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

there is no magic in dark
wine at all, while others praised it as the greatest magic known to man. A third
party damned it as a snare—an alluring gateway to unspeakable evil—but
Albrecht never kept company with men of that kind while he was pretending to be
a scholar in Marienburg. Nor did I, in Eilhart.”
    The old man paused to take a drink; it was Gottfried who helped him with the
cup. This time, it was hock rather than water, but Luther still looked as if he
would have preferred something far stronger.
    “You would not think to look at me now that I was once a man of superabundant
youth,” Luther went on, “but I was. I never thought any less of myself because
of it, although my father was a man of my son’s stripe—worse, in a way, for he
never allowed any kind of liquor to pass his own lips. It needs a sober man to
deal in wine, he used to say. Cultivate a liking for the stock, and you’ll pour
your profits down your throat. You might think your father’s love of moderation
stern enough, Reinmar, but you never had the opportunity to measure him against
a real pillar of rectitude.
    “Albrecht took the brunt of our father’s wrath and disapproval, and it drove
him away. I was younger, and I learned to be sly. I was a drinker long before he
found me out, and once I had tasted dark wine I lost my appetite for most lesser
vices. But he did find me out, alas, and he was not an easy man to best in a
dispute. He had his way, although he had to steal my own son to secure his final
victory—and his gain was our loss, for my father never once considered the
possibility of refusing to trade in the dark wine and its kin, which is what
your own dear father did as soon as he had the whip hand.”
    “It was the only way,” Gottfried muttered.
    “Was it?” Luther asked, sceptically. “What consternation there must have been
in Marienburg when you made that decision! But only for a while. As the
Schilder’s assiduous lock-builders discovered long ago, the flow of a river can
never be entirely gentled. When the spring meltwater runs from the mountains the
gates must be opened wide, and the worst floods can only be diverted; you can
only protect land here by diverting the floodwater there. The dark wine was like
the Schilder; frustrated in its normal course, it only found other channels to
the Reik—and once there, it vanished into the irresistible tide of river
traffic.”
    “This is no use,” Gottfried butted in. “We need something to give the
witchfinder. The only way to get him off our backs is to send him further along
the trail. You must have some idea where the dark wine is produced, and by
whom.”
    “I don’t,” Luther said, stubbornly.
    “I don’t believe you,” Gottfried said. “Albrecht went to Marienburg, but you
stayed here. You went up into the hills on yearly buying trips just as I have
always done. Don’t try to tell me that you never searched for the source of the
dark wine.”
    “The agents of the dark wine’s producers always came to us.”
    “And who were they? Where did they live?”
    “They were gypsies—wanderers, without any permanent home.”
    “People hereabouts blame such travellers for everything,” Gottfried said,
disgustedly. “Every time a chicken is stolen, the gypsies took it. Every time a
milk-cow dries up, it was cursed by the gypsies. If a man gets a bellyache, it
was never from eating unripe apples, but always because some gypsy crone looked
sideways at him. Now you tell me that the gypsies make dark wine—doubtless
from wild grapes gathered in some secret valley whose location is known only to
their elders.”
    “I did not say that they made it,” Luther pointed out. “Merely that they
brought it from its source—of which they had nothing, or next to nothing, to
say.”
    “But you did ask,” Gottfried said. “As often and as cleverly as you could,
given your fondness for the stuff. And you say they told you next to nothing.
Why