sent when it can.’
‘You’ve murdered us, then,’ she spat. ‘You damned dogs! You’ve murdered–’
I cut the feed. I couldn’t listen to any more.
Slowly, though, over days and weeks, we built up what defences we could. The orbital grid remained mostly intact even as we lost contact with roughly a quarter of the planetary surface. The priests of Mars, less susceptible to mortal weakness, lent us what aid they could, though I suspect they were also terrified about the precariousness of Mars. Our battleships maintained a tight cordon throughout the Sol System, plying the cold depths even as the Throneworld withered under preternatural flames.
On the twentieth day of the Blindness came two developments that gave us hope. The first was a flight of silver-grey landers dropped from a strike cruiser newly locked in geostation over the Palace. The occupants of those craft were dispatched directly into the heart of the Sanctum, striding in pale grey robes beneath the bloody storm-light.
I witnessed their arrival from a long way away, but even a distant glimpse of Grey Knights gave my tired old soul a brief spike of exhilaration. In times past that sight would have seen me mind-wiped, or perhaps killed, but those old strictures seemed pointless now and I did not fear them. They were going to confer with Valoris himself, I understood, and thence to the walls themselves. I could not tell you how many had come. Perhaps fifty? It was not what we needed, but I was mindful of Arx’s words, and knew that their greatest strength had been mustered close by. Still, it was something.
The second cause for hope was less visible. Had Arx not said anything I might never have known of it, but once the seed had been planted I was relentless in tracking it down. My agents were sent into every sensor station we still controlled, sifting through millions of planetfall records and orbital transfer dockets. The more we looked, the more we found.
They had been careful, and they had been discreet, but it’s very hard to keep secrets entirely on Terra from someone who knows where to look. Sisters of Silence had been landed for months, sometimes from Black Ships, other times from chartered transports or military convoys. They had disappeared into the Tower of Hegemon, where the trail had died.
I wondered who else knew about it. Had Valoris informed his fellow High Lords yet? Perhaps some of them had been in on this for a long time, merely playing along with the rest of the Council. In ordinary times I would have delved for more, but the knowledge that they were here was enough. It gave me some comfort to know that it was not just the Enemy who had been preparing – others had foreseen the darkening of the skies and had set plans in motion to counter it.
But I doubt that any living soul on this world, save perhaps He who dwells on the undying Throne, had any true conception of what was coming for us next. The Grey Knights, by whatever means they used to peer into the murk of the future, had been closest to the truth – Luna, not Terra, was the first target hit. All we knew of it here was a sudden flash of multihued light that briefly pierced the gyre of clouds above us.
I had been high up in my private sanctum, scouring the day’s many piles of frantic missives. Jek was with me, as always, and the candles were burning low. Suddenly, shafts of vivid illumination lanced through the high windows, breaking on the stone flags. Both of us dropped what we were doing and raced to the iron-barred windows. Jek gasped out loud. I dropped my quill. We could see the stars.
I should explain why that was so remarkable. I had never seen stars on Terra. None of us had – the toxic cloud cover was absolute, all the time, and had been for thousands of years. Now, though, we were staring into a night sky of flickering, dancing aurorae, torn open for the first time in living memory. I saw the hulls of the low-orbit defence platforms at guard over the world-city, their undersides blinking with markers and their position thrusters churning blue-white. I saw millions of military aircraft in stark relief, zigzagging across tortured skies on strafing runs against our own kind. But most of all, I saw the moon – Luna, our great naval dockyard, by reputation as dirt-grey and damaged