The Redemption of Althalus

PROLOGUE

Now before the Beginning, there was no Time, and all was Chaos and Darkness. But Deiwos, the Sky-God, awoke, and with his awakening, Time itself began. And Deiwos looked out upon the Chaos and the Darkness, and a great yearning filled his heart. And he rose up to make all that is made, and his making brought encroaching Light into the emptiness of his kinsman, the Demon Daeva. But in time Deiwos wearied of his labors, and sought him a place to rest. And with a single thought made he a high keep at that edge which divides the light from the darkness and the realm of Time from that place where there is no Time. And Deiwos marked that awful edge with fire to warn all men back from Daeva’s abyss, and then he rested there in his keep and communed with his Book while Time continued her stately march .

Now the Demon Daeva was made sore wroth by the encroachment upon his dark domain by his kinsman Deiwos, and eternal enmity was born in his soul, for the light caused him pain, and the orderly progression of Time herself was an agony unto him. And then retreated he to his cold throne in the echoless darkness of the void. And there he contemplated vengeance against the Light, and against his kinsman, and against Time herself.

And their sister watched, but said nothing.

From The Sky and the Abyss

The Mythology of Ancient Medyo

In defense of Althalus, it should be noted that he was in very tight financial circumstances and more than a little tipsy when he agreed to undertake the theft of the Book. Had he been completely sober and had he not reached the very bottom of his purse, he might have asked more questions about the House at the End of the World, and he most certainly would have asked many more about the owner of the Book.

It would be sheer folly to try to conceal the true nature of Althalus, for his flaws are the stuff of legend. He is, as all men know, a thief, a liar, an occasional murderer, an outrageous braggart, and a man devoid of even the slightest hint of honor. He is, moreover, a frequent drunkard, a glutton, and a patron of ladies who are no better than they should be.

He is an engaging sort of rogue, however, quick-witted and vastly amusing. It has even been suggested in some circles that if Althalus really wanted to do it, he could make trees giggle and mountains laugh right out loud.

His nimble fingers are even quicker than his wit, though, and a prudent man always keeps a firm hand over his purse when he laughs at the sallies of the witty thief.

So far as Althalus could remember, he had always been a thief. He had never known his father, and he could not exactly remember his mother’s name. He had grown up among thieves in the rough lands of the frontier, and even as a child his wit had made him welcome in the society of those men who made their living by transferring the ownership rights of objects of value. He earned his way with jokes and stories, and the thieves fed him and trained him in their art by way of thanks.

His mind was quick enough to make him aware of the limitations of each of his mentors. Some of them were large men who took what they wanted by sheer force. Others were small and wiry men who stole by stealth. As Althalus approached manhood, he realized that he’d never be a giant. Sheer bulk was apparently not a part of his heritage. He also realized that when he achieved his full growth, he’d no longer be able to wriggle his way through small openings into interesting places where interesting things were kept. He would be medium-sized, but he vowed to himself that he would not be mediocre. It occurred to him that wit was probably superior to bull-like strength or mouse-like stealth anyway, so that was the route he chose.

His fame was modest at first in the mountains and forests along the outer edges of civilization. Other thieves admired his cleverness. As one of them put it one evening in a thieves’ tavern in the Land of Hule, ‘I’ll swear, that Althalus boy could persuade the bees to bring him honey or the birds to lay their eggs on his plate at breakfast time. Mark my words, brothers, that boy will go far.’

In point of fact, Althalus did go far. He was not by nature a sedentary man, and he seemed to be blessed – or cursed – with a boundless curiosity about what lay on the other side of any hill or mountain or river he came across. His curiosity was not limited to geography, however, since he was also interested in what more sedentary men had in their houses or what they might be carrying in their purses. Those twin curiosities, coupled with an almost instinctive realization of when he’d been in one place for quite long enough, kept him continually on the move.

And so it was that he had looked at the prairies of Plakand and Wekti, at the rolling hills of Ansu, and at the mountains of Kagwher, Arum, and Kweron. He had even made occasional sorties into Regwos and southern Nekweros, despite the stories men told of the horrors lurking in the mountains beyond the outer edges of the frontier.

The one thing more than any other that distinguished Althalus from other thieves was his amazing luck. He could win every time he touched a pair of dice, and no matter where he went in whatever land, fortune smiled upon him. A chance meeting or a random conversation almost always led him directly to the most prosperous and least suspicious man in any community, and it seemed that any trail he took, even at random, led him directly to opportunities that came to no other thief. In truth, Althalus was even more famous for his luck than for his wit or his skill.

In time, he came to depend on that luck. Fortune, it appeared, absolutely adored him, and he came to trust her implicitly. He even went so far as to believe privately that she talked to him in the hidden silences of his mind. The little twinge that told him that it was time to leave any given community – in a hurry – was, he believed, her voice giving him a silent warning that unpleasant things lurked on the horizon.

The combination of wit, skill and luck had made him successful, but he could also run like a deer if the situation seemed to require it.

A professional thief must, if he wants to keep eating regularly, spend a great deal of his time in taverns listening to other people talk, since information is the primary essential to the art of the thief. There’s little profit to be made from robbing poor men. Althalus liked a good cup of mellow mead as much as the next man, but he seldom let it get ahead of him in the way that some frequenters of taverns did. A befuddled man makes mistakes, and the thief who makes mistakes usually doesn’t live very long. Althalus was very good at selecting the one man in any tavern who’d be most likely to be in possession of useful information, and with jokes and open-handed generosity, he could usually persuade the fellow to share that information. Buying drinks for talkative men in taverns was something in the nature of a business investment. Althalus always made sure that his own cup ran dry at about the same time the other man’s did, but most of the mead in the thief’s cup ended up on the floor instead of in his belly, for some reason.

