[Warhammer] - The Wine of Dreams

by Brian Craig - (ebook by Undead)

  “If there are no servants here,” Reinmar dared to ask, “who will tend to Marcilla?”

  “Marguerite might look in, if I leave a key with her father,” Gottfried said. “If not, the gypsy will have to fend for herself if and when she wakes.”

  “Where’s Ulick?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  Reinmar paused before saying: “This impending battle really isn’t my fault, father.”

  Gottfried looked genuinely startled by that. “Of course it’s not.” he said. “I told you before not to blame yourself. It was inevitable from the moment the witch hunter arrived. The monsters began massing before you left in the wagon—I was a fool to send you out, but I was afraid that we might all be thrown in jail if Luther or Albrecht said the wrong thing, or nothing at all. This is a settlement of debts that were contracted long before you and I were born, when Eilhart first became involved in the trade in dark wine. I always knew that I couldn’t stop the trade, but I hoped to postpone the reckoning a while, and I did. None of this is your fault. None of it.”

  “I tried to destroy the supplies of wine stored in the underworld—but I stole a measure of the nectar too. That, I fear, was twice a provocation.”

  “These things need no provocation,” Gottfried assured him. “Their only intent is harm and their subtler sorceries are worse, in the long run, than brute assault. They have raised an army to fight von Spurzheim, not to punish you. If they desire to do that too—and they might—they’ll use subtler means than cold iron and brute force. Eilhart is under threat because the world is under threat, and the world is under threat because there is malice abroad, not because of anything that you or I, or even that old fool Luther, has done. Don’t blame yourself for giving Luther what he wanted so desperately—the desire was his, after all, and the craving was all that was keeping him alive.”

  Reinmar could not remember his father ever delivering such a calculated and uncritical speech. It scared him, for it let him know how desperate the situation was. If Gottfried Wieland had been intimidated into giving his generosity free rein, the world must indeed be on the brink of disaster.

  “I’m glad Sigurd will be close by, when the battle starts,” Reinmar said, as he finished the dregs of wine from the jar that he and his father had been passing back and forth.

  “So am I,” said Gottfried. “If you have to stand back-to-back with anyone, choose him. If you have to slip past Vaedecker to seize the position, do it.”

  “And who will you stand back-to-back with, if the fighting comes to that?” Reinmar asked.

  “I’ll make up my mind about that when I’ve seen how the fighting goes,” Gottfried told him, dourly. “Some hardened infantryman, I suppose. Not one of my fellow tradesmen, if I can help it—and not one of von Spurzheim’s zealots. With luck, all I’ll have to do is stand and cheer while the Reiksguard cavalry charges from the marketplace and the bowmen let fly. You’d best go now. I have to make sure that the shop and the cellars are locked up as tightly as possible—there’s something about a battle that loosens people’s respect for their neighbours’ property.” “But you’ll leave a key for Marguerite?” Reinmar said. “If you insist. Go. Take an extra jar for Sigurd.” Reinmar obediently picked up an extra jar of wine, although he was already more than amply burdened. Then he said goodbye, hoping as he said it that it would not be the last goodbye he ever had to offer, and that it would not be the last that his father ever had to receive.

  Chapter Thirty

  Reinmar had to trot through the streets in order to be back at his post before the market bell chimed six, but he took what comfort he could from the fact that the alarm had not yet been sounded.

  As he neared the top of the slope, he could see plumes of smoke ascending into the sky from distant barns and houses that had been sacked and set alight, and the deepening blue of the evening sky was already tinged with purple and pink. He looked back toward the north, and saw the surly glow of airborne smoke particles there too. No one had thought that the beastmen and their allies could have moved so swiftly to surround the town—but the fact that they had must mean that their forces were spread thinner than they would have wished. So Reinmar told himself, at least.

