Chapter Twenty-Four
When Reinmar came out of Albrecht’s cell, Matthias Vaedecker locked the door behind him. The sergeant stayed behind in the blockhouse while Machar von Spurzheim took Reinmar out of the constables’ lair and led him across the square to the town hall. Once they had arrived there, the witch hunter led the way to a room that presented as dramatic a contrast as could possibly be imagined to the one Reinmar had just been in. Its walls were hidden by velvet hangings and the floor was thickly carpeted. All the chairs had lavishly-upholstered seats and the enormous leather-topped oaken table at which Reinmar was invited to sit was piled with more pieces of parchment than he had ever seen in one place.
Von Spurzheim sat opposite, moving his hands on the table top in such a way as to part the scraps of parchment into two roughly-equal heaps, one to each side. Then he leaned forward, planting his elbows in the space he had cleared. “Well, Master Wieland,” he said. “It seems that I have something for which to thank you.”
“You should let my uncle go now,” Reinmar said. “He’s harmless.”
“Perhaps he is,” the witch hunter answered. “Your father has made me the same assurances about your grandfather. But we have not quite cleared out the nest of vipers that was lodged in Holthusen, so there are others free with whom he might join up, possibly forming a company that would be stronger for his presence. Your cousin Wirnt warned them of our approach, you see, as he had earlier warned others, including your grandfather and your great-uncle—unless, of course, that was you.”
Reinmar said nothing to that, and von Spurzheim spread his hands dismissively. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m sure now that you have only done what you thought was right. You’re a man who knows the meaning of duty, Matthias says. He also says that you’re a fool, but that may be too harsh a judgement. There are matters I’m bound to keep secret even from him. I confess that I don’t quite understand why, but I too am a man of duty and when I am forbidden to speak of things I do not speak of them. It makes my job more difficult, but I am also bound not to complain. If I asked you to go to Holthusen for me, to help smoke out Wirnt’s friends, would you do it?”
“I have been advised to leave Eilhart,” Reinmar replied, cautiously, “but I doubt that my family would approve of my doing so as a spy. I don’t think I ought to leave my father—and I can’t leave the gypsy girl.”
Von Spurzheim frowned slightly at that, but he did not seem surprised. “Your loyalties are still confused,” he observed. “That is natural. Even if I could tell you everything that I know, you might not see the situation any more clearly. But you will listen, I suppose, to what I can tell you.”
“Of course,” Reinmar said.
Very well. When you went into that strange underworld with Matthias Vaedecker, you caught a glimpse of something that very few innocent men have ever been unlucky enough to see. I do not simply mean the underworld itself but something far greater, of which it is but a tiny part. The world you know is not nearly as safe and secure as it seems; it exists in the shadow of a terrible threat, which manifests itself in many different ways. Matthias knows far more of this evil than most men, but he has only faced its most direct and brutal manifestations. Men like me are commissioned to deal with subtler threats—threats which do not crowd upon civilised lands from their unruly borders, seeking to diminish us by crude force of arms, but which emerge by stealth even in the best strongholds of order and humanity.
“Even in Eilhart, Master Wieland, you must have heard rumours saying that all is not well in the cities of the Empire. Even in Altdorf, in the very heart of the greatest Empire of men that there has ever been, there have been eruptions of horror and violence. The appetites that men possess are part of our precious humanity, but they are also portals to the heart and mind through which subtle invaders may pass. Some men are vulnerable because of their pride and their propensity to wrath, some because of their love of luxury and intoxication. Others are betrayed by their own inquisitiveness and hunger for strange sensations. The health of humankind is always under siege, from diseases of the body and diseases of the spirit—and great cities make fine breeding grounds for all manner of sicknesses.
“The phases of decay are easy to see, for those who are educated to see them. First, self-indulgence; second, addiction; third, desperation. All men begin by thinking, as your grandfather once thought and your great-uncle still professes to believe, that they can taste such temptations as the wine of dreams without becoming dependent on them—but all men find, as your grandfather did, that once they are increased such appetites can never be diminished to what they were before, nor abandoned without painful cost. Once men become slaves to the wine of dreams their thirst becomes so magnified that it requires stronger and stranger liquors to slake it. It has the reputation of being the indulgence of superior scholars and arrogant aristocrats—something which confers an enviable status on its users—but its purpose is to spread a cancer within the highest ranks and wisest enclaves of human civilization.