He moved from place to place, he told jokes to tavern loafers and bought mead for them for a few days, and then, when he’d pinpointed the rich men in any town or village, he’d stop by to pay them a call along about midnight, and by morning he’d be miles away on the road to some other frontier settlement.

Although Althalus was primarily interested in local information, there were other stories told in taverns as well, stories about the cities down on the plains of Equero, Treborea, and Perquaine, the civilized lands to the south. He listened to some of those stories with a profound skepticism. Nobody in the world could be stupid enough to pave the streets of his home town with gold, and a fountain that sprayed diamonds might be rather pretty, but it wouldn’t really serve any practical purpose.

The stories, however, always stirred his imagination, and he sort of promised himself that someday, someday, he’d have to go down to the cities of the plain to have a look for himself.

The settlements of the frontier were built for the most part of logs, but the cities of the lands of the south were reputed to be built of stone. That in itself might make the journey to civilization worthwhile, but Althalus wasn’t really interested in architecture, so he kept putting off his visit to civilization.

What ultimately changed his mind was a funny story he heard in a tavern in Kagwher about the decline of the Deikan Empire. The central cause of that decline, it appeared, had been a blunder so colossal that Althalus couldn’t believe that anybody with good sense could have even made it once, much less three times.

‘May all of my teeth fall out if they didn’t’, the storyteller assured him. ‘The people down in Deika have a very high opinion of themselves, so when they heard that men had discovered gold here in Kagwher, they decided right off that God had meant for them to have it – only he’d made a mistake and put it in Kagwher instead of down there where it’d be convenient for them to just bend over and pick it up. They were a little put out with God for that, but they were wise enough not to scold him about it. Instead, they sent an army up here into the mountains to keep us ignorant hill-people from just helping ourselves to all that gold that God had intended for them. Well, now, when that army got here and started hearing stories about how much gold there was up here, the soldiers all decided that army life didn’t really suit them any more, so the whole army just ups and quits so that they could strike out on their own.’

Althalus laughed. ‘That would be a quick way to lose an army, I suppose.’

‘There’s none any quicker,’ the humorous story-teller agreed. ‘Anyhow, the Senate that operates the government of Deika was terribly disappointed with that army, so they sent a second army up here to chase down the first one and punish them for ignoring their duty.’

‘You’re not serious!’ Althalus exclaimed.

‘Oh, yes, that’s exactly what they did. Well, sir, that second army decided that they weren’t any stupider than the first one had been, so they hung up their swords and uniforms to go look for gold, too.’

Althalus howled with laughter. ‘That’s the funniest story I’ve ever heard!’ he said.

‘It gets better,’ the grinning man told him. ‘The Senate of the Empire just couldn’t believe that two whole armies could ignore their duty that way. After all, the soldiers were getting paid a whole copper penny every day, weren’t they? The Senators made speeches at each other until all their brains went to sleep, and that’s when they took stupidity out to the very end of its leash by sending a third army up here to find out what had happened to the first two.’

‘Is he serious?’ Althalus asked another tavern patron.

‘That’s more or less the way it happened, stranger,’ the man replied. ‘I can vouch for it, because I was a sergeant in that second army. The city-state of Deika used to rule just about the whole of civilization, but after she’d poured three entire armies into the mountains of Kagwher, she didn’t have enough troops left to patrol her own streets, much less the other civilized lands. Our Senate still passes laws that the other lands are supposed to obey, but nobody pays any attention to them any more. Our Senators can’t quite seem to grasp that, so they keep passing new laws about taxes and the like, and people keep ignoring them. Our glorious Empire has turned itself into a glorious joke.’

‘Maybe I’ve been putting off my visit to civilization for too long,’ Althalus said. ‘If they’re that silly down in Deika, a man in my profession almost has to pay them a visit.’

‘Oh?’ the former soldier said. ‘Which profession do you follow?’

‘I’m a thief,’ Althalus admitted, ‘and a city filled with stupid rich men might just be the next best thing to paradise for a really good thief.’

‘I wish you all the best, friend’, the expatriate told him. ‘I was never all that fond of Senators who spent all their time trying to invent new ways to get me killed. Be a little careful when you get there, though. The Senators buy their seats in that august body, and that means that they’re rich men. Rich Senators make laws to protect the rich, not the ordinary people. If you get caught stealing in Deika, things won’t turn out too well for you.’

‘I never get caught. Sergeant,’ Althalus assured him. ‘That’s because I’m the best thief in the world, and to make things even better, I’m also the luckiest man in the world. If half the story I just heard is true, the luck of the Deikan Empire has turned sour lately, and my luck just keeps getting sweeter. If the chance to make a wager on the outcome of my visit comes along, put your money on me, because in a situation like this one, I can’t possibly lose.’

And with that, Althalus drained his cup, bowed floridly to the other men in the tavern, and gaily set off to see the wonders of civilization for himself.

PART ONE

The House at the End of the World

CHAPTER ONE

Althalus the thief spent ten days on the road down out of the mountains of Kagwher to reach the imperial city of Deika. As he was coming out of the foothills, he passed a limestone quarry where miserable slaves spent their lives under the whip laboriously sawing building blocks out of the limestone with heavy bronze saws. Althalus had heard about slavery, of course, but this was the first time he’d ever actually seen slaves. As he strode on toward the plains of Equero, he had a little chat with his good luck about the subject, strongly suggesting to her that if she really loved him, she’d do everything she possibly could to keep him from ever becoming a slave.

The city of Deika lay at the southern end of a large lake in northern Equero, and it was even more splendid than the stories had said it was. It was surrounded by a high stone wall made of squared-off limestone blocks, and all the buildings inside the walls were also made of stone.

The broad streets of Deika were paved with flagstones, and the public buildings soared to the sky. Everyone in town who thought he was important wore a splendid linen mantle, and every private house was identified by a statue of its owner – usually so idealized that any actual resemblance to the man so identified was purely coincidental.

