'Just do it,' I'd said. For the opportunity to reach Pontius Glaw, I'd happily sacrifice prosthetic sophistication. All I needed was function.
Barbarisater trembled in my right fist as it sensed a bio-aura, but I relaxed. It was Kara Swole.
She jogged back down the chasm towards me, dressed in a tight, green armoured bodyglove and a thick, quilted flak coat. She had a dust visor on, and a fat-nosed compact handcannon slung over her shoulder.
'All right, boss?' she said
'I'm doing fine.'
'You look…'
'What?'
'Pissed off.'
'Thank you, Kara. I'm probably annoyed because you and Nayl are having all the fun taking point.'
'Well, Nayl thinks we should tighten up anyway'
I voxed back to the second element of our force. In less than two minutes, Eleena and Medea had joined us. Along side them came Lief Gustine and Korl Kraine, two men from Gideon's band who had subbed as reinforcements, as well as Gideon's mercenary archaeologist, Kenzer.
'Moving up/ I told them.
You managing okay, sir?' Eleena asked.
'I'm fine. Fine. I just wish you'd…' I stopped. 'I'm fine, thank you, Eleena.'
They were all still worried about me. It had only been three and half weeks since the carnage at Jeganda. I'd only been walking for five days. They all quietly agreed with Crezia's advice that I should still be in the infirmary and leaving this to Ravenor.
Well, that was the perk of being the boss. I made the damn decisions. But I shouldn't be angry with them for worrying. But for Kara and Eleena's frantic emergency work on the pinnace, I'd be dead. I'd crashed twice. Eleena, the only one whose blood-type matched mine, had even made last minute donations.
Pulled apart at the seams, my band was pulling together tighter than ever.
'Let's pick up the pace,' I said. 4Ve don't want Nayl and Ravenor to have all the glory.'
After you, Ironhoof/ Medea said. Kara sniggered, but pretended she was having trouble with her filter mask.
'I can't imagine why you think you can get away with that nickname,' 1 said.
We heard the shuriken catapult buzzing again. It was close, the sound rolling back to us around the maze of die gorge.
'Someone's having a party,' said Gustine. Bearded, probably to help disguise the terrible scarring that seemed to cover his entire skin, Gustine was an ex-guardsman turned ex-pit fighter turned ex-bounty hunter turned
Inquisition soldier. He said he came from Raas Bisor in the Segmentum Tempestus, but I didn't know where that was. Apart from that it was in the Segmentum Tempestus. Gustine wore heavyweight grey ablative armour and carried a old, much-repaired standard IG lasrifle.
He'd been with Ravenor for a good many years, so I trusted him.
The whizzing sounds echoed again, overlapping with laser discharges.
'Ravenor's friends/ Medea said. None of us were comfortable about the eldar. Six of them had arrived on Gideon's ship as a bodyguard for the farseer. Tall, too tall, inhumanly slender, silent, keeping themselves to the part of the ship assigned them. Aspect warriors, Gideon had called them, whatever that meant. The plumed crests on their great, curved helmets had made them seem even taller once they were in armour.
They'd deployed to the surface with Ravenor, the seer lord and three more of Ravenor's band.
A third strike team of six under Ravenor's senior lieutenant Rav Skynner, was advanced about a kilometre to our west.
Ghul, or 5213X to give it its Carto-Imperialis code, was nothing like I had imagined it. It didn't at all resemble the arid world I had glimpsed in Maria Tarray's mind, the dried-out husk where primaeval cities lay buried under layers of ash. I suppose that was because all I'd seen was her own imagined view of the place. She'd never seen it. She hadn't lived long enough to get the chance.
I wondered if Ghul matched the farseer's vision. Probably. The eldar seemed unnecessarily precise bastards to me.
We'd approached the world in a wide, stealthy orbit. The
Ghul itself was invisible. Or nearly invisible. I have never seen a world that seemed so much to be not there. It was a shadow against the starfield, a faintly discernable echo of matter. Even on the sunward side, it lacked any real form. It appeared to soak up light and give nothing back.
When Cynia Preest, Ravenor's ship-mistress, had brought us the first surface scans to study, we thought she was showing us close up pictures of a child's toy.
'It's a maze/ I remember saying.
'A puzzle… like an interlock/ Ravenor decided.
'No, a carved fruit pit/ Medea had said.
We had all looked at her. 'The works of the Lord on the heart of a stone?' she asked. 'Anybody?'
'Perhaps you'd explain?' I'd said.
So she had. A some length, until we grasped the idea. The hermits of Glavia, so it seems, thought no greater expression of their divine love for the Emperor could be made than to inscribe the entire Imperial Prayer onto the pits of sekerries. A sekerry, we learned, was a soft, sweet summer
fruit that tasted of quince and nougat. A bit like a shirnapple, we were reliably informed. The pits were the size of pearls.
Thankfully, no one had made the mistake of asking what a shirnapple was.
'I don't know how they do it/ Medea had gone on. They do it by eye, with a needle, They can't even see, I don't think. But they used to show us liths of the carved pits, magnified, in scholam. You could read every word! Every last word! The works of the Lord on the heart of a stone. All laced together, tight and compact, using every corner of the space. We were taught that the prayer pits were one of the Nineteen Wonders of Glavia and that we should be proud.'
'Nineteen Wonders?' Cynia had asked.
'Golden Throne, woman, don't get her started!' I had cried out. But there had indeed been something in Medea's comparison. The surface of Ghiil had been engraved, that's what it looked like. A perfect black sphere, engraved across its entire surface with tight, deep, interlocking lines. In reality, each of those lines was a smooth sided gorge, two hundred metres wide and nine hundred metres deep.
I wondered about Medea's description. I remembered the chart we had witnessed during the auto-seance on Promody, and the way dear Aemos's notes had taken on the same scrolling forms of the chart as he struggled to decipher it.
Ghiil could very well be engraved, I decided. The warped ones' entire culture, certainly their language, had been built upon expressions of location and place. I imagined that the inscribed wall we had seen during the auto-seance had been part of just such a maze of lines, from a time when Promody had looked like Ghiil, the capital world.
Cynia Preest's sensors had located heat and motion traces on the surface. We'd assembled the teams, and prepared for planetfall. The
