The Book of Transformations - Matt Keefe Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  The Book of Transformations - Matt Keefe

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Myths & Revenants’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  Prologue

  The Gaze of Stone

  The door to the old alchemist’s place was made of heavy oak and surrounded by neat stone blocks set directly into the cliff. A dozen windows looked out haphazardly from the rocky face, with no obvious indication of sense to the rooms and the floors behind them. Between those windows ran veins of metal and seams of minerals. They grew where the alchemist’s work had suffused the rock of the cliff-face and climbed up it like vines, his magicks bringing to the surface the latent energies of Chamon.

  The boy had passed this sight perhaps half a dozen times, but he had never been inside. Everyone called it a shop, but it didn’t look like one, and the boy was full of trepidation. Whatever the alchemist’s own esoteric pursuits, most knew him as the city’s most reliable purveyor of all manner of substances, mundane and otherwise.

  Though the door was ajar, its size and sturdiness had the boy imagining frightful things, like this great oak door was in place not to keep the world out, but to keep something terrible in. He raised his hand in a fist and knocked, three times, though the first was so timid and faint that the sound was that of only two.

  Nothing.

  He waited but knew he would have to go in, so he pushed. The great heavy door opened smoothly and easily – but so nervous was he that he pushed it only enough to open it by about a foot or so. He slipped inside, as if somehow imagining that going unseen, even as he entered, would quieten his own fears.

  Three stone steps, hemmed in by shelves packed with stone jars, leather flasks and small wooden boxes, led down from the doorway. As far as the boy could tell there was just a single room in front of him, but its space was so packed with shelves and stacks of wooden cases that they created a narrow passageway that turned off to the right ahead of him.

  The boy stopped and peered into the jars closest to him. Fat black leeches writhed over a lump of stone – nothing more than a dull rock, and yet their writhing, slug-like bodies left threads of silver across the glass. Beside them sat a jar of liquid – metal, seemingly, like mercury, but vivid blue in colour.

  The boy peered around the corner into the room up ahead. Green flames flickered in lamps on the wall, but the room was still dim and for a moment the boy could make out little around him. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he realised with a fright that there was a man standing right in front of him.

  Shinguren, the alchemist.

  The boy gasped and stepped back. He tripped and sent the lid of a great cauldron tumbling to the ground with a clang. The alchemist didn’t say a thing, even sterner and more terrifying than the boy had imagined. The boy stuttered an apology and clumsily returned the lid to the cauldron, never taking his eyes from the man.

  The alchemist was not tall but seemed particularly rigid and imposing. His clothes were drab, his hair and beard grey and his face oddly colourless, an effect compounded by the gloom, and one that had made him hard to pick out amidst the jumble of shelves, cases, bottles and jars.

  ‘You’re the alchemist, sir?’ said the boy.

  But the alchemist did not answer.

  The boy stepped a little closer, pulling his cloth cap from his head and swallowing hard.

  ‘Excuse me, sir. I’m Mehrigus. I’ve been sent by my father to–’

  ‘I doubt he sent you to speak to that thing, boy.’

  The boy jumped as a voice came unexpectedly from behind him. He turned to see a second man standing there, taller, somewhat older, his beard much longer and his robes much heavier and shabbier. And he was moving rather more than the first man. The boy looked from one to the other.

  ‘A statue?’ he said, his heart racing in a mixture of surprise and fear as he realised the first figure was entirely motionless.

  ‘Not quite, boy,’ said the real alchemist, taking another step into the room from the shelf-lined passageway behind him. ‘That is a petrulus.’

  ‘A what, sir?’ said the boy.

  ‘A petrulus. A living thing turned to stone.’

  The boy was already open-mouthed, and hearing this he quite forgot to breathe, gasping and spluttering a moment later as he looked around him – for something to say, or for simple escape, he wasn’t sure which. In the end, he couldn’t help but turn his attention back to the statue – to the petrulus – reaching out to touch it but stopping himself before he did.

