Luther first of the fall.., p.1
Luther: First of the Fallen, page 1
Further reading from The Horus Heresy
Book 1 – HORUS RISING
Dan Anett
Book 2 – FALSE GODS
Graham McNeill
Book 3 – GALAXY IN FLAMES
Ben Counter
Book 4 – THE FLIGHT OF THE EISENSTEIN
James Swallow
Book 1 – THE SOLAR WAR
John French
Book 2 – THE LOST AND THE DAMNED
Guy Haley
Book 3 – THE FIRST WALL
Gav Thorpe
Book 4 – SATURNINE
Dan Abnett
Book 5 – MORTIS
John French
SONS OF THE SELENAR (Novella)
Graham McNeill
FURY OF MAGNUS (Novella)
Graham McNeill
ANGRON: SLAVE OF NUCERIA
Ian St. Martin
KONRAD CURZE: THE NIGHT HAUNTER
Guy Haley
LION EL’JONSON: LORD OF THE FIRST
David Guymer
ALPHARIUS: HEAD OF THE HYDRA
Mike Brooks
The Horus Heresy Character Series
VALDOR: BIRTH OF THE IMPERIUM
Chris Wraight
LUTHER: FIRST OF THE FALLEN
Gav Thorpe
Order the full range of Horus Heresy novels, audio dramas
and audiobooks from blacklibrary.com
Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
The Horus Heresy
Tale of the Long Night
Tale of the Beast
Tale of the Lion
Tale of the Book
Tale of the Jaws
Tale of the Hunt
Tale of the Traitor
Tale of the Heart
About the Author
An Extract from ‘Alpharius: Head of the Hydra’
A Black Library Publication
eBook license
THE HORUS HERESY
It is a time of legend.
Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Mankind conquer the stars in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races are to be smashed by His elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.
The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor, as system after system is brought back under His control. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of His most powerful champions.
First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superhuman beings who have led the Space Marine Legions in campaign after campaign. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation, while the Space Marines themselves are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.
Many are the tales told of these legendary beings. From the halls of the Imperial Palace on Terra to the outermost reaches of Ultima Segmentum, their deeds are known to be shaping the very future of the galaxy. But can such souls remain free of doubt and corruption forever? Or will the temptation of greater power prove too much for even the most loyal sons of the Emperor?
The seeds of heresy have already been sown, and the start of the greatest war in the history of mankind is but a few years away...
TALE OF THE LONG NIGHT
He remembered the world breaking.
It was very confused; everything happened at the same time, a kaleidoscope of images, conflicting and noisy. The sky burned. No, not burned. A storm. A storm not of this reality, devouring the universe.
The gods had claimed their dues.
He had not expected anything quite so… apocalyptic.
Pain broke into his thoughts. Intense. Sharp.
A blade lanced into his side and he screamed.
He screamed at the memory of it. It was not in his side any longer. He could feel the wound, raw and bleeding. It mirrored the wound in the sky that had swallowed his army.
The hand that had driven the blade, inhumanly strong. Stronger even than he was. Stronger than the archaic technologies that had given him such endurance and long life. Stronger than the will of the gods.
Driven by hate that had burned in eyes the green of Caliban’s forests.
Caliban’s lost forests…
So long ago.
Eyes of a demigod, filled with rage.
A heartbeat. A thunderous heartbeat, drumming, drumming. His own? Why couldn’t he see? He had the memory of sight, but he was in darkness. They had fixed his eyes. He could see as well as a wildcat at night and a hawk in the day. One of the simplest procedures, but one of the most effective. How did one see the world as he did? What did the universe look like to a creature made of science and myth?
The drumming was not his heart. That slowly and surely resounded in his chest. He felt the pulse of it in the blood vessels in his neck, at his temples, throbbing through wrist and thigh. He had never been so aware of his body.
The drumming was footfalls. Quick strides thudding on rock.
Eyes made perfect by the arcane knowledge of the Dark Age finally adjusted to the gloom, picking out the slightest of light sources, sketching in broken ruins. A toppled statue lay to his left, of a knightly figure with blade held in salute, snapped at the waist. An archway had collapsed behind him.
Lights approached, a pair of lamps moving up and down in time with the foot-drums. Less than two hundred metres away, several metres lower than where he lay upon the slope of a tumbled wall.
His hearing had also been honed to preternatural accuracy and he detected another sound amidst the trickling of grit and dust, the patter of liquid from a ruptured pipe and the creak of settling masonry. The sound was a mechanical wheeze. As the lights grew brighter and brighter they brought with them a hum of electrical circuitry too.
The suit lamps dimmed, their illumination replaced by a sudden cerulean brightness that caused him to flinch. The movement sent a stab of pain crackling up through pulped ribs, searing through the coagulating wound in his flank.
The blue light flickered as a flame for several seconds before assuming the shape of an axe blade, forming a crackling field around the weapon. It was impossible to tell the colour of the armour in the harsh light. Dark, but black or green?
