[Warhammer] - The Wine of Dreams

by Brian Craig - (ebook by Undead)

  “He’s dead. They suffered heavy losses reaching him, but reach him they did. Vaedecker too, I’ve heard—and Sigurd. Your father’s safe, though.”

  “What about your sons?”

  “My family are all well,” Godrich said. His relief was obvious. “We’ll be safe now, I think.”

  “I suppose so,” Reinmar said, as they moved into the kitchen. “It was von Spurzheim they wanted dead. Vaedecker told me that he would be replaced, but that his replacement wouldn’t have his knowledge, or his particular obsession. They’ll search for the valley, but when they fail to find it, they’ll go on to something else. The Reiksguard will maintain a presence in the town for a while, but they’ll find better things to do soon enough. It’s not over, by any means—but things will soon be back to normal, for those of us who survive.”

  “The road to Holthusen is already open,” Godrich told him, as if it were proof. “The river route will have to await the repair of the locks, I fear, and that will have to wait till the water runs a good deal cleaner than it does now, but more soldiers have already arrived to help with the clearing up. No one’s taking tally of the enemy casualties, but ours—the town’s, that is, not including soldiers—number a few hundred. Not as many as a thousand, thankfully. The soldiers lost hundreds too, of course, but the new forces will compensate for that. The fires were not quite as bad as they seemed, although the quays and the storehouses nearby were devastated and a dozen homes were gutted.”

  By the time this speech was finished Godrich was filling Reinmar’s cup again, from a pitcher. “Take care, sir,” the steward added. “Drinking water’s in direly short supply.”

  Reinmar felt a slight stab of guilt at the realisation that he had already emptied the cup. “Where’s my father?” he asked.

  “Gone to look for your grandfather.”

  Reinmar frowned at that. “Gone where to look for my grandfather?”

  “Albrecht’s house. You should eat something, sir. It looks unappetising, I know, but you should eat.”

  Reinmar looked at the “meal” that Godrich had laid out. There was no bread and no meat, and the boiled vegetables were not in the least inviting, but he knew that Godrich was right. He ought to eat while he could. There would be such hunger in the days and weeks to come that even this would come to seem, in memory, an enviable feast—but there were more important things to worry about. “Is the way to Albrecht’s house safe?” Reinmar demanded, as he sat down and picked up a spoon. “Is the house still standing, for that matter?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Godrich told him. “But Gottfried believes that if Luther is to be found at all, that is where he will be.”

  “Wirnt will surely draw the same conclusion,” Reinmar murmured. “That bastard stole my sword—and he may still have Marguerite. I ought to-”

  “Eat first,” Godrich finished for him, nudging Reinmar’s spoon in the direction of his mouth. “I urged your father not to take the risk, but… well, sir, there is a matter between the two of them that has been unsettled for many years, as you probably know.”

  “The matter of the dark wine,” Reinmar said.

  “The matter of authority in the business,” Godrich countered. “The matter of self-determination, and the power to achieve it. Sometimes, sir, children are not as dutiful towards their parents as custom and morality demand.”

  For a moment, Reinmar thought that he was being accused, but he realised that Godrich was referring to matters between Gottfried and Luther. He spared a thought too for Wirnt and Albrecht—and for Valeria. Whatever else the wine of dreams might give to its consumers, it was obviously very unhelpful to family feeling.

  “Do you have any idea what happened to Marguerite?” Reinmar asked, as he continued forcing food into his mouth. There was turnip in the mess that had been piled on his trencher, and cabbage, but nothing that he could think of as pleasurable eating. Even so, he was hungry, and his stomach appreciated the bulk. “She was with me in the cellar. Cousin Wirnt held a knife to her throat in order to compel me, but the gypsy boy knocked him out. Wirnt must have recovered consciousness while I was still asleep, and if Marguerite was still there, for whatever reason…”

  “I haven’t seen her,” Godrich said, “but you should ask at her home before jumping to ominous conclusions. Change your clothes first, though—for your own sake as well as her mother’s.”

