Leontus: Lord Solar, page 7
His final prayer was more personal, and tinged with regret.
‘God-Emperor. As your humble servant I beg you to bestow your grace on Tempestor Ignaci Udon, Sergeant Tobin Sherudev, and troopers Hautin and Longinus, for their service in your name, and their sacrifice that I might live.’
The last moments aboard his Aquila lander flashed before his eyes. Smoke. Blood. Fire. Hard rounds stitching a line of sparks and searing metal through the compartment, before an ork missile bit through the reinforced bulkheads like an ocean predator tearing flesh from its prey. Shouting orders to Fleetmaster Emmin over the screeching vox when Ignaci tackled him from the holo-table, saving him from the barking gunfire that blew the table apart. Being pushed into the saviour pod that had been retrofitted for this exact purpose as fire consumed the shuttle, and then falling…
He let out a long, slow, controlled breath and tried to visualise the tension leaving his body, just as his personal physicians had once taught him, and applied cold logic to the challenges ahead as he looked out across the sleeping forms on the cavern floor below.
Belgutei’s mind was still adrift on a melancholic sea; Leontus had lit the torch on a distant shore, but it would be up to the Attilan to navigate his own path through the turbulent waters of fatalism. It hadn’t felt good to lie to the Attilan about his reasons for needing to take the space port, even if it had just been a lie of omission, but it had been necessary. He had no intention of leaving Fortuna Minor, but Belgutei and his men were Leontus’ greatest resource; if the Attilan could find his way clear of his spiritual ennui then they would be a swift hammer, capable of bringing even the mightiest of foes to their knees.
Lying had never come naturally to him, but it was a skill he had been forced to hone in order to survive courtly life in the Imperial Palace, where a man as powerful as the Lord Solar had to watch his allies as vigilantly as his enemies. He had learned to lace a lie with enough truth to make it believable, weaving facts through the fiction to create a rich tapestry where one thread couldn’t be separated from another. In the more humble surroundings of Fortuna Minor, the deceit left a sour taste on his tongue.
Belgutei’s men appeared to have taken their sergeant’s decision as well as could be hoped for, but the next day would see how many remained by their sergeant’s side. It wouldn’t be unheard of or unexpected for at least one to desert their post, but Leontus prayed that his words to the Attilan might be enough for them to be swayed.
Arnetz stirred as Csaba returned from his turn on watch, barely visible to Leontus from her shadowed niche above Raust’s prone form. Like most of the people of her world, her brash exterior concealed hidden depths and an unbending spirit, adding dimensions to the muscle-bound caricatures some believed Catachans to be. She saw and understood more than others might perceive, which made her a useful resource beyond her value as a skilled medicae.
What he needed now was to understand the scale of the enemy they faced: their numbers, their disposition and their locations. In doing so, he might also discover the fate of any Imperial survivors, be they in captivity or in hiding just as he was, and the opportunities that they might present.
At dawn, he would head out with some of Belgutei’s riders to scout the surrounding area and gather the information he needed.
Then he could plan his war.
Leontus led the scouting party out before dawn, following the path of the river through the canyon under the grey light of a new day on Fortuna Minor. The last vestiges of night fled to the deepest corners of the canyon to await their turn to dominate the land once more.
Leontus had ordered that the scout party forgo the horses’ barding and armour, preferring speed over battlefield durability; if they were caught by orks in any great numbers, there would be little chance of fighting their way clear. Escape would be the better option. It also helped that Arnetz had volunteered to remain behind, ostensibly to guard the cavern and to watch over Raust, but also because she would only slow them down as they scouted the surroundings. Csaba had been more reluctant to stay, but the young Attilan had done as he was ordered.
‘You know what we need,’ Leontus said as he halted the riders, looking out over a bank of thick mist that drifted over the water’s surface and out across the plateau. ‘Don’t engage. Don’t get caught. Don’t return to the cavern before dark.’
