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.