The Redemption of Althalus

by Eddings, Leigh;Eddings, David

  “Unfortunately?”

  “They didn’t expect us to do that, so they weren’t ready for us. That gave the idiot in Kanthon all sorts of wild delusions, and he ordered me to lay siege to the city of Osthos itself. I didn’t have enough men to set up a picket line around the place, much less lay siege to it, but the jackass in Kanthon wouldn’t listen to me.”

  Althalus started to swear.

  “When your vocabulary begins to run dry, I can give you whole platoons of interesting things to say about my former employer. I’ve been inventing new swearwords for the last two and a half weeks. You seem to be taking this sort of personally.”

  “Yes, I am. I’ve been looking for a young fellow who’s under your command. His name’s Eliar. He doesn’t happen by any chance to be among your wounded, does he?”

  “I’m afraid not, Althalus. I’d imagine that Eliar’s long dead by now—unless that savage girl down in Osthos is still slicing very tiny pieces off of him.”

  “What happened?”

  “Eliar was very enthusiastic about this business; you know how young fellows are in their first war. Anyway, the Aryo of Osthos had ordered his troops to fall back every time they saw us. Eliar and some of my other green troops thought that meant that they were cowards instead of men who had a very clever leader. When we reached the walls of the city, the Osthos just closed their gates and invited us to try to get in if we thought we could. I had this cluster of young enthusiasts on my hands, and they were all jumping up and down and frothing at the mouth and begging me to mount an assault on the walls. Eliar was the one who was screaming the loudest, so I put him in charge and ordered him to take a run at the gate and see how many of his men he could get killed.”

  “That’s a blunt way to put it, Sergeant.”

  “It’s the only real way to find out if a young leader’s got sand in his craw. Eliar was a nice boy, and the other young fellows all sort of followed his lead. That’s part of my job. I’m supposed to keep an eye on these natural leaders and put them into situations where they can prove whether or not they’ve got what it takes to lead troops. Getting some of your people killed is part of the business of command. Well, to cut this short, Eliar and his puppies all went rushing across the meadow toward the city gate screaming and waving their weapons as if they thought they could frighten the walls into falling down. When they were about fifty paces from the gate, it swung open, and the Aryo of Osthos personally led out his troops to give my howling little barbarians a quick lesson in good manners.”

  “By hand, I assume,” Althalus added in a gloomy voice.

  “Also by foot. They tramped all over my little boys. Eliar was right in the thick of things, naturally, and he was really doing quite well until he came up against the Aryo himself, who just happened to be armed with a battle-ax. Eliar took a wild swing at the Aryo’s head with his sword, and the Aryo blocked it with his ax. Eliar’s sword broke off just above the hilt, and I thought, ‘Well, good-bye, Eliar.’ But the boy surprised me—and he probably surprised the Aryo even more. He threw what was left of his sword right at the Aryo’s face and went for his dagger. Before the Aryo could regain his balance, Eliar was all over him, and he was working that dagger double time. He must have stabbed that poor nobleman two dozen times, and he left a gash as wide as his hand with every stab. I didn’t really think that ornamental dagger of his was worth all that much, but it certainly leaves big holes in people if a man uses it right. The Aryo’s men swarmed Eliar under, of course, and they took him and some of his men prisoner and went back into the city with them.”

  “Who was this woman you mentioned before?”

  “The Aryo’s daughter. There’s a girl who can probably cut glass with her voice from a mile away. We could hear her very clearly when her father’s soldiers carried his body to her. We even heard her when she ordered the soldiers to come out of the city and chop us into little pieces. I didn’t think real soldiers would take orders from a woman, but Andine’s got the kind of voice you can’t really ignore.” Khalor winced. “It seems that I can still hear her. But for all I know, I really can. You’ve never heard a voice like that one. It’s only been two and a half weeks, and she might very well be still screaming about how many yards of our entrails she wants draped over every tree in the vicinity.”

