THE
REDEMPTION
OF ALTHALUS

COPYRIGHT

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Voyager 2000

Copyright © David and Leigh Eddings 2000

David Eddings and Leigh Eddings assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this ebook is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006514831

Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007375097

Version: 2019-09-27

MAP

DEDICATION

For the sisters, Lori and Lynette, who have made our lives so much more pleasant.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you! ! ! ! ! !

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

MAP

DEDICATION

PROLOGUE

PART ONE The House at the End of the World

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

PART TWO The Gathering

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

PART THREE Dweia

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

PART FOUR Eliar

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

PART FIVE Andine

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

PART SIX Leitha

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

PART SEVEN Gher

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

EPILOGUE

KEEP READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

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 and started rolling the dice.’

‘What stakes?’ the bearded clansman asked.

‘My carcass and his skin, of course.’

The toll-taker started to laugh.

‘Well,’ Althalus began to expand the story, ‘I just happen to be the best dice-player in all the world – and we were playing with my dice, and I’ve spent a lot of time training those dice to do what I want them to do. Well, to cut this short, the wolf had a little run of bad luck, so I’m wearing his skin now, and he’s up there in the forest of Hule shivering in the cold because he’s running around naked.’

The tattooed man laughed even harder.

‘Have you ever seen a naked wolf with goose-bumps all over him?’ Althalus asked, feigning a sympathetic expression. ‘Pitiful! I felt terribly sorry for him, of course, but a bet is a bet, after all, and he did lose. It wouldn’t have been ethical for me to give his skin back to him after I’d fairly won it, now would it?’

The toll-taker doubled over, howling with laughter.

‘I felt sort of sorry for the poor beast, and maybe just a little bit guilty about the whole business. I’ll be honest about it right here and now, friend. I did cheat the wolf a few times during our game, and just to make up for that I let him keep his tail – for decency’s sake, of course.’

‘Oh, that’s a rare story, friend!’ the chortling toll-taker said, clapping Althalus on the back with one meaty hand. ‘Gosti’s got to hear this one!’ And he insisted on accompanying Althalus across the rickety bridge, through the shabby village of log-walled and thatch-roofed huts, and on up to the imposing log fort that overlooked the village and the bridge that crossed the foaming river.

They entered the fort and proceeded into the smoky main hall. Althalus had visited many of the clan halls in the highlands of Arum, so he was familiar with these people’s relaxed approach to neatness, but Gosti’s hall elevated untidiness to an art-form. Like most clan halls, this one had a dirt floor with a fire-pit in the center. The floor was covered with rushes, but the rushes appeared not to have been changed for a dozen years or so. Old bones and assorted other kinds of garbage rotted in the corners, and hounds – and pigs – dozed here and there. It was the first time Althalus had ever encountered pigs as house-pets. There was a rough-hewn table across the front of the hall, and seated at that table stuffing food into his mouth with both hands was the fattest man Althalus had ever seen. There could be no question about the man’s identity, since Gosti Big Belly came by his name honestly. He had pig-like little eyes and his pendulous lower lip hung down farther than his chin. A full haunch of roasted pork lay on the greasy table in front of him, and he was ripping great chunks of meat from that haunch and stuffing them into his mouth. Just behind him stood a huge man with hard, unfriendly eyes.

‘Are we disturbing him at lunchtime?’ Althalus murmured to his guide.

The tattooed clansman laughed. ‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘With Gosti, it’s a little hard to tell exactly which meal he’s eating, since they all sort of run together. Gosti eats all the time, Althalus. I’ve never actually seen him do it, but there are some here who swear that he even eats while he’s asleep. Come along. I’ll introduce you to him – and to his cousin Galbak, too.’

They approached the table. ‘Ho, Gosti!’ the tattooed man said loudly to get the fat man’s attention, ‘this is Althalus. Have him tell you the story of how he came by this fine wolf-eared tunic of his.’

‘All right,’ Gosti replied in a deep, rumbling voice, taking a gulp of mead from his drinking horn. He squinted at Althalus with his pig-like little eyes. ‘You don’t mind if I keep eating while you tell me the story, do you?’

‘Not at all, Gosti,’ Althalus said. ‘You do appear to have a little gaunt spot under your left thumbnail, and I certainly wouldn’t want you to start wasting away right in front of my eyes.’

Gosti blinked and then he roared with laughter, spewing greasy pork all over the table. Galbak, however, didn’t so much as crack a smile.

Althalus expanded the story of his dice game with the wolf into epic proportions, and by night-fall he was firmly ensconced in the chair beside the enormous fat man. After he’d told various versions of the story several times for the entertainment of all the fur-clad clansmen who drifted into the hall, he invented other stories to fill the hall of Gosti Big Belly with nearly continuous mirth. No matter how hard he tried, however, Althalus could never get so much as a smile out of the towering Galbak.

He wintered there, and he was more than welcome to sit at Gosti’s table, eating Big Belly’s food and drinking his mead, as long as he could come up with new stories and jokes to keep Gosti’s belly bouncing up and down with laughter. Gosti’s own occasional contributions obviously bored his clansmen, since they were largely limited to boasts about how much gold he had stored away in his strongroom. The clansmen had evidently heard those stories often enough to know them all by heart. Althalus found them moderately fascinating, however.

The winter plodded on until it was finally spring and by then Althalus knew every corner of Big Belly’s hall intimately.

The strongroom wasn’t too hard to locate, since it was usually guarded. It was at the far end of the corridor where the dining hall was located, and three steps led up to the heavy door. A massive bronze lock strongly suggested that things of value were kept inside.

Althalus noticed that the night-time guards didn’t take their jobs very seriously, and by midnight they were customarily fast asleep – a condition not uncommon among men who take large jugs of strong mead to work with them.

All that was left to do now was to wait for the snow to melt – and to stay on the good side of Gosti and his sour-faced giant cousin. If all went well, Althalus would be in a hurry when he left. Galbak had very long legs, so Althalus didn’t want deep snow in the passes to slow him down enough for Galbak to catch up with him.

Althalus took to frequently stepping out into the courtyard to check the progress of the spring thaw, and when the last snowdrift disappeared from a nearby pass, he decided that the time had come for him to take his leave.

As it turned out, the strongroom of Gosti Big Belly wasn’t nearly as strong as Gosti thought it was, and late one night when the fire in the pit in the center of the hall had burned down to embers and Gosti and his clansmen were filling the corners with drunken snores, Althalus went to that strongroom, stepped over the snoring guards, undid the simple latch, and slipped inside to transfer some ownership. There was a crude table and a sturdy bench in the center of the room and a pile of heavy-looking skin bags in one corner. Althalus took up one of the bags, carried it to the table, and sat down to count his new wealth.

The bag was about the size of a man’s head, and it was loosely tied shut. Althalus eagerly opened the bag, reached his hand inside, and drew out a fistful of coins.

He stared at the coins with a sinking feeling. They were all copper. He dug out another fistful. There were a few yellow coins this time, but they were brass, not gold. Then he emptied the bag out onto the table.

Still no gold.

Althalus raised the torch he’d brought with him to survey the room – maybe Gosti kept his gold in a different pile. There was only the one pile, however. Althalus picked up two more bags and poured their contents onto the table as well. More copper sprinkled with a little brass lay on the now-littered table.

He quickly emptied out all the bags, and there wasn’t a single gold coin in any of them. Gosti had hoodwinked him, and he’d evidently hoodwinked just about everybody in Arum as well.

Althalus began to swear. He’d just wasted an entire winter watching a fat man eat. Worse yet, he’d believed all the lies that slobbering fat man had told him. He resisted the strong temptation to return to the hall and to rip Gosti up the middle with his dagger. Instead he sat down to pick the brass coins out of the heaps of copper. He knew that he wouldn’t get enough to even begin to pay him for his time, but it’d be better than nothing at all.

After he’d leached all the brass out of the heaps of copper, he stood up and disdainfully tipped the table over to dump all the nearly worthless copper coins onto the floor, and left in disgust.

He went out of the hall, crossed the muddy courtyard, and walked on down through the shabby village, cursing his own gullibility and brooding darkly about his failure to take a look into the strongroom to verify the fat man’s boasting.

Fortune, that most fickle goddess, had tricked him again. His luck hadn’t changed after all.

Despite his bitter disappointment, he stepped right along. He hadn’t left Gosti’s strongroom in a very tidy condition, and it wouldn’t be long until the fat man realized that he’d been robbed. The theft hadn’t been very large, but it still might not be a bad idea to cross a few clan boundaries – just to be on the safe side. Galbak had the look of a man who wouldn’t shrug things off, and Althalus definitely wanted a long head-start on Gosti’s hard-faced cousin.

After a few days of hard travel, Althalus felt that it was safe enough to stop by a tavern to get a decent meal. Like just about everyone else on the frontiers, Althalus carried a sling, and he was quite skilled with it. He could get by on an occasional rabbit or squirrel, but he was definitely in the mood for a full meal.

He approached a shabby village tavern, but stopped just outside the doorway when he heard someone saying, ‘–a wolf-skin tunic with the ears still on.’ He stepped back from the door to listen.

‘Gosti Big Belly’s fit to be tied,’ the man who’d just mentioned the tunic went on. ‘It seems that this Althalus fellow’d just spent the whole winter eating Gosti’s food and drinking his mead, and he showed his gratitude by sneaking into Gosti’s strongroom and stealing two full bags of gold coins.’

‘Shocking!’ somebody else murmured. ‘What did you say this thief looked like?’

‘Well, as I understand it, he’s about medium sized and he’s got a black beard, but that description fits about half the men in Arum. It’s that wolf-eared tunic that gives him away. Gosti’s cousin Galbak is offering a huge reward for the fellow’s head, but for all of me, he can keep his reward. It’s those two bags of gold this Althalus fellow’s carrying that interest me. I’m going to track him down, believe me. I’d like to introduce him to the busy end of my spear, and I won’t even bother to cut off his head to sell to Galbak.’ The man gave a cynical laugh. ‘I’m not a greedy man, friends. Two bags of gold are more than enough to satisfy me.’

Althalus stepped around to the side of the tavern to swear. It was the irony of it all that stung so much. Gosti desperately wanted everybody in Arum to believe that he was rich. That absurd reward offer was nothing more than a way for the fat man to verify his boasts. Gosti, still eating with both hands, was probably laughing himself sick right now. Althalus had stolen no more than a handful of brass coins, and now he’d have to run for his life. Gosti would get the fame, and Althalus now had Galbak on his trail and every man in Arum looking for him – with a knife.

Obviously though, he was going to have to get rid of his splendid new tunic, and that really bit deep. He went back to the door and peeked inside to identify the man who’d just described him. What had happened had been Gosti’s doing, but Gosti wasn’t around to punish, so that loud-mouthed tavern loafer was going to have to fill in for him.

Althalus etched the man’s features in his mind, and then he went outside the village to wait and watch.

Dusk was settling over the mountains of Arum when the fellow lurched out of the tavern and came wobbling out to the main trail that passed the village. He was carrying a short spear with a broad-bladed bronze tip, and he was whistling tunelessly.

He stopped whistling when Althalus savagely clubbed him to the ground.

Then Althalus dragged him back into the bushes at the side of the trail. He turned the unconscious man over. ‘I understand you’ve been looking for me,’ he said sardonically. ‘Was there something you wanted to discuss?’

He peeled the man’s knitted smock off the limp body, removed his own splendid tunic, and regretfully dropped it on his would-be assassin’s face. Then he put on the shabby tunic, stole the man’s purse and spear, and left the vicinity.

Althalus didn’t have a very high opinion of the man he’d just robbed, so he was fairly certain that the idiot would actually wear that tunic, and that might help to muddy the waters. The description the fellow had been spreading around had mentioned a black beard, so when the sun rose the following morning, Althalus stopped by a forest pool where he could see his reflection in the surface of the water and painfully shaved with his bronze dagger.

Once that had been taken care of, he decided that it might be prudent to continue his northward journey along the ridge-lines rather than in the canyons. His shave and his change of clothing had probably disguised him enough to conceal his identity from people who were searching for somebody with a black beard and a wolf-eared tunic, but a fair number of men had stopped by Gosti’s hall during the preceding winter, and if some of those guests were among the searchers, they’d probably recognize him. And if they didn’t, Gosti’s cousin Galbak certainly would. Althalus knew the Arums well enough to be certain that they’d stay down in the canyons to conduct their search, since climbing the ridges would be terribly inconvenient, and there weren’t many taverns up on top where they could rest and refresh themselves. Althalus was positive that no real Arum could ever be found more than a mile away from the nearest tavern.

He climbed the ridge with a sense of bitterness dogging his heels. He’d make good his escape, of course. He was too clever to be caught. What really cankered at his soul was the fact that his escape would just reinforce Gosti’s boasts. Gosti’s reputation as the richest man in Arum would be confirmed by the fact that the greatest thief in the world had made a special trip to Arum just to rob him. Althalus mournfully concluded that his bad luck was still dogging his heels.

Up on the ridge-line, the sodden remains of last winter’s snowdrifts made for slow going, but Althalus doggedly slogged his way north. There wasn’t much game up here on the ridges, so he frequently went for days without eating.

As he sourly struggled north, he once again heard that peculiar wailing sound he’d first noticed back in the mountains on his way to Gosti’s fort the previous autumn. Evidently it was still out there, and he began to wonder if maybe it was following him for some reason. Whatever it was, it was noisy, and its wailing cries echoing back from the mountainsides began to make Althalus distinctly edgy.

It wasn’t a wolf; Althalus was sure of that. Wolves travel in packs, and this was a solitary creature. There was an almost despairing quality about its wailing. He eventually concluded that it was most probably the mating season for that particular creature, and that its mournful, hollow cries were nothing more than an announcement to others of its species that it would really like to have some company along about now. Whatever it was, Althalus began to fervently wish that it’d go look for companionship elsewhere, since those unearthly cries of absolute despair were beginning to get on his nerves.

CHAPTER THREE

Althalus was in a somber mood as he slogged north. along the ridge-lines of Arum. He’d had set-backs before, of course. Nobody wins every time, but always in the past his luck had returned in short order. This time had been somehow different. Everything he’d touched had gone sour. His luck had not just deserted him, she seemed to be going out of her way to ruin everything he attempted. Had he done something that’d turned her love to hate? That gloomy thought hounded him as he came down out of the mountains of Arum into the deep-forested land of Hule.

Hule is the refuge of choice for men who are the unfortunate victims of various misunderstandings in the surrounding lands. Helpful men who ‘just wanted to give your horse some exercise’ or were ‘just taking your silver coins out into the light so that I could polish them for you,’ found sanctuary in Hule, since there’s nothing resembling a government or laws of any kind in Hule, and in a land where there aren’t any laws, there’s no such thing as a law-breaker.

Althalus was in a foul humor when he reached Hule, and he felt a great need for the companionship of people of his own kind with whom he could be completely open, so he made his way directly through the forest to the more or less permanent encampment of a Hulish man named Nabjor who brewed good mead and sold it at a fair price. Nabjor also had several plump young ladies available for the convenience of customers who might be feeling lonely for conversation or consolation.

There’s a hushed quality about the vast forests of Hule. The trees of that land of the far north are giants, and a traveler can wander under the endless canopy of their outspread limbs for days on end without ever seeing the sun. The trees are evergreens for the most part, and their fallen needles blanket the ground in a deep, damp carpet that muffles the sound of a traveler’s footsteps. There are no trails in the land of Hule, since the trees continually shed their dead needles in a gentle sprinkle to cover all signs of the passage of man or beast.

Nabjor’s congenial camp lay in a small clearing on the banks of a cheerful little stream that giggled its way over brown rocks, and Althalus approached it with some caution, since a man reputed to be carrying two heavy bags of gold tends to be very careful before he enters any public establishment. After he’d lain behind a fallen tree watching the camp for a while, Althalus concluded that there were no Arums around, so he rose to his feet. ‘Ho, Nabjor,’ he called. ‘It’s me, Althalus. Don’t get excited; I’m coming in.’ Nabjor always kept a heavy-bladed bronze axe close at hand to maintain order and to deal with interlopers who might have some questions about his own indiscretions, so it was prudent not to surprise him.

‘Ho! Althalus!’ Nabjor bellowed. ‘Welcome! I was beginning to think that maybe the Equeros or the Treboreans had caught you and hung you up on a tree down there.’

‘No,’ Althalus replied with a rueful laugh. ‘I’ve managed to keep my feet on the ground so far, but only barely. Is your mead ripe yet? That batch you had the last time I passed through was just a trifle green.’

‘Come and try some,’ Nabjor invited. ‘This new batch came out rather well.’

Althalus walked into the clearing and looked at his old friend. Nabjor was a burly man with dun-colored hair and beard. He had a large, bulbous nose, shrewd eyes, and he was dressed in a shaggy bearskin tunic. Nabjor was a businessman who sold good mead and rented out ladies. He also bought things with no questions asked from men who stole for a living.

The two of them clasped hands warmly. ‘Sit you down, my friend,’ Nabjor said. ‘I’ll bring us some mead, and you can tell me all about the splendors of civilization.’

Althalus sank down on a log by the fire where a spitted haunch of forest bison sizzled and smoked while Nabjor filled two large earthenware cups with foaming mead. ‘How did things go down there?’ he asked, returning to the fire and handing Althalus one of the cups.

‘Awful,’ Althalus said glumly.

‘That bad?’ Nabjor asked, seating himself on the log on the other side of the fire.

‘Even worse, Nabjor. I don’t think anybody’s come up with a word yet that really describes how bad it was.’ Althalus took a long drink of his mead. ‘You got a good run on this batch, my friend.’

‘I thought you might like it.’

‘Are you still charging the same price?’

‘Don’t worry about the price today, Althalus. Today’s mead is out of friendship.’

Althalus lifted his cup. ‘Here’s to friendship then,’ he said and took another drink. ‘They don’t even make mead down in civilization. The only thing you can buy in the taverns is sour wine.’

‘They call that civilized?’ Nabjor shook his head in disbelief.

‘How’s business been?’ Althalus asked.

‘Not bad at all,’ Nabjor replied expansively. ‘Word’s getting around about my place. Just about everybody in Hule knows by now that if he wants a good cup of mead at a reasonable price, Nabjor’s camp is the place to go. If he wants the companionship of a pretty lady, this is the place. If he’s stumbled across something valuable that he wants to sell with no embarrassing questions about how he came by it, he knows that if he comes here, I’ll be glad to discuss it with him.’

‘You’re going to fool around and die rich, Nabjor.’

‘If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather live rich. All right, since that’s out of the way, tell me what happened down in the low-country. I haven’t seen you for more than a year, so we’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’

‘You’d better brace yourself, Nabjor,’ Althalus warned. ‘This isn’t going to be one of those happy stories.’ Then he went on to describe his misadventures in Equero, Treborea, and Perquaine at some length.

‘That’s awful!’ Nabjor said. ‘Didn’t anything turn out well?’

‘Not really. Things were so bad that I had to waylay men coming out of taverns to get enough money to pay for my next meal. My luck’s gone sour on me, Nabjor. Everything I’ve touched for the past year and a half’s turned to ashes on me. I thought for a while that it was because my luck hadn’t followed me when I went down into the low-country, but things didn’t get any better when I got to Arum.’ Then he told his friend about his misadventures in the hall of Gosti Big Belly.

‘You really do have a problem, don’t you, Althalus?’ Nabjor observed. ‘It’s your luck that’s always made you famous. You’d better see what you can do to get back on the good side of her.’

‘I’d be more than happy to, Nabjor, but I don’t know how. She’s always been so fond of me that I didn’t have to take any special pains to keep her in my pocket. If she had a temple someplace, I’d steal somebody’s goat and sacrifice it on her altar. But the way things have been going here lately, the goat would probably kick my brains out before I could cut his throat.’

‘Oh, cheer up, Althalus. Things have got to get better for you.’

‘I certainly hope so. I don’t see how they could get any worse.’

Just then Althalus heard that almost despairing wail again, far back in the trees. ‘Do you have any idea of what sort of animal makes that kind of noise?’ he asked.

Nabjor cocked his head to listen. ‘Can’t quite place it,’ he admitted. ‘It wouldn’t be a bear, would it?’

‘I don’t think so. Bears don’t go around singing in the woods that way. I heard that beast howling for days on end while I was up in Arum.’

‘Maybe it’s heard about Gosti’s lies and it’s following you to rob you of all your gold.’

‘Very funny, Nabjor,’ Althalus said sarcastically.

Nabjor smirked at him. Then he took their cups back to the crock to refill them. ‘Here,’ he said, coming back to the fire and holding one of the cups out to Althalus, ‘smother your laughter with this and quit worrying about animals. They’re afraid of fire, so whatever it is out there howling among the trees isn’t likely to come in here and sit down with us.’

Althalus and Nabjor had a few more cups of mead, and then the thief noticed that his friend had a new wench in his camp. The wench had wicked eyes and a provocative way of walking. He decided that it might be sort of nice if he and the wench got to know each other a little better. He was very much in need of friendship just now.

And so Althalus remained in Nabjor’s establishment for quite some time to enjoy the entertainments available there. Nabjor’s mead was plentiful, there was usually a haunch of forest bison on a spit near the fire in case anyone grew hungry, and the wench with wicked eyes was talented. Not only that, other thieves, almost all of them old friends and acquaintances, stopped by from time to time, and they could all spend happy hours together, bragging, talking shop, and engaging in friendly dice games. After this past year, Althalus really needed some relaxation to unwind his nerves and restore his good humor. His stock in trade was witty stories and jokes, and a grumpy man can’t tell jokes very well.

His meager supply of brass coins was not inexhaustible, however, and after a time his purse grew very slender, so he regretfully concluded that he’d probably better start thinking about going back to work.

And then along toward the end of summer on a blustery day when the racing clouds overhead were blotting out the sun, a man with deep-sunk eyes and lank, greasy black hair rode into Nabjor’s camp on a shaggy grey horse. He slid down from the back of his weary mount and came to the fire to warm his hands. ‘Mead!’ he called to Nabjor in a harsh voice.

‘I don’t know you, friend,’ Nabjor said suspiciously, fingering his heavy bronze axe. ‘I’ll have to see your money first.’

The stranger’s eyes hardened and then he wordlessly shook a heavy leather purse.

Althalus squinted speculatively at the stranger. The fellow was wearing a kind of bronze helmet on his head that reached down the back of his neck to his shoulders, and there were thick bronze plates sewn onto his black leather jerkin. He also wore a long, hooded black cloak which looked rather fine and which Althalus was sure would fit him, if the stranger happened to drink too much of Nabjor’s mead and drift off to sleep. The man also had a heavy-bladed sword tucked under his belt and a narrow bronze dagger as well.

There was an oddly archaic look about the stranger’s features that made his face appear to have been only half-finished. Althalus didn’t really pay too much attention to the stranger’s face, though. What he was really looking for were the characteristic clan-tattoos of the Arums. At this particular time Althalus thought it might be prudent to avoid Arums. The stranger, however, had unmarked hands and forearms, so our thief relaxed.

The black-haired stranger seated himself on a log across the fire-pit from where Althalus lounged and looked penetratingly at the thief. It might have been some trick of the light, but the dancing flames of the fire were reflected in the stranger’s eyes, and that made Althalus just a bit edgy. It’s not every day that a man comes across somebody whose eyes are on fire. ‘I see that I’ve finally found you,’ the stranger said in a peculiarly accented voice. It appeared that this man was not one to beat about the bush.

‘You’ve been looking for me?’ Althalus said as calmly as possible. The fellow was heavily armed, and as far as Althalus knew, there was still a price on his head back in Arum. He carefully shifted his own sword around on his belt so that the hilt was closer to his hand.

‘For quite some time now,’ the stranger replied. ‘I picked up your trail in Deika. Men down there are still talking about how fast you can run when dogs are chasing you. Then I tracked you to Kanthon in Treborea and on to Maghu in Perquaine. Druigor’s still trying to figure out why you just dumped all his money on the floor and didn’t steal any of it.’

Althalus winced.

‘You didn’t know that it was money, did you?’ the stranger said shrewdly. ‘Anyway, I followed you from Maghu up into Arum, and there’s a fat man up there who’s looking for you even harder than I am.’

‘I sort of doubt that,’ Althalus said. ‘Gosti wants people to think he’s rich, and I’m probably the only man around who knows that there was nothing in his strongroom but copper pennies.’

The stranger laughed. ‘I thought there was something that didn’t quite ring true about the way he kept going on about how you’d robbed him.’

‘And just why have you spent all this time looking for me?’ Althalus asked, getting to the point. ‘Your clothing says Nekweros, and I haven’t been there in years, so I’m sure I haven’t stolen anything from you recently.’

‘Set your mind at rest, Althalus, and slide your sword back around your belt so the hilt doesn’t keep poking you in the ribs. I haven’t come here to take your head back to Gosti. Would you be at all interested in a business proposition?’

‘That depends.’

‘My name’s Ghend, and I need a good thief who knows his way around. Are you at all familiar with the land of the Kagwhers?’

‘I’ve been there a few times,’ Althalus replied cautiously. ‘I don’t care very much for the Kagwhers. They have this habit of assuming that everyone who comes along is there to sneak into their gold mines and just help himself. What is it that you want me to steal for you? You look like the kind of man who can take care of things like that for himself. Why would you want to pay somebody else to do it for you?’

‘You’re not the only one with a price on his head, Althalus,’ Ghend replied with a pained expression. ‘I’m sure I wouldn’t care much for the reception I’d get if I happened to venture into Kagwher just now. Anyway, there’s someone in Nekweros who’s holding some obligations over my head, and he’s not the sort I’d want to disappoint. There’s something he really wants over in Kagwher, and he’s told me to go there and get it for him. That puts me in a very tight spot, you understand. You’d be in the same sort of situation if someone told you to go get something for him and it just happened to be in Arum, wouldn’t you?’

‘I can see your problem, yes. I should warn you that I don’t work cheap, though.’

‘I didn’t expect you to, Althalus. This thing my friend in Nekweros wants is quite large and very heavy, and I’m prepared to pay you its weight in gold if you’ll steal it for me.’

‘You just managed to get my undivided attention, Ghend.’

‘Are you really as good a thief as everyone says you are?’ Ghend’s glowing eyes seemed to burn more brightly.

‘I’m the best,’ Althalus said with a deprecating shrug.

‘He’s right about that, stranger,’ Nabjor said, bringing Althalus a fresh cup of mead. ‘Althalus here can steal anything with two ends or with a top and a bottom.’

‘That might be a slight exaggeration,’ Althalus said. ‘A river has two ends, and I’ve never stolen one of those; and a lake has a top and a bottom, but I’ve never stolen one of those either. What exactly is it that this man in Nekweros wants badly enough to offer gold for it – some jewel or something like that?’

‘No, it’s not a jewel,’ Ghend replied with a hungry look. ‘What he wants – and will pay gold for – is a Book.’

‘You just said the magic word “gold” again, Ghend. I could sit here all day and listen to you talk about it, but now we come to the hard part. What in blazes is a book?’

Ghend looked sharply at him, and the flickering firelight touched his eyes again, making them glow a burning red. ‘So that’s why you threw all of Druigor’s money on the floor. You didn’t know that it was money because you can’t read.’

‘Reading’s for the priests, Ghend, and I don’t have any dealings with priests if I can avoid it. Every priest I’ve ever come across promises me a seat at the table of his god – if I’ll just hand over everything I’ve got in my purse. I’m sure the dining halls of the gods are very nice, but you have to die to get an invitation to have dinner with God, and I’m not really that hungry.’

Ghend frowned. ‘This might complicate things just a bit,’ he said. ‘A book is a collection of pages that people read.’

‘I don’t have to be able to read it, Ghend. To be able to steal it, all I have to know is what it looks like and where it is.’

Ghend gave him a speculative look, his deep sunk eyes glowing. ‘You may be right,’ he said, almost as if to himself. ‘I just happen to have a Book with me. If I show it to you, you’ll know what you’re looking for.’

‘Exactly,’ Althalus said. ‘Why don’t you trot your book out, and I’ll have a look. I don’t have to know what it says to be able to steal it, do I?’

‘No,’ Ghend agreed, ‘I guess you don’t at that.’ He rose to his feet, went over to his horse, reached inside the leather bag tied to his saddle, and took something square and fairly large out of the bag. Then he brought it back to the fire.

‘It’s bigger than I thought,’ Althalus noted. ‘It’s just a box, then, isn’t it?’

‘It’s what’s inside that’s important’, Ghend said, opening the lid. He took out a crackling sheet of something that looked like dried leather and handed it to Althalus. ‘That’s what writing looks like’, he said. ‘When you find a box like this one, you’d better open it to make sure it has sheets like that one inside instead of buttons or tools.’

Althalus held up the sheet and looked at it. ‘What kind of animal has a hide this thin?’ he asked.

‘They take a piece of cowhide and split it with a knife to get thin sheets,’ Ghend explained. ‘Then they press them flat with weights and dry them so that they’re stiff. Then they write on them so that other people can read what they’ve put down.’

‘Trust a priest to complicate things,’ Althalus said. He looked carefully at the neatly spaced lines of writing on the sheet. ‘It looks sort of like pictures, doesn’t it?’ he suggested.

‘That’s what writing is,’ Ghend explained. He took a stick and drew a curved line in the dirt beside the fire. ‘This is the picture that means “cow”,’ he said, ‘since it’s supposed to look like a cow’s horns.’

‘I thought learning to read was supposed to be difficult,’ Althalus said. ‘We’ve only been talking about it for a few minutes, and I already know how to read.’

‘As long as all you want to read about is cows,’ Ghend amended, half under his breath.

‘I don’t see anything about cows on this page,’ Althalus said.

‘You’ve got it upside down,’ Ghend told him.

‘Oh.’ Althalus turned the page and studied it for a little while. Some of the symbols carefully drawn on the parchment chilled him for some reason. ‘I can’t make any sense of this,’ he admitted, ‘but that’s not important. All I really need to know is that I’m looking for a black box with leather sheets inside.’

‘The box we want is white,’ Ghend corrected, ‘and it’s quite a bit bigger than this one.’ He held up his Book. The cover of the Book had red symbols on it, ones that chilled Althalus.

‘How much bigger than yours is the book we want?’ he asked.

‘It’s about as long and as wide as the length of your forearm,’ Ghend replied, ‘and about as thick as the length of your foot. It’s fairly heavy.’ He took the sheet of parched leather from Althalus and almost reverently put it back inside the box. ‘Well?’ he said then, ‘are you interested in the proposition?’

‘I’ll need a few more details,’ Althalus replied. ‘Just exactly where is this book, and how well is it guarded?’

‘It’s in the house at the end of the world over in Kagwher.’

‘I know where Kagwher is’, Althalus said, ‘but I didn’t know that the world ended there. Exactly where in Kagwher is this place? What direction?’