Nomak and Rugen made noises of assent and rode away into the mist together; they knew their role and what was expected of them. On the face of it, they were to scout the eastern bank of the lake and mark any notable settlements or structures on the plains below, whilst Leontus did the same to the west with Belgutei. In truth, it was a test, and one that Leontus hoped they wouldn’t fail.
He rode to the edge of the plateau with Belgutei, where the cold wind from the mountain had begun to clear the morning mist into a whirling haze. It rolled over the contours of the hills down towards the plains, filling the crevasses and dried river cuts as if they weren’t there, and settled in the shadowed contours of the foothills miles below. Leontus’ eyes flicked to the brightening sky, the dull grey crystallising into a cloudless blue that would have matched the colour of his uniform had it not been caked in dust and flecks of mud.
‘I keep looking for their airborne threats too, my lord,’ Belgutei said.
‘We’d hear them before we saw them, but we can’t be too careful,’ Leontus said. ‘There – that promontory will make a good vantage point.’
They dismounted near a limestone outcrop and led their horses towards a low rise overlooking the lake to the east and the foothills to the west. Beyond the misted green of undulating ridges lay the sun-scarred grasslands of the plains, an almost featureless expanse that held back the endless horizon.
Belgutei handed him a pair of ornate antique magnoculars from his saddlebags, and Leontus took a moment to admire the hand-beaten brass casing and carefully maintained lenses. They were no substitute for a fleet’s auspex arrays, nor the corps of logisticians and analysts he usually relied upon, but they would have to be enough.
‘There’s a camp due west,’ Leontus said after a moment’s scanning of the vista, the magnoculars auto-focusing on an earth-walled encampment that was nothing more than a blemish on the horizon with his naked eyes. Tiny figures were rendered into dark blurs by the distance, but it was clear to see that the orks were riding huge bipedal beasts that snapped and bit at one another.
He looked away and offered the magnoculars to Belgutei. ‘Five miles distant at least.’
The Attilan took them and zeroed in on the camp, his teeth grinding as he looked upon his enemy once more. ‘Beast Snaggas.’
‘That was my assumption,’ Leontus said, and took back the magnoculars.
‘We didn’t fight any Beast Snaggas on the landing fields,’ Belgutei muttered.
‘Perhaps they were elsewhere on the battlefield,’ Leontus said. ‘Or else they weren’t there at all.’
He scanned south of the Beast Snaggas camp, noting how quickly the mists were burned away by the rising sun. It was a fleeting advantage but a usable one, especially for a force that couldn’t rely on weight of numbers, and so he made a mental note of it.
‘There’s a structure to the south-west – is that the space port?’ Belgutei asked. ‘There, over the sharp stone peak, do you see it?’
‘It’s the space port,’ Leontus said as he focused on the distant tower, which reached high into the sky like a taloned finger topped with a cracked gem that glimmered in the morning sun. The dull grey of the tower’s body was rent and gapped by long-quenched fires, revealing the mesh of reinforcement bars running through the plascrete shell and the warped structures within. But the hive of activity at the tower’s base was what caught his eye: a ring of blackened metal was taking shape around the space port’s scattered hangars, warehouses and storage sheds, and even the tower itself. Orks swarmed through the structures in streams of green flesh as they attended to their barbaric whims, working on ramshackle machines daubed in red paint or brawling over scavenged materiel. The choicest pieces were dragged towards a hangar nestled at the base of the tower, rendered squat by distance but which must have been two hundred feet tall at its zenith.
‘That looks more organised than I would like,’ Leontus muttered, and Belgutei made a noise of assent.
‘Could it be that the orks have rallied around a new leader?’ the Attilan asked.
‘It should have taken them longer than this for one of the lieutenants to take full control,’ Leontus said.
He ran through the possibilities in his mind, searching the libraries of information he’d read and written on the unpredictability of the orks. It was unlikely, but not inconceivable.
