Contents

Cover

The Book of Transformations - Matt Keefe

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Myths & Revenants’

A Black Library Publication

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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 his 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 this – 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?’

‘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 bedchamber 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.

‘’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 something 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.

‘They will not see,’ he said. ‘You see, Mehrigus. You see. Now it is time to leave.’

‘No,’ said Mehrigus. ‘They don’t understand… but it’s a mistake. The hydra… the leeches… the cure… It didn’t work… It will… I’ll… I will make it work. I will make it change.’

‘It is enough, my young apprentice,’ said Trimegast, pulling at Mehrigus’ shoulder. ‘You have shown them the power of change. A war is raging, but it is not between mortals and this trifling rot. It is a great game, a war between the gods. And you have shown you command the power to play your part in it, Mehrigus. Nurgle has sent his minions and you have mastered the gifts of change well enough to defeat them. For now. Our master is pleased. But these others, Mehrigus, they do not see…’

Ahead, down the way, the haphazard windows of the old shop erupted outwards into the street one by one, staves, axes and spears bursting through them. A few moments later, smoke followed, billowing.

‘One day it might be revealed to them, perhaps,’ said Trimegast. ‘One day. But for now, you must not be seen, my apprentice. Not like this.’

Up ahead, the mob began to emerge from the shop. They were led by the watch captain. He recognised Mehrigus at once.

‘They’ll hunt me. They’ll find me,’ he said, turning to Trimegast, pale with fear.

‘No,’ said Trimegast. ‘You have been given the gift of change.’

Mehrigus reached a hand into his robes, even as the mob dashed towards him. He fingered the edges of the sheaf of papers. The Book of Transformations. He looked up, panting.

Trimegast stepped across, swinging his huge, twisting staff in a great arc in front of him. Bolts of light shot forth from the gleaming arc, launching into the mob like arrows. Men howled when they struck them and Trimegast turned, grabbing Mehrigus by the collar and hauling him back down the street. Unthinking now, Mehrigus ran with him.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

Trimegast turned a corner – into a little alley between shops leading back to Mandringatte. But up ahead came a watchman. Trimegast leapt forward, striking the watchman down with his staff. He seemed untroubled by the effort.

‘I am Trimegastraxi’attar-i-qash, magister now to you, my apprentice,’ he said. ‘And you are right. They will hunt you. It is time to take the gift of change, Mehrigus…’

Trimegast reached out a hand, running pointed claws over the baetylus hanging around Mehrigus’ neck.

‘Take it, my apprentice. Take the gift of change…’

Mehrigus reached for the book inside his robes. He drew it out slowly, even as he heard the noise of the mob approaching. He ran his hands over it. He was drawn to a part he had never fathomed before. He knew what he needed to do. He could never allow himself to be seen again. Not like this. With the tip of a finger, he instinctively drew a strange sigil he had never seen before.

Trimegast beamed. ‘The Mark of Tzeentch.’

Mehrigus cast off his robes. He stooped and pulled the breeches and jerkin from the slain watchman at his feet, even as the mob approached. There was a puddle in the road beside him, and in the reflection Mehrigus saw, though he already knew, that his appearance was changed. He was taller, younger, his skin darker, his eyes changed from brown to green, his hair from straight and neat to shaggy and thick.

He placed the book on top of his discarded robes and conjured a blue flame around them – he needed those pages no longer. He turned and ran back to the head of the alleyway. The mob was approaching.

‘Where is he?’ yelled the watch captain. Paluris stumbled along behind him, and thirty or forty men after them.

‘He’s not here,’ said Mehrigus. ‘He must’ve gone that way,’ he added, gesturing on down the street towards the north gate. The mob hurried past and Mehrigus made to follow them before letting himself fall behind. He turned, his heart pounding, and slinked back into the shadows where Trimegast waited for him.

This, it seemed, was his fate. He could change it no longer.

About the Author

Matt Keefe’s Black Library credits include the novel Outlander, set in the dark underhives of Necromunda, and the Warhammer 40,000 short story ‘Fate’s Masters, Destiny’s Servants’, which features the Ultramarines and first appeared in the anthology Tales from the Dark Millennium. He lives in Sheffield, England.

