'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.