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Renegades: Lord of Excess – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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Chapter One

The censer swung like a metronome. Arqat stared at it, transfixed. Fashioned in ornate silver and trailing cloying grey smoke, it would disappear for a moment into its own wake, before reappearing once again, a stinking comet in reverse course. The smell stung Arqat’s nostrils, and he rubbed at his nose, taking his eyes from the book he was copying.

Arqat heard a thwack, and the pain came a second later: sharp and stinging across his shoulder blades.

‘Concentrate, boy!’ Gospeler Lautrec shouted, tucking his cane back into hands folded behind his back. Arqat watched, anger fomenting on a face too young to hide its effects yet, as Lautrec continued his interminable pacing, walking the pews of the Cathedral of the Bounteous Harvest.

Arqat muttered a curse under his breath, and refocused his eyes on the page in front of them. It was so stupid. He was in his nineteenth cycle, he was a Ministorum adept in training, he was a man, but he was being treated like a child by an old gargoyle.

Arqat hated the older priest’s hands. The skin, spectre-pale and so thin that it split over his knuckles like torn paper, leaving little punctuation marks of blood on the parchment he handed his students. Serrine was a blessed world, his father said, where the worthy could bathe in the youthful waters of rejuvenat treatment. Why did Lautrec spurn that blessing?

And, more importantly, why did Arqat have to listen to him?

‘Tradition, Arqat,’ his father had said, reciting the rules for vassal children before Arqat could stop him. ‘First son to his master, second son to the masters, third son to the Master of all.’

His oldest brother had left home before Arqat could hold on to memories, his duties as an aide to the undersecretary of planetside logistics arranged between Arqat’s great-great-grandfather and the hereditary holder of the noble title generations before. Arqat wasn’t envious of his existence, if only because on the few trips he made back to the family table – when his master was on hunting expeditions across the grass ocean, or recovering from one of his clandestine visits to the seedier establishments in the undercity – it sounded like his brother had to do just as much copying of documents as he did.

But his middle brother, Telo, ah, there was an experience to be envied. He was doing something with his life: keeping the peace in the planetary militia. Arqat had listened, rapt, as his brother regaled him with tales of training that made him sharp, strong and brave. Of journeys below the haze line and into the darkness of the undercity to corral filthy smugglers and shut down their illicit trade.

His brother, always bigger and stronger than Arqat, had been made bigger and stronger still by the militia’s chemical regimen until he – only two cycles older than Arqat – stood a head and a half taller than even their father.

And here Arqat was, stuck in a musty cathedral, copying scripture for the tenth time for the Emperor knew what reason.

He could recite the story from memory, anyway. He and his brother would request it from Nanny every bedtime – at least until Telo started to get hair under his arms and decided he didn’t like hearing children’s stories any more. Arqat got his own hair soon after that, but he still liked the story, and sometimes, when Telo was out playing war with the other boys at the academy, he would ask Nanny to tell it to him. He would lay his head on her shoulder as she sat in her wheeled chair, her curly grey hair tickling his cheek, as he mouthed the words of the tale along with her.

It was their most basic story, and it told of the foundation of their world. He saw it now in the book he copied, laid out in both words and pictures so that even a child could understand. The parchment was ancient and the ink was fading, but the image was still vibrant and clear.

‘Once there was a world,’ Nanny would start, ‘where pain could be found.’

A grey circle lay on the page, bleak and perfectly empty.

‘From his golden throne, our lord came to the ground.’

A blazing figure, descending from heaven, his long hair forming a billowing halo around his perfect features.

‘He brought salvation, bounty for us all.’

Golden light shone from above, illuminating the four ceremonial offerings that represented Serrine: the sheaf of grass, the threshing blade, and the two cups – one of water, one of Solipsus sap. Four offerings, held in four arms. Father had said that the Saviour should only have had two arms, but Nanny’s book featured a perversion of the human form that had increasingly been adopted by members of the faith.

‘Return’d to us if dark times should befall.’

The figure stood vast, astride the world, wrapped in armour the colour of Serrine’s main export. The colour of kings and emperors.

A deep, imperial purple.

The grass told its secrets at night.

Cecily had learned its language when she was young, on the precipitous border between true childhood and the age at which she was assessed to be just tall enough, just strong enough, just educated enough to work the threshing machines or tend the irrigation pipes. She would steal out at night, during the precious few hours assigned for sleep, and lie at the edge of the fields where grass rose like a wall, each soft-pink blade as strong as a cable and as wide as a man’s head, listening to the waft and wave of the fronds on the wind.

It told of beasts and barbarians that spent their lives nestled in its bosom, and places, special places far from the cities and the reach of the threshing machines, where visitors could even see the sky. The grass stretched the length of existence, her grandpa had told her – from this horizon to that horizon, and back again. She had never seen the horizon – she’d never even been above the haze line – but the grass told her that the old man was right.