An extract from Myths & Revenants.

A column of armoured wagons rumbled through dusty Chamonite wastes. Stocky duardin marched beside them, their shoulders broad, their eyes hard. They wore runic chainmail and were festooned with weapons. They watched the horizon with belligerent intensity. Squat dobkine plodded along in traces near the column’s rear, the chitin-armoured bovines hauling field artillery and wagons.

A doughty duardin lord led the march. He was suited in magnificently crafted armour and wore a look of ferocious determination beneath his beetling black brows. He was carried atop a broad shield, its considerable weight borne without obvious discomfort by a quartet of grey-bearded champions.

Beside him stalked Neave Blacktalon. The Knight-Zephyros was tall, even for a Stormcast Eternal, and in her sleek Sigmarite armour and sculpted helm her eyes were at the same level as the duardin lord’s.

‘The sorcerer has been caught, and he will pay for his crimes,’ said the duardin. His voice was a gravelly rumble so deep that Neave felt it in her chest.

‘For that, I am sure that Sigmar thanks you, Thane Halgrimmsson,’ she replied. Her tone was sharp steel to his grinding stone, tinged with the ghost of a tribal lilt.

‘You don’t, though, do you, Stormcast?’ asked the duardin.

Neave didn’t immediately reply. She swept her eyes across the desolate lands around them. Her supernaturally keen senses drank in every detail, their acuity only slightly dulled by an omnipresent stench. The acrid stink wafted from some distance back down the line, from the caged wagon that contained the throng’s captive.

More distantly, Neave could feel the thumping footfalls of some huge beast. Predatory, she thought, from its loping gait, but not foolish enough to assail a marching column of warriors, no matter how scarce prey might be. Where would it go after dark? How did anything survive here when the ashen people came? She heard the grumbling conversations of the duardin, her quick mind easily able to sift out any given conversation from amongst the hubbub of voices, marching feet and clanking wargear.

Closer, she heard the steady thud of the duardin lord’s heart, read every nuance of his posture, smelled the sharp bite of his sweat. He was eager to provoke a row, she thought, all too ready to lead her into some sleight or act of disrespect that he could then pounce on as justification to deny her claim upon his captive.

You don’t so easily snare a huntress, no matter how many times you try this, thought Neave.

‘Xelkyn Xerkanos has left a trail of horror and infamy behind him that stretches for thousands of miles and taints three of the Mortal Realms with its touch,’ she said, finally answering the thane’s barb. ‘He triggered uprisings in Hammerhal-Ghyra and Anvilheim. He stole the secrets of the Vault of Echoes and reduced their guardians to fleshspawn. He has insulted the dignity and authority of the God-King Sigmar time and again. I am glad that he has been run to ground at last.’

‘Aye, but only because he took his blade to King Halgrimm, and I made him pay for it,’ said the duardin, returning his eyes to the road ahead.

Neave heard the unspoken accusation. She had been on Xerkanos’ trail for more than half a year by Azyrite reckoning, had fought him and his minions several times and come so close to slaying him that she could almost smell his foul blood upon her blades. She had been closing upon the sorcerer, sure this time of striking the killing blow, when the duardin had taken her quarry instead. That another had been responsible for claiming her mark rankled with Neave, but what troubled her more was that the mark still lived.

‘Your warriors fought hard and well,’ she said, keeping her tone neutral.

‘They also got there before you,’ said Halgrimmsson bluntly. ‘Neave Blacktalon. The most famed of Sigmar’s Knights-Zephyros, his arch-hunters. A warrior of the Hammers of Sigmar no less, and yet we got to your quarry before you could. I know if it were me, Stormcast, I’d feel the dishonour keen as a wound.’

With pride like yours, I don’t doubt it, Neave almost said. Instead, she pressed her lips into a thin line behind her helm’s faceplate. She shot a glance back along the line of march to where the sorcerer’s cage-wagon rumbled along. She should have been back there guarding it, and would have been but for the necessity to once again appeal to Halgrimmsson’s better sense.

‘Xerkanos is caught,’ she began after a moment’s thought. ‘His cult lies slain. It will be my blades that strike the fatal blow once your courts have accounted the sorcerer’s guilt. I see no dishonour in such a victory, thane, only the rightful cooperation of those who have allied themselves to oppose the Dark Gods.’

