The Redemption of Althalus
Althalus had never seen a house like this one before. The granite house at the edge of the world was enormous, bigger even than the log fort of Gosti Big Belly back in Arum or the temple of Apwos in Deika. It was so huge that it rivaled several nearby natural spires for sheer size. It wasn’t until he saw windows that he finally accepted the fact that it really was a house. Natural rock formations do break off into square shapes from time to time, but a natural formation with windows? Not very likely.
It was about noon on a short, overcast late autumn day when Althalus first saw the house, and he approached it with some caution. Ghend had told him that the house was unoccupied, but Ghend had probably never been here, since Althalus was still convinced that Ghend was afraid of the house.
The silent house stood on a promontory that jutted out from the edge of the world, and the only way to approach it would be to cross the drawbridge that had been built to span the deep chasm that separated the house from the narrow plateau that lined the precipice where the world ended. If the house were indeed deserted, the owner would certainly have devised some way to raise that drawbridge before he’d left. But the drawbridge was down, almost inviting entry. That didn’t ring true at all, and Althalus ducked down behind a moss-covered boulder to gnaw at a fingernail and consider options.
The day was wearing on, and he’d have to decide soon whether to just walk on in, or wait until night. Night was the native home of all thieves, but under these circumstances, might it not be safer to cross that bridge in the daylight? The house was unfamiliar, and if the place were indeed occupied, the people inside would be alert at night, and they would know exactly how to slip up behind him if he tried to sneak inside. Might it not be better to openly cross the bridge and even shout some kind of greeting to the unseen occupants? That might persuade them that he had no evil intent, and he was fairly sure that he could talk fast enough to keep them from immediately hurling him into the void beyond the promontory.
‘Well,’ he muttered. ‘I guess it’s worth a try.’ If the house were indeed empty, all he’d be wasting was his breath. He still had lots of that, and trying to sneak in at night might be a very good way to cut it short. A show of friendly innocence really seemed to be the best approach right now.
Acting on that, he rose to his feet, took up his spear, and walked on across the bridge, making no effort to conceal himself. If anyone were in the house watching, he’d certainly see Althalus, and a casual saunter across the bridge would shout louder than words that he had no unsavory motives.
The bridge led to a massive arch, and just beyond that arch lay an open place where the ground was covered with closely fitting flat stones with weeds growing up through the cracks. Althalus braced himself and took a tighter grip on his spear. ‘Ho!’ he shouted. ‘Ho, the house!’ He paused, listening intently.
But there was no answer.
‘Is anybody here?’ he tried again.
The silence was oppressive.
The main door of the house was massive. Althalus poked his spear at it a few times and found it to be quite solid. Once again the warning bell sounded inside his head. If the house had been empty for as long as Ghend had suggested, the door should have completely rotted away by now. All sorts of normal rules didn’t appear to be in force here. He took hold of the massive ring and pulled the heavy door open. ‘Is anybody here?’ he called once more.
He waited again, but again there was no answer.
There was a broad corridor leading back into the house beyond the doorway, and there were other corridors branching off from that main one at regular intervals, and there were many doors in each corridor. The search for the book would obviously take longer than he’d thought.
The light inside the house was growing dimmer, and Althalus was fairly certain that evening was rapidly descending. He was obviously running out of daylight. The first order of business now was to find a secure place to spend the night. He could begin his search of the house tomorrow.
He looked down one of the side corridors and saw a rounded wall at the far end, which hinted strongly that there might be a tower there. A tower room, he reasoned, would probably be more secure than a chamber on the ground floor, and the notion of security in this peculiar structure seemed fairly important just now.
He hurried down the hall and found a door somewhat larger than those he’d previously passed. He rapped his sword-hilt against the door. ‘Ho, in there?’ he called.
But of course there was no answer.
The door-latch was a bronze bar that had been designed to slip into a hole chipped deep into the stone door-frame. Althalus tapped its knob with the butt of his sword until it cleared the hole. Then he poked the point of his sword into the edge of the door, flipped the door open, and jumped back, sword and spear at the ready.
There was nobody behind that door, but there were steps leading upward.
The likelihood that these hidden steps just happened to be behind a door Althalus had just happened to notice in passing was very, very slim. The clever thief had a profound distrust of things that came about by sheer chance. Chance was almost always a trap of some kind, and if there was a trap in this house, there almost had to be a trapper.