  “Andine?” Althalus asked.

  “That’s her name. It’s a pretty name for a pretty girl, but she’s got a very ugly mind.”

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “Oh, yes. She stood up on top of the city wall to gloat while her soldiers butchered us. She kept screaming for more blood and waving Eliar’s dagger around. She’s a total savage, and she’s the ruler of Osthos now.”

  “A woman?” That startled Althalus.

  “She’s no ordinary woman, Althalus. That one’s made out of steel. She was the Aryo’s only child, so they’re probably all bowing to her and calling her ‘Arya Andine.’ If Eliar’s lucky, she just had him killed outright. I sort of doubt that, though. More probably, she’s been carving pieces off him with his own knife and making him watch while she eats them. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that she’s trying to come up with a way to cut out his heart so fast that he’d still be alive long enough to watch her eat it right in front of his face. Stay away from that one, Althalus. I’d advise you to give her forty or fifty years to cool down before you go anywhere near her.”

  C H A P T E R N I N E

  Why should we care if she kills him, Em?” Althalus asked aloud. “It’s the Knife we want, not some half-grown little boy from Arum.”

  When are you going to learn to look beyond the end of your nose, Althalus? Her tone was a bit snippy, and there was enough condescension in it to be offensive.

  “That’s about enough of that, Em,” he told her crisply.

  Sorry, pet, she apologized. That was a little nasty, wasn’t it? What I’m getting at is that everything is connected. Nothing happens in isolation. Eliar’s probably some crude, unschooled barbarian from the backcountry of Arum, but he did pick up the Knife back in Albron’s arms room. It might have been a whim, but we can’t be sure of that until we test him. If he can’t read what’s written on the blade, we’ll pat him on the head and tell him to run along home. If he can read it, though, he’ll have to come with us.

  “What if he’s like I was before I came to the House? I couldn’t even read my own name back then.”

  I noticed. It won’t matter whether he can read or not. If he happens to be one of the selected ones, he’ll know what the writing means.

  “How will we know if he’s got it right?”

  We’ll know, pet. Believe me, we’ll know.

  “Why don’t you enlighten me? Tell me what the word on the blade is.”

  It varies. It’ll mean something different to each person who reads it.

  “Emmy, that doesn’t make any sense at all. A word’s a word, isn’t it? It’s supposed to have one specific meaning.”

  Does the word “home” have a specific meaning?

  “Of course it does. It means the place where a man lives—or maybe the place he originally came from.”

  Then it has a different meaning for each person, doesn’t it?

  He frowned.

  Don’t beat yourself over the head with it, pet. The word that’s carved into the Knife’s blade is a command, and it tells each one of the people we have to locate to do something different.

  “It can’t just be one word, then.”

  I didn’t say that it was. Each reader will see it differently.

  “It changes, then?”

  No. It’s permanent. The writing stays the same. It’s the reading that changes.

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

  Don’t brood about it, Althie. It’ll make more sense to you once we get the Knife. Our problem right now is getting the Knife—and Eliar—away from Andine.

  “I think I’ve already got the answer to that one, Em. I’ll just buy them f
rom her.”

  Buy?

  “Pay her to give them to me.”

  Althalus, Eliar’s a person. You can’t buy people.

  “You’re wrong about that, Em. Eliar’s a captured soldier, and that means that he’s a slave now.”

  That’s disgusting!

  “Of course it is, but that’s the way things are. I’ll have to rob a few rich people to get enough gold to buy Eliar and the Knife. If Arya Andine’s as dead set on butchering Eliar as Sergeant Khalor seems to think she is, I’ll need lots of gold to persuade her to sell him to me.”

  Maybe, she murmured, her green eyes going distant. But then again, maybe not. If we use the Book right, she’ll be more than happy to sell him to us.

