The Book of Transformations - Matt Keefe Read online

  ‘Well, you see,’ said Trimegast, ‘I had heard that you treated a man known to me, a neighbour–’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. In fact, a few folks hereabouts mentioned it to me. Some were quite amazed, some were quite troubled. It’s always the way, Mehrigus. Don’t worry, that isn’t why it intrigued me,’ he went on. ‘You see, once they described you and one of them mentioned your name, it came to me that I had heard your name before, Mehrigus. I recalled that I think I had perhaps once heard you speak…’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mehrigus.

  ‘…on transformation as cure.’

  Mehrigus felt an involuntary cringe run through him; he hated that he felt this way about his life’s obsession, but it was a reaction long cultivated by the responses his ideas drew from those who claimed to know well the arts of healing and magic.

  ‘The Collegiate Arcane,’ he replied. Mehrigus had spoken there, three years prior, when he was certain his ideas were ready to be shared. He was wrong. Not on account of his own ideas, perhaps, as Mehrigus saw it, but in his own simple naivety. He had not before that day quite realised that for knowledge to be shared required also an audience willing to receive it. He had discovered in humiliating fashion that day that his did not yet exist.

  ‘Yes!’ said the old man, animatedly. ‘And then I wondered, whatever happened to this work of transformation as cure…’

  ‘It goes on,’ said Mehrigus, slinking back behind the counter, as if he felt the need of physical protection if he were to find the will to go on with the conversation. ‘But it won’t be transforming the minds of the Collegiate Arcane any time soon, I’m sure.’

  Trimegast seemed to sense Mehrigus’ reticence and fell silent for a few moments, turning on the stool to gaze around the shop.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said at last, ‘are people surprised to find this is an apothecary’s shop?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mehrigus, at least a little intrigued by Trimegast’s perceptiveness.

  ‘I can see why,’ said Trimegast.

  ‘My master was an alchemist,’ said Mehrigus. ‘I was apprenticed to him as a boy. He dabbled in spagyry, too. I thought myself an alchemist for some time. I suppose he thought he knew something of the apothecary’s physic, too. But in one regard I always knew he was mistaken – limiting his arts of transformation to the inanimate.’ He stepped back out from behind the counter, pacing slowly around the shop, seeming not to fear a trap from the old man any longer.

  ‘We have mastered the transformation of the inanimate,’ said Mehrigus. ‘No one thinks anything of it. Ice to water, water to mist to water again. Stone to magma, magma to rock. It is the way of things, and we have mastered it for ourselves, we alchemists, centuries since. Why shouldn’t the living substance be the same way?

  ‘It is, you see,’ he said, confident now. ‘Life, growth, age – just change, transformation, but we have not yet mastered it. Why, it’s as if we believe we can’t. But it’s so obvious. If an infection can rot the flesh, it is but change – deleterious change. And if a tumour can grow, it is the same. Why can we not harness this transformation, grow back the living flesh, the youthful flesh, healthy and new? The flesh is as ready for change as the simple metals and realmstones we can craft into a thousand forms.’

  Trimegast smiled. ‘I don’t doubt it, Mehrigus. But, tell me, do you believe you are the first to think it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Mehrigus. ‘It’s obvious. Doesn’t the God-King himself show us the power of transformation in his Stormcast Eternals? And the flesh can be no different from the inanimate,’ said Mehrigus, almost manic now. ‘I know it. I’ve always known it.’ He swept across the floor of the shop, to the far wall, where an object stood under a heavy, deep-blue cloth.

  ‘How can the animate be any different from the inanimate,’ he said, whipping back the cloth to reveal the petrulus beneath, ‘when the animate can become the inanimate?’

  Trimegast grinned. ‘A masterful observation,’ he said, rising from his stool and walking gingerly across the room to the petrulus – the motionless stone that had so terrified, then so intrigued, then so inspired the young Mehrigus, and which he had inherited from his long-deceased master.

  ‘So if there is a gaze to turn a man to stone, there is something – something – to turn him back to flesh and bone,’ said Mehrigus.