  ‘Did… did you do this?’ he said, immediately wishing he hadn’t, and rushing in with the second-most terrifying of the thoughts running through his head as if to disguise the first. ‘I mean, if I touch it, what will happen? Will I turn to stone, too?’

  The alchemist burst into uproarious laughter.

  ‘No, boy. I didn’t. And you won’t. This is the work of a cockatrice.’ The alchemist took a couple more steps into the room, standing just beside the boy as he looked up at the petrulus. The boy hesitated a moment, but then reached out, running his hand over the face of the ‘man’ he had first seen on making his way into the stuffy little room. He could feel nothing but cold stone.

  ‘This was… a person? A man?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said the apothecary. ‘One with the unhappy distinction of having met the gaze of a cockatrice.’

  ‘What are you going to do with him?’ said the boy.

  ‘What do you mean, child?’ said the apothecary.

  ‘Are you going to… change him back?’

  There was more laughter from the gruff old alchemist.

  ‘Oh, no, boy,’ he said. ‘Nothing will ever change this wretched fellow back again.’

  The boy swallowed hard; the thought of what had become of this man had been terrifying enough when he’d imagined it to be some kind of trick or curse that might be undone, in time. He trembled to think that this was a living person turned forever to stone.

  ‘Then… what are you going to do with him?’ he said, the fear and trepidation in his young voice obvious.

  The alchemist smiled unsettlingly.

  ‘You’re a curious one, aren’t you, boy?’

  I

  A Baetylus of Heavens

  Mehrigus looked up from the bench as he became aware of Ngja chittering below – a moment later, the lizard appeared, settling on the wall over the open doorway leading to the stairs beyond. Ngja lurked most of the time on the jambs of the front door. He had turned up of his own accord one day and had stayed more or less ever since. Mehrigus fed him on scraps of all kinds of things. Ngja would eat anything and, whatever kind of creature he was exactly, it seemed his behaviour would change, echoing whatever magical essence he was able to extract from these scraps and morsels. Mehrigus had once fed him the leftovers from a spagyric of magmatic sulfur he had been making, and for the next three nights Ngja’s belly had glowed like a lantern. In return for this nourishment, Ngja would announce the arrival of visitors if Mehrigus wasn’t downstairs to hear them. When Mehrigus was too deep in his work to notice the chittering, as he was today, Ngja would flap lazily up into the chambers above to find him.

  As Mehrigus arose from his chair and headed for the winding staircase, Ngja took to his shimmering, dragonfly wings and followed him, hovering close by his master’s head.

  Downstairs in the shop a boy stood quivering in front of the counter. He was barely tall enough to see over it, but he was turning hi
s head frantically from side to side, clearly looking for Mehrigus. The place had little changed from when Mehrigus himself had stood there, timid and afraid, in front of that very counter.

  ‘Are you the apothecary, master?’ said the boy as soon as he saw him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mehrigus calmly. ‘I am. What do you need?’

  ‘They told me to ask you to come, master,’ the boy said. ‘A man’s been injured.’ The boy trembled as he spoke. But it wasn’t from fright, it was from terrible, terrible alarm. ‘My father,’ he said.

  Mehrigus turned and took his heavy, dark outer robe from where it hung on the wall and donned it hurriedly, before reaching out for a satchel and two small pouches, throwing them about himself with equal haste.

  ‘Come, then!’ he said. ‘Show me where.’

  Mehrigus was right behind the boy, his hands on his shoulders, as the pair hurried out of the door. Behind them, Ngja settled back down onto the doorframe and shot out his tongue to lock the door.

  Up on Mandringatte, the boy led Mehrigus into one of the small houses lining the road where it began to slope up towards the city’s eastern gate. Up a flight of wooden stairs, Mehrigus found the injured man in a crowded room on the first floor. There were three members of the city’s watch, unkempt, bloodied and anxious – the man’s comrades – plus two women and the boy, who Mehrigus presumed to be the man’s family.

