The Wine of Dreams (22 page)

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 the
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?”

“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.

These flowers were of a different sort; there was no hum of insects audible
in the underworld. Their dutiful pollinators were presumably human: monks, who
were content to gather their reward instead of consuming it, so that they could
transmit its currency and its luxury to the world outside. There, it became an
object of trade like any other—or, perhaps, quite unlike any other.

The monk who had brought them down the spiral stair and along the tunnel took
a step backwards, as if he assumed that his task was done.

“Wait,” said Vaedecker, quietly but sharply. “We need to know which way they
took the girl’s body. Which path?”

“I have shown you too much,” the monk replied, his face as white as chalk in
the unnatural light. Now that he was in the presence of the giant flowers he
seemed more frightened of them than he was of Vaedecker’s blade, no matter that
the blood was still seeping sluggishly from the cut in his throat. Even so, he
raised his arm to point to the middle path.

Vaedecker’s eyes narrowed as he made a calculation, and then he lifted his
sword above his head. The terrified monk ducked away from the blade, but when
the soldier brought it down he made sure that it was the flat of the blade that
landed on the monk’s tonsured pate. The first blow only knocked the man to his
knees, but a second strike rendered him unconsciousness.

Reinmar made as if to kneel in order to check that the man was still alive,
but the sergeant grabbed his sleeve and dragged him away.

“We must hurry,” he said. He was still speaking in a low voice, anxious that
his words did not echo from the walls in case there were monks abroad in the
underworld, hidden from view by the flowers. “If he lied, we’ll find out soon
enough.”

The soldier moved off between the gargantuan plants, passing beneath a rough
arch formed by two of the flower-heads, and Reinmar followed. He was anxious to
see more of their structure, so he threw back the capacious hood that had concealed his face
while he and Vaedecker had descended the stair. This allowed him the freedom to
look up into the bell-like corollas to see what was inside.

He was not overly surprised to discover that each of them had a single
pendulous style, which seemed to be hanging limply in the manner of the
thickly-woven rope which hung from the dome of the temple. Shadowed as they were
by the flowers it was difficult to tell what colours the styles might be, but
most were pale. He could not see the nectar-glands that were presumably
clustered about the base of each style, because the more distant parts of the
interior of each flower-head were hidden even from reflected light.

Having looked up, he looked down again, to study the tangled structures at
the bases of the stems. These holdfasts were highly irregular in shape, but as
soon as Reinmar began to inspect them more closely he detected shapes within
each mass that reminded him somewhat of human bodies laid supine and
mysteriously bloated. A fifth “limb” which sometimes appeared to be present
seemed, in accordance with this fancy, to be the head of the recumbent form,
which had become so molten and misshapen as to seem part of the bedrock.

Although he cursed himself for his stupidity when he finally realised the
appalling truth, it took time for Reinmar to accept that this impression was
more than mere macabre fancy. He might have realised it sooner had it not been
for the fact that some of the forms seemed very far from human—but that, he
eventually realised, was because they had only been half-human to begin with.
The tangled “roots” which bound the gargantuan plants to the cavern floor really
were bodies bloated and transmogrified by alien flesh. Some had been human, but
some had been beastmen whose limbs had extended into claws instead of hands and
feet and whose misshapen heads had been horned.

“Do you see—?” he asked of Vaedecker—but the sergeant did not let him
finish.

“Be quiet,” he retorted, hoarsely. “I see what you see. Keep looking—and be
on guard!”

The advice was good, for it had hardly been voiced when Reinmar caught sight
of robed figures ahead of them. Vaedecker immediately reached up to take his
hood and flip it over his head again, before moving sideways to take cover behind one of the
massive stems. Reinmar copied him, taking cover behind a stem some eight or ten
paces to his right.

Peering around the stem, Reinmar saw that half a dozen monks were gathered
together, all but one facing away from him. There was a slight susurrus of
voices, but the monks were standing quite still. It seemed that they were
waiting for something significant to happen. Reinmar could not see the face of
the one monk who was facing them—for which he was duly grateful, since it
implied that the man in question could not see him—but he could see that the
man was holding aloft a staff decorated at the head with the effigy of a black
flower, whose “petals” were fashioned from ravens’ wings.

It was not until a momentary gap appeared in the rank of six that Reinmar was
able to see more—but when it did, he had to suppress a gasp of horror and
alarm.

In the space between the line of six and the man with the staff the naked
body of the gypsy girl had been carefully laid out, supine, within a shallow
depression in the cavern’s floor that extended away to the left of the path that
they had followed, close to a junction at which it crossed another.

It was almost as if the polished rock were getting ready to hug her, and
welcome her to its adamantine bosom.

Reinmar understood, now that he had seen what he had seen, that some of the
holdfasts which supported the stems of these astonishing plants had indeed once
been the bodies of human beings—those who had “heard a call” that summoned
them here. He understood, too, that although they had undergone some monstrous
mutation and transfiguration which had made them part stone and part alien
flesh, they still retained faint echoes of their previous identity.