‘The ork that Arnetz killed on the landing field, with Raust,’ Belgutei said, as if suddenly realising something. ‘It was the largest xenos on that field by a margin. Perhaps–’
‘I had teams monitoring their communication channels on the approach to Fortuna Minor and there was no intelligence that they had a new warboss, just a reference to the “Head Nobz”,’ Leontus said. ‘It’s most likely that one of the lieutenants has taken the space port and is fortifying it against attack by Imperial forces… And its competitors.’
‘So there’s at least two of them fighting for leadership.’
‘Maybe. We’ve found out as much as we’re going to from here, we should head south.’
He took Belgutei’s silence as agreement and turned to the south, towards the plumes of roiling black smoke that had been dancing at the corners of their eyes since light had washed the night from Fortuna Minor. The landing fields would have to be surveyed in order to get a complete picture of their surroundings, but Leontus was as reluctant as Belgutei to see it again with his own eyes.
He didn’t need the magnoculars to see the bloody wound on Fortuna Minor’s surface. Crumpled hulks of fallen landers still burned, their smoke combining into a sky-blackening tumble of lightless smoke that left the battlefield in the shade. The bodies of humans lay intertwined with innumerable orks on the gore-stained ground, a dark morass of death that Leontus knew his eyes would never be able to unsee.
‘God-Emperor protect them,’ Belgutei said, and turned away.
But Leontus kept looking, scorching every aspect of the sight into his brain like a brand marking cattle. The Imperium would raise no monuments to the dead below him; the galaxy would not mourn, nor would the Administratum so much as blink at the numbers of the lost.
Leontus would remember them.
‘Have you seen enough, my lord?’
Belgutei wasn’t looking down at the battlefield but at him, Leontus realised. He hoped that his emotions hadn’t been clearly written on his features. Belgutei needed the Lord Solar to be an inviolable sentinel against the darkness, not a grief-stricken old man who had led hundreds to their deaths on a fallen world.
Leontus squared his jaw and held out his hand for the magnoculars. Belgutei passed them over without another word and turned to the battlefield, his head bowed in prayer.
The sight was no better with the magnoculars’ zoom, though he was able to read the ebb and flow of the battle that had taken place: the central ring of black-armoured Goff orks who had been assailed from all sides by their savage brethren, before the Imperial forces’ disastrous arrival; the furious defences on the thresholds of burning landers; a beachhead cut through the ork lines to a downed dakkajet and then on to a Krieg gunline. He could even make out the path of the Attilan charge that had burst free from the melee, reading a churned trail of hoof-marked earth that led back to the battle and was lost beneath dead horses and fallen orks.
His eye was drawn to other tracks in the earth, where heavy vehicles and iron-shod boots had come and gone after the battle was done. Diminutive figures were still visible on the field, dragging sacks and sleds filled with the battle’s detritus.
‘Such a place needs a name to honour those who died there,’ Belgutei said, pulling Leontus from his study of the battlefield and the trails that led away from it.
‘Bruke.’
‘My lord?’
‘The libraries of Terra speak of an ancient warrior, Eolbert of Bruke, who ruled long before mankind looked to the stars. His people were enslaved, and he waged war to free them.’
‘A noble endeavour.’
Leontus nodded. ‘It was, but Bruke tasted defeat many times before he finally usurped the tyrant that ruled his lands. After one such defeat he found himself in a cave by the sea, and contemplated fleeing and leaving the war behind. It was there that he saw a spider building its web, only for the sea’s swell to destroy what it had built, again and again, until it at last found a way to complete its work.’
‘I have never liked spiders,’ Belgutei said.
‘It’s not about spiders, but about holding your course no matter what obstacles you find in your way,’ Leontus replied. ‘Once he became king, Bruke told the story of the spider’s perseverance and how it had given him the strength to continue. Of course, like most Terran legends the story is likely embellished – if it ever happened at all – but the message still stands.’
Belgutei was quiet for a while, his features unreadable.
At last, he said, ‘We will persevere, my lord. For those that died at Bruke.’
‘We will, together,’ Leontus told him, and looked over to the east, where a growing cloud of dust was forming on the plateau.
‘It’s Nomak,’ Belgutei said.