There wasn’t much daylight left, however, and Althalus didn’t really want to meet whoever it was at night. He drew in a deep breath. Then he tapped the first step with the butt end of his spear to make certain that the weight of his foot wouldn’t bring something heavy down on top of him. It was slow going up the stairs that way, but the careful thief methodically checked every single step before he put his foot on it. Just because ten steps had been perfectly safe, there were no guarantees that the eleventh wouldn’t kill him, and the way his luck had been going lately, it was better to take some extra precautions.
He finally reached the door at the top of those hidden steps, and he decided not to rap this time. He tucked his sword under his left arm, slowly pushed the latch back until it came clear of the stone door-frame. Then he took hold of his sword again and nudged the door open with his knee.
Beyond the door there was one room, and one only. It was a large circular room, and the floor was as glossy as ice. The whole house was strange, but this particular room seemed stranger still. The walls were also polished and smooth, and they curved inward to form a dome overhead. The workmanship that had created this room was far more advanced than anything Althalus had ever seen before.
The next thing he noticed was how warm the room seemed to be. He looked around, but there was no fire-pit to explain the warmth. His new cloak wasn’t necessary here.
Reason told him that the room should not be warm, since there was no fire and there were four broad windows, one looking out in each direction. There should be cold air blowing in through each of those unglazed windows, but there was not. That wasn’t at all natural. Winter was coming, so the air outside was bitterly cold; but it wasn’t coming in, for some reason.
Althalus stood in the doorway carefully looking over every bit of the domed, circular room. There was what appeared to be a very large stone bed against the far wall, and the bed was covered with dark, thick-furred bison robes. There was a table made of the same polished stone as the floor and walls, and the table rested on a stone pedestal in the center of the floor, and there was an ornately carved stone bench beside that table.
And there, resting on the precise center of that gleaming tabletop, was the Book Ghend had described.
Althalus cautiously approached the table. Then he leaned his spear against it and, with his sword firmly gripped in his right hand, he rather hesitantly reached out with his left. Something about the way Ghend had handled that black-boxed Book of his back in Nabjor’s camp had suggested that books should be approached with extreme caution. He touched his fingers to the soft white leather of the Book’s enclosing box, and then he snatched his hand away to grab up his spear as he heard a faint sound.
It was a soft, contented sort of sound that seemed to be coming from the fur-covered bed. The sound was not exactly continuous, but seemed to change pitch slightly, going in and out almost like breathing.
Before he could investigate, though, something else happened that took his attention away from that soft sound. Twilight was deepening outside the windows, but it was not growing dark in this room. He looked up in astonishment. The dome above him had begun to glow, growing slowly brighter and perfectly matching its brightening to the pace of the increasing darkness outside. The only source of light other than the sun, the moon, and the shimmering curtain of God’s light at the edge of the world was fire, and the dome over his head was not on fire.
Then that contented sound coming from the bed grew even louder, and now that the light from the dome over his head was growing brighter, Althalus could see the source of that sound. He blinked, and then he almost laughed. The sound was coming from a cat.
It was a very dark cat, almost black, and it blended so well into the dark fur of the bison robes on the bed that his cursory glance when he’d first entered the room had missed it entirely. The cat lay on its belly with its head up, though its eyes were closed. Its front paws were stretched out on the robe in front of its short-furred chest, and they were making little kneading motions. The sound which had so baffled Althalus was the sound of purring.
Then the cat opened its eyes. Most of the cats Althalus had seen before had looked at him with yellow eyes. This cat’s eyes, however, were a brightly glowing green.
The cat rose to its feet and stretched, yawning and arching its sinuous back and hooking its tail up. Then the furry creature sat down, looking into the face of Althalus with its penetrating green eyes as if it had known him all its life.
‘You certainly took your own sweet time getting here’, the cat observed in a distinctly feminine voice. ‘Now why don’t you go shut that door you left standing wide open? It’s letting in the cold, and I just hate the cold.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Althalus stared at the cat in utter disbelief. Then he sighed mournfully and sank down onto the bench in absolute dejection. His luck hadn’t been satisfied with everything else she’d done to him. Now she was twisting the knife. This was why Ghend had hired somebody else to steal the Book instead of doing it himself. The House at the End of the World didn’t need guards or hidden traps to protect it. It protected itself and the Book from thieves by driving anyone who entered it mad. He sighed and looked reproachfully at the cat.
‘Yes?’ she said with that infuriatingly superior air all cats seem to have. ‘Was there something?’
