The Wine of Dreams by Brian Craig - (ebook by Undead) Read Free Book Online

fearfully out into
the darkness before closing it again and replacing the bar in its slots.
    “There,” he said. He was pointing to the poorer of a pair of rickety chairs.
It stood beside a table strewn with the debris of at least three meals, half a
dozen saucers pooled with sooty candle-wax, and various pieces of rotting
parchment that might once have been deeds, letters or pages torn out of a book.
Reinmar sat down gingerly, rocking the chair one way and then the other until he
figured out which three-legged stance was the more comfortable. The room was
suffused with a strong animal odour, although the scrawny cat asleep by the
hearth seemed hardly big enough to be responsible. Albrecht’s housekeeper—of
whom there was still no sign—did not seem to be overly attentive to her
duties.
    Albrecht took the other chair, which was somewhat sturdier and equipped with
arms on which he could rest his own. “What would a witch hunter want with me?”
he demanded.
    “The man he is chasing told me that he is your son,” Reinmar informed him.
“He also told me that he was coming to see you, although he doesn’t seem to have
arrived.”
    “Wirnt?” Albrecht seemed to be utterly astonished. “Wirnt is in Eilhart?”
    “He did not tell me his name,” Reinmar said. “So you do have a son, then? My
father didn’t seem to know it. The stranger came to the shop asking for dark
wine, and was disappointed when my father told him that we had none. Perhaps it
was as well, given that the witch hunter came so quickly on his heels. The witch
hunter’s soldiers searched the cellars, although I cannot imagine that there is
witchcraft in wine.”
    “All wine is witchcraft,” Albrecht murmured, although his mind seemed to be
elsewhere. “What else is intoxication but a gentle form of magic, a pleasing
disorder?”
    “According to my father,” Reinmar told his aged relative, “good wine is
virtue incarnate, and even bad wine is a useful accompaniment to poor food. I am
his apprentice, but he has never said a word to me of evil wine. That is the
sense, I assume, in which this mysterious liquor is dark?”
    “Wine comes in more colours than the burgers of Eilhart and Holthusen
imagine,” Albrecht told him, still speaking rather absent-mindedly while he
worried over possibilities that he was not yet inclined to share, “and the
dreams it stimulates are far richer and more various than your father or his
neighbours can imagine. Luther knows—but Luther was always a weakling and a
coward. There is no evil in wine, but there is evil in men, and even the finest
wine can sometimes draw it out. The wine of dreams may reveal more than some men
find comfortable. It is always the way of witch hunters and priests of law to
blame the magic rather than the man, but scholars have another way of seeing.”
    “In Eilhart,” Reinmar observed, “the kind of learning you call scholarship is
regarded with far more suspicion than wine.”
    That remark brought Albrecht’s mind back into focus. “Do you think I need to
be told that?” he demanded sharply. “It was to escape such ignorance that I went
to Marienburg, and let my brother steal my share of your precious shop by slow
degrees. If your father imagines that he can send a witch hunter after the
rascal of the family while keeping his own house clean he is mistaken. If I am
guilty, in the witch hunter’s eyes—and I am certainly innocent in my own—than Luther is guilty too, and if my past catches up with me your precious
business is bound to be drawn into the enquiry. If Wirnt has any sense at
all…”
    He broke off, somewhat to Reinmar’s annoyance.
    “I don’t understand what is happening, great-uncle,” Reinmar said. “My father
will not tell me, and my grandfather insists on respecting my father’s wishes,
for the time being—although he did suggest that I ought to forego my precious
sleep in order to warn you that the witch hunter is here. Do you not