Leontus: Lord Solar, page 8
‘Did you see what instigated it?’ the Lord Solar asked, Do-Song’s magnoculars pressed hard against his eyes. He let in a sharp intake of breath as if he’d spotted something in the camp that Belgutei and the others hadn’t, but didn’t explain what.
‘One came out and started screaming something, though I have no idea what it was saying.’
The Lord Solar ran his tongue over his teeth again as he considered something, looking from Belgutei to the others as if measuring them up.
‘We could ride down now whilst they’re fighting, rescue some of the prisoners?’ Nomak suggested, but the Lord Solar shook his head.
‘We wouldn’t get there in time. We would need to be ready to strike the moment the orks commit to fighting one another,’ he said. ‘Belgutei, which is your fastest horse?’ he asked.
‘Gori, by a long way,’ Belgutei replied. ‘Why? What are you thinking, my lord?’
‘That we have an opportunity to increase our odds of success,’ the Lord Solar said, and began to unclasp his cloak.
‘This is insane.’
‘I know,’ Belgutei said.
‘He’s going to get us all killed.’
Belgutei nodded. ‘Most likely.’ Nashi whickered beside him and made to stand, but he calmed her with a low, soothing voice.
‘Are you listening to me, Belgutei?’ Nomak asked.
‘No,’ Belgutei said, keeping the smile from his face.
He felt alive again, back in the moment, with his men by his side and a target in front of him. The Lord Solar’s plan was an audacious one, but the man was famous for achieving what other men said could not be done.
Belgutei, Rugen, and Nomak were hidden on the riverbank south of the Deathskulls camp, crouched next to their horses in the tall reeds that lined both sides of the winding river. The horses were lying in the sodden mud next to their riders, a feat that required years of training for Attilan warhorses to learn. It had taken over an hour to get into position without being seen by the orks, to find the source of the river, and to swim their horses downstream and under the ramshackle bridge that the xenos had constructed over its waters.
Belgutei kept his eyes on the camp’s totem, just visible above the thick reeds – a glowering blue ork skull fashioned from hammered metal and decorated with actual skulls that looked uncomfortably human.
‘Do you see him?’ Belgutei asked Rugen, who was higher on the riverbank than the others.
‘I do not see him,’ the older Attilan replied.
The Lord Solar had taken a different route down the mountain, riding due east of the plateau towards the open ground north of the two ork camps, and it was possible that he wasn’t even in position yet.
‘The orks are going back to their camps,’ Rugen hissed, waving Belgutei up the slope to look.
Belgutei passed Nashi’s reins to Nomak and crawled through the reeds hand over hand until he was at Rugen’s side. He took the offered magnoculars and saw orks limping back to the camp from their little battle. Most seemed battered and bruised but otherwise elated, but there were many prone forms left on the ground in both sides’ colours.
‘Remember, we need to hit the rear of the camp as soon as he rides through. If we can see him, that is,’ Belgutei muttered, scanning the hazy horizon for any sign of the Lord Solar, until his eyes settled on a growing cloud of dust.
‘That’s him,’ Rugen said with a gap-toothed smile.
‘Prepare the lances and get ready to move.’
SIX
Gori’s stride was solid, her rhythm perfectly even as she galloped across the plains. If the weight of Leontus’ cloak bothered her as it trailed behind, the horse gave no sign, but barrelled forward at punishing speed. The Lord Solar rode high in the saddle, his body moving in time with Gori’s thunderous pace, his eyes fixed on the ork camp ahead.
In his study of orks, drawn from both first-hand experience and second-hand accounts, he had identified a multitude of ways that they left themselves tactically exposed at almost every level. Their many weaknesses were overcome in the main by sheer ferocity and weight of numbers, with little to no plan other than to smash what lay in front of them; that suited Leontus, as it meant that the orks were often far too busy watching the most obvious target to notice what approached them from behind.
The red-daubed walls seemed to grow as he approached, starting as a scarlet line on the horizon and becoming a gap-toothed maw of looming metal plates the colour of blood. His heart hammered beneath his dust-grimed breastplate, his rational mind screaming at him to turn back before he was seen and cut down, that the orks wouldn’t take the bait and his plan was doomed to fail.