  Once he was inside the storehouse, he found Sigurd easily enough and gave him the wine. Sigurd was surprised to see him; Matthias Vaedecker had obviously not taken the trouble to share the news that Reinmar had been conscripted to his command. “You should not be here, Master Wieland,” the giant said. “You are too young to be thrust into the first line of defence. Far too young.”

  “I’d rather be with the best soldiers than the worst,” Reinmar told him. “There’ll be no safety anywhere until the battle is won.”

  “True enough,” Sigurd conceded. “Stay close to me, sir. If we fall, we’ll fall together—but there’s no monster born that can bring us to that. If it were you and I against the world, we’d come through unscathed.”

  “It certainly won’t come to that,” Reinmar assured him. “Von Spurzheim’s come this far—he won’t be beaten now. He’ll crush the enemy, and then he’ll march on the valley and the underworld beneath the monastery. He’s irresistible.” He deliberately made no mention of magic, although he had taken leave to wonder privately whether von Spurzheim’s close retinue included priests who might try to neutralise any spells that might be cast by the likes of the lady Valeria.

  “That’s the spirit, lad,” another voice broke in, eager to join the conversation. It was one of Vaedecker’s infantrymen, who did not know either of them but obviously thought it worth the trouble to cultivate their acquaintance. “From what I’ve seen, the things we have to fight are the dregs of the enemy’s reserves—nasty but unskilled. They’ll be tough, but by no means unbeatable. At the end of the day, even the best of them are little better than animals. We’re men.”

  Reinmar could not help but remember his grandfather’s similarly insistent assurances of his own humanity. “Do you think they’ll come tonight?” he asked. “Von Spurzheim said this morning that they probably would not come until tomorrow night.”

  “Oh yes,” said the infantryman, sounding like a man who had learned much from experience. “They’ll come tonight, even though it’s too soon to allow them proper preparation. They’ve already begun the work of slaughter, and once that kind begin, they can’t be made to pause. They’re animals: cunning, but not clever; vicious, but not artful. They’re coming now—and as soon as they arrive, we’ll be in the thick of it. But we’ll win. As you say, we’re irresistible.”

  It was all too obvious that the soldier was trying hard to convince himself—and Reinmar recognised the wisdom of making that kind of effort, for his own and everyone else’s benefit. He got up and went to find Matthias Vaedecker, who was still trying to drum some semblance of discipline into the dullest of the townsmen.

  “They’re ready, sergeant,” Reinmar said, quietly. Then he raised his voice in order to add: “This is their home, after all. They’ll defend it with every last vestige of their strength. Eilhart is the best town on the Schilder. Nobody who lives here will do anything less than his best to save it from the vermin that are determined to foul it.”

  Matthias Vaedecker looked at him, and grinned. “Master Wieland!” he said, raising his own voice rather more than was necessary. “Another brave slayer of beastmen! I’ll take your word for it—you know these people better than I.” But when he had dismissed the men, and told them to rest a while, he became much graver.

  “It’s going to be bad, Reinmar,” he said confidentially. “You and I have seen what they’ve been summoned to defend. It’s no mere patch of ground. News of its existence is already speeding northwards, so another army will certainly come if von Spurzheim fails, and another after that, but we’ve been on the road for a long time. No one else has von Spurzheim’s knowledge, or his conviction. Whoever comes in his stead, if anyone has to, won’t be half as determined to find the valley, let alone to prevent the supply-line from renewin
g itself. For a prize like this one, the enemy will likely send forth daemons as well as brutes, and this is the point they’ll be most anxious to breach in order to strike at von Spurzheim himself. I don’t know how insanely suicidal they’re prepared to be, but I know that it’s going to be bad.”

  “But in the end, we’re irresistible,” Reinmar said, wryly. “We’re men, after all, and they’re monsters.”

  “It’s precisely because we’re men that we’re no more irresistible than they are,” the sergeant replied—but the reply was a whisper, spoken softly so that no one else would overhear it. Reinmar felt oddly privileged to be the chosen recipient of such a dangerous truth, but he soon went back to his station to sit down with Sigurd.