  “He has my sword,” Reinmar repeated, sullenly. “Perhaps he has the nectar too—but if he did take Marguerite, he must think that there is still something to be won by bargaining, so I must assume that Marcilla took the phial.” He had finished as much of his meal as he was capable of putting down his throat, and he rose to his feet again.

  Godrich obviously did not think he had eaten enough, but made no move to stop him.

  “You’re right about the clothes,” Reinmar said, as he turned to go to his own room—but he paused on the threshold and said: “Did I do wrong, Godrich? Was it my foolishness that spoiled Eilhart?”

  “I do not know what you did, sir,” Godrich pointed out, with a politeness so scrupulous as to be almost insulting. “You did not confide in me.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to find my way into the underworld beneath the monastery,” Reinmar told him, flatly. “The fact that I discovered the secret of the dark wine’s manufacture was of no particular importance—but I spilled their vintages and I stole a vital ingredient that might have been used to make more. I robbed a dark god of a small fraction of his power to do evil. Should I have let that power alone, to continue in its subtle work of evil?”

  “I cannot tell,” Godrich said. “I wonder, though, why you did not tell anyone else about the nectar you removed.”

  “I was angry and outraged,” Reinmar confessed, “and I wanted to make my mark. I wanted to make my wrath felt, but I also wanted a secret to keep, a power of my own. I did not know who to trust, but that was not the reason for my refusal to trust anyone. I wanted to be a player in the game, not a pawn. Because of that, Eilhart was nearly destroyed.”

  “Not because of that,” Godrich said. “Those things which came last night have no other reason for being than to maim and destroy. Had they not fallen on Eilhart they’d have done the same work elsewhere. Eilhart is fortunate in having such passionate defenders. The world is the world, Master Reinmar. It is not your fault, or mine, that there is evil in it. We fight it as best we can. That is what you did.”

  Reinmar nodded. “Thank you,” he said, before ascending the stair to his bedroom.

  Once there he went immediately to his closet and his trunk. He had spoiled so many clothes of late that he was lucky to have any left at all, especially since Luther had stolen his best suit, but it was Reinmar’s good fortune to be the scion of an unusually prosperous family. The outfit he decided to put on was a little too small as well as inelegant, but it had to do.

  The water left by his bedside for washing had not been changed for two days, and he did not suppose that it would be changed for another fortnight, so he was more careful than usual in trying to clean the worst of the muck from his hands and face. He succeeded well enough, although he still seemed a slightly sorry sight when he looked at himself in the mirror.

  When he turned away from the mirror he intended to go to the door, but some unaccountable impulse made him hesitate on the threshold. He waited for a moment, trying to figure out what it was that had made him stop. Then, still without being certain, he turned back.

  He went to his favourite hiding-place, in which he had secreted the phial of nectar before it was stolen by Luther. It had not been there when he had replaced the strip of mortar, but as soon as he removed the fragment again he saw that the hidey-hole was no longer empty.

  Someone had replaced the phial, from which no more than a couple of drops had been removed.

  “Marcilla,” he muttered. But he knew now that Marcilla was not wholly Marcilla, and that it was the other part of her—her possessor—that had put the phial back where Wirn
t had already looked for it and failed to find it.

  Everyone in the world, it seemed—and perhaps one beyond it—was determined that he should be a wine merchant, no matter how hard he might try to avoid that fate.

  He took the phial, and put it in his pouch. Then he went back to Godrich and asked him for the loan of a sword.

  Godrich told him that there was no weapon of any kind in the house, all of them having been requisitioned by von Spurzheim. “I suspect, however,” the faithful servant said, “that if you care to use your eyes as you cross the town boundary, you might well find something you can use.”

