[Warhammer] - The Wine of Dreams

by Brian Craig - (ebook by Undead)

  “Comrades,” Reinmar agreed, clasping the hand as firmly as he could.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Vaedecker led Reinmar to the edge of the wood, then told him to wait while he scouted ahead. While Reinmar obeyed he offered up a quiet prayer to the god of death and dreams, imploring him to concentrate his attention upon this little place, in order to make certain that his servants here were scrupulous in keeping to their vows. Reinmar suggested to the god, in a suitably humble fashion, that if there were those in this valley who had betrayed their monkish vows, then perhaps Morr might spare a little of his wrath to help a son of Eilhart in an hour of need.

  Whether Morr would hear this prayer or not, Reinmar could not judge, but he was prudent enough to offer others, both to Sigmar and to the goddess Verena, whose scales of fairness were the symbol of honest trade. He hoped that she would not disregard it, even though he had never been so wholehearted in his veneration to think of himself as a devout follower.

  When Vaedecker returned it was to report that members of the company of monks were tending the vegetable-patches which lay without the walls, feeding their animals, and otherwise going about their everyday business, but that the temple was silent and seemingly unoccupied.

  “No longer,” Reinmar replied, drawing Vaedecker behind the bole of a tree and pointing.

  Two hooded priests had just come from the temple, bearing spades. They passed through the lich-gate into the burial-ground, and went immediately to the reopened grave, which they began to fill again with earth. Reinmar watched them, his eyes hot with patient anger, until they had finished and returned their tools to one of the wooden outbuildings.

  “Now we shall see,” said Vaedecker, as the two monks returned to their cloister. “Not the front door—there’s another at the back, in a secluded court.”

  The wall at the rear of the temple was so pitted and overgrown with creeping plants that they had no difficulty in climbing over it and letting themselves down into the courtyard. The small door which they found there was latched within, but there was a narrow gap between the worn edge of the ancient door and the stone wall, and Vaedecker was able to lift the latch with the blade of his sword in order to let himself in.

  The corridor inside was very gloomy, but the last rays of twilight sent light enough through the slit-windows to let Vaedecker find his way, and he moved cautiously into the heart of the building, listening carefully for footsteps. Reinmar followed.

  They had gone only a few steps, and had not yet reached the door that gave access to the altar-space, when Reinmar heard the sounds of softly-slippered feet approaching from the other side. There was nowhere to hide, and no time to get back to the door through which they had come, so he was not surprised when Vaedecker stayed where he was.

  The door opened. The monk who came through was hooded, and he carried a smouldering taper although he had no lamp or candle with him. While other sounds were masked by the creaking of the door upon its rusty hinge Vaedecker moved very swiftly past the monk, sliding his left arm around the man’s throat to take a choking grip. In his right hand he still held the sword which he had used to open the latch on the outer door, and he touched its point gently to the monk’s cheek while whispering in his ear to warn him to be quiet.

  “Go back the way you came,” the soldier murmured, “and make not a sound, lest it be your last.”

  He pushed the man back into the altar-space. There was a candle on a table set beside the door, its recently-extinguished wick still glowing faintly.

  “Relight it!” Vaedecker commanded.

  The monk had breath enough to blow his taper into brightness, but when he touched it to the wick of the candle he was panting with anxiety, and his hand was trembling. It took more than ten seconds to warm the wax sufficiently to make the candle take light.

  When the tiny flame was finally alive the monk turned to look at his assailants, and said: “Who are you?”

  Vaedecker’s only answer was to push back the folds of the monk’s cowl so that his face became visible. The man was considerably older than Vaedecker and much thinner—it was obvious that he would not be capable of putting up a fight, and he did not seem inclined to try.

  “I need two sets of robes like yours,” Vaedecker said, gruffly.

  “There are none here,” the monk replied—but his eyes had flickered sideways to a cupboard, and Reinmar moved quickly to open it.