The young Attilan corporal rode at pace across the plateau with Rugen following in his wake, their horses kicking up a cloud of dust as they made for the Lord Solar at speed. Leontus was more pleased to see them than he could let on – they had passed his test by returning, and not abandoning the others to a slim chance of escape across the plains.
‘Slow down, damn you! Can’t you see the dust?’ Belgutei roared as they came within earshot.
‘These blunt-minded beasts can’t see us up here,’ Nomak said with a grin. ‘But you will want to see what we have found.’
‘There are humans inside,’ Belgutei breathed, the borrowed magnoculars shaking in his hands as he lowered them from his disbelieving eyes.
Nomak had been giddy as they rode to the eastern edge of the plateau, his mouth running almost as fast as his horse as he urged the other riders to greater speed. ‘There are two camps within spitting distance of one another – one seems to be a Speed Freeks enclave, filled with their rickety vehicles, machine parts and fuel containers,’ he had said over his shoulder. ‘The other… You won’t believe this, either of you, but there are people in there!’
‘Prisoners of the Waaagh!,’ Leontus said, lowering Do-Song’s ornate magnoculars as his brows furrowed. ‘Deathskulls in the southern camp, Speed Freeks in the northern camp.’
They knelt on the edge of a steep escarpment carpeted by thick grasses and low shrubs, its lower reaches scarred by a landslide that had gouged the slope’s surface. Despite Nomak’s assurance that they wouldn’t be spotted so far from the orks below, Leontus had insisted upon caution.
Belgutei raised the magnoculars again, hoping that his eyes hadn’t given way to the blind hope in his heart. They were still there: slight, human frames clearly visible over the right-hand camp’s walls, distinct from the stooping, heavy-shouldered orks that bustled around the ramshackle structures. Most of the prisoners appeared to be on their feet and moving, which was an encouraging sign.
‘I told you there were survivors,’ Nomak said, barely able to contain his own excitement. ‘We could–’
‘What else have you seen, other than these two camps?’ the Lord Solar asked.
‘There is a river that leads off to the south, passing just west of the camps, which looks to be fed from the lake,’ Nomak said. He pointed due west of the twin camps to a shimmering ribbon that wound across the terrain to the south. ‘The source must be behind the hills below, but the orks seem to be able to cross it at will.’
‘Which suggests that it is fordable or that there is a bridge,’ Leontus mused. ‘Anything else?’
‘There is a downed ship to the north-east, though I can’t tell if it’s one of ours or theirs, my lord.’
‘A problem for another day,’ Leontus said.
Belgutei listened to their exchange in his periphery, but found that he couldn’t focus on their words. There were men and women in the camp below – Astra Militarum soldiers who had survived the landing field massacre too. He couldn’t leave them there to rot with the xenos, penned in like cattle awaiting slaughter.
Then a lone figure stepped out of the Deathskulls camp, its face and mismatched armour daubed in blue paint, and began to scream something at the Speed Freeks camp. Belgutei couldn’t hear whatever it was saying, but it had an almost immediate effect on the orks in the other encampment. An ork in what appeared to be a butchered Imperial Navy pilot’s jacket emerged from between one of the many massive gaps in the camp’s walls, the material likely scavenged to build their ramshackle vehicles. It took a few steps forward and started screaming in response to the Deathskull, and crowds began to form behind each of them.
‘Something’s happening,’ Belgutei said, motioning for the others’ attention.
With frightening speed, both groups suddenly surged forward as the orks charged at one another across the few hundred yards between them, their war cries carrying over the foothills to where Belgutei knelt. His body tingled with sudden adrenaline, and he had the urge to have his sword in his hand.
‘They’re fighting each other?’ Nomak said in surprise from behind his own magnoculars.
Both camps had all but emptied, their occupants rushing out through their gates with such speed that they were torn from their hinges, the massive metal plates crushing any orks too slow to get out of the way. The others didn’t slow, but ran ahead to meet their foes in a whirling melee of fists and teeth.