Smell.
Sweat. A lot of blood. His own, most likely. The residue of bolter rounds and ozone aftertaste of las and plasma discharge. Smells of battle. Smells he had learned as a child.
Lubricant, alien and strong. Not the maintenance oils used by the Order but something else. The approaching figure was not of this world. Martian smells.
One of the demigod’s warriors.
The Space Marine stopped at the bottom of the steep rubble slope, one booted foot crunching onto the shattered brick. He leaned forward, the light of the axe revealing a scarred face with trifurcated beard and a dark stubble breaking a bald scalp. The eyes widened with shock.
‘Luther.’
His name brought further clarity. Names had power and his brought him back to the present in a way that the barbs of broken stone in his spine had not. The voice was familiar, but the face was a mystery at first. The thud of other footsteps echoed behind the stranger as he slowly processed what he was looking at. Not one of the Order, one of the Dark Angels. A face he had not seen for more than five decades. He removed the scars, mentally healing the ravages of wars both old and recent, until he could place the features.
‘Farith?’ His voice was little more than a croaking whisper. ‘Wait… I need to–’
The warrior took a step.
‘Bastard traitor!’
Blue light blazed as the axe swung.
Harsh edges of metal brought him round, biting at wrists and ankles. He was in irons, chained to a chair. He had been stripped of his armour’s remnants and was clad in a stiff kilt of leather, such as one might train in when unarmed. The pain in his side was no more. Paralysis? His heart thudded at the thought, but the ache of the shackles on his legs proved the falseness of the theory.
He had been healed, then. By whom?
Opening his eyes revealed the face he last remembered before the axe had struck him. The flat of it, given that he still lived. The Paladin, Farith. One of the last to be squired to the Order by the Lion before the First Legion had arrived. He was a cold killer; Luther had disliked him but admired his ruthlessness, and he was utterly dedicated to the Lion. It was hard to reconcile the clean-cheeked youth with the haggard soldier in front of him. The years had not been kind.
Farith was also unarmoured, clad in a heavy sleeveless robe of dark green, embellished only with the Legion symbol upon the left breast – a downward-pointing sword flanked by wings, in thick white thread. They both sat in a chamber just a few metres square, furnished only with the two chairs. Something moved in the shadows beyond the door. Red eyes gleamed inside a dark hood, the height of a small child’s face, but Luther knew it was no infant. A Watcher in the Dark. It had been some time since he had laid eyes upon one of Caliban’s mysterious guardians. It was gone a heartbeat later.
‘Where is the Lion?’ asked Farith, leaning forward, thick forearms resting on his knees.
The q uestion surprised Luther. His side spasmed as though the sword were still buried there. The room swirled in and out of focus, merging with flashes of memory and sights of what had not yet arrived. The storm that had engulfed them, that had swept up his warriors, now swirled inside his thoughts. With an effort he broke out of its nebulous grip, blinking as he focused on the legionary before him.
Luther was sure that there was something he was supposed to do, or say, but he could not recall it. Farith asked the question again, more forcefully.
‘I do not know what happened to the Lion. Aldurukh broke. We fell. He is not with you?’
Farith shook his head, eyes fixed on Luther. There was barely suppressed fury in that gaze.
‘Caliban…’ Farith looked away, jaw clenched. He was shaking, hands making fists and unclenching. The robe stretched as he took in a long breath and looked once more at his prisoner. ‘Caliban is no more. It was destroyed by the bombardment and warp storm. There is no sign of the primarch. Tell me what you remember.’
‘Little,’ confessed Luther, frowning. ‘My thoughts twist into themselves, more contorted than a forest path. Past, present, future. I wander among them. I cannot tell one from the other. Have we had this conversation before?’
‘Where did you send your followers?’
‘Send?’ Luther recalled the storm, tendrils of warp power flashing down, striking like lightning. ‘I sent them nowhere. They were taken. The storm! I remember what happened now. In shadow, at least. The storm. I had to get to the heart. The Lion and I… He stopped me before I could stop it. I needed to… I cannot recall. It was important, but the Lion… We fought, but I did not kill him. I would not.’
Farith sat back as he absorbed this, eyes narrowing in suspicion.
‘You protest innocence?’
‘I did not summon the storm, I did not kill the Lion,’ Luther assured him. Farith’s words filtered through the tumult of his mind, settling like debris on the shore of his thoughts. He looked around the cell, confused. ‘Caliban is no more?’
Farith nodded.
‘Broken by your sorcery and the guns of the fleet. Aldurukh’s energy fields sustain the tower, the rest is rock and ash scattered across the void.’
‘No, you are lying,’ said Luther. ‘I saved Caliban from destruction. I saw it. Or not. It is still moving, the fog and the storm.’
Panic set in, speeding his heart, sweating his palms as the notion took root. Farith said nothing, offering no word of defence.
‘I saved Caliban,’ Luther said again, but as he spoke his words fell quieter with doubt. ‘I saved Caliban…’
He was going to save Caliban. Was that it? Or save the Lion? Was it memory or something else?