“Imagine, Reinmar, if you will, the magnitude of the conspiracy required to convey the wine of dreams and its darker kin from the underworld beneath the Grey Mountains to a city somewhere in the Empire. Imagine, too, that that is merely one part of a greater conspiracy, which has all the Empire’s cities in its sights—not merely Marienburg and Altdorf but Nuln and Talabheim, and even far Middenheim, despite the distances involved. But imagine too a counter-conspiracy, directed by the defenders of all that is good in humankind and Empire: a conspiracy which attacks the cancer as it grows in a city and begins to squeeze the evil life out of it, while painstakingly tracing its extension along the Talabec, the Stir or the Reik itself.
The conspiracy has been the work of centuries, and the counter-conspiracy likewise the work of generations. The principal arena of concern has shifted half a dozen times, as has the balance of the contest, but in the present generation there has been a crucial shift in that balance, at least in respect of the wine of dreams.
“The present artery of the dark wine’s supply is by no means the first to have been cut, but we have believed for some time that it is the most direct, and the one which has brought us closest to the source. We have not merely mapped the line along the Reik to the Schilder, to Holthusen and then to Eilhart, but each link in the chain has been so carefully broken that the supply-line has been decisively severed. I would dearly like to say irrevocably instead of decisively, but I dare not. Such hopes have been entertained before, and have failed. This may be the closest we have ever come to the source, and might well be the best opportunity we have ever had to destroy that source, but… do you see my difficulty, Reinmar? Can you see why I dare not take what you and Matthias have told me entirely at face value?”
Reinmar was puzzled, at first, and quite at a loss to see what von Spurzheim was driving at—but then he began to understand.
“It is far too convenient,” he said. “The timing is too perfect. My grandfather and Albrecht have searched long and hard for the source of the wine of dreams—and other men like you have done so, for their own reasons—but none ever found it, until the day when you arrived in Eilhart, having erased almost every element of the supply-line. You think that a trap was being laid for you—a snare, carefully loaded with bait.” It was an idea that had not occurred to him before, but now that it had he saw exactly how monstrous the coincidence was. Could it be, he wondered, that Marcilla had led him into the hidden valley? Had she been placed against the wall of that barn in the village merely so that he might rescue her? If so, she could have been more than a pawn, with no inkling of the plot… but if Matthias Vaedecker and Machar von Spurzheim were right about the slyly playful nature of their enemy, it was certainly conceivable. And how, after what he had seen in that awful underworld, could he doubt the awful subtlety of its designer?
But even if Marcilla had led him to the valley, Reinmar thought, how much of what happened thereafter had been included in the plan? Surely the architects of the trap could not have expected him to find his way into the underworld itself? That must have been the point at which the carefully-laid plan began to go badly awry. There was no way that any one could have anticipated that he would find the storeroom and destroy its stocks. If he had been drawn into a trap—as even Albrecht had thought likely—then he had contrived to turn the tables on those who had laid down the lure, and had turned the advantage they hoped to win into a disaster.
“I was supposed to find the valley,” Reinmar said, trying to think the matter through. “I was supposed to follow the girl on my own—Sergeant Vaedecker was an unexpected complication. The monks were supposed to test my attitude to the wine very carefully, winning me to their cause if I could be won—but when the gypsies sent word that the sergeant had come into the valley with me Brother Noel decided that it would be best to let us leave as soon as possible. He did not know, of course, that Vaedecker had seen Marcilla disinterred and that I would insist on following her. I saw the astonishment on his face when he saw Marcilla and realised what Vaedecker and I had done, and I am perfectly certain that he had never imagined for a moment that we would do what we did—but even then, he thought that the bare bones of the plan were still in place. He wanted you to think that the valley could be found, and that Ulick and I could lead you to it. Why?”
“You do understand my problem,” von Spurzheim said, nodding his head. “In all probability, you and the boy—quite innocently, I don’t doubt—would have led my hastily-gathered troops into an ambush or a magical trap. If there are valleys which are impossible to find, there might be others that are impossible to leave. More soldiers would come eventually, of course, and my reports have been transmitted back to Altdorf at regular intervals, but if I and my trusted lieutenants could be destroyed now, the work we have done could be undone and our cause set back by years.”
“Not now,” Reinmar said. “Now, for the first time, you know exactly what you are dealing with—and it will not be easy to rebuild a chain of supply if there are no goods to supply.”
Von Spurzheim smiled at that, and nodded in acknowledgement, but he did not seem entirely reassured. “I’ll grant that you really did see far more than you were supposed to see,” he said, “and that having seen it you took brave and altogether unexpected action. I believe that you did strike a real and telling blow against our enemies, and that you disrupted their scheme magnificently—but we may be sure that they will react, as swiftly and as effectively as they can. What do you think they might do now?”