  The time dragged on with such painful slowness that Reinmar almost began to wish that the enemy would appear and put an end to his suspense. Given that an attack was now inevitable, he thought, it might be best to get it over with. He was obviously not the only one who felt that way, but all that came down the river between six and midnight were two sharpened tree-trunks, neither of which broke through the nets that the defenders had strung across the flow.

  “They can send as many of those as they wish,” Vaedecker called to his men. “They’re the ones who’ll be fighting from the water, not us.”

  When the market bell struck midnight a tangible ripple of tension passed through the crowd, but it was no alarm signal; the hour came and passed like its predecessors. Half an hour afterwards, though, a different missile came floating down the river: an oarless rowboat whose interior had been stuffed with oil-soaked chaff and kindling. The chaff had been set alight, and by the time the nets caught the boat it was ablaze like a giant candle. The nets, being beneath the surface, were not in the slightest danger of catching fire, but the light of the fire reflected from the faces of the waiting bowmen and the projecting heads of the pikes that had been laid down on the lowest floor.

  “The light won’t tell them anything they don’t already know,” Vaedecker called out, as promptly as before. “It’s just a gesture, intended to unsettle us. When the time comes to fight, fire on the water will be our ally, not theirs.”

  The fire in the boat died down to mere embers, and finally sputtered out. It was then that the enemy came, perhaps hoping to gain some tiny advantage from the afterglow that the flames had left in the defenders’ eyes. The boats came swiftly, skimming the surface while their occupants lay flat, with blades ready to attack the nets.

  The signal must have passed like lightning into the centre of the town, for the market bell immediately began to jangle wildly, sounding the call to arms.

  “Bowmen ready!” Vaedecker shouted. “Pikemen stand by!” It was the last order he was able to give so clearly, for heavier boats were making their way down the river behind the first few, and these were loaded with fighting-men. Some, no doubt, were beastmen with the voices of beasts, but even those which had human throats and tongues gave voice in a markedly bestial fashion as soon as the arrows began to fly.

  Reinmar leaned forward to see what was happening, but Sigurd pulled him back from the lip of the opening at which he crouched, anxious that he might present a target to an enemy bowman. For this reason, he heard rather than saw the bolts fired by Vaedecker’s crossbowmen as they rained down upon the boats, slapping into the wooden hulls and clicking into the water. He saw arrows hurtling into the warehouse, and immediately wished that the openings in its flanks could have been smaller, but the pikemen were crouching very low, waiting for their turn without exposing themselves. Vaedecker was still shouting, punctuating his commands with curses whenever they did not have the desired effect. The war-cries of the beast-men and their subhuman allies were mingled with screams, but as the noise grew it became increasingly difficult to tell the difference between howls of aggression and howls of pain.

  The noise seemed to take hold of Reinmar’s heart, almost as if it were a kind of magic, forcing the pace of its beating to increase It seemed, too, that the beat became lurchingly unsteady. Reinmar hoped that that, at least, was only an illusion.

  Reinmar never heard Vaedecker give the order, but the pike-men closest to the north side of the building and those at the middle aperture—including Sigurd—began to pick up their weapons. A full-length pike was so long, and its head so heavy, that no one but a giant could thrust repeatedly, especially at an awkward angle, so the weapons were not yet of much use, but the fact that they had been taken in hand at all testified to the fact that the heavier boats must have drawn in close to the warehouse walls, waiting only for the clearance of the nets and the boom that were preventing their further progress.

  “What’s happening?” Reinmar shouted at Sigurd.

  The only authentically human voice he could hear for a few moments afterwards was Vaedecker’s, as he urged his cross-bowmen to fire and fire again and to make every bolt count, but Sigurd did eventually turn. “Not long!” was what he shouted—which Reinmar took to mean that the nets had been cut to shreds, and that only the metal hawser forming the boom was offering significant resistance to the passage of the boats.

