The Wine of Dreams (44 page)

“I will not die screaming,” Gottfried told his father, blending rage and
outrage in his tone. “All flesh must wither and die, and all spirit too. Nothing
can set that inevitability aside. There is nothing in that phial but delusion,
and brief delusion at that. I have seen its promises, and I have seen them fail.
I am an honest trader, and I intend to remain one for many years to come. You
must make your own choice, Reinmar, but you’ve seen what life has made of me and
you’ve seen what life has made of your grandfather.”

“I’ve seen far more than that, father,” Reinmar said. I’ve seen the source of
the wine, both the flower and the root of its temptations.”

“You could not save the gypsy,” Valeria told him, although he already knew
it, “because she never had the least desire to be saved. She was made to be a
dreamer, and nothing could have kept her long awake once she had been called to
her dream. Nothing. What could any mere man offer her, when she already had the
love of a god?”

“Let me go,” Reinmar said to Brother Noel. “Take the knife away, and I’ll
open the phial.”

The monk hesitated, but he had to look to Valeria for instruction.

She nodded, and Noel removed his arm. He even took a step backwards, fully
convinced that if things went awry he would have every opportunity to stab
Reinmar in the back.

Reinmar transferred the phial from his right hand to his left, but he made no
move to open the seal. Instead, he looked at Wirnt. “I believe that you have my
sword,” he said.

Wirnt hesitated, and Reinmar saw a sharp glint enter the eyes that gleamed
within his cousin’s suddenly-aged face. Wirnt freed his right hand from
Valeria’s grip, and made a show of reaching out towards Reinmar—but it was the
point that he extended, not the hilt.

“Don’t be silly, Wirnt,” Valeria said, again—but it seemed that Wirnt had
heard that particular injunction once too often. He slashed sideways with the
blade, seemingly with all the force he could muster—not at Reinmar, but at his
mother. The blade sliced into her throat, severing her windpipe and causing
blood to fountain from her arteries at either side of her neck.

The expression on her face was one of the utmost astonishment.

As Valeria crumpled to the litter-strewn floor, Wirnt freed the blade again
with a sudden wrench, and moved the tip in a slow arc, threatening to cut anyone
else who moved.

“Sons can be so unruly,” he said, mockingly, “but mothers must learn to let
go. Do you not agree, Cousin Reinmar? Will you not agree with me that I had no
choice? She really shouldn’t have tried to favour you over her own son, should
she? That wasn’t right. You don’t really want that phial, do you? I shan’t be
robbing you by taking it off your hands.”

Reinmar smiled, as if to agree, and held out the object of the other’s fierce
desire as if to surrender it.

That was when Brother Noel—who had come late to his vocation—hurled his
dagger with all the force he could muster. The blade buried itself to the hilt
in Wirnt’s chest, cutting deep into his heart. While Wirnt was falling, Reinmar
stepped forward, using his left hand to pluck the sword from the dead man’s
nerveless fingers.

The compound stink of blood and shit filled the room, but Reinmar was used to
that by now and did not feel the need of a stronger perfume to cloak its
vileness. He was now a man to whom the sight and nearness of death came
naturally: a man who could anticipate the malice of others and make them pay the
price of folly. And why should he not extract such prices in full, given that he
was not merely a man who had fought and killed beastmen, and matched wits with
fiends, but an honest tradesman?

“The Lady Valeria should have known, if anyone did, how weak the bonds of
family affection become, when they are strained by the wine of dreams,” he
observed. “You must go away now, grandfather. There is no safety for you here. If
you manage to reach Marienburg, tell anyone who asks that there will be no dark
wine to be had for a year and more, and none to be had in Eilhart at any future
time—not, at least, from the Wieland shop.”

Having said that, he suddenly felt quite tired, but he knew that it was not a
decision he would regret within the next few years, so long as he was awake and
free of dreams.