Althalus was garbed in clothes suitable for the frontier, and he received many disparaging glances from passers-by as he viewed the splendors of the imperial city. After a while, he grew tired of that and sought out a quarter of town where the men in the streets wore more commonplace garments and less superior expressions.

Finally he located a fishermen’s tavern near the lakefront, and he stopped there to sit and to listen, since fishermen the world over love to talk. He sat unobtrusively nursing a cup of sour wine while the tar-smeared men around him talked shop.

‘I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you here before,’ one of the men said to Althalus.

‘I’m from out of town,’ Althalus replied.

‘Oh? Where from?’

‘Up in the mountains. I came down to look at civilization.’

‘Well, what do you think of our city?’

‘Very impressive. I was almost as impressed with your city as some of the town’s rich men seemed to be with themselves.’

One of the fishermen laughed cynically. ‘You passed near the forum, I take it.’

‘If that’s the place where all the fancy buildings are, yes I did. And if you want it, you can take as much of my share of it as you want.’

‘You didn’t care for our rich men?’

‘Apparently not as much as they did, that’s for certain. People like us should avoid the rich if we possibly can. Sooner or later, we’ll probably be bad for their eyes.’

‘How’s that?’ another fisherman asked.

‘Well, all those fellows in the forum – the ones who wear fancy nightgowns in the street – kept looking down their noses at me. If a man spends all his time doing that, sooner or later it’s going to make him cross-eyed.’

The fishermen all laughed, and the atmosphere in the tavern became relaxed and friendly. Althalus had skillfully introduced the topic dearest to his heart, and they all spent the rest of the afternoon talking about the rich men of Deika. By evening, Althalus had committed several names to memory. He spent another few days narrowing down his list, and he ultimately settled on a very wealthy salt merchant named Kweso. Then he went to the central market-place, visited the marble-lined public baths, and then dipped into his purse to buy some clothing that more closely fit into the current fashion of Deika. The key word for a thief who’s selecting a costume for business purposes is ‘nondescript’, for fairly obvious reasons. Then Althalus went to the rich men’s part of town and spent several more days – and nights – watching merchant Kweso’s walled-in house. Kweso himself was a plump, rosy-cheeked bald man who had a sort of friendly smile. On a number of occasions Althalus even managed to get close enough to him to be able to hear him talking. He actually grew to be rather fond of the chubby little fellow, but that’s not unusual, really. When you get right down to it, a wolf is probably quite fond of deer.

Althalus managed to pick up the name of one of Kweso’s neighbors, and, with a suitably business-like manner, he went in through the salt merchant’s gate one morning, walked up to his door and knocked. After a moment or two, a servant opened the door. ‘Yes?’ the servant asked.

‘I’d like to speak with Gentleman Melgor,’ Althalus said politely. ‘It’s on business.’

‘I’m afraid you have the wrong house, sir,’ the servant said. ‘Gentleman Melgor’s house is the one two doors down.’

Althalus smacked his forehead with his open hand. ‘How stupid of me,’ he apologized. ‘I’m very sorry to have disturbed you.’ His eyes, however, were very busy. Kweso’s door latch wasn’t very complicated, and his entryway had several doors leading off it. He lowered his voice. ‘I hope my pounding didn’t wake your master,’ he said.

The servant smiled briefly. ‘I rather doubt it,’ he said. ‘The master’s bedroom is upstairs at the back of the house. He usually gets out of bed about this time in the morning anyway, so he’s probably already awake.’

‘That’s a blessing,’ Althalus said, his eyes still busy. ‘You said that Melgor’s house is two doors down?’

‘Yes.’ The servant leaned out through the doorway and pointed. ‘It’s that way – the house with the blue door. You can’t miss it.’

‘My thanks, friend, and I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’ Then Althalus turned and went back out to the street. He was grinning broadly. His luck was still holding him cuddled to her breast. The ‘wrong house’ ploy had given him even more information than he’d expected. His luck had encouraged that servant to tell him all sorts of things. It was still quite early in the morning, and if this was Kweso’s normal time to rise, that was a fair indication that he went to bed early as well. He’d be sound asleep by midnight. The garden around his house was mature, with large trees and broad flowering bushes that would provide cover. Getting inside the house would be no problem, and now Althalus knew where Kweso’s bedroom was. All that was left to do was to slip into the house in the middle of the night, go directly to Kweso’s bedroom, wake him, and lay a bronze knife against his throat to persuade him to cooperate. The whole affair could be settled in short order.

Unfortunately, however, it didn’t turn out that way at all. The salt merchant’s chubby, good-natured face obviously concealed a much sharper mind than Althalus expected. Not long after midnight, the clever thief scaled the merchant’s outer wall, crept through the garden, and quietly entered the house. He stopped in the entryway to listen. Except for a few snores coming from the servants’ quarters, the house was silent. As quietly as a shadow, Althalus went to the foot of the stairs and started up.

It was at that point that Kweso’s house became very noisy. The three dogs were almost as large as ponies, and their deep-throated barking seemed almost to shake the walls.

Althalus immediately changed his plans. The open air of the night-time streets suddenly seemed enormously attractive.

The dogs at the foot of the stairs seemed to have other plans, however. They started up, snarling and displaying shockingly large fangs.

There were shouts coming from upstairs, and somebody was lighting candles.

Althalus waited tensely until the dogs had almost reached him. Then, with an acrobatic skill he didn’t even know he had, he jumped high over the top of the dogs, tumbled on down to the foot of the stairs, sprang to his feet and ran back outside.

As he raced across the garden with the dogs snapping at his heels, he heard a buzzing sound zip past his left ear. Somebody in the house, either the deceptively moon-faced Kweso himself or one of his meek-looking servants, seemed to be a very proficient archer.

Althalus scrambled up the wall as the dogs snapped at his heels and more arrows bounced off the stones, spraying his face with chips and fragments.