Halgrimmsson gave a noncommittal grunt.

Neave had come to the battlefield in Irongrief Vale too late to swing her blades in anger, but in time to witness the duardin binding Xerkanos in runic chains and loading him into a cage-wagon for transport. The carnage of that charnel field had been hideous. The duardin had bled for their victory. Still, Neave had only had eyes for the sorcerer.

She had explained her hunt to Halgrimmsson and claimed Xerkanos as her rightful mark by the God-King’s authority. The duardin had scoffed, telling her that his clan’s blood debt outweighed all other considerations. He had implied that, allies or not, he would not hesitate to have his surviving warriors send her back to the Heavens if she meant to stand in his way.

Rather than tell the thane just how many of his warriors would perish if he gave that order, Neave had begun what turned out to be a wrangling and hard-fought negotiation. There, amongst the dead, the Knight-Zephyros and the duardin, the thane had agreed that Xerkanos would be dragged in chains before the ancient Grudgekeepers of Clan Halgrimm, and there be tried and sentenced for the murder of Halgrimmsson’s father, the king. However, it would be Neave who would act as Xerkanos’ appointed executioner. Thus, she would conclude her hunt successfully and Halgrimmsson would have his justice. Just as important, particularly from the perspective of the hidebound duardin, was that no bad blood would be borne between Neave’s Stormhost, the Hammers of Sigmar, and Clan Halgrimm.

It was not an arrangement that either party had delighted in. Neave was conscious that, had he not been forced to obey certain codes of honour in front of his clansmen, Halgrimmsson would most likely have refused it point blank.

Neave knew that Halgrimmsson was young by duardin standards. He had just lost his father in terrible circumstances and it could not have escaped him that, had Neave brought her mark down sooner, that death would have been avoided. She knew she couldn’t blame him for his resentfulness, his stubbornness. Neave glanced back down the lines again. I can’t be blamed either, she thought, for finding his stance so damned frustrating.

And so, they had found themselves in this situation: Neave accompanying what remained of the Clan Halgrimm forces across these nameless wastes towards where the Shuddering Mountains lined the southern horizon. There lay the karak the duardin called home, a mighty fortress delved deep into the mountainside. There, Xerkanos could be put to death in a manner that would satisfy the honour of all concerned, and the matter put to rest.

Yet Halgrimmsson kept pushing, trying to edge Neave into undermining her claim.

‘It will be my blades that separate the sorcerer’s filthy head from his neck, thane,’ she repeated, taking care to inject the right blend of deference and authority into her tone.

‘Aye,’ replied Halgrimmsson after a pause. ‘Such was our bargain. But not until time.’

Neave was careful not to let her frustration show. When Sigmar gave her a mark, the sense of that quarry was imprinted upon her psyche. She felt her prey like a tingle or itch that grew more pronounced the closer she came to them, like a murmur that swelled to a ringing note. Having Xerkanos so close, just a hundred yards or so to her rear, and being unable to take her axes to his neck was almost physically painful for Neave.

She had endured worse, of course – she had been slain and Reforged eight times already in Sigmar’s service. Her impatience with the arrangement stemmed not from discomfort, but bitter experience.

‘Thane, I ask again, can a tribunal not be convened here, now?’ she asked. ‘You have the authority and the good cause to try and then sentence this monster right here by the roadside. You have witnesses in plentiful supply and of unimpeachable character. You would incur no dishonour from the deed.’

Thane Halgrimmsson heard her out stolidly, as he had each time she had made this same entreaty. Then shook his head just as he had each time before.

‘No dishonour, Stormcast, but the whispers would start all the same,’ he said. ‘“Halgrimmsson allowed his anger to spur him into actions over-hasty”, “Halgrimmsson had his judgement clouded by the words of some Azyrite outsider”, “Halgrimmsson failed to uphold the proper traditions of his people”, “Halgrimmsson’s oath is unfulfilled, and he is not fit to be king like his father before him.”’

After this last, he favoured her with a fierce glare, as though challenging Neave to agree with his imagined detractors.

But Neave did not. Instead, she replied, ‘You know that every minute Xelkyn Xerkanos still lives, it is another minute that he is dangerous.’

