Contents

Cover

The Book of Transformations – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

Prologue

The Gaze of Stone

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

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

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

Nothing.

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

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

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

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

Shinguren, the alchemist.

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

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

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

But the alchemist did not answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A what, sir?’ said the boy.

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

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

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

The alchemist burst into uproarious laughter.

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

‘This was… a person? A man?’ he said.

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

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

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

‘Are you going to… change him back?’

There was more laughter from the gruff old alchemist.

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

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

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

The alchemist smiled unsettlingly.

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

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

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ISBN: 978-1-78999-923-5

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