‘North. It’s up in that part of Kagwher that doesn’t see the sun in the winter and where there isn’t any night in summer.’

‘That’s a peculiar place for somebody to live.’

‘Truly. The owner of the Book doesn’t live there any more, though, so there won’t be anybody there to interfere with you when you go inside the house to steal the Book.’

‘That’s convenient. Can you give me any kind of landmarks? I can move faster if I know where I’m going.’

‘Just follow the edge of the world. When you see a house, you’ll know it’s the right place. It’s the only house up there.’

Althalus drank off his mead. ‘That sounds simple enough,’ he said. ‘Now, then, after I’ve stolen the book, how do I find you to get my pay?’

‘I’ll find you, Althalus.’ Ghend’s deep-sunk eyes burned even hotter. ‘Believe me, I’ll find you.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘You’ll do it then?’

‘I said I’ll think about it. Now, why don’t we have some more of Nabjor’s mead – since you’re the one who’s paying.’

Althalus didn’t feel very well the next morning, but a few cups of Nabjor’s mead quieted the shaking in his hands and put out the fire in his belly. ‘I’ll be gone for a while, Nabjor’, he told his friend. ‘Tell the wench with the naughty eyes that I said goodbye and that I’ll see her again someday.’

‘You’re going to do it then? Go steal that book thing for Ghend?’

‘You were listening.’

‘Of course I was, Althalus. Are you really sure you want to do this, though? Ghend kept talking about gold, but I don’t remember that he ever showed you any. It’s easy to say “gold”, but actually producing some might be a little more difficult.’

Althalus shrugged, ‘If he doesn’t pay, he doesn’t get the book.’ He looked over to where Ghend lay huddled under his excellent black wool cloak. ‘When he wakes up, tell him that I’ve left for Kagwher and that I’m going there to steal that book for him.’

‘Do you really trust him?’

‘Almost as far as I could throw him,’ Althalus replied with a cynical laugh. ‘The price he promised me sort of hints that there’ll be some fellows with long knives nearby when I demand my pay. Besides, if somebody offers to pay me to steal something for him, I’m always certain that the thing’s worth at least ten times what he’s offering me to steal it. I don’t trust Ghend, Nabjor. There were a couple of times last night after the fire had burned down when he looked at me, and his eyes were still on fire. They were glowing bright red, and the glow wasn’t a reflection. Then there was that sheet of parched leather he showed me. Most of those pictures were sort of ordinary, but some of them glowed red the same way Ghend’s eyes did. Those pictures are supposed to mean words, and I don’t think I’d like to have anybody saying those particular words to me.’

‘If you feel that way about it, why are you going to take on the job, then?’

Althalus sighed. ‘Normally I wouldn’t, Nabjor. I don’t trust Ghend, and I don’t think I like him. My luck’s turned sour on me here lately, though, so I sort of have to take what comes along – at least until fortune falls in love with me again. The job Ghend offered me is fairly simple, you know. All I have to do is go to Kagwher, find a certain empty house, and steal a white leather box. Any fool could do this job, but Ghend offered it to me, so I’m going to jump on it. The job’s easy, and the pay’s good. It won’t be hard to do it right, and if I do pull it off, fortune might change her mind and go back to adoring me the way she’s supposed to.’

‘You’ve got a very strange religion, Althalus.’

Althalus grinned at him. ‘It works for me, Nabjor, and I don’t even need a priest to intercede for me – and take half my profits for his services.’ Althalus looked over at the sleeping Ghend again. ‘How careless of me,’ he said. ‘I almost forgot to pick up my new cloak.’ He walked over to where Ghend lay, gently removed the black wool cloak, and put it around his own shoulders. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Nabjor, striking a pose.

‘It looks almost as if it’s been made for you,’ Nabjor chuckled.

‘Probably it was. Ghend must have stolen it while I was busy.’ He walked back, digging several brass coins out of his purse. ‘Do me a favor, Nabjor,’ he said, handing over the coins. ‘Ghend drank a lot of your mead last night, and I noticed that he doesn’t hold his drink very well. He won’t be feeling too good when he wakes up, so he’s going to need some medicine to make him feel better. Give him as much as he can drink, and if he’s feeling delicate again tomorrow morning, get him well again with the same medicine – and change the subject if he happens to ask what happened to his cloak.’

‘Are you going to steal his horse, too? Riding’s easier than walking.’

‘When I get so feeble that I can’t do my own walking, I’ll take up begging at the side of the road. A horse would just get in my way. Keep Ghend drunk for a week, if you can manage it. I’d like to be a long ways up into the mountains of Kagwher before he sobers up.’

‘He said that he’s afraid to go into Kagwher.’

‘I don’t think I believe him on that score either. He knows the way to that house up there, but I think it’s the house he’s afraid of, not the whole of Kagwher. I don’t want him hiding in the bushes when I come out of that house with the book under my arm, so keep him drunk enough not to follow me. Make him feel good when he wakes up.’

‘That’s why I’m here, Althalus,’ Nabjor said piously. ‘I’m the friend of all men when they’re thirsty or sick. My good strong mead is the best medicine in the world. It can cure a rainy day, and if I could think of a way to make a dead man swallow it, I could probably even cure him of being dead with it.’

‘Nicely put,’ Althalus said admiringly.

‘Like you always say, I’ve got this way with words.’

‘And with your brewing crocks. Be the friend of Ghend then, Nabjor. Cure him of any unwholesome urges to follow me. I don’t like to be followed when I’m working, so make him good and drunk right here so that I don’t have to make him good and dead somewhere up in the mountains.’

CHAPTER FOUR

It was late summer now in deep-forested Hule, and Althalus could travel more rapidly than he might have in less pleasant seasons. The vast trees of Hule kept the forest floor in perpetual twilight, and the carpet of needles was very thick, smothering obstructing undergrowth.

Althalus always moved cautiously when traveling through Hule, but this time he went through the forest even more carefully. A man whose luck has gone bad needs to take extra precautions. There were other men moving through the forest, and even though they were kindred outlaws, Althalus avoided them. There weren’t any laws in Hule, but there were rules about behavior, and it was very unhealthy to ignore those rules. If an armed man doesn’t want company, it’s best not to intrude upon him.

When Althalus was not too far from the western edge of the land of the Kagwhers, he encountered another of the creatures who lived in the forest of Hule, and things were a little tense for a while. A pack of the hulking forest wolves caught his scent. Althalus didn’t really understand wolves. Most animals don’t bother to waste time on things that aren’t easy to catch and eat. Wolves, however, seem to enjoy challenges, and they’ll chase something for days on end just for the fun of the chase. Althalus could laugh at a good joke with the best of them, but he felt that the wolves of Hule tended to run a joke all the way into the ground.

And so it was with some relief that he moved up into the highlands of Kagwher, where the trees thinned out enough to make the forest wolves howl one final salute and turn back.

There was, as all the world knows, gold in Kagwher, and that made the Kagwhers a little hard to get along with. Gold, Althalus had noticed, does peculiar things to people. A man with nothing in his purse but a few copper coins can be the most good-natured and fun-loving fellow in the world, but give him a little bit of gold and he immediately turns suspicious and unfriendly, and he spends almost every waking moment worrying about thieves and bandits.

The Kagwhers had devised a charmingly direct means of warning passers-by away from their mines and those streams where smooth round lumps of gold lay scattered among the brown pebbles just under the surface of the water. Any time a traveler in Kagwher happened across a stake driven into the ground with a skull adorning its top, he knew that he was approaching forbidden ground. Some of the skulls were those of animals; most of them, however, were the skulls of men. The message was fairly clear.

So far as Althalus was concerned, the mines of Kagwher were perfectly safe. There was a lot of back-breaking labor involved in wrenching gold out of the mountains, and other men were far better suited for that than he was. Althalus was a thief, after all, and he devoutly believed that actually working for a living was unethical.

Ghend’s directions hadn’t really been too precise, but Althalus knew that his first chore was going to be finding the edge of the world. The problem with that was that he wasn’t entirely sure what the edge of the world was going to look like. It might be a sort of vague, misty area where an unwary traveler could just walk off and fall forever through the realm of the stars that wouldn’t even notice him as he hurtled past. The word ‘edge’, however, suggested a brink of some kind – possibly a line with ground on one side and stars on the other. It was even possible that it might just be a solid wall of stars, or even a stairway of stars stretching all the way up to the throne of whatever god held sway here in Kagwher.

Althalus didn’t really have a very well-defined system of belief. He knew that he was fortune’s child, and even though he and fortune were currently a bit on the outs, he hoped that he’d be able to cuddle up to her again before too long. The Ruler of the universe was a little distant, and Althalus had long since decided to let God – whatever his name was – concentrate on managing the sunrises and sunsets, the turning of the seasons, and the phases of the moon without the distraction of suggestions. All in all, Althalus and God got along fairly well, since they didn’t bother each other.

Ghend had said that the edge of the world lay to the north, so when Althalus reached Kagwher, he bore off to the left rather than climbing higher into the mountains where most of the gold mines were located and where the Kagwhers were all belligerently protective.

He came across a few roughly clad and bearded men of Kagwher as he traveled north, but they didn’t want to discuss the edge of the world for some reason. Evidently this was one of the things they weren’t supposed to talk about. He’d encountered this oddity before, and it had always irritated him. Refusing to talk about something wouldn’t make it go away. If it was there, it was there, and no amount of verbal acrobatics could make it go away.

He continued his journey northward, and the weather became more chill and the Kagwher villages farther and farther apart until finally they petered out altogether, and Althalus found himself more or less alone in the wilderness of the far north. Then one night as he sat in his rough camp huddled over the last embers of his cooking fire with his new cloak wrapped tightly around his shoulders, he saw something to the north that rather strongly told him that he was getting closer to his goal. Darkness was just beginning to settle over the mountains off to the east, but up toward the north where the night was in full bloom, the sky was on fire.

It was very much like a rainbow that had gotten out of hand. It was varicolored, not the traditional arch of an ordinary rainbow, but rather was a shimmering, pulsating curtain of multi-colored light, seething and shifting in the northern sky. Althalus wasn’t very superstitious, but watching the sky catch on fire isn’t the sort of thing a man can just shrug off.

He amended his plans at that point. Ghend had told him about the edge of the world, but he’d neglected to mention anything about the sky catching on fire. There was something up here that frightened Ghend, and Ghend had not seemed to be the sort of man who frightened easily. Althalus decided that he’d continue his search. There was gold involved, and even more importantly, the chance to wash off the streak of bad luck that had dogged his steps for more than a year now. That fire up in the sky, however, set off a very large bell inside his head. It was definitely time to start paying very close attention to what was going on around him. If too many more unusual things happened up here, he’d go find something else to do – maybe over in Ansu, or south on the plains of Plakand.

Just before sunrise the next morning he was awakened by a human voice, and he rolled out from under his cloak, reaching for his spear. He heard only one voice, but whoever was talking seemed to be holding a conversation of some kind, asking questions and seeming to listen to replies.

The conversationalist was a crooked and bent old man, and he was shambling along with the aid of a staff. His hair and beard were a dirty white, he was filthy, and he was garbed in scraps of rotting fur-covered animal skins held together with cords of sinew or twisted gut. His weathered face was deeply lined, and his rheumy eyes were wild. He gesticulated as he talked, casting frequent, apprehensive glances up at the now-colorless sky.

Althalus relaxed. This man posed no threat, and his condition wasn’t all that uncommon. Althalus knew that people were supposed to live for just so long, but if someone accidentally missed his appointed time to die, his mind turned peculiar. The condition was most common in very old people, but the same thing could happen to much younger men if they carelessly happened to miss their appointment. Some claimed that these crazy people had been influenced by demons, but that was really far too complicated. Althalus much preferred his own theory. Crazy people were just ordinary folk who’d lived too long. Roaming around after they were supposed to be lying peacefully in their graves would be enough to make anybody crazy. That’s why they started talking to people – or other things – that weren’t really there, and why they began to see things that nobody else could see. They were no particular danger to anyone, so Althalus normally left them alone. Those who were incapable of minding their own business always got excited about crazy people, but Althalus had long since decided that most of the world’s people were crazy anyway, so he treated everybody more or less the same.

‘Ho, there,’ he called to the crazy old man, ‘I mean you no harm, so don’t get excited.’

‘Who’s that?’ the old man demanded, seizing his staff in both hands and brandishing it.

‘I’m just a traveler, and I seem to have lost my way.’

The old man lowered his staff. ‘Don’t see many travelers around here. They don’t seem to like our sky.’

‘I noticed the sky myself just last night. Why does it do that?’

‘It’s the edge of things,’ the old man explained. ‘That curtain of fire up in the sky is where everything stops. This side’s all finished – filled up with mountains and trees and birds and bugs and people and beasts. The curtain is the place where nothing begins.’

‘Nothing?’

‘That’s all there is out there, traveler – nothing. God hasn’t gotten around to doing anything about it yet. There isn’t anything at all out beyond that curtain of fire.’

‘I haven’t lost my way then after all. That’s what I’m looking for – the edge of the world.’

‘What for?’

‘I want to see it. I’ve heard about it, and now I want to see it for myself.’

‘There’s nothing to see.’

‘Have you ever seen it?’

‘Lots of times. This is where I live, and the edge of the world’s as far as I can go when I travel north.’

‘How do I get there?’

The old man stabbed his stick toward the north. ‘Go that way for about a half a day.’

‘Is it easy to recognize?’

‘You can’t hardly miss it – at least you’d better not.’ The crazy man cackled. ‘It’s a place where you want to be real careful, ‘cause if you make one wrong step when you come to that edge, your journey’s going to last for a lot longer than just a half a day. If you’re really all that eager to see it, go across this meadow and through the pass between those two hills up at the other end of the grass. When you get to the top of the pass you’ll see a big dead tree. The tree stands right at the edge of the world, so that’s as far as you’ll be able to go – unless you know a way to sprout wings.’

‘Well then, as long as I’m this close, I think I’ll go have a look.’

‘That’s up to you, traveler. I’ve got better things to do than stand around looking at nothing.’

‘Who were you talking to just now?’

‘God. Me and God, we talk to each other all the time.’

‘Really? Next time you talk to him, why don’t you give him my regards? Tell him I said hello.’

‘I’ll do that – if I happen to think of it.’ And then the shabby old fellow shambled on, continuing his conversation with the empty air around him.

Althalus went back to his camp, gathered up his belongings and set out across the rocky meadow toward the two low, rounded hills the old man had indicated. The sun rose, climbing above the snowy peaks of Kagwher, and the night chill began to fade.

The hills were darkly forested, and there was a narrow pass between them where the ground had been trampled by the hooves of deer and bison. Althalus moved carefully, stopping to examine the game-trail for any unusual footprints. This was a very peculiar place, and it was entirely possible that unusual creatures lived here. Unusual creatures sometimes had unusual eating habits, so it was time to start being very careful.

He moved on, stopping frequently to look around and listen, but the only sounds he heard were the songs of birds and the sluggish buzzing of a few insects just starting to come awake after the chill night.

When he reached the top of the pass, he stopped again for quite a long time to look to the north, not because there was anything to see in that direction, but because there wasn’t. The game-trail went on down through a narrow patch of grass toward the dead snag the crazy old man had mentioned, and then it stopped. There wasn’t anything at all beyond that tree. There were no distant mountain peaks and no clouds. There was nothing but sky.

The dead snag was bone-white, and its twisted limbs seemed to reach in mute supplication to the indifferent morning sky. There was something unnerving about that, and Althalus grew even more edgy. He walked very slowly across the intervening stretch of grass, stopping quite often to bring his eyes – and his spear – around to look toward his rear. He’d seen nothing threatening so far, but this was a very unusual place, and he didn’t want to take any chances.

When he reached the tree, he put his hand on it to brace himself and leaned out carefully to look down over the edge of what appeared to be a precipice of some kind.

There wasn’t anything down there but clouds.

Althalus had been in the mountains many times before, and he’d frequently been in places that were above the clouds, so looking down at the tops of them wasn’t really all that unusual. But these clouds stretched off to the north with absolutely no break or occasional jutting peak for as far as he could see. The world ended right here, and there was nothing past here but clouds.

He stepped back from the tree and looked around. There were rocks lying here and there, so he lifted one that was about the size of his head, carried it back to the tree, and heaved it as far as he could out over the edge. Then he cocked his head to listen.

He listened for a long time, but he didn’t hear anything. ‘Well,’ he murmured ‘this must be the place.’

He stayed some distance back from the edge of the world and followed it off toward the northeast.

There were places where tumbling rock-slides had rolled down from nearby mountainsides to spill over the edge, and Althalus idly wondered if those sudden avalanches might have startled the stars. That thought struck him as funny for some reason. The notion of stars whirring off in all directions like a frightened covey of quail was somehow vastly amusing. The cold indifference of the stars sometimes irritated him.

In the late afternoon he took his sling and picked up several round stones from a dry creek-bed. There were hares and beaver-faced marmots about, and he decided that some fresh meat for supper might be an improvement over the tough strips of dried venison he carried in the pouch at his belt.

It didn’t take too long. Marmots are curious animals, and they have the habit of standing up on their hind legs beside their burrows to watch passing travelers. Althalus had a good eye, and he was very skilled with his sling.

He chose a small grove of stunted pines, built a fire, and roasted his marmot on a spit. After he’d eaten, he sat by his fire watching the pulsating, rainbow-colored light of God’s fire in the northern sky.

Then, purely on an impulse that came over him just after moon-rise, he left his camp and went over to the edge of the world.

The moon gently caressed the misty cloud-tops far below, setting them all aglow. Althalus had seen this before, of course, but it was different here. The moon in her nightly passage drinks all color from the land and sea and sky, but she could not drink the color from God’s fire, and the seething waves of rainbow light in the northern sky also burnished the tops of the clouds below. It seemed that they almost played there among the cloud-tops with the moon’s pale light encouraging the amorous advances of the rainbow fire. All bemused by the flicker and play of colored light that seemed almost to surround and enclose him, Althalus lay in the soft grass with his chin in his hands to watch the courtship of the moon and the fire of God.

And then, far back among the jagged peaks of the land of the Kagwhers, he once again heard that solitary wailing that he’d heard before in Arum and again in the forest outside Nabjor’s camp. He swore, rose to his feet, and went back to his camp. Whatever it was out there was obviously following him.

His sleep was troubled that night. The fire of God in the northern sky and the wailing back in the forest were somehow all mixed together, and that mixing seemed to have a significance that he couldn’t quite grasp, no matter how he struggled with it. It must have been along toward dawn when his dreams of fire and wailing were banished by yet another dream.

Her hair was the color of autumn, and her limbs were rounded with a perfection that made his heart ache. She was garbed in a short, archaic tunic, and her autumn hair was plaited elaborately. Her features were somehow alien in their perfect serenity. On his recent trip to the civilized lands of the south, he had viewed ancient statues, and his dream-visitor’s face more closely resembled the faces of yore than the faces of the people of the mundane world. Her brow was broad and straight and her nose continued the line of her forehead unbroken. Her lips were sensual, intricately curved, and as ripe as cherries. Her eyes were large and very green, and it seemed that she looked into his very soul with those eyes.

A faint smile touched those lips, and she held her hand out to him. ‘Come,’ she said in a soft voice, ‘come with me. I will care for you.’

‘I wish I could,’ he found himself saying, and he cursed his tongue. ‘I would go gladly, but it’s very hard to get away.’

‘If you come with me, you will never return,’ she told him in her throbbing voice, ‘for we shall walk among the stars, and fortune will never betray you more. And your days will be filled with sun and your nights with love. Come, come with me, my beloved. I will care for you.’ And she beckoned and turned to lead him.

And, all bemused, he followed her, and they walked out among the clouds, and the moon and the fire of God welcomed them and blessed their love.

And when he awoke, there was a sour emptiness in him, and the taste of all the world was bitter, bitter.

He continued on toward the northeast for the next several days, and he almost hoped that at some point he might see a peak or even a low-lying shadow emerging from the perpetual cloud beyond the edge of the world to prove that this was not the place where everything ended, but nothing ever emerged, and he gradually and with great reluctance was forced to concede that the sharp brink he followed was indeed the very edge of the world and that there was nothing beyond but cloudy emptiness.

The days grew shorter and the nights more chill as Althalus followed the edge of the world, and he began to look at the prospect of a very unpleasant winter looming ahead. If he didn’t come to the house Ghend had described very soon, he’d have to pull back, seek some kind of shelter and lay in a supply of food. He decided that the first snowflake that touched his face would send him south in search of someplace to hole up until spring. He began to keep his eyes directed toward the south in search of a break in the mountains even as he continued along the edge of the world.

Perhaps it was because his attention was divided that he didn’t even see the house until he was quite close to it. The house was made of stone, which was unusual here on the frontier, where most houses were made of logs or thatched limbs. Moreover, such houses as he had seen in civilized lands had been made of limestone. This house, however, had been built of granite blocks, and granite would eat up the bronze saws which slaves used to cut limestone at a ferocious rate.

Althalus had never seen a house like this one before. The granite house at the edge of the world was enormous, bigger even than the log fort of Gosti Big Belly back in Arum or the temple of Apwos in Deika. It was so huge that it rivaled several nearby natural spires for sheer size. It wasn’t until he saw windows that he finally accepted the fact that it really was a house. Natural rock formations do break off into square shapes from time to time, but a natural formation with windows? Not very likely.

It was about noon on a short, overcast late autumn day when Althalus first saw the house, and he approached it with some caution. Ghend had told him that the house was unoccupied, but Ghend had probably never been here, since Althalus was still convinced that Ghend was afraid of the house.

The silent house stood on a promontory that jutted out from the edge of the world, and the only way to approach it would be to cross the drawbridge that had been built to span the deep chasm that separated the house from the narrow plateau that lined the precipice where the world ended. If the house were indeed deserted, the owner would certainly have devised some way to raise that drawbridge before he’d left. But the drawbridge was down, almost inviting entry. That didn’t ring true at all, and Althalus ducked down behind a moss-covered boulder to gnaw at a fingernail and consider options.

The day was wearing on, and he’d have to decide soon whether to just walk on in, or wait until night. Night was the native home of all thieves, but under these circumstances, might it not be safer to cross that bridge in the daylight? The house was unfamiliar, and if the place were indeed occupied, the people inside would be alert at night, and they would know exactly how to slip up behind him if he tried to sneak inside. Might it not be better to openly cross the bridge and even shout some kind of greeting to the unseen occupants? That might persuade them that he had no evil intent, and he was fairly sure that he could talk fast enough to keep them from immediately hurling him into the void beyond the promontory.

‘Well,’ he muttered. ‘I guess it’s worth a try.’ If the house were indeed empty, all he’d be wasting was his breath. He still had lots of that, and trying to sneak in at night might be a very good way to cut it short. A show of friendly innocence really seemed to be the best approach right now.

Acting on that, he rose to his feet, took up his spear, and walked on across the bridge, making no effort to conceal himself. If anyone were in the house watching, he’d certainly see Althalus, and a casual saunter across the bridge would shout louder than words that he had no unsavory motives.

The bridge led to a massive arch, and just beyond that arch lay an open place where the ground was covered with closely fitting flat stones with weeds growing up through the cracks. Althalus braced himself and took a tighter grip on his spear. ‘Ho!’ he shouted. ‘Ho, the house!’ He paused, listening intently.

But there was no answer.

‘Is anybody here?’ he tried again.

The silence was oppressive.

The main door of the house was massive. Althalus poked his spear at it a few times and found it to be quite solid. Once again the warning bell sounded inside his head. If the house had been empty for as long as Ghend had suggested, the door should have completely rotted away by now. All sorts of normal rules didn’t appear to be in force here. He took hold of the massive ring and pulled the heavy door open. ‘Is anybody here?’ he called once more.

He waited again, but again there was no answer.

There was a broad corridor leading back into the house beyond the doorway, and there were other corridors branching off from that main one at regular intervals, and there were many doors in each corridor. The search for the book would obviously take longer than he’d thought.

The light inside the house was growing dimmer, and Althalus was fairly certain that evening was rapidly descending. He was obviously running out of daylight. The first order of business now was to find a secure place to spend the night. He could begin his search of the house tomorrow.

He looked down one of the side corridors and saw a rounded wall at the far end, which hinted strongly that there might be a tower there. A tower room, he reasoned, would probably be more secure than a chamber on the ground floor, and the notion of security in this peculiar structure seemed fairly important just now.

He hurried down the hall and found a door somewhat larger than those he’d previously passed. He rapped his sword-hilt against the door. ‘Ho, in there?’ he called.

But of course there was no answer.

The door-latch was a bronze bar that had been designed to slip into a hole chipped deep into the stone door-frame. Althalus tapped its knob with the butt of his sword until it cleared the hole. Then he poked the point of his sword into the edge of the door, flipped the door open, and jumped back, sword and spear at the ready.

There was nobody behind that door, but there were steps leading upward.

The likelihood that these hidden steps just happened to be behind a door Althalus had just happened to notice in passing was very, very slim. The clever thief had a profound distrust of things that came about by sheer chance. Chance was almost always a trap of some kind, and if there was a trap in this house, there almost had to be a trapper.

There wasn’t much daylight left, however, and Althalus didn’t really want to meet whoever it was at night. He drew in a deep breath. Then he tapped the first step with the butt end of his spear to make certain that the weight of his foot wouldn’t bring something heavy down on top of him. It was slow going up the stairs that way, but the careful thief methodically checked every single step before he put his foot on it. Just because ten steps had been perfectly safe, there were no guarantees that the eleventh wouldn’t kill him, and the way his luck had been going lately, it was better to take some extra precautions.

He finally reached the door at the top of those hidden steps, and he decided not to rap this time. He tucked his sword under his left arm, slowly pushed the latch back until it came clear of the stone door-frame. Then he took hold of his sword again and nudged the door open with his knee.

Beyond the door there was one room, and one only. It was a large circular room, and the floor was as glossy as ice. The whole house was strange, but this particular room seemed stranger still. The walls were also polished and smooth, and they curved inward to form a dome overhead. The workmanship that had created this room was far more advanced than anything Althalus had ever seen before.

The next thing he noticed was how warm the room seemed to be. He looked around, but there was no fire-pit to explain the warmth. His new cloak wasn’t necessary here.

Reason told him that the room should not be warm, since there was no fire and there were four broad windows, one looking out in each direction. There should be cold air blowing in through each of those unglazed windows, but there was not. That wasn’t at all natural. Winter was coming, so the air outside was bitterly cold; but it wasn’t coming in, for some reason.

Althalus stood in the doorway carefully looking over every bit of the domed, circular room. There was what appeared to be a very large stone bed against the far wall, and the bed was covered with dark, thick-furred bison robes. There was a table made of the same polished stone as the floor and walls, and the table rested on a stone pedestal in the center of the floor, and there was an ornately carved stone bench beside that table.

And there, resting on the precise center of that gleaming tabletop, was the Book Ghend had described.

Althalus cautiously approached the table. Then he leaned his spear against it and, with his sword firmly gripped in his right hand, he rather hesitantly reached out with his left. Something about the way Ghend had handled that black-boxed Book of his back in Nabjor’s camp had suggested that books should be approached with extreme caution. He touched his fingers to the soft white leather of the Book’s enclosing box, and then he snatched his hand away to grab up his spear as he heard a faint sound.

It was a soft, contented sort of sound that seemed to be coming from the fur-covered bed. The sound was not exactly continuous, but seemed to change pitch slightly, going in and out almost like breathing.

Before he could investigate, though, something else happened that took his attention away from that soft sound. Twilight was deepening outside the windows, but it was not growing dark in this room. He looked up in astonishment. The dome above him had begun to glow, growing slowly brighter and perfectly matching its brightening to the pace of the increasing darkness outside. The only source of light other than the sun, the moon, and the shimmering curtain of God’s light at the edge of the world was fire, and the dome over his head was not on fire.

Then that contented sound coming from the bed grew even louder, and now that the light from the dome over his head was growing brighter, Althalus could see the source of that sound. He blinked, and then he almost laughed. The sound was coming from a cat.

It was a very dark cat, almost black, and it blended so well into the dark fur of the bison robes on the bed that his cursory glance when he’d first entered the room had missed it entirely. The cat lay on its belly with its head up, though its eyes were closed. Its front paws were stretched out on the robe in front of its short-furred chest, and they were making little kneading motions. The sound which had so baffled Althalus was the sound of purring.

Then the cat opened its eyes. Most of the cats Althalus had seen before had looked at him with yellow eyes. This cat’s eyes, however, were a brightly glowing green.

The cat rose to its feet and stretched, yawning and arching its sinuous back and hooking its tail up. Then the furry creature sat down, looking into the face of Althalus with its penetrating green eyes as if it had known him all its life.

‘You certainly took your own sweet time getting here’, the cat observed in a distinctly feminine voice. ‘Now why don’t you go shut that door you left standing wide open? It’s letting in the cold, and I just hate the cold.’

CHAPTER FIVE

Althalus stared at the cat in utter disbelief. Then he sighed mournfully and sank down onto the bench in absolute dejection. His luck hadn’t been satisfied with everything else she’d done to him. Now she was twisting the knife. This was why Ghend had hired somebody else to steal the Book instead of doing it himself. The House at the End of the World didn’t need guards or hidden traps to protect it. It protected itself and the Book from thieves by driving anyone who entered it mad. He sighed and looked reproachfully at the cat.

‘Yes?’ she said with that infuriatingly superior air all cats seem to have. ‘Was there something?’

‘You don’t have to do that anymore,’ he told her. ‘You and this House have already done what you’re supposed to do. I’ve gone completely insane.’

‘What in the world are you talking about?’

‘Cats can’t talk. It’s impossible. You aren’t really talking to me, and now that I think about it, you’re probably not really even there. I’m seeing you and hearing you talk because I’ve gone crazy.’

‘You’re being ridiculous, you know.’

‘Crazy people are ridiculous. I met a crazy man on my way here, and he went around talking to God. Lots of people talk to God, but that old fellow believed that God talked back to him.’ Althalus sighed mournfully. ‘It’ll probably all be over before long. Since I’m crazy now, it shouldn’t be very long until I throw myself out of the window and fall on down through the stars forever and ever. That’s the sort of thing a crazy man would do.’

‘What do you mean by “fall forever”?’

‘This House is right at the end of the world, isn’t it? If I jump out that window, I’ll just fall and fall through all that nothing that’s out there.’

‘Whatever gave you the ridiculous idea that this is the end of the world?’

‘Everybody says it is. The people here in Kagwher won’t even talk about it, because they’re afraid of it. I’ve looked out over that edge, and all there is down there is clouds. Clouds are part of the sky, so that means that this edge is the place where the world ends and the sky starts, doesn’t it?’

‘No,’ she replied, absently licking one of her paws and washing her face. ‘That’s not what it means at all. There is something down there. It’s a long way down, but it is there.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s water, Althalus, and what you saw when you looked over that edge is fog. Fog and clouds are more or less the same thing – except that fog’s closer to the ground.’

