The Book of Transformations - Matt Keefe

by Warhammer

  ‘’Ere it is,’ said the surly duardin, Grimendahl, not seeming to care much whether Mehrigus had arrived to hear him or not.

  He slapped a heavy, and rather bloody, cloth sack down on the counter as Mehrigus entered.

  ‘What’s that?’ the Apothecary asked, peering down at the grizzled adventurer and his comrades.

  ‘You know what it is!’ said Grimendahl. ‘You asked for it!’

  Mehrigus picked up an iron rod from beneath the counter and opened the mouth of the sack. ‘It’s the head. That’s not what I asked for, Grimendahl.’

  ‘It is,’ said the duardin, turning red. ‘Hydra’s blood, you said. That thing’s full of it!’

  Mehrigus sighed. ‘I thought I’d been quite clear. Blood from the body, not the head. It doesn’t grow back from the head, does it? It grows back from the body. The head is the part that dies.’

  ‘Guts, ’eads, legs, can’t tell ’em apart with them hydras. Can’t tell its ’eads from its tails or any of ’em from its–’

  ‘Ignore our friend here,’ said Ostion, Grimendahl’s human companion, and a man who spoke curiously well for someone who’d fallen in with a disgraced duardin, an alcoholic priestess and a seasick pirate. ‘He’s obsessed with the heads. And he’s playing with you. We have what you need, Mehrigus. And it will be worth every single gold coin… but I’m sure we would all like to see them first.’

  Mehrigus disappeared from sight and returned dragging a heavy wooden chest. He hauled it in front of the counter and nodded at it. Ostion did the same to Grimendahl who kicked it, then, cursing that it hadn’t magically opened when he did so, stooped and lifted the lid. The odd band, all four of them, seemed pleased enough with what they saw. Ostion nodded to another of the duardin, Kaliqar, who then stooped to reach into the sack at his feet. He brought out a large, earthen jar and set it on the counter. Mehrigus reached out to remove its lid.

  ‘Take care with that…’ said Ostion. He and the rest of his party were already shuffling away, dragging the chest behind them.

  ‘Thank you, all,’ said Mehrigus, unconcerned with their presence now he had what he wanted. ‘I will be quite careful with it.’

  He removed the lid. Inside, just large enough to be visible above the surface of the pool of blackened blood that surrounded it in the jar, was the heart of a hydra.

  Mehrigus followed Dormian across the courtyard and into the small basement where the wounded man lay feverish on the hay.

  ‘Paluris, I’ve brought an apothecary to see you,’ Dormian said, but the man was feverish and insensible. ‘I told you, he’s the one who fixed my eyes.’ Another moment went by without reply, and Dormian simply gestured towards the prone man. Mehrigus nodded and stepped closer. A woman, the wife of one of the other watchmen, Mehrigus was told, sat on a small stool beside the man, periodically checking his fever and mopping his brow.

  ‘They cut off his leg?’ said Mehrigus, crouching down beside him.

  ‘As soon as that chirurgeon saw a sign of the rot,’ said Dormian. ‘See what I mean about starting to think I was lucky?’ Dormian offered a grim chuckle. ‘But they saved him doing that, didn’t they?’ He seemed earnest.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Mehrigus. He doubted it. This was simple butchery to him now. And the rot, well, Mehrigus couldn’t for a moment say it aloud, but the rot was growth, life, change, in its own way. Its fecundity might even have been turned to healing the man’s other wounds if Mehrigus had been brought here sooner. Still, Mehrigus had no need of such extra potence. Not anymore.

  Mehrigus pulled a brass pot from his satchel. It had no lid, for the ichor inside was set solid, like black wax. Mehrigus took a knife from his robes and carved out some of the ichor from the centre of the pot, making a small well.

  ‘Leave me, please,’ he said to the others in the room. Dormian and the woman looked from one another to Mehrigus and the wounded man, Dormian shrugging to show that he saw no reason not to do as the apothecary asked. His clear, seeing eyes were evidence of his ability. They left.

  Mehrigus set the pot down in the hay between the man’s legs. He took a tourniquet from his robes and bound it around the thigh of the man’s surviving whole leg. He breathed deeply as he prepared to test what would be this near-ultimate transformation as cure, then he put the point of the blade to the man’s leg, below the tourniquet. Quickly, he snatched up the pot to catch the blood that came streaming forth.

