The Wine of Dreams (34 page)

Reinmar understood that the last question cut to the heart of the matter. Who
could he trust? Who did he trust? Von Spurzheim? Matthias Vaedecker? Godrich?
Sigurd? Marguerite? Himself?

“What are you going to do, great-uncle?” Reinmar asked, as he finally
resheathed his blade.

“I am going to mind my own business, for as long as I have the opportunity/
Albrecht Wieland replied. “If you ever had that option, you have lost it now. Do
you have the least idea what kind of game you are playing?”

“I think so,” Reinmar said, speaking more honestly but still in some need of
convincing. “I am a pawn, it seems—but I was not supposed to find my way into
the underworld. They had no idea that I would care so much about the fate of a
girl I had only just met, and they did not know that Vaedecker would see them
dig her up as soon as they had buried her. I was supposed to return to Eilhart
with Ulick, offering von Spurzheim a way to find the valley—but I suspect that
his men would have been led to a different and more dangerous place, where they
would have fought at a great disadvantage. Once Vaedecker and I had seen too
much, the plan had to be recalculated. They still hope that I will serve their
purpose, using our existing business to establish a new supply-route for the
wine of dreams and its darker kin. They desperately need some such link with the
Reik towns, and they will not kill me while there is a chance that I might
provide it, no matter how I have annoyed them. Von Spurzheim guessed that my
discovery of the valley was bait in a trap, and he would not have hurried into
it in any case. He will build what defences he can within the town, and I
suppose that his enemies will try to stop him before he gathers sufficient
reinforcements. Eilhart has no choice but to help him, and pray to all the good
gods for his victory—and because I am part of Eilhart, that is what I must
do.”

Albrecht shook his head slowly and sighed. “Such is the nature of the wine of
dreams,” he said. “Its promises always lead to nightmares in the end. Go back,
Reinmar, as fast as you can, and make what preparations you can for the battle.
It will be fierce, I think. Von Spurzheim and the Reiksguard will have to draw
on every last vestige of their might and endurance.”

Reinmar would not have obeyed the injunction to leave immediately had his
ears not caught the sound of hoofbeats, but he knew that he did not want to be
standing in Albrecht’s house, watching the old man clutch a flask of the wine of
dreams, when soldiers burst in, seeking revenge for the wounding of their
comrade.

“Bar the door behind me,” he said, and immediately went out to meet the
approaching troop.

He was very glad to see that the newly-arrived party was led by Matthias
Vaedecker rather than some Reiksguard knight. The dozen men who were with him
were all von Spurzheim’s followers—a rather motley crew, although Reinmar did
not doubt that they knew their business very well indeed.

“It was the two monks who attacked the sentry,” Reinmar told the sergeant.
“They came to meet a woman—a sorceress, I suspect. If you have not been
tracking her from Marienburg, she has been tracking you. She was old until they
gave her dark wine to drink, but she is younger now.”

“Did you put up a fight?” Vaedecker wanted to know.

“No,” Reinmar confessed. “Had they threatened my life, I would have done, but
they took me by surprise. I had time to draw my weapon, but I was outnumbered,
and they had no time to spare for a fight in which my great-uncle would surely
have supported me.

Vaedecker had not dismounted, and he was looking about him as he listened to
Reinmar’s reply, clearly uncertain as to what to do next. “Damn their
insolence!” he said. “They’re taunting us—but if we ride after them, we’ll
probably ride into a trap. Your great-uncle refused to go with them, you say?”

Reinmar had not said anything of the sort, but he had no objection to the
sergeant leaping to that conclusion. “He’s an old man,” Reinmar said. “He can’t
fight. He has no desire to do anything but wait at home for whatever transpires.
He cannot see that anyone has any reason to hurt him.”

“I have not,” Vaedecker agreed. “But the enemies we have to face are not the
kind to need reasons. Beastmen would rip him apart and dine on his flesh whether
they were hungry or not. The best of their allies are no better, and the worst
are far worse. But it’s not my job to defend him, or yours. You’d better come
back to town with us. Von Spurzheim would not like me to leave you to walk
unprotected. He thinks you might be useful to him—and the horses you’ve just
lost weren’t his to begin with, although we might have made good use of them
tomorrow.”