He became suddenly and horribly certain that these luckless persons had never
died and were not dead even now: that their human souls were within them still,
eternally imprisoned in strangeness. The beastmen, he presumed, were in a
similar state—but he could not bring himself to care overmuch about that.
Marcilla was a different matter.

“If this is not your doing, Morr,” he murmured, not loud enough for Vaedecker
to hear but not quite silently, “then I beg you to send down your most fervent
wrath upon these people without delay, whatever consequence it may have for me.”

But the God of Death and Dreams, after the invariable habit of all the gods
to whom men pray, gave no evidence of having heard this prayer, nor any evidence
at all of his concern.

The monk who had held the staff aloft above Marcilla’s naked body lowered it
again, looking down at the motionless form that lay exposed before him. Then he
pushed back the cowl which had covered his head—and Reinmar could not help but
start with shock, because he could see the exposed face between the heads of two
of the six, and saw how it caught the white light which flooded from above.

The monk’s features seemed to catch fire with a similar glow of their own, as
if the light were taking on substance as it gathered about the man, caressing
his cheeks and forehead lovingly. His eyes, in particular, seemed fiercely
ablaze, and Reinmar realised that the uncanny brightness which he had perceived
in the eyes of Brother Noel and Brother Almeric when he first saw them was a
feeble presentiment of what it one day might become. The monk’s skull was quite
hairless, and his features seemed abnormally rounded—his nose snubbed and his
chin like a tide-worn pebble—but his flesh had a curious glossy polish, as if
it had the texture as well as the colour of a tarnished tooth.

The celebrant extended his arm, and with the foot of his staff he began to
make a series of passes over Marcilla’s naked body. While he did so he crooned a
long sequence of liquid syllables in some arcane language whose like Reinmar had
never heard. When this part of the ritual was complete the monk changed his grip
upon the staff, so that he held it near the foot, and extended its ornamented
head towards the bell of a black flower which loomed above him.

The model fashioned from ravens’ wings that surmounted the staff was but a
hundredth the size of the huge entity above it, but as the symbol extended, so
the thing which it symbolised began to move towards it, lowered very gently by
the gradual relaxation of its massive stem.

Again the celebrant began to make a complex series of passes in the air,
still chanting all the while. From time to time the remainder of the company
joined in to add their voices to a periodic chorus, or to answer some particular
syllable—but positioned as they were, there was little danger that anyone
would notice either of the uninvited guests.

As the rite drew towards its close, Reinmar saw that the pendulous style
within the bell of the flower had extended itself, so that its tip now extended
beyond the rim of the corolla. It had not done so by any process of engorgement
or uncoiling, but rather by stretching itself in an elastic manner. Its basic
colour was not amber, as he had at first imagined, but a creamy near-white hue
similar to that of the leaves which spread from the stalk in fanlike fashion. It
was darker because the white was faintly streaked with pink.

The style writhed very slowly, in a manner which reminded Reinmar of the head
of a luckless and bewildered earthworm come unexpectedly to the surface of the
soil. Marcilla lay quite still beneath the enormous dome of the flower:
unseeing, unfeeling, unbreathing.

The officiating priest began to lower his ornamented staff, and the tip of
the style dipped down more urgently, as though trying to pursue it. But then the
celebrant stepped aside and moved unhurriedly away, to allow the flower-head to
continue its slow descent.

It seemed to Reinmar that the flower was now aware of Marcilla’s cold
presence, and he choked back an exclamation of horror. The tip of the style had
extended at least half a yard beyond the rim of the corolla now, and its
writhing had become more excited. Down and down it came, while Reinmar held his
breath in terrified anticipation.

The moment the lascivious style touched Marcilla’s pale flesh, she moved. It
seemed to Reinmar that she was trying to squirm away, and would have moved more
urgently had her limbs not been deadened by the drug she had been given. It was
as if she were stirring in her sleep, trying to awaken from a bad dream in which
her entire body had become mysteriously immovable.

The style touched her again, drawing its tip along the length of her arm, as
slow and gentle as the caress of a lover’s finger. Again she moved, restlessly
but impotently. It was as if she were trying with all her might to awake, but
could not. Her body was cold and stiff, her flesh as white as marble in the
unnatural light, and the power of intention was insufficient to move her
reluctant limbs.

But she certainly was not dead.

She was not dead.

Reinmar clenched his jaw very tightly, but he gripped his stolen staff more
tightly in his right hand and adjusted the position of his feet so that he was
set to leap forward. He did not know how far this ritual would go, but he wanted
to be ready to act as soon as the moment seemed ripe. With his left hand he
fumbled at the cord holding his sword in its scabbard, but the shock of what he
had seen made his fingers clumsy and the knot would not come undone.