‘You don’t have to do that anymore,’ he told her. ‘You and this House have already done what you’re supposed to do. I’ve gone completely insane.’
‘What in the world are you talking about?’
‘Cats can’t talk. It’s impossible. You aren’t really talking to me, and now that I think about it, you’re probably not really even there. I’m seeing you and hearing you talk because I’ve gone crazy.’
‘You’re being ridiculous, you know.’
‘Crazy people are ridiculous. I met a crazy man on my way here, and he went around talking to God. Lots of people talk to God, but that old fellow believed that God talked back to him.’ Althalus sighed mournfully. ‘It’ll probably all be over before long. Since I’m crazy now, it shouldn’t be very long until I throw myself out of the window and fall on down through the stars forever and ever. That’s the sort of thing a crazy man would do.’
‘What do you mean by “fall forever”?’
‘This House is right at the end of the world, isn’t it? If I jump out that window, I’ll just fall and fall through all that nothing that’s out there.’
‘Whatever gave you the ridiculous idea that this is the end of the world?’
‘Everybody says it is. The people here in Kagwher won’t even talk about it, because they’re afraid of it. I’ve looked out over that edge, and all there is down there is clouds. Clouds are part of the sky, so that means that this edge is the place where the world ends and the sky starts, doesn’t it?’
‘No,’ she replied, absently licking one of her paws and washing her face. ‘That’s not what it means at all. There is something down there. It’s a long way down, but it is there.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s water, Althalus, and what you saw when you looked over that edge is fog. Fog and clouds are more or less the same thing – except that fog’s closer to the ground.’
‘You know my name?’ That surprised him.
‘Well, of course I know your name, you ninny. I was sent here to meet you.’
‘Oh? Who sent you?’
‘You’re having enough trouble holding onto your sanity already. Let’s not push you off any edges with things you aren’t ready to understand just yet. You might as well get used to me, Althalus. We’re going to be together for a long, long time.’
He shook off his momentary dejection. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I think I’ve had just about enough of this. It’s been just wonderful talking with you, but if you’ll excuse me now, I think I’ll just take the Book and go. I’d love to stay and chat some more, but winter’s going to be snapping at my tail feathers all the way home as it is.’
‘And just how did you plan to leave?’ she asked calmly as she started to wash her ears.
He turned sharply to look around. But the door through which he had entered the room wasn’t there any more. ‘How did you do that?’
‘We won’t be needing it any more – for a while at least – and it was letting in the cold air, since you were too lazy to close it behind you when you came in.’
A brief panic clutched at the thief’s throat. He was trapped. The Book had lured him into this place, and now the cat had trapped him, and there was no way out. ‘I think I’ll kill myself,’ he said mournfully.
‘No you won’t,’ she said quite calmly, beginning to wash her tummy. ‘You can try, if you like, but it won’t work. You can’t leave, you can’t jump out of the window, and you can’t stab yourself with your sword or your knife or your spear. You might as well get used to it, Althalus. You’re going to stay right here with me until we’ve done what we’re supposed to do.’
‘Then I can leave?’ he asked hopefully.
‘You’ll be required to leave. We have things we need to do here, and then there are other things that have to be done in other places, so you’ll have to go do them.’
‘What are we supposed to do here?’
‘I’m supposed to teach, and you’re supposed to learn.’
‘Learn what?’
‘The Book.’
‘How to read it, you mean?’
‘That’s part of it.’ She began to wash her tail, hooking it up to her tongue with one curved paw. ‘After you learn how to read it, you have to learn how to use it.’
‘Use?’
‘We’ll get to that in time. You’re having enough trouble here already.’
‘I’ll tell you something right here and now,’ he said hotly. ‘I am not going to take any orders from a cat.’
‘Yes, actually you will. It may take you a while to come around, but that’s all right, because we’ve got all the time in the world.’ She stretched and yawned. Then she looked herself over. ‘All nice and neat,’ she said approvingly. Then she yawned again. ‘Did you have any other silly announcements you’d like to make? I’ve finished everything that I have to say’
The light in the dome overhead began to grow dim.
‘What’s happening?’ he demanded sharply.
‘Now that I’ve got my fur all nice and neat, I think I’ll take a little nap.’
‘You just woke up.’
‘What’s that got to do with anything? Since you’re obviously not ready to do what you’re supposed to do, I might as well sleep for a while. When you change your mind, wake me up and we’ll get started.’ And then she settled back down on the thick-furred bison robes and closed her eyes again.