Halgrimmsson snorted.

‘He’s bound in runic chains fashioned by Borrikh Gnarlhelm himself, and being transported under armed guard by the best part of a hundred stout duardin warriors. He’s in a damned cage, Stormcast, unarmed and with his followers dead in his wake. He is no danger to us. What would prove dangerous is delaying our march long enough for night to come upon us and the ashen people to crawl from under the dunes. We don’t halt until we reach sanctuary.’

Neave shook her head, breathed out slowly through her nostrils. If Halgrimmsson only understood what it meant to evade the pursuit of a Knight-Zephyros for so long, she thought, how diabolically devious and dangerously skilled Xerkanos had to be to achieve that feat, then perhaps the duardin would listen. She shrugged off the bleak notion that there was slim chance of that, at least until it was too late.

‘I understand the dangers of these lands,’ said Neave, trying again. ‘But I ask you to hear me, for our alliance’s sake. Xerkanos doesn’t need followers, or weapons. He needs only his mind and the time to plot. The longer we allow him those things, the greater the danger that he escapes.’

‘Just because he slipped your grasp, don’t think that means he’ll slip ours,’ said Halgrimmsson. ‘We ran him to ground first try.’

‘I still do not believe that was coincidence,’ said Neave. ‘He knew I was close, that I had the measure of him this time–’

‘So he let us catch him by staging the bloodiest battle I’ve witnessed in a century?’ interrupted Halgrimmsson. ‘He murdered my father just to draw my ire and then used me to keep him from your blades? He just happened to know precisely how matters would play out, and is even this moment manipulating all of us into effecting his escape yet again?’

Neave remained silent. Halgrimmsson had just voiced her every concern, barring perhaps that Xerkanos had read the son’s insecurity and stubbornness in his prognostications and factored those into his scheme as well.

‘Hrukhni,’ swore Halgrimmsson. ‘Why would your sorcerer be so worried about one Stormcast when he was leading an army?’

‘He’s led armies before, thane,’ said Neave. ‘They’ve never stopped me.’ Halgrimmsson spat by way of reply.

‘Xerkanos perpetrated one act of malfeasance too many when he slew King Halgrimm,’ he said, his voice dangerously low. ‘He’ll pay for it by our laws and at the time of our choosing. You get to strike the killing blow that should, by rights, be mine. Be satisfied with that, Stormcast.’

Recognising a lost cause when she saw one, Neave inclined her head slightly and slackened her pace. She allowed the king’s bearers to march on ahead as she dropped back through the column of march. Duardin flowed past in ordered blocks, clan banners flying proudly at the head of each regiment, drummers battering out a steady tattoo that kept their comrades in lockstep.

Neave drifted to the roadside and let the duardin pass her by. She stared out to the horizon and its curling dust devils. This was a truly desolate land, one of the bleakest she could recall.

Had it always been thus, she wondered, or had the Age of Chaos reduced some fertile paradise to this? Neave suspected the latter was true. If so, it was a stark reminder of why she fought, and what she battled to prevent.

Her keen eyes caught the dull edges of wind-eroded ruins in the distance, and her cloak stirred in the cold breeze as she eyed them where they lurked, half buried in dunes of dust.

‘It is a sorrowful land,’ she murmured. ‘Good only for sorrowful things.’

Still, the spark of civilisation had been re-lit here, Neave knew, and they were making straight for it. There was a walled town about an hour’s march ahead. Labouring under the overly optimistic title of Lightsdawn, the place had been raised by Azyrite settlers several years earlier and now acted as an outpost in this dead land. Neave had passed through Lightsdawn on her way to Irongrief Vale, had seen the underground springs and carefully husbanded crop-caverns that kept the place alive, the high walls and vast braziers that kept this land’s mysterious bogeymen at bay. She had seen its hard-eyed citizens and the copious soldiers who watched over them. Neave had seen precious little evidence of the resurgence of life in the wilds that the Sigmarite priests claimed was coming, however.