  Mehrigus let the pot fill and flow over, then set it down again in the hay. He stitched and bandaged the cut he had made, then took the same knife and began to stir the blood and ichor, incanting the words he had gleaned from the Book of Transformations.

  Essence, substance, enchantment.

  The balm writhed and lashed, momentary shapes, waiting to be flesh…

  VI

  A Course of Leeches

  Mehrigus sensed another presence in the room. He looked up, calmly, from his desk. He had been without fear for days. He had been transformed by certainty.

  Trimegast stood in the doorway, at the head of the stairs. Ngja was nowhere to be seen. Mehrigus smiled.

  ‘You heard,’ he said.

  ‘I wondered,’ Trimegast replied. ‘It goes well, I think.’

  Mehrigus smiled. ‘Perfectly, I think. I’ve deciphered more of the book and–’

  Trimegast stepped into the room. Mehrigus paused, struck for a moment by the man’s seemingly greater stature. The infirmity he had seen before was gone.

  ‘Hmm?’ said Trimegast.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’ve deciphered more of the book and I have the proof I need. Of transformation as a cure.’ Mehrigus couldn’t help himself. He grinned.

  ‘You seem pleased,’ said Trimegast.

  ‘I am ready to show them all how mistaken they have been.’

  Trimegast frowned. ‘You think the mistaken are willing to see it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mehrigus. ‘When I–’ Something about Trime­gast’s stern gaze silenced him. The old man stepped closer. He peered at something on Mehrigus’ desk. The baetylus. Mehrigus watched him as he took it carefully in his hand, long fingernails tracing its geometries as he examined it. He smiled, pleased, and set it back down.

  ‘Perhaps… perhaps I will attempt one more proof before I show them,’ said Mehrigus, coy now.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Trimegast, turning and descending the stairs. Mehrigus did not follow.

  Mehrigus woke with a start. This had been happening more and more lately. He sat there, dazed. He couldn’t remember going to sleep, or what he had been doing before that. He didn’t know why he’d awoken as he had.

  Then the banging started again.

  He rolled out of bed, running a hand over his face as if to lure himself into consciousness. Ngja was on the wall beside the door, chittering furiously. Mehrigus seized up his robe from the floor and shot down the stairs.

  ‘Help! Help!’ came the voice, half drowning itself out with the frantic banging on the door. At least, Mehrigus assumed the banging and the voice were one and the same.

  He opened the door.

  A man fell into the shop, stumbling down the shallow steps behind the door. He collapsed on the floor at their feet, legs splayed, just about propping himself up on his hands as he coughed and wheezed. Mehrigus stepped slowly around him, willing only to nudge a little wooden stool towards the man with his foot. He was dressed in rags that were worse than tattered, matted hair poking through holes in a torn hood, sores and pustules covering his arms and legs.

  ‘I need… an… apothecary,’ he hacked. ‘I need… Mehrigus.’ The voice was a spiteful hiss.

  ‘Well, which one is it?’ said Mehrigus. ‘Mehrigus or an apothecary?’ It was a strange sort of vanity that seized him – he’d been ridiculed for so long while hoping for acceptance that it filled him with an odd sense of satisfaction now to think of himself as someth
ing more than a mere apothecary.

  The man raised his head, glaring at Mehrigus with one good eye. It was clear he was desperate and had no time for this game. He hauled himself up onto the stool, panting and heaving.

  ‘I need the apothecary… Mehrigus… The rot… The rot…’ A drip-drip-dripping sound joined the noise of the man’s sputtering breath, and droplets of something began to patter onto the floor around the little stool. The man was horrifically afflicted. Mehrigus couldn’t quite believe he had made it here. In desperation, he supposed.

  ‘I don’t know if I can help you,’ said Mehrigus.

  The man laughed. A wicked, snickering laugh. The hissing of his breathing could have been coming from anywhere – his mouth, his neck, his open wounds – as he did so. His hand shot out from his stinking robes and grabbed Mehrigus by the wrist. Mehrigus’ skin burned where the man touched it.

  ‘You can!’ hissed the rotten man, what seemed a terrible roar giving way to the most perverse laughter.