  The logs had been sent down first in order to increase the load on the boom, and the boats were increasing that stress with every minute that passed, but Reinmar knew that the creatures within the boats must be paying a heavy price. Arrows and crossbow bolts would thin them out—and when the boom finally broke, the pikemen at his own station would seize their own opportunity.

  Reinmar tried hard to force himself to be still, fearful that he might start trembling long before he was actually drawn into the action. His self-discipline seemed effective, and he felt the thump of his heartbeat ease a little. The boom was still holding, it seemed, and everything was going to plan.

  And then, within the space of half a second, the plan went wrong.

  All of a sudden there were two fronts and not one. The watchmen at the doors to the street set up a clamour of their own, and men wielding swords and half-pikes began to pour through into the interior of the storehouse. The lanterns set above the doorways reassured Reinmar that they were men, some wearing Reiksguard colours and others having faces that he knew, but he realised immediately that they were in retreat, and that the barricade they had been manning must already have been breached.

  Matthias Vaedecker was shouting at the top of his voice, and Reinmar knew—even though he could not make out more than one word in three—that he had to come into the action now. He and the other swordsmen had to make sure that anyone or anything that was not one of the town’s defenders would die as soon as he or it passed through either of the two broad doorways that opened on to the street. Alas, the feeble attempts that the watchmen made to close the doors once they had admitted their retreating allies were immediately cancelled out, for the pursuers already had battering-rams in play, having presumably used them to smash through the barricade at the north end of the street. Both doors were thrust back again and the battering rams kept on coming, their sharpened heads aimed at the backs and legs of the defenders.

  Those among the fleeing men who knew what they were about tried to turn as soon as they were inside, but there were too many among them who did not know, whose further attempts to dodge and find positions of safety interfered with the rank of defenders that was forming to cover their retreat and carry the fight back to the enemy.

  The squat figures who were carrying the head of the ram on their shoulders were ready targets, but they took a dozen cuts apiece before they went down, and there were more behind them to maintain the ram’s momentum for a few precious seconds more. That was all the time required to clear the doorways and make a way in, and by the time Reinmar had joined something resembling a proper formation of spearmen and swordsmen the chance to seal the breach had gone.

  As the rams bounced and rolled, knocking more defenders down, the enemy produced enough swords and spears of their own to make the fight seem almost even. It was, at any rate, even enough to be fierce.

  There was
light enough for Reinmar to see the faces of the creatures ranged against him. He was slightly surprised to see that only a few were significantly unhuman, but the rest made up for their lack of literal bestiality with as much sheer ugliness as he had ever seen packed into human features. Their eyebrows were huge, their chins jutting and their gritted teeth were yellow and overlarge. They were exceptionally hairy, and a few had so many warts as to seem toadlike, but they had hands and they had minds, and the manner in which they wielded their clubs and blades spoke of practised skill and malign intelligence. When they leapt forward they were undeniably reckless, but they were not by any means easy targets.

  As soon as Reinmar had thrust forwards for the first time, and felt his blade connect with something hard, he knew that he was in terrible danger. The line of which he was a part had been too hastily-formed, and the men in it too lightly drilled. It was already ragged, and at dire risk of fragmentation—but it had to hold, or the entire space within the vast storehouse would become a chaotic battle-zone. If the men at the riverside were to continue doing their job they needed to be covered; they had to be able to devote their entire attention to the battle on the water, or it would be lost within an hour.

  Fortunately, Reinmar was not the only man who knew that the line had to hold, and Vaedecker’s men were not about to let the failings of farm-hands and shopkeepers ruin their formation. Those with half-pikes were already drawing a picket-line, with swordsmen between them—and their precision was so plainly manifest that even the most thick-headed townsmen could see what they were about and why. Reinmar inserted himself smoothly enough into a position between two men who knew exactly how to lay about them with the heads of their half-pikes, and as soon as they saw that he knew how to ply his sword they gave him room to do it. Their weapons were heavier than anything the enemy forces had, and it required considerable luck as well as skill for any enemy to get past the sharpened blades.