Free The Wine of Dreams by Brian Craig - (ebook by Undead)

the margin, father? What little did they tell you?”
    The old man let his head flop back on to the pillow, but there was a wry
twist to his mouth as he realised that he had given himself away, and knew that he could no take refuge in his enfeeblement.
    “Only that the source was magically protected—that a man might search for
years without ever obtaining a glimpse of it, because it was accessible only to
those of their own kind who heard the call and to those who accompanied them to
see them safely to their destination.”
    “What call?”
    “How should I know?” Luther protested, his voice becoming feeble again as he
wilted under his son’s fierce gaze. “I never heard it—and not for want of
listening.” The last phrase was muttered.
    “How can I give this to the witch hunter?” Gottfried complained, speaking
more to Reinmar than to Luther. “It’s the kind of tittle-tattle you can hear on
any street-corner. Gypsies and calls—old wives’ tales, more like. It’s a lie,
put about to distract the gullible. You must know more.”
    “It’s what I was told,” Luther complained. “Maybe I never quite believed it,
but all the searching I did wasn’t enough to teach me any better. There were
other rumours, of monasteries built atop deep caverns, and strange flowers that
grow underground, but I always discounted them. The wine of dreams isn’t the
produce of the grape—not entirely, at any rate—but no fruit can ripen except
in the sun. If there’s a valley whose entrance isn’t hidden by magic it must be
very well concealed in some other way. Perhaps Albrecht knows more. He’s
certainly had time to enquire since he scuttled back from Marienburg with his
tail between his legs. Even hired a nomad to be his housekeeper, perhaps because
of something she knew that the town’s old crones did not. He’s housebound now,
but he certainly did his share of searching when he first came back and thought
himself unjustly dispossessed. He was ambitious to set himself up as a rival
then, but I dare say that the mysterious makers of the wine of dreams didn’t
want a disgraced brother of mine for a middleman. If I couldn’t find the source
in twenty years of searching, your witch hunter has a hard task on his hands. I
wish him luck.”
    “I need a name,” Gottfried said. “I need something that will tell von
Spurzheim which gypsies to question.”
    “Who asks a gypsy’s family name?” Luther retorted. “Who obtains a reply if he
does? The nomads keep the secrets of their kind. The witch hunter has only one advantage, in my estimation, and it may
not be enough.”
    “What advantage?” Gottfried demanded, exasperatedly.
    “The season. Whatever fruit it is that gives dark wine its special qualities
surely ripens when other fruits ripen, and there must be a cycle to its
manufacture. If all living things are prisoners of the calendar, this season’s
crop should now be ready, and those commissioned to bring it away will need to
be summoned soon. If von Spurzheim’s spies can find the final link in the chain
that stretches here from Marienburg, they have a chance of being led to the
source—but if that opportunity is real, it’ll only last for twenty or thirty
days.”
    “Guesswork of that kind is not good enough,” Gottfried told him, harshly.
    “It is all I have to offer, as a man who has spent his life in the wine
trade,” Luther retorted, stiffly—but his voice was very weak now and his head
lolled back on his pillow, exhausted. His distress was obviously real.
    “He’s doing his best, father,” Reinmar murmured. “He has no more liking for
the prospect of being vigorously interrogated by the witchfinder than have you.
If this liquor really is as insidiously evil as you suppose, its source would be
jealously guarded, would it not?”
    Gottfried sighed. “I suppose so,” he conceded. “I had better find out what
Albrecht has to say—and you had better get back to your counter.