  This prophecy proved correct, although Reinmar was careful to visit Marguerite’s house before putting it to the test. Her mother had not seen her, and was extremely displeased to discover that she was no longer safe in Gottfried Wieland’s house. There was nothing Reinmar could say in reply but that he was sorry, and to swear on his life that he would bring her safely home.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The soldiers and the townsmen had been busy all morning gathering everything that might be of further use, but there were far too many stinking corpses lying outside the barricades to have been properly examined. The blade that Reinmar eventually appropriated was crude, blunt and rusted, but he needed the reassurance of its weight far more than the keenness of its blade. He kept it in his hand while he marched steadfastly over the ridge and into the fir wood surrounding Albrecht Wieland’s house.

  There was smoke above the wood, but it was coming from the chimney of the house, not the embers of its timbers. The enemy that had fallen upon the town with such reckless fury had not been here, and no remnants of the hideous army seemed to be lurking in the wood, even though von Spurzheim’s sentries had been withdrawn more than a day before. Reinmar never ceased to look about him as he went along the path, continually glancing over his shoulder to make sure that no one was sneaking up behind him, but the fir wood seemed utterly lifeless. No birds sang, no wind rattled the leaves, and the greenery seemed oddly faded.

  When he came in sight of the door of the house, though, he saw that it stood open. That seemed to him to be a bad sign, and he gripped the hilt of his stolen sword more tightly. He approached stealthily, making sure that his boots made no sound as they trod on the soft leaf-litter beside the crudely-laid path that led to the door. When he came to the threshold he paused, listening intently, but he could not hear voices.

  He slipped in quietly, and saw soon enough why no voices had been raised. For the time being, at least, the fighting was over.

  If Albrecht’s sitting room had been a mess before, it was pure chaos now. The table had been overturned and the chairs flung aside. Wherever there had been a pile there was now a mere scattering of individual objects, some crushed and some shattered.

  The five combatants in the struggle had separated now that its fury was done, seemingly to count its cost—although one was so still that he was more likely to be numbered among the counted than the counters, and one so well-confined that she probably ought not to have been reckoned a combatant at all.

  Marguerite would probably have cried out when she saw Reinmar, had she not been gagged. She was trussed too, her hands tied behind her and her ankles roped together. She had been set in a corner, probably upright to begin with, but had sunk into a crouch. Albrecht, the apparent corpse, was lying to the left of her, not four feet away.

  The man was huddled into an almost-foetal position, his hands having clutched at his belly when he was cut and his knees having been drawn up in agony, so that his hands and thighs shared the work of trying to confine his entrails to their proper place. His brother, Luther, still seemingly young and still seemingly mad—though perhaps no madder, now, than Wirnt—knelt beside him, displaying his empty hands as if appalled by their helplessness.

  Reinmar had no doubt at all that the sword that had slit Albrecht’s abdomen was his own, wielded by Wirnt. Wirnt still held it, and still seemed ready to use it, but for the moment he had taken a defensive stance, setting his back against the other wall that extended from the corner where Marguerite crouched. He did not appear to have been injured, but he was panting hard. In his left hand he was holding a flask, which Reinmar recognised as the one that the monks had given to Valeria, and which Valeria had left behind half-full. It was not half-full now, but if Reinmar read the expression of Wirnt’s face correctly, the rest had been spilled rather than drunk.

  Until Reinmar came in, Wirnt’s eyes had been fixed on Gottfried Wieland, who was supporting himself against the opposite wall, still upright but hurt by a long cut extending from his left shoulder almost to his midriff, which had leaked so much blood that Gottfried’s shirt and trousers were soaked. Reinmar judged that the cut had scored half a dozen ribs, and must be very painful, but even though the blood-loss seemed massive, it was probably not life-threatening in itself. If infection set in, then Gottfried would certainly have to fight for his life, but for now he was very much alive and fully conscious. Had he a weapon in his hand, he might have made a formidable opponent for Wirnt, who was smaller and less athletic, but he had been forced to drop his sword in the course of the brawl, and it lay beneath Wirnt’s foot. For that reason, if for no other, Gottfried was content to keep his back to the wall, offering no obvious threat to his mad nephew.

  Marguerite and Gottfried both looked imploringly at Reinmar when they saw him, but neither spoke. Marguerite was silent because she had no option; Gottfried, presumably, because he did not know what to say.