He rolled over the top of the wall and dropped into the street, running almost before his feet hit the paving stones. Things had not turned out the way he’d planned. His tumble down the stairs had left scrapes and bruises in all sorts of places, and he’d managed to severely twist one of his ankles in his drop to the street. He limped on, filling the air around him with curses.

Then somebody in Kweso’s house opened the front gate, and the dogs came rushing out.

Now that, Althalus felt, was going just a little too far. He’d admitted his defeat by running away, but Kweso evidently wasn’t satisfied with victory, but wanted blood as well.

It took some dodging around and clambering over several walls, but the thief eventually shook off the pursuing dogs. Then he went across town to put himself a long way away from all the excitement and sat down on a conveniently placed public bench to think things over. Civilized men were obviously not as docile as they appeared on the surface, and Althalus decided then and there that he’d seen as much of the city of Deika as he really wanted to see. What puzzled him the most, though, was how his luck had failed to warn him about those dogs. Could it be that she’d been asleep? He’d have to speak with her about that.

He was in a foul humor as he waited in the shadows near a tavern in the better part of town, so he was rather abrupt when a couple of well-dressed patrons of the tavern came reeling out into the street. He very firmly persuaded the both of them to take a little nap by rapping them smartly across the backs of their heads with the heavy hilt of his short-bladed bronze sword. Then he transferred the ownership of the contents of their purses, as well as a few rings and a fairly nice bracelet, and left them slumbering peacefully in the gutter near the tavern.

Waylaying drunken men in the street wasn’t really his style, but Althalus needed some traveling money. The two men had been the first to come along, and the process was fairly routine, so there wasn’t much danger involved. Althalus decided that it might be best to avoid taking any chances until after he’d had a long talk with his luck.

As he went toward the main gate of town, he hefted the two purses he’d just stolen. They seemed fairly heavy, and that persuaded him to take a step he normally wouldn’t even have considered. He left the city of Deika, limped on until shortly after dawn, and then stopped at a substantial looking farmhouse, where he bought – and actually paid for – a horse. It went against all his principles, but until he’d had that chat with his luck, he decided not to take any chances.

He mounted his new horse and, without so much as a backward glance, he rode on toward the west. The sooner he left Equero and the Deikan Empire behind, the better. He absently wondered as he rode if geography might play some part in a man’s luck. Could it possibly be that his luck just didn’t work in some places? That was a very troubling thought, and Althalus brooded sourly about it as he rode west.

He reached the city of Kanthon in Treborea two days later, and he paused before entering the gates to make sure that the fabled – and evidently interminable – war between Kanthon and Osthos had not recently boiled to the surface. Since he saw no siege engines in place, he rode on in.

The forum of Kanthon rather closely resembled the forum he’d seen in Deika, but the wealthy men who came there to listen to speeches seemed not to be burdened with the same notions of their own superiority as the aristocrats of Equero were, so Althalus found that he was not offended by their very existence. He even went into the forum once to listen to speeches. The speeches, however, were mostly denunciations of the city-state of Osthos in southern Treborea or complaints about a recent raise in taxes, so they weren’t really very interesting.

Then he went looking for a tavern in one of the more modest neighborhoods, and he no sooner entered a somewhat run-down establishment than he became convinced that his luck was once again on the rise. Two of the patrons were involved in a heated argument about just who was the richest man in Kanthon.

‘Omeso’s got it all over Weikor,’ one of them asserted loudly. ‘He’s got so much money that he can’t even count it.’

‘Well, of course he has, you fool. Omeso can’t count past ten unless he takes his shoes off. He inherited all his money from his uncle, and he’s never earned so much as a penny on his own. Weikor worked his way up from the bottom, so he knows how to earn money instead of having it handed to him on a platter. Omeso’s money flows out as fast as he can spend it, but Weikor’s money keeps coming in. Ten years from now, Weikor’s going to own Omeso – though why anybody would want him is beyond me.’

Althalus turned and left without so much as ordering a drink. He’d picked up exactly the information he wanted; clearly his luck was smiling down on him again. Maybe geography did play a part in fortune’s decisions.

He nosed around Kanthon for the next couple of days, asking questions about Omeso and Weikor, and he ultimately promoted Omeso to the head of his list, largely because of Weikor’s reputation as a man well able to protect his hard-earned money. Althalus definitely didn’t want to encounter any more large, hungry dogs while he was working.

The ‘wrong house’ ploy gave him the opportunity to examine the latch on Omeso’s front door, and a few evenings spent following his quarry revealed that Omeso almost never went home before dawn and that by then he was so far gone in drink that he probably wouldn’t have noticed if his house happened to be on fire. His servants, of course, were well aware of his habits, so they also spent their nights out on the town. By the time the sun went down, Omeso’s house was almost always empty.

And so, shortly before midnight on a warm summer evening, Althalus quietly entered the house and began his search.

He almost immediately saw something that didn’t ring at all true. Omeso’s house was splendid enough on the outside, but the interior was furnished with tattered, broken-down chairs and tables that would have shamed a pauper. The draperies were in rags, the carpets were threadbare, and the best candlestick in the entire house was made of tarnished brass. The furnishings cried louder than words that this was not the house of a rich man. Omeso had evidently already spent his inheritance.

Althalus doggedly continued his search, and after he’d meticulously covered every room, he gave up. There wasn’t anything in the entire house that was worth stealing. He left in disgust.

He still had money in his purse, so he lingered in Kanthon for a few more days, and then, quite by accident, he entered a tavern frequented by artisans. As usually was the case down in the lowlands, the tavern did not offer mead, so Althalus had to settle for sour wine again. He looked around the tavern. Artisans were the sort of people who had many opportunities to look inside the houses of rich people. ‘Maybe one of you gentlemen could clear something up for me,’ he addressed the other patrons. ‘I happened to go into the house of a man named Omeso on business the other day. Everybody in town was telling me how rich he is, but once I got past his front door, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There were chairs in that man’s house that only had three legs, and the tables all looked so wobbly that a good sneeze would knock them over.’

