The Redemption of Althalus

by Eddings, Leigh;Eddings, David

  Sergeant Khalor adamantly held his ground on “standard fee” as the basis for negotiation, despite some shrill objections. Gweti in particular wanted to hold out for a fairly exotic “fee-for-service” arrangement. Chief Gweti had obviously done some computations, and he realized the “standard fee” would put a fair amount of those twenty kegs beyond his reach. That seemed to cause him something very much akin to physical pain.

  “Actually, Chief Gweti, I’m being generous,” Khalor pointed out. “We’re hiring every man you can muster. If he can stand up, see lightning, and hear thunder, we’ll pay for him. I won’t push for a discount on cripples as I probably should. We’re honorable Arums, noble Chiefs. How would it look to the rest of the world if we cheated an innocent young girl?”

  “Who cares what the rest of the world thinks?” Gweti demanded.

  “You should, Chief Gweti,” Khalor told him. “If the word gets around that you’re a cheat, nobody’s ever going to want to do business with you again. Your soldiers will stay at home, and you’ll still have to feed them. You’ll be old and grey and up to your eyebrows in debt before anybody out there will ever hire men from you again.”

  “The good Sergeant speaks truly, son Gweti,” Chief Delur intoned pompously. “The prosperity of all Arum might well hinge upon what we do here in this day. As all men know, Arum soldiers are the best to be found across the wide, wide world, but if Arum Chiefs are dishonorable men, who will ever come to these sacred mountains again with gold to deal with us? Take less, my sons, that ye may gain more.”

  Althalus was closely watching Smeugor and Tauri, who were sitting somewhat apart from the Chiefs and holding a whispered conversation. They seemed to be a bit worried about something. Andine’s blatant display on the previous day appeared to have taken them off guard.

  Althalus let his gaze drift across the faces of the clansmen seated directly behind the pair of wayward chiefs, and he saw some hints of a certain dissatisfaction there. Smeugor and Tauri, it appeared, weren’t overly popular with the members of their clans, and their obvious dismay with Andine’s “show everybody the gold” strategy was arousing a certain disaffection. Althalus tucked that notion away for future use. For right now, Smeugor and Tauri might be very useful, but when they started to be unuseful, a well-coordinated mutiny might be a quick solution to the problem.

  The haggling continued for most of the rest of the day as each Clan Chief struggled to find reasons to increase his share of the gold, but Sergeant Khalor held fast to his original offer based on numbers alone. Stubbornly, he kept repeating, “So much a head,” almost as if he were buying a herd of sheep. The Chiefs of the smaller clans protested vigorously, but Khalor ignored claims of “better training,” “more enthusiasm,” and “superior weaponry” and concentrated on numbers. Finally, he put it to them bluntly. “That’s my offer, gentlemen. You can take it or you can leave it. If Arum doesn’t have enough men for us, we can probably find recruits in Kweron or Kagwher. I’m sure that if I mention all the profitable looting that’s likely to be going on during this war, I won’t have much trouble finding enough soldiers to fill up the ranks of this army. I’d rather have Arums, but I’ll take what I can get.”

  Their resistance more or less collapsed at that point.

  “Oh, one other thing,” Khalor added. “Payment will be on delivery. I won’t pay for promises. I’ll see the bodies right in front of me before I’ll open the purse.”

  “That’s not the way it’s done!” Gweti objected. “Our word’s always been accepted in the past!”

  “Not this time, Chief Gweti,” Khalor told him. “I’m buying men, not promises.”

  Albron leaned closer to Althalus. “I told you that Khalor was very good, Althalus,” he said slyly. “Don’t you think his services might be worth a premium of some kind?”

  “Certainly, Albron,” Althalus agreed placidly. “I’ll tell you what I’ll give you by way of a premium. I’m the one who owns that gold mine, so I can buy almost anything, but I’ll give you my absolute promise that I won’t make any attempt whatsoever to hire Khalor right out from under you. How’s that for a premium?”

  It was well past midnight when Emmy woke Althalus in the usual way, and her nose hadn’t grown any warmer or drier, he noticed. “We have to go to the House, Althalus,” she said quite urgently.

