“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 hasn’t lived there for many, many years, 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 good-bye 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 then 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.”
C H A P T E R F O U R
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 spends almost every waking moment worrying about thieves and bandits.
The Kagwhers had devised a charmingly direct means of warning passersby 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 backbreaking 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 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 a shimmering, pulsating curtain of multicolored 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 cou
ld 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.”
The Redemption of Althalus Page 6