Reinmar had not the slightest idea. “Brother Noel and Brother Almeric took care to warn me that I had done myself more harm than good, even before they knew that I had wrecked their storehouse,” he recalled. “The sergeant warned me to expect reprisals—but I never paused to wonder about the wider consequences of my actions.”
“How extensive was the underworld, Reinmar?” von Spurzheim asked him, quietly.
Reinmar realised that he had not the faintest idea. He had seen only that fraction of it that lay close to the entrance beneath the temple. Although he had run in panic once he had plucked Marcilla from the cleft in which she had been set, he had ended up at another covert in the same wall, not more than a couple of hundred paces away. In the other direction, the underworld might have extended for miles—or for tens of miles. The Grey Mountains were vast, providing a barrier many hundreds of miles long that separated the Empire from Bretonnia, passable only at widely-spaced intervals. Even if the cave he had visited were no bigger than the valley it underlay, how many similar underworlds might there be?
He realised that even though he had seen too much, he had not seen enough. He had no idea of the enemy’s true strength, and no basis for guessing what new plan might now be put in place of the one that had gone awry.
“Perhaps, for your sake, I ought to send you to Holthusen anyhow, even if you will not be my spy,” von Spurzheim said. “Alas, there is nowhere in the world that is truly safe, and the cities of the Empire are less safe now than they were. I have no idea how useful you might be as bait in a trap of my own setting, but you will understand that I have to consider the possibility. Perhaps I should let you make your own decision—but I still have to make mine. Should I set off tomorrow for this valley of yours, using the boy or the girl as a guide, and risk an ambush? Or should I stay here and wait, hoping that the enemy will now be angry enough to fight on any ground, no matter how disadvantageous? If I do stay, can I defend the town successfully? If I were to ask the townspeople, I dare say they’d beg me to be gone, not caring in the least whether I went forwards or back—but the townspeople don’t know what you and I know, do they?
“By daybreak, I suppose the wings of rumour will have carried some account of your exploits into every last shop and house—but the people who listen to those rumours will not know a quarter of what you and I know. I have the reputation of being a good tactician, but every man of my kind still alive has that, because the first defeat he suffers is usually his last. I would ask for advice, if I thought there was anyone in Eilhart capable of giving it, but there is not. Everyone here who knows anything worth knowing is, for that very reason, untrustworthy. Even you, Reinmar. Even you.”
Reinmar pondered that for a few moments—but he was not tempted to bring the phial out of his pouch and hand it over to the witch hunter. If everyone who knew anything had to be reckoned as being untrustworthy by the Wieland family, then von Spurzheim was surely the least trustworthy of all. “I still have only the faintest idea who or what it is that we are fighting,” Reinmar said, dubiously. “If they come, should we expect men or beastmen, or something even worse—daemons, perhaps?”
“I don’t know,” von Spurzheim admitted. “But I’m glad to hear you say ‘we’, because I do want you on my side. I can’t tell you exactly what form the enemy will take, but ought to warn you to expect the most dreadful beastmen you can imagine, and things more frightful still. That way, at least, you will be mentally prepared. Always remember this, though: these monsters can be successfully fought. Their power is limited, in ways I cannot pretend to comprehend. Even daemons, it seems, can only enter our world for brief periods, and their tenure here is always fragile. While they are here they can be hurt like any mortal creature. If you can keep your head and use your brain, you have advantages of your own which most of your enemies have not. Whatever else they are, they are no great thinkers, and such discipline as they have is very weak indeed. They can be beaten. Whatever may happen, remember that. They are not invincible. Powerful, vicious, treacherous, insidious… but not invulnerable.”
“The people of Eilhart,” Reinmar observed, wryly, “are not used to making do with such small crumbs of comfort as that.”
“Well,” said Machar von Spurzheim, standing up as he spoke and moving towards the door of the room, “I hope, as you undoubtedly do, that they will not be forced to get used to it—but I dare not be optimistic. Go home now—but think on what I have said. If you really have contrived to harm the cause of our enemies, rather than merely serving as an instrument of their cunning, the choice of battleground may not be left to me. If you have invited vengeance, it will probably be swift in coming, and you will obtain more than your fair share of our enemies’ attentions. Sleep, if you can—and pay close attention to your dreams.”
While he was concluding this speech the witch hunter ushered Reinmar from the room, but he left him to make his own way down the stair and out into the street.
Reinmar walked home alone, nervous of every footfall and shadow because of the possibilities that von Spurzheim had suggested to him, and wondering all the while what kind of welcome his father would by now have prepared for him.