‘That’s the latest fashion here in Kanthon, friend,’ a mud-smeared potter told him. ‘I can’t sell a good pot or jug or bottle anymore, because everybody wants ones that are chipped and battered and have the handles broken off.’

‘If you think that’s odd,’ a wood-carver said, ‘you should see what goes on in my shop. I used to have a scrap-heap where I threw broken furniture, but since the new tax law went into effect, I can’t give new furniture away, but our local gentry will pay almost anything for a broken-down old chair.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Althalus confessed.

‘It’s not really too complicated, stranger,’ a baker put in. ‘Our old Aryo used to run his government on the proceeds of the tax on bread. Anybody who ate helped support the government. But our old Aryo died last year, and his son, the man who sits on the throne now, is a very educated young man. His teachers were all philosophers with strange ideas. They persuaded him that a tax on profit had more justice than one on bread, since the poor people have to buy most of the bread, while the rich people make most of the profit.’

‘What has that got to do with shabby furniture?’ Althalus asked with a puzzled frown.

‘The furniture’s all for show, friend,’ a mortar-spattered stone-mason told him. ‘Our rich men are all trying to convince the tax collectors that they haven’t got anything at all. The tax collectors don’t believe them, of course, so they conduct little surprise searches. If a rich man in Kanthon’s stupid enough to have even one piece of fine furniture in his house, the tax collectors immediately send in the wrecking crews to dismantle the floors of the house.’

‘The floors? Why are they tearing up floors?’

‘Because that’s a favorite place to hide money. Folks pry up a couple of flagstones, you see, and then they dig a hole and line it with bricks. All the money they pretend they don’t have goes into the hole. Then they cement the flagstones back down. Right at first, their work was so shabby that even a fool could see it the moment he entered the room. Now, though, I’m making more money teaching people how to mix good mortar than I ever did laying stone block walls. Here just recently, I even had to build my own hidey-hole under my own floor, I’m making so much.’

‘Why didn’t your rich men hire professionals to do the work for them?’

‘Oh, they did, right at first, but the tax collectors came around and started offering us rewards to point out any new flagstone work here in town.’ The mason laughed cynically. ‘It was sort of our patriotic duty, after all, and the rewards were nice and substantial. The rich men of Kanthon are all amateur stone-masons now, but oddly enough, not a single one of my pupils has a name that I can recognize. They all seem to have names connected to honest trades, for some strange reason. I guess they’re afraid that I might turn them in to the tax collectors if they give me their real names.’

Althalus thought long and hard about that bit of information. The tax law of the philosophical new Aryo of Kanthon had more or less put him out of business. If a man were clever enough to hide his money from the tax collectors and their well-equipped demolition crews, what chance did an honest thief have? He could get into their houses easily enough, but the prospect of walking around all that shabby furniture, while knowing that his feet might be within inches of hidden wealth, made him go cold all over. Moreover, the houses of the wealthy men here were snuggled together so closely that a single startled shout would wake the whole neighborhood. Stealth wouldn’t work, and the threat of violence probably wouldn’t either. The knowledge that the wealth was so close and yet so far away gnawed at him. He decided that he’d better leave very soon, before temptation persuaded him to stay. Kanthon, as it turned out, was even worse than Deika.

He left Kanthon the very next morning and continued his westward trek, riding across the rich grainfields of Treborea toward Perquaine in a distinctly sour frame of mind. There was wealth beyond counting down here in civilization, but those who had been cunning enough to accumulate it were also, it appeared, cunning enough to devise ways to keep it. Althalus began to grow homesick for the frontier and to wish devoutly that he’d never heard the word ‘civilization’.

He crossed the river into Perquaine, the rich farmland of the plains country where the earth was so fertile that it didn’t even have to be planted, according to the rumors. All a farmer of Perquaine had to do each spring was put on his finest clothes, go out into his fields, and say ‘wheat, please,’ or, ‘barley, if it’s not too much trouble,’ and then return home and go back to bed. Althalus was fairly sure that the rumors were exaggerations, but he knew nothing about farming, so for all he knew there might even be a grain of truth to them.

Unlike the people of the rest of the world, the Perquaines worshiped a female deity. That seemed profoundly unnatural to most people – either in civilization or out on the frontiers – but there was a certain logic to it. The entire culture of Perquaine rested on the vast fields of grain, and the Perquaines were absolutely obsessed with fertility. When Althalus reached the city of Maghu, he discovered that the largest and most magnificent building in the entire city was the temple of Dweia, the Goddess of fertility. He briefly stopped at the temple to look inside, and the colossal statue of the fertility goddess seemed almost to leap at him. The sculptor who’d carved the statue had quite obviously been either totally insane or caught up in the grip of religious ecstasy when he’d created that monstrosity. There was a certain warped logic to it, Althalus was forced to concede. Fertility meant motherhood, and motherhood involved the suckling of the young. The statue suggested that the goddess Dweia was equipped to suckle hundreds of babies all at the same time.

The land of Perquaine had been settled more recently than Treborea or Equero, and the Perquaines still had a few rough edges that made them much more like the people of the frontiers than the stuffier people to the east. The taverns in the seedier parts of Maghu were rowdier than had been the case in Deika or Kanthon, but that didn’t particularly bother Althalus. He drifted around town until he finally located a place where the patrons were talking instead of brawling, and he sat down in a corner to listen.

‘Druigor’s strongbox is absolutely bulging with money,’ one patron was telling his friends. ‘I stopped by his counting-house the other day, and his box was standing wide open, and it was packed so full that he was having trouble latching down the lid.’