  The man lay on a straw-stuffed mattress on the floor. He was still in the breeches of his uniform but shirtless, his open jerkin underneath him. A wound on his left-hand side had been hastily bandaged, a dark mass of seeping blood showing through them, but there was clearly more to his condition than this mere wound. The man’s skin was sallow, and his eyes clouded. He moved his head as Mehrigus and the boy entered but seemed almost to be looking through or past the figures in the room.

  ‘He’s been wounded,’ said one of the watchmen, a slender man of average height, grey-haired and bearded. He crouched down beside the mattress to point at the all too obvious wound. ‘Some outcasts – real dregs – down in the tunnels. It was a wicked, rusted old thing they stabbed him with,’ he said. ‘The blade broke off but we left it for fear of bleeding. We brought him back here to get it out of him but…’

  The man hesitated and one of the women took over.

  ‘It wasn’t right. It had rusted to nothing, that thing,’ she said.

  ‘Worse than rust, I fear,’ said Mehrigus, kneeling down beside the man. The others in the room glanced from one to another, as if Mehrigus had just said the very thing they had all feared.

  ‘The remains of it are in there?’ said Mehrigus, peering into a bucket pushed against the wall, where flecks of sickly white scum floated on top of blood and water.

  ‘Aye,’ said the watchman beside him. ‘We dropped it in there, but I doubt there’s anything left of it. It was falling apart even as we pulled it out of him.’

  Mehrigus watched the scum seeming to expand across the surface, creating ripples in the still water. There was an unsettling life to it. He began to peel back the man’s bandages and, much as he feared, saw at once little white spores around the wound.

  He reached for one of the pouches he’d brought with him, and from his satchel drew a phial of water. He took the cork from it and then, taking a flat metal rod from his satchel, added a little powder from the pouch.

  The other woman knelt by the bed, hands clenched in front of her, elbows on the sheets, offering a prayer to Sigmar. Her words were inaudible, hurried, but she finished the prayer before looking up to see Mehrigus standing beside her. She stood up and stepped aside to allow him to move closer to the wounded man.

  ‘You’ve a cure for it?’ she said, lingering beside him.

  ‘Of sorts,’ said Mehrigus, stirring the mixture. He reached out towards the bucket, and carefully tipped the phial until just a few drops of the liquid fell from it. Where they landed, steam rose and water hissed, and the sickly white scum died away.

  ‘It’s poison,’ he said. ‘But you mustn’t be alarmed. There are times when you have to kill to cure.’ Mehrigus dipped the metal rod into the phial of liquid. He took one last look around the room – at every one of them, silent and still, pale with fear – and began to drip the poison sparingly around the wound.

  The wounded man snarled as his flesh began to hiss. He turned his head to Mehrigus, staring at him. Mehrigus could sense the man himself now. His eyes were still alert, fixed on Mehrigus, not staring past him at all, but they were hidden behind the sickly white sheen forming over them. The man’s breathing began to slow. He seemed calmer, as if he understood Mehrigus was trying to help him, and he laid his head back on the mattress.

  Mehrigus rummaged through his satchel again. He drew out what looked like a rough, pitted stone, the size of an orange.

  ‘It’s a baetylus,’ he said. ‘Of the heavens.’

  It had the smell of petrichor, even though it was bone dry and had been stored safely indoors for months. It was carved with sigmarite runes connected by lines whose geometries made the rough orb into a careful approximation of the heavens. It appeared as dull stone, but where Mehrigus ran his hands over the runes and incanted, the dullness of the stone gave way to glimmering light, as if revealing precious metals beneath. And unlike the other ‘baetyluses’ in Mehrigus’ collection, this one really was a meteorite – or a fragment of one – hurled down from Azyr in the wake of one of Sigmar’s Stormhosts and possessed of much celestial magic.

