The Wine of Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page A

the quality of his prison that much more treacherous,
and to increase the sense he had had for more than a year of being trapped in a
life for which he might be direly ill-suited. “Yes it is,” he agreed. “It always
has been, and probably always will be.”
    Reinmar could hardly wait for night to fall, so that he could steal up the
stairs to his grandfather’s room and interrogate him. In the meantime, he
wavered between hoping that Gottfried would stay out of the way long enough for
him to learn whatever Luther cared to reveal to him and dreading that his father
might not return at all, having been thrown in jail on suspicion of having
consorted with evil magicians.
    Marguerite stayed with him for an hour, chattering about the possibilities
opened up by the arrival of the witch hunter and his escort, but Reinmar easily
resisted the temptation to tell her that the mysterious stranger they were
hunting was his father’s cousin. She went away again, having had no occasion to
take further offence at his treatment of her, when the second wave of customers
began to arrive in the shop, intent on trading rumours as well as buying wine.
    Reinmar knew better than to trust the rumours entertained by labourers, who
rarely knew anything and were ever wont to fantasise, but he could not help
suffering pangs of anxiety when he was assured that the stowaway was a
necromancer from the Cursed Marshes west of Marienburg, a sailor who had gone
mad while cast away on a haunted islet in the Sea of Claws, or a daemonologist
from the Howling Hills who had unleashed a host of evil spirits into the streets
of Altdorf. He had no idea what a necromancer or a daemonologist was, and he
suspected that his wide-eyed informants had no better idea than he, but the
titles seemed pregnant with horrible disaster.
    Just as the rush was easing, Machar von Spurzheim returned in the company of
four armed men, one of whom he introduced to Reinmar as Sergeant Matthias
Vaedecker.
    “Your father has graciously offered to allow us to search his stock,” the
witch hunter informed Reinmar. “He assures us that he has never placed any dark
wine in his cellars, and we believe him, but he shares our anxiety that there
might be some hidden corner where old stocks lurk of which he knows nothing.”
    The statement was, of course, absurd. Gottfried Wieland knew every jug, jar,
cask and flagon in his cellars, and was not a man to tolerate the existence of
hidden corners or unevaluated stock. If Gottfried had given von Spurzheim
permission to search, his intention must be to clear away any slight shadow of
doubt that might remain in the witch hunter’s mind as to his innocence of any
dealings in “dark wine”.
    “I will show you the way,” Reinmar said. He did, and lit all the lamps that
were grouped at the foot of the stone stairs so that every last corner of the
mazy cellars could be illuminated at will. He stayed to watch, as Gottfried
would have wanted him to do, while the five men prowled the multitudinous racks, removing the
stoppers from stone jars so that they might sniff the contents and turning the
spigots on wooden casks to let drops fall onto the palms of their hands. They
were not wasteful, nor did their tentative sampling of the produce lead to the
least intoxication.
    The search would have been quicker had all the wines in the cellars been kept
in transparent bottles, but only the finest wines were ever dignified thus, and
usually only in the shop itself. Glass was too precious a commodity to be
wasted, and customers who were slow in returning their empties for reuse were
always treated with prejudice. Gottfried Wieland was well known for his
sternness in keeping count of such errors of omission, and for the infallibility
of his memory.
    Machar von Spurzheim insisted that Reinmar open every cupboard and chest,
while Sergeant Vaedecker used the hilt of a dagger to rap on every wall,
listening raptly for any hollow