The Redemption of Althalus (95 page)

“Galbak’s got a good chance of catching the thieves, Gosti,” he reported. “Ghend and Khnom haven’t got much more than an hour’s head start, and they’re not as familiar with the surrounding territory as Galbak is.” He gave the grossly fat Clan Chief a wry sort of smile. “It’s a peculiar sort of thing to say, but Ghend’s greed is actually working for
us.
”

“I didn’t follow that, Althalus,” Gosti admitted.

“Gold’s very heavy, Gosti,” Althalus explained, “and from what Galbak was saying, there are about eight bags of it missing from your strong room.”

Gosti groaned. “Eight bags!” he grieved.

“It’d be better if Ghend’s greed had gone even further, but eight should be enough. Ghend and Khnom only have two horses, and the dead weight of those bags is going to slow those horses down. Galbak and his men are traveling light, so they’ll be able to move faster. I’d guess that they’ll catch up with those thieves by midafternoon.”

“That makes very good sense, Althalus,” Gosti said, his sweaty face breaking into a broad grin of relief.

“Evidently, your gold’s very fond of you, Gosti. Notice how it cooperates with you and Galbak in the capture of those thieves.”

“It
does,
doesn’t it? I hadn’t thought of that.”

“You were meant to have that gold, Gosti, and now it’s going out of its way to come back to you.”

“I like your way of thinking, Althalus.”

“It never hurts to look on the bright side.”

Althalus and Gher remained in Gosti’s hall for several days after the robbery. Their fat host grew more and more unhappy as the messengers from Galbak failed to bring good news.

“I think it’s just about time for us to move on,” Althalus told Gher on the morning of the third day. “We’ll cross Gosti’s bridge and meet Eliar over on the other side of the river. Then we can go back to the House.”

“I thought we’d be going to Hule to wait for Ghend.”

“I want to talk with Emmy about that. We’ve tampered with reality quite a bit here lately, and I think we might want things to go back to the way they were last time before we wander off too much more. As far as I can tell, we’ve only opened up
one
new possibility. If we keep fooling around with it, a dozen or so more might crop up. I can handle two, but twelve or fourteen might stretch me a little thin.”

“It’d be a lot funner, though,” Gher said, his eyes brightening.

“Never mind,” Althalus told him firmly.

They gathered up their belongings and went to Gosti’s great hall. “We’d really like to stay, Gosti,” Althalus apologized, “but I’m supposed to meet a fellow in Maghu this spring, and he’ll be very put out with me if I leave him cooling his heels down there until summer. We’ve got some business to attend to, and he’s a grouchy sort of man who hates delays.”

“I understand, Althalus,” Gosti replied.

“We’d like to cross your bridge, but I’m a little short of money right now. Do you suppose . . .” Althalus left it hanging.

“I’ll send word to the men at the bridge,” Gosti replied. “I think I owe you that much. Your stories brightened a long, dreary winter, and you
did
report the robbery. If you hadn’t seen Ghend sneaking out of the fort, it might have been a week before we’d have known that he’d robbed us.”

“I was hoping you’d see it that way. We’ll stop by the next time we come through Arum. Then
you
can tell
me
the story of how Galbak caught Ghend and nailed him to a tree so that the wolves could eat him.”

“I don’t think Galbak would do that, Althalus.”

“You might suggest it to him the next time you send a messenger in his direction.”

Gosti’s answering grin was evil. “It
would
make a pretty good story, wouldn’t it?” he said.

“It would indeed, and if it got around, it’d probably be a long, long time before the notion of robbing you even occurred to anybody else.”

Then Althalus and Gher went to the stable, saddled their horses, and rode out of Gosti’s fort. The toll taker at the bridge waved them through, and they crossed the river in the bright spring sunshine.

“It went off pretty good, didn’t it, Althalus?” Gher said proudly.

“Close to perfect, Gher,” Althalus agreed. “I just wish we hadn’t been forced to bamboozle Galbak in the process.”

“Why should that bother you?”

Althalus shrugged. “I like him, and cheating him the way we did left a sour taste in my mouth.”

“Eliar’s just up ahead,” Gher said, pointing. “If we sort of hurry right along maybe Emmy can fix us something to eat. I sure missed her cooking last winter.”

“So did I, Gher.”

Eliar beckoned them, and they followed him back into the woods. “Emmy’s very impressed, Althalus,” the young man said. “I didn’t think she really approved of what you were doing, but she was laughing all the time while you two were leading Ghend around by the nose.”

