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

think that
I am entitled to know what danger I am in?”
    Albrecht recoiled slightly under this assault, but he seemed to be made of
stronger stuff than Luther. He drew his lips back to expose his yellow teeth, and teased the incisors thoughtfully with his
tongue as he considered the matter.
    “Although you would not know it to hear the gossip in the marketplace, we
live in quiet times in a favoured place,” the old man said, eventually.
“Tradesmen are always grumbling, but the tradesmen of Reikland know nothing of
how hard life is in less prosperous parts of the Empire or how desperate it was
in Reikland in other phases of our history. There are rumours of terrible events
in distant corners of the Empire, and horrors in Altdorf itself, but nothing has
happened in my lifetime to compare with the great conflicts of the past. The
siege of Praag has always been the stuff of legend in Reikland, and the Vampire
Counts of Sylvania are bogeymen fit only to frighten naughty children in these
parts, but you and I have every reason to be grateful that we were not born in a
worse place or in an earlier era. You have not the slightest idea how grim
reality is in less favoured localities, or what evil lurks in the wastes of the
far north.”
    “Tell me, then,” Reinmar suggested.
    Albrecht hesitated. “Your education is your father’s responsibility,” he
said, after a few moments.
    “Your brother thinks the same,” Reinmar observed. “He is too old, and too
weak, even to think of defying my father by telling me things that my father
would rather I did not know. But that is why I came to you: a scholar, and a man
who can still stand upright. My cousin has come to Eilhart with a witch hunter
at his heels. We are all under suspicion, it seems. My father has been taken
away, and you may well be next. I need to know what is going on, and you are the
only one who can tell me. You are the scholar of the family, are you not?”
    Flattery, Reinmar had heard it said, would get a man anywhere. It was the
flattery of being named the scholar of the family that loosened his
great-uncle’s tongue.
    “Very well,” Albrecht said. “Perhaps it is time that my nephew’s son knew the
family secrets—and I believe that he will hear a more honest account from me
than from my brother or his son. Listen, then!”
    Reinmar listened, more enthusiastically than he had ever listened to any
lecture delivered by his father.

 
 
Chapter Five
     
     
    “The relative peace that we enjoy was not cheaply bought,” Albrecht told
Reinmar. “The price my father’s generation paid was fierce repression. If the
scholars of Marienburg are right in their account of the world, much of that
repression was necessary and wholly justified, but the forces of repression
never know when to stop or relent. Trade in the wine of dreams—which is not the
only dark wine but the one most commonly used and the one to which most men
refer when they use the phrase—had been established for centuries before my
father’s time, but when it was investigated by agents of Magnus the Pious and
his Theogonists it was quickly limited, and then proscribed.
    “Suppression of the trade was by no means welcome in Marienburg, and may even
have played some small part in the events leading to secession, but that was
before my time. The trade went underground thereafter, at least in the lower
reaches of the Reik, but it was tolerated by local people to whom it
was a matter of custom. The main effect of the notional ban was, in fact, to
increase curiosity among those who dealt in the wine as to the reason for its
bad reputation. Yes, I used dark wine myself—more freely, I dare say, than
Luther—and I would have continued to use it had I been able to stay in Marienburg or had I been able
to secure a supply of my own when I returned to Eilhart. Once the traffic was
taken out of the charge of our family, however, I found it as hard to come by as
anyone else