“One day, Reinmar,” Luther said, in a low voice, “you will understand. You
are too young now, but you will never have Gottfried’s gift of utter
insensitivity, no matter how you may try to cultivate it. One day, you will
understand.”

Reinmar turned briefly to look for Brother Noel, but the monk had seen
Reinmar take back his sword, and he knew the havoc that blade had already
wreaked among his brethren. He was running away as fast as his legs would carry
him. Reinmar did not expect to see him again. Luther had not moved to follow him
as yet, and his attitude suggested that he was in no hurry, but his awkward
stance betrayed his deep anxiety.

Reinmar looked down at the fallen bodies of Wirnt and Valeria—which seemed
older now than they had before they suffered the fatal blows—before looking up
at his grandfather.

“Don’t ask me to give you the nectar, grandfather,” he said. “Don’t try to
take it, either. You’ve had your share. Just go.”

Luther seemed to be on the point of arguing, but he was not as mad now as he
had been. Recent events had overlaid a new sobriety upon his hard-won youth. He
looked hard at his son, but Gottfried was deliberately looking the other way,
refusing to see him.

In the end, Luther took one more look at the condition of the flesh on his
once-wrinkled hands, and decided that Reinmar was right. He darted a glance in
Albrecht’s direction before he left, but did not take the trouble to check
whether there was any life remaining in the fallen man.

It was left to Gottfried to haul himself painfully to his feet and make his
way to where his uncle lay. His verdict was succinct. “Dead. We can only hope
that he lived long enough to know that he was properly avenged.”

When Reinmar looked down again, he saw that Valeria’s corpse was still
mutating, although Wirnt’s had settled. Her flesh had shrivelled considerably,
so that the skin lay upon her bones like parchment. The blood that had spilled
from her gaping wound was now as black as ancient ink, and every bit as dry.

Valeria must have hoped that she was invulnerable, Reinmar supposed, because
she knew some petty sorceries. In fact, she had been as vulnerable as anything
alive to the whim of the mysterious creature that she worshipped: the dark and
playful god whose name he had not yet contrived to discover and probably never
would. She had died anxious, perhaps because she understood how capriciously
vindictive that whim had become.

Reinmar remembered something that Matthias Vaedecker had said to him. The
greatest power our enemies have is not that they can release daemons upon the
world, but that they can twist their knives inside the hearts of those we know
and love, turning cousin against cousin, brother against brother.

Foremost in his mind, however, was one of the slogans that his father had
been so enthusiastic to teach him.

Good wine matures.

“We have to go back now, father,” he said to Gottfried, as he went to free
Marguerite and help her to her feet. “The battle is finished, but the war goes
on. Eilhart will not be rebuilt in a year—and from now until we all die, there will be people in the town who
shudder every time they hear tales of monsters in the hills.”

“There will always be monsters in the hills,” Gottfried said weakly. “We must
all learn to live honestly and carefully with our fears, as we must all learn to
live honestly and carefully with our lusts and appetites.”

“And with our dreams,” Reinmar said, as he replaced the phial in his pouch,
taking great care to ensure that the stopper was secure and that the glass was
in no danger of breaking.

He knew exactly where he would hide it, once he was home.

When asked why he dresses entirely in black, Brian Craig claims to be in
mourning for H.P. Lovecraft, but the real reason is too dreadful to reveal. The rumour that he joined the
British Antarctic Survey in 1993 “to get away from it all” is false; he failed
the medical and had to join the French Foreign Legion under a pseudonym instead. He is not
allowed to discuss the reasons for his dishonourable discharge therefrom in 1999, but he is glad that he will now have more time to write and play
cricket.

Brian Craig was the author of
Zaragoz, Plague Daemon
and
Storm
Warriors
in an earlier range of Warhammer novels, and has contributed short
stories to a range of anthologies, including
The Dedalus Book of Femmes
Fatales,
edited by Brian Stableford. He is 28 and only looks older because
his troubles have aged him.

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proofing by Undead.