“You think the battle will begin tomorrow?” Reinmar asked, as he came forward
to join the troop, ready and willing to walk between their two ranks if
Vaedecker would not let him ride two-a-back.

“It has already begun,” the sergeant said, reaching down after only a
moment’s hesitation to draw Reinmar up behind him.

“From now on, its fury will only increase. I doubt there’ll be an all-out
assault today, but our adversaries will be busy nonetheless, and so shall we.”

Once Reinmar was safely installed, though, and the drumming of four dozen
hooves on the dry ground had set up a secure screen of privacy, Vaedecker
changed his tune.

“What went on in there, Master Wieland?” he whispered over his shoulder. “Why
did they come to fetch her, when they could not have known that the sentries
would be so ineffectual? Why didn’t they take you with them?”

“I don’t know,” Reinmar answered, knowing that it sounded weak, although it
was only a little short of the whole truth. “Perhaps they did know that the
sentries would be off their guard. Perhaps the sorceress had power enough for
that, even when she seemed older. As for me—they still think of me as a pawn
in their game, fit for baiting traps and running errands. So do you, it seems.”

“Not I,” Vaedecker contradicted him, implying that there were others who
might. “I’ve seen you in action. Who is she, Master Wieland?”

“Her name is Valeria,” Reinmar told him. “My great-uncle knew her in
Marienburg.”

“Ah,” the sergeant said. “We have heard of her. Von Spurzheim will probably be
glad that she is here. He wants the battle to be conclusive as well as to win
it. This has been a long and arduous campaign.”

“You don’t seem to be in wholehearted agreement,” Reinmar observed.

“Life is a long and arduous campaign,” the soldier told him. “I have always
found it better to fight little battles, one at a time. Given that we never run
out of enemies, it seems unnecessary and unwise to fight too many at a time.
There’s more pleasure and profit in an endless series of small victories than in
a single costly blaze of glory, believe me.”

Reinmar did believe him, but knew that the choice that Vaedecker had outlined
was not his to make, and might not be von Spurzheim’s either.

When Matthias Vaedecker helped Reinmar down from his horse on the edge of
Eilhart’s market square Reinmar found himself on the outskirts of a seething
crowd. The anxiety in the air was palpable, but he did not see the cause of
their consternation until he had pushed his way through the crowd to the focal
point of its attention.

Laid out in open view on the steps of the corn exchange were six corpses. Not
one was fully human. All of them had two arms and two legs, but in all cases but
one of these limbs were brutishly thickened and shortened. Three of them had
only one hand, the other being replaced by a claw, and two of these had feet
like massive taloned paws. Their heads were the worst parts, not one of them
being even approximately human. One had a head like a bull with heavy horns,
another like a bison and a third like a monstrous cat. The fourth head was
wolf-like, more hideous than that of the beastmen that he, Godrich, Sigurd and
Vaedecker had fought; the remaining two were like snakes save for their awful
compound eyes.

Reinmar had no need to ask why these bodies had been put on display, but his
neighbours, seeing that he had only just arrived, were more than enthusiastic to
tell him.

“Creatures like these are pressing forward from Holy Hill, west of the
Schimel Farm,” Aloys Walther the baker’s son informed him. “They’ve attacked
Vitway and Konigmuell. The town is cut off to the south and west, and at least
two of the locks on the river have been smashed. Barges can no longer get to
Eilhart Pool, and any rowboats that contest the river’s faster flow are deluged
with arrows at the Heiligergap. An army of monsters is massing, pressing forward
all the while, and they say we’ll get no more reinforcements for at least two
days. It’s too late for anyone else to flee, though—we all have to report for
assignment to the defences.”

“We’ve strength enough,” Reinmar assured him. “I’ve fought the beastmen once,
and they’re far less powerful than they are horrible.”

Long queues of men were already winding halfway around the square, waiting to
be interrogated as to the weapons they possessed and the training they had had
in their use. Although they were orderly they were far from silent; rumours were
flying in every direction. Reinmar had only to walk back to the stable to which
Vaedecker’s men had taken their horses to hear half a dozen more reports like
the one Aloys had poured into his ear. The place-names were sometimes different,
but the import was always the same. The town was cut off, or would be within a
matter of hours. The flow of military reinforcements had slowed to a trickle,
and Eilhart was certain to be attacked before another contingent of the
Reiksguard could be mobilised to reinforce its defenders.

