a matter of pride to him that the Chasseurs handled their own affairs. The Commissariat would not be needed to maintain order while he lived.

His Chasseurs were the bones upon which his reputation had grown. And iron discipline was the force that made them fear him more than any foe they had yet faced.

‘And, unlike the Cadians,’ Holzhauer liked to say, ‘I have never lost a battle.’

When the punishment had finished, the Elnaur Chasseurs turned and marched under the gothic façade of the Cathedral of Saint Helena Richstar, back to their barracks halls.

The corpse was cut down from the whipping post and dragged away, leaving a pool of blood on the floor. Holzhauer turned his back on the mess, and as he did so his attendant aides-de-camp and officers did likewise, their smartly polished boots coming to a smart at-ease.

‘A good death,’ Adjutant Lehr remarked.

Holzhauer made no response. His thin lips remained sealed, his closely shaved cheeks as cold and blue as freshly whetted steel. The conversation died. The officers followed their commander’s gaze.

Holzhauer was watching a black-robed figure march across the square towards them. The priest was not dressed in their usual barracks garb but in full battle dress – battered carapace breastplate and shoulder guards over his dark vestment and silk surplice embroidered with a golden skull.

As Father Bellona reached the doors of the cathedral, he pulled his pistol from its holster and used the butt to hammer a nail into the faded wooden doorway. It took only five sharp cracks before the deed was done. A scrap of parchment fluttered like a struggling prisoner beneath the nail.

An Ecclesiarchy adept had come running at the sound of the banging – a bald and hunched figure in his forties with the air of an over-officious clerk. ‘Heresy!’ he shouted. ‘These words are heresy!’

Lord-Marshal Holzhauer lifted a finger and one of his aides stepped forward to hold the adept back.

The adept managed to get a few strangled shouts out. ‘Stop this!’ Holzhauer heard. The lord-marshal took no notice. He would decide what was or was not to happen here.

Holzhauer stepped forward to where the parchment still tugged against the nail, caught in the morning breeze.

The Imperium is a dying man. Filled with cancerous growths, the rot comes not from its body… but from the head itself. The Emperor’s regents have failed him.

The words written upon it were…

‘Heresy!’ the adept hissed in strangled horror.

‘Take the adept away!’ Holzhauer snapped.

The sound of scuffles rose behind him. The adept managed to get his mouth free. ‘Lord!’ he gasped. ‘These are the lies of the unclean!’

What Lord-Marshal Holzhauer read did not feel heretical. It seemed to express truths that he had never seen put into words before. ‘Silence!’ he ordered, and a backhanded blow from one of his aides enforced the command.

The words of Father Bellona outlined what had gone wrong with the Imperium of Mankind. They explained that with brutal surgery, a cleansing crusade and a return to the ways of the Saint Vandire, the Imperium of Man could be returned to vigorous health.

The thesis called for a military leader of great skill and purpose to lead the crusade. A warrior of faith and conviction and iron. The last chance to save the Imperium of Man.

Lord-Marshal Holzhauer considered all the skeins of fate that had come together in this moment. It seemed like divine providence that these words had been posted this day. That he should be here to read them.

He had never been defeated in battle. What greater proof did any have that he could be that warrior? With a moment’s consideration, could changed to should.

Holzhauer beckoned the priest forward. Father Bellona stood before him, boots set squarely onto the rockcrete, resolute and defiant. He looked emaciated. His cheeks were pinched. His swollen eyes stared out from his face. But there was an inner light that seemed to glow from within him that spoke of great holiness and purity.

‘There are many within the Imperium who would consider your thoughts heretical,’ Holzhauer stated. ‘Servants of the corrupt will try to destroy both you and your words. You will need a worthy protector.’

‘Are you that man?’ Bellona demanded.

‘I am,’ Holzhauer declared. With one swift motion he tore the parchment from the doorway. He turned to Adjutant Lehr. ‘Make copies of this and distribute them to my commanding officers. And ensure Father Bellona has my personal protection.’

Lehr bathed in the lord-marshal’s attention. ‘It shall be done as you command, my lord!’