She reflected that but for the alliance with the duardin, this town might well have choked on the dust and desolation that surrounded it or been overrun by the terrors that came at night. It was duardin fuel and ironwork that kept Lightsdawn together. That was part of the reason that Halgrimmsson had taken this road towards his distant karak; the column would stay overnight in the capacious cavern-barracks that his folk had dug out beneath Lightsdawn for just such a purpose, and would push on towards the Shuddering Mountains in the morning.

Before then, Neave meant to have a conversation with their captive.

Presently, Neave heard the armoured wagons rumbling up behind her. Several contained weapons and ammunition, she knew, another a complement of healers. Another was a heavy affair of iron spars and reinforced wheels with a blackened chimney protruding from its roof. That wagon housed a mobile forge presided over by Runesmith Gnarlhelm.

Amidst them all, rattling along with a knot of heavily armoured Ironbreakers marching beside it, came the cage-wagon that held Xelkyn Xerkanos.

Neave had been able to smell his acrid stench ever since Irongrief Vale. Now, as then, it swelled in her nostrils and coated the back of her throat until it made her want to gag. It was the reek of unfettered sorcery, of mutated flesh, squirming insects and caustic ashes.

It was the scent of her mark.

Neave matched pace with the cage-wagon, moving up behind it and pointedly ignoring the clanking Ironbreakers just as they ignored her. She stared in through the stout iron bars of the cage at the figure hunched within. Neave felt a violent surge of hatred swell in her breast at the sight of him. She pushed it down with an effort. This pathetic-looking pile of blue-and-yellow rags had cost her good comrades and caused grief and pain to both her and many that she cared about.

‘Xerkanos,’ she said, her voice cold as drawn steel. ‘I see you, sorcerer. I see you clearly.’

Xelkyn Xerkanos unfolded from his crouch like a mutant spider emerging from its burrow. Insectile limbs scraped together, rune-wrought fetters clanking as he moved. The sorcerer’s face was a ghastly mixture of human and dragonfly, gross mouthparts squirming in a fleshy jaw, iridescent chitin bursting in ridges through tattooed flesh. Neave saw herself reflected in the lenses of his bulbous compound eyes, each mirror image subtly different and filled with a promise of violence and horror to come.

‘Do you, Blacktalon?’ he asked, his warped mouth mangling his words. ‘I wonder…’

‘You’re going to your death, you realise?’ she asked. ‘Whatever machinations you intended, they have landed you in chains and on the road to your doom.’

It was a crude stab, and Neave knew it, but sparring with Halgrimmsson had worn down her patience. She wanted to jog a reaction from Xerkanos. Neave’s gifts allowed her to read the slightest nuance of posture, expression and response, even in a being as cunning and unnatural as Xerkanos. If he had anything to give away, she would see it, and in her experience his greatest flaw was his sense of smug superiority.

Sure enough, there it was, a very slight twitch of knowing amusement in the stretched muscles of his cheeks, a minute trip of his ninefold heartbeat.

‘If you say so, Blacktalon, then it must be so,’ he said, and his voice was like knucklebones clicking and insect wings rasping together. ‘What is the might of Tzeentch when set against the pre-eminent majesty of your God-King, after all? How might a humble servant of the Changer of the Ways contend with so formidable a gathering of my master’s foes? Surely, this time, I am doomed.’

He sounded defeated, she thought. Miserable, even. Neave knew better.

‘After all the times you scried the weave of the future to evade me,’ she said. ‘After the armies of cultists you raised and the powerful secrets you stole, you were cornered and defeated by a host of duardin.’

‘Prognostication is imprecise,’ said Xerkanos. ‘Fate is a scattered reflection on broken waters, not an image in a mirror, clear to see.’ There was nothing false about the bitterness she heard in his voice this time.

‘What were you trying to do?’ she asked. ‘What possible benefit could you derive from killing the duardin king?’

No response. Xerkanos’ mouthparts worked, rasping one over the other in a cleaning motion. He twitched slightly beneath his ragged robes.

‘I don’t believe it, Xerkanos,’ said Neave, her words barbed with scorn. ‘I am not fooled.’

‘You have never been able to see the full extent of my schemes, Blacktalon,’ he said. ‘Just as your idiot god cannot perceive the true breadth of my master’s plan. But you tried. You tried to predict me, to pre-empt me. It is your instinct as a huntress. This was what made you easy to evade and to manipulate.’