All of this had seemed to be a relatively distant prospect when Reinmar and
Albrecht had left the town, but it was palpably imminent now and it no longer
seemed so odd that the enemy had come to Albrecht’s house. Any outlying
dwelling, it seemed, was ripe for invasion now. Thanks to the flood of refugees
flocking into the town with tales of horror, and the similar flood whose
northward routes would soon be cut off, there could be no one within twenty
miles of Eilhart who did not know that the town was effectively under siege, and
that it would soon have to be defended against a fierce and massive assault.

The town crier was busy in front of the tower that housed the market bell,
but it was not his job to put out the call for conscription. Reinmar paused to
listen to him, but only for a minute. The proclamations that he was repeating, probably for the tenth or
fifteenth time, were to do with the conservation of water—the waters of the
river had apparently been fouled and were unfit to drink even after boiling—and the powers of requisition that had been granted to the Reiksguard and the
followers of Machar von Spurzheim for the building of barricades.

When Reinmar rejoined Matthias Vaedecker he asked the soldier whether he
ought to join one of the queues to await the attention of a recruiting sergeant.
He was told that he had already been assigned.

“To you?” Reinmar asked.

“Aye, but don’t thank me for my generosity,” Vaedecker told him. “We’re at
the upper neck of the river, commissioned to stop and sink anything that comes
down.”

“The river above Eilhart is supposed to be unnavigable,” Reinmar observed,
although he knew perfectly well that whatever the enemy cared to set upon the
waters would float well enough. They would not come in heavily-laden barges but
in skiffs and rafts—and they would be very difficult to stop. Vaedecker’s men
would undoubtedly cast nets and booms across the watercourse, but such barriers
could be cut or broken, and while they were being hacked, sawed and smashed the
enemy vessels would pile up, discharging missiles to either side. It was
impossible to guess which of the many barricades placed across the roads into
the town would be the most heavily beset, but one thing that was perfectly
certain was that the neck of the river would see fierce and crucial fighting.
Once that entry-way was breached, the enemy forces would have a vital artery to
carry their assault deep into the town’s heart.

“Don’t be afraid, either,” Vaedecker added. “You’ll have some of the best
infantrymen this side of Middenheim around you, and many of the townsfolk in the
rank will be men who know their business. The crossbows and pikes will do the
donkey-work at first. Your people will not be forced to go hand-to-hand unless
and until they storm the shore, and we’ll do everything in our power to make
sure they can’t outnumber us.”

“What time shall I report?” Reinmar asked.

“You’ve already reported,” Vaedecker told him. “You’re under my command now,
though I’ll have to trust you to go to von Spurzheim and tell him everything you
can about what happened at the house. When he’s satisfied, you must come back to me so that
I can show you your position. After that, you can go home to eat and gossip—but the moment you hear the clamour of the bell you must come running, and if no
clamour sounds you must listen for the hours. Even if all is quiet you must be
at your post by six o’clock, and you must keep watch till two in the morning. If
nothing has happened by then… well, we’ll know that when it does, it’ll be
even worse than it would have been had they come more hurriedly.”

Reinmar nodded, then set off to look for the witch hunter while Vaedecker
went to see to the organisation of his men.

Von Spurzheim was by no means hard to find, having stuck hard to his base in
the town hall, but he was busy with his maps and surrounded by men, including
four Reiksguard knights. Von Spurzheim’s estimate of the likely time of the
attack had been hastily revised, and everything was now being organised in
haste. The knights and the witch hunter’s lieutenants all seemed to be busy
quarrelling, although Reinmar assumed that they would have preferred to describe
their argument as a tactical discussion. He had to wait for an opportunity to
signal his presence to the witch hunter, and then had to wait far longer for von
Spurzheim to find an opportunity to break away. When he did manage to disengage
himself, the witch hunter immediately took Reinmar into another room and closed
the door behind him.