Dan Abnett - Eisenhorn Omnibus

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 Hinterlight was equipped with disguise fields that Ravenor was reluctant to explain to me but which I felt were partly created by his own, terrifyingly strong will. High band sensors had located a starship in tight orbit, a rogue trader of some considerable size that didn't appear to realise we were there.

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 Hinterlight's ship-mistress had been told to line up on the enemy's ship and stand ready to take it out.

Our three vessels, my pinnace and two shuttles from Ravenor's stable, had sunk low into the thin atmosphere and skimmed across the perfect, geometric surface, their shadows flitting across the flat black sections and the deep chasms.

We'd put down in adjacent gorges near the target zone.

The first surprise had been that the air was breathable. We'd all brought vacuum suits and rebreathers.

'How is that possible?' Eleena had asked.

'I don't know.'

'But it's so unlikely… I mean it's unfeasible,' she had stammered.

'Yes, it is.'

The second surprise had been the discovery that Medea was right.

Kenzer had knelt down with his auspex at the side of the gorge, studying microscopically the relationship between chasm floor and chasm wall.

I didn't need him to tell me they were perfect. Smooth. Exact. Machined. Engraved.

'The angle between floor and wall is ninety degrees to a margin of accuracy that… well, it is so precise, it goes off my auspex's scale. Who… who could do a thing like this?' Kenzer had gasped.

The hermits of Glavia?' Medea had cracked.

'If they had fusion beams, starships, a spare planet and unlimited power supplies,' I had said. 'Besides, tell me this: who polished the planet smooth before they started?'

We moved down the gorge. It curved gently to the west, like an old river, deep cut in its banks. Long before on KCX-1288, facing the sarathi, I had been disconcerted by the lack of angular geometry. Now I was disturbed by the reverse. Everything was so damned precise, squared off, unmarked and unblemished. Only a faint sooty deposit in the wide floor of the trench suggested any antiquity at all.

We caught up with Nayl.

'They know we're here/ he said, referring to the sounds of battle in the nearby gorge.

'Any idea of numbers?' I asked.

'Not a thing, but Skynner's mob has found trouble too. Vessorines, so he reckon, wrapped up in carapace suits and loaded for bear.'

"We'd best be careful then/

I tried Ravenor, using my mind instead of my intervox.

Status?

THE ASPECTS HAVE-

Whoa, whoa, whoa… quieter, Gideon.

Sorry. I forget sometimes you-

I what?

You're hurt, I meant to say. The aspect warriors have engaged. It's quite busy here.

I could feel the sub-surface twinges of power as he channelled his mind into his force chair's psi-cannons.

Opposition? I sent.

Vessorine janissaries and some other heterodox meres. We-

He broke off. There was a grinding wash of distortion for a moment.

Sorry, he sent. Some sort of fusion weapon. They certainly don't want us in here.

In where?

He broadcast a sequence of map co-ordinates and I took the map-slate out of Nayl's hands and punched them in.

A structure, Ravenor sent. Ahead of us, south-west of you. It's built into the end pier of one of the gorge junctions. Although I can't see how. There are no doors. The Vessorine are coming out of somewhere, though. There must be a hidden entrance.

More distortion. Then he floated back to me.

The Vessorine are fighting like maniacs. My lord seer says they have already earned the respect of the aspects.