David Eddings - The Redemption of Althalus

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A fabulous Eddings standalone fantasy, set in an entirely new magical world.Burglar, armed robber and sometime murderer, our hero Althalus is commissioned to steal a book from the House at the End of the World by a mysterious cloaked stranger named Ghend. At the House at the End of the World, he finds a talking cat… in the same room as the book Ghend described. What he can’t find once he’s in the house is the door by which he entered. Only 2467 years and an ice age later does Althalus re-emerge with the cat, Emmy. He’s read the book written by the god Deiwos, whose evil brother Daeva is trying to unmake the world. Emmy is in fact their sister and she’s setting out to save the world with Althalus to help her. No easy task. First there is a quest to unearth the magical knife that will enable Emmy to assemble her band of essential helpers: Eliar (young soldier), Andine (leader of a small country), Bheid (black-robed priest), Gher (ten-year old orphan), Leitha (telepath/witch). Battles follow against Gelta the Queen of Night and the armies of Daeva involving many devious manoeuvres in and out of the House where Doors can be opened to any place at any time. Daeva has his Doors, too. When Daeva can’t win through battle, he tries revolution. When Dweia (Emmy) can’t win any other way, Althalus will persuade her to lie, cheat and steal – reciprocating the lessons in truth, justice and morality Emmy has been giving him for some while. The existence of the world hangs in the balance and love cannot be guaranteed to triumph in this glorious epic fantasy.

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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.’

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