The Redemption of Althalus (3 page)

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 was usually 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. He addressed the other patrons. “Maybe one of you gentlemen could clear something up for me. 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 brokendown 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 stonemason 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 home, 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 stonemasons 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 was 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 grain fields 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 devoutly wish that he’d never heard the word “civilization.”

He crossed the river into Perquaine, the fabled 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 countinghouse 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 passerby. “Excuse me,” he said politely, “but I’m looking for the countinghouse 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 barnlike warehouses, and a helpful fellow pointed out the one that 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 swearwords, 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 was 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.