  There were several sets of robes inside, most of them ornate and ceremonial—but there were two plain robes, and Reinmar took them both. He offered the more capacious of the two to Vaedecker, and put the other one on himself.

  “Thank you,” said the sergeant to the monk. “But from now on, I require you to be honest, else I’ll feel obliged to cut your throat.”

  “You have no business here,” said the monk, in a low tone.

  “I disagree,” Vaedecker said. “I saw a body disinterred, and I need to know why, and what you intend to do with it. Show me!”

  “She is beyond your help,” the monk said, stubbornly.

  “If that is so,” Reinmar put in, “then we have only vengeance to seek against those who placed her there. But you must show us anyway.”

  “I cannot,” the monk insisted, but Matthias Vaedecker was not about to tolerate any refusal. The soldier pressed the point of his blade a little harder, and drew blood.

  “There is an odour about this place,” the sergeant whispered in his captive’s ear, “which reminds me of the stink of necromancy. As a virtuous man, I do not hesitate to kill whenever such a stench reaches my nostrils.”

  “Necromancy!” the monk spluttered, as though stifling a cry with difficulty. “There is no necromancy here!”

  Reinmar scowled. “Is she alive?” he hissed. “Tell us now or my friend will cut your throat. Is she alive?”

  The monk’s eyes dilated with fear, and he nodded his head. “The wine does not kill those it chooses,” he whispered, “although it stills their hearts and relieves them of the need to breathe. But she is chosen. She is gone from the world of men. Go, I beg you—there is nothing for you here.”

  Vaedecker pressed harder—not lethally, but with sufficient force to cut the frightened monk more deeply. He gasped, so tortuously that Reinmar could almost believe that his windpipe was half-severed.

  Terrified as he was, however, the monk shook his head. “I am bound by vows which I dare not break,” he said. “I dare not.” The way in which he said it suggested that his fear of breaking his vow was almost as great as his fear of the blade at his throat. “What do men like you know of the lord who rules our lives and our souls? Go, I beg of you.”

  There was such an awful sincerity in the man’s voice that Reinmar was frightened. Despite having paused to say his prayers, he had not thought as he climbed over the wall surrounding the temple grounds that he was entering the domain of a god. Now he faced up to that notion and its implications, including the probability that this domain might belong to a god even sterner and darker than the one that men called Morr.

  Matthias Vaedecker did not hesitate at all. “Show us the way!” he whispered again, his voice overflowing with menace. “Lead and live. Refuse and die!” It was obvious to Reinmar that the soldier meant what he said—and it was obvious to the monk, too. It proved, in that moment of extremity, that the man had underestimated his own ability and power of choice.

  “This way,” he croaked. “But it is a sacrilege you will regret.”

  Wearing their stolen robes over their own clothes, with their faces well-hidden by the cowls and Vaedecker’s unsheathed blade all-but-covered by a loose fold of his costume, the two intruders followed the captive monk. As they passed the altar, Reinmar noticed a staff propped up against it, and immediately picked it up. Its head was carved, as priests’ staves usually were, having been fashioned into the shape of a raven’s head with the beak extended in line with the staff. It seemed to Reinmar by no means unsuitable to be carried by a priest of Morr, but it was not
unsuitable to be carried as a weapon either. He had his sword, but if his disguise was to be of any use it might be prudent to have a weapon that could be carried more openly.

  The domed chamber in front of the altar was bare of all furniture, as custom dictated. It was strange in only two significant respects. Firstly, the great oaken doors which should have stood perpetually open in a temple dedicated to Morr were shut and barred. Secondly, the hollow dome was ornately decorated in a curious fashion, which made it resemble the spreading petals of some vast flower. This resemblance was further enhanced by an intricately-woven rope, as thick as those used to tow barges along the Schilder, hung down from the dome into the atrium, as if it were a pendulous style extending the flower’s stigma in order to facilitate pollination.