‘That stands to reason,’ another man said. ‘Druigor drives very hard bargains. He can always find some way to get the best of anybody he deals with.’

‘I hear tell that he’s thinking about standing for election to the Senate,’ a wispy looking fellow added.

‘He’s out of his mind,’ the first man snorted. ‘He doesn’t qualify. He doesn’t have a title.’

The wispy man shrugged. ‘He’ll buy one. There are always nobles running around with nothing in their purses but their titles.’

The conversation drifted on to other topics, so Althalus got up and quietly left the tavern. He went some distance down the narrow, cobblestoned street and stopped a fairly well-dressed passer-by. ‘Excuse me,’ he said politely, ‘but I’m looking for the counting house of a man named Druigor. Do you by any chance happen to know where it is?’

‘Everybody in Maghu knows where Druigor’s establishment’s located,’ the man replied.

‘I’m a stranger here,’ Althalus replied.

‘Ah, that explains it then. Druigor does business over by the west gate. Anybody over in that neighborhood can direct you to his establishment.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Althalus said. Then he walked on.

The area near the west gate was largely given over to barn-like warehouses, and a helpful fellow pointed out the one which belonged to Druigor. It seemed to be fairly busy. People were going in and out through the front door and there were wagons filled with bulging sacks waiting near a loading-dock on one side. Althalus watched for a while. The steady stream of men going in and out through the front door indicated that Druigor was doing a lot of business. That was always promising.

He went on up the street and entered another, quieter warehouse. A sweating man was dragging heavy sacks across the floor and stacking them against a wall. ‘Excuse me, neighbor,’ Althalus said. ‘Who does this place belong to?’

‘This is Garwin’s warehouse,’ the sweating man replied. ‘He’s not here right now, though.’

‘Oh,’ Althalus said. ‘Sorry I missed him. I’ll come back later.’ Then he turned, went back out into the street, and walked on down to Druigor’s warehouse again. He went inside and joined the others who were waiting to speak with the owner of the place.

When his turn came he went into a cluttered room where a hard-eyed man sat at a table. ‘Yes?’ the hard-eyed man said.

‘You’re a very busy man, I see,’ Althalus said, his eyes covering everything in the room.

‘Yes, I am, so get to the point.’

Althalus had already seen what he’d come to see, however. In the corner of the room stood a bulky bronze box with an elaborate latch holding it shut.

‘I’ve been told that you’re a fair man, Master Garwin,’ Althalus said in his most ingratiating manner, his eyes still busy.

‘You’ve come to the wrong place,’ the man at the table said. ‘I’m Druigor. Garwin’s establishment’s over to the north – four or five doors.’

Althalus threw his hands up in the air. ‘I should have known better than to trust a drunkard,’ he said. ‘The man who told me that this was Garwin’s place of business could barely stand up. I think I’ll go back out into the street and punch that sot right in the mouth. Sorry to have bothered you, Master Druigor. I’ll revenge the both of us on that sodden idiot’

‘Did you want to see Garwin on business?’ Druigor asked curiously. ‘I can beat his prices on just about anything you can name.’

‘I’m terribly sorry, Master Druigor,’ Althalus said, ‘but my hands are tied this time. My idiot brother made some promises to Garwin, and I can’t think of any way to wriggle out of them. When I get back home, I think I’ll take my brother out behind the house and brick his mouth shut. Then, the next time I come to Maghu, you and I might want to have a little chat.’

‘I’ll look forward to it, Master –?’

‘Kweso,’ Althalus picked a name at random.

‘Are you by any chance a relation of that salt merchant in Deika?’

‘He’s our father’s cousin,’ Althalus replied glibly. ‘They aren’t talking to each other right now, though. It’s one of those family squabbles. Well, you’re busy, Master Druigor, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go have some words with that drunkard and then visit Master Garwin and find out how much of the family holdings my half-wit brother’s given away.’

‘I’ll see you next time you come to Maghu, then?’

‘You can count on it. Master Druigor.’ Althalus bowed slightly, and then he left.

It was well after midnight when Althalus broke in through the door on Druigor’s loading-dock. He went on silent feet through the wheat-fragrant warehouse to the room where he’d spoken with Druigor that afternoon. The door to the room was locked, but that, of course, was no problem. Once Althalus was inside the room, he quickly ignited his tinder with his flints and lit a candle sitting on Druigor’s table. Then he closely examined the complex latch that held the bulky lid of the bronze strongbox shut. As was usually the case, the complexity had been designed to confuse anyone who might be curious about the contents of the box. Althalus was quite familiar with the design, so he had the latch open in only a few moments.

He lifted the lid and reached inside, his fingers trembling with anticipation.

There were no coins inside the box, however. Instead, it was filled to overflowing with scraps of paper. Althalus lifted out a handful of the scraps and examined them closely. They all seemed to have pictures drawn on them, but Althalus couldn’t make any sense of those pictures. He dropped them on the floor and dug out another handful. There were more pictures.

Althalus desperately pawed around inside the box, but his hands did not encounter anything at all that felt anything like money.

This made no sense whatsoever. Why would anybody go to the trouble to lock up stacks of worthless paper?

After about a quarter of an hour, he gave up. He briefly considered piling all that paper in a heap on the floor and setting fire to it, but he discarded that idea almost as soon as it came to him. A fire would almost certainly spread, and a burning warehouse would attract attention. He muttered a few choice swear-words, and then he left.

He gave some thought to returning to the tavern he’d visited on his first day in Maghu and having some words with the tavern loafer who’d spoken so glowingly about the contents of Druigor’s strongbox, but he decided against it. The sting of constant disappointments he’d endured this summer were making him very short-tempered, and he wasn’t entirely positive that he’d be able to restrain himself once he started chastising somebody. In his present mood, chastisement might very well be looked upon as murder in some circles.