Leontus drew in a short, sharp breath, tasting the dust on the air mingled with Gori’s musty sweat, and rode through one of the many wide gaps in the Speed Freeks encampment walls and into a crowd of shocked-looking orks.
Their camp was less of a fortified position than an untidy workshop with a few patches of wall still standing, the welded plates having been scavenged for their insane creations. The dust billowed through the camp in Leontus’ wake, obscuring him for a moment as it settled on the xenos that stared at him in open-mouthed surprise.
Sol’s Righteous Gaze blazed with incandescent rage, blasting a scorched hole through the nearest ork and the pile of tools behind it; a second shot slagged the cockpit of a three-wheeled buggy, pilot and metal alike, and the third ignited a bowser of promethium in a column of searing heat.
That was enough to shake the xenos out of their surprise and back to their primary state of being.
Gori reared up as they let out their bellowing war cries. The orks grabbed whatever tools were nearest as they charged towards the intruder, falling over one another as they scrambled to land the first blow. Leontus was already moving, whipping Gori into motion as the first of the xenos flung themselves into the air where he had been only heartbeats before. He launched Gori towards an open space in the gapped walls, firing his pistol at any ork that got too close, until he was free of the press and galloping breathlessly towards the Deathskulls camp. The explosive roar of engines starting behind him told him that the first step of the plan had been a success; all that remained was the second half.
He could see that the commotion hadn’t yet drawn the attention of the Deathskulls – either they didn’t care that their erstwhile kin were under attack, or they were simply used to the noise. It was that short-sightedness that Leontus was going to exploit.
A hard round slapped into the ground ahead of him, and he smiled, hearing the roar of pursuing engines from the Speed Freeks camp. He turned in the saddle to see their dust cloud rising higher than his own, obscuring everything behind them. Bullets sprayed from the weapons of drivers and gunners alike, fizzing past Leontus like angry insects on a faraway death world.
‘Go, Gori! Move!’ Leontus shouted, whipping the reins in an attempt to urge a little more pace from his mount. The horse found yet more speed and lurched forward, panting hard as she closed the distance between Leontus and the Deathskulls camp; its gates were mercifully still open, their under-engineered hinges sagging beneath the weight of the heavy plated doors.
‘Don’t let me down, Belgutei,’ Leontus hissed, his words lost to the wind and the screaming of engines that sounded close enough for him to touch.
Ahead, the orks in the Deathskulls camp were finally taking notice of the Speed Freeks’ charge, running to grab weapons and prepare for the attackers racing towards them. Leontus only needed them to hold their fire a little longer, just a few seconds…
With a tug on a worn leather cord, he released the ropes tying the cloak to his saddle and pulled hard on Gori’s reins. The heavy material flopped to the earth in a dust-encrusted pile, the rocks tied to the ragged hem dragging it down as Leontus broke to the right and away from the path of the oncoming Speed Freeks under the cover of his own dust trail.
The camp’s walls whipped past in a blur of badly painted metal, hard rounds hissing around him as the Deathskulls tried their luck with their brutal firearms. They quickly lost interest as he galloped out of their sight and around the side of the camp, finding far more enticing targets in the oncoming vehicles of their rivals.
Gori’s breathing was laboured, her flanks slick with a mix of sweat and dust as she raced on. Leontus turned away from the grisly trophies hanging from the camp walls – the skeletal and half-rotted remains of humans and orks swinging from barbed hooks – though whether they were meant as a warning to outsiders or grim decoration, he couldn’t say. What did become clear was that several of the disembodied limbs were far fresher than the others, the blood still glistening in browning trails where it stained the walls beneath.
A titanic impact set the grim trophies to dancing on their hooks as the Speed Freeks’ charge slammed into the Deathskulls camp behind him. He smiled at that, clearing the walls in time to see Belgutei, Nomak, and Rugen charging towards him in the distance.