  “I’ve come across vindictive ladies before, Em. Believe me, it’ll take a lot of gold. If Sergeant Khalor was anywhere at all close to being right, she’s developed a strong appetite for Eliar’s blood by now. Let’s see if we can find some rich man’s house. I’ll rob him and then we can go make Andine an offer.”

  There are other ways to get gold, Althalus.

  “I know—mining it out of the ground. I don’t care for doing it that way. I’ve seen a lot of deep holes in the mountainsides of Kagwher, and from what I hear, only about one in a hundred has turned up even a speck of gold.”

  I believe I can improve on those numbers, pet.

  “I still don’t like chopping at the ground, Em. It makes my back hurt.”

  That’s because you don’t get enough exercise. Let’s move right along. We have several days’ travel ahead of us before you get to start digging.

  “There isn’t any gold down here in the low country, Em.”

  There is if you know where to look. Ride on, my brave boy, ride on.

  “Was that supposed to be funny?”

  They rode south across the parched grain fields of Perquaine for the next several days, moving at a steady canter. It was about midafternoon on the third day after their meeting with Sergeant Khalor when Althalus reined in and dismounted.

  Why are we stopping? Emmy asked.

  “We’ve been pushing the horse a bit. I’ll walk alongside to give him a rest.” He looked around at the sun-baked fields. “Skimpy,” he observed.

  What is?

  “This year’s crop. It looks to me as if it’s hardly going to be worth the trouble to harvest it.”

  It’s the drought, pet. It doesn’t rain much anymore.

  “We should be getting close to the coastline, Em. It always rains along the coast.”

  We’re a long way from where the coast is now, pet. We talked about that back in the House, remember? The ice locks up more of the world’s water every year. That causes the drought and lowers the sea level.

  “Are we going to be able to repair that?”

  What do you mean?

  “Melt the ice so that things go back to the way they’re supposed to be.”

  Why do men always want to tamper with the natural order of things?

  “When something breaks, we fix it, that’s all.”

  What gave you the absurd idea that it’s broken?

  “It’s not the way it was before, Em. To our way of looking at things, that means that it’s broken.”

  Now which one of us is thinking the way Daeva thinks?

  “Drying up the oceans and turning the world into a desert doesn’t make things better, Em.”

  Change doesn’t necessarily mean improvement, Althalus. Change is just change. “Better” and “worse” are human definitions. The world changes all the time, and no amount of complaining’s going to stop it from changing.

  “The seacoast shouldn’t move around,” he declared stubbornly.

  You can tell it to stop, if you’d like. It might listen to you, but I wouldn’t make any large wagers on it, if I were you. She looked around. We should reach the place we’re looking for sometime tomorrow.

  “Have we been looking for someplace special?”

  Sort of special. It’s the place where you’re going to start working for your living.

  “What an unnatural thing to suggest.”

  It’ll be good for you, love—fresh air, exercise, wholesome food . . .

  “I think I’d sooner take poison.”

  They set up a rudimentary camp in a scraggly thicket some distance back from the road that evening and started out again shortly after dawn.

  There it is, Emmy said after they’d ridden for a couple of hours.

  “There what is?”

  The place where you do some honest work, pet.

  “I wish you’d stop rubbing my nose in that.” He looked across what appeared to be a long-abandoned field at a kind of knoll, sparsely covered with stunted, tired-looking grass. “Is that it?” he asked.

  That’s the place.

  “How can you tell? It’s just a hill. We’ve passed dozens of others just like it.”

  Yes, we have. This one isn’t an ordinary hill, though. It’s the ruins of an old house that’s been covered with dirt.

  “Who buried it like that?”

  The wind. The ground’s very dry now, so the wind picks up dirt and carries it along until it comes to something that blocks it. That’s where it drops the dirt.

  “Is that the way all hills get built?”

  Not all of them, no.

  Althalus squinted at the rounded hillock. “I think I’m going to need some tools. I’ll dig if you insist, Em, but I’m not going to do it with my bare hands.”