He sourly returned to the inn where his horse was stabled and spent the rest of the night sitting on his bed glaring at the single piece of paper he’d taken from Druigor’s strongbox. The pictures drawn on the paper weren’t really very good. Why in the world had Druigor bothered to lock them up? When morning finally arrived, Althalus roused the innkeeper and settled accounts with him. Then he reached into his pocket. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I just remembered something.’ He drew out the piece of paper, ‘I found this in the street. Do you have any idea at all what it means?’

‘Of course,’ the innkeeper replied. ‘That’s money.’

‘Money? I don’t follow you. Money’s made out of gold or silver – sometimes copper or brass. This is just paper. It’s not worth anything, is it?’

‘If you take that to the treasury behind the Senate, they’ll give you a silver coin for it.’

‘Why would they do that? It’s just paper.’

‘It has the seal of the Senate on it. That makes it as good as real silver. Haven’t you ever seen paper money before?’

A sense of total defeat came crashing down on Althalus as he went to the stable to pick up his horse. His luck had abandoned him. This had been the worst summer in his entire life. Evidently, his luck didn’t want him down here. There was wealth beyond counting in these cities of the plain, but no matter how hard he’d tried, he hadn’t managed to get his hands on any of it. As he mounted his horse, he amended that thought. Last night in Druigor’s counting house, he’d had his hands on more money than he’d likely ever see in the rest of his entire life, but he’d just walked away from it, because he hadn’t realized that it was money.

He ruefully conceded that he had no business down here. He belonged back on the frontier. Things were just too complicated down here.

He mournfully rode his horse to the central marketplace of Maghu to trade his civilized clothes for apparel more suitable to the frontier where he belonged.

The clothier swindled him, but he’d more or less expected that. Nothing down here was ever going to go well for him.

He wasn’t even particularly surprised to discover when he came out of the clothier’s shop that someone had stolen his horse.

CHAPTER TWO

His sense of defeat made Althalus a little abrupt with the first man who passed his place of concealment late the next night. He stepped out of the shadows, grabbed the unwary fellow by the back of his tunic, and slammed him against a stone wall just as hard as he could. The man sagged limply in his hands, and that irritated Althalus all the more. For some reason he’d been hoping for a bit more in the way of a struggle. He let the unconscious man collapse into the gutter and quickly stole his purse. Then, for no reason he could really justify, he dragged the inert body back into the shadows and stole all the man’s clothes.

He realized as he walked down the dark street that what he’d just done was silly, but in some obscure way it seemed appropriate, since it almost perfectly expressed his opinion of civilization. For some reason the absurdity made him feel better.

After he’d gone some distance, however, the bundle of clothes under his arm became a nuisance, so he shrugged and threw it away without even bothering to find out if any of the garments fit him.

As luck had it, the city gates were open, and Althalus left Maghu without even bothering to say goodbye. The moon was almost full, so there was light enough to see by, and he struck out to the north, feeling better with every step. By dawn he was several miles from Maghu, and up ahead he could see the snow-capped peaks of Arum blushing in the pink light of the sunrise.

It was a long walk from Maghu to the foothills of Arum, but Althalus moved right along. The sooner he left civilization behind, the better. The whole idea of going into the low-country had been a mistake of the worst kind. Not so much because he hadn’t profited. Althalus usually squandered every penny he got his hands on. What concerned him about the whole business was the apparent alienation between him and his luck. Luck was everything; money meant nothing.

He was well up into the foothills by late summer. On a golden afternoon he stopped in a shabby wayside tavern, not because of some vast thirst, but rather out of the need for some conversation with people he could understand.

‘You would not believe how fat he is,’ a half-drunk fellow was saying to the tavern keeper. ‘I’d guess he can afford to eat well, he’s got about half the wealth of Arum locked away in his strongroom by now.’

That got our thief’s immediate attention, and he sat down near the tipsy fellow, hoping to hear more.

The tavern keeper looked at him inquiringly. ‘What’s your pleasure, neighbor?’ he asked.

‘Mead,’ Althalus replied. He hadn’t had a good cup of mead for months, since the lowlanders seemed not to know how to brew it.

‘Mead it is,’ the tavern keeper replied, going back behind the wobbly counter to fetch it.

‘I didn’t mean to interrupt you,’ Althalus said politely to the tipsy fellow.

‘No offense taken,’ the fellow said. ‘I was just telling Arek here about a Clan-Chief to the north who’s so rich that they haven’t invented a number for how many coins he’s got locked away in that fort of his.’

The fellow had the red face and purple nose of a hard-drinking man, but Althalus wasn’t really interested in his complexion. His attention was focused on the man’s wolfskin tunic instead. For some peculiar reason, whoever had sewn the tunic had left the ears on, and they now adorned the garment’s hood. Althalus thought that looked very fine indeed. ‘What did you say the chief’s name was?’ he asked.

‘He’s called Gosti Big Belly – probably because the only exercise he gets is moving his jaw up and down. He eats steadily from morning to night.’

‘From what you say, I guess he can afford it.’

The half-drunk man continued to talk expansively about the wealth of the fat Clan-Chief, and Althalus feigned a great interest, buying more mead for them each time the fellow’s cup ran dry. By sundown the fellow was slobbering drunk and there was a sizeable puddle of discarded mead on the floor near Althalus.

Other men came into the tavern after the sun had set, and the place grew noisier as it grew dark outside.

‘I don’t know about you, friend,’ Althalus said smoothly, ‘but all this mead is starting to talk to me. Why don’t we go outside and have a look at the stars.’

The drunken man blinked his bleary eyes. ‘I think that’s a wunnerful idea’, he agreed. ‘My mead’s telling me to go see some stars, too.’

They rose to go outside, and Althalus caught the swaying man’s arm. ‘Steady, friend,’ he cautioned. Then they went outside with Althalus half-supporting his drunken companion. ‘Over there, I think’, he suggested, pointing at a nearby grove of pine trees.