  Wirnt did.

  “It was not my fault,” was what he said first, and he was quick to amplify his claim. “I had no intention of causing injury to anyone, my father least of all—but he would not give me the wine. It was a purely private dispute, between father and son, that would never have turned to bloodshed if those who had no right to interfere had not thrown themselves into the quarrel. First this maniac arrives, calling my father brother, insisting that my father should take the draught himself. He was the one who forced me, in the end, to draw my sword, precisely because he had none of his own, and required a show of force to be controlled—except, of course, that he was too furious to be controlled, even by the sight of a naked blade. In time, I dare say, he would have seen sense—but then this perfect fool arrives, no sooner seeing my blade than he draws his own, and his opinion is that no one should touch the wine. Even then, we might have settled the argument as civilised men, if he would only have consented to sheath his blade while we talked—all the more so given that the real object of his ire was this creature that he called father—but he insisted on keeping the weapon handy.

  “As soon as I realised the full truth of the situation I became conciliatory—a peacemaker, through and through—but my attempts to calm the situation were fruitless. There was a point, I assure you, when I almost ceased to care whether my father let me have the little measure of wine he had, because I realised how negligible it was by comparison with the other supply—the one that my Uncle Luther swore that he had hidden in the cellar. Far better, I told them, that we should all join forces in order that one or two of us could move to intercept the gypsy girl before she could make much headway southwards, while someone waited here for your arrival, in case you had managed to retain the prize. It was all so very simple… so very simple… except that your father and his father could not be quiet, and Albrecht simply would not surrender that trivial draught. And so it came to blows, with the result that you see. I wounded them both, I will confess, but it was not my fault.”

  Reinmar listened until Wirnt had finished, because he knew that he had to understand what had happened, but as soon as the torrent of words sputtered and dried up, he addressed his grandfather. “Is he dead?” he asked, meaning Albrecht.

  “Not yet,” Luther replied, dolefully, meaning that it would take a miracle to save him.

  “Father?” was Reinmar’s next enquiry.

  “It’s a shallow cut for all the gore,” Gottfried reported, grimly. “I wo
n’t die, but I can’t deny that I’m weak and all-but-useless. If anyone kills him, it will have to be you. If you weren’t my son, I’d say have at him and the best of luck, but if you have what he wants, it might save a deal of trouble if you gave it to him and let him go.”

  “Do you have what I need?” Wirnt wanted to know.

  “Yes I have,” Reinmar said, seeing no need at all to prove it. “Perhaps you should try to take it, if you dare.”

  Luther smiled at that, but the smile was humourless.

  “This is the family business, after all,” Wirnt said. “Even now, there is no reason for us to be enemies. I did not mean to hurt him. Even now, what I want is reconciliation, and harmony. I need the nectar, but once I have it, I am more than willing to make treaties and contracts. Von Spurzheim is dead, and half his entourage. There will be soldiers in Eilhart for years to come, and witch hunters in the hills, but nothing fundamental has changed. There are other battles to be fought, other crusades to be mounted, and the soldiers and witch hunters will see soon enough that they will be more profitably employed elsewhere. We are businessmen, are we not? Let us behave like honest tradesmen.”

  “If you can kill him,” Gottfried Wieland said to his son, “I’d be obliged if you’d do it soon.”

  “I believe that I can,” Reinmar said—but his opportunity to try had already vanished. It had been easy enough for him to enter the house unheard even while its occupants were temporarily silent. It was even easier for those who had come after him. He had not the slightest idea that anyone was behind him until he felt an arm slide over his shoulder like a snake and the edge of a dagger laid upon his windpipe.

  It was not the man who held the knife to his throat who spoke, though; it was the woman who had come in behind him and now stepped past him.

  “My son is right in what he says,” she said, “no matter how far his actions have put him in the wrong. No matter what disasters have caught us up or how badly we are hurt, we are a civilised family. Those of us who are scholars have been long estranged from those of us who are tradesmen, but that was always petty foolishness. Our aim now should be reconciliation.”