  We’ll take care of it. I’ll tell you the word to use.

  “I still think it’d be easier just to rob somebody.”

  There’s more gold in that hill than you’re likely to find in a dozen of the houses we’ve passed. You say that you’ll need gold to buy Eliar and the Knife from Andine. All right, there’s the gold. Go dig it up.

  “How do you know there’s gold there?”

  I just do. There’s more gold in those ruins than you’ve ever seen before. Fetch, boy, fetch.

  “That’s starting to make me a little tired, Em.”

  If you’d do as you’re told the first time, I wouldn’t have to keep telling you over and over again. You’re going to do what I tell you to do eventually anyway, so why not just do it immediately instead of arguing with me?

  He gave up. “Yes, dear.”

  Good boy, she said approvingly. Good boy.

  She gave him instructions on how to manufacture a shovel with a single word and then directed him to a spot about fifty paces up the south side of the slope. As he led his horse up the hill, he saw some very ancient limestone building blocks half buried in the soil. They’d obviously been sawed square when the house had been erected, but wind and weather had rounded them to the point that they were almost indistinguishable from native stone. “How long ago was the house abandoned?” he asked.

  About three thousand years ago. The man who built it started out in life as a plowman. Then he went up into Arum before anybody else went up there. He wasn’t really looking for gold, but he found some.

  “Probably because he got there first. Why did he go to Arum if he didn’t know there was gold there, though?”

  There’d been a slight misunderstanding about the ownership of a certain pig. His neighbors were a little excited about it, so he decided to go up into the mountains for a while to give them time to calm down. I’m sure you understand. This is the place, pet. Get down off the horse and start digging.

  He dismounted, lifted Emmy out of the hood of his cloak, and set her on his saddle. Then he took off his cloak and rolled up his sleeves. “How deep do I have to dig?” he asked.

  About four feet. Then you’ll hit some flagstones, and you’ll have to pry them up. There’s a little cellar under the stones, and that’s where the gold is.

  “Are you sure?”

  Quit wasting time and start digging, Althalus.

  “Yes, dear.” He sighed and very reluctantly thrust his shovel into the dirt.

  The drought had ma
de the soil dry and sandy, so digging wasn’t really as hard as he’d thought it would be.

  I wouldn’t throw the dirt so far down the hill, pet, Emmy suggested after a while. You’ll have to shovel it all back in the hole when you’ve finished.

  “What for?”

  To keep somebody from finding the gold you’ll have to leave behind.

  “I’m not going to leave any, Em.”

  How do you plan to carry it?

  “You’re sitting on him, love. He’s a strong horse.”

  Not that strong, he isn’t.

  “How much is there here?”

  More than our horse can carry.

  “Really?” Althalus began to dig faster.

  After about a half hour, he struck the flagstones Emmy had told him about. Then he widened out the hole he’d dug to give himself some more room. He leaned his shovel against the side of the hole, knelt on the stones, and began to probe between them with his bright steel dagger. “Exactly what am I looking for here, Em?” he asked. “These flagstones fit together so tight that I can’t get my knife into the cracks.”

  Keep looking, she instructed. The one you want to find fits a little more loosely.

  He kept poking until he found it. The dirt the patient centuries had blown in had sifted down into the cracks between the stones, and it took him a while to dig it out with his dagger point. Then he resheathed his dagger, took the shovel, and began to pry.

  The stone lifted out rather easily, followed by a rush of stale-smelling air. There was an open space of some kind below the flagstones, but it was too dark down there to see anything. He pried up another stone to let in more light.

  There were tightly piled stacks of dust-covered bricks in the cellar, and a hot surge of disappointment came over him. But why would anyone take so much trouble just to hide bricks? He reached down through the hole and brushed the dust away from one of the bricks.

  He stared at it in absolute disbelief. The brick that had been concealed by centuries of dust was bright yellow.

  “Dear God!” Althalus exclaimed, brushing away more dust.