by Dan Abnett
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.
Your lord seer?
Send again. I didn't make that out.
Nothing, Gideon. We're going to try and come round on your flank, around the north-east intersection of the gorge.
Understood.
Come on! I urged. The others all jumped, all except Eleena, and I realised I was still
using my psyche. Sloppy. I was tired and in pain. Still no excuse.
'My apologies,' I said, vocal again. 'We're moving forward. This chasm turns south-west and intersects with two others. Target site's at the junction, so Gideon reckons/
We hurried forward, moving through the steep shadow of the gorge.
'Glory be!' exclaimed Kenzer suddenly. He was looking up.
Bright flashes lit up the starry sky framed by the sides of the chasm. They washed back and forth like spills of milk in ink. Alerted to our presence, Glaw's starship had presented for combat and the Hinterlight was answering. Vast blinks of light lit up the sky like a strobe.
'I wouldn't wanna be up there/ said Korl Kraine. Kraine was a hiver who'd never served in any formal militia. His allegiance was to Ravenor first and to the underclan of Tanhive Nine, Tansetch, second and last. He was a short, pale man wearing patched and cut-off flak-canvas. His skin was dyed with clan colours and his eyes were cheap augments. He wore a string of human teeth around his neck, which was ironic as his own teeth were all made of ceramite.
Kraine raised his night-sighted Tronsvasse autorifle to his shoulder and scurried forward. He'd lived in a lightless warren of city all his life until Ravenor recruited him. This gloom suited him.
The sound of catapults grew louder. There were several of them at work now, buzzing out a duet with heavyweight lasguns. I heard the gritty thump of a grenade.
Kenzer, the archaeologist, was lagging. He wasn't part of Ravenor's official troop, merely an expert paid to help out on Promody. I didn't like him much. He had no fibre and no real commitment.
I didn't need to read his mind to see that he was only here for the potential fortune a few exclusive academic papers about the Ghiil discovery could make him.
'Hurry up!' I yelled at him. My back was getting tired and the blood in my mouth was back again.
Kenzer was hunched down at the base of the chasm side, fidgeting with his hand-scanner.
I called a halt and stomped back to him, my heavy boots, reinforced with the brace's metal frame, kicking up soot. Ironhoof, indeed!
I believed my greatest annoyance wasn't the brace-frame or its weight or the lumpen gait I was forced to adopt, not even the non-specific haemorrhage that was seeping into my mouth.
No, the worst thing was my cold scalp.
I really couldn't get used to it. Crezia had been obliged to shave my head in order to implant the cluster of neural and synaptic cables that would drive the augmetic frame around my legs. She had been upset all through the implant procedure. It really was terribly crude, even by basic Imperial standards. But out in the middle of nowhere at all, it had been the best she and Antribus could cobble together.
Needs must, as they say.
I was bald, and the back of my skull was raw, sore and clotted with the multiple implant jacks of the sub-spine feeds my faithful medicaes had installed to make my leg frame work. The steel-jacketed cables sprouted from my scalp and ran down my back into the lumbar servo of the walking brace. The bunched cables were flesh-stapled to my back, like a neat, augmetic ponytail.
I would get used to it, in time. If there was time. If there wasn't, what the hell did it matter?
I stopped beside Kenzer, throwing a hard shadow over him.
'What are you doing?'
'Making a recording, sir/ he gabbled. 'There's a marking here. The carved walls we've seen so far have been blank/
I peered down. It was difficult to bend.
'Where?'
He pulled a puffer-brash out of his kit-pack and blew the soot away.
There!'
A small spiral. Cut into the smooth face of the rock.
It looked like a tiny version of the chart we'd seen on Promody, or a really tiny version of the mazed surface of this planet.
'Record it quickly and move on/ I told him. I turned away. 'Let's go/ I called over my shoulder curtly.
Kenzer screamed. There was a flurry of las-fire.
I wheeled back immediately. Kenzer was sprawled on the floor of the gorge, ripped apart by laser shots. He was only partially articulated, such had been the point blank ferocity of the shots. The wide puddle of blood seeping from his carcass was soaking into the soot.
There was no sign of any attacker.
'What the hell?' Barbarisater was in my hand and had been purring, but now it was dull.
Nayl dropped close to me, his matt-black hellgun sweeping the area of the corpse.
'How in the name of Terra did that happen?' he asked. 'Lief? Korl? Upside?'
I looked back. Gustine and Kraine were walking backwards slowly, scoping up at the cliff tops of the gorge.
'Nothing. No shooters above/ Gustine reported.
I slapped my palm against the cold stone face of the gorge above the marking Kenzer had found. It was unyielding.
We moved forward, following the sweep of the chasm. Kraine was covering our backs. After we'd gone about fifty metres, he suddenly cried out.