“She has an artistic temperament, Eliar,” Althalus explained, “and the swindle Gher and I just put over on Ghend was a work of art. Give me just a little more time, and I’ll make her one of the best thieves in the world.”

They led their horses through the door that opened in the south wing of the House, and they were soon climbing the stairs to Dweia’s tower.

“All hail the conquering hero,” Leitha said.

“Why do you have to do that?” he asked her.

“It’s a form of affection, Daddy.” She gave him a radiant smile.

“Could I have a look at the imitation Book you made, Em?” he asked.

“It’s over there on that marble bench, pet,” she replied, pointing.

Althalus went to the bench and picked up the black Book. “The cover matches the real Book perfectly,” he observed.

“Naturally.”

He opened the lid of the box and took out the first sheet of parchment. He looked at the sheet closely. “It seems different, for some reason,” he noted.

“That’s probably because you can read it now,” Dweia suggested.

“Maybe
that’s
it. Back when Ghend showed me the real Book, none of it made any sense to me. I see that some of the words are still written in red.” He frowned. “I thought I could read just about anything anybody’d written down, but I can’t seem to get the meaning of those red words on this sheet.”

“You don’t really want to. Put it back in the box.”

“Could we see how Ghend’s doing, Emmy?” Gher asked hopefully. “I’ll bet he’s awful miserable by now.”

“Moderately miserable, yes,” Andine said with a wicked little giggle.

“Weren’t you just a bit direct with Khnom, Gher?” Bheid asked. “The Knife told you to ‘deceive,’ not to ‘bang him on the head.’ ”

“I had to work on that,” Gher admitted as they crossed the room to the south window. “I didn’t want to disappoint the Knife, but I had to get Khnom out of the way for long enough for me to grab Ghend’s Book. Then it sort of came to me that ‘deceive’
might
mean ‘do something Khnom wouldn’t expect me to do,’ and getting thumped on the head was just about the last thing he expected.”

“There’s a weird sort of logic to that, I suppose,” Bheid conceded.

“Things are definitely going to pot for poor Ghend,” Leitha reported from the window. “Galbak’s running him ragged down there.”

“What a shame,” Althalus said absently.

“What’s troubling you, Althalus?” Dweia asked him. “I thought you’d be pleased at the way this turned out.”

“I am—up to a point,” he replied. “I just wish I’d been able to do it a little differently, that’s all.”

“It bothers Althalus that he had to trick Galbak while we were tricking Ghend,” Gher explained. “Althalus and Galbak got along real good, and Althalus doesn’t like to trick friends.”

“Morality, Althalus?” Dweia asked in mock amazement.

“Ethics, Em,” he corrected her. “There’s a difference between ethics and morality. You
did
realize that, didn’t you?”

“My perspective’s a bit different, love,” she replied. “Maybe when this is all over, we can discuss that issue for a few centuries.”

“Doesn’t Khnom do the same stuff Eliar does?” Gher asked suddenly. “I mean, isn’t he Ghend’s door opener?”

“Sort of,” Dweia replied.

“What’s giving them so much trouble down there, then? If we were the ones trying to run away, all we’d have to do is yell for Eliar and he’d pop open a door for us, we’d zip on through, and then we’d pop out someplace a hundred or maybe even a thousand miles away.”

“It’s not entirely their fault, Gher. Daeva keeps
his
agents on a very tight leash. He doesn’t care for creativity, and he’s extremely sensitive about the doors in Nahgharash. He doesn’t want his people using them without his permission, and there are some rather extreme punishments for anybody who uses a door in Nahgharash
without
that permission.”

“That’s just silly, Emmy,” Gher objected.

“That more or less describes my brother, yes,” she agreed. “Both of them, actually.”

“Dweia!” Bheid protested.

“They’re silly in different ways, Bheid,” she said, “but silly is silly, no matter how much we try to pretty it up. Both Deiwos and Daeva tinker with things—and people—most of the time. I’m just a bit more relaxed than they are. I’ve found that as long as my people love me, things are probably going to turn out the way I want them to.” Then she looked at Althalus. “Were you planning to go to Hule sometime in the near future, love?” she asked pleasantly.

“I think we should talk about that, Em,” he replied seriously. “Haven’t we tampered just about enough?”

“I don’t quite follow you.”

“It was early autumn when Ghend came to Nabjor’s camp last time. How much can change if he arrives in early summer? If he hires me to steal the Book then, won’t I come to the House about three months early? And if I do, how many other things will change?”