  Trimegast smiled. He slipped a shaking, aged hand inside his heavy cloak, creating the sound of rustling paper as he tugged at something inside a deep pocket.

  ‘You are not the first to think it, Mehrigus, as I have told you. I believe once much was known of this. Much indeed. But it was lost.’ Trimegast pulled a sheaf of papers from his cloak. He offered them to Mehrigus.

  Mehrigus took the sheaf of papers, aghast that at last someone had come to him of a like mind, and even more aghast that he seemed already to know of much which Mehrigus did not. The papers were ancient and tattered. The script and the symbols on them were unknown to him, but over perhaps a third of each page, at a glance, there were translations in a modern hand, which Mehrigus took to be Trimegast’s.

  ‘Do not misunderstand me. By no means is all of this plain to me, Mehrigus,’ said the old man. ‘It has been a life’s work, collecting these pages and deciphering what I have, and there is much missing. There is much that I cannot decode. But it is there. And it is obvious enough that the secrets you seek – the secrets I have been seeking for a lifetime – were once known, Mehrigus. They are written in those pages you hold. That is the Book of Transformations. I will entrust it to you a little while, Mehrigus, if you’ll agree to let me share in whatever discoveries might follow.’

  Mehrigus took two stumbling strides and sat himself down on the stool he had earlier set out for the old man, such was his great surprise at what had come to him. Trimegast seemed almost amused by Mehrigus’ overawed delight. He continued to inspect the petrulus.

  ‘There must be great potency in a stone like this,’ he said, with a grin.

  III

  A Dream of Sight

  For three days, Mehrigus did not sleep. The door to the shop remained barred and Ngja found himself having to venture several times a day up to the study above to plead with his master to feed him. Mehrigus was absorbed in the Book of Transformations. His own journals – the work of years – lay around him but so dismayed was he now with the blindness of his own earlier reasoning that he tore whole pages from them and fed them to the demanding lizard.

  There was much that was indecipherable but Mehrigus could already see from the old man’s diligent work that he had missed a very obvious truth. Mehrigus himself had long lambasted (privately, for the most part) the short-sightedness of those who confined themselves to alchemy or physic or magic alone, but he realised now that his own methods had too long been lacking some vital part of each. Essence, substance, enchantment – transformation required each of these. Mehrigus’ own perfunctory blending of mystical arts had been too haphazard; it was so obvious to him now. He rolled the baetylus between his palms, one to the other, as he pondered it, mulling over the runes and their power and wondering how he might harness the same from the strange symbols on the pages of the Book of Transformations.

  At last, in exhaustion, he abandoned his desk and his study for his bedchamber and collapsed into sleep and fevered dreams.

  The eyes were flicking frantically from side to side, pupils wide in terror at their imprisonment – seeming, in fact, even more horrified for the unblinking, stone eyelids frozen open around them.

  Mehrigus awoke, sitting up sharply in bed. No light fell from the gaps in the rickety old shutters – it was the middle of the night. Perhaps he had slept for a day or more. He sat panting, letting his thoughts gather for a few moments. It was a dream, but it was quickly turning into an irresistible question in his mind.

  Mehrigus pushed the thin quilt aside and hurried barefoot across the be
dchamber and headed for the cramped, winding stairs to the shop below. He snatched at the lantern that hung always at the head of the stairs and whispered to it, bringing to life its faithful orange glow. Down he went. As he entered from the back of the room, he dropped to his knees beside a large wooden box standing against the wall. He swept aside the clutter of empty jars, bottles and smaller boxes on top of it and pulled off the lid.