Lord-Marshal Holzhauer felt a new sense of purpose. This was what he had been born for: to be the cleansing flame that would start the Imperium anew.

From the towers of the Cathedral of Saint Helena Richstar, the bells struck the hour. After, when the true cost was being tallied, the Munitorum would fix this point as the moment the Malouri Uprising began.

Part One

PART ONE

One

ONE

Sergeant Minka Lesk shaded her eyes as the bombardment resumed. This was her thirtieth day upon Malouri. She was ten miles back from the front, sitting on her Gryphonne IV Chimera armoured transport, but even here she could feel the ground shudder as the building roll of Earthshaker batteries warming up became a rolling thunder.

The fyceline smoke grew thicker and darker as battery after battery added to the onslaught. The target for this fury was five miles off, across the steel-grey waters: the island fortress of Crannog Mons, known to them as Traitor Rock.

Beneath her, the five-inch thick ceramite armour of her Chimera, The Saint, rattled like a tin can. This was what the Imperium of Mankind did. It channelled blunt might from thousands of worlds and focused it into one square mile of utter destruction.

For the rank and file of the Astra Militarum the effect was awe-inspiring. For the Cadians, who had seen war on a thousand planets, this was just the beginning.

It was five years since the whirlwind of the fall of Cadia had snatched Arminka Lesk up in its vortex. In that tumultuous time she had grown from a teenage Whiteshield to trooper to sergeant. She’d learnt many things with the Cadian Shock Troops. To kill in the name of the Emperor. To drink. To sleep anywhere. To own every room she walked into. To always twist the bayonet.

Now she was a young woman of twenty-one years with scars and bad memories and nightmares as twisted as the roiling swirls of the Eye of Terror. But she was still alive, and there was still fight within her yet.

That morning Minka was dressed in seasoned Cadian drab, her flak armour scuffed from action, her bull-pup Accatran-pattern lascarbine slung over her shoulder, a pair of grenades hanging from her webbing. Her tri-dome helmet lay next to her. Her sleeves were pushed up above her elbows.

An ornate tattoo had been worked into the skin of her forearm, with the symbol of her home fortress of Kasr Myrak surrounded by the motto Cadia Stands in High Gothic script.

Jaromir came up behind her. ‘Traitors?’ he said simply.

She nodded. Jaromir was a well-built giant with a mop of sandy hair. He’d been a handsome man once, but he’d taken a bolt shell to the head long before he was assigned to Minka’s squad. His injury had left him unable to express himself with ease. Sometimes his mouth stopped working, and he could not connect his thoughts together well. In the old days he’d have been retired to the reserves.

But despite his injuries, Jaromir could still strip a carbine, could still hit a bullseye at a hundred yards, and when given an order he responded with the sharpness of a new recruit. His training ran deep.

Orugi had been lying on the open rear access ramp, his helmet beside him. He sat up from the shade of the Chimera. ‘Nothing like a bombardment to wake you up,’ he said as he stood and stretched.

A klaxon rang. Minka slapped the Chimera’s front slabs of ­armour. ‘Come on! We’re moving out!’

Breve had been fretting over the machine-spirit ever since they’d landed. He made the sign of the aquila before engaging the engine-stud. ‘Here goes!’ he called out as he coaxed the Chimera’s machine-spirit to life. The first gritty puffs of promethium fumes began to splutter through the armoured slats that screened the twin exhaust pipes.

‘So far so good…’ Breve said, keeping the engine turning over. All across the camp, every trooper, every squad, every company of the Cadian 101st, ‘Hell’s Last’, was already moving with prompt efficiency.

Minka clambered back over the hull, dropping into one of the roof hatches and pulling the top closed to keep the dust out. The air-filters were already kicking in, blowing warmed air about their feet. It smelt of burning unguents.

‘Breve!’ Allun shouted. ‘Can we turn this thing off?’

Breve shouted something that Bergen, the front gunner, relayed into the cabin. ‘They’re overheating. If you need ventilation then open the hatches.’