  Mehrigus ground his teeth. His hand shot to the baetylus hanging around his neck. He clenched it in his left hand, even as his right hand burned, still clutching his staff. His fingers searched out its geometries, running over them to draw out the shapes of those most powerful symbols – the symbols of transformation – and the rotten man shrieked as the baetylus’ power lashed out at him. The burning receded and the afflicted hand recoiled.

  The man screamed in pain.

  ‘Listen,’ said Mehrigus, angry now, but determined to take the opportunity fate had presented him. ‘You are terribly afflicted. That rot does more to you than you know. Your soul is in a worse state already than this miserable body of yours. But I will try.’

  Mehrigus stood and paced across the room. He bolted the door and led the man into the secluded back room of the shop.

  The man lay on the layer of thin sack cloth Mehrigus had rolled out on the floor. Fumescences filled the room, their smoke drifting from braziers around the walls. Mehrigus set the heavy glass jar down on the little table beside the man. He removed its broad lid slowly with both hands, setting it down carefully on the table beside the jar before reaching for his tongs, and picking out a huge, two-headed leech, grown fat on hydra’s blood and worse.

  Mehrigus lowered it towards the man’s face, towards the gaping, horrific wound on his cheek. He set the leech to the diseased canker and carefully loosed his tongs. The huge leech quivered, slapping its tail against the man as it rolled its body over to bring its mouthparts to the diseased flesh of the open wound, latching on at once. The leech fed with one mouth, tearing at the rotten flesh, and the rot spread down its own body as it did. The leech’s flesh boiled with pustules and boils, but as it changed it came to match the man’s own diseased flesh and then, as the rot died away on the leech’s writhing skin, it came to take on the appearance of something else – healthier, human flesh. The leech’s second head bit on now, spewing out a black ichor from around its mouthparts, but it did not rend. Instead, the transformation that he’d begun in the leech’s flesh spread to the man, the rot dying away around the parasite’s bite, ichor spilling and changing, turning into fresh, pink, healthy human flesh. The leech itself was consumed by this transformation, its fat body thrashing away to nothingness as it gave up its substance to restore to the afflicted man what the rot had taken.

  But the man howled in agony. Mehrigus knew well that the cause of this rot was dark and terrible, and it would not be easily undone by the physics and magics of a mere man. Great buboes grew on the man’s body, bursting as they swelled and casting blobs of pus and angry, red, bloodstained spores into the air. Mehrigus reached with his tongs for another leech. He pulled back the man’s tattered robes and dropped the fat, quivering thing into the worst of the wounds he could see on the man’s side, but the rot still attacked him and the man kicked and thrashed.

  Mehrigus could not wait. He picked up the glass jar and shook it, hurling a rain of bloated, two-headed leeches over the man.

  It was a feast. The leeches attacked the rot, here and there even fighting their brothers and sisters for the taste. Their potency was great, perhaps even greater than Mehrigus had hoped, and in their frenzy, many split, one gnashing head pulling free from the other, a second bursting from each as the leeches multiplied, tearing at flesh and vomiting forth black ichor.

  The man screamed and wailed, thrashing his legs, ragged fingers tearing at his own flesh where the leeches worked. Their bulbous bodies quivered, the transformation rife, but it was too much. No longer did the writhing leeches take on the shade of healthy, living flesh, but as they thrashed instead their tails grew into a mass of lashing tentacles of vivid pink and blue, melting into the man’s flesh and spreading their lurid colour across his body. Where the leeches stripped away the rot on the man’s face, they exposed for a moment the bone and cartilage of his jaw, his nose and his cheeks, and feasted on it the same way. Their flesh grew hard, and as the transformation spread grew into a great bony protrusion, like a beak, where they had eaten away the man’s face. The man’s screams were transformed, too, turning from gurgling howls into manic screeching.

  Bile rose suddenly in Mehrigus’ throat. He grabbed an ancient sword from the wall and hoisted it above his head. He stared at the transformed figure writhing in frenzied agony on the floor, and brought the blade crashing down, severing the man’s – the beast’s – head clean from his shoulders.

  VII

  A Gift of Change

  Mehrigus’ skin ran with cold sweat. He sat on the floor of the shop, in the corner, his back to two cold stone walls.