  “Trouble?” he asked.

  “Ghend’s making his move. We aren’t quite ready yet, but we’re going to have to respond.”

  Althalus dressed and went down the torchlit hallway to rouse his friends. They went through the armory door again and up the stairs to the tower.

  “Wekti’s right on the verge of collapse,” Dweia told them. “We’re going to have to deal with that.”

  “Wekti?” Bheid said. “Who cares about Wekti? It’s nothing but one vast sheep pasture.”

  “If Wekti falls, Plakand will as well, Brother Bheid,” Dweia said crisply. “Then they’ll march on Medyo. Awes is on the eastern frontier of Medyo, and this time there won’t be anything left after the battle’s over. The destruction of Awes has always been a part of Ghend’s plan.”

  “How are we going to get enough men there to make any difference, Emmy?” Eliar asked. “It’s a month or more from Arum to Wekti.”

  “Use the doors,” Gher suggested.

  “I can’t bring Arum soldiers to the House, Gher,” Eliar objected.

  “You probably won’t have to bring them to the House, Eliar,” Gher said. “Just take the House to them instead—well, not the whole House. A couple of doors ought to turn the trick.”

  “Would you like to explain that?” Eliar said with a certain exasperation.

  “I’ve been sort of working on this,” Gher admitted, “so maybe I jumped over a few things. We don’t really want all the Arums to know about the House and the doors, but I think I know of a way to pass them through so that they won’t even know they’ve been here. We’ll need a lot of bushes, though.”

  “Bushes?”

  “To kind of hide what we’re doing. It sort of goes like this. You’re leading this army of Arums, you see, and you march them along a path that goes through a big thicket of bushes. You’ve got a door hidden in that thicket, and they march on through the door, and they’re in the House—only they don’t know it, because we’ve piled more bushes up in the hallway outside the door they’ve just come through. Then you keep on—” He stopped, frowning slightly. “Oops,” he said.

  “What’s wrong?” Eliar asked.

  “I think I missed something. The doors aren’t really wide enough. I mean, if you’ve got a whole lot of people, and they can only go through one at a time—” He shook his head. “Maybe I’d better work on this some more.”

  “Don’t worry about the doors, Gher,” Dweia told him. “That’s my department. They’ll be as wide—or as narrow—as I want them to be.”

  “That’d be great, Emmy!” he exclaimed. “You could fix it so that a door’s so narrow that I’m the only one who could wiggle through.”

  “You’re wandering, Gher,” Leitha told him. “Finish one thought before you jump off to another one. You’ve got an army out in the hallway. What are you going to do with them?”

  “Oh, that’s right. I was sort of thinking that Eliar leads them through a door they can’t even see into the House here, but they don’t know that they’re in the House because the bushes hide it. Then they go to another door and walk out into this Wekti place. They start over here, and they end up over there, but they don’t even know it.”

  “Except that they start out in the mountains and end up in the flat country,” Eliar objected.

  “The House can take care of that. Since it’s Everywhen, it can make the trip through those bushes last for as long as Emmy wants it to last. The soldiers are going to think they’ve been walking through those bushes for weeks and weeks, but when they come out, it’ll only be a minute or so later. We’ll know that, but they won’t.” He looked at Dweia. “Could we do it t
hat way, Emmy?” he asked her.

  “I think we can, yes,” she replied. “What started you to thinking about this, Gher?”

  “The other day I was sort of listening when that Chief with the squoze-in face was talking with the one with the big jaw. He thought it was going to be real neat that he’d get paid for whole weeks when his soldiers wouldn’t be doing anything but walking. Then I got to thinking about how the House can make distance and time turn into the same thing. The House is kind of like a shortcut, but I don’t think we want those people to know about it. Some of them would probably get all excited, and maybe try to use it in ways we wouldn’t want them to. Then I came up with the notion of the bushes. They won’t know anything at all about the House, because they won’t even know that they’ve been here. Wouldn’t it sort of work out that way, Emmy?”

  Dweia was smiling fondly at him. “You’re an absolute treasure, Gher,” she said. “I believe I owe you quite a few hugs and kisses for this particular idea.”

  Gher blushed furiously. “Just a thank-you would be enough, Emmy,” he protested. “I don’t really like all that hugging and kissing business. It’s all gooey and sticky, and it makes me real uncomfortable.”

  “Gooey and sticky get more interesting after you grow a little older, Gher,” Andine told him. Then her huge eyes moved slowly to Eliar’s face, and a wicked little smile touched her lips. She didn’t say anything, but for some reason, Eliar’s face turned bright red.

  Part Four

  ELIAR

  C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - O N E

  A summer storm had been raging across the mountains of Kagwher with roiling clouds, staggering lightning bolts, and sharp cracks of thunder that seemed almost to shake the very stones of the eternal House at the End of the World. Wind-driven rain had swept the battlements, but not long after midnight the storm passed, and the sliverlike moon emerged from behind the clouds to look down upon a world washed all clean by the savage storm.

  Dweia stood at the north window in all her perfection, and her green eyes were a mystery.

  “Just exactly what’s Ghend doing in Wekti, Dweia?” Althalus asked her.

  “The trouble’s coming from the north, Althalus,” she replied, turning back to look around the room where they all had gathered. “Ghend sent Gelta to southern Ansu to stir up the tribes along the frontier. She dominated those tribes back in the fourth millennium, and she’s the central figure in their mythology. Her return appears to be miraculous, and the southern Ansus are convinced that she’s an immortal War Goddess. They’ll follow her blindly, and if we don’t stop her, she’ll crush Wekti within a month.”

  “How did she persuade the Ansus that she’s really the same Gelta who led them six thousand years ago?” Althalus asked. “The Ansus aren’t very bright, but that should have been a little hard to swallow, even for them.”

  “Ghend arranged a few demonstrations, pet,” Dweia replied. “After Gelta came riding down out of the sky, skepticism became very unfashionable in southern Ansu.”

  “Do the Wekti have any sort of army to meet them?” Eliar asked. “Enough to slow them down a little, at least?”

  Bheid laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Eliar asked.

  “Wekti’s a land of sheep, Eliar,” Bheid said. “That’s the domain of the white-robed priests, and the White Robes have elevated ‘meek’ to an art form. The Wekti won’t defend themselves. The apostate White Robes have seen to that.”

  “Do you suppose we could discuss theology some other time, Bheid?” Althalus suggested. “I need facts, not denunciations. Where’s the capital of Wekti, and who rules?”

  “Maybe I was getting a little sidetracked,” Bheid apologized. “The government of Wekti’s located in the old provincial capital of Keiwon. The city dates back to the days of the Deikan Empire, and the titular ruler’s a direct descendant of the last imperial governor.”

  “Titular?”

  “He’s a joke, Althalus. His official title is ‘Natus,’ which is supposed to mean ‘father.’ Shepherds have some very odd notions. His name’s Dhakrel, and he’s a figurehead with no real authority. He wears a golden crown, dresses himself in an antique Deikan toga, and carries a scepter. He’s a pudgy, balding man of middle years with a mind uncontaminated by thought. He never leaves the palace, and neither do any of his ‘Royal Proclamations.’ The sycophants in his court all tell him how important he is. His face appears on Wekti coins, and that’s just about the entire extent of his significance.”

  “Who’s really in charge, then?” Andine asked.

  “Exarch Yeudon.”

  “Exarch? Is that some title of nobility?”

  “It’s a theological title, Princess. Each of the three orders is ruled by an Exarch. The term roughly translates as ‘the priest of the priests.’ Yeudon’s the real power in Wekti, so he’s the one we’ll have to deal with. He’s a brilliant man, but he’s shrewd, devious, and not to be trusted.”

  “Then they don’t have any kind of army at all?” Eliar pressed.

  “Two ceremonial legions in Dhakrel’s palace,” Bheid answered. “They’re fat, lazy, and probably completely useless. They carry swords but don’t know how to use them, and if you marched them for more than a mile, they’d probably all collapse and die of sheer exhaustion.”

  Eliar was frowning. “What about the ordinary people? Could we make decent soldiers out of them?”