She frowned slightly. “You may have a point, Althalus. There are a number of things that should stay more or less just the way they are.”

“It shouldn’t really be too hard to do it, Emmy,” Gher said. “All we have to do is fix it so that Ghend and Khnom don’t get away from Galbak quite so easy. We can watch him from your window, and every time he brushes out his horse tracks so that Galbak can’t find his trail, Eliar can come along behind him and put down new tracks for Galbak to find. That way, Ghend ought to have a real nervous summer, and he won’t get to Nabjor’s camp until pretty close to the right time.”

“It’s worth a try, Em,” Althalus agreed. “And if we do it that way, there’s no particular urgency about getting to Nabjor’s camp. That’ll give me enough time to take a bath and put on some clean clothes at least.”

“I think I’ll faint.”

“Quit trying to be funny, Em. After a few centuries, bathing gets to be a habit.”

“You
are
planning to get rid of that ridiculous tunic, aren’t you?”

“Not on your life. I just spent an entire winter arranging things so that I could
keep
my tunic instead of throwing it away.”

“I thought the whole point of this past winter was to trick Ghend so that you could steal his Book.”

“Well, there’s that, too, but keeping this tunic was the main thing.”

She sighed. “We’ve got further to go than I thought,” she said.

C H A P T E R     F O R T Y - S I X

I
t’s good to be home again,” Gher said as he and Althalus rode north through deep-forested Hule in early autumn. “I sort of missed the trees.” Then he frowned. “But they aren’t really the same trees, are they?”

“Some of the smaller ones might be,” Althalus replied.

“Do trees really live for that long?”

“Some of them do.”

“And they just keep getting bigger and bigger, don’t they?”

“Oh, I’d imagine there’s some kind of limit.”

“Just exactly where’s this place where we’re going?”

“You’ll probably recognize it, Gher. It’s the place where you joined us—right after Eliar and I caught you trying to steal our horses. It’s one of those ‘significant places’ we come across from time to time.”

“That’s spooky,” Gher said.

“You’ll have to talk with Emmy about that.” Althalus looked up at the massive trees around them. “We’ve changed a lot of things as we’ve gone along, but the trees are still the same, and I’m sure Nabjor’s camp hasn’t changed all that much either.” Then he grinned. “I
do
feel better this time, though. I was in a foul humor last time. I’d just gone through a year of incredibly bad luck.” Then he cocked his head to listen to a sound they’d been hearing since they’d first ridden through the door that had led them to Hule. “That’s
also
a definite difference. Last time it was the wailing noise we used to hear every time we turned around. This time it’s Eliar’s Knife.”

“That means that we’re going to win, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a little hard to say for sure, but I’d say that we’re ahead this time.” Althalus peered on up the trail. “Nabjor’s camp’s just ahead. I’ll introduce you to him. You’d probably better keep on talking sloppy. Ghend’ll be along soon, and you talked that way back at Gosti’s place. A good thief should be consistent. Part of what you’re doing when you’re trying to trick somebody is to make up a different person.”

“Tenlike I’m him instead of me, you mean?”

“Exactly. There are a lot of tenlike people in every thief’s saddlebags. You get to know them after a while, and you can pull out whichever one’s going to work best.” Then Althalus scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “I think I’d better use the happy tenlike Althalus this time. Last time I didn’t have anything to talk about but my bad luck, but this time I’m up to my ears in good luck.”

“That sort of means that you’re in charge, doesn’t it?”

“I think that was the whole idea, Gher. Last time, Ghend was running things; this time it’s me. Go along with the story I’m going to spin for Nabjor. There won’t be much truth to it, but that’s not too important.”

“I sort of think you’re wrong, Althalus,” Gher said. “We’re changing things, so any story you tell anybody is true this time, isn’t it? You’re not really tenliking, are you?”

Althalus blinked.

“If I was you, the first thing I’d do is get rid of them dogs in that rich man’s house in Deika. If he don’t have dogs, things’ll turn out a lot different, won’t they? The neat part of this is that you can change anything that happened back then that you didn’t like. This is
your
dream thing, so you can make it come out any way you want it to. No matter what kind of story you tell, it’ll turn out to be the truth.”

“You’re starting to give me a headache again, Gher.”

“It’s not really
that
hard, Althalus. It’ll be easy if you just remember that anything you say is the truth. You
can’t
lie—even if you want to.”