‘You know my name?’ That surprised him.

‘Well, of course I know your name, you ninny. I was sent here to meet you.’

‘Oh? Who sent you?’

‘You’re having enough trouble holding onto your sanity already. Let’s not push you off any edges with things you aren’t ready to understand just yet. You might as well get used to me, Althalus. We’re going to be together for a long, long time.’

He shook off his momentary dejection. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve had just about enough of this. It’s been just wonderful talking with you, but if you’ll excuse me now, I think I’ll just take the Book and go. I’d love to stay and chat some more, but winter’s going to be snapping at my tail feathers all the way home as it is.’

‘And just how did you plan to leave?’ she asked calmly as she started to wash her ears.

He turned sharply to look around. But the door through which he had entered the room wasn’t there any more. ‘How did you do that?’

‘We won’t be needing it any more – for a while at least – and it was letting in the cold air, since you were too lazy to close it behind you when you came in.’

A brief panic clutched at the thief’s throat. He was trapped. The Book had lured him into this place, and now the cat had trapped him, and there was no way out. ‘I think I’ll kill myself,’ he said mournfully.

‘No you won’t,’ she said quite calmly, beginning to wash her tummy. ‘You can try, if you like, but it won’t work. You can’t leave, you can’t jump out of the window, and you can’t stab yourself with your sword or your knife or your spear. You might as well get used to it, Althalus. You’re going to stay right here with me until we’ve done what we’re supposed to do.’

‘Then I can leave?’ he asked hopefully.

‘You’ll be required to leave. We have things we need to do here, and then there are other things that have to be done in other places, so you’ll have to go do them.’

‘What are we supposed to do here?’

‘I’m supposed to teach, and you’re supposed to learn.’

‘Learn what?’

‘The Book.’

‘How to read it, you mean?’

‘That’s part of it.’ She began to wash her tail, hooking it up to her tongue with one curved paw. ‘After you learn how to read it, you have to learn how to use it.’

‘Use?’

‘We’ll get to that in time. You’re having enough trouble here already.’

‘I’ll tell you something right here and now,’ he said hotly. ‘I am not going to take any orders from a cat.’

‘Yes, actually you will. It may take you a while to come around, but that’s all right, because we’ve got all the time in the world.’ She stretched and yawned. Then she looked herself over. ‘All nice and neat,’ she said approvingly. Then she yawned again. ‘Did you have any other silly announcements you’d like to make? I’ve finished everything that I have to say’

The light in the dome overhead began to grow dim.

‘What’s happening?’ he demanded sharply.

‘Now that I’ve got my fur all nice and neat, I think I’ll take a little nap.’

‘You just woke up.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything? Since you’re obviously not ready to do what you’re supposed to do, I might as well sleep for a while. When you change your mind, wake me up and we’ll get started.’ And then she settled back down on the thick-furred bison robes and closed her eyes again.

Althalus spluttered to himself for a bit, but the sleeping cat didn’t so much as twitch an ear. Finally he gave up and rolled himself up in his cloak near the wall where the door had been, and he too went to sleep.

Althalus held out for several days, but his profession had made him a high-strung sort of man, and the forced inactivity in this sealed room was beginning to fray at his nerves. He walked around the room several times and looked out the windows. He discovered that he could put his hand through them – or his head – quite easily, but when he tried to lean out, something that he couldn’t see was in his way. Whatever that something was kept out the much colder air outside. There were so many things about this room that couldn’t be explained, and the thief’s curiosity finally got the best of him. ‘All right,’ he said to the cat one morning as daylight began to stain the sky, ‘I give up. You win.’

‘Of course I won,’ she replied, opening her bright green eyes. ‘I always do.’ She yawned and stretched sinuously. ‘Now why don’t you come over here so that we can talk?’

‘I can talk from right here.’ He was a little wary about getting too close to her. It was clear that she could do things he couldn’t understand, and he didn’t want her to start doing them to him.

Her ears flicked slightly and she lay back down. ‘Let me know when you change your mind,’ she told him. And then she closed her eyes again.

He muttered some choice swear-words, and then he gave up, rose from the bench beside the table and went to the fur-robed bed. He sat down, reached out rather tentatively and touched her furry back with his hand to make sure that she was really there.

‘That was quick,’ she noted, opening her eyes again and starting to purr.

‘There’s not much point in being stubborn about it. You’re obviously the one who’s in control of things here. You wanted to talk?’

She nuzzled at his hand. ‘I’m glad you understand,’ she said, still purring. ‘I wasn’t ordering you around just to watch you jump, Althalus. I’m a cat for now, and cats need touching. I need to have you near me when we talk.’

‘Then you haven’t always been a cat?’

‘How many cats have you come across who know how to talk?’

‘You know,’ he bantered, ‘I can’t for the life of me remember the last time.’

She actually laughed, and that gave him a little glow of satisfaction. If he could make her laugh, she wasn’t entirely in control of the situation here.

‘I’m not really all that hard to get along with, Althalus,’ she told him. ‘Pet me now and then and scratch my ears once in a while, and we’ll get along just fine. Is there anything you need?’

‘I’ll have to go outside to hunt food for us before long’, he said, trying to sound casual about it.

‘Are you hungry?’

‘Well, not right now. I’m sure I will be later, though.’

‘When you’re hungry, I’ll see to it that you have something to eat.’ She gave him a sidelong look. ‘You didn’t really think you could get away that easily, did you?’

He grinned. ‘It was worth a try.’ He picked her up and held her.

‘You aren’t going anywhere without me, Althalus. Get used to the idea that I’m going to be with you for the rest of your life – and you’re going to live for a very, very long time. You’ve been chosen to do some things and I’ve been chosen to make sure you do them right. Your life’s going to be much easier once you accept that.’

‘How did we get chosen – and who did the choosing?’

She reached up and patted his cheek with one soft paw. ‘We’ll get to that later’, she assured him. ‘You might have a little trouble accepting it right at first. Now then, why don’t we get started?’ She hopped down from the bed, crossed to the table, and without any seeming effort leaped up and sat on the polished surface. ‘Time to go to work, pet,’ she said. ‘Come over here and sit down while I teach you how to read.’

The ‘reading’ involved the translation of stylized pictures, much as it had in Ghend’s Book. The pictures represented words. That came rather easily with concrete words such as ‘tree’, or ‘rock’, or ‘pig’. The pictures that represented concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, or ‘honesty’, were more difficult.

Althalus was adaptable – a thief almost has to be – but the situation here took some getting used to. Food simply appeared on the table whenever he grew hungry. It startled him the first few times it happened, but after a while, he didn’t even pay attention to it any more. Even miracles become commonplace if they happen often enough.

Winter arrived at the edge of the world, and as it settled in, the sun went away and perpetual night arrived. The cat patiently explained it, but Althalus only dimly understood her explanation. He could accept it intellectually, but it still seemed to him that the sun moved around the earth instead of the other way around. With the coming of that endless night, he lost all track of days. When you get right down to it, he reasoned, there simply weren’t any days any more. He stopped looking out the windows altogether. It was almost always snowing anyway, and snow depressed him.

He was making some progress with his reading. After he’d come across one of the pictures often enough, he automatically recognized it. Words became the center of his attention.

‘You weren’t always a cat, were you?’ he asked his companion once when the two of them were lying on the fur-covered bed after they’d eaten.

‘I thought I’d already told you that,’ she said.

‘What were you before?’

She gave him a long, steady look with her glowing green eyes. ‘You aren’t quite ready for that information yet, Althalus. You’re fairly well settled down now. I don’t want you to start bouncing off the walls the way you did when you first arrived.’

‘Did you have a name – before you became a cat, I mean?’

‘Yes. You probably wouldn’t be able to pronounce it, though. Why do you ask?’

‘It just doesn’t seem right for me to keep calling you “cat”. That’s like saying “donkey” or “chicken”. Would it upset you if I gave you a name?’

‘Not if it’s a nice name. I’ve heard some of the words you use when you think I’m asleep. I wouldn’t like one of those.’

‘I sort of like “Emerald”, because of your eyes.’

‘I could live with that, yes. I had a very nice emerald once – before I came here. I used to hold it up in the sunlight to watch it glow.’

‘Then you had arms before you became a cat, and hands as well,’ he said shrewdly.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. Now would you like to make some guesses about how many and where they were attached to me?’ She gave him an arch look. ‘Stop fishing, Althalus. Someday you’ll find out who I really am, and it might surprise you, but you don’t need to know that right now.’

‘Maybe I don’t,’ he said slyly, ‘but every now and then, you make a slip, and I keep track of those slips. It won’t be too long before I know pretty much what you used to be.’

‘Not until I’m ready for you to know, you won’t,’ she told him. ‘You need to concentrate right now, Althalus, and if I used my real form here in the House, you wouldn’t be able to do that.’

‘That bad?’

She snuggled up against him and started to purr. ‘You’ll see, pet,’ she said. ‘You’ll see.’

Despite her rather superior attitude – which Althalus strongly suspected had been a part of her original nature – Emerald was an affectionate creature who always wanted to be in close physical contact with him. He slept on the thickly furred bison robes on the stone bed, and she always snuggled up to him, purring contentedly. Right at first he didn’t care for that, so he made a practice of covering himself with his wool cloak and holding it tightly around his neck. Emerald would sit quite calmly at the foot of the bed watching him. Then, as he started to drift off to sleep and his grip relaxed, she would silently creep up the bed until she was just behind his head. Then she would skillfully touch her cold, wet nose to the back of his neck, and Althalus would automatically flinch away from that surprising touch. That was all she needed to burrow down under the cloak, and she would settle down against his back and purr. Her purring was really very soothing, so he didn’t mind having her there. She seemed to get a great deal of entertainment out of the game, though, so Althalus continued to clench his cloak up around his neck so that she could surprise him in the same way each time they slept. It didn’t really cost him anything, and as long as it amused her . . .

She had one habit, though, that he really wished she’d get over. Every so often, Emerald seemed to develop an overpowering urge to bathe his face – usually when he was sound asleep. His eyes would suddenly pop open, and he’d realize that she had her paws firmly wrapped half-way around his head to hold him in place while she licked him from chin to forehead with her rough, wet tongue. He tried to jerk away from her the first few times, but as soon as he started to move, she’d flex her paws slightly, and her claws would come out. He got the point almost immediately. He didn’t really care for those impromptu baths, but he learned to endure them. There are always adjustments to be made when two creatures set up housekeeping together, and – aside from a few bad habits – Emerald wasn’t really all that hard to get along with.

Although the permanent night which blanketed the far north had taken away anything he could really call ‘day’, Althalus was fairly sure that the routine they followed probably coincided rather closely with the rising and setting of the sun farther to the south. He had no real reason for that belief and no way to verify it, but it seemed to him that it made more sense to think of it that way.

His ‘days’ were spent at the table with the Book open before him and with Emerald seated beside the Book, watching. Their conversations were largely limited to his pointing at an unfamiliar symbol and asking, ‘What’s this one mean?’ She would tell him, and he’d stumble along until he came to another unintelligible picture. The parchment sheets were loose inside the white leather box, and Emerald became very upset if he got them back in the wrong order. ‘It doesn’t make any sense if you mix them up like that,’ she’d scold him.

‘A lot of it doesn’t make sense anyway.’

‘Put them back the way you found them.’

‘All right, all right. Don’t tie your tail in a knot.’ That remark always seemed to trigger one of their little mock tussles. Emerald would lay her ears back, crouch low over her front paws and, with her bottom raised up and swinging back and forth ominously, her tail swished. Then she’d leap on his hand and mouth it. She’d never extend her claws and, though she growled terribly, she never actually bit him.

His best response to that was to take his other hand and thoroughly stir up her fur. She seemed to hate that, since it took her quite a while to comb everything back in place with her tongue.

Since Emerald was a cat – at least for right now – she had a keen sense of smell, and she insisted that Althalus should wash frequently – every time he turned around, it seemed. A large tiled tub filled with steaming water would quite suddenly appear near their bed, and after the first few times, Althalus would sigh, rise from his seat and begin removing his clothes. In the long run, he’d found, it was easier to bathe than it was to argue with her. As time went on, he even began to enjoy soaking in hot water before supper every day.

A peculiar notion came to him that winter, brought on perhaps by the continual darkness. He was still not entirely convinced that he wasn’t crazy, and, as insanity usually was, his had been brought on because he’d missed his time to die – just as the madness of the old man who’d talked to God had been. But maybe he hadn’t missed it after all. What if somewhere back in Hule, or maybe after he’d come up into the mountains of Kagwher, someone had slipped up behind him with an axe and chopped his head open, and he was dead? If it’d happened quickly enough, he wouldn’t have even realized it, so his ghost had just kept on walking. His body was probably lying somewhere with its brains dribbling out of its ears, but his ghost had continued on toward this House, totally unaware that he was really dead. It hadn’t been Althalus who’d encountered the crazy man who talked to God, and he hadn’t really reached the edge of the world and watched the fire of God. That was just something his ghost had thought up. Now his ghost had reached its final destination, and it would remain here in this closed room with Emerald and the Book forever. If his theory were correct, he’d crossed over into the afterlife. Everyone knows that the afterlife is filled with all sorts of strange things, so there was no point in getting excited about a room that stayed warm and comfortable and well-lighted without any trace of fire, and no real need to start bellowing, ‘impossible’ every time he turned around and something unusual happened. The whole business was just his own personal afterlife.

All things considered, though, this particular afterlife wasn’t so bad. He was warm and well-fed, and he had Emerald to talk to. He might have wished that there was some of Nabjor’s mead around someplace, or that some sister of the naughty-eyed girl in Nabjor’s camp might pay him a call now and then, but as time went on, those things became less and less important. He’d heard some pretty terrible stories about the afterlife, but if it didn’t get any worse than it was right now, Althalus felt that he could learn to be dead with it – he realized that ‘learn to live with it’ didn’t exactly fit in with his current situation. The one thing that nagged him was the total lack of any possibility of hunting down the man who’d killed him. Since he was now an insubstantial ghost, he wouldn’t be able to hack the rascal to pieces. But then he realized that he might just be able to haunt his unknown assailant, and that might be even more satisfying than butchering him.

He wondered if he might be able to persuade Emerald to agree to that. He could promise her that they could come back here to their private afterlife after he’d haunted his murderer to death, but he was almost positive that she wouldn’t put much store in promises made by the ghost of a man so famous for lying at every chance he got. After he’d thought his way through the idea, he decided that he wouldn’t mention the notion to his furry roommate.

Then the sun came back to the roof of the world, and the notion that he was dead began to fade. Eternal darkness sort of fit in with his concept of an afterlife, but the return of the sun made him almost feel that he’d been reborn.

He could read the Book fairly well by now, and he found it more and more interesting. One thing did sort of bother him, though. Late one spring afternoon, he laid his hand on the Book and glanced at Emerald, who appeared to be sleeping with her chin resting on her paws as she lay on the table beside the Book. ‘What’s his real name?’ he asked her.

Her green eyes were sleepy when she opened them. ‘Whose name?’ she asked.

‘The one who wrote the Book. He never comes right out and identifies himself.’

‘He’s God, Althalus.’

‘Yes, I know, but which one? Every land I’ve ever visited has its own god – or its own set of gods – and they all have different names. Was it Kherdhos – the god of the Wekti and Plakands? Or maybe Apwos, the god of Equero? What is his name?’

‘Deiwos, of course.’

‘Deiwos? The god of the Medyos?’

‘Of course.’

‘The Medyos are the silliest people in the world, Emerald.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘You’d think that the people who worshiped the real true God would have better sense.’

She sighed. ‘It’s all the same God, Althalus. Haven’t you realized that by now? The Wekti and Plakands call him Kherdhos because they’re interested in their herds of sheep or cows. The Equeros call him Apwos, because they concentrate most of their attention on the lakes. The Medyos are the oldest people in this part of the world, and they brought the name with them when they first came here.’

‘Where did they come from?’

‘Off to the south – after they learned how to herd sheep and plant grains. After they’d lived in Medyo for a while, they expanded out into those other places, and the people in the new places changed God’s name.’ She rose to her feet and stretched and yawned. ‘Let’s have fish for dinner tonight,’ she suggested.

‘We had fish last night – and the night before.’

‘So? I like fish, don’t you?’

‘Oh, fish is all right, I suppose, but I get a little tired of it after we’ve eaten it three times a day for three straight weeks.’

‘Fix your own supper,’ she flared.

‘You know perfectly well that I don’t know how to do that yet.’

‘Then you’ll just have to take whatever I put on the table, won’t you?’

He sighed. ‘Fish?’ he asked with a certain resignation.

‘What a wonderful idea, Althalus! I’m so glad you thought of it’

There were many concepts in the Book that Althalus couldn’t understand, and he and Emerald spent many contented evenings talking about them. They also spent quite a bit of time playing. Emerald was a cat, after all, and cats like to play. There was a kind of studied seriousness about her when she played that made her absolutely adorable, and she filled up most of the empty places in his life. Every so often she’d do something while she was playing that was so totally silly that it seemed almost human. Althalus thought about that, and he came to realize that only humans could be silly. Animals generally took themselves far too seriously to even suspect that they were being ridiculous.

Once, when he was concentrating very hard on the Book, he caught a slight movement out of the corner of his eye and realized that she was creeping up on him. He hadn’t really been paying much attention to her, and she’d only let that go on for just so long before she’d assert herself. She came creeping across the polished floor one furtive step at a time, but he knew that she was coming, so he was ready for her when she pounced, and half-turning, he caught her in mid-air with both hands. There was the usual mock tussle, and then he pulled her to his face and held her tightly against it. ‘Oh, I do love you, Emmy!’ he said.

She jerked her face back from his. ‘Emmy?’ she hissed. ‘EMMY!?!’

‘I’ve noticed that people do that,’ he tried to explain. ‘After they’ve been together for a while, they come up with pet names for each other.’

‘Put me down!’

‘Oh, don’t get all huffy.’

‘Emmy indeed! You put me down, or I’ll claw off one of your ears!’

He was fairly sure she wouldn’t, but he put her down and gave her a little pat on the head.

She turned sort of sideways, her fur bristling and her ears laid back. Then she hissed at him.

‘Why, Emmy,’ he said in mock surprise, ‘what a thing to say. I’m shocked at you. Shocked.’

Then she swore at him, and that really surprised him. ‘You’re actually angry, aren’t you?’

She hissed again, and he laughed at her. ‘Oh, Emmy, Emmy, Emmy,’ he said fondly.

‘Yes, Althie, Althie, Althie?’ she replied in a spiteful tone.

Althie?’

‘In your ear!’ she said. Then she went off to the bed to sulk.

He didn’t get any supper that night, but he sort of felt that it might have been worth it. He now had a way to respond when she started acting superior. One ‘Emmy’ would immediately erase the haughty look on her face and reduce her to near-inarticulate fury. Althalus carefully tucked that one up his sleeve for future use.

They declared peace on each other the next day, and life returned to normal. She fed him a near-banquet that evening. He understood that it was a peace-making gesture, so he complimented her after about every other bite.

Then, after they’d gone to bed, she washed his face for quite some time. ‘Did you really mean what you said yesterday?’ she purred.

‘Which particular thing I said were you thinking of?’ he asked.

Her ears went back immediately. ‘You said you loved me. Did you mean it?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that. Of course I meant it. You shouldn’t even have to ask.’

‘Don’t you lie to me.’

‘Would I do that?’

‘Of course you would. You’re the greatest liar in the whole world.’

‘Why, thank you, dear.’

‘Don’t make me cross, Althalus,’ she warned. ‘I’ve got all four paws wrapped around your head right now, so be very nice to me – unless you’d like to have your face on the back of your head instead of the front.’

‘I’ll be good,’ he promised.

‘Say it again, then.’

‘Say what, dear?’

‘You know what!’

‘All right, little kitten, I love you. Does that make you feel better?’

She rubbed her face against his and started to purr.

The seasons turned, as seasons always do, although the summers were short and the winters long up here on the roof of the world, and after they’d gone around several times, the past seemed to recede until it was only a dim memory. In time, the days plodded by unnoticed as Althalus struggled with the Book. He began to spend more and more of his time staring up at the glowing dome overhead as he pondered the strange things the Book had revealed.

‘What is your problem?’ Emerald demanded irritably once when Althalus sat at the table with the Book lying almost unnoticed on the polished surface in front of him. ‘You’re not even pretending to be reading.’

Althalus laid his hand on the Book. ‘It just said something I don’t understand,’ he replied. ‘I’m trying to work it out.’

She sighed. ‘Tell me what it is,’ she said in a resigned tone. ‘I’ll explain it to you. You still won’t understand, but I’ll explain anyway’

‘You can be very offensive, did you know that?’

‘Of course. I’m doing it on purpose – but you still love me, don’t you?’

‘Oh – I guess so.’

‘You guess so?’

He laughed. ‘Woke you up, didn’t I?’

She laid back her ears and hissed at him.

‘Be nice,’ he said, putting out his hand and scratching her ears. Then he looked back at the troublesome line. ‘If I’m reading this right, it says that all the things Deiwos has made are of the same value in his eyes. Does that mean that a man isn’t any more important than a bug or a grain of sand?’

‘Not exactly,’ she replied. ‘What it really means is that Deiwos doesn’t think of the separate parts of what he’s made. It’s the whole thing that’s important. A man’s only a small part of the whole thing, and he’s not really here for very long. A man’s born, lives out his life, and dies in so short a time that the mountains and stars don’t even notice him as he goes by.’

‘That’s a gloomy thought. We don’t really mean anything, do we? Deiwos won’t even miss us after the last one of us dies, will he?’

‘Oh, he probably will. There were things that used to be alive, but they aren’t any more, and Deiwos still remembers them.’

‘Why did he let them die out, then?’

‘Because they’d done everything they were supposed to do. They’d completed what they’d been put here to attend to, so Deiwos let them go. Then too, if everything that had ever lived were still here, there wouldn’t be any room for new things.’

‘Sooner or later, that’ll happen to men as well, won’t it?’

‘That’s not entirely certain, Althalus. Other creatures take the world as they find it, but man changes things.’

‘And Deiwos guides us in those changes?’

‘Why would he do that? Deiwos doesn’t tinker, pet. He sets things in motion and then moves on. All the mistakes you make are entirely yours. Don’t blame Deiwos for them.’

Althalus reached out and ruffled her fur.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that,’ she said. ‘It takes forever to get it all straight again.’

‘It gives you something to do between naps, Emmy,’ he told her, and then he went back to the Book.

CHAPTER SIX

The past receded even more in his memory as the Book claimed Althalus. By now he could read it through from end to end, and he’d done that so often that he could recite long passages from memory. The more it sank into his memory, the more it altered his perception of the world. Things that had seemed very important before he’d come here to the House at the End of the World were no longer relevant.

‘Was I really that small, Em?’ he asked his companion one evening in the early autumn of another of those interminable years.

‘What exactly are we talking about here, pet?’ she asked, absently washing her ears.

‘I was convinced that I was the greatest thief in the world, but along toward the end there, I wasn’t really much more than a common highwayman hitting people on the head so that I could steal their clothes.’

‘That comes fairly close, yes. What’s your point?’

‘I could have done more with my life, couldn’t I?’

‘That’s why we’re here, pet,’ she told him. ‘Whether you like it or not, you are going to do more with it. I’m going to see to that.’ She looked directly at him, her green eyes a mystery. ‘I think it’s time for you to learn how to use the power of the Book.’

‘What do you mean, “use”?’

‘You can make things happen with the Book. Where did you think your supper comes from every night?’

‘That’s your job, Em. It wouldn’t be polite for me to stick my nose into that area, would it?’

‘Polite or not, you are going to learn, Althalus. Certain words from the Book carry the sense of doing things – words like “chop” or “dig” or “cut”. You can do those things with the Book instead of with your back if you know how to use it. Right at first, you’ll need to be touching the Book when you do those things. After some practice, though, that won’t be necessary. The idea of the Book will serve the same purpose.’

‘The Book’s always going to be here, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the whole point, dear. The Book has to stay here. It wouldn’t be safe to take it out into the world, and you have things you have to do out there.’

‘Oh? What kind of things?’

‘Little things – saving the world, keeping the stars up in the sky where they belong, making sure that time keeps moving – things like that.’

‘Are you trying to be funny, Em?’

‘No, not really. We’ll get to those things later, though. Let’s try the easy ones first. Take off your shoe and throw it over by the bed. Then tell it to come back.’

‘I don’t think it’ll listen to me, Emmy.’

‘It will if you use the right word. All you have to do is put your hand on the Book, look at the shoe, and say “gwem”. It’s like calling a puppy’

‘That’s an awfully old-fashioned word, Emmy.’

‘Of course it is. It’s one of the first words. The language of the Book is the mother of your language. Your language grew out of it. Just try it, pet. We can talk about the changes of language some other time.’

He dubiously pulled off his shoe and tossed it over by the bed. Then he laid his hand on the Book and said ‘gwem’ rather half-heartedly.

Nothing happened.

‘So much for that as an idea,’ he muttered.

‘Command, Althie,’ Emerald said in a weary tone. ‘Do you think a puppy would listen if you said it that way?’

‘Gwem!’ he sharply commanded his shoe.

He didn’t really expect it, so he wasn’t ready to fend the shoe off, and it hit him squarely in the face.

‘It’s a good thing we didn’t start with your spear,’ Emmy noted. ‘It’s usually best to hold your hands out when you do that, Althalus. Let the shoe know where you want it to come to.’

‘It actually works!’ he exclaimed in astonishment.

‘Of course it does. Didn’t you believe me?’

‘Well – sort of, I guess. I didn’t think it’d happen quite that fast, though. I kind of expected the shoe to come slithering across the floor. I didn’t know it was going to fly.’

‘You said it just a little too firmly, pet. The tone of voice is very important when you do things this way. The louder and more sharply you say it, the faster it happens.’

‘I’ll remember that. Getting kicked in the face with my own shoe definitely got my attention. Why didn’t you warn me about that?’

‘Because you don’t listen, Althie. It’s just a waste of breath to warn you about things. Now try it again.’

Althalus put miles on that shoe over the next several weeks, and he gradually grew more proficient at altering the tone of his voice. He also discovered that different words would make the shoe do other things. ‘Dheu’ would make it rise up off the floor and simply stand in front of him on nothing but air. ‘Dhreu’ would lower it to the floor again.

He was practising on that one day in late summer when an impish kind of notion came to him. He looked over at Emerald, who was sitting on the bed carefully washing her ears. He focused his attention on her, set his hand on the Book, and said ‘Dheu.’

Emerald immediately rose up in the air until she was sitting on nothing at all at about the same level as his head. She continued to scrub at her ears as if nothing had happened. Then she looked at him, and her green eyes seemed very cold and hard. Then she said ‘Bhlag!’ quite sharply.

The blow took Althalus squarely on the point of the chin, and it sent him rolling across the floor. It seemed to have come out of nowhere at all, and it had rattled him all the way down to his toes.

‘We don’t do that to each other, do we?’ Emerald said in an almost pleasant tone of voice. ‘Now put me down.’

His eyes wouldn’t seem to focus. He covered one of them with his hand so that he could see her and said ‘Dhreu’ in an apologetic sort of way.

Emerald settled slowly back to the bed. ‘That’s much better,’ she said. ‘Are you going to get up, or did you plan to lie there on the floor for a while?’ Then she went back to washing her ears.

He more or less gathered at that point that there were rules and that it wasn’t wise to break them. He also realized that Emerald had just demonstrated the next step. She hadn’t been anywhere near the Book when she’d knocked him across the room.

He continued to practice with his shoe. He was more familiar with it than with his other possessions, and it didn’t have any sharp edges, as some of the others had. Just to see if he could do it, he’d put a pair of wings on it, and it went flapping around the room blundering into things. It occurred to him that a flying shoe would have been a sensation in Nabjor’s camp or Gosti Big Belly’s hall. That had been a long time ago, though. He idly roamed back through his memory, trying to attach some number to the years he’d spent here in the House, but the number kept evading him for some reason.

‘How long have I been here, Em?’ he asked his companion.

‘Quite some time. Why do you ask?’

‘Just curious, I suppose. I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t here.’

‘Time doesn’t really mean anything here in this House, pet. You’re here to learn, and some of the things in the Book are very difficult. It took your mind a very long time to fully grasp them. When we came to one of those, I’d usually let your eyes sleep while your mind worked. It was a lot quieter that way. Your arguments were with the Book, not with me.’

‘Let me see if I understand this. Are you saying that there’s been times when I went to sleep and didn’t wake up for a week or more?’

She gave him one of those infuriatingly superior looks.

‘A month?’ he asked incredulously.

‘Keep going,’ she suggested.

‘You’ve put me to sleep for years on end?’ he almost screamed at her.

‘Sleep’s very good for you, dear. The nice thing about those particular naps is that you don’t snore.’

‘How long, Emmy? How long have I been penned up in here with you?’

‘Long enough for us to get to know each other.’ Then she heaved one of those long-suffering sighs. ‘You must learn to listen when I tell you something, Althalus. You’ve been here in this House long enough to learn how to read the Book. That didn’t really take too long, though. It was learning to understand the Book that took you so much time. You haven’t quite finished that yet, but you’re coming along.’

‘That means that I’m very, very old, doesn’t it?’ He reached up, took hold of a lock of his hair and pulled it down so that he could see it. ‘I can’t be that old,’ he scoffed. ‘My hair hasn’t even turned white yet’

‘Why would it do that?’

‘I don’t know. It just does. When a man gets old, his hair turns white.’

‘That’s the whole point, Althalus. You haven’t grown old. Nothing changes in this House. You’re still the same age as you were when you first came here.’

‘What about you? Are you still the same age you were as well?’

‘Didn’t I just say that?’

‘If I remember right, you told me once that you haven’t always been here.’

‘Not always, no. I was somewhere else a long time ago, but then I came to wait for you.’ She glanced back over her shoulder at the mountain peaks looming out beyond the south window. ‘Those weren’t there when I first came,’ she added.

‘I thought mountains lasted forever.’

‘Nothing lasts forever, Althalus – except me, of course.’

‘The world must have been very different back in the days before those mountains,’ he mused. ‘Where did people live back then?’

‘They didn’t. There weren’t any people then. There were other things here instead, but they died out. They’d done what they were supposed to do, so Deiwos let them go. He still misses them, though.’

‘You always talk about Deiwos as if you knew him personally.’

‘Yes, as a matter of fact we’re very well acquainted.’

‘Do you call him “Deiwos” when you’re talking together?’

‘Sometimes. When I really want to get his attention I call him “brother”.’

‘You’re God’s sister?’ That startled Althalus.

‘Sort of.’

‘I don’t think I want to push that any further. Let’s go back to what we were talking about before, Em. Just how long have I been here? Give me a number.’

‘Two thousand, four hundred, and sixty seven – as of last week.’