  “I doubt it,” Bheid said. “They’re shepherds, and they’re more sheep themselves than they are human. A loud noise would send them running off in all directions, bleating in terror. The average Wekti spends his days cuddling lambs to his breast and composing bad poetry—and worse songs—about his love for the shepherdess in the next valley.”

  “Do we really have to get involved with these people, Emmy?” Eliar asked, turning to Dweia. “It doesn’t seem to me that they’re worth the trouble.”

  “We don’t have much choice, Eliar,” the Goddess replied. “Ghend already controls Nekweros in the west. You might want to talk with Sergeant Khalor about your strategic position when your enemy controls lands on both sides of you. We won’t be defending Wekti so much as we’ll be defending our eastern flank.”

  “I guess I hadn’t thought of that,” Eliar conceded.

  “We’d better go to Keiwon and talk with this Yeudon,” Althalus decided.

  Bheid laughed. “The war’s probably going to be over before we get the chance to do that,” he said.

  “I didn’t quite follow that.”

  “The White Robes are obsessively traditional, Althalus. It takes about six months to gain access to Yeudon. We’d have to wade our way upstream through whole platoons of self-important church functionaries before we’d even get close to the Exarch.”

  “I could use a door,” Eliar suggested.

  “I don’t think we want to wave the doors around in unfamiliar places,” Althalus replied. “Ghend might have spies in Keiwon.” He looked speculatively at Bheid. “Who’s the headman of your order?” he asked.

  “Exarch Emdahl.”

  “If he happened to send a messenger to Keiwon to speak with Yeudon, that messenger wouldn’t have much trouble bypassing the usual procedures, would he?”

  “Probably not, but it’d take a week at least to get in to see my Exarch to explain the situation to him.”

  “Your Exarch’s a busy man, Bheid. We don’t need to bother him. Who’d normally carry his message to Yeudon?”

  “Probably a Scopas—one of the nobles of our church.”

  “Do they wear any special garb?”

  “Their robes aren’t made of burlap, if that’s what you mean.” Bheid plucked at the front of his roughly woven black robe. “And they wear scarlet sashes about their waists.”

  “Congratulations on your promotion, Scopas Bheid,” Althalus said.

  “We can’t do that!”

  “Why not? If all it takes is a change of clothes to open doors, I’ll spin you several yards of gold cloth
.”

  “It’s forbidden!”

  “In Awes, probably, but we aren’t going to Awes, Bheid. We’re going to Keiwon. Your order has no authority in Keiwon, so the rules don’t apply there, do they?”

  “That’s pure sophistry, Althalus.”

  “Of course it is. Sophistry’s the basis of any good religion. Didn’t you know that? Would you need any credentials aside from the costume?”

  Bheid started to object further, but then his eyes narrowed. “It might just work,” he admitted. “It goes against everything I’ve been taught, but—”

  “Our purpose is noble, Scopas Bheid. Our means to achieve that purpose aren’t particularly important.” Then Althalus looked at Dweia. “Are you coming with us?” he asked her.

  “I think you can manage things this time without my help, Althalus. The girls, Gher, and I will wait here.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, rising to his feet. “Let’s go find the door to Keiwon, Eliar.”

  Dawn was just peeping over the rolling hills of Wekti when Eliar led Althalus and Bheid through a door that opened out into a small clump of willows off to the side of the road that came up from the south. Althalus went to the edge of the trees to look at the city.

  Keiwon lay a hundred miles or so upstream from the ancient ruins of Awes, and it was on the east bank of the River Medyo. It had that second-rate quality about it that was characteristic of all provincial capitals. In many ways it was no more than an imitation Deika, complete with a forum, a palace, and a temple—except on a reduced scale. The architecture was uninspired, and there was a wooden quality to the statues. The provincial governors who had ruled Wekti for centuries had been bureaucrats from the imperial city of Deika, and no secondary bureaucrat is ever burdened with artistic integrity—or any other kind, for that matter. They had wanted Keiwon to resemble Deika as closely as possible, and as a result, Keiwon did not soar as Deika had. It huddled instead.