Althalus spluttered to himself for a bit, but the sleeping cat didn’t so much as twitch an ear. Finally he gave up and rolled himself up in his cloak near the wall where the door had been, and he too went to sleep.
Althalus held out for several days, but his profession had made him a high-strung sort of man, and the forced inactivity in this sealed room was beginning to fray at his nerves. He walked around the room several times and looked out the windows. He discovered that he could put his hand through them – or his head – quite easily, but when he tried to lean out, something that he couldn’t see was in his way. Whatever that something was kept out the much colder air outside. There were so many things about this room that couldn’t be explained, and the thief’s curiosity finally got the best of him. ‘All right,’ he said to the cat one morning as daylight began to stain the sky, ‘I give up. You win.’
‘Of course I won,’ she replied, opening her bright green eyes. ‘I always do.’ She yawned and stretched sinuously. ‘Now why don’t you come over here so that we can talk?’
‘I can talk from right here.’ He was a little wary about getting too close to her. It was clear that she could do things he couldn’t understand, and he didn’t want her to start doing them to him.
Her ears flicked slightly and she lay back down. ‘Let me know when you change your mind,’ she told him. And then she closed her eyes again.
He muttered some choice swear-words, and then he gave up, rose from the bench beside the table and went to the fur-robed bed. He sat down, reached out rather tentatively and touched her furry back with his hand to make sure that she was really there.
‘That was quick,’ she noted, opening her eyes again and starting to purr.
‘There’s not much point in being stubborn about it. You’re obviously the one who’s in control of things here. You wanted to talk?’
She nuzzled at his hand. ‘I’m glad you understand,’ she said, still purring. ‘I wasn’t ordering you around just to watch you jump, Althalus. I’m a cat for now, and cats need touching. I need to have you near me when we talk.’
‘Then you haven’t always been a cat?’
‘How many cats have you come across who know how to talk?’
‘You know,’ he bantered, ‘I can’t for the life of me remember the last time.’
She actually laughed, and that gave him a little glow of satisfaction. If he could make her laugh, she wasn’t entirely in control of the situation here.
‘I’m not really all that hard to get along with, Althalus,’ she told him. ‘Pet me now and then and scratch my ears once in a while, and we’ll get along just fine. Is there anything you need?’
‘I’ll have to go outside to hunt food for us before long’, he said, trying to sound casual about it.
‘Are you hungry?’
‘Well, not right now. I’m sure I will be later, though.’
‘When you’re hungry, I’ll see to it that you have something to eat.’ She gave him a sidelong look. ‘You didn’t really think you could get away that easily, did you?’
He grinned. ‘It was worth a try.’ He picked her up and held her.
‘You aren’t going anywhere without me, Althalus. Get used to the idea that I’m going to be with you for the rest of your life – and you’re going to live for a very, very long time. You’ve been chosen to do some things and I’ve been chosen to make sure you do them right. Your life’s going to be much easier once you accept that.’
‘How did we get chosen – and who did the choosing?’
She reached up and patted his cheek with one soft paw. ‘We’ll get to that later’, she assured him. ‘You might have a little trouble accepting it right at first. Now then, why don’t we get started?’ She hopped down from the bed, crossed to the table, and without any seeming effort leaped up and sat on the polished surface. ‘Time to go to work, pet,’ she said. ‘Come over here and sit down while I teach you how to read.’
The ‘reading’ involved the translation of stylized pictures, much as it had in Ghend’s Book. The pictures represented words. That came rather easily with concrete words such as ‘tree’, or ‘rock’, or ‘pig’. The pictures that represented concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, or ‘honesty’, were more difficult.
Althalus was adaptable – a thief almost has to be – but the situation here took some getting used to. Food simply appeared on the table whenever he grew hungry. It startled him the first few times it happened, but after a while, he didn’t even pay attention to it any more. Even miracles become commonplace if they happen often enough.
Winter arrived at the edge of the world, and as it settled in, the sun went away and perpetual night arrived. The cat patiently explained it, but Althalus only dimly understood her explanation. He could accept it intellectually, but it still seemed to him that the sun moved around the earth instead of the other way around. With the coming of that endless night, he lost all track of days. When you get right down to it, he reasoned, there simply weren’t any days any more. He stopped looking out the windows altogether. It was almost always snowing anyway, and snow depressed him.
He was making some progress with his reading. After he’d come across one of the pictures often enough, he automatically recognized it. Words became the center of his attