interlaced into an armoured garment. Beneath it, 1 could glimpse a body of burnished chrome, duralloy and steel, a mechanical humanoid body of marvellous design.
The work of Magos Geard Bure, I had no doubt. The late Geard Bure.
This is was Khanjar the Sharp. The man-machine… the 'living blade' from the eldar vision. Pontius Glaw.
I could see his face. It was the face of a beautiful young man with a mane of curled hair, but the hair didn't move and the expression didn't alter from a curling smirk. It was a mask worked from gold, like the head of a noble gilded statue. I had seen the face before, in old records that showed Pontius Glaw in his prime.
There was no sound, but Glaw said something to his point man. Then he turned and seemed to address someone or something we couldn't see.
There was a long pause as they waited and then the ogryn shuffled back, as if alarmed by something. The point man set his auspex to close focus. Glaw stood still as if awestruck for a moment, then clapped his metal hands in delight.
'I can't see what they're doing…' Kenzer said.
There's nothing there to see/ Gideon snapped in disappointment. That seemed to be the case. There was a faint visual distortion where the psychic ghost of the location failed to match its real counterpart exactly. But nothing else.
'No/ I said suddenly. 'I think there is. Get your astropaths to widen the field of the seance/
'What?' Gideon asked.
'Just do it/
With a little effort, Ravenor's telepaths managed to increase the diameter of the conjured scene. Almost at once, were able to make out shadowy figures lurking around the edge.
'Psykers!' said Gideon.
'Exactly/ I said. 'The reason we can't see what he's up to is because he did what we're doing!'
'An auto-seance.'
That's right.'
'How did you guess, Gregor?'
'Mr Kenzer here said there were no ancient remains on Promody. Glaw has to be looking for the past by other means.'
'But we can't resolve what it is he's seeing.
'Go back,' said a voice behind us. Silently, the eldar seer had joined us on the walkway.
'Go back,' he said again.
It took a few minutes for the astropaths to compose themselves and reestablish the image. Now I could feel the eldar's mental strength supporting them.
We watched as the scene replayed. The three figures approached us just as before. Glaw conversed with his point man and then called back to his psykers.
The world changed.
There was no jungle. No water. Great, smooth cliffs of rock blocked out the sky. Stone columns like giant fir trees towered over us. We were seeing what Glaw's psykers had allowed him to see. The surface of Promody as it had been eons before the age of man. A cyclopean city of glassy black rock that had long since vanished so completely only its psychic phantom remained.
'God-Emperor!' Kenzer gasped and collapsed in a faint. It was terrifying. Mesmeric. The scale was so big. We felt like microbes or motes of dust on the streets of an Imperial hive.
I stared, fascinated. Now when the ogryn shuffled back in fear and Glaw stood awestruck, I could see why. Glaw dapped his hands in delight and the point man began scanning a wide section of the ghostly wall with his auspex.
'There's an inscription!' Ravenor cried.
I leapt off the walkway and waded through the oily water until I was beside the images of Glaw and his men. We need to get this before it fades!' I shouted. Ravenor flew his chair in over the water to join me. Recording sensors in his chair began to whir and store the images.
They were written in a language I had never seen before. It made me sick to look at it. There was no linear form. It simply spiralled and meandered up across the massive wall face, looping and circling.
I felt dizzy. Glaw was capering and dancing like a lunatic, his machine body lurching and awkward.
The light around us began to wink and flicker.
We're losing it/ said Ravenor.
'Probably time we did…' I said, stumbling back towards the walkway.
The colossal city melted away. Then Glaw and his companions vanished and blue light ebbed away.
Ravenor's telepaths were slumped on the walkways, exhausted. The eldar stood, head bowed.
'It looked like a chart.'
'It was a chart/ said the eldar. 'A plan of the seven worlds. And on it was the location of Ghul/
Pontius Glaw knew where he was going. He'd known for some weeks. He might already have arrived.
It took Ravenor and the lord seer about a day to make sense of the findings. Allowing for procession and sidereal shifts as best they could considering the vast passage of time involved, they determined that the world known before the time of man as Ghul was in an uncharted system designated 5213X, three months outside Imperial space and twenty weeks from our current location.
We made preparation to break orbit the following night. Ravenor explained to me that the eldar had requested to be taken to a secret location en route, where he could access something called a warp tunnel. Ravenor was beholden to him.
We agreed to rendezvous at Jeganda, three weeks short of 5213X, prior to the final leg of our chase.
'Do we inform the ordos?' Ravenor asked.
'No. What strength they could lend us would be outweighed by problems they'd cause. I will prepare a full documented account of everything we know to be transmitted back in the event that we…'
'We?'
'Fail/1 finished.
Before we departed, I dared to visit Ravenor's ship, the
Crezia and Harlon hung back by the hatchway.
Alizebeth looked like she was asleep. Her skin was as pale as the snows of the high Atenates.
'Is she alive?' I asked Antribus.
'Yes, sir/
'I mean… without these vital supports, the stasis field-?'
'If we shut them down, she may remain the way she is. But she might also fade. It is never easy to tell in cases of such significant injury/
'Will she recover?' I asked.
'No/ he said, caring enough to look me in the eyes. 'Except for some miracle.