‘You’re just making that up, aren’t you?’

‘No. Was there anything else?’

He swallowed very hard. ‘Some of those naps I took were a lot longer than I’d thought they were, weren’t they? That makes me just about the oldest man in the world, doesn’t it?’

‘Not quite. There’s a man named Ghend who’s quite a bit older than you are.’

‘Ghend? He didn’t really look all that old to me.’

Her green eyes went very wide. ‘You know Ghend?’

‘Of course I do. He’s the one who hired me to come here and steal the Book.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she almost shrieked at him.

‘I must have.’

‘No, as a matter of fact, you didn’t. You idiot! You’ve been sitting on that for the last twenty-five hundred years!’

‘Calm down, Emmy. We’re not going to get anywhere if you turn hysterical.’ He gave her a long, level look. ‘I think it’s just about time for you to tell me exactly what’s going on, Emmy – and don’t try to put me off this time by telling me that I won’t understand or that I’m not ready to know certain things yet. I want to know what’s going on and why it’s so important.’

‘We don’t have time for that.’

He leaned back on his bench. ‘Well, we’re just going to take the time, little kitten. You’ve been treating me like a house-pet for quite a while now. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t have a tail, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t wag it every time you snapped your fingers. You don’t have me completely tamed, Em, and I’m telling you right here and now that we aren’t going any further until you tell me just exactly what’s going on.’

Her look was very cold. ‘What is it that you want to know?’ Her tone was almost unfriendly.

He laid one hand on the Book. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we start out with everything? Then we can move on from there.’

She glared at him.

‘No more deep, dark secrets, Emmy. Start talking. If things are as serious as you seem to think they are, then be serious.’

‘Maybe you are ready to know what’s going on,’ she conceded. ‘How much do you know about Daeva?’

‘Just what it says in the Book. I’d never even heard of him before I came here. He’s very angry with Deiwos, I gather. Deiwos seems to be sorry that he feels that way, but he’s going to keep on doing what he’s doing whether Daeva likes it or not – probably because he has to.’

‘That’s a novel interpretation,’ she said. She mulled it over a bit. ‘Now that I think about it, though, there seems to be a lot of truth in it. Somehow you’ve managed to redefine the concept of evil. In your view, evil’s no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be. Deiwos thinks they’re supposed to be one way, and Daeva thinks they’re supposed to be another.’

‘I thought I just said that. It’s the business of making things that started the fight then, isn’t it?’

‘That might be an oversimplification, but it comes fairly close. Deiwos makes things because he has to make them. The world and the sky weren’t complete the way they were. Deiwos saw that, but Daeva didn’t agree. When Deiwos does things to make the world and the sky complete, it changes them. Daeva believes that’s a violation of the natural order. He doesn’t want things to change.’

‘What a shame. There’s not much he can do about it, though, is there? Once something’s been changed, it’s been changed. Daeva can’t very well go back and unchange it, can he?’

‘He seems to think so.’

‘Time only moves in one direction, Emmy. We can’t go back and undo something that happened in the past just because we don’t like the way it turned out’

‘Daeva thinks he can.’

‘Then both of his wheels just came off the axle. Time isn’t going to run backward just because he wants it to. The sea might run dry and the mountains might wear down, but time runs from the past to the future. That’s probably the only thing that won’t change.’

‘We can all hope that you’re right, Althalus, because if you aren’t, Daeva’s going to win. He’ll unmake everything Deiwos has made and return the earth and sky to what they were at the very beginning. If he can make time go backward, then things he does now will change things that happened in the past, and if he can change enough of the past, we won’t be here any more.’

‘What’s Ghend got to do with all of this?’ Althalus asked her suddenly.

‘Ghend was one of the early men who came to this part of the world about ten thousand years ago. That was before men had learned how to cook certain rocks to make copper or how to mix tin with copper to make bronze. All their tools and weapons were made of stone, and Ghend’s chief put him to work cutting down trees so that the tribe could plant grain. Ghend hated that, and Daeva approached him and persuaded him to abandon Deiwos and worship him instead. Daeva can be very persuasive when he wants to be. Ghend’s the high priest of the Demon Daeva, and the absolute master of Nekweros.’ Emerald looked up suddenly. Then she sinuously flowed down from the bed, crossed the floor and jumped up to the sill of the north window. ‘I should have known,’ she said in an irritated voice. ‘He’s doing it again.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Come here and see for yourself.’

He rose and crossed to the window. Then he stopped, staring incredulously. There was something out there, and there wasn’t supposed to be. The world didn’t seem to end there any more. ‘What is that?’ he asked, staring at what appeared to be a white mountain.

‘Ice,’ she replied. ‘This isn’t the first time it’s happened. Every so often Daeva and Ghend try this way to slow things down – usually when they think Deiwos is getting too far ahead of them.’

‘That’s a lot of ice, Em. When I was coming here, the clouds were a long way down. Did that water down there start rising?’

‘No. It froze solid a long time ago. It snows on it every winter, and the snow doesn’t melt any more. More snow piles up and presses down on it, and it turns to ice.’

‘How thick is it?’

‘About two miles – maybe three.’

‘I meant how thick, Em, not how far away.’

‘So did I. Once it gets thick enough, it’ll be above the level of what you call the edge of the world. Then it’ll start to move. It’ll grind down mountains and spill down onto the plains. Nothing can stop it, and man won’t be able to live in this part of the world any more.’

‘Have you seen this happen before?’

‘Several times. It’s just about the only way Ghend and Daeva have to interrupt what Deiwos is doing. We’re going to have to change our plans, Althalus.’

‘I didn’t know we had a plan.’

‘Oh, we’ve got a plan all right, pet. I just hadn’t gotten around to telling you about it yet. I thought we had more time.’

‘You’ve already had twenty-five hundred years, Em. How much more did you think you were going to need?’

‘Probably about another twenty-five hundred. If you’d told me about Ghend earlier, I might have been able to adjust things. Now we’re going to have to cheat. I just hope it doesn’t make Deiwos angry with me.’

‘Your brother’s awfully busy, Em,’ Althalus said piously. ‘We shouldn’t really pester him with all the picky little details, should we?’

She laughed. ‘My thought exactly, pet. We were made for each other.’

‘Are you only just now coming to realize that? The simplest way for us to cheat would probably be for me to just slip on over to Nekweros and kill Ghend, wouldn’t it?’

‘That’s an awfully blunt way to put it, Althalus.’

‘I’m a plain-spoken man, Em. All this dancing around is just a waste of time, because that’s what it’s going to come down to in the end, isn’t it? Ghend wanted me to come here and steal the Book so that he could destroy it. If I kill him, we can destroy his Book, and then Daeva has to go back and start all over.’

‘How did you find out about Daeva’s Book?’ she asked sharply.

‘Ghend showed it to me back in Nabjor’s camp.’

‘He’s actually carrying it around out in the real world? What’s he thinking of?’

‘Don’t ask me to tell you what somebody else is thinking, Em. My guess is that he knew that I’d never seen a Book before, so he brought one along to show me what they look like. The pictures in his Book weren’t at all like the ones in ours, though.’

‘You didn’t touch it, did you?’

‘Not the Book itself. He handed me one of the pages, though.’

‘The pages are the Book, Althalus. You’ve touched both Books with your bare hands?’ she demanded, shuddering.

‘Yes. Is that significant?’

‘The Books are absolutes, Althalus. They’re the source of ultimate power. Our Book is the power of pure light, and Ghend’s Book is the power of absolute darkness. When you touched that page from his Book, it should have totally corrupted you.’

‘I was moderately corrupt already, Em, but we can sort that out later. What do you think about my idea? I can slip across the border into Nekweros without anybody ever seeing me. Once I’ve put Ghend to sleep, I’ll burn his Book, and that’ll be the end of it, won’t it?’

‘Oh, dear,’ she sighed.

‘It is the simplest solution, Em. Why complicate things when you don’t have to?’

‘Because you probably wouldn’t get more than a mile past the border, pet. Ghend’s about seventy five hundred years ahead of you. He knows how to use his Book in ways you couldn’t even imagine. Using a Book is a very complicated process. You have to be so totally immersed in the Book that the words come to you automatically.’ She looked at him speculatively. ‘Do you really love me, Althalus?’ she asked.

‘Of course I do. You shouldn’t even have to ask. What’s that got to do with what we were just talking about?’

‘It’s crucial, Althalus. You have to love me totally. Otherwise, this won’t work.’

‘What won’t work?’

‘I think I know a way for us to cheat. Do you trust me, pet?’

‘Trust you? After all the times you’ve tried to creep up and pounce on me from behind? Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You’re sneaky, little kitten. I love you, dear, but I’m not foolish enough to trust you.’

‘That’s only playing, so it doesn’t count.’

‘What’s love and trust got to do with getting rid of Ghend and his Book?’

‘I know how to use our Book, and you don’t; but you can do things out there in your world, and I can’t.’

‘That sort of defines the problem, I guess. How do we get around it?’

‘We break down the barriers between us, but that means that we have to completely trust each other. I have to be able to get inside your mind so that I can tell you what you have to do and which word from the Book you have to use to do it.’

‘Then I just tuck you in my pocket and we go kill Ghend?’

‘It’s a little more complicated than that, Althalus. You’ll understand better, I think, once we’re inside each other’s minds. The first thing you have to do is empty your mind. Open it up so that I can get in.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Think about light – or dark – or empty. Turn your mind off.’

Althalus tried to empty his mind of thought, but that almost never works. The mind can be like an unruly child. Tell it to stop, and it works that much faster.

‘We’ll have to try something different,’ Emerald said, her ears laid back in irritation. ‘Maybe –?’ she said a bit uncertainly. ‘Go to the south window. I want you to look south at the mountains of Kagwher. Pick out the closest one and count the trees on it.’

‘Count trees? What for?’

‘Because I said so. Don’t ask silly questions, just do it.’

‘All right, Em, don’t get so excited.’ He stood up and went to the south window. The nearest peak was only a mile or so away, and he started counting the snow-covered trees up near the top. The snow blurred the outlines of the trees, and that made counting them very difficult.

‘Move over just a little.’ Her voice seemed to be murmuring in his right ear, and he jerked his head around in surprise. He couldn’t feel her on his shoulder, but he could almost feel her warm breath on the side of his face.

Emerald was still sitting on the bed a dozen feet away. ‘I asked you to move over, pet,’ her voice sounded inside his head. ‘I need a little more room.’

‘What are you doing?’ he exclaimed.

‘Shush. I’m busy.’

He felt a kind of surging inside his head as if something were moving around in there. ‘Quit fidgeting,’ her voice told him. ‘I’m not taking up that much room.’

Then the sense of intrusion began to fade and he felt the gentle rumble of her purring within his mind. ‘Now you are mine,’ her purring gloated.

‘What’s going on?’ he demanded in alarm.

‘You don’t have to talk out loud any more, pet,’ she breathed inside his mind. ‘Now that I’m in here, I can hear your thoughts; and you can hear mine, if you’ll just take the trouble to listen.’

‘How did you do that?’

‘Just think the words, Althalus. There’s an awful echo in here when you think them and say them at the same time.’

‘Are you really in there?’ he sent his thought inward.

‘My awareness is. It’s also over on the bed, but it’s easy to be in two places at once with your mind.’ There was a kind of tickling sensation over his left ear. ‘It’s bigger in here than I thought it’d be. You’re more clever than I’d imagined, and you’re really rather poetic’.

‘Will you quit rummaging around in there?’

‘Not a chance, pet. Cats are curious, didn’t you know that?’

‘How did you manage to break through so quickly? I thought this was going to take a long time.’

‘So did I, to be honest. I was pushing at the barrier before you started counting. I couldn’t get through it, though. As soon as you started counting trees, the barrier went down.’

‘Does that mean that I’ll have to say, “one-two-three” every time I want to talk with you this way?’

‘Not any more, pet. I’m in now, and you’ll never get rid of me.’

‘It’s going to take some getting used to. I’ve never had somebody inside my head before.’

‘Is it really that unpleasant?’

‘Not really.’

‘Now I’ll be with you wherever you go.’

‘I wasn’t going to leave without you, Em. I’d been meaning to talk with you about that. I’m not going anywhere without you, kitten – even if that means that the world goes all to smash. The world doesn’t matter; you do.’

‘Please don’t say things like that, Althalus.’ Her voice inside his head had a melting sort of tone. ‘You’re making it very hard for me to think.’

‘Yes, I noticed that.’ He considered it. ‘When you get right down to it, though, this is where we’ve been going since I first came here, isn’t it? You started out by talking to me out loud, and a talking cat isn’t the most natural thing in the world. All we’ve done is take that one step further, so now you won’t have to waste all those thousands of years teaching me how to use the Book. We could leave right now if winter weren’t settling in.’ He looked at her with one raised eyebrow. ‘Now that you’ve opened the door, all sorts of things are coming through,’ he said aloud. ‘I don’t want to seem critical, Em, but you shouldn’t really be having those kinds of thoughts, you know.’

She glared at him for a moment. Then she jumped down from the bed and stalked away.

‘Are you blushing, Em?’ he asked mildly.

She turned and hissed at him.

PART TWO

The Gathering

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘Stay out of there, Althalus! What’s in there is none of your concern!’

‘You’re the one who opened the door, Em,’ he replied mildly. ‘It swings both ways, you know.’

‘Just mind your own business and quit snooping. You have to start paying closer attention. When I tell you which word to use, I’m sending a picture of what the word’s going to do. You must have the picture in your mind as well as the word. The word’s just a sound, pet. Nothing’s going to happen if all you’re doing is making noises. Now try it again.’

‘How much longer is it before we have to leave?’

‘About a month – six weeks at the most. As soon as spring arrives, we go, whether you’re ready or not.’

‘We have to pick something up in Arum?’

‘The Knife, yes.’

‘Is that the knife I’ll use when I kill Ghend?’

‘Will you stop that?’

‘Isn’t that what this is all about? Ghend’s interfering with what Deiwos is trying to do, so I’m supposed to get rid of him. It’s not really all that uncommon, Em. I’ve done it before. I’m primarily a thief, but I’ll take on a murder if the pay’s right. I thought that’s what you had in mind.’

‘It most certainly is not!’

‘It is a simple solution, Em, and you wouldn’t even have to get your little paws dirty. We go to Arum and pick up the knife. Then I go to Nekweros and cut Ghend’s throat with it.’

‘That’s not what it’s for, Althalus. It has writing on the blade. There are some people we’re going to need, and we’ll recognize them because they’ll be able to read that writing.’

‘Isn’t that just a little exotic? Talk to your brother and find out who these people are. Then we’ll chase them down and get on with this.’

‘It doesn’t work that way, Althalus. Situations change. If things have happened one way, we’ll need certain people. If they’ve happened in another way, we’ll need different people. Circumstances decide exactly who we’re going to need.’

‘Wouldn’t that mean that the writing on the knife-blade changes as the circumstances change.’

‘No. It’s not the writing that changes, pet. It’s the reading.’

‘Wait a minute. Doesn’t the writing mean the same thing to everybody?’

‘Of course it doesn’t. Everybody who reads any writing gets a different meaning from it. When you look at the writing on the blade, you’ll see a certain word. Other people will see a different word. Most people won’t see words at all – only decorations. The people we want will see a word, and they’ll say that word out loud.’

‘How will we know that they’ve read it right?’

‘We’ll know, pet. Believe me, we’ll know.’

The tag-end of winter dragged on for the next month or so, and then one night a warm wind blew in from the southwest, cutting the snow away almost overnight. Althalus stood at the south window watching the muddy brown streams overflowing their banks as they ripped their way down the mountainsides of Kagwher. ‘Did you do that, Em?’ he asked.

‘Do what?’

‘Call up that wind that’s melting all the snow.’

‘I don’t tamper with the weather, Althalus. Deiwos doesn’t like it when we do that.’

‘If we don’t tell him, maybe he won’t notice. We’re already cheating, Em. What’s one more little cheat? Maybe we should work on that a bit. You teach me how to use the Book, and I’ll teach you how to lie, cheat, and steal.’ He grinned at her.

‘That isn’t funny, Althalus!’ she flared.

‘I sort of liked it. How about a little wager on which of us can corrupt the other first?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Corruption’s a lot of fun, Em. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try it?’

‘You stop that!’

‘Think it over, Em, and let me know if you change your mind.’

They were both edgy for the next week while they waited for the spring runoff to subside. Then, after the mountain streams had returned to their banks, Althalus gathered up his weapons and they made ready to leave.

He pulled his cloak over his shoulders and looked around. ‘I guess that’s everything,’ he said. ‘I’m going to miss this place. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a permanent home. Do you think we’ll be able to come back some day?’

‘I think so, yes. Shall we leave?’

He picked her up, reached back and spread the hood of his cloak. ‘Why don’t you ride back there, Em?’ he suggested. ‘Once we get outside, I might need to have both hands free in a hurry.’

‘All right,’ her voice murmured in his head. She crawled up over his shoulder and down into the bag-like hood. ‘This should work out just fine.’

‘Will other people be able to see you when we get outside?’

‘If we want them to. If we don’t, they won’t.’

He looked at the curved wall and saw that she’d put the door back.

‘No questions or comments?’ Her silent voice sounded disappointed.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Em. How’s this?’ He threw himself back in an exaggerated posture of amazement. ‘Astonishing!’ he exclaimed. ‘There seems to be a hole in that wall! And somebody even covered that hole with a door! Would you fancy that?’

She hissed in his ear.

He laughed, opened the door, and started down the stairs. ‘Don’t forget to turn out the lights,’ he said as they went on down.

He remembered something as they were crossing the drawbridge. ‘This might not mean anything, Em,’ he said, ‘but I’ll tell you anyway, since you always seem to tie your tail in a knot when I mention something that doesn’t seem very important. There was some kind of animal following me when I first came here. I never saw it, but I could definitely hear the silly thing.’

‘What did it sound like?’

‘It was a sort of wailing sound, but not quite like the howl of a wolf. I heard it off and on all the way here.’

‘A kind of despairing scream? The kind of cry a man might make if he’d just fallen off a cliff?’

‘That comes close. It wasn’t a man, though.’

‘No, it probably wasn’t.’

‘Should I have hidden so that I could get a look at it?’

‘You wouldn’t have really wanted to see that creature. It’s something that Ghend sent to follow you, to make sure you were doing what he wanted you to do.’

‘Ghend and I are going to have a little talk about that one of these days. Will that thing still be waiting out there on the other side of the bridge?’

‘It might be. There’s not much we can do about it if it is.’

‘I could chase it down and kill it.’

‘You can’t kill it. It’s a spirit. Is killing always your first answer to every problem?’

‘Not every problem, Em, but I can kill things – or people – when the situation calls for it, and I don’t get all weepy about it. It’s part of the business I’m in. If I do my job right, I don’t have to kill anybody, but if something goes wrong – ah, well.’

‘You’re a terrible person, Althalus.’

‘Yes, I know. Isn’t that why you hired me?’

‘Hired?’

‘You want something done, and you want me to do it for you. One of these days before long we’ll have to discuss my wages.’

‘Wages?’

‘I don’t work for nothing, Em. That’s unprofessional.’ He continued on across the bridge, his spear at the ready.

‘You want gold, I suppose?’ she asked in an accusatory tone.

‘Oh, gold’s all right, I suppose, but I’d really rather get paid in love. Love can’t be counted, so it’s probably even more valuable than gold.’

‘You’re confusing me, Althalus.’

‘I was trying hard enough.’

‘You’re teasing me, aren’t you?’

‘Would I do that? Me? Little old loveable me?’

They reached the other side of the bridge, and Althalus stopped, listening intently for the wailing sound of Ghend’s sentinel, but the forest and mountains remained silent. ‘It must have gotten bored,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ her voice murmured dubiously.

He turned to take one last look at the House, but it wasn’t there any more. ‘Did you do that?’he demanded.

‘No, it takes care of that itself. You were able to see it when you came here because you were supposed to. Nobody else needs to see it, so they can’t. Let’s go to Arum, pet,’ she said. Then she stirred around inside the bag-like hood of his cloak until she was comfortable and went to sleep.

They covered about fifteen miles that day, traveling along the brink of the precipice Althalus still thought of as the edge of the world, despite the frozen glaciers that now loomed off to the north. As evening approached, they took shelter in a clump of stunted trees, and Althalus built a fire. Then Emmy provided him with the words that produced bread and a roasted chicken.

‘Not too bad,’ she observed, nibbling at a piece of chicken, ‘but isn’t it a little overdone?’

‘I don’t criticize your cooking, Em.’

‘Just a suggestion, pet. I wasn’t criticizing.’

He learned back against a tree, stretching his feet out to the fire. ‘I think there’s something you need to know, Em,’ he said after some reflection. ‘Before Ghend hired me to go steal the book, I was having a run of bad luck. It might have worn off by now, but nothing was working for me the way it was supposed to.’

‘Yes, I know. I thought the paper money in Druigor’s strongbox was a nice touch, didn’t you?’

He started at her. ‘It was you? You were behind all that bad luck?’

‘Of course. If luck hadn’t turned sour, you wouldn’t have even considered Ghend’s proposititon, would you?’

‘And before that, you were the one responsible for all the good luck I was so famous for?’

‘Well, of course it was me, pet. If you hadn’t had such a streak of good luck, you wouldn’t have even recognized bad luck when it came along, would you?’

‘You’re the goddess of fortune, aren’t you, Em?’

‘It’s a sideline, pet. We all play with the luck of certain people. It’s a way to get them to cooperate.’

‘I’ve been worshiping you for years, Emmy.’

‘I know, and it’s been just lovely.’

‘Wait a minute,’ he objected. ‘I thought you said that you didn’t know that it was Ghend who hired me to steal the Book. If you were perched right on my shoulder to play games with my luck, how could you have missed it?’

‘I wasn’t quite that close, Althalus. I knew that somebody was going to do it, but I didn’t know it’d be Ghend himself. I thought he’d have some underling take care of it – Argan, maybe, or Khnom. I’m sure it wouldn’t have been Pekhal.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Ghend’s underlings. I’m sure you’ll meet them before this is all over.’

‘You almost got me killed in Equero, you know. Some of those arrows came awfully close when I was running across Kweso’s garden.’

‘But they didn’t hit you, did they? I wasn’t going to let anything happen to you, pet.’

‘That notion of paper money was your idea, wasn’t it? Nobody could actually believe that paper’s worth anything.’

‘The idea’s been around for a while. People who are in the business of buying and selling things write little notes to each other. They’re a sort of promise to pay, and they’re not as cumbersome as gold is. The people of Maghu have sort of formalized the idea.’

‘Were you the one who arranged for Gosti Big Belly to lie to me about what was in his strongroom?’

‘No. That was probably Ghend. He had as much reason as I did to want you to be unlucky right then.’

‘I wondered why everything was turning so sour. I had people pouring trash on my luck from both sides of the fence.’

‘Isn’t it nice to have everybody so concerned about you?’

‘Then my luck has changed back now?’

‘Of course it has, Althalus. I’m your luck, and I’ll love you all to pieces – as long as you do just exactly as I tell you.’ She patted his cheek then with one soft paw.

A few days later they reached the place where the dead tree stood. ‘It’s still here?’ Althalus was a bit startled.

‘It’s a landmark, pet. We sort of like to keep it here as a reference point.’

They turned south there and traveled down through Kagwher for a week or so. Then late one afternoon they crested a hill and saw a rude village huddled in the next valley. ‘What do you think, Em?’ Althalus said back over his shoulder. ‘Should we go on in and talk with a few people? I’ve been out of touch for quite a while, so it might not be a bad idea to find out what’s happening in the world.’

‘Let’s not leave memories of our passing lingering behind us, pet. Ghend has eyes and ears everywhere.’

‘Good point,’ he agreed. ‘Let’s sleep here, then. We can slip past that village before daybreak tomorrow.’

‘I’m not really sleepy, Althalus.’

‘Of course not. You’ve been sleeping all day. I’m the one who had to do the walking, and I’m tired.’

‘All right, we’ll rest your poor little legs here, then.’

Althalus wasn’t really all that tired, however. There was something about the rude village below that had immediately caught his eye when he’d crested the hill. There was a corral on the southern edge of the village, and there were horses in that corral and a number of rude saddles laid over the top rail. It was still a long way to Arum, and riding would probably be faster – and easier – than walking.

He decided not to burden Emmy with his plan. He was a master thief, after all, so he was perfectly capable of stealing a horse and saddle without any help – or commentary.

He fixed supper, and after they’d eaten, they curled up under his cloak and went to sleep.

‘What are you doing?’ Emmy asked with a sleepy thought as he was preparing to leave not long after midnight.

‘I thought we should get an early start and slip past that village before the people woke up. Traveling at night’s the best way I know of to avoid being seen.’

‘You don’t mind if I sleep a bit longer, do you?’

‘Not at all, Em,’ he said. ‘Just curl up in your little pouch and go back to sleep.’

She squirmed around in the hood of his cloak as he started out. Then she got settled in and purred herself back to sleep.

She woke up rather abruptly, however, when Althalus nudged his new horse into a loping canter. ‘I suppose I should have guessed,’ she murmured.

‘We are on a sort of sacred mission, aren’t we, Em?’ he replied with a tone of high-minded justification. ‘We’re going out to save the world. It’s only right and proper that the people along the way should lend a hand, isn’t it?’

‘You’ll never change, will you, Althalus?’

‘Probably not, no. Go back to sleep, Em. I’ve got everything under control now.’

Once they were mounted, they made good time, and they crossed out of Kagwher into the vast forest of Hule a couple of days after Althalus had acquired the horse.

There were villages here and there in the deep wood of Hule now, and that offended Althalus. Hule was supposed to be wild, but now grubby little men had come here to contaminate it. The villages were squalid-looking collections of rude huts squatting on muddy ground and surrounded by garbage. They weren’t much to look at, but what really offended Althalus were the tree-stumps. These wretched intruders were cutting down trees. ‘Civilization,’ he muttered in tones of deepest contempt.

‘What?’ Emmy asked.

‘They’re cutting down trees, Em.’

‘Men do that, pet.’

‘Little men, you mean. Men who are afraid of the dark and invent ways to talk about wolves without actually saying the word “wolf”. Let’s get out of here. The sight of that trash-heap makes me sick.’

They passed a few other villages on their way south, and the opinion he’d formed about the people who lived in those villages didn’t improve very much.

His humor began to improve as they rode up into the foothills of Arum. He was fairly certain that no matter how civilized man became, it was highly unlikely that they’d come up with a way to chop down mountains.

They rode some distance up into the foothills, and on the second day as evening settled over the mountains, Althalus rode back from the narrow track a ways and set up their night’s camp in a small clearing.

‘Could we have fish tonight, pet?’ Emmy asked once he had their fire going.

‘I was sort of thinking about beef.’

‘We had beef last night.’

He was about to say something, but suddenly laughed instead.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘Haven’t we had this conversation before? It seems that I can remember long talks about having the same thing six or eight days in a row.’

‘That was different.’

‘I’m sure it was,’ he gave in. ‘All right, dear, if you want fish, we’ll have fish.’

She began to purr in happy anticipation.

Althalus slept well that night, but just before dawn he awoke quite suddenly as some almost forgotten instinct warned him of approaching danger. ‘Somebody’s coming, Em,’ he jarred her awake with an urgent thought.

Her green eyes opened immediately, and he felt her send out a searching thought. Then she hissed.

‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded.

‘Pekhal! Be careful, Althalus. He’s very dangerous.’

‘Didn’t you tell me that he’s one of Ghend’s people?’

‘Ghend’s animal would come closer. There isn’t much humanity left in Pekhal. I’m sure he’ll try to kill you.’

‘Lots of people have tried that, Em.’ He rolled out from under his cloak, reaching for his bronze-tipped spear.

‘Don’t try to fight him, Althalus. He’s a total savage and very vicious. He’ll try to talk his way in close enough to reach you with his sword. I’d imagine that he’s looking for breakfast along about now.’

‘He eats people?’ Althalus exclaimed.

‘That’s one of his nicer habits.’

‘I think I remember a way to make him keep his distance,’ Althalus said with a bleak sort of grin.

There was a crashing sound back in the undergrowth, and Althalus slipped behind a tree to watch.

The man was huge, and his face was almost subhumanly brutish. He was bulling his way through the bushes, and he was swinging a large sword that obviously wasn’t made of bronze. ‘Where are you?’ he roared in a hoarse, animal-like voice.

‘I’m more or less here,’ Althalus replied. ‘I don’t think you need to come any closer.’

‘Show yourself!’

‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘I want to see you!’

‘I’m not really all that attractive.’

‘Show yourself!’ the beast roared again.

‘If you say so, neighbor,’ Althalus replied mildly. He stepped out from behind the tree, looking intently at the heavily armed savage. Then he said, ‘Dheu.’

The brute rose up off the ground with a startled oath.

‘Just a precaution, friend,’ Althalus explained urbanely. ‘You seem a bit bad-tempered this morning – somebody you ate, no doubt.’

‘Put me down!’

‘No, I don’t think we’ll do it that way. You’re fine just where you are.’

The grotesque brute began swinging his sword at the air around him as if trying to slash at whatever was holding him suspended.

‘You don’t mind if I have a look at that, do you?’ Althalus asked. Then he held out his hand and said, ‘Gwem!’

The huge sword spun out of the giant’s hand and then drifted obediently down to Althalus. ‘Very impressive,’ Althalus said, hefting the heavy weapon.

‘You give that back!’

‘No. Sorry. You don’t really need it.’ Althalus stuck the heavy sword into the ground and then neatly filched the brute’s dagger and purse from his belt as well.

Pekhal began roaring, his face contorted with savage fury.

Althalus lifted his hand and said, ‘Dheu’ again.

Pekhal rose about another twenty feet into the air. His face blanched, his eyes went very wide, and he stopped moving entirely.

‘How’s the view from up there?’ Althalus was beginning to enjoy this. ‘Would you like to take a look at things from a few miles higher up? I can fix that, if you wish.’

Pekhal gaped at him, his eyes filled with sudden terror.

‘Do we understand each other, friend?’ Althalus asked. ‘Now, then, the next time you see Ghend, give him my regards and tell him to quit playing around like this. I don’t work for him any more, so he has no claim on me.’ Althalus picked up his new purse and dagger. He tucked the purse in his pocket, pulled his new sword out of the turf, and tapped its heavy blade with the hilt of the dagger. It made a ringing sound. Then he tested the sword-edge with his thumb. It seemed much sharper than his bronze sword. ‘Very nice,’ he murmured. Then he looked up at Pekhal. ‘I certainly want to thank you for the gifts, friend,’ he said pleasantly. ‘All I have to give you in return are my old weapons, but since you’re so much nobler than I am, I’m sure you won’t mind.’ He shed his bronze weapons. ‘We’ll have to do this again one of these days,’ he called. ‘You have yourself a very nice day now, hear?’

‘Are you going to just leave him up there?’ Emmy asked critically.

‘Oh, I imagine he’ll set along about the same time the sun does, Em. If he doesn’t come down today, he probably will tomorrow – or the next day. Why don’t we have a bite of breakfast and move on?’

She was trying to stifle her laughter without too much success. ‘You’re awful!’ she chuckled.

‘Fun, though, don’t you think? Is that half-wit the best that Ghend can come up with?’

‘Pekhal’s the one Ghend summons when brute strength and savagery seem to be called for. The others are much more dangerous.’

‘Good. This might get kind of boring otherwise.’ He looked closely at his new dagger. ‘What is this metal?’ he asked.

‘Men call it steel,’ she replied. ‘They learned how to forge it about a thousand years ago.’

‘I was a little busy just then. That’s probably why I missed it. Where does this metal come from?’

‘You’ve seen all those red rocks in Plakand, haven’t you?’

‘Oh, yes. Plakand’s red from one end to the other.’

‘There’s a metal called iron in those rocks. Men couldn’t smelt it out of the rocks until they learned how to make hotter fires. Iron is harder than bronze, but it’s brittle. It has to be mixed with other metals to make weapons or tools.’

‘It’s completely replaced bronze, then?’

‘For most things, yes.’

‘It might be better than bronze, but it’s not as pretty. This grey’s sort of depressing.’

‘What on earth has that got to do with anything?’

‘It’s a question of aesthetics, Em. We should always strive to fill our lives with beauty.’

‘I don’t see anything beautiful in something that was designed to kill people.’

‘There’s beauty in everything, Em. You just have to learn to look for it.’

‘If you’re going to preach at me, I think I’ll just curl up and go back to sleep.’

‘Whatever you wish, Em. Oh, before you doze off, though, do you happen to know which clan here in Arum has that knife we’re looking for? If I’m going to have to search every man in these mountains for it, we could be here for quite a while.’

‘I know where it is, pet, and you’ve been there before. You’re even rather famous in the clan that has the Knife.’

‘Me? I try to avoid fame whenever I can.’

‘I wonder why. You do remember the way to the hall of Gosti Big Belly, don’t you?’

‘Is that where the knife is?’

‘Yes. The current Clan-Chief has it. He doesn’t know how he came by it or how important it is, so he keeps it in the room where all his spare weapons are.’

‘Is that a coincidence of some sort? I mean, that the knife’s in Gosti’s hall?’

‘Probably not.’

‘Would you care to explain that?’

‘I don’t think so. The word “coincidence” always seems to start religious arguments for some reason.’

For the next several days, they traveled along the ridge-line Althalus had followed to make good his escape from Gosti and they finally reached the high pass that overlooked the canyon where Gosti’s hall had stood. The rough log fort had been replaced by a large stone castle. The rickety toll-bridge that had been the source of Gosti’s meager wealth was gone, and the bridge that now spanned the rushing stream was a structure of stone arches. Althalus turned his horse off the trail and rode back into the trees.

‘Aren’t we going on down?’ Emmy asked.

‘It’s almost evening, Em. Let’s wait and go down in the morning.’

‘Why?’

‘My instincts tell me to wait, all right?’

‘Oh, well,’ she replied with exaggerated sarcasm, ‘we must obey our instincts, mustn’t we?’

‘Be nice,’ he murmured. Then he dismounted and went over to the edge of the trees to look at the settlement outside the fort. Something struck him as peculiar. ‘Why are the men all wearing dresses?’ he asked.

‘They call them kilts, Althalus.’

‘A dress is a dress, Em. What’s wrong with leggings like mine?’

‘They prefer kilts. Don’t be picking any fights with them about their clothing. Keep your opinions to yourself.’

‘Yes, Ma’am,’ he replied. ‘You’ll want fish for dinner again, I suppose?’

‘If it’s not too much trouble.’

‘And if it is?’

‘That’s just too bad, isn’t it?’

CHAPTER EIGHT

Althalus and Emmy woke early the next morning, but they waited until the villagers started stirring before Althalus mounted his horse and rode through the woods to the trail that led on down to the settlement. He noticed that the houses were more substantial now than they’d been last time he’d been here.

They reached the settlement just as a husky fellow in a dirty kilt came out of one of the houses near the wall of the castle. He was stretching and yawning, but when he saw Althalus riding toward him, his eyes became suddenly alert. ‘You there – stranger,’ he called.

‘Were you talking to me?’ Althalus replied innocently.

‘You don’t live here, so you’re a stranger, aren’t you?’

Althalus made some show of looking around. ‘Why, blast my eyes, I do believe you’re right. Isn’t it strange that I hadn’t noticed that myself?’

The man’s suspicious look softened, and he started to chuckle.

‘Was it something I said?’ Althalus asked, feigning wide-eyed innocence and climbing down from his horse.

‘You’re a humorous fellow, I see.’

‘I try. I’ve found that a little humor smoothes over the awkward moments when I first meet somebody. It lets people know that I’m not really a stranger, but only a friend they haven’t met yet.’

‘I’ll have to remember that one,’ the now openly grinning man said. ‘And what might your name be, friend I haven’t met yet?’

‘I’m called Althalus.’

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

‘That wasn’t what I had in mind. Is there something wrong with it?’

‘There’s a very old story in our clan about a man named Althalus. Oh, my name’s Degrur, by the way.’ He held out his hand.

Althalus shook hands with him. ‘Pleased to meet you. What’s the gist of this story about that other Althalus?’

‘Well, as it turned out, he was a thief.’

‘Really? What did he steal?’

‘Money, I’m told. The Clan-Chief back in those days was named Gosti Big Belly, and he was the richest man in the world.’

‘My goodness!’

‘Oh, yes. Gosti’s strongroom was filled to the rafters with gold – until Althalus came along. Anyway, this Althalus could tell jokes so funny that they made the walls laugh. Then, late one night after everybody in the hall had drunk himself to sleep, the thief Althalus broke into Gosti’s strongroom and stole every single gold coin there. The story says that he had to steal twenty horses just to carry it all away.’

‘That’s a lot of gold.’

‘It was indeed. I’d imagine that the story’s been exaggerated a little over the years, though, so there probably wasn’t all that much gold in the strongroom.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Degrur. I heard a story once about a man who was supposed to be as big as a mountain.’

‘I’m going on to the hall’, Degrur said. ‘Why don’t you come along, and I’ll introduce you to our chief? I think he’d really like to meet a man called Althalus.’

‘Probably so that he can keep his eye on me. My name might raise a few suspicions around here.’

‘Don’t worry, my friend. Nobody takes those old stories seriously any more.’

‘I certainly hope not.’

‘Would it alarm you if I told you that you’ve got a cat peeping out of the hood of your cloak?’

‘No, I know she’s there. I was camped up in the mountains, and she wandered in – probably to steal some food. We sort of took to each other, so we’re traveling together for a while. What’s your chief’s name?’

‘Albron. He’s young, but we think he’s going to work out fairly well. His father, Baskon, spent most of his time face down in the nearest ale barrel, and a drunken Clan-Chief tends to make mistakes.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He got roaring drunk one night and went up to the top of the highest tower to challenge God to a fight. Some say that God took him up on it, but I think he just wobbled and fell off the tower. He splattered himself all over the courtyard.’

‘Everybody dies from something, I suppose.’

They went on into the courtyard of the stone castle. Althalus noticed that it was paved, much as the courtyard of the House at the End of the World had been. Degrur led the way up the steps to the massive door and they proceeded down a long, torchlit corridor to the dining hall.

There were bearded men sitting at a long table there, eating breakfast off of wooden plates. Althalus glanced around as he and Degrur approached the table. The bleak stone walls were decorated with battle-flags and a few antiquated weapons, and the logs burning in the fire-pit crackled cheerfully. The stone floor had obviously been swept that morning, and there weren’t any dogs gnawing bones in the corners.

‘Neatness counts,’ Emmy’s voice murmured approvingly.

‘Maybe,’ he replied, ‘but not for very much.’

‘My Chief,’ Degrur said to the kilted man with shrewd eyes and a clean-shaven face at the head of the table, ‘this traveler was passing through, and I thought you might want to meet him, since he’s very famous.’

‘Oh?’ the Clan-Chief said.

‘Everybody’s heard of him, my Chief. His name’s Althalus.’

‘You’re not serious!’

Degrur was grinning openly now. ‘That’s what he told me, Albron. Of course, if that’s really his name, he might have lied about it to put me off my guard.’

‘Degrur, that doesn’t make any sense at all.’

‘I just woke up, my Chief. You don’t expect me to make sense when I first get up, do you?’

Althalus stepped forward and bowed elegantly. ‘I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Chief Albron,’ he said. Then he looked around the hall. ‘I see that you’ve made some improvements since my last visit.’

‘You’ve been here before?’ Albron asked with one quizzically raised eyebrow.

‘Yes – quite some time ago. The chief in those days used to keep pigs in this hall. Pigs are nice enough animals, I suppose – good to their mothers and all – but they don’t make very good house-pets. And the dining hall isn’t really the place to keep them – unless you like your bacon very fresh.’

Albron laughed. ‘Is your name really Althalus?’

Althalus sighed with feigned regret. ‘I’m afraid so, Chief Albron,’ he replied theatrically. ‘I was positive that your clan had forgotten me by now. Fame can be so inconvenient sometimes, can’t it, my Lord? Anyway, since my dreadful secret’s out in the open, and if you’re not too busy, maybe we can get right down to cases here. Has your clan managed to amass enough gold since my last visit to make it worth my while to rob you again?’

Chief Albron blinked, and then he burst into laughter.

Althalus pushed on. ‘Since you already know my dreadful secret, there’s no point in beating about the bush, now is there? When would it be most convenient for you to have me rob you? There’ll be all that shouting and running around and organizing pursuits, and the like. You know how disruptive a robbery can be sometimes.’

‘You carry your age very well, Master Althalus’, Chief Albron noted with a grin. ‘According to that story we all heard when we were children, you robbed Gosti Big Belly several thousand years ago.’

‘Has it been that long? My goodness, where does the time go?’

‘Why don’t you join us for breakfast, Master Althalus?’ Albron invited. ‘Since you plan to rob me of all my gold, you’re going to need a few dozen horses to carry off all your loot. We could discuss that over breakfast. I’ve got a few spare horses, and some of them even have all four of their legs. I’m sure we can strike a bargain on them. Just because you’re planning to rob me, it shouldn’t get in the way of our doing business together, should it?’

Althalus laughed and joined the group of men at the table. They bantered back and forth over breakfast, and after they’d eaten, the young Chief Albron offered Althalus a tankard of something he called ale.

‘Never mind’, Emmy’s voice murmured.

‘It wouldn’t be polite to refuse, Em,’ he sent back his silent reply. Then he lifted the tankard and drank.

It took all of the self-control he could bring to bear to keep from spitting the awful stuff onto the floor. Good rich mead was one thing, but Albron’s ale was so bitter that Althalus almost choked on it.

‘Told you.’ Emmy’s voice sounded smug.

Althalus carefully set the tankard down. ‘This has all been very entertaining, Chief Albron,’ he said, ‘but there’s a question I need to ask you.’

‘The best escape route to take after you’ve robbed me?’

Althalus laughed. ‘No, my Lord. If I really were that other Althalus, I’d have planned my escape before I even came down here. As you’ve probably noticed from my clothes, I’m not an Arum.’

‘That had sort of crossed my mind, Master Althalus.’

‘Actually I come from over to the east in Ansu, and I’ve been trying to track something down for several years now.’

‘Something valuable?’

‘Well, not to anybody else, probably, but it’s something I need to have to lay claim to an inheritance. My father’s older brother is the Arkhein of our region.’

‘Arkhein?’

‘It’s a title of nobility, my Lord – sort of an equivalent to your own title. Anyway, my uncle’s only son – my cousin – had an argument with a bear a few years back, and not many men win those kinds of arguments, since the bears of Ansu are very big and very bad tempered. Anyway, my cousin lost the argument, and since his father, my uncle, only had the one son, his title’s going to be vacant after he dies.’

‘And you’ll succeed him? Congratulations, Master Althalus,’ Albron said.

‘It’s not quite that cut and dried, my Lord,’ Althalus said, making a sour face. ‘I’ve got another cousin, the son of my father’s younger brother, and he and I were both born in the same summer. We Ansus don’t have a very precise calendar, so nobody can really be sure which one of us is the eldest.’

‘Wars tend to break out over things like that.’

‘My uncle, the Arkhein, realized that too, my Lord. That’s when he called my cousin and me to his castle and told us very firmly to stop recruiting armies and forming alliances. Then he told us a story. It seems that many years ago one of our ancestors had owned a very pretty dagger. There’d been one of those little wars that break out in Ansu from time to time, and our ancestor had gotten himself killed. Then, after the sun had gone down, the scoundrels who lurk like vultures around the edges of every battlefield came out to rob the dead.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Albron said, nodding grimly.

‘You’ve seen the same sort of thing yourself, I gather. Anyway, one of those scoundrels picked up our ancestor’s dagger. It didn’t have any jewels in the hilt or anything, but it was ornamental enough that the rascal thought he could probably sell it for enough to make it worth his while. Our uncle told my cousin and me that he was proposing a sort of contest. Whichever one of us could track down that dagger and bring it back to him would be the one who’d get his title.’ Althalus sighed dramatically. ‘I’ve been running hard ever since that day. You would not believe how interesting life can be when you’re looking for an antique with one eye and watching for assassins with the other.’

‘Assassins?’

‘My other cousin’s a bit lazy, my Lord, so the idea of wandering around the world looking for an ancient knife doesn’t light any warm fires in his heart. He seems to feel that it’d be much easier to have me murdered than it’d be to try to win a race with me. Anyway, to get to the point here, I happened across a fellow who told me that he’d been in your arms-room once, and he said that he was almost certain that he’d seen a knife there that fit the description of the one I’d just told him about’ Althalus cast a covert look at Chief Albron. The story he’d just conjured up out of whole cloth seemed to have fired the Clan-Chief’s imagination. Althalus was quite pleased to discover that he hadn’t lost his touch.

Chief Albron rose to his feet. ‘Why don’t we go have a look, Arkhein Althalus,’ he suggested.

‘I’m not the Arkhein yet, my Lord,’ Althalus amended.

‘You will be if that dagger’s in my armory. You’re a well-spoken man with a civilized sense of humor, Althalus. Those are noble qualities, and your cousin’s an absolute knave. I’ll do everything in my power to see to it that you inherit your uncle’s title.’

Althalus bowed. ‘You honor me, my Lord,’ he said.

‘Wasn’t that all just a little thick?’ Emmy’s voice suggested.

‘I know these Arums, Em, so I know exactly what kind of story to tell them. Actually, that was a very good one. It had a threat of civil war, a hero, a villain, and a quest fraught with danger. What more does a good story need?’

‘A little bit of truth might have added something.’

‘I don’t like to contaminate a good story with truth, Em. That’d be a violation of my artistic integrity, wouldn’t it?’

‘Oh, dear,’ she sighed.

‘Trust me, little kitten. That knife’s as good as in my hands already, and I won’t even have to buy it. Albron’s going to give it to me outright, along with his blessing.’

Albron’s armory was a stone-walled chamber at the back of his castle, and it was littered with all kinds of swords, axes, pikes, helmets, daggers, and shirts made of chain.

‘This is my armorer, Rheud.’ Albron introduced Althalus to a blocky, kilted fellow with a bristling red beard. ‘Describe this dagger you’re looking for to him.’

‘It’s about a foot and a half long, master armorer,’ Althalus told the red-bearded man, ‘and it’s got an odd-shaped blade – sort of like a laurel-leaf. There’s a design etched into the blade. From what I understand, the design’s actually writing in some ancient language that nobody understands any more.’

Rheud scratched his head. ‘Oh,’ he said then, ‘it’s that one. It’s very pretty, but it’s a little ornate for my taste. I prefer more business-like weapons.’

‘It’s here, then?’

‘Well, it was. Young Eliar came here to arm himself before he went off to that war down in Treborea. He took a fancy to that knife, so I let him take it.’

Althalus gave chief Albron a puzzled look. ‘Have you got a quarrel of some kind with somebody in Treborea, my Lord?’

‘No, it’s a business arrangement. In the old days the lowlanders were always trying to persuade the Clan-Chiefs of Arum to agree to alliances with them – alliances where we’d do the bleeding and they’d get the profit. There was a conclave of all the Clan-Chiefs of Arum about fifty years ago, and the chiefs all agreed that there weren’t going to be any more of those alliances with the lowlanders. The way things are now, if the lowlanders need soldiers, they have to rent them.’

‘Rent?’

‘It works out very well for us, Master Althalus. We don’t ally ourselves with anybody during those wars, so we don’t get swindled out of our share when the war’s over. It’s all strictly business now. If they want soldiers, they pay for them – in advance – and we won’t accept promissory notes or paper money. They pay in gold, and they pay before any of our men start marching.’

‘How did the lowlanders take that?’

‘From what I’ve heard, their screams of outrage were echoing off the moon. The Clan-Chiefs of Arum have held firm, though, so now the lowlanders either pay, or they fight their own wars.’ Albron scratched his chin reflectively. ‘We’re a war-like people here in Arum, and there was a time when almost anything could set off a clan war. It’s not that way here any more. There hasn’t been a clan war in Arum for forty years.’

Althalus grinned at him. ‘Why burn down your neighbors for fun when you can set fire to Perquaine and Treborea for profit?’ he said. ‘Which Treborean city bought the services of this young Eliar?’

‘Kanthon, wasn’t it, Rheud?’ Albron asked. ‘Sometimes I lose track. I’ve got men involved in a half-dozen little wars down there right now.’

‘Yes, my Lord,’ Rheud replied. ‘This was Eliar’s first war, so you sent him off to one of the quiet ones so he could get his feet wet in shallow water his first time out. That war between Kanthon and Osthos has been simmering for the last ten centuries, and nobody’s taking it very seriously.’

‘Well,’ Althalus said, ‘I guess I get to go to Kanthon then. There’s something to be said for that, I suppose.’

‘Oh?’ Albron asked.

‘It’s open country down there in Treborea. I don’t want to offend you, my Lord, but there are too many trees here in Arum for my taste.’

‘Don’t you like trees?’

‘Not when one of my cousin’s assassins might be hiding behind any one of them. Flat, open country’s sort of boring, but some boredom might give my nerves a bit of a rest. Here lately they’ve been stretched as tight as a bowstring. What does Eliar look like?’

‘He’s sort of gangly,’ the red-bearded armorer said. ‘He’s only about fifteen years old, so he’s still growing. If he lives, he’ll probably turn into a fairly respectable warrior. He isn’t any too bright, but he might outgrow that. He’s got a lot of enthusiasm, and he’s convinced that he’s the greatest warrior alive.’

‘I’d better hurry, then,’ Althalus said. ‘Young Eliar sounds like a fellow who’s just brimful of incipient mortality.’

‘Nicely put, Master Althalus,’ Albron said admiringly. ‘That description fits just about every adolescent male in the whole of Arum.’

‘They’re good for business, though, aren’t they, Chief Albron?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Albron smirked. ‘I can usually get double price for the young ones.’

Althalus and Emerald left Albron’s castle the next morning and traveled south. ‘Do you know the way to Kanthon?’ Emmy asked as they rode on down the canyon.

‘Of course, Em. I know several ways to just about every city in the world.’

‘And several other ways to get out of them?’

‘Naturally. Getting out of town in a hurry is sometimes very necessary for people in my profession.’

‘I wonder why?’

‘Be nice, Emmy. Where do we go after we get the Knife away from Eliar?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t worry, Althalus. The writing on the Knife will tell us where to go.’

‘I thought the words on the blade were there to identify the people we’re going to need.’

‘That’s part of what they say, but only part of it. The writing on the blade is much more complex than that, pet, and it changes with the circumstances. It tells us where to go, who we need to find, and what we’re supposed to do next.’

‘It sounds to me as if it’s almost like the Book.’

‘Sort of, yes. The Knife changes, though, and the Book doesn’t. Let’s move along, Althalus. We have a long way to go.’

They rode down onto the plains of Perquaine, and after about a week they reached the city of Maghu. There had been many changes in Maghu since Althalus had last been there, but the ancient temple was still the most prominent building in town. As they rode past it, Althalus was a bit startled by Emmy’s reaction. She was riding, as always, in the hood of his cloak, and she laid back her ears and hissed at the temple. ‘What was that all about?’ he asked her.

‘I hate that place!’ she replied vehemently.

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘It’s grotesque!’

‘It’s a little fancy, but not much more than other temples I’ve seen.’

‘I’m not talking about the temple, Althalus. I’m talking about the statue inside.’

‘You mean the one with all those extra bosoms? It’s just the local goddess, Em. You don’t have to take it so personally.’

‘It is personal, Althalus!’

He could feel her fuming outrage, and he looked sharply back over his shoulder at her. A sudden notion struck him, and he sent a probing thought into that part of her mind she’d always insisted was personal and private. He was stunned by what he found. ‘Is that who you really are?’ he gasped.

‘I’ve told you to stay out of there!’

‘You’re Dweia, aren’t you?’

‘Amazing. You even pronounced it right.’ Her tone was snippy. She was definitely not in a good humor.

Althalus was awed. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he demanded.

‘It wasn’t any of your business who I am.’

‘Do you really look anything like that statue?’

‘Like a brood-sow, you mean? – Like a whole herd of brood sows?’

‘I was talking about the face, not all those extra – ’He groped for a non-offensive word.

‘The face isn’t accurate either.’

‘A fertility goddess? What’s fertility got to do with anything?’

‘Would you like to rephrase that question – while you still have your health?’

‘Maybe I should just drop it.’

‘Wise decision.’

They rode on out of Maghu, and Althalus struggled with what he’d just discovered. In a peculiar sort of way, it began to make sense. ‘No biting,’ he said to Emmy. ‘Just tell me if I’ve got this straight. Deiwos makes things, right?’

‘So?’

‘After he’s made them, though, he goes on to make other things, and he turns the things he’s already made over to you. You’re the one who keeps them alive by making sure that they all have offspring – or whatever.’ Then another thought came to him. ‘That’s why you hate Daeva so much, isn’t it, Em? He wants to destroy everything Deiwos made, but you want to preserve it – to keep it alive. Is that why your names all begin with the same sound? – Deiwos, Dweia, and Daeva? And does that mean that you’re Daeva’s sister as well as the sister of Deiwos?’

‘It’s a little more complex than that, Althalus, but you’re nibbling around the edges of it. There are some men coming up the road toward us.’

Althalus looked on ahead. ‘Maybe you’d better pull your head in until I find out who they are.’

As the men came closer, Althalus saw that they were wearing kilts. Most of them were also wearing bloody bandages, and several were hobbling along with the aid of wooden staffs. ‘Arums,’ he muttered to Emmy. ‘The markings on their kilts suggest that they’re members of Albron’s clan.’

‘What are they doing here in Perquaine?’

‘I don’t know, Em. I’ll ask them.’ Althalus reined in his horse and waited as the wounded men hobbled closer.

The man at the front of the column was tall, lean, and dark haired. He had a bloody bandage wrapped about his head and a sour look on his face.

‘You gentlemen are a long way from home,’ Althalus said by way of greeting.

‘We’re trying to do something about that right now,’ the sour-faced man said.

‘You’re of Albron’s clan, aren’t you?’

‘How did you know that?’

‘The markings on your kilts, neighbor.’

‘You don’t look like an Arum to me.’

‘I’m not, but I’m acquainted with your customs. It looks as if you’ve run into some trouble.’

‘That sort of covers it, yes. Chief Albron hired us out to work in a war over in Treborea. It was supposed to be a quiet little war, but it got out of hand.’

‘It wasn’t by any chance that little squabble between Kanthon and Osthos, was it?’ A cold lump began to settle somewhere in the vicinity of Althalus’ stomach.

‘You’ve heard about that one?’

‘We’ve just come from Chief Albron’s hall.’

‘We?’

‘My cat and me,’ Althalus explained.

‘A cat’s an odd traveling companion for a grown man,’ the lean man observed. He glanced back at his battered troops. ‘Rest a bit,’ he barked out the command. Then he sank down onto the grass at the side of the road. ‘If you’ve got a little time, I’d sort of like to know what’s up ahead of us,’ he said to Althalus.

‘Of course.’ Althalus swung down from his saddle. ‘My name’s Althalus, by the way.’

The wounded war chief gave him a startled look.

‘It’s just a coincidence,’ Althalus explained. ‘I’m not really that Althalus.’

‘I didn’t really think so. I’m called Khalor, and I’m the Ancient of what’s left of this group of Albron’s clansmen.’

‘You don’t look all that ancient to me.’

‘It’s a Treborean title, friend Althalus. We’re supposed to try to fit in when we come down into the low countries to fight their wars for them. Back at home they call me Sergeant. Did you happen across any groups of armed men on your way out of the mountains?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary, Sergeant Khalor – a few hunters, is about all. I think you’ll be able to get home without any trouble. From what your chief told me, the clans of southern Arum are more or less at peace with each other. What happened to you and your men?’

‘Albron hired us out to the Kanthons about six months or so ago. Like I told you before, it was supposed to be a quiet little war. About all we were supposed to do was march around in places where the Osthos could see us – the usual sorts of things, you understand – flex our muscles, wave our swords and axes, shout war-cries, and all the other foolishness that impresses the lowlanders. Then the feeble-minded fool that sits on the throne of Kanthon got carried away and ordered us to invade the territory of the Aryo of Osthos.’ The sergeant shook his head in disgust.

‘You couldn’t talk him out of it?’

‘I tried, Althalus. God knows I tried. I told him that I didn’t have enough men for that and that he’d have to hire ten times as many as he already had before I could mount an invasion, but the silly ass wouldn’t listen. Don’t ever try to explain military reality to a lowlander.’

‘You got yourself trounced, I take it?’

‘Trounced only begins to cover it. I got a mud-puddle stomped into my backside, if you want to know the truth. Unfortunately, we took the Osthos by surprise when we marched across their frontier.’

‘Unfortunately?’

‘They didn’t expect us to do that, so they weren’t ready for us. That gave the idiot in Kanthon all sorts of wild delusions, and he ordered me to lay siege to the city of Osthos itself. I didn’t have enough men to set up a picket-line around the place, much less lay siege to it, but the jack-ass in Kanthon wouldn’t listen to me.’

Althalus started to swear.

‘When your vocabulary begins to run dry, I can give you whole platoons of interesting things to say about my former employer. I’ve been inventing new swear words for the last two and a half weeks. You seem to be taking this sort of personally’

‘Yes, I am. I’ve been looking for a young fellow who’s under your command. His name’s Eliar. He doesn’t happen by any chance to be among your wounded, does he?’

‘I’m afraid not, Althalus. I’d imagine that Eliar’s long dead by now – unless that savage girl down in Osthos is still slicing very tiny pieces off of him.’

‘What happened?’

‘Eliar was very enthusiastic about this business; you know how young fellows are in their first war. Anyway, the Aryo of Osthos had ordered his troops to fall back every time they saw us. Eliar and some of my other green troops thought that meant that they were cowards instead of men who had a very clever leader. When we reached the walls of the city, the Osthos just closed their gates and invited us to try to get in if we thought we could. I had this cluster of young enthusiasts on my hands, and they were all jumping up and down and frothing at the mouth and begging me to mount an assault on the walls. Eliar was the one who was screaming the loudest, so I put him in charge and ordered him to take a run at the gate and see how many of his men he could get killed.’

‘That’s a blunt way to put it, Sergeant.’

‘It’s the only real way to find out if a young leader’s got sand in his craw. Eliar was a nice boy, and the other young fellows all sort of followed his lead. That’s part of my job. I’m supposed to keep an eye on these natural leaders and put them into situations where they can prove whether or not they’ve got what it takes to lead troops. Getting some of your people killed is part of the business of command. Well, to cut this short, Eliar and his puppies all went rushing across the meadow toward the city gate screaming and waving their weapons as if they thought they could frighten the walls into falling down. When they were about fifty paces from the gate, it swung open, and the Aryo of Osthos personally led out his troops to give my howling little barbarians a quick lesson in good manners.’

‘By hand, I assume,’ Althalus added in a gloomy voice.

‘Also by foot. They tramped all over my little boys. Eliar was right in the thick of things, naturally, and he was really doing quite well until he came up against the Aryo himself – who just happened to be armed with a battle-axe. Eliar took a wild swing at the Aryo’s head with his sword, and the Aryo blocked it with his axe. Eliar’s sword broke off just above the hilt, and I thought, “Well, goodbye, Eliar”. But the boy surprised me – and he probably surprised the Aryo even more. He threw what was left of his sword right at the Aryo’s face and went for his dagger. Before the Aryo could regain his balance, Eliar was all over him, and he was working that dagger double-time. He must have stabbed that poor nobleman two dozen times, and he left a gash as wide as his hand with every stab. I didn’t really think that ornamental dagger of his was worth all that much, but it certainly leaves big holes in people if a man uses it right. The Aryo’s men swarmed Eliar under, of course, and they took him and some of his men prisoner and went back into the city with them.’

‘Who was this woman you mentioned before?’

‘The Aryo’s daughter. There’s a girl who can probably cut glass with her voice from a mile away. We could hear her very clearly when her father’s soldiers carried his body to her. We even heard her when she ordered the soldiers to come out of the city and chop us into little pieces. I didn’t think real soldiers would take orders from a woman, but Andine’s got the kind of voice you can’t really ignore.’ Khalor winced. ‘It seems that I can still hear her. But for all I know, I really can. You’ve never heard a voice like that one. It’s only been two and a half weeks, and she might very well be still screaming about how many yards of our entrails she wants draped over every tree in the vicinity.’

‘Andine?’ Althalus asked.

‘That’s her name. It’s a pretty name for a pretty girl, but she’s got a very ugly mind.’

‘You’ve seen her?’

‘Oh, yes. She stood up on top of the city wall to gloat while her soldiers butchered us. She kept screaming for more blood and waving Eliar’s dagger around. She’s a total savage, and she’s the ruler of Osthos now.’

‘A woman?’ That startled Althalus.

‘She’s no ordinary woman, Althalus. That one’s made out of steel. She was the Aryo’s only child, so they’re probably all bowing to her and calling her “Arya Andine”. If Eliar’s lucky, she just had him killed outright. I sort of doubt that, though. More probably, she’s been carving pieces off him with his own knife and making him watch while she eats them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that she’s trying to come up with a way to cut out his heart so fast that he’d still be alive long enough to watch her eat it right in front of his face. Stay away from that one, Althalus. I’d advise you to give her forty or fifty years to cool down before you go anywhere near her.’

CHAPTER NINE

‘Why should we care if she kills him, Em?’ Althalus asked. ‘It’s the Knife we want, not some half-grown little boy from Arum.’