Allun kicked the vents closed. ‘Last thing we need is cooking alive.’

They’d been on Malouri for four weeks, drilling incessantly and preparing themselves for the battle. There was a serious air to them now, underlined by the crackling static of orders that came through on the vox-unit.

It was routine traffic. Orders of the Day. Crude jokes. Mundane banter between the signal officers of the various companies. It went on and on until Colonel Sparker’s ident code cut through it all. All other voices fell silent.

‘General Bendikt commands.’ The attack on Traitor Rock was about to begin.

The interior of The Saint had been their home for years – mass produced, unadorned, utilitarian in every way, but home nevertheless. Every inch held some memory for Minka: the Black Five tally marks scratched over Baine’s head, old sentry rotas from their time on Potence, a few fading sketches of exercises on Crone B9 that she had engraved with her knife-blade, the scorch marks from when Dreno had accidentally discharged a las-bolt within the tight confines and miraculously no one had been more than alarmed and singed.

She took this all in. This was her squad and she was their leader, and they could not wait to get to grips with the enemy. It was not just her who felt it. A thrill went through the tight confines of The Saint. The months of travel and practice and training were over.

Even Baine sobered up. ‘So, this is it,’ he said.

Minka adjusted her helmet and slid the chin strap down. She nodded. ‘We’re going in.’

Two

TWO

Minka’s regiment, the Cadian 101st, ‘Hell’s Last’, had travelled to the planet of Malouri aboard the Endeavour-class cruiser Right of Will – a tough little scrapper that originally hailed from the shipyards orbiting Morten’s Quay, in the Agripinaa System.

The regiment had spent six months on the ice world of Crone B9. After successive campaigns on Potence, Leymas and Eastea, a spell of arctic training had raised their spirits. The air on Crone B9 was so still and quiet that they could hear the snow squeak under their boots.

Not only had it been cathartic, but it had allowed troopers from other Cadian regiments that had been decimated by action or considered ‘lesser’, to be easily merged into the 101st. Nothing but amasec and ice, they had joked as they swapped their stories and memories and melded their many pasts into a new whole.

Minka’s squad had been two short of the requisite ten. ‘I’ll fix that for you,’ Colour Sergeant Tyson promised as he stood with a clipboard and scribe. Minka was still wary of him. He was a short, bullish man with an overlarge chin that was always shaved so close it looked pale blue.

‘Here are your two,’ he said, and waved the men forward. The first was Thuja Baine, a square man with a boxer’s face. Baine was a rough, bare-knuckle fighter with ‘Cadia Stands’ and the Imperial aquila tattooed in a band about his arm. What remained of his nose had long since been smeared across the left side of his face and reset in a crooked V. Minka herself had broken it a few months back, sparring.

He was shorter than she remembered. From the colour in his cheeks it was clear that he remembered her as well. She was used to this.

‘Baine, is it?’ she smiled, not giving him a chance to speak. ‘Welcome to Seventh Company.’

If Baine held a grudge, he did not show it. He smiled and shook her hand. ‘Greetings, sarge.’

The other man was Elias Orugi, a poseur with a bald head and neatly trimmed black goatee. A solid looking trooper, he had a burn scar on his right cheek that had left the skin stretched. His right eye had been replaced with a cheap field-augmetic of bare steel and simple red targeting orb.

‘Plasma overheat,’ he said when he caught the look in her eyes, ‘on Potence. But I’ve retained my marksmanship. Marksman, First Class.’

‘Welcome to Seventh Company,’ Minka repeated. ‘Don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’re heading back to El’Phanor.’

El’Phanor was an ancient warrior world that was being brought back to life. It was also the headquarters of this section of Imperial Command.

‘Can’t wait!’ Baine said. But it turned out that Minka had spoken too soon. Their orders had been altered and they were diverted.

‘It’s an emergency, apparently,’ Colour Sergeant Tyson told the collected officers of the 101st. He had to try to buoy up their spirits. ‘Local commanders have made an Imperial mess of things. We’ll go in and bang some heads together.’

The Right of Will had a smooth passage through the warp.

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