  Opposite the closed doors was the symbolic gateway which Reinmar would have expected to see in any temple of Morr, consisting of two plain pillars and a heavy black lintel. Behind it there was a tapestried screen depicting ravens in flight against the background of a stormy sky. These were the universal emblems of Morr—but Reinmar realised as he saw them here that they might equally well be employed as emblems of any other god of death and dreams, if there were any others of that kind in the mysterious and unknowable realm of the gods.

  In the temples and shrines of Morr that Reinmar had previously had occasion to visit the screens behind the inner gateway were never thrust back or drawn aside. There would, of course, have been no point in doing so, for in those other places they invariably stood against blank walls, but the true reason was not a practical one. Such gateways were symbolic of the threshold of death, which the soul could cross but the body could not, and their screens were symbolic of the curtain of ignorance that had been placed across the threshold in question by decree of the gods, so that no man might know his fate in the Great Beyond. It was inconceivable, supposedly, that a screen of this kind should ever be moved in such a way as to permit a living being to pass through.

  In this temple, however, the screen was hanging loose, so that the monk who was leading them could draw it aside like a curtain and pass by into some mysterious space beyond the gateway. Reinmar could not help but catch his breath when he saw what was happening, but his stride did not falter at all. He already knew that the boundary between life and death was somehow blurred in this uncanny place, in fact as well as allegory.

  When all three of them had passed through, Vaedecker took the screen from the monk and closed it behind them.

  The space behind the gateway was small; it was no more than a covert cut into the wall of the temple, which here seemed to be founded in native granite, not on quarried stones. It had no floor at all, but was simply the mouth of a fissure. The cleft did not appear to have been hollowed out by pick and spade, and Reinmar guessed that it was entirely natural. Human artifice had, however, added to it a spiral staircase of wrought iron, lit by candles mounted on spikes, three to every complete turn of the stair. The steps were very steep, and Reinmar estimated that each rotation took them four fathoms or more into the depths of the earth—and yet the stairway wound about the central pillar no less than eighteen times before their descending feet touched level ground again.

  So the rumours Luther had heard had more truth in them than he would credit, he thought. The real secret here lies far beneath any mere cellars.

  At the bottom of the spiral stair there was a tunnel, very neat and round in section. Again, Reinmar was certain that no human hand had had any part in making the passage; it was as if some huge and patient worm had bored through the rock a thousand or a million years before. How many pairs of slippered feet had passed along its length since then he could not guess, for they had not yet succeeded in eroding any kind of track. Like the staircase, the tunnel was lit by candles set on spikes placed fifteen paces apart. Reinmar counted nineteen candles before he saw, over the shoulders of the two figures hurrying ahead of him, the light at the end of the tunnel.

  For one careless and unthinking moment he presumed that the bright light must be daylight—but then he remembered that the sun must be near to setting by now, even if it were possible for the tunnel to have brought them out on to a hillside somewhere in the forest. Whatever this bright glow might be, he realised, it could not possibly be the bountiful light of day.

  He remembered what his grandfather had said about fruits never ripening except in the sun, and realised that the old man might have made a wrong assumption. As the two cowled figures before him came to the tunnel’s end, Reinmar was able to move alongside them again.

  They had entered a much broader space, having passed into a vast cavern, more huge by far than the domed atrium of the temple from which they had come. The floor of this awesome area was smooth but not flat, undulating like a range of gentle hills in miniature. Its walls and ceiling were formed even more peculiarly, their undulations being so pronounced that the roof seemed to be festooned with countless bulbous fungi—but Reinmar could only see this indistinctly, because white light blazed so dazzlingly from the rounded extremities of these protrusions that the fissures between them were hidden by the glare.

  What a light that is! Reinmar thought. What fruits might ripen in its glare!