‘You doomed Caliban.’ Farith’s sneer was more cutting than any sword edge. ‘You betrayed the Lion and destroyed our world.’
‘No, that was not how it happened,’ protested Luther. He tried to rise but the restraints bit into flesh and bone as he struggled. ‘No! He betrayed me! He abandoned us!’
Luther slumped into the chair, chains rattling, frustrated as Farith just glowered at him in silence. The storm. Everything breaking. The fall. Like the depths that had swallowed him and the Lion, his gut became a deep chasm.
Hollow, emptied out like a swine’s carcass for the roasting spit. As empty as the oaths he had taken. Oaths he had thrown away for… For what? It was hard to remember.
‘You killed the Lion and destroyed Caliban,’ said Farith, every word heavy with the weight of its accusation.
Luther raised no argument, letting the charges settle on him like a shroud. His mouth was dry, his bones ached and yet the greatest discomfort was the knowledge that Farith spoke the truth. Not about the Lion, but about Caliban’s fate. The planet of his birth was no more. He had tried to bring it back, to restore it to the way it was meant to be, but he had failed.
And he had dishonoured himself and the Order. For nothing. For lies and vainglory.
‘Are those tears, traitor?’ Farith grimaced, standing up. ‘You do not get to shed tears. You are not allowed sorrow for what you have done.’
Luther choked back his grief and nodded, acknowledging the right of Farith’s anger.
‘I… I was weak,’ he began.
I was weak when I thought I was being strong.
A moment was fast approaching when our fates would be set. Whose fates do I mean? Myself and my council, a mixture of disparate souls that had found common cause in our secession from the Imperium. Once we had been united under the auspices of the Legion, now we were bonded by something even stronger: mutual need.
My seneschal was perhaps the most unlikely of candidates, not even born of Caliban. The Terran veteran Sar Astelan, who bore a grudge against the Lion greater than any other of us. Astelan was my commander openly, and in secret he was my chief of espionage, enforcement and the other unpleasantries of rule. Our arrangement was simple but effective: he was loyal to me and I asked no questions about his business or what he did to maintain my authority and that of the Order.
My chief advisor was a companion of long acquaintance who had never been a Dark Angel direct, but by dint of her associations with command of the Order had benefited from the physical enhancements gifted to me and the other senior knights when the Emperor arrived. We were too old to become legionaries, but there were plenty of augmetics and bio-therapies that could still be applied to make us formidable, long-lived warriors. She was Saulus Maegon, the deadly mistress of the Angelicasta, who had been in command of Caliban’s greatest fortress for decades.
Then there was Sar Griffayn, the Spear-Cast, formerly the voted lieutenant of the Firewing. A traditionalist who had been returned to us on a fleet of ships sent for reinforcements and, following the death of their leader, Belath, come over to our cause along with the survivors of a brief but bloody internecine fight. His defection was perhaps the most important and heartening, for he had not been one of us isolated on Caliban and yet still saw the worth in our goals for autonomy. Inculcated in the oldest rites of the Legion, nevertheless his loyalty was to Caliban over the Dark Angels. It had boded well that we might encounter others who would lend ear to our arguments, and that those arguments came from one of such standing in the Legion gave them some weight outside of the Order.
Finally, there could be no council of the Order without the Lord Cypher. Guardian of our history and judge of our current character, the Lord Cypher was a figure steeped in the tradition of Aldurukh and Caliban and no Grand Master would have legitimacy without him. For us there was additional benefit to his inclusion, for my Lord Cypher had before been the Librarian Zahariel, a psyker, and so doubled as the master of my Mystai.
This was my council, the leaders of Caliban beneath me, the Grand Master of the Order.
Our great endeavour was now poised upon glory or ruin, our striving for independence about to face the final test of strength.
The Lion.
He was returning after many decades of fighting the battles of the Emperor. The massive war fleet of the First, the honoured Dark Angels, was but days or even hours from breaking warp at the edge of the system. Lord Cypher and our own warp auguries had confirmed as much, for so many ships do not travel unannounced through the immaterium. We had flotillas of our own: some won through guile and conquest; others raised in the shipyards of Zaramund, which we had made our colony; yet more supplied from other worlds that had been brought within the ruling sphere of Caliban.
The star system was a fortress yet to be tested, and the strength of the Lion was not certain. Yet always the advantage is with the defender, and so we were confident that if it came to martial examination we would not be found the weaker.
Not in military terms, at least.
It was Astelan that first raised concern when the council was convened. I remember it clearly. We met in the Chamber of Arthorus as we often did, lit by the early sun. Morning training had commenced and the noise of feigned combat rang through the open window from the mustering fields and shooting ranges beyond the Angelicasta.
‘They are ready,’ Maegon assured us. She and Astelan were jointly in charge of recruitment and training, combining the best rites and culture of the Order with the disciplines of the Legion we had left behind.