“You’re making it worse.” Althalus reined in his horse. “I’d better let Nabjor know that we’re coming. He doesn’t like to have people just ride into his camp without any kind of warning.” He raised his voice then. “Ho, Nabjor,” he called. “It’s me—Althalus. Don’t get excited. I’m coming in.”

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

“Not a chance, Nabjor,” Althalus called back. “You should know by now that nobody ever catches me. Is your mead ripe yet? That batch you had last time I passed through was just a trifle green.”

“Come on in and try some,” Nabjor invited. “This new batch came out rather well.”

Althalus and Gher rode forward into the clearing, and Althalus looked at his old friend with a peculiar sense of sadness as “then” and “now” clashed in his mind. He knew that Nabjor was long dead in the world from which he and Gher had come to revisit the past, but there was Nabjor the same as always—big, burly, squinty eyed, and dressed in a shaggy bearskin tunic.

Althalus dismounted, and he and Nabjor clasped hands warmly. “Who’s the boy?” Nabjor asked curiously.

“His name’s Gher,” Althalus replied, “and I’ve sort of taken him under my wing as an apprentice. He shows quite a bit of promise.”

“Welcome, Gher,” Nabjor said. “Sit you down, gentlemen. I’ll fetch us some mead and you can tell me all about the splendors of civilization.”

“Ah, no mead for the boy,” Althalus said quickly. “Gher’s got an older sister who doesn’t really approve of drinking. She doesn’t get upset about lying, cheating, or stealing, but she can go on for weeks about some of the simpler pleasures of life. If word happened to get back to her that I was leading Gher astray, she might haul him back home.”

“I’ve met a few like that,” Nabjor said. “Sometimes women get a little strange. I’ve got some cider that hasn’t turned yet. Would that be all right for your apprentice?”

“I don’t think she’d find any fault with cider.”

“Good. Mead for us and cider for Gher, then. That’s a haunch of forest bison on that spit over the fire. Help yourselves to some of it. I’ll bring a loaf of bread, too.”

Althalus and Gher seated themselves on a log by the fire and carved some chunks of meat from the spitted haunch while Nabjor filled two cups with foaming mead and a third with golden cider. “How did things do down there in civilization?” he asked.

Althalus realized that
this
was the important moment. This would change things. “It went beyond my wildest expectations, Nabjor,” he replied expansively. “My luck was smiling at me every step of the way. She still absolutely adores me.” He took a long drink of his mead. “You got a good run on this batch, my friend,” he complimented Nabjor.

“I thought you might like it.”

“It’s good to come home where I can get mead to drink. Down there in civilization, they don’t seem to know how to brew it. The only thing you can buy in their taverns is sour wine. How’s business been?”

“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 there 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’re not going to believe just how well things went, Nabjor,” Althalus replied with a broad grin. “Everything I touched down there turned to gold.” He laid an affectionate hand on Gher’s shoulder. “This boy here has luck that’s at least as good as mine, and when you pour both of them into the same pot, we just can’t possibly lose—as we discovered when we got to Deika. After we’d looked at all their fancy stone buildings, we just ‘happened’ to overhear talk about a rich salt merchant named Kweso. I’m positive that it wasn’t really a coincidence. My luck was herding us from one direction, and Gher’s was coming from the other. Anyway, if you’ve bought any salt lately, I’m sure you can understand how a salt merchant can end up richer than any gold miner in the world.”

“Oh, yes,” Nabjor agreed. “They’re the worst gougers there are.”

“Well,” Althalus went on, “we located this Kweso fellow’s house, and I sent Gher up to the door to ask for directions to the place where one of the neighbors lived—
and
to have a close look at the latch on Kweso’s door.”

“It wasn’t much of a latch, Mister Nabjor,” Gher added. “It
looked
big and strong, but I could have sprung it open with my thumbnail.”

“Is this boy
that
good?” Nabjor asked Althalus.

“Why do you think I took him on as my apprentice?” Althalus replied. “Well, to cut it short, we went to Kweso’s house along about mid-night a couple of days later, undid that latch, and went on inside. Kweso’s servants were all asleep, and Kweso himself was filling all the corners of his bedroom with snores. He stopped snoring when I set the point of my knife against his throat, though, and he was very cooperative. There’s nothing quite like a knife point to get somebody’s attention. A few minutes later, Gher and I came into a great deal of money. We thanked Kweso for his hospitality, tied him up, and stuffed a rag into his mouth to keep him from disturbing the sleep of his servants. Then we left the splendid city of Deika. We even bought some horses. Now that we were rich, we didn’t have to walk anymore.”

“Where did you go next, Althalus?” Nabjor asked eagerly.