  Inside was a mess of tools, some inherited, some found, some opportunistically collected, few with any particular reason for being there. Mehrigus rummaged excitedly through the jumble of them, looking for an implement. He knew what he needed it to do, but not yet what it would look like. He pulled out a small pick, used for chipping mineral deposits free from their rocky birthplaces. Too destructive, he thought, but set it down on the floor beside him all the same and continued to rummage. He pushed a small, square-ended hammer aside – too clumsy – then stopped, turning back to it, scrabbling for its handle through the mess of tools pushed on top of it and pulling it out. The hammer was too clumsy, true enough, but at the sight of it Mehrigus realised what he needed. Impatient, he hauled the box towards him, spilling its contents across the floor. Sharp edges cut his bare feet as the mass of tools slid across the stone but he didn’t care. He snatched up what he was looking for. A stonemason’s chisel. He grabbed the pick and the ­hammer too before hurrying through to the front of the shop.

  The petrulus was where it had always been, its eyes as unmoving and as petrified as ever. Mehrigus stopped, panting – in fear, in anticipation, in mad, senseless curiosity – and stared at the floor beside the statue. The excitement he felt was like that of someone knowing they are about to do wrong, and he asked himself why he felt it, if that was what he really believed. He looked at the petrulus, wondering if something within it or beyond it still existed to judge him. But he could gain no such sense and, calming his thoughts, he could see no reason to judge himself either. He raised the chisel and put the blade to the petrulus’ lifeless eyes, carefully positioning just one corner in the little gully between the eye and its lower lid.

  He lifted his right hand, his grip tight around the handle of the hammer. But then he relaxed his arm, and instead ran the corner of the chisel’s blade slowly and carefully along that little gully, without striking the chisel once. A trail of dust, like sand, fell from the corner of the petrulus’ eye, like tears. Beneath the stone was whiter and the dream of those eyes – brilliant whites, pupils wide – came back vividly.

  Mehrigus lifted the hammer and struck. The trickle of sandy tears became a stream, flecks of white stone falling down the petrulus’ cheek, over his stiff, stone robes and onto the floor. But the chisel was now perhaps a blade’s thickness further in, and the white that shone from the gouge Mehrigus had made was still just stone. Cold, lifeless stone.

  So, it was just a dream. Mehrigus could be sure of that, at least. This stony surface was not some eggshell waiting to be shattered to reveal a still-living eye beneath. Mehrigus breathed a great sigh – of relief that he had not made some horrendous mistake or discovered something truly terrible, but equally of disappointment that he had not yet uncovered any of the secrets he was sure the unfortunate thing held.

  But the question of whether or not some living thing still dwelt beneath was not really the one that Mehrigus had come to answer. This was not the source of that nervous, guilty excitement that had brought him rushing from his bed. That same excitement returned now as – having answered his dreaming mind’s darkest doubts and being free to ask the question that gripped his waking mind – he set down the chisel and dropped the hammer to the floor beside him.

  He lifted the pick.

  And slammed its tip straight into the corner of the petrulus’ agog, still-staring eye.

  IV

  A Spagyric of Light

  ‘It’s a tincture,’ said Mehrigus, drawing out the little phial. He was speaking to Dormian, the watchman, but the man’s family clustered around him. ‘Just a powder, dissolved in alcohol and set beneath lenses shaped to capture celestial light.’

  He didn’t tell them what the powder was made from.

  ‘A few drops, into each eye, morning and night. Do you understand?’ he said, turning to the man’s son.

  The boy nodded.

  ‘I will return in a week.’

  ‘Funny thing, you coming by here unexpected,’ said the watchman from his chair as Mehrigus was turning to leave.

  ‘A fortuitous thing, I hope we shall soon see,’ said Mehrigus.

  ‘Yes, perhaps,’ said the man. ‘Though I shouldn’t like to get my hopes up. And, in any case, I was starting to think I was lucky, being wounded already.’

  ‘What do you mean by that, Dormian?’ said Mehrigus.

  Dormian leaned forward in his chair. ‘The rot’s come,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Three days ago, there was an attack, a little way from here. More of the dregs, trying to force their way in through the east gate.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Mehrigus. He looked from Dormian to the woman sat beside him, to the boy. All were pale with fright.

  ‘The watch got up a militia and beat them off, but a lot of men were injured, and others are sick. They’ve tried to confine them, like,’ said Dormian, ‘but Brennia told me she heard it’s spreading.’ Dormian nodded his head. Mehrigus turned to the second woman.

  ‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘People are taking sick all over the place. They’re saying it’s the rot. And now people are hiding them for fear of what might happen to them otherwise, so there’s no one with any idea of how to help them…’

  Mehrigus pulled his robes tight about his face as he hurried through the streets. He was hopeful, he was curious, but he had no wish to be his own patient.

  So the rot had come. A plague was upon the town and people feared it heralded worse to come. By all accounts, so afflicted were those dregs who had assaulted the city that they should have succumbed long ago. No one could really believe this was some mere mortal malady.

  As Mehrigus approached the east gate barracks, two men emerged from the sides of the road, barring his way. Watchmen.

  ‘Turn back,’ said the man on the left. ‘No one’s to go any further.’ He put his hand to the hilt of his sword where it hung by his side to reinforce his point – his mate held a cudgel, though both looked terrified.

  Mehrigus calmly raised a hand as he approached.

  ‘I know the danger,’ he said. ‘If you won’t let me pass, please, go and tell your captain that Mehrigus the apothecary is here.’

  The man with the sword kept his eyes fixed on Mehrigus. The man with the cudgel looked from Mehrigus to his fellow watchman and back again. Seeing that his comrade was unsure of what to do, he stepped closer, whispering, though he couldn’t prevent himself being heard.

  ‘Mehrigus. He’s the apothecary that saved Dormian,’ he said.

  The man with the sword looked Mehrigus over again, as if weighing up the man when he was really weighing up the situation – he didn’t actually have any good idea of how to do either.

  ‘Alright,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll let you through, but understand this – I can’t be letting you back out without the captain’s say so. Go on, if you choose…’

  Mehrigus offered a solemn nod, the collar of his inner robes still pulled up over the lower half of his face, and carried on towards the barracks.

  Mehrigus watched the leeches writhing in the jars on his desk. Three generations, left to right. The first were grossly afflicted – they were the same leeches he’d placed on the confined victims in the barracks, allowing him to capture samples of the rot. He popped the lid from the jar and reached for his tongs. He lifted one of the rotten leeches from the jar, and dropped it into the next one.

  This second generation of leeches were a slick, oily blue-black colour. They swarmed over the afflicted
leech, their mouth parts rending chunks from it. The rot spread, appearing in buboes and boils on their skin, but died away almost as quickly. The leeches, at least, Mehrigus could make strong against the rot.

  He collected another of the afflicted specimens from the first jar, and dropped it into the third jar, the one on the right. The leeches in this jar shimmered with purples and blues. As they feasted on the infected leech, buboes, boils and welts appeared across their flesh, sickly grey, green and yellow erupting on their shimmering, periwinkle flesh. But these marks of the disease didn’t merely die away. Where they erupted, they soon burst, birthing new leeches, oily and purple-skinned, free of the taint, which even then died away on their parent.

  This was another step forward for Mehrigus – taking the disease’s vitality and turning its energies against it, binding them to the leeches’ own essence. But it was not enough. The leeches might feed on diseased flesh, but they could cleanse the rot only by stripping it away. Its victims would be stripped, scarred, mutilated. Saved, perhaps, but half-ruined by the leeches, killed by them if the rot went deep enough. It was more poison. Mehrigus would need more potency than this if he was to truly heal.

  He returned the lid to the jar of infected leeches and turned back to the pages of the Book of Transformations.

  V

  A Balm of Ichor

  Ngja appeared above the door. Mehrigus looked up but didn’t move, as if waiting for a more definite sign from his pet. This had become the norm, as if he had become loathe to imagine there should be any tedious mere apothecary’s business to distract him now. The lizard threw back his head, unimpressed, and chittered again, but there was no need.

  ‘Mehrigus!’ came a booming voice from below. ‘I’ve gots your guts and I’m here for mi’ gold!’

  Mehrigus set the baetylus and the engraving tool down on his desk, atop the pages of the book, and hurried down the stairs.