  The thought was forced upon him, for the floor of the cavern was thickly planted with flowers, which grew to far greater size than any he had ever seen before. There were hundreds of them arrayed before him, of several different kinds. Each one was mounted on a stalk as thick as a man’s leg, from the base of which sprouted four gargantuan leaves. The immense flower-heads were vast and bell-like, compounded of eight, ten or twelve close-set petals. Every one that Reinmar could see hung downwards, every stalk being curved into the shape of an inverted hook.

  Had the flowers been coloured as gorgeously as the flowers which grew in the best garden in Eilhart they would have been very beautiful indeed, but they were not. The predominant colours were four in number: jet black, livid white, pale blue and rosy pink. Some of the flowers were plainly coloured, but there were a few in which the colours were mixed as stripes, white paired with black and blue with pink. The stems and leaves which carried them, far from reproducing the green shades of the forested hills, were a curious creamy white colour.

  The scent of the flowers was more subtle than their size implied, but while Reinmar stood there lost in amazement the fragrances teased his nose, gradually filling his mouth and throat with a sickly sweetness. He recognised the particular bouquet of the wine that Noel and Almeric had given him to taste, but it was mixed with other scents that seemed sharper and more piquant.

  There were pathways in the flower-forest, three of which diverged from the entrance at which they stood, but the undergrowth to either side of each pathway was abundant, and seemed impenetrable. Although the floor of the underworld was very uneven, deeply pitted and grooved, the flower-stalks did not seem to be bedded in soil-filled hollows. Instead, each stalk widened out into a complex base not unlike the holdfasts by which the sturdier kinds of river weed clung to the rocks and boulders of the Schilder. It was not easy to judge from where they stood, but Reinmar thought that each stem was a bundle of four or five threads, which separated as they neared the ground, each element broadening and becoming more lumpen, its texture taking on the appearance of petrifaction, as it met and merged with the cavern’s stony floor. Vegetable flesh and stone seemed ultimately to be fused together, without any distinct junction.

  When he had studied these vegetable marvels for half a minute, Reinmar was convinced that the radiance which lit this eerie underworld must be very different in its quality from the light of the sun, or from the silvery light of the twin moons and the stars. This was an alien light, which he had never seen before.

  The flowers with which he was familiar, fed on the golden light of the sun, reproduced in their character something of the colour, the warmth and the sweetness of that glorious light. It mattered not whether they grew wild in the shady glades of the forest, or whether they were carefully nurtured in th
e gardens of Eilhart; the light which nourished them was the same. These flowers had a different mode of sustenance, and in every aspect of their character they gave evidence of that disparity. They were not without colour, nor without warmth, and certainly not without a kind of sweetness, and yet all these things were strange—and, to Reinmar’s eye, quite wrong.

  Vaedecker plainly felt the same. “What is this place, Reinmar?” he whispered in an awed tone. “What have we found?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “You have found something that is forbidden to the sight of men like you,” the captive monk hissed, in reply to Vaedecker’s question. “This invasion will not be forgiven.”

  Vaedecker ignored him. The soldier was still searching with his eyes. The space immediately outside the entrance of the tunnel belonged more to the upper world than the nether one. It was cluttered with tools and various other items of apparatus, including ladders, tables and empty crates. There was obviously a good deal of work to be done hereabouts, but none was being done at present—not, at least, within sight of the underworld’s entrance.

  This, Reinmar decided, must be the place where the fruit was grown from which dark wine was pressed, if it really were the product of a wine-press. But was it? Given that the dark wine was not the produce of any ordinary grape, ought he to assume that it was made by a similar method? Now that he had seen the massive flowers which grew here, he wondered whether it might not be the result of a very different process. Was it possible, he wondered, that the liquor might in fact be made from the nectar manufactured by these enormous and extraordinary blooms?

  Nectar, he knew, was made by flowers to attract and nourish the insects which carried their pollen away to fertilise their neighbours. Nectar was the currency in which flowering plants paid for sexual intercourse, the lubricant of their trade in the seeds of identity. Nectar was, on the other hand, the luxury of insects: the most delicious food imaginable.