“We made our next stop in Kanthon,” Althalus replied. “That’s a city up in northern Treborea. There’s a new ruler in the city, and he’s got some peculiar ideas about taxes.”

“What are taxes?”

“I’m not entirely sure. The way it seems to work is that people have to pay to live in their own houses and breathe all the precious air that the ruler of the place so generously provides. Breathing’s
very
expensive in Kanthon—about half of everything a man owns usually covers most of it. The local rich men seem to think that it’s not a very good idea to
look
rich. Shabby, broken-down furniture’s very expensive in Kanthon, and rich men take lessons from stonemasons to learn how to lay flagstones very neatly, so that the tax collectors can’t identify the flat rock that covers the hole in the floor where the rich man hides his gold. My luck—and Gher’s—herded us into a tavern where the stonemasons of Kanthon did their drinking, and they just
happened
to be talking about a fellow who’d just inherited a fortune from his uncle. Those masons were laughing themselves sick over the sloppy job he’d done laying that particularly important rock. From what they were saying, the fellow was one of those ne’er-do-wells who spend all their nights carousing around in the seedier establishments down by the river, and I guess his hands were a bit shaky the day he set the stone in place. To make things even better for us, the fellow’s servants had appetites of their own that were the same as his. They’d piously promise to look after things while he was out enjoying himself, but a quarter of an hour after he went out the front door, his house was deserted.”

Nabjor chuckled. “What a shame.”

“Well, Gher and I just happened to come into
more
money that very same evening. By now, we had so much money that carrying it was turning into quite a chore, so after we left Kanthon, we found a secluded place and buried it—and that wasn’t the last time, either. We’ve got money buried in a half dozen places down there, because we had more than we could carry, and every time we turned around, more of it kept piling up on us.”

Nabjor laughed. “You know, I just can’t seem to remember the last time I had
that
problem.”

Althalus glossed over his encounter with paper money, since the concept was a little exotic for Nabjor. “I could go on for days telling you about all the swindles and robberies we pulled off down there, but our biggest success was in Arum, of all places.”

“I’ve heard that they’ve struck gold down there,” Nabjor said. “Don’t tell me that you finally broke down and started digging your own gold.”

“Not
this
old dog,” Althalus replied. “I let somebody else take care of that for me. Gher and I’d come up out of Perquaine and we were hotfooting our way back here to Hule. Well, we stopped in a wayside tavern, and there was this fellow who had a splendid tunic—wolf skin, it was, and the ears decorated the hood of that tunic.”

“I see that some ownership got transferred,” Nabjor said, eying the tunic Althalus was wearing. “Did you swindle that fellow out of it, or did you just break down and buy it from him?”

“Bite your tongue! I
steal
gold, Nabjor; I don’t spend it. Anyway, the loafers in the tavern were talking about a rich man called Gosti Big Belly who owns and operates a toll bridge that just
happens
to be the only way to cross a certain river that stands between the rest of Arum and the region where gold’s just been discovered. The price Gosti charges to cross is outrageous, but people are glad to pay it, and this Gosti is getting richer by the hour. Well, I’m not one to pass up an opportunity like that, so I decided to look into the matter.”

“
After
you’d transferred some ownership?” Nabjor asked slyly, looking at the wolf-skin tunic.

Gher smirked. “That didn’t hardly take no time at all, Mister Nabjor. The fellow in the tunic went outside the tavern after a while, and Althalus followed him, popped him on the head with the handle of his sword, and took his tunic and his shoes.”

Nabjor raised one eyebrow.

“I’ll admit it went a little far,” Althalus conceded apologetically, “but my shoes were just about ready to fall apart. That fellow didn’t really need shoes all that much: he wasn’t too likely to walk very far away from that tavern. Anyway, Gher and I mounted up and rode on. After a day or so we stopped at another tavern, and the people there were talking about Gosti Big Belly, the same as the ones in the other tavern had been. Gher and I picked up some more details, and I began to realize that robbing Gosti might go a little further than a simple “smash and grab” sort of thing, so we were probably going to need some help. That’s where our luck stepped in again. My luck’s always been sort of sneaky, and Gher’s is even worse. There were two other fellows in that tavern, and I’d noticed them the minute we walked in, because I could tell by their looks that they weren’t Arums. Their eyes lit up like torches every time somebody said the word ‘gold,’ so I was fairly sure they were in the same business as we are. We talked with them after we all left the tavern, and we decided to go into partnership instead of competing with each other.”