‘When are you going to learn to look beyond the end of your nose, Althalus?’ Her tone was a bit snippy, and there was enough condescension in it to be offensive.

‘That’s about enough of that, Em,’ he told her crisply.

‘Sorry, pet,’ she apologized. ‘That was a little nasty, wasn’t it? What I’m getting at is that everything is connected. Nothing happens in isolation. Eliar’s probably some crude, unschooled barbarian from the back country of Arum, but he did pick up that Knife back in Albron’s arms-room. It might have been a whim, but we can’t be sure of that until we test him. If he can’t read what’s written on the blade, we’ll pat him on the head and tell him to run along home. If he can read it, though, he’ll have to come with us.’

‘What if he’s like I was before I came to the House? I couldn’t even read my own name back then.’

‘I noticed. It won’t matter whether he can read or not. If he happens to be one of the selected ones, he’ll know what the writing means.’

‘How will we know if he’s got it right?’

‘We’ll know, pet. Believe me, we’ll know.’

‘Why don’t you enlighten me? Tell me what the word on the blade is.’

‘It varies. It’ll mean something different to each person who reads it.’

‘Emmy, that doesn’t make any sense at all. A word’s a word, isn’t it? It’s supposed to have one specific meaning.’

‘Does the word “home” have a specific meaning?’

‘Of course it does. It means the place where a man lives – or maybe the place he originally came from.’

‘Then it has a different meaning for each person, doesn’t it?’

He frowned.

‘Don’t beat yourself over the head with it, pet. The word that’s carved into the Knife-blade is a command, and it tells each one of the people we have to locate to do something different.’

‘It can’t just be one word, then.’

‘I didn’t say that it was. Each reader will see it differently.’

‘It changes, then?’

‘No. It’s permanent. The writing stays the same. It’s the reading that changes.’

‘You’re starting to give me a headache, Em.’

‘Don’t brood about it, Althie. It’ll make more sense to you once we get the Knife. Our problem right now is getting the Knife – and Eliar – away from Andine.’

‘I think I’ve already got the answer to that one, Em. I’ll just buy them from her.’

‘Buy?’

‘Pay her to give them to me.’

Althalus, Eliar’s a person. You can’t buy people.’

‘You’re wrong about that, Em. Eliar’s a captured soldier, and that means that he’s a slave now.’

‘That’s disgusting!’

‘Of course it is, but that’s the way things are. I’ll have to rob a few rich people to get enough gold to buy Eliar and the Knife. If Arya Andine’s as dead-set on butchering Eliar as Sergeant Khalor seems to think she is, I’ll need lots of gold to persuade her to sell him to me.’

‘Maybe,’ she murmured, her green eyes going distant. ‘But then again, maybe not. If we use the Book right, she’ll be more than happy to sell him to us.’

‘I’ve come across vindictive ladies before, Em. Believe me, it’ll take a lot of gold. If Sergeant Khalor was anywhere at all close to being right, she’s developed a strong appetite for Eliar’s blood by now. Let’s see if we can find some rich man’s house. I’ll rob him and then we can go and make Andine an offer.’

‘There are other ways to get gold, Althalus.’

‘I know – mining it out of the ground. I don’t care for doing it that way. I’ve seen a lot of deep holes in the mountainsides of Kagwher, and from what I hear, only about one in a hundred has turned up even a speck of gold.’

‘I believe I can improve on those numbers, pet.’

‘I still don’t like chopping at the ground, Em. It makes my back hurt.’

‘That’s because you don’t get enough exercise. Let’s move right along. We have several days’ travel ahead of us before you get to start digging.’

‘There isn’t any gold down here in the low-country, Em.’

‘There is if you know where to look. Ride on, my brave boy, ride on.’

‘Was that supposed to be funny?’

They rode south across the parched grainfields of Perquaine for the next several days, moving at a steady canter. It was about mid-afternoon on the third day after their meeting with Sergeant Khalor when Althalus reined in and dismounted.

‘Why are we stopping?’ Emmy asked.

‘We’ve been pushing the horse a bit. I’ll walk alongside to give him a rest.’ He looked around at the sun-baked fields. ‘Skimpy,’ he observed.

‘What is?’

‘This year’s crop. It looks to me as if it’s hardly going to be worth the trouble to harvest it.’

‘It’s the drought, pet. It doesn’t rain much any more.’

‘We should be getting close to the coastline, Em. It always rains along the coast.’

‘We’re a long way from where the coast is now, pet. We talked about that back in the House, remember? The ice locks up more of the world’s water every year. That causes the drought and lowers the sea-level.’

‘Are we going to be able to repair that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Melt the ice so that things go back to the way they’re supposed to be.’

‘Why do men always want to tamper with the natural order of things?’

‘When something breaks, we fix it, that’s all.’

‘What gave you the absurd idea that it’s broken?’

‘It’s not the way it was before, Em. To our way of looking at things, that means that it’s broken.’

‘Now which one of us is thinking the way Daeva thinks?’

‘Drying up the oceans and turning the world into a desert doesn’t make things better, Em.’

‘Change doesn’t necessarily mean improvement, Althalus. Change is just change. “Better” and “worse” are human definitions. The world changes all the time, and no amount of complaining’s going to stop it from changing.’

‘The sea-coast shouldn’t move around,’ he declared stubbornly.

‘You can tell it to stop, if you’d like. It might listen to you, but I wouldn’t make any large wagers on it, if I were you.’ She looked around. ‘We should reach the place we’re looking for sometime tomorrow.’

‘Have we been looking for someplace special?’

‘Sort of special. It’s the place where you’re going to start working for your living.’

‘What an unnatural thing to suggest.’

It’ll be good for you, love – fresh air, exercise, wholesome food –’

‘I think I’d sooner take poison.’

They set up a rudimentary camp in a scraggly thicket some distance back from the road that evening and started out again shortly after dawn.

‘There it is,’ Emmy said after they’d ridden for a couple of hours.

‘There what is?’

‘The place where you do some honest work, pet.’

‘I wish you’d stop rubbing my nose in that.’ He looked across what appeared to be a long-abandoned field at a kind of knoll, sparsely covered with stunted, tired-looking grass, ‘Is that it?’ he asked.

‘That’s the place.’

‘How can you tell? It’s just a hill. We’ve passed dozens of others just like it.’

‘Yes, we have. This one isn’t an ordinary hill, though. It’s the ruins of an old house that’s been covered with dirt.’

‘Who buried it like that?’

‘The wind. The ground’s very dry now, so the wind picks up dirt and carries it along until it comes to something that blocks it. That’s where it drops the dirt.’

‘Is that the way all hills get built?’

‘Not all of them, no.’

Althalus squinted at the rounded hillock. ‘I think I’m going to need some tools. I’ll dig if you insist, Em, but I’m not going to do it with my bare hands.’

‘We’ll take care of it. I’ll tell you the word to use.’

‘I still think it’d be easier just to rob somebody.’

‘There’s more gold in that hill than you’re likely to find in a dozen of the houses we’ve passed. You say that you’ll need gold to buy Eliar and the Knife from Andine. All right, there’s the gold. Go dig it up.’

‘How do you know there’s gold there?’

‘I just do. There’s more gold in those ruins than you’ve ever seen before. Fetch, boy, fetch.’

‘That’s starting to make me a little tired, Em.’

‘If you’d do as you’re told the first time, I wouldn’t have to keep telling you over and over again. You’re going to do what I tell you to do eventually anyway, so why not just do it immediately instead of arguing with me?’

‘Yes, dear,’ he gave up.

‘Good boy,’ she said approvingly. ‘Good boy.’

She gave him instructions on how to manufacture a shovel with a single word and then directed him to a spot about fifty paces up the south side of the slope. As he led his horse up the hill, he saw some very ancient limestone building blocks half buried in the soil. They’d obviously been sawed square when the house had been erected, but wind and weather had rounded them to the point that they were almost indistinguishable from native stone. ‘How long ago was the house abandoned?’ he asked.

‘About three thousand years ago. The man who built it started out in life as a plowman. Then he went up into Arum before anybody else went up there. He wasn’t really looking for gold, but he found some.’

‘Probably because he got there first. Why did he go to Arum if he didn’t know there was gold there, though?’

‘There’d been a slight misunderstanding about the ownership of a certain pig. His neighbors were a little excited about it, so he decided to go up into the mountains for a while to give them time to calm down. I’m sure you understand. This is the place, pet. Get down off the horse and start digging.’

He dismounted, lifted Emmy out of the hood of his cloak and set her on his saddle. Then he took off his cloak and rolled up his sleeves. ‘How deep do I have to dig?’ he asked.

‘About four feet. Then you’ll hit some flagstones, and you’ll have to pry them up. There’s a little cellar under the stones, and that’s where the gold is.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quit wasting time and start digging, Althalus.’

‘Yes, dear,’ he sighed, and very reluctantly thrust his shovel into the dirt.

The drought had made the soil very dry, so digging wasn’t really as hard as he’d thought it would be.

‘I wouldn’t throw the dirt so far down the hill, pet,’ Emmy suggested after a while. ‘You’ll have to shovel it all back in the hole when you’ve finished.’

‘What for?’

‘To keep somebody from finding the gold you’ll have to leave behind.’

‘I’m not going to leave any, Em.’

‘How do you plan to carry it?’

‘You’re sitting on him, love. He’s a strong horse.’

‘Not that strong, he isn’t.’

‘How much is there here?’

‘More than our horse can carry.’

‘Really?’ Althalus began to dig faster.

After about a half hour, he struck the flagstones Emmy had told him about. Then he widened out the hole he’d dug to give himself some more room. He leaned his shovel against the side of the hole, knelt on the stones, and began to probe between them with his bright steel dagger. ‘Exactly what am I looking for here, Em?’ he asked. ‘These flagstones fit together so tight that I can’t get my knife into the cracks.’

‘Keep looking,’ she instructed. ‘The one you want to find fits a little more loosely.’

He kept poking until he found it. The dirt the patient centuries had blown in had sifted down into the cracks between the stones, and it took him a while to dig it out with his dagger-point. Then he resheathed his dagger, took the shovel and began to pry.

The stone lifted out rather easily, followed by a rush of stale-smelling air. There was an open space of some kind below the flagstones, but it was too dark down there to see anything. He pried up another stone to let in more light.

There were tightly piled stacks of dust-covered bricks in the cellar, and a hot surge of disappointment came over him. But why would anyone take so much trouble just to hide bricks? He reached down through the hole and brushed the dust away from one of the bricks.

He stared at it in absolute disbelief. The brick which had been concealed by centuries of dust was bright yellow.

‘Dear God!’ Althalus exclaimed, brushing away more dust.

‘He’s busy right now, Althalus. Could I take a message?’

‘There must be tons of it down here!’

‘Told you,’ she reminded him smugly.

The gold had been cast into oblong blocks, each about the size of a man’s hand and slightly thicker. They weighed about five pounds apiece. Althalus found that he was trembling violently as he lifted the blocks out of the hole and laid them on the flagstones.

‘Don’t get carried away, Althalus,’ Emmy suggested.

‘Twenty?’ He said it with a great reluctance.

‘I don’t think the horse would want to carry any more.’

Althalus forced himself to stop at twenty of the gold blocks. Then he replaced the flagstone, shoveled all the dirt back into the hole, and uprooted a number of nearby bushes. He replanted the bushes in the freshly dug-up dirt to conceal his private gold mine.

Then he fashioned a couple of bags, put ten blocks of gold in each, tied them together and hung them across his horse’s back just behind his saddle. Then he remounted, whistling gaily.

‘You’re all bubbly this afternoon,’ Emmy noted.

‘I’m stinking rich, Em,’ he said exuberantly.

‘I’ve been noticing that for several days now. You’re long overdue for a bath.’

‘That’s not what I meant, little kitten.’

‘It should have been. You’re strong enough to curdle milk.’

‘I told you that hard work didn’t agree with me, Em,’ he reminded her.

They crossed the River Osthos late that afternoon and made camp on the Treborean side. To keep the peace, Althalus bathed, washed his clothes and even shaved off the past month’s growth of beard. Emmy definitely approved of that. They rose early the following morning, and three days later they caught sight of the walls of the city of Osthos. ‘Impressive,’ Althalus observed.

‘I’m sure they’ll be glad you approve,’ Emmy’s whisper sounded inside his head. ‘How did you plan to gain entry into the palace?’

‘I’ll come up with something. What’s the word for “stay away”?’

‘“Bheudh”. Actually “bheudh” means “to make someone aware of something”, but your thought when you say the word should get your meaning across. Why do you ask?’

‘I’ll have to go about on foot to locate certain officials, and I’d rather not have some rascal steal my horse. He’s very dear to me right now.’

‘I wonder why.’

Althalus rode some distance away from the road and, with Emmy’s instruction, he converted five of his gold blocks into coins marked with the idealized picture of a stalk of wheat which identified them as having come from Perquaine. Then he rode into the city, where he stopped by a clothier’s shop and bought himself some moderately elegant garments to disguise his rustic origins. Emmy chose not to comment when he emerged from the shop.

He remounted and made his way to the public buildings near the palace to listen and to ask questions.

‘I wouldn’t go anywhere near her, stranger,’ a silvery-haired old statesman advised when Althalus asked him about the procedure for gaining an audience with Arya Andine.

‘Oh?’ Althalus said, ‘why’s that?’

‘She was difficult before her father’s death, but now she’s graduated from difficult to impossible.’

‘Unfortunately, I have some business I have to discuss with her. I’d planned to talk with her father, the Aryo. I hadn’t heard that he’d died. What happened to him?’

‘I thought everybody knew. The Kanthons invaded us a month or so back, and they sent their mercenaries down here to lay siege to our city. Our noble Aryo led our army outside the walls to chase those howling barbarians off, and one of the scoundrels murdered him.’

‘My goodness!’

‘The murderer was captured, naturally.’

‘Good. Did Arya Andine have him put to death?’

‘No, he’s still alive. Arya Andine’s still considering various ways to send him off. I’m sure she’ll come up with something suitably unpleasant – eventually. What line of business are you in, my friend?’

‘I’m a labor contractor,’ Althalus replied.

The statesman gave him a quizzical look.

Althalus winked slyly at him. ‘“Labor contractor” sounds so much nicer than “slave trader”, wouldn’t you say? I’d heard about the assault on your city, and I understand that your soldiers captured several of the attackers. I thought I might stop by and take them off your hands. The owners of the salt mines in Ansu are paying a lot of money for strong, healthy slaves right now. Captured soldiers bring a premium price in the salt mines, and I pay in good gold. Do you think Arya Andine might be interested?’

‘The word “gold” is very likely to get her attention,’ the courtier agreed. ‘She’ll want to keep Eliar, the young fellow who killed her father, but she’d probably be willing to sell the others to you. What might your name be, my friend?’

‘I’m called Althalus.’

‘A very ancient name.’

‘My family was sort of old-fashioned.’

‘Why don’t we step over to the palace, Master Althalus?’ the courtier suggested. ‘I’ll introduce you to our impossible Arya.’

The old gentleman led the way to the palace gate, and he and Althalus were immediately admitted. ‘The soldiers will look after your horse, Master Althalus,’ the silvery-haired man said. ‘Oh, my name’s Dhakan, by the way. I tend to forget that strangers don’t know me.’

I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Lord Dhakan,’ Althalus said, bowing politely.

Emmy, who’d been sitting rather primly on the saddle of their horse, dropped sinuously to the stones of the courtyard.

‘Your pet, Master Althalus?’ Dhakan asked.

‘She tends to look at it the other way around, my Lord,’ Althalus replied. ‘Cats are sort of like that.’

‘I have a pet turtle myself,’ Dhakan said. ‘He doesn’t move very fast, but then, neither do I.’

Osthos was an ancient city, and the throne room was truly magnificent. It had a marble floor and stately columns. At the far end was a raised dais backed by crimson drapes, and there was an ornate throne on that dais. Imperious Andine, Arya of Osthos, sat upon that throne. She was quite obviously not paying the slightest bit of attention to the droning speech being presented by a stout man wearing a white mantle. The speech was a diplomatically gentle suggestion that the young Arya wasn’t paying enough heed to affairs of state.

Andine was young – very young, in fact. Althalus judged her to be no more than fifteen years old. Everyone else in her throne room had white hair, the only exception being a similarly youthful kilted Arum, who was chained to a marble column at one side of the dais. That young fellow was receiving imperious Andine’s undivided attention. She was looking directly at him with her huge, almost black eyes, and she was absently toying with a large laurel-leaf dagger.

‘That’s the Knife, pet,’ Emmy silently exulted.

‘Is that the murderer chained to that post?’ Althalus whispered to Dhakan a bit incredulously.

‘Sick, isn’t it?’ Dhakan replied. ‘Our glorious, but slightly warped, leader hasn’t let him out of her sight since the day he was captured.’

‘Surely she has a dungeon.’

‘Oh, yes, indeed she does. The other prisoners are all there. For some strange reason, our little girl longs for the sight of the young ruffian. She never talks to him, but she never takes her eyes off him. She sits there playing with that knife and watching him.’

‘He looks just a bit nervous.’

‘Wouldn’t you be?’

Then Emmy, her tail sinuously flowing back and forth, daintily crossed the marble floor and went up onto the dais.

‘What are you doing?’ Althalus sent a startled thought at her.

‘Stay out of this, pet,’ her voice came back. Then she raised herself up, putting her front paws on the marble throne, and meowed inquiringly at the young Arya.

Andine jerked her eyes off her captive and looked at the green-eyed cat at her knee. ‘What an adorable kitten!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where did you come from, Puss?’

‘My apologies. Your Highness,’ Althalus said, stepping forward. ‘Emmy, you come back here.’

Arya Andine gave him a puzzled look, ‘I don’t believe I know you,’ she said. Her voice was rich and vibrant, the kind of voice that stirs a man’s spirit.

‘Permit me, Your Highness,’ Dhakan said, stepping forward and bowing slightly. ‘This is Master Althalus, and he’s come here to discuss a business matter.’

Emmy gave another inquiring meow.

‘Did you want to come up here into my lap, Puss?’ Andine asked. She leaned forward and picked Emmy up. She held the cat out and looked into her face. ‘My,’ she said in her rich voice, ‘aren’t you adorable?’ Then she put the cat in her lap. ‘There,’ she said, ‘was that what you wanted?’

Emmy started to purr.

‘Master Althalus here is a businessman, Arya Andine,’ Dhakan said. ‘He deals in captives, and since he heard about the recent attack on our city, he’s stopped by to inquire about the possibility of buying those barbaric Arum prisoners from you. I recommend that you give him a hearing, Your Highness.’

‘What on earth would you do with them, Master Althalus?’ Andine asked curiously.

‘I have a number of contacts in Ansu, Your Highness,’ Althalus replied. ‘The owners of the salt mines there are always in the market for strong young men. A salt mine uses up workers at a ferocious rate.’

‘You’re a slave trader, then?’

Althalus shrugged deprecatingly. ‘It’s a living, Your Highness. Slaves are a valuable commodity. I buy them in places where they’re an inconvenience and take them to places where they can be put to work to pay for their keep. Everybody benefits, really. The one who sells them to me gets gold, and the one who buys them gets laborers.’

‘What do the slaves get?’

‘They get fed, Your Highness. A slave doesn’t have to worry about where his next meal’s coming from. He gets fed even when the crops fail or the fish aren’t biting.’

‘Our philosophers tell us that slavery’s an evil.’

I don’t concern myself with philosophy, Your Highness. I take the world as I find it. I’m prepared to offer ten Perquaine gold wheats for every able-bodied young captive you’d care to sell.’

She stared at him in astonishment. ‘That’s a noble price, Master Althalus,’ she said in that throbbing voice.

‘I buy the best, Your Highness, so I pay the best. I don’t deal in children or old men or young women. I buy only young, strong, healthy men who can put in a good day’s work.’ He glanced over at the youthful Arum chained to the marble pillar. ‘With your permission, Your Highness,’ he said, bowing slightly. He walked over to the pillar where Eliar sat disconsolately on the marble floor in chains. ‘On your feet!’ Althalus barked.

‘Who says so?’ Eliar replied sullenly.

Althalus reached out, took Eliar by his hair and jerked him into a standing position. ‘When I tell you to do something, do it,’ he said. ‘Now open your mouth. I want to see your teeth.’

Eliar tightly clamped his mouth shut.

‘He’s a bit stubborn, Master Althalus,’ Andine said. ‘I’ve been trying ever so hard to cure him of that.’

‘It takes a certain amount of firmness to break a slave’s spirit, Your Highness,’ Althalus advised her. Then he took his dagger from his belt and pried Eliar’s teeth apart with it. ‘Good healthy teeth,’ he noted. ‘That’s a promising sign. Bad teeth usually mean that the slave’s got something wrong with him.’

Eliar made a lunge at Althalus, but his chains brought him up short.

‘He’s a little stupid,’ Althalus observed, but that can be cured. Boy,’ he said to the captive, ‘didn’t your sergeant ever explain to you that it’s foolish to attack an armed man with your bare hands? Particularly when you’re chained up?’

Eliar was straining at his chains, trying to pull himself free.

‘Good muscle tone there, too,’ Althalus said approvingly. ‘I’d pay a premium for this one, Your Highness.’

‘That one isn’t for sale,’ Andine replied rather intensely. Her voice had taken on a steely note, and her huge black eyes burned.

‘Everything’s for sale, Your Highness,’ Althalus replied with a cynical laugh.

‘Don’t push it just yet, Althalus,’ Emmy’s purring voice murmured in his mind. ‘I’m still working on her.’

‘Do you think you can bring her around?’

‘Probably. She’s young enough to be impulsive. Ask to see the other captives. You’ll probably have to buy them all to get Eliar.’

‘We can discuss this one later, Your Highness,’ Althalus said to the Arya. ‘Do you suppose I might be able to take a look at the others?’

‘Of course, Master Althalus,’ Andine replied. ‘Show him the way to the dungeon, Lord Dhakan.’

‘At once. Your Highness,’ the silvery-haired old gentleman replied. ‘This way, Master Althalus.’

The two of them left the throne room.

‘Your Arya’s a beautiful young woman, Lord Dhakan,’ Althalus observed.

‘That’s the only reason we tolerate her, Althalus. She’s pretty enough that we can overlook her flaws.’

‘She’ll settle down, Dhakan. Marry her off, that’s my advice. After she’s had a few babies, she’ll start to grow up.’

There were nine kilted young Arums in the dungeon, and some of them were still nursing wounds they’d received during the battle outside the walls of Osthos. Althalus made some show of inspecting them. ‘Not bad, on the whole,’ he said as he and Dhakan were returning to the throne room. ‘That one she’s got chained to the post is the key to the whole arrangement, though. He’s the best of the lot. If we can persuade her to include him, I’ll make her an offer. If she won’t agree, I think I’ll have to go elsewhere.’

‘I’ll speak with her, Althalus,’ Dhakan promised. ‘You might want to describe the conditions the slaves have to live in once they get to the mines of Ansu. Exaggeration wouldn’t hurt. Our little girl hungers and thirsts for revenge. Let’s persuade her that the life of a slave in a salt mine is far, far worse than anything she can think of to do to him here. That might just tip the scales. Be eloquent, Althalus. Linger on unspeakable horrors if you possibly can. Our dear Andine is top-full of passions, and passionate people make hasty decisions based on whims. I’ll help as much as I can. I want that young Eliar out of Osthos and out of Andine’s sight. If she refuses to sell him to you, I’ll have to come up with a way to kill him. I have to get rid of him.’

‘Trust me, Dhakan,’ Althalus said confidently. ‘When it comes to buying and selling, I’m the very best.’ Then he sent his thought out to Emmy. ‘Have you got her yet, Em?’ he asked.

‘I’m getting closer.’

‘See if you can stir some interest in the salt mines.’

‘What for?’

‘So I can tell her some horror stories.’

‘You’re going to lie to her, I take it?’

‘No, I’m going to tell her the truth. Unless things have changed, the salt mines of Ansu are worse than the deepest pits in Nekweros. Dhakan thinks that might turn the trick here. Nudge her hard, Em. If she doesn’t sell Eliar to us, Dhakan’s going to have him killed.’

When Althalus and Dhakan entered the throne room, they saw that Andine had laid the laurel-leaf dagger aside and that she was concentrating all her attention on Emmy. She was smiling, and her smile was almost like the sun coming up. Even when she’d been scowling at Eliar, she’d been beautiful, but when she smiled, her beauty made Althalus go weak in the knees.

Dhakan went up to the dais and spoke quietly with his young ruler at some length.

Andine shook her head vehemently several times. Then Dhakan beckoned to Althalus.

Althalus approached the throne. ‘Yes, my Lord?’ he asked Dhakan.

‘I think we should get down to cases here, Master Althalus,’ Dhakan declared. ‘What’s your offer?’

‘Nine Perquaine wheats apiece for the ones you’ve got down in the dungeon,’ Althalus replied.

‘You said ten!’ Andine’s voice suddenly soared. Sergeant Khalor’s description of that voice appeared to have been a slight understatement.

Althalus held up one finger. ‘The price is subject to amendment, Your Highness,’ he said. ‘If you’re willing to include Eliar, I’ll slide it up. I’ll pay you eighty-one gold wheats for the nine in the dungeon. If you’re willing to add Eliar, I’ll pay you a hundred for the lot.’

‘That’s a difference of nineteen pieces of gold. He isn’t worth that much!’ Her voice rose again.

‘He’s prime stock. Your Highness. When I reach Ansu, I’ll put him out front for the mine-owners to look at. They’ll buy the lot just to get him. I know good merchandise when I see it. I could sell cripples if I could wave Eliar in the buyer’s face.’

‘What’s it like down there in those salt mines?’ she asked. ‘How would you describe them?’

Althalus feigned a shudder. ‘I’d really rather not, Your Highness,’ he replied. ‘Over to the east, in Wekti, Plakand and Equero, criminals beg to be executed when they’re sentenced to be sold into the salt mines as a punishment for murder and the like. Being sent into those mines is far worse than a death sentence. If a slave’s unlucky, he’ll last for ten years down there. The lucky ones die in just a few months.’

‘Why don’t we talk about that?’ Andine almost purred.

Althalus described conditions in the salt mines at some length, exaggerating only slightly. He mentioned the prevalence of blindness, the frequent cave-ins – during which lucky slaves were crushed to death. He covered the darkness, the perpetual chill, the continuous choking dust, and dwelt at some length on the burly men with whips. ‘All in all,’ he concluded, ‘murderers and the like are very wise to prefer hanging to the mines.’

‘Then you’d say that being sent to the salt mines is a fate worse than death?’ Andine said, her lovely eyes all aglow.

‘Oh, yes,’ Althalus assured her, ‘much, much worse.’

‘I do believe we can strike a bargain here, Master Althalus,’ she decided. ‘A hundred gold wheats for the lot, you say?’

‘That was my offer, Your Highness.’

‘Done, then – if you’ll throw in your cat.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I want this lovely little cat. If you let me have her, we’ve struck a bargain.’

CHAPTER TEN

‘Do as she says, Althalus’, Emmy’s thought cut through his startled dismay.

‘I most certainly will not!’ he shot back.

‘You don’t really think she can keep me here, do you? Make her throw in the Knife, though.’

‘How am I going to manage that?’

‘I don’t care. Think something up. That’s what I’m paying you for, remember? Oh, one other thing. When you get the Knife from her, just tuck it under your belt and don’t look at it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Can’t you ever do as you’re told without asking all these questions? I don’t want you to look at the Knife until after we’re out of here. Just do it and don’t argue.’

He gave up. ‘Yes, dear,’ he said silently.

‘What’s the problem, Master Althalus?’ Andine asked, gently stroking the purring cat in her lap.

‘You took me by surprise, Your Highness,’ he replied. ‘I’m really very fond of my cat.’ He scratched his chin. ‘This puts the whole transaction on a different footing. The slaves are just merchandise; including Emmy changes things. I think I’ll need something in addition to the slaves before I’d be willing to part with her.’

‘Such as?’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He pretended to think about it. ‘It really ought to be some personal possession of yours. I’m much too fond of my cat to include her in some crass commercial transaction. I’d have trouble living with myself if I just sold her outright.’

‘You’re a strange man, Master Althalus.’ Arya Andine looked at him with her luminous eyes. ‘What sort of possession of mine would satisfy your delicate sensibilities?’

‘It doesn’t have to be anything of great value, Your Highness. I didn’t pay anything for Emmy. I just picked her up along the side of the road a few years ago. She’s very good at worming her way into someone’s affections.’

‘Yes, I noticed that.’ Andine impulsively lifted Emmy up to hold her against her own face, ‘I just love this cat,’ she said in that throbbing voice of hers. ‘Choose, Master Althalus. Name your price.’

Althalus laughed. ‘You really shouldn’t say things like that, Your Highness,’ he advised her. ‘If I weren’t an honest businessman, I could take advantage of your sudden attachment to my cat.’

‘Name your price. I must have her.’

‘Oh, I don’t know – anything, I suppose. How about that Knife you’ve been toying with? You seem to have a certain attachment to it. That’s all that matters, really.’

‘Choose something else.’ Andine’s eyes grew troubled.

‘Ah – no, Your Highness, I don’t think so. My cat for your Knife. You won’t value her if you haven’t given up something that you cherish for her.’

‘You bargain very hard, Master Althalus,’ she accused.

Emmy reached out one soft paw and gently stroked the Arya’s alabaster cheek.

‘Oh, dear,’ Andine said, pressing Emmy against her face. ‘Take the Knife, Master Althalus. Take it. I don’t care. Take anything you want. I must have her.’ She seized up the laurel-leaf dagger and tossed it to the marble floor in front of the dais.

‘If it please Your Highness, I’ll see to the details,’ the silvery-haired Dhakan said smoothly. Quite obviously, Dhakan was the one who really ran things here in Osthos.

‘Thank you, Lord Dhakan,’ Andine said, rising to her feet with Emmy cradled possessively in her arms.

‘You be a good cat now, Em,’ Althalus said, bending to pick up the Knife. ‘Remember – no biting.’

‘Does she bite?’ Andine asked.

‘Sometimes,’ Althalus replied, tucking the Knife under his belt. ‘Not very hard, though. Usually it’s when she gets carried away while we’re playing. Snap her on the nose with your fingernail and she’ll quit. Oh, I should probably warn Your Highness: don’t be too surprised if she decides to give your face a bath. Her tongue’s a bit rough, but you get used to it after a while.’

‘What’s her favorite food?’

‘Fish, of course.’ Althalus bowed. ‘It’s been a pleasure doing business with Your Highness,’ he said.

The clinking of the long chain started to irritate Althalus before he and the ten young Arums even reached the main gate of Osthos. It was a continual reminder that he wasn’t alone any more, and he didn’t really like that.

Once they were outside the city, Althalus sent a searching thought back toward the palace. This was the farthest he’d been from Emmy in the last twenty-five centuries, and he didn’t like that either.