Without slowing Gori’s gallop, Leontus steered the horse in a wide arc to bring himself to the back of the charging Attilans, the sounds of ork combat lost between the distance and the hammering of his mount’s hooves.
‘Strike at the wall and follow me through!’ Leontus shouted as Gori brought him alongside the lance-carrying Attilans. Only then did he slow the horse’s pace, putting a little protective distance between himself and Belgutei’s riders; he would need it for what came next.
As one, Belgutei, Nomak, and Rugen turned from their charge at the very last second, wrenching their steeds away from a headlong gallop into the wall’s riveted and welded metal plates, and used the last of their momentum to launch their explosive-tipped lances like thrown spears.
The wall disappeared in a sudden shockwave of light and heat, the melta charges chewing through plate steel and blue-daubed flakboard like a las-bolt through unprotected flesh. Dust billowed from the detonation in a choking cloud, carpeting the escaping Attilans as they brought their horses around for a second charge, but not so thick that Leontus couldn’t see the new path into the camp.
‘Go, Gori!’ Leontus cried, holstering Sol’s Righteous Gaze to grip the reins with both hands.
The horse responded as if they had been bonded for a lifetime, surging forward into the thinning dust cloud and the camp beyond.
Dazed orks bounced from Gori’s flanks as they charged through a throng of the xenos, heading straight for the cages. Leontus needed to get as many prisoners out as possible before the battling Speed Freeks and Deathskulls realised that their fight was an engineered distraction and turned on the humans. He passed improvised cookhouses and rough bedding in a blur of muted colours, piles of scavenged flak armour and meat that still wore Astra Militarum uniforms. Those that still lived shouted to him as he approached, reaching for him through the rusting bars of their cages as they recognised the figure in blue and gold.
In a flash of rough-cast iron, accompanied by the scream of a wounded horse, the saddle was wrenched down with violent force. Leontus didn’t have time to do anything but curl his arms over his head as he was thrown through the air. Colours flashed before his eyes as the sky, earth, and rows of cages tumbled around him until the hard-packed ground met him with bruising force.
He let out an air-starved grunt of pain and anger as the last of his momentum rolled him to his feet, just in time to sidestep the burly ork’s first swing of its brutal maul. Two more orks emerged from the cages behind it, the furthest creature’s axe buried in Gori’s skull.
The burly ork was large and fast, relying on aggression and strength to heft its heavy weapon two-handed, each blow powerful enough to dent the armour of a Leman Russ but slow and obvious enough for him to dodge. How had his forces been undone by such inefficient beasts?
Sol’s Righteous Gaze slipped into his hand like the handshake of an old friend, blasting away the ork’s legs as Conquest left its scabbard. Motes of blue light flickered in its wake as he drew and slashed with a single, precise movement; the ork fell into the path of the swinging blade, and its head rolled clear of its hunched shoulders in a splash of black ichor. The second ork was already charging before its dead comrade had stopped twitching, its crude pistol spitting bullets as it leaped at the Lord Solar with a bestial roar.
Fingers of golden lightning flickered around Leontus as his refractor field deflected the few rounds that were on target, and he raised Sol’s Righteous Gaze as his opponent’s weapon clicked empty. The archeotech pistol felt hot in his hand, and he pulled the trigger, blasting the ork’s torso into wet strings of bloody viscera as the captured humans cheered him on.
The final ork stepped over the ruined meat of Gori’s skull, its beady red eyes taking in the little human in blue and gold that had killed two of its kind in only a few moments. Leontus lifted Conquest in a challenge that even the dull mind of an ork couldn’t misunderstand, and holstered his pistol. Sol’s Righteous Gaze needed time to cool before he used it again, so it would just be him against the ork – Lord Solar against xenos, ancient relic against blood-smeared iron.
That was the moment that Belgutei, Nomak, and Rugen rode through the hole blasted by their melta-tipped lances, their lasguns already flaring to punch the creature off Gori’s corpse and into the dirt.
‘They took the bait!’ Belgutei said as he dragged on Nashi’s reins.