It whispered of the threshing machines, the huge harvesters that carved miles-long furrows through its depths, slicing and slashing at growth old and new. These injuries changed its tone, making it weak, scared or angry. It whispered of the water, the thousands of miles of irrigation pipes that trickled a steady stream of fertiliser-enhanced liquid into the parched soil. Her cousin Sol had worked these pipes, monitoring their status from his glider, checking for breaks in the line with patched-up magnoculars that he would report back to base for others to fix. Grandpa said that Sol was a born pilot, and she thought for years that was how it worked: that your life was chosen for you when you were put on this world. That the Emperor, in His infinite wisdom, watched over all the billions upon billions of babies born in His Imperium, and picked a job for them as they came into the world, all wet and squealing. Grandpa had laughed when she told him that, and said that wasn’t how it was, but she wasn’t so sure. She still wasn’t so sure.

She asked the grass about Sol, a week after the warm day that he hadn’t come home. She wanted to know if he’d been taken by one of the hovering monsters – those flat, rippling things that hung in the sky and scanned the grass with rows of belly-set eyes – or if he’d been speared by a dive-bomber, its three-foot beak severing his spine as it carried him to the soft dirt. Had his glider failed, a wing shearing off through overuse? The mechanics of the undercity did their best, but supplies were always limited, and anything that did make its way down the pipes from above usually came clapped out. Or had he just crashed, the joy of flight addling his mind and taking his life? She put all these suggestions to the grass, but it ignored her, continuing its song of itself.

It whispered of the city. The city was clanking, steaming, whirring – a blight that marred its immaculate pinkness. It wanted to envelop the city like a white blood cell, to eat at its cancer until all was quiet, nothing left but the soft hiss of wind on grass. But for now, it made do by encircling the city, growing back even when it was cut down, forcing the tiny things that lived inside to build upwards, ever upwards, until they were above the clouds. She wondered if they could see the Emperor’s light up there.

Yes, the grass had always spoken, and she had listened, but tonight – tonight it was different. Tonight it was speaking directly to her. She could hear it all the way down on the third sub-basement of her refinery hab-block, through solid ferrocrete and soft dirt. It woke her as she danced on the edge of sleep, pulling her from her bunk, teasing her out of her threadbare blanket, and leading her past the sleeping forms of her shiftmates. She walked the route she’d walked as a youth, out past the barricades that marked the edge of the undercity, past thresher machines, their engines slumbering until they took tomorrow’s toll, to the edge of the grass ocean.

She stood for a moment, a hand outstretched, palm against a fibrous stalk. The grass was thick and strong, ripe for harvest. Once, it would have already been taken, sliced at the root by whirring blades before being deposited into vast containers held at the back of the threshing machines like the abdomens of vicious beetles. From there, it would be mulched, pounded, and pulverised in the refineries at the heart of the undercity. Their chimneys spewed a pastel mist as the grass was rendered down to its constituent parts – a cloying, sweet-smelling fug the same colour as the clouds above that blocked out the sky.

And when it was done, it was grass no more. It was thick, pungent, the purple of a mouldering bruise – the drug that gave her world purpose. Her grandpa said it helped make people young again, that the fancy types who lived up above the clouds would lie, cheat, and even kill for it. She didn’t understand why they would have to do that. Why didn’t they just come down here? There was so much grass – enough for everyone.

A soft susurrus pulled at her attention, and she stepped forward, into the field. The waving fronds surrounded her, each taller than a man and then half as tall again. The city lay just behind her, she knew, vast in scale, but cloying mist made it into a vague shape, and she felt her bearings slip away. The mist teased her nostrils and slid down her throat, tugging at her lungs. She gulped hard, looking for the breath that would slow her racing heart. The grass spoke to her.

Calm, it whispered. She breathed again, and felt the staccato rhythm in her chest start to stabilise. Forward, the grass said, and she walked, pushing springy fronds aside as she ventured into the perfectly uniform pinkness. Keep going, that’s it, the grass urged, the tone reassuring, like a mother to an infant. You’re close.

She was close. She didn’t need the grass to tell her that now. She could hear voices, cheated by the wind and dampened by the fog, but still powerful, their owners raising them in unison. She could hear the resonant boom of a drum, the skin of one of the canid predators that prowled these grasslands in packs pulled taut over a length of pipe or a part of a threshing machine’s engine. And she could hear the grass, still, over all this, guiding her to her future.

It’s time.

She pushed the fronds aside and saw a hole in the world. A great depression had been carved into the earth, wide and deep enough to hold a thousand people. Hundreds were already there, standing in groups on shaped dirt steps, and as she stood at the lip of the makeshift amphitheatre, she saw more filter in: grizzled threshers, sallow-faced washers, refinery mulchers. Even in the milky moonlight, she could see that many had a purple tinge to their skin and the peculiar hairlessness that her grandpa had put down to proximity to the chemicals produced by the grass.