‘I’m busy right now, Althalus,’ her thought came back to him. ‘Don’t bother me. Go to that place where we made the coins and wait for me there.’

‘Do you have any idea of how long you’ll be?’

‘Sometime tonight. Keep Eliar, and turn the others loose.’

‘I just paid a lot of money for them, Em.’

‘Easy come, easy go. Point them toward Arum and send them home. Get them out from underfoot.’

The walls of Osthos were still in sight when Althalus turned his horse aside and rode across an open field to the small grove of oak trees where he and Emmy had converted the five bars of gold. As his horse plodded across the field, Althalus prudently manipulated his hearing and directed it back toward his slaves to hear what they were up to.

‘– only one man,’ he heard Eliar whisper. ‘As soon as we get away from the city, we’ll all jump on him at once and kill him. Pass it on to the others. Tell them to wait for my signal. Up until then, we’d all better act sort of meek. Once we’ve got him alone, we’ll get un-meek.’

Althalus smiled to himself. ‘I wonder why it took him so long’, he murmured to himself. ‘That notion should have come to him hours ago.’ Obviously, he was going to have to take some steps here to discourage certain loyalties.

They reached the grove of trees, and Althalus dismounted. ‘All right, gentlemen’, he said to his captives, ‘I want you to sit down and listen. You’re right on the verge of making some hasty decisions, and I think there’s something you should know first.’ He took the key to their chains and freed the young man at the end of the line. ‘Come out here in front of the others’, he told him. ‘You and I are going to demonstrate something for your friends.’

‘You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?’ the boy asked in a trembling voice.

‘After what I just paid for you? Don’t be silly.’ Althalus led the boy out to the center of the clearing. ‘Watch very closely,’ he instructed the others. Then he held his hand out, palm up, toward the shaking boy. ‘Dheu’, he said, raising his hand slowly upward.

The slave gave a startled cry as he rose up off the ground. He continued to rise, going higher and higher into the air as Althalus rather over-dramatically continued to lift his hand. After a few moments the boy appeared to be only a tiny speck high above them.

‘Now then,’ Althalus said to his gaping slaves, ‘what lesson have we just learned? What do you suppose would happen to our friend up there if I let go of him?’

‘He’d fall?’ Eliar asked in a choked voice.

‘Very good, Eliar. You’ve got a quick mind. And what’d happen to him when he came back down to earth?’

‘It’d probably kill him, wouldn’t it?’

‘It goes a long way past “probably”, Eliar. He’d splatter like a dropped melon. That’s our lesson for today, gentlemen. You don’t want to cross me. You want to go a long way to avoid crossing me. Does anybody need any further clarification?’

They all shook their heads violently.

‘Good. Since you all understand just exactly how things stand, I suppose we can bring your friend down again.’ Althalus said, ‘Dhreu,’ in the same way he’d said it to his shoe back in the House at the End of the World, slowly lowering his hand as he said it.

The boy descended to the ground and collapsed, blubbering incoherently.

‘Oh, stop that,’ Althalus told him. ‘I didn’t hurt you.’ Then he went down the chain, unlocking each slave’s iron collar, leaving only Eliar still chained up. Then he pointed north. ‘Arum’s off in that direction, gentlemen. Pick up your distracted friend there and go home. Oh, when you get back, tell Chief Albron that I’ve found the Knife I was looking for and that Eliar’s going to be coming with me. Albron and I can settle accounts on that somewhere on down the line.’

‘What’s that all about?’ Eliar demanded.

‘Your chief and I have a sort of agreement. You’ll be working for me for a while.’ Althalus glanced at the others. ‘I told you to go home’, he said. ‘Why haven’t you left yet?’

They were running the last time he saw them.

‘Aren’t you going to unchain me?’ Eliar asked.

‘Let’s hold off on that for a little while.’

‘If you’ve got an agreement with my chief, you don’t have to keep me chained up like this. I’ll honor his word.’

‘The chain makes it easier for you, Eliar. As long as you’re chained up, you won’t have to struggle with any difficult moral decisions. Do you want something to eat?’

‘No’, the boy answered sullenly. Eliar appeared to be very good at sullen. Aside from his pouty expression, he was a fairly handsome young man, tall and blond-haired. Despite his youth, he had fairly bulky shoulders, and his kilt revealed powerful legs. It was easy to see why the other young Arums in Sergeant Khalor’s detachment had accepted this young fellow as their leader.

Althalus looped the boy’s chain around an oak tree, locked it securely and then stretched out on the leafy ground. ‘You might as well catch a few winks,’he advised, ‘I expect we’ll have a long way to go and not much time, so we’ll be a little short on sleep in the not too distant future.’

‘Where are we going?’ Eliar asked as curiosity evidently won out over sullen.

‘I haven’t got the foggiest idea’, Althalus admitted. ‘I’m sure Emmy will tell us when she gets here, though.’

‘Your cat?’

‘Things aren’t always what they appear to be, Eliar. Go to sleep.’

‘Can I have some bread or something?’

‘I thought you said you weren’t hungry.’

‘I changed my mind. I really could eat something.’

Althalus called up a loaf of bread and tossed it to his captive.

‘How did you do that?’ Eliar exclaimed.

‘It’s just a little trick I picked up a few years back. It’s no great thing.’

‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen anybody do it. You’re not exactly like other people, are you?’

‘Not very much, no. Eat your supper and go to sleep, Eliar.’ Then Althalus settled back and drifted off to sleep.

Emmy ghosted silently into the oak grove not long after midnight and found Althalus just waking up. ‘Aren’t we being a bit irresponsible, pet?’ she chided him.

‘About what?’

‘I sort of thought you’d be keeping an eye on Eliar.’

‘He’s not going anyplace, Em – not unless he plans to take that tree with him.’

‘Did you have any trouble persuading his friends to leave?’

‘No, not really. They were scheming a bit on our way here, but then I showed them that it wasn’t a good idea.’

‘Oh? How?’

‘I picked one at random and did the same thing to him that we did to Pekhal a few weeks ago. They got my point almost immediately. Then I unchained them and told them all to go home. They left in quite a hurry.’

‘Show-off.’

‘I know the way Arums think, Em. They’re intensely loyal, so I had to do something spectacular enough to dispel that loyalty. I didn’t think we’d want them lurking back in the bushes watching for a chance to ambush us. I managed to get my point across to them.’

‘Have you got the Knife?’

He patted the Knife-hilt protruding from his belt. ‘Right here,’ he replied.

‘Come out into the moonlight,’ she told him, leading the way out of the grove.

‘What are we doing?’

‘You’re going to read the Knife.’

‘I take my orders from you, Em, not from this antique.’

‘Just a precaution, Althalus. The Knife’ll make sure you don’t lose interest along the way.’

‘What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me?’

‘Trust you?’ Her laugh was sardonic.

‘That wasn’t very nice, Em.’

‘Just take the Knife out and read it, Althalus. Let’s get on with this.’

He drew the Knife out from under his belt and held it out in the moonlight. The inscription engraved on the blade was complex and very formal with interlocking lines that twined around each other. The writing was not the distinctly separated pictographs Althalus had seen in the Book, but seemed somehow to flow together. He had no difficulty picking out one single word, however, since it glowed with a pale light.

‘What does it say?’ Emmy asked intently.

‘Seek,’ he answered promptly.

There was a soft, musical sound that seemed to soar higher and higher, enclosing, enveloping, almost caressing him. It was so beautiful that it brought sudden tears to his eyes.

‘And now you are mine,’ Emmy gloated.

‘I already was, Em. Is the Knife really singing?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘What for?’

‘To let me know that you’ve been chosen. And, of course, that you’ll do exactly as I tell you to do.’ She gave him a sly look. ‘Sit, Althalus,’ she said.

He immediately sat down.

‘Stand up.’

He scrambled to his feet. ‘Stop this, Emmy!’ he said sharply.

‘Dance.’

He began hopping around. ‘I’m going to get you for this, Em!’ he threatened.

‘No, you won’t. You can stop dancing now. I just wanted to show you what the Knife can do. You’ll be able to do the same sort of thing with it – just in case Eliar or any of the others we’ll pick up later start getting out of hand.’

‘That could come in handy.’ He looked even more closely at the Knife-blade. ‘That one word is all I can make out. It jumps right out of the middle of those other squiggles.’

‘The other “squiggles” are intended for others.’

‘Why can’t I read them?’

‘Nobody can read it all, Althalus. Some of those words were intended for people who lived thousands of years ago, and others are there to be read by people who won’t even be born for several thousand more. Our current crisis isn’t the only one in the history of the world, you know.’

‘It’s enough to get my attention. Did it tell you where we go next?’

‘That’ll come after Eliar reads his instructions. Everything in its proper time and place.’

‘Anything you say, dear.’ He frowned slightly. ‘Let’s see if I’ve got this straight. Nobody except certain people can read the Knife, right?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Everybody else just sees those squiggles that look like some meaningless decoration?’

‘Didn’t I already say that?’

‘What would happen if I showed it to Ghend – or Pekhal, or Khnom?’

‘The screams would probably be very loud. The sight of the Knife causes unbearable pain to the agents of Daeva.’

‘Well, now,’ he said, grinning. ‘Maybe I’d better not use the Knife to cut bacon with, then.’

‘You wouldn’t!’

‘Only teasing, Em. That Knife’s going to be very useful, I think. I believe I’ll keep it very close.’

‘Sorry, pet. You aren’t the one who’s supposed to carry it.’

‘Who is?’

‘Probably Eliar.’

‘Are you absolutely sure I can control him? He is a professional killer, Em, so the first thing he’s likely to do if I hand him the Knife is stab me in the belly with it.’

‘There aren’t really any absolutes in life, Althalus.’

‘Oh, thanks, Em,’ he said sarcastically.

‘It’s a safe wager. The chance that he’ll kill you is about the same as the one for the sun coming up in the west this morning.’

‘I suppose I’d risk a little money on that one. Why don’t we wake him up and have him read to us?’

‘Let him sleep. After he reads the Knife, we’ll find out where we’re supposed to go next, and we’ll have to leave immediately. Let’s not start wandering around in the dark.’

He shrugged. ‘You’re the one in charge, Em.’ Then he looked at her curiously. ‘What did you do to Andine to bring her around? She didn’t really want to sell Eliar to me.’

‘I persuaded her to love me more than she hated him.’

‘I thought you couldn’t do that sort of thing out here.’

‘I didn’t create her love, pet. All I did was encourage it. Andine’s very young and very passionate. She loves – and hates – with her blood and bones, and she loves even more intensely than she hates. All I had to do to unleash her love was to be adorable. I’m an expert at that, if you’ll recall.’

‘I still think you’re cheating, Em.’

‘No, not really. Andine’s very pretty, and she smells nice. She’s soft and warm, and that voice of hers throbs like a bell. She’s very easy to love, and she responds to love with love of her own. I didn’t cheat her, Althalus. I did love her – and I still do.’

‘I thought you were supposed to love only me.’

‘What a ridiculous idea. Just because I love her, it doesn’t mean that I love you less. My love is boundless, you know.’

‘But now you’ve managed to sneak away from her, and that means that I’ve swindled her out of Eliar, the Knife and you – all in the same day. I really think we should get out of here, Em – almost immediately.’

‘She won’t wake up until morning; I’ve seen to that. When she does wake up, the first thing she’ll do is search her whole palace for me. The idea of sending out her soldiers won’t come to her until later.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Trust me.’

Eliar woke up just before dawn, and he’d evidently forgotten that he was securely attached to the tree, because he started struggling with his chain before he was fully awake.

‘Stop that!’ Althalus barked sharply. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’

Eliar quit fighting. He held up one of his wrists and jingled the chain. ‘You don’t need to keep me locked up any more,’ he said. ‘I thought it over last night, and if you really do have an agreement with my chief, I’ll do what you tell me to do. If you’re lying about it, you’ll have to answer to him.’

‘Now you’re starting to make some sense,’ Althalus said approvingly. ‘I thought I might have to rattle your teeth a little bit before you started to get the point.’

‘I’m a good soldier, and I follow my chief’s orders. I don’t have to get any points or understand anything. I just have to do what I’m told to do.’

‘I think we’ll get along just fine’, Althalus said. ‘Hold out your hands. Let’s get rid of those silly chains.’

Eliar held out his wrists, and Althalus freed him.

Eliar stood up, stretching and yawning. ‘I didn’t sleep too well,’ he said. ‘Those stupid chains jingled and rattled every time I moved. What am I supposed to call you? Sergeant, maybe? I won’t call you “Master”, no matter what you do to me.’

If you ever call me “Master”, I’ll braid all your fingers and toes together. My name’s Althalus. Why don’t you call me that?’

‘Is that really your name? There’s an old story in our clan about a man named Althalus.’

‘I know. Chief Albron thought it was just a coincidence, but he was wrong.’ Althalus made a wry face. ‘My name’s about the only part of the story your people got right. The rest of it’s the biggest lie I’ve heard in my whole life – and I’ve heard some very big lies in my time. Let’s get it right out into the open, Eliar. I am the one who robbed Gosti Big Belly about twenty-five hundred years ago, but Gosti didn’t have any gold in his strongroom, just copper and a little brass. He wanted people to believe that he was the richest man in the world, so he spread some wild lies about how much gold I’d stolen from him. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble that caused me.’

‘Nobody can live that long,’ the boy scoffed.

‘I didn’t think so myself, but Emmy cured me of that. Let’s stick to the point here. Can you read?’

‘Warriors don’t waste their time on that nonsense.’

‘There’s something you have to read.’

‘I just told you that I don’t know how, Althalus. You’ll have to read it to me.’

‘It won’t work if we do it that way.’ Althalus took the Knife out from under his belt and held it out to Eliar. He pointed at the complex engraving on the blade. ‘What does this say?’ he asked.

‘I can’t read. I told you that.’

‘Look at it, Eliar. You can’t read it if you don’t look.’

Eliar looked at the leaf-shaped blade, and he jerked his head back, startled. ‘It says “Lead”!’ he exclaimed. ‘I can actually read it!’ Then he shrank back as the song of the Knife touched him.

‘Pretty, isn’t it?’ Althalus said.

Emmy had been sitting nearby, watching. She rose and came over to where they were seated. She looked very closely at Eliar, who was still staring at the Knife with a befuddled expression. ‘Tell him to do something, Althalus,’ she suggested. ‘Let’s make sure that you can control him before you give him the Knife.’

Althalus nodded. ‘Stand up, Eliar,’ he said.

The boy immediately scrambled to his feet. He swayed a bit and put one hand to the side of his head. ‘It made me a little dizzy,’ he confessed.

‘Dance,’ Althalus told him.

Eliar started to jig, his feet pattering on the ground.

‘Stop.’

Eliar quit dancing.

‘Put both hands up over your head.’

‘Why are we doing this?’ the boy asked, raising his hands.

‘Just making sure that it works. You can put your hands down. Did you notice anything peculiar just now?’

‘You kept telling me to do things that were sort of silly,’ Eliar replied.

‘If they seemed silly, why did you do them?’

‘I’m a soldier, Althalus. I always do what the man in charge tells me to do. If he tells me to do silly things, he’s the one who’s silly, not me.’

‘That sort of takes a lot of the fun out of this, doesn’t it, Em?’ Althalus said aloud. ‘Did the Knife force Eliar to jump around, or was it just his training?’

Eliar gave Emmy a surprised look. ‘How did your cat get away from Andine?’ he asked curiously.

‘She’s sort of sneaky.’

‘Andine’s going to be very angry about that. Maybe we should leave in sort of a hurry – right after breakfast.’

‘Are you hungry?’

‘I’m always hungry, Althalus.’

‘Why don’t we eat, then?’ Althalus held the Knife out to the boy. ‘Here. You’re the one who’s supposed to carry this. Tuck it under your belt and don’t lose it.’

Eliar put his hands behind his back. ‘You should probably know that I was planning to kill you last night before we got to know each other. You might want to think it over a little before you just hand me back my knife like that.’

‘You aren’t going to try to kill me now, though, are you?’

‘No. Not now.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re the man in charge, Althalus. Your arrangement with Chief Albron sort of makes you my sergeant. A good soldier never tries to kill his sergeant.’

‘Then I haven’t got a thing to worry about. Take the Knife, Eliar, and let’s eat.’

‘What a great idea,’ Eliar said enthusiastically, tucking the Knife under his belt.

‘Bacon? Or maybe ham?’

‘Whichever one you can make the quickest.’

Althalus made some ham and a loaf of black bread. Then he produced a very large cup of milk.

Eliar started to eat as if he hadn’t had anything for a week.

Althalus made more. ‘How long can he keep this up?’ he silently asked Emmy.

‘I’m not really certain,’ her reply came back. She watched Eliar eat with a slightly bemused look in her large green eyes. ‘See if you can distract him enough to get him to show me the Knife. I need to find out where we’re supposed to go next.’

‘Eliar,’ Althalus said, ‘you can keep chewing, but Emmy needs to take a quick look at your Knife.’

Eliar mumbled something.

‘Don’t talk with your mouth full,’ Althalus told him. ‘Just take the Knife out from under your belt and show it to her.’

Eliar shifted the chunk of ham he’d been eating to his left hand, wiped the grease off his right hand on the grass, and drew out his Knife. Still chewing, he held the Knife out to Emmy.

She glanced at it briefly. ‘Awes,’ she said.

‘Isn’t it in ruins?’ Althalus asked.

‘So?’

‘Just thought I’d mention it, that’s all. I’ll go saddle my horse.’

Emmy had gone back to watching Eliar eat. ‘There’s no real hurry, Althalus,’ her silent response sounded slightly amused. ‘From the look of things, our boy here’s just getting started.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

‘Just exactly where’s this war?’ Eliar asked as he trotted along beside Althalus’ horse, ‘and what kind of people are we going to be fighting?’

‘War?’ Althalus asked.

‘People don’t rent soldiers just for show, Althalus. I’m fairly sure you didn’t go to all the trouble of getting me away from Andine just because you were lonesome. Sergeant Khalor always told us that we should find out as much about the people we’re going to be fighting as we possibly can.’

‘Your sergeant’s a very wise man, Eliar.’

‘We all looked up to him – even though he could be awfully picky about details sometimes. I’ll swear that he can talk about one speck of rust on a sword for half a day.’

‘Some soldiers are like that, I suppose,’ Althalus said. ‘I don’t get all that excited about it myself. A rusty sword kills somebody as well as a polished one does.’

‘We’re going to get along just fine,’ Eliar said, grinning broadly. ‘Now, then, who am I supposed to fight?’

‘The war we’re involved with isn’t exactly like an ordinary war – at least not yet. We haven’t quite reached the point of armies and battlefields.’

‘We’re still choosing up sides?’

Althalus blinked, and then he laughed. ‘That might just come closer to what we’re doing than anything I’ve heard so far.’

‘Watch your mouth,’ Emmy’s thought had a slight edge to it.

Althalus laughed again. ‘That’s why we absolutely had to get our hands on the Knife, Eliar,’ he told the boy. ‘It’s the only thing that can tell us who’s on our side. The ones we want can read it. Others can’t. Emmy can read more of it than you and I can, and it tells her where we’re supposed to go to recruit the people we’ll need.’

‘She’s not really a cat, then, is she? My mother’s got a cat, but all her cat does is eat and sleep and chase mice. If Emmy’s that important, you took an awful chance when you traded her for the Knife the way you did. Andine’s a very strange little lady. You’re lucky she didn’t chain Emmy to her bed-post.’

‘The way she had you chained to that pillar in her throne room?’

Eliar shuddered. ‘That was a real bad time for me, Althalus. The way she used to look at me gave me the wibblies. She’d sit there for hours playing with my knife and staring right straight at me. Women are very strange, aren’t they?’

‘Oh, yes, Eliar. Indeed they are.’

Shortly before noon, Althalus noticed a farmstead some distance back from the road they were following, and he turned into the lane that led toward the house. ‘Let’s get you mounted, Eliar,’ he said.

‘I can keep up with you on foot, Althalus.’

‘Possibly, but we’ve got a long way to go. I’ll talk with the farmer here and see what he’s got to offer.’

While Althalus spoke with the seedy-looking farmer, Eliar carefully examined the farm horses in the large corral behind the farmhouse. ‘This one’, he said, rubbing the ears of a large sorrel horse.

The farmer started to object, but he changed his mind when Althalus jingled his purse.

‘You paid him too much,’ Eliar said as they rode away from the farm.

‘The money doesn’t really mean anything.’

‘Money always means something – unless you just made it up in the same way you make up the food we eat.’ Then he looked sharply at Althalus. ‘You did, didn’t you?’ he demanded. ‘You just reared back, waved your hand, and there was a great big pile of gold, wasn’t there?’

‘No, as a matter of fact, I –’ Althalus stopped, his eyes suddenly going very wide. ‘Can I do that?’ he sent his startled question at Emmy, who was dozing in the hood of his cloak.

‘Probably, yes.’

‘Then why did you make me dig it up?’

‘Honest work’s good for you, pet. Besides, it doesn’t exactly work that way. Food’s one thing, but minerals are quite a bit different.’

‘Why?’

‘They just are, Althalus. There’s certain balance involved that we shouldn’t tamper with.’

‘Would you like to explain that?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

They rode hard for the next couple of days until they were some distance away from Osthos, and then they slowed to give their horses a bit of rest. The plains of Treborea, drought-stricken and barren under the hot summer sun, were depressing, so Althalus passed the time telling Eliar slightly elaborated stories about his adventures back in the days before he’d gone to the House at the End of the World. Like all Arums, Eliar enjoyed good stories, and he was exactly the kind of audience that warmed Althalus’ heart.

Althalus did cheat just a little, though, as they rode along. Every time Eliar’s attention started to wander, a chicken leg or a chunk of still-warm bread would immediately recapture it. The arrangement worked out rather well, actually.

Emmy, however, found long naps much more interesting than the stories, for some reason.

Eliar more or less took over the care of their horses when they set up camp each night. Althalus produced the hay and oats their mounts needed, and not infrequently he was obliged to provide water for them as well. Eliar did the actual work, though, and the horses seemed quite fond of him. All in all, Althalus rather liked the arrangement.

They passed the walled city of Leupon a few days later, crossed the River Kanthon, and entered the lands of the Equeros. The lake country was not as parched as the plains of Perquaine and Treborea had been, and the population there had not been forced to huddle around slowly diminishing water holes or along river banks.

It took them about ten days to cross Equero, and then they entered mankind’s ancestral homeland of Medyo. Five days later they reached the place where the River Medyo forked and where the ruins of the city of Awes was located.

‘What happened here?’ Eliar asked as they stood on the west bank of the river waiting for the barge that – for a price – ferried travelers across to the ruins.

‘There was a war, I’m told,’ Althalus replied. ‘The way I understand it, back in those days the priesthood ruled all of Medyo and the surrounding lands. They got a little too greedy finally, and the army decided that the world might be a nicer place without so many priests, so they marched in to see if they could arrange that. The priests had an army of their own, and those two armies had some extended discussions in the streets of Awes.’

‘It must have been a long, long time ago. They’ve got full-grown trees standing in the streets over there.’

‘Althalus,’ Emmy’s voice murmured, ‘I need to talk with Eliar directly, so I’m going to borrow your voice. I think it might be easier if he’s holding me while we do this.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Just do it, Althalus’, she replied. ‘Don’t keep asking silly questions.’

Althalus took her up and held her out to their youthful companion. ‘Here’, he said. ‘Emmy wants to talk to you. Hold her.’

Eliar put his hands behind his back. ‘I think I’d rather not’, he said.

‘You’d better get over that. Take her, Eliar.’

‘I don’t understand cat-talk, Althalus,’ Eliar protested, taking Emmy with obvious reluctance.

‘I’m sure she’ll make you understand.’

‘Get out of the way, Althalus,’ Emmy’s voice commanded. ‘Count trees or something. I’m going to be using your voice, so don’t interfere.’ Then Althalus heard his own voice saying, ‘Can you hear me, Eliar?’ His voice seemed lighter, and it had a higher pitch.

‘Of course I can hear you, Althalus’, Eliar replied. ‘You’re only a few feet away. Your voice sounds a little odd, though.’

‘I’m not Althalus, Eliar,’ the voice coming from Althalus’ lips said. ‘I’m just using his voice. Look at me, not at him.’

Eliar looked down at Emmy with astonishment.

Emmy wrinkled her nose. ‘You need a bath,’ she said.

‘I’ve been a little busy. Ma’am,’ the boy replied.

‘You can pet me, if you’d like,’ she suggested.

‘Yes, Ma’am.’ Eliar began to stroke her.

‘Not quite so hard.’

‘Sorry, Ma’am.’

‘He’s such a nice boy’, Emmy murmured in her borrowed voice. ‘All right, Eliar, listen to me very carefully. There’s a distinct chance that we’ll encounter enemies over there on the other side of the river. What do you do when you meet an enemy?’

‘Kill him, Ma’am.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Emmy!’ Althalus overrode her usurpation of his voice.

‘Stay out of this, Althalus. This is between the boy and me. Now then, Eliar, we’ll be meeting priests over there. I want you to show the Knife to every one of them we meet. Can you pretend to be stupid?’

Eliar made a rueful kind of face. ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘I’m a country boy from the highlands of Arum. We invented stupid.’

‘I’d really prefer it if you called me “Emmy”, Eliar; we don’t have to be so formal. This is the way I want you to do this: when we talk to a priest, put on your best Arum expression and hold the Knife out for him to see. Then you say, “Excuse me, yer priestship, but kin you tell me what’s wrote on this here Knife?”’

‘Probably not with a straight face, Emmy,’ Eliar said, laughing. ‘Is there really anybody in the whole world who’s that simple-minded?’

‘You’d be surprised, Eliar. Practice saying it until you can do it without coming down with the giggles. Now, most of the priests won’t be able to make any sense out of what’s written on the Knife. They’ll either admit that they can’t read it, or they’ll pretend to be too busy to take the time. The one we’re looking for will read it in exactly the same way you did when you read it, and the Knife will sing to you as soon as he reads it aloud.’

‘I sort of thought that was what was going to happen, Emmy. What’s this got to do with enemies, though?’

‘If you do happen to show the Knife to an enemy, he’ll scream and try to cover his eyes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the sight of the Knife will hurt him – probably more than anything has hurt him in his entire life. As soon as somebody does that, drive the Knife right into his heart.’

‘All right, Emmy.’

‘No problems? No questions?’

‘No, Emmy, none at all. You’re in charge of things. If you tell me to do something, I’ll do it. Sergeant Khalor always told us that we’re supposed to obey orders immediately without asking any stupid questions, and your orders are really very simple. If somebody screams when I show him the Knife, he’ll be dead before the echo fades away.’

Emmy reached up one soft paw and stroked his cheek. ‘You’re such a good boy, Eliar,’ she purred.

‘Thank you, Emmy. I try my best.’

‘I hope you’ve been listening very carefully, Althalus. Maybe you should have taken some notes for future reference. It saves so much time when people know how to follow orders without all the endless discussion I get from some people I know.’

‘Can I have my voice back now?’

‘Yes, pet, you may. I’m done with it – at least for right now. I’ll let you know when I need it again.’

The barge took them across the west fork of the River Medyo, and they rode on into the ruins of the city. The priests who lived there wore cowled robes, for the most part, and they had built crude hovels among the ruins. There were some noticeable differences between the various groups of priests. Those who lived in the northern part of the ruins wore black robes, the ones in central Awes were robed in white, and the ones closest to the river fork wore brown. Althalus noted that they tended not to talk to each other very much – except to argue.

‘No, you’ve got it all wrong,’ a black-robed priest from the northern end of town was saying to a fat priest in a white robe. ‘The Wolf was in the ninth house when that happened, not the tenth.’

‘My charts don’t lie,’ the chubby priest replied hotly. ‘The sun had moved to the fourth house by then, and that definitely moved the Wolf to the tenth.’

‘What are they talking about?’ Althalus silently demanded of Emmy.

‘Astrology. It’s one of the cornerstones of religion.’

‘Which religion?’

‘Most of them, actually. Religion’s based on a desire to know what’s going to happen in the future. Astrologers believe that the stars control that.’

‘Are they right?’

‘Why would the stars care what happens here? Besides, most of the stars the priests argue about don’t actually exist any more.’

‘I think that one missed me, Em.’

‘The stars are fire, and fires eventually burn out.’

‘If they’re burned out, why are the priests still arguing about them?’

‘Because they don’t know that they’ve burned out.’

‘All they have to do is look, Em.’

‘It doesn’t quite work that way, Althalus. The stars are a lot farther away than people realize, and it takes a long time for their light to reach us. Probably about half of what you see when you look up at night isn’t really there any more. To put it another way, the priests are trying to predict the future by looking at the ghosts of dead stars.’

Althalus shrugged. ‘It gives them something to do, I suppose.’ He looked around at the ruined buildings and rubble-strewn streets. The robed and cowled priests were moving about singly or in small groups, but there were more conventionally dressed men in Awes as well. He saw one man who’d set up what appeared to be a shop next to a partially collapsed wall. The man had a rough table with pots, pans and kettles on it.

‘Welcome friends,’ the fellow said hopefully, rubbing his hands together. ‘Look and buy. Look and buy. I have the best pots and kettles in all of Awes, and my prices are the lowest you’ll find in any shop here.’

‘Be careful, Althalus,’ Emmy murmured. ‘That’s Khnom. He works for Ghend.’

‘Then Ghend knew that we were coming here?’

‘Maybe not. He might have just spread his agents out to watch for us. Fix Khnom’s face in your mind. We’ll probably run across him again.’

‘Was there anything in particular you were looking for, friend?’ the ostensible merchant asked. He was a small-sized man, and he seemed to be very careful not to look Althalus in the eye.

‘Actually, I need some information, neighbor,’ Althalus replied. ‘I’m not familiar with the proprieties here in Awes. Can I just set up shop in any ruined building that’s empty?’

‘That wouldn’t be a good idea,’ the merchant advised. ‘Most of the business that goes on here in Awes takes place in this middle part of town, and the white-robes who control it sort of expect a “donation” from you before you open for business.’

‘A bribe, you mean?’

I wouldn’t use that word to their faces. Pretend to be some religious simpleton. All priests love feeble-minded parishioners.’ Khnom cast a sly, sidelong glance at Althalus to see how his somewhat sacrilegious remark had gone over.

Althalus kept his face bland. ‘What are their feelings about us pitching our tents at the back of the shop?’ he asked.

‘They’d rather that we didn’t – and you probably wouldn’t want to. They pray a lot, and they’re noisy about it. The rest of us businessmen have a sort of community over by what’s left of the east wall of the city.’

‘How do these priests get the money to buy anything?’

‘They sell horoscopes to gullible people who believe in that nonsense, and they charge a fairly steep price.’

‘Good. They swindle their parishioners, and then we swindle them. I love doing business with a man who devoutly believes he’s more clever than I am. Thanks for the information.’