‘They did. Get the cages open,’ Leontus said, his eyes on the furious melee that roiled like boiling oil at the camp’s gates, spitting severed limbs and broken orks with each passing second. It had been a desperate gamble to draw the xenos away from their captives by using the Speed Freeks as bait; he’d known that it would work if he executed the plan properly, but now that the orks were distracted, they had to move fast to liberate as many soldiers as possible before the creatures realised what was happening behind them.
He slashed at the heavy locks with Conquest, the sword’s power field crackling as it sliced deep gouges in the rough iron. Belgutei and his riders did the same, sliding from their saddles to move between the cages and shoot them open with their lasguns, all encouraged by desperate-eyed Astra Militarum soldiers.
‘Move, run towards the river!’ Leontus shouted as Conquest turned another lock to melted slag. He wrenched the cage’s door open and pulled a soldier aside, noting the sergeant’s stripes stitched onto his sleeve. ‘What’s your name, soldier?’
‘Andersson, Lord Solar!’ the man said, his violet eyes signifying his Cadian origins better than the standard-issue uniform he wore.
‘Get your men to the river, Andersson – keep them together!’
Andersson nodded and turned back to the other occupants of his cage, barking orders for them to move and pointing the way out of the camp as Leontus moved on. Escaping troopers swarmed past him away from the embattled orks, some muttering their thanks as they ran whilst others supported wounded or weakened comrades.
Leontus looked about for the cage that he had seen from the plateau, one that he couldn’t leave the camp without unlocking…
‘Gori.’
Belgutei had stopped, his sword hanging loose in his hand as he approached his fallen mount.
‘I’m sorry, Belgutei. I couldn’t have done it without her,’ Leontus said, sidestepping the Attilan to slash at the door to a cage containing three Catachans.
‘May you find Do-Song and ride together at the God-Emperor’s side,’ Belgutei said, placing a hand on the horse’s neck. When he looked up his expression was cold, his sword held tightly in his grip once more.
‘Orks turning!’ Nomak shouted, loosing a volley of shots into a pair of xenos who had realised that something was going on towards the rear of the encampment. The first fell, half of its skull vaporised by las-fire, but the second didn’t seem to feel the scorching touch of the las-bolts in its chest. Belgutei charged to face it, his blade singing as it met the ork’s in a vicious parry, then flicking out to slice open the beast’s neck.
Leontus turned away as the ork fell, its clawed hands scrabbling at the blood pumping from its ruined neck. He heard Belgutei’s sword sing again as it struck something thick and muscular, then the telltale sound of a head rolling free of its shoulders.
‘They’re turning,’ Belgutei said. ‘We need to go.’
‘Not yet. I’m not leaving him here.’
Leontus found the cage he had been looking for a few heartbeats later. It was deeper into the ork camp, near its centre and far closer to the bloody melee waged by the rival ork warbands.
‘My lord, we have to move!’ Belgutei shouted from behind him, but Leontus ignored the Attilan’s desperate plea.
Conquest sheared the bolts holding Konstantin captive, his horse standing placidly even as a battle raged on one side and a desperate escape on the other.
‘Good to see you, my old friend,’ Leontus said, reaching out to run his hand along the shaped ceramite panels that ran the length of Konstantin’s neck. The horse’s augmetic eyes studied him for a long moment, their unblinking red glare more familiar to Leontus than the golden brown his organic eyes had once been. Konstantin bowed his head in acknowledgement, a harsh exhalation the closest he could come to a friendly snort.
Leontus led Konstantin from his cage and stepped up onto the horse’s back, the feeling of his steed’s whirring augmetic heartbeat as familiar as his own as he took up the reins built into his horse’s facial plating.
‘Did you get all the cages open?’ he called over to Belgutei, who had helped a wounded Catachan up behind him on Nashi’s saddle. The Attilan’s eyes lingered on Konstantin for a moment too long, a shadow of his revulsion crossing his features before he could mask it.
‘We did, but not all of them will escape today,’ Belgutei said, turning away to where the orks still fought. ‘We would need Chimeras to move those who cannot run.’