She recognised faces among the crowd. There was Doren, whose daughter she had played alongside as a child, until she was old enough to join a thresher gang and the grass claimed her. There was Pount, scrap dealer, who would trade parts surreptitiously lifted from threshing machines or the network of pipes that connected the undercity to the world above for little vials of the refined grass sap. The hit made you feel a decade younger, her more adventurous friends had said, but she saw the comedown first-hand – headaches, memory loss, and skin so tight that it would split around the eyes – and decided that it wasn’t for her.

But the vast majority she didn’t know, a mass of humanity that had spilled out into the depths of the grass on this night for… something. Had they been called from their beds as well? They carried tools of their trade: blades, spanners, wrenches and heavy hammers. They must have come straight from their shifts, she thought with a twinge of idle sympathy, walking the long walk through the grass without time to even return to their bunk or hab-block, to wash or change their clothes.

And they were all silent. No conversation flowed in the loose groups they stood in; instead, their attention was fixated on the centre of the amphitheatre, and the spectacle that was unfolding there. There stood a makeshift stage, built from engine parts, rusted pipes, and battered panels seemingly stolen from the side of thresher machines. Around it, she saw the source of the drumbeat: four giants, easily as tall as the grass she had walked through, brought bleached bone clubs down onto huge drums. The figures were robed, their faces hidden in the heavy gloom, and as their arms rose and fell with each strike, she saw that their skin had been swaddled in rough-looking bandages. She was perturbed to see that one of the drummers – seemingly their leader – had three arms.

A figure stood at the centre of the stage. Like the drummers, it wore a long robe, its head hooded and its arms hidden by billowing sleeves. It stood onstage a moment longer, captivating in its pure stillness, before a hand rose from one of those sleeves, silencing the drums. In their absence, even though she stood shoulder to shoulder with strangers, surrounded by thousands of the undercity’s residents, she could hear the whisper of the grass, so perfect was their rapt attention.

‘My brothers and sisters,’ the figure on the stage began. Its voice was beautiful: mellifluous and light, but imbued with such force that Cecily could hear it as if the figure was standing next to her. As if it was in her mind. It sounded like the grass speaking to her.

‘We are told that the Emperor protects. That He sits on the Golden Throne on far-off Terra, and watches over His subjects, over our toils and our troubles, salves our aches, and heals our wounds. We are told that this world pleases the Emperor, and that our harvest belongs to Him – that we belong to Him.

‘We grow, and water, and harvest, and mulch, sending shipments to the city above. But the fruit of our toil rots in the sun that we cannot see. Terra does not answer our call. The Emperor does not answer our call.’

The figure continued, its beautiful voice rising in register.

‘Look inside yourselves. I tell you what you already know. We do not belong to the Emperor on Terra’ – it paused for a breath – ‘because the Emperor is dead.’

The figure on the stage almost spat the word, and Cecily gasped at both its tone and meaning. Her hand shot to her mouth, and she felt her stomach lurch like a glider pilot falling from the sky. This was blasphemy, heresy, counter to the reality she had been raised in. But somehow more shocking was that none of the people around her seemed shocked at all. They stood, unmoving, jaws set, or swaying slightly as if in a trance, hammers, blades, and clubs dangling limply from arms by their sides.

‘We are a poisoned people,’ the figure went on. ‘We are born below the clouds. We toil below the clouds. We die below the clouds. We waste our bodies for those who dwell above. We are sliced and slashed, gassed and choked, stunted and warped, and most of us will never see the sky.’

The figure gestured upwards with both arms. In the gloom of deep night, the haze line above was rendered in grey, giving it an artificial glow – as though a plasteel bubble had been lowered over the amphitheatre.

‘But I have seen the stars. Our salvation lies within them. We can reach for them together, but we must rise, as one, above the cloud that blinds us. We deserve this world, we deserve the sky’ – both arms were raised now, long and willowy, exposing pinkish skin – ‘and we deserve the stars!’

The crowd found its voice, suddenly, and all at once. There was a roar of assent, uniform and perfect, before the figure spoke again.

‘Only in those stars will we find salvation. Our Emperor has forsaken us, but rejoice, for a better master rises to take His place. We will rise from below the clouds, and we will take this world!’

As the figure tipped its head back, the hood fell, and Cecily saw the owner of the voice clearly. She had the stained pink skin of the refinery workers, but where their work made their bodies haggard, their eyes sallow, and their skin sag, she was the most beautiful creature Cecily had ever seen. Her skin was so perfect as to be luminous, and her green eyes shone bright in her hairless head.

Cecily would follow her. She would obey her. She would die for her.

‘Tonight, children of Serrine,’ the luminary on stage shouted. ‘Tonight, we take this world for ourselves, and for our future!’

Click here to buy Renegades: Lord of Excess.

A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2024.
This eBook edition published in 2024 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Manuel Castañón.

Renegades: Lord of Excess © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2024. Renegades: Lord of Excess, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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