The man grunted his agreement and lurched toward the pines. He stopped, breathing hard, and leaned back against a tree. ‘Kinda woozy’, he mumbled, his head drooping.

Althalus smoothly pulled his heavy bronze short-sword out from under his belt, reversed it and held it by the blade. ‘Friend?’ he said.

‘Hmm?’ The man’s face came up with a foolish expression and unfocused eyes.

Althalus hit him squarely on the forehead with the heavy hilt of his sword. The man slammed back against the tree and bounced forward.

Althalus hit him on the back of the head as he went by, and the fellow went down.

Althalus knelt beside him and shook him slightly.

The man began to snore.

‘That seems to have done it,’ Althalus murmured to himself. He laid his sword down and went to work. After he’d removed his new wolf-skin tunic from the unconscious man, he took the fellow’s purse. The purse wasn’t very heavy, but his drinking companion’s shoes weren’t too bad. The trip up from Maghu had left Althalus’ own shoes in near tatters, so replacing them was probably a good idea. The snoring man also had a fairly new bronze dagger at his belt, so all in all, Althalus viewed the entire affair as quite profitable. He dragged the man farther back into the shadows, then put on his splendid new tunic and his sturdy shoes. He looked down at his victim almost sadly. ‘So much for wealth beyond counting,’ he sighed. ‘It’s back to stealing clothes and shoes, I guess.’ Then he shrugged. ‘Oh, well. If that’s what my luck wants me to do, I might as well go along with her.’ He half saluted his snoring victim and left the vicinity. He wasn’t exactly deliriously happy, but he was in better spirits than he’d been down in the low-country.

He moved right along, since he wanted to be in the lands of the next clan to the north before the previous owner of his fine new tunic awakened. By mid-morning of the following day, he was fairly certain that he was beyond the reach of last night’s victim, so he stopped in the tavern of a small village to celebrate his apparent change of luck. The wolf-eared tunic wasn’t equal to all that unrecognizable wealth in Druigor’s counting house, but it was a start.

It was in that tavern that he once again heard someone speak of Gosti Big Belly. ‘I’ve heard about him,’ he told the assembled tavern loafers. ‘I can’t imagine why a Clan-Chief would let his people call him by a name like that, though.’

‘You’d almost have to know him to understand,’ one of the other tavern patrons replied. ‘You’re right about how a name like that would offend most Clan-Chiefs, but Gosti’s very proud of that belly of his. He even laughs out loud when he brags that he hasn’t seen his feet in years.’

‘I’ve heard tell that he’s rich,’ Althalus said, nudging the conversation around to the topic that most interested him.

‘Oh, he’s rich, all right,’ another confirmed the fact.

‘Did his clan happen to come across a pocket of gold?’

‘Almost the same thing. After his father was killed in the last clan war, Gosti became Clan-Chief – even though most of the men in his clan didn’t think none too highly of him on accounta how fat he was. Gosti’s got this here cousin, though – Galbak his name is – and Galbak’s about seven feet tall, and he’s meaner than a snake. Anyway, Gosti decided that a bridge across the river that runs through their valley might make things easier for him when he had to go meet with the other Clan-Chiefs, so he ordered his men to build him one. That bridge isn’t none too well-made, and it’s so rickety that it’s as much as a man’s life is worth to try to cross it, but let me tell you, that’s not a river that a man with good sense would want to wade across. The current’s so swift that it carries your shadow a good half-mile downstream. That rickety bridge is as good as any gold mine, since it’s the only way to cross that river for five days’ hard travel in either direction, and Gosti’s cousin’s in charge of it, and nobody who’s got his head on straight crosses Galbak. He charges an arm and a leg to cross, and that’s how it is that Gosti’s got a sizeable chunk of the loose money in Arum salted away in that fort of his.’

‘Well now,’ Althalus said, ‘how very interesting.’

Different lands required different approaches, and up here in the highlands of Arum our thief’s standard plan of attack had always been to ingratiate himself into the halls of men of wealth and power with humorous stories and outrageous jokes. That kind of approach obviously would not have worked in the stuffier cities of the plain where jokes were against the law and laughter was held to be in extremely bad taste.

Althalus knew that tavern stories are almost always exaggerations, but the tales of Gosti Big Belly’s wealth went far enough to suggest that there was probably at least sufficient money in the fat man’s fort to make a journey there worth the time and effort, so he journeyed to the lands of Gosti Big Belly’s clan to investigate further.

As he moved north into the mountains of Arum, he occasionally heard a kind of wailing sound far back in the hills. He couldn’t immediately identify exactly what kind of animal it was that was making so much noise, but it was far enough away that it posed no immediate threat, so he tried to ignore it. Sometimes at night, though, it seemed very close, and that made Althalus a bit edgy.

He reached the shaky wooden bridge he’d been told about, and he was stopped by a burly, roughly dressed toll-taker whose hands and forearms were decorated with the tattoos that identified him as a member of Gosti’s clan. Althalus choked a bit over the price the tattooed man demanded for crossing the bridge, but he paid it, since he viewed it in the light of an investment.

‘That’s a fine-looking garment you’ve got there, friend,’ the toll-taker noted, looking with a certain envy at the wolf-eared tunic Althalus wore.

‘It keeps the weather off,’ Althalus replied with a casual shrug.

‘Where did you come by it?’

‘Up in Hule,’ Althalus replied. ‘I happened across this wolf, you see, and he was about to jump on me and tear out my throat so that he could have me for supper. Now, I’ve always sort of liked wolves – they sing so prettily – but I don’t like them well enough to provide supper for them. Particularly when I’m going to be the main course. Well, I happened to have this pair of bone dice with me, and I persuaded the wolf that it might be more interesting if we played dice to decide the matter instead of rolling around on the ground trying to rip each other apart. So we put up the stakes on the game