‘Not so easy to evade that I didn’t slaughter your followers and foil your schemes at every turn,’ she said, and was rewarded by a spasm that raced, there and gone, across his features. Neave had learned early on that Xerkanos liked his plans to run smoothly, his enemies to flounder bewildered, and to know the full extent of their defeat before he crushed them. With Neave at his heels, he had been forced to rush, to improvise frantically. It had cost him, both in terms of followers and ruined plans.

‘Still you goad and second-guess,’ he said, his buzzing voice sounding part mocking, part sorrowful. ‘You believe that I am, what, conning my captors in some way? That I have some plan of escape that they are stupid enough to be an unwitting part of?’

At the sorcerer’s words, Neave felt a couple of glares from the Ironbreakers. Just because they were ignoring her and the sorcerer didn’t mean the duardin were deaf to their conversation. She suspected Xerkanos was attempting to rile them.

‘I believe that you are a supremely dangerous being and that the Mortal Realms will not be safe from your taint until your head lies separate from your neck,’ she said in a low growl. ‘And even then, Xerkanos, you can be sure that I will see the body burned and the ashes salted and buried.’

Xerkanos hissed for a moment with what Neave realised was laughter, but then he seemed to deflate. The sorcerer rested his gnarled hands upon the wooden boards of the wagon’s floor. His torn robes pooled around him.

‘You give me more credit than I deserve,’ he said bitterly. ‘I will not give you the satisfaction of knowing how, or why, but these duardin failed to dance upon their puppet-strings as they should have. This is no ruse, Blacktalon.’

She stared levelly at him for long seconds, then Xerkanos hurled himself into sudden motion. He lunged towards the bars of his cage with an insectile hiss, blue sparks dancing to life at the ends of his taloned fingers. Chains rattled as they raced through the iron ring set into the wagon’s floor, then clanged taut. The runes inscribed along their length glowed with a baleful light and Xerkanos screamed in pain. His sorcerous energies died as suddenly as they had flared, and he slumped against the wagon’s floor.

‘X’thazk z’threkkis aeshlech g’zarr,’ he spat, a foul curse in a daemonic tongue. The beasts pulling the wagon snorted and reared at the unholy words, and even the Ironbreakers recoiled as if struck. Only Neave remained impassive, her eyes locked unflinchingly upon the Tzeentchian sorcerer. She caught the sound of scratching talons that all others surely missed in that moment.

‘Lady Stormcast, you are bothering the captive and that bothers us,’ grumbled one of the Ironbreakers, a champion or leader by his helmet plume.

‘My apologies,’ said Neave.

‘Save them and take them elsewhere, eh?’ said the duardin sourly. ‘We’ll be in Lightsdawn within the hour. Interrogate him then if you must.’ He glanced away towards where the light of Hysh was lowering towards the mountain peaks and the shadows were stretching long. It would not do to delay, that look said, for darkness brought death in this place.

Neave inclined her head and picked up her pace, sweeping past the cage-wagon and leaving its mutant occupant in her wake. She had no desire to antagonise the duardin further.

Besides, she had got what she wanted, heard the sound that indicated the sorcerer’s true intentions. In the instant that Xerkanos had cursed and the wagon had jolted, Neave had caught the imperceptible motion of one of his talons dragging a long scratch through the wood of the wagon’s floorboards. She had seen him nimbly lever loose a splinter of ironwood and flick it back into the ragged material of his sleeve for later retrieval. A lock pick, she thought.

Neave asked herself if she should warn the duardin, but she already knew the answer. Even if they would listen to her, even if they would halt their march long enough to search Xerkanos and remove the wooden jag from his person, she still didn’t believe that they would fully appreciate the threat he represented.

She would let this play out. The moment that Xerkanos revealed himself and became a danger to them all, that was the moment in which her slaying him would be unavoidable and entirely justified. Even Halgrimmsson would struggle to gainsay a battlefield execution, though his pride and anger might push him to try.

Neave wouldn’t make the mistake that the duardin had. She wouldn’t underestimate her mark.

With that thought foremost in her mind, Neave settled in to match the marching pace of the duardin, holding position fifty yards ahead of the cage-wagon. She would know the moment when it came.

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