‘Glad I could help. Do you need any pots or pans?’

‘Not right at the moment, no. Thanks all the same.’

‘He knows who you are, Althalus,’ Emmy’s voice warned.

‘Yes, I know. He’s clever, I’ll give him that, but he’s not really a merchant.’

‘How did you know that?’

‘He didn’t once ask me what line I was in. That’s the first question any merchant asks. No merchant wants a competitor right across the street. Should we get rid of him? Eliar and I could kill him right now.’

‘No. You two aren’t the ones who are supposed to deal with Khnom. Just be careful around him, that’s all.’

‘Where do we go now?’ Eliar asked.

‘There’s a merchant community over by the east wall,’ Althalus replied. ‘We’ll set up camp there and start looking for the one we want first thing in the morning.’

‘Could you make me some soap?’ Eliar asked as they led their horses off down the rubble-strewn street.

‘Probably. Why?’

‘Emmy wants me to take a bath. Is that the first thing that pops into every woman’s mind? Every time I’d visit my mother back home, those were usually the first words that came out of her mouth.’

‘You don’t like bathing, I take it?’

‘Oh, I’ll bathe if it really gets necessary, but once a week’s usually enough, isn’t it? Unless you’ve been cleaning the stables, of course.’

‘Emmy’s got a very sharp nose, Eliar. Let’s neither of us go out of our way to offend her.’

‘You too, Althalus,’ Emmy’s voice murmured.

‘I don’t need a bath, Em,’ he silently protested.

‘You’re wrong. You definitely need a bath. You’ve been riding for several weeks now, and you’ve got a very horsey fragrance about you. Bathe. Soon. Please.’

They started out early the following morning, and after a few awkward starts Eliar became more proficient. His open, boyish face helped quite a bit as he hopefully approached each hooded priest with his question. Most of the priests, Althalus noticed, refused to come right out and admit that they couldn’t read the alien script carved into the Knife-blade Eliar showed them. Their usual response was a brusque, ‘I’m too busy for that kind of nonsense.’ Several they encountered, however, offered to translate – for a price. One hollow-eyed fanatic launched a blistering denunciation, declaring that any script that he couldn’t read was obviously the handwriting of the devil himself.

Althalus and Eliar left him in the middle of the street still preaching to nobody in particular.

‘Here comes another one,’ Eliar said quietly. ‘Maybe we can start making wagers about what they’ll say when I show them the Knife. This one looks like an “I’m too busy” sort of fellow to me.’

‘I’d put him in the “I’ll have to charge you for a reading” crowd,’ Althalus replied, grinning.

‘What gives him away?’

‘He’s cock-eyed. He’s got one eye on the sky watching for Deiwos and the other on the ground looking for a penny that somebody might have dropped.’

‘I just hope he’s not like the last one. The next one who calls my Knife an instrument of the devil is going to get my fist in his face.’

The priest approaching them up the empty street had a gaunt, hungry look about him, and his disconnected eyes and wild hair gave him the appearance of a lunatic. His shabby brown robe was filthy, and there was a powerful odor about him.

‘Excuse me, your worship,’ Eliar said politely, going up to the cock-eyed holy man. ‘I just bought this Knife and it seems to have some kind of writing on the blade. I never got around to learning how to read, so I can’t tell what it says. Could you help me out?’

‘Let me see it,’ the priest growled in a harsh, rasping voice.

Eliar held out his laurel-leaf dagger.

The sudden scream was shockingly loud, echoing from the ruined walls of nearby buildings. The ragged priest stumbled back, covering his eyes with his hands and screaming as if he’d just been dipped in boiling pitch.

‘I hope you won’t take this personally, your worship,’ Eliar said, driving the Knife directly into the shrieking priest’s chest.

The scream cut off abruptly, and the dead man collapsed with not so much as a twitch.

Althalus spun, his eyes searching every vacant window and doorway. As luck had it, they were alone. ‘Get him out of sight!’ he barked at Eliar. ‘Hurry!’

Eliar quickly put the Knife away, seized the fellow’s wrists and dragged him behind a partially collapsed wall. ‘Did anybody see us?’ he asked just a bit breathlessly.

‘I don’t think so,’ Althalus replied. ‘Come here and keep watch. I want to search the body.’

‘What for?’ Eliar stood up. His hands were trembling slightly.

‘Calm down,’ Althalus told him. ‘Get a grip on yourself.’

‘I’m all right, Althalus,’ Eliar said. ‘It’s just that he startled me when he started screaming like that.’

‘Why did you apologize before you killed him?’

‘Just trying to be polite, I guess. Mother taught me to mind my manners. You know how mothers are.’

‘Watch the street. Let me know if somebody happens along.’ Althalus roughly searched the body, not really knowing what he might be looking for, but the dead man’s pockets had absolutely nothing in them. He kicked a bit of rubble over the body, and then he came back out into the street.

‘Did you find anything?’ Eliar asked. His voice still sounded a little excited.

‘Calm down,’ Althalus told him. ‘If you’re going to do this, do it right. People who are all worked up make mistakes.’

Then a black-robed priest came striding up the rubble-littered street toward them. He was a fairly young man, and his hair was a rich auburn color. His dark eyes were flashing indignantly. ‘I saw what you just did!’ he said. ‘You men are murderers!’

‘Shouldn’t you get a few details before you start making accusations like that?’ Althalus said calmly.

‘You killed him in cold blood!’

‘My blood wasn’t particularly cold,’ Althalus said. ‘Was yours, Eliar?’

‘Not really,’ Eliar replied.

‘The man was not a priest. Reverend Sir,’ Althalus told their accuser. ‘Quite the opposite – unless Daeva’s set up a priesthood of his own here lately.’

‘Daeva!’ the youthful priest gasped. ‘How did you know that name?’

‘Is it supposed to be a secret?’ Althalus asked mildly.

‘That information is not supposed to be in the hands of the general population. Ordinary people aren’t equipped to deal with it.’

‘Ordinary people are probably much wiser than you think they are, Reverend,’ Althalus told him. ‘Every family has a few black sheep. There’s nothing really unusual about it. Deiwos and Dweia aren’t really happy that their brother went astray, but it wasn’t really their fault.’

‘You’re a priest, aren’t you?’

‘You make it sound almost like an accusation,’ Althalus said, smiling slightly. ‘Eliar and I sort of work for Deiwos, but I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call us priests. The man Eliar just put to sleep was one of the people who work for Daeva. As soon as we discovered that, we killed him. There’s a war in the works right now, Reverend. Eliar and I are soldiers, and we’re going to fight that war.’

‘I’m a soldier of Deiwos, too,’ the priest asserted.

‘That hasn’t been established yet, my young friend. There’s a little test you’d have to take first. That’s what you just saw happen here. The fellow lying over behind that wall didn’t pass the test, so Eliar killed him.’

‘The stars haven’t said anything about a war.’

‘Maybe the news hasn’t reached them yet.’

‘The stars know everything.’

‘Maybe. But maybe they’ve been told to keep the information to themselves. If I happened to be the one who’s running this war, I don’t think I’d be scrawling my battle-plans across the sky every night, would you?’

The priest’s eyes grew troubled. ‘You’re attacking the very core of religion,’ he accused.

‘No. I’m attacking a misconception. You look at the sky and imagine that you’re seeing pictures up there, but they aren’t really pictures, are they? They’re just disconnected points of light. There isn’t a Raven up there, or a Wolf, or a Serpent, or any other imaginary picture. The war’s right here, not up there. But this is all beside the point. Let’s find out if you really are one of the soldiers of the Sky-God.’

‘I have taken a vow to serve him,’ the priest asserted devoutly.

‘Did he ever get around to telling you whether or not he accepted your vow?’ Althalus asked slyly. ‘Maybe you don’t qualify.’

The auburn-haired young man’s eyes grew even more troubled.

‘You’re filled with doubts, aren’t you, friend?’ Althalus said sympathetically. ‘I know that feeling very, very well. Sometimes your faith falters and everything you want to believe seems to be nothing but a mockery and a deception – some cruel joke.’

‘I want to believe! I try so hard to make myself believe.’

‘Eliar and I are here to make it easier for you,’ Althalus assured him. ‘Show him the Knife, Eliar.’

‘If you say so,’ Eliar said obediently. He looked at the troubled priest. ‘Don’t get excited about this, Your Worship,’ he said. ‘I’m going to show my Knife to you. I’m not threatening you with it or anything. There’s some writing on the blade that you’re supposed to read to us. If you can’t read it, we’ll shake hands and part friends. If you do happen to see a word on the blade, you’ll be joining us. This is that test Althalus was talking about.’

‘Just show him the Knife, Eliar,’ Althalus said. ‘You don’t have to make a speech to him.’

‘He gets grouchy sometimes,’ Eliar told the now-baffled priest. ‘He’s the oldest man in the world, and you know how grouchy old men get sometimes. We’d better get down to business before he starts jumping up and down and frothing at the mouth.’

‘Eliar!’ Althalus almost shouted. ‘Show him the Knife!’

‘You see what I mean about him?’ Eliar said. He took the Knife out from under his belt and pointed at the complex engraving on the blade. ‘This is what you’re supposed to try to read,’ he explained. ‘The word sort of jumps right out at you, so you don’t really have to work at it too hard.’

‘Eliar!’ Althalus almost pleaded.

‘I’m just trying to help him, Althalus.’ Eliar held the hilt of the dagger firmly in his fist and turned his hand to hold the blade directly in front of the trembling priest’s pale face. ‘What does it say. Your Worship?’ he asked politely.

The youthful priest went paler still, as if every drop of blood had drained from his face. ‘Illuminate,’ he replied so reverently that it seemed almost a prayer.

The dagger in Eliar’s fist broke into joyful song.

‘I knew he was the one, Althalus,’ Eliar said in an off-hand sort of way. ‘That’s why I was trying to sort of ease him into it. You’re a fairly good sergeant, but sometimes you’re just a little rough. You ought to work on that, if you don’t mind my saying so.’

‘Thanks,’ Althalus replied in a flat, almost unfriendly way.

‘It’s part of my job, Althalus,’ Eliar replied, tucking the Knife back under his belt. ‘I’m sort of your second in command, so if I see a way to do things better, I’m supposed to suggest it to you. You don’t have to listen if you don’t want to, of course, but I’d be letting you down if I didn’t say it, wouldn’t I?’

‘Don’t say anything, Althalus,’ Emmy silently commanded.

Althalus sighed. ‘No, dear,’ he replied in a resigned tone.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The auburn-haired young priest had sunk limply down onto a mossy stone, and he sat staring at the ground in a kind of distracted wonder.

‘Are you all right?’ Eliar asked their new companion.

‘I have seen the word of God,’ the priest replied in a trembling voice. ‘Deiwos has spoken to me.’

‘Yes,’ Eliar replied. ‘We heard him, too.’ Then he amended that. ‘Well, actually we heard the Knife, but since it’s God’s Knife in the first place, it sort of amounts to the same thing, I guess.’

‘Why did the Knife make that sound?’ The priest’s voice was still shaking and filled with awe.

‘I think that’s God’s way of letting us know that you’re the one we’ve been looking for. My name’s Eliar.’

‘I’m known as Bheid,’ the priest replied, looking into the young Arum’s face with a puzzled expression.

‘I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Bheid,’ Eliar said, grasping the priest’s hand.

‘Aren’t you a bit young to be a holy man?’ Bheid asked. ‘Most holy men I’ve known are much older.’

Eliar laughed. ‘Nobody’s ever called me a holy man before, and I’m not, really. I’m just a soldier who happens to be working for God right now. I don’t really understand what’s going on, but that’s all right. A soldier doesn’t have to understand. He just has to do as he’s told.’

Bheid started to rise, but Eliar put one hand on his shoulder. ‘It might be better if you sat still for a while,’ he suggested. ‘If you’re feeling at all the way I did when I first read the Knife, you’re probably a little wobbly right now. God’s got a very loud voice. I’m sure you noticed that.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Bheid replied fervently. ‘What are we supposed to do now?’

‘You’ll have to ask Althalus here. He’s the only one who can talk to Emmy, and Emmy’s the one who makes the decisions.’

‘Who’s Emmy?’

‘As I understand it, she’s the sister of God, but right now she sort of looks like a cat, and she spends all her time sleeping in that hood Althalus has on the back of his cloak. It’s sort of complicated. Emmy’s older than the sun, and she’s very sweet, but if you make a mistake and cross her, she’ll swat the end of your nose right off.’

Bheid looked at Althalus. ‘Is this boy all right?’ he asked.

‘Eliar?’ Althalus replied. ‘I think so. Of course he hasn’t had anything to eat for an hour or two, so he might be a little light-headed.’

‘I don’t understand any of this at all,’ Bheid confessed.

‘Good. That’s the first step toward wisdom.’

‘This might all make more sense if I knew your sign, Althalus – and Eliar’s as well. If I can cast your horoscopes, I’ll probably know just who you are.’

‘Do you actually believe that, Bheid?’ Althalus asked.

‘Astrology’s the core of all religion,’ Bheid told him. ‘Deiwos has written our destinies in the stars. The duty of the priesthood is to study the stars so that we can give man the word of God. What’s your sign? When were you born?’

‘A very long time ago, Bheid,’ Althalus said with a faint smile. ‘I don’t think you’d have much luck trying to cast my horoscope, because the stars have changed a lot since then. They had different names, and the people who looked at the skies didn’t see them in the same combinations that you do. Half of the Wolf was the bottom of something the old sky-watchers called the Turtle, and what astrologers call the Boar now was the top half.’

‘That’s blasphemy!’ Bheid exclaimed.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Bheid. Those astrologers all died, so they won’t be able to accuse you.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know, but they’d see it that way, wouldn’t they?’ Althalus put his hand on Bheid’s arm. ‘There aren’t really any pictures in the sky, you know. As I said before, the stars aren’t connected with each other to make pictures for us to look at, but you’ve already guessed that, haven’t you? That’s why you’re having your crisis of faith. You want to believe that there’s a Wolf and a Boar and a Dragon up there, but when you look, you just can’t really see them, can you?’

‘I try,’ Bheid almost wept. ‘I try so very hard, but they just aren’t there.’

‘Things have just been rearranged, Bheid. You won’t have to look at the sky any more, because Eliar’s got the Knife of Deiwos. The Knife will tell us where to go next.’

‘Are we going to leave Awes?’

‘I’m sure we are. We have a long way to go, I think.’

‘You’re wasting time, Althalus,’ Emmy’s voice crackled inside his head. ‘You and Bheid can speculate about the stars on the way back to Osthos.’

‘Osthos!’ Althalus protested out loud. ‘Emmy, we just came from there!’

‘Yes, I know. Now we have to go back.’

‘Were you talking with Emmy just now?’ Eliar demanded. ‘Did she say that we have to go to Osthos again? I can’t go back there, Althalus! Andine would have me killed if I went back!’

‘Is there something wrong?’ Bheid asked, sounding very confused.

‘We just got our marching orders,’ Althalus told him. ‘Eliar’s a little bit unhappy about them.’

‘Did something happen just now that I missed?’

‘Emmy just told me that we have to go to Osthos.’

‘I’m not sure I understand all this talk about somebody named Emmy.’

‘Emmy’s the messenger of Deiwos – sort of. It’s a bit more complex than that, but let’s keep it simple for right now. Deiwos tells Emmy what he wants done. Then she tells me, and I pass it on.’

‘We’re taking orders from a cat?’ Bheid asked incredulously.

‘No, we’re taking orders from God. We can talk about that on our way to Osthos, though. Emmy wants us to start getting ready to leave.’ Althalus glanced about. ‘Let’s pile some more rocks on top of that dead man so that he’s not quite so visible. Then we’ll go pick up your belongings, and I’ll buy you a horse. We’ll leave first thing in the morning.’

They concealed the body more thoroughly and started off through the ruins toward the northern end of Awes. ‘Who’s this Andine person you were talking about?’ Bheid asked Eliar.

‘She’s the ruler of Osthos,’ Eliar replied. ‘She wants to kill me.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Well,’ Eliar replied with a lightly pained expression, ‘I did sort of kill her father, I guess, but it was during a war, and that kind of thing happens during wars. I was just doing my job, but Andine took it personally. I didn’t really mean anything by it. I was just following orders, but she can’t quite understand that, I guess.’

‘Did any of that make any sense to you?’ Bheid asked Althalus with a perplexed look.

‘You almost had to have been there,’ Althalus told him. ‘It was all very complicated. We can talk about it on our way to Osthos.’

They went to the northern end of Awes where the black-robed priests stayed, picked up Bheid’s blankets and his few other belongings, and then returned to the rudimentary camp where Althalus and Eliar had spent the previous night. Then Eliar and Bheid went to the corral of a horse trader and returned with a mount for their newest member.

‘I’m awfully hungry, Althalus,’ Eliar said hopefully. ‘Could we have beef tonight instead of fish?’

‘I’ll make a fire,’ Bheid offered.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Althalus told him. Then he called up a fairly large beef roast and several loaves of bread.

Bheid jerked back with a startled oath.

‘Makes your hair stand on end, doesn’t it?’ Eliar chuckled. ‘I was almost afraid to eat the first supper he made that way, but the food he makes with words is really very good.’ Eliar started to eat with a great deal of enthusiasm.

‘How do you do that?’ Bheid asked Althalus in an awed voice.

‘Emmy calls it “using the Book”,’ Althalus replied. ‘She taught me how to do it back in the House at the End of the World where the Book is.’

‘Which Book?’

‘The Book of Deiwos, of course.’

‘You’ve actually seen the Book of Deiwos?’

‘Seen it?’ Althalus laughed. ‘I lived with it for twenty-five hundred years. I can recite it from end to end, forward or backward, and from side to side, if you’d really care to hear it that way. I think I could even recite it upside down if I put my mind to it.’

‘Exactly how is it that the Book of Deiwos makes it possible for you to perform miracles?’

‘The Book’s the word of God, Bheid. It’s written in a very antique language that’s sort of like the language we speak now, but not exactly. The words from the old language make things happen. If I say “beef”, nothing happens, but if I say “gwou”, we get supper. There’s a little more involved in the procedure, but that’s the core of it. I spent a lot of years committing the Book to memory.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘I’ve got it in here now, so I don’t have to carry it with me – which isn’t permitted, of course. The Book has to stay in the House. It wouldn’t be safe to carry it out into the real world. You’d better eat your supper before it gets cold.’

Eliar had several more helpings, then they talked a bit more before rolling up in their blankets to sleep.

It was Awes. Althalus was sure that it was Awes, but it had no buildings. He could clearly see the fork of the River Medyo, but a grove of ancient trees had somehow replaced the ruins. He wandered for a time under those mighty oaks, and then he looked toward the west and saw people far off in the distance. As he watched them coming across the grassy plain toward the place where he stood, he seemed to hear a faint wailing sound coming from very far away. There was a lost, despairing quality to that wailing that seemed to wrench at his very soul.

And then the people he’d seen reached the far bank of the river, and he could see them more clearly. They were dressed in the skins of animals, and they carried spears with stone points.

He rolled over, muttering and groping under his blanket for the rock which had been gouging his hip. He finally located it, threw it away, and slid easily back into sleep.

There were crude huts under the oak trees now, and the fur-clad people moved among those huts, talking, talking, talking in hushed and fearful tones. ‘He comes, he comes, he comes,’ the people said. ‘Make ready for his coming, for he is God.’ And the faces of some of the people were exalted, and the faces of others were filled with terror. And still they said, ‘He comes, he comes, he comes.’

And Ghend moved among them, whispering, whispering. And the people pulled back from Ghend with fear upon their faces. But Ghend paid no heed to their fear, and his eyes burned, burned.

And Ghend lifted his face and looked upon Althalus with his burning eyes. And the eyes of Ghend seared at the soul of Althalus. And Ghend spoke then, saying, ‘It is of little moment, my thief. Run, Althalus, run, and I shall pursue you down the nights and down the years, and the Book shall avail you not, for I shall deliver you up to the throne of Daeva, and you – even as I – shall serve him down all the endless eons. And when the eons end, we shall turn and follow them back to their beginning. And then shall we turn again, and behold, they shall not be as they were before.’

The wailing sound rose to an awful shriek.

Althalus started up, sweating profusely. ‘God!’ he exclaimed, trembling violently.

‘Who was he?’ Bheid’s terrified voice came out of the darkness. ‘Who was that man with eyes of fire?’

‘You saw him too?’ Eliar asked, his voice also trembling.

‘Step aside, Althalus,’ Emmy’s voice inside his head had a crisp, no-nonsense quality about it. ‘I need to talk to them.’

Althalus felt himself being rather rudely thrust aside. ‘Eliar,’ Emmy said, ‘tell Bheid who I am.’

‘Yes, Ma’am,’ Eliar responded. ‘Bheid,’ he said, ‘that’s Emmy talking. She does that now and then. Althalus might still be there, but she’s using his voice.’

‘The cat?’ Bheid said incredulously.

‘I wouldn’t think of her as a cat, exactly,’ Eliar advised. ‘That’s just the way she hides what she really is. Her real form would probably blind us if we looked at her.’

‘Hush, Eliar,’ Emmy said gently.

‘Yes, Ma’am.’

‘What you’ve all just experienced, gentlemen, wasn’t exactly a dream,’ Emmy told them. ‘Althalus has met Ghend before, so he’ll be able to tell you about him – after I’ve finished using his voice. What you saw just now wasn’t a dream, but it wasn’t real, either. It’s what Ghend – and Daeva – want to make real.’

‘Who were those people we saw?’ Bheid asked in a trembling voice.

‘The Medyos – the first ones who came to this part of the world ten thousand years ago. They brought the worship of Deiwos with them when they came here, but Daeva’s trying to change that. He’s trying to alter things so that the first Medyos worship him instead of his kinsman, Deiwos.’

‘But that’s impossible,’ Bheid protested. ‘Once something’s happened, it can’t be changed.’

‘Keep a very firm grip on that thought, Bheid,’ she advised. ‘It might help. Daeva doesn’t seem to agree with you, though. He believes that he can change the past – by changing the present. That’s why we’re being gathered together. We’re supposed to prevent what Daeva’s trying to do. This will happen again. You’ll see things that didn’t really happen, and you won’t always be asleep when you see them.’

‘This just stopped being fun, Emmy,’ Eliar complained. ‘If these wide-awake dreams come popping out of nowhere the way that one did, how can we tell what’s real and what’s not?’

‘Because of the wailing,’ she replied. ‘When you hear that wailing off in the distance, it’s a sure sign that Ghend’s trying to alter the past. You’ll also know when the wailing starts that you’re not in the present. You may be in the past or in the future, but you aren’t in the place called now.’

Althalus looked off to the east where the first faint hint of the new day was touching the horizon, ‘It’s almost daybreak,’ he told his companions. ‘Let’s gather up our things and get ready to start.’

‘We are going to have breakfast, aren’t we?’ Eliar asked in a worried tone.

Althalus sighed. ‘Yes, Eliar, we’ll have breakfast.’

The sun was just coming up when the barge ferried them across the west fork of the river, and they rode toward the west. After they’d gone a few miles, Bheid trotted up beside Althalus. ‘Can we talk?’ he asked.

‘I guess that’s permitted,’ Althalus replied.

‘How did you find out where the Book of Deiwos was located?’ Bheid asked. ‘I’ve been hearing stories about it for years now. Arguments about that Book have been going on for centuries. Most of my teachers said that the Book was actually the night sky, but some said that it really did exist. Evidently those were the ones who were right.’

‘Yes,’ Althalus replied, ‘there really is a Book.’

‘How did you find it? Did God come to you in a vision?’

Althalus laughed. ‘No it wasn’t God who came to me. It was Ghend.’

‘Ghend?’

‘He looked me up and hired me to steal the Book for him. It was Ghend who told me where the House was.’

‘Why would any honest man agree to something like that.’

‘An honest man probably wouldn’t have, but I don’t have that problem. I’m a thief, Bheid.’

‘A thief?’

‘That’s a man who steals things. I’m probably the best thief in the world, so I’ve got a good reputation. Ghend tracked me down and told me that he’d pay me if I stole the Book for him. Then he told me where it was.’

‘The House at the End of the World?’

‘Well, that’s what it’s called. It’s built on the edge of a cliff up in northern Kagwher, and it’s the biggest house I’ve ever seen. It’s almost completely empty though. There’s only one room that has any furniture in it. That’s where the Book was. Of course, Emmy was there, too. She scolded me for being late, and I thought for certain that I’d gone mad. She told me to stop being silly, and then she taught me how to read.’

‘From the Book of Deiwos?’ Bheid asked reverently.

‘It was the only Book there.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘It’s a box covered with white leather. The pages are stacked inside the box. Emmy used to come all unraveled if I mixed up the pages. Anyway, I learned how to read the Book, and then Emmy and I found a way to speak to each other without using our voices. Then we left the house to go find the Knife. We discovered that Eliar had it. He’s a mercenary soldier, and he was fighting in that war between Kanthon and Osthos that’s been going on for forty or fifty generations now. Eliar was leading an attack on the walls of Osthos, and he killed the Aryo during the fighting. The Aryo’s daughter, Andine, didn’t like that at all, and, since Eliar’d been taken prisoner, she started thinking about all sorts of interesting things to do to him. I posed as a slave trader and bought him from her. Then we came here to find you. Now we’re going back to Osthos to find somebody else.’

‘How long ago was it? When Ghend hired you, I mean?’

‘Emmy says it was twenty-five hundred years ago. From what she tells me, people don’t age in the House. It’s just as well, really. If I’d aged normally, I’d have a white beard about twelve miles long by now.’

‘Is Emmy really the sister of God?’

‘That’s what she tells me. Her name’s Dweia, but she says she doesn’t actually look much like that statue in her temple in Maghu.’

‘You worship a female God?’ Bheid’s eyes bulged in outrage.

‘I don’t worship her, Bheid. I love her, but I don’t worship her. Worship means absolute obedience, and it involves a lot of groveling. I do what Emmy tells me to do most of the time, but I don’t spend much time on my knees. We argue all the time, actually. Emmy likes to argue – almost as much as she likes to sneak up and pounce on me.’

‘May I touch her?’ Bheid asked in an almost reverent tone.

‘Emmy,’ Althalus said back over his shoulder. ‘Wake up. Bheid wants to rub your ears.’

Emmy poked her sleepy-eyed face up out of his hood. ‘That would be nice,’ she murmured.

Althalus reached back, lifted her out of his hood, and held her out to Bheid. ‘Go ahead and hold her, Bheid,’ he said. ‘She’ll steal your soul, of course, but why should you be any different from Eliar and me?’

Bheid jerked his hand back.

‘I’m only joking, Bheid,’ Althalus said.

‘Are you really all that certain, pet?’ Emmy asked, her green eyes turning sly.

Bheid’s hands were trembling as he took her from Althalus, but he relaxed when Emmy started purring.

‘When are we going to stop for lunch?’ Eliar called from behind them.

They rode on across western Medyo, keeping off the main roads whenever possible. The sudden appearance of the cock-eyed man back in Awes indicated a likelihood that Ghend had agents everywhere. Althalus knew that they could deal with those agents, but unnecessary killings went against his grain. A really good thief shouldn’t have to kill people.

It was midsummer by the time they approached the bridge across the west fork of the River Osthos, and Althalus prudently turned aside from the road and led Eliar and Bheid into a grove of trees some distance upstream.

‘Em,’ he said silently after they’d dismounted, ‘just exactly who are we supposed to find there in Osthos?’

‘Guess,’ she replied rather smugly.

‘Don’t do that,’ he scolded.

‘You’ve already met her, pet.’

He blinked. ‘You’re not serious!’ He almost said it out loud.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘How are we supposed to get inside her palace?’

‘You’re the thief, Althalus,’ she replied. ‘If you can steal things, I’m sure you’ll be able to steal one little girl.’

‘Emmy, her palace is guarded by an army. One little squeak out of her and I’ll have thirty armed men climbing all over me.’

‘Then we’ll just have to make sure she doesn’t squeak, won’t we?’ She considered it. ‘I think we’d better leave Eliar and Bheid here – and your horse. We’ll want to move very quietly. I’m a cat, and you’re a thief. We know how to be quiet. They don’t.’

‘How long have you known that Andine would be joining us?’

‘Since the moment Eliar read the Knife.’

‘Why didn’t we pick her up before we went to Awes?’

‘That would have been out of sequence, pet. Everything must be in its proper place and time.’

Althalus glanced at Eliar, and he remembered the way Arya Andine had looked at the boy. ‘I think your brother’s got a very warped sense of humor, Em,’ he said.

‘Why, Althalus,’ she said, ‘I’m shocked at you. Shocked.’

It was well past midnight when Althalus and Emmy slipped into Andine’s palace in the center of Osthos. This time, Emmy chose to walk rather than ride, and she moved on silent feet ahead of the thief, passing warnings back to him. Once they were inside the massive palace, she led him to the Arya’s private quarters. ‘She’s asleep,’ Emmy advised. ‘There are two guards outside her door. Encourage them to take a little nap.’

‘How?’

‘Try “leb”.’

‘Will that work?’

‘It always has before. After we leave, you’d better wake them up again, though. People might think it’s a little peculiar if they slept for fifty or sixty years the way you used to do back in the House.’

‘Is that the way you did it?’

‘Of course. Step right along, Althalus. The night won’t last forever, you know.’

The pair of guards at Andine’s door were still standing, but their chins had sagged down onto their chests and they were snoring softly. Althalus reached past them and took hold of the door handle.

Then Emmy hissed.

‘What’s the problem?’ he whispered.

‘Argan!’

‘What’s an Argan?’

‘It’s a who, not a what. This guard on the left is Argan.’

‘Is that name supposed to mean anything to me?’

‘I mentioned him before. Argan’s another one of Ghend’s underlings.’

‘That’s convenient.’ Althalus reached for his dagger.

‘Put that away,’ Emmy said in a disgusted tone.

‘It’s a nice simple solution, Em.’

‘Perhaps, but how do you plan to solve the problem that’ll come up later?’

‘Which problem is that?’

‘Returning him to life when he absolutely must be alive and well.’

‘I didn’t follow that.’

‘I didn’t really think you would. Put the knife away, Althalus. You aren’t the one who’s supposed to deal with Argan – any more than you were the one who’s supposed to deal with Pekhal or Khnom. Just leave him alone.’

‘Hold it, Em. Doesn’t this mean that Ghend knew that we were coming here?’

‘Probably, yes.’

‘How did he find out?’

‘Probably because Daeva told him.’

‘How did Daeva find out?’

‘The same way I did, of course. We hear things that you can’t, Althalus. I know about people like Khnom and Pekhal and Argan, and Daeva knows about people like Eliar and Bheid and Andine. They’re significant people, and significant people give off a certain sound that we can hear. Just leave Argan alone. Let’s get Andine and get out of here before he wakes.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.