I turned in time to see him in a face-to-face gunfight with two Vessorine janissaries in full carapace-wear. Kraine staggered backwards as he was hit repeatedly in the torso, but managed to keep firing. He put a burst of rounds through the face plate of one of the Vessorines before the other one made the kill shot and dropped him into the soot.
Nayl and Medea were already firing. The remaining Vessorine swung his aim and squeezed off another salvo, winging both Eleena and Nayl.
Then he walloped over onto his back as Kara's cannon ripped him apart.
'See to them!' I ordered, pointing Medea at Nayl and Eleena. Nayl had been skinned across the left arm and Eleena had a flesh wound on her left shin. Both kept insisting they were fine. Medea opened his kitbag for field dressings.
I looked at the corpses, Kraine and the Vessorines. Gustine appeared beside me. 'Where the jesh did they come from?' he asked.
I didn't answer. I drew my runestaff over my head out of its leather boot, and gripped it tightly as I focused my force at the gorge wall. Soot and the debris of eons puffed out, and I saw another spiral mark in the wall like the one Kenzer had found.
'Charts,' I said.
'What, sir?' asked Lief.
I bent down, spitting on my fingers then rubbing my hand across the spiral marks. I tried to ignore the fact that there was a smear of blood in the spittle.
'No wonder Ravenor couldn't find a door. We're not seeing this in the right dimension.'
'Pardon me, but what the craphole are you talking about?' asked Lief. 1 liked him. Always honest.
'The warped ones understood location and moment in way we can't imagine. They were, after all, warped. We see this as a geometric network of mathematically precise chasms, a maze. But it's not. It's four dimensional…'
'Four?' Gustine began, uncertainly
'Oh, four, six, eight… who knows? Think of it this way, like a… a woven garment!
'A woven garment, sir?'
Yes, all those thick, intertwined threads, such a complex pattern.'
'All right…'
'Now imagine the knitting needles that made it. Just the needles. Big and hard and simple.'
'Okay…' said Medea, joining us.
'This planet is simply the knitting needles. Hard, rigid, simple. The reality of Ghiil is the garment woven from it, something we can't see, something complex and soft, interlaced round the needles.'
'I'm sorry, sir, you've lost me/ Lief Gustine said.
'Lost/ I said. 'That's damn right. These marks on the wall. They're like mini charts, explaining how the overall reality can be accessed and exited/
Ghustine nodded as if he understood. 'Right… so, going back, where the jesh did the janissaries come from?' he asked.
I slapped the hard wall.
'There. Right there/
'But it's solid rock!'
'Only to us/1 said.
As we moved on again, down the gorge, we formed a pack that covered all sides, like phalanx of spearmen from the old ages of warfare. The soun
ds of Ravenor's battle had become frenetic. Nayl reported grimly that he couldn't raise Skynner or any of his force any more.
We all hunted the walls for further carvings
'Here, sir! Here!' Kara sang out.
I ran over to the spiral cut she had found. 'Wait/1 ordered.
Like an eye blinking, the smooth rock opened. Suddenly it just wasn't there. A Vessorine janissary in combat carapace pushed out, weapon raised.
Nayl had him cold, felling him with a single shot. But there were more behind the first.
Medea started shooting. Two more meres had blinked out of the gorge wall on the far side of us.
There was no cover. No damn cover at all.
In a moment, we were fired on from a third angle.
I had already drawn the big Hecuter autopistol I had borrowed from the Hinterlight's arsenal. Gustine's old las was cracking away beside me and Eleena was emptying her pistol's extended clip on semi-automatic.
They'd just been poaching us up until now. This was a full scale ambush. I counted at least fifteen janissaries, as well as an ogryn with a heavy weapon. Nayl went down, hit in the thigh, but he kept blasting. A las round sparked bluntly against the heavy brace on my left leg.
Time to reset the odds.
'Cherabael!' I commanded.
It had been drifting high above the gorge, trailing us like a kite, but now it descended, gathering speed, beginning to shine.
I had been much more careful in my design of this daemonhost. Elaborating on the basic and hasty ritual construction Aemos and I had wrought in those last few minutes aboard the Essene, I had supplemented the wards and rune markings on its flesh to reinforce its obedience. This daemonhost would not be permitted to have any of the capricious guile of the previous versions. It would not rebel. It would not be a maverick that had to be watched at all times. It was bound and locked with triple wards, totally subservient. I liked to think I could learn from my mistakes, at least sometimes.
Of course, there was a price to pay for such security. This Cherubael could manifest much less power, a direct consequence of its reinforced bindings. But it had enough. More than enough.
It swept down the gorge, warp-flame trailing from its upright body, and demolished one group of attackers in a blurry storm of aether. To their credit, the Vessorines didn't scream. But they broke and started to fall back.