  There was a silver bowl full of water beside him. He cupped a handful of it and threw it on his face. His carefully prepared crop of leeches, sat in dozens of glass jars in crates in front of him, just waiting to be carried to the street and put onto carts to take Mehrigus’ ‘cure’ to the city. But now Mehrigus had seen the effects of his cure and had fallen into a stupor, a fog of clouded thoughts. He felt stretched by exhaustion, anticipation and now cold fear.

  He hauled himself to his feet and staggered across the room. He clambered up the shallow steps and yanked the door open, stepping out into the street outside. He would find Dormian and Paluris. Mehrigus would need more proof – though he dreaded finding it – if he were to really admit he had failed. He wanted to see, again, his transformation as a cure. He wanted desperately to believe that the rotten man’s fate was down to his own sorry condition.

  He headed across Mandringatte and west through the small streets, to the courtyard where Dormian had taken him weeks before.

  The little basement was empty. The matted pile of straw still lay at one end but it didn’t look like anyone had been here for days. Mehrigus turned back the way he had come, up the stairs to the passageway between houses. As he emerged into the courtyard, a window opened above him. A man leaned out, yelling, bawling, sobbing. ‘What have you done?!’ It was Paluris. ‘What have you done?!’

  Mehrigus stood dumbfounded. Paluris disappeared from the window and up ahead, where stone steps ran from the end of the passageway up to the floor above, the crashing of bolts could be heard. Paluris appeared again, in the open doorway, howling in rage. He stood there, whole again, in a way – one bird-footed leg gripping the stone of the threshold.

  Mehrigus turned and fled through the courtyard and down the narrow streets.

  Sweat was pouring from Mehrigus’ brow by the time he crashed through the front door of Dormian’s house and charged up the stairs. He burst into the little room Dormian and his family used as a sitting room. He couldn’t wait – he couldn’t risk being refused entry. He needed to see for himself.

  Dormian was slumped in the corner, hands to his face, scratching at his eyes. The boy and the two women stood over him.

  ‘Horrors! Horrors!’ he yelled. ‘I’m surrounded by daemons!’ Dormian turned his head. Swirls of purple and blue clouded his eyes, the
pupils barely visible beneath them – not blind, but all too seeing. Mehrigus could feel him fix his corrupted sight on him as he entered the room. Dormian howled all the louder. Mehrigus turned and fled once more.

  Mehrigus left Mandringatte, hurriedly descending the steps down to the little lane outside his shop. He turned the corner onto that narrow street to be confronted by a mob, Paluris at their head, hobbling on his mismatched legs, waving a sword and screaming. Around him a crowd was yelling, carrying cudgels, swords, small axes, blacksmith tools – seemingly anything they could lay their hands on. They battered at the door to Mehrigus’ shop.

  ‘I didn’t mean any of this…’ Mehrigus murmured, weeping as he took an almost automatic set of steps forward. Something inside him was driving him to give himself up to the crowd.

  But they hadn’t seen him. Not yet. Up ahead, the mob smashed the door from its charges and in they swept.

  Mehrigus hesitated. He reached for the baetylus around his neck. He searched for the words to a prayer to Sigmar – they did not come. The baetylus felt heavier. He turned it over in his fingers, frozen in indecision. Over the weeks and months since Trimegast had gifted him the Book of Transformations, Mehrigus had carved it with new geometries. The runes were meaningless now – lost, all but erased by the lattice of lines that allowed Mehrigus to trace out any of the symbols of transformation and transfiguration he so chose. But it was changed beyond even that now – perhaps it had been for some time. As Mehrigus turned the baetylus in his hands, he followed the oldest of the lines he could find, but no matter how he turned it, he could not follow it back to where it began. The lines ran ever onwards but never returned – it was impossible. It was changed.

  Mehrigus felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned, gasping.

  It was Trimegast.

  ‘Those who are mistaken will never be willing to see it,’ Trimegast said, beaming almost beatifically. ‘Come with me.’

  Trimegast pushed back his robes, sheathing the sword he held in his hand. He was a foot taller than Mehrigus. He was younger, sturdier, more imposing than Mehrigus had even seen him before. He was changed.