  Mehrigus took the man’s hands and wrapped them around the baetylus, covering them with his own, and using his fingers to guide the man’s thumbs around the glowing edges of the runes.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘Incant as I do.’

  ‘He’s too weak,’ said one of the women.

  ‘I know,’ said Mehrigus. ‘I’m talking to the rest of you. What this man has been touched by is a taint… Pray it spreads no further.’

  II

  A Likeness in Mind

  Three weeks later, the man was well enough that Mehrigus was able to tell him and his family that he would not need to visit them again. The man was blind and afflicted with great pain when moving his left arm, the latter caused, it seemed, by the spot on his side where Mehrigus had scarred his flesh with poison. But he was alive, and seemingly free of the wicked taint the weapon had been infected with. There’d been more reports of diseased dregs lurking in the city’s caves and tunnels. Some said these outcasts were victims of a plague rumoured to be raging in a number of nearby towns, driven from their homes by their terrified neighbours, but others pointed out these bands seemed to be armed, and more than willing to attack any who chanced upon them. Many, Mehrigus included, began to wonder if something more sinister was afoot.

  As he made his way home after his last visit with the man, Mehrigus fumed inside. He hated that these were the methods he was forced to use – to have to poison a man and scar him to let him live. He knew there was another way. He burned all the more to find it.

  Several more days passed, and it continued to play on Mehrigus’ mind, feeding and reinvigorating what had long been his obsession: transformation as cure. The only true cure. To Mehrigus, the apothecary’s fledgling art – let alone the chirurgeon’s dull butchery – was nothing more than the savage preservation of life, however desperate for that savage preservation benighted and afflicted souls might be. It was little of an art at all. But he had glimpsed how close something better must be. His journals were full of these glimpses, meticulous in their reasoning, of life, sickness, age – nigh on all of existence, in fact – as simple processes of change and transformation, whose course needed only to be guided to do away with all the harms they might otherwise bring. The apothecary’s simple physic, with most of its potions no better than poison, was lacking. For Mehrigus, what the apothecary knew of the body would have to be melded with the alchemist’s art and the mage’s lore. And t
his – this – was his obsession.

  Freshly determined, he pored over his journals. The man’s case he added, as he always did, while taking what he had seen there and looking back across pages filled over years with his observations, his reasonings, the results of his experimentations, and looking for what would unite and illuminate them from what was new.

  Around noon one day, as he paced to and fro behind the desk on which lay open the most recent of his journals, Mehrigus was filled with a curious sense that someone was waiting for him. He descended the stairs, down into his little apothecary’s shop. Sure enough, an elderly man, perhaps twice Mehrigus’ own age, stood peering into the jars Mehrigus kept on the shelves closest to the door.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Mehrigus, emerging behind the counter. He glanced up at the door. Ngja was there as ever but gave no sign of having noticed the man at all. Peculiar. Mehrigus tried to recall what he had fed him last.

  The man turned and smiled.

  ‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘Mehrigus? The apothecary?’

  Mehrigus smiled, amused as much as he was surprised. He was seldom greeted by name on a first meeting.

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘Mehrigus, I am. May I be of help?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said the old man, shuffling forward. Mehrigus noted the difficulty with which the old man moved and came out from behind the counter, dragging a stool to offer to him. ‘Or perhaps I can be of help to you,’ said the man, accepting the seat without a word about it passing between them. ‘Or perhaps this will prove to be nothing more than a meeting of two men of a like mind.’

  ‘You’re an apothecary?’ said Mehrigus.

  ‘I was,’ said the man. ‘You might say I’ve retired, but for one or two little interests.’ He smiled, one hand resting on the counter as he leaned forward on the stool. ‘Call me ­Trimegast,’ he said.

  ‘Trimegast. Welcome, sir,’ said Mehrigus, idly wondering if he ought to be deferential, his pondering making him seem quizzical instead as he spoke. ‘And how did you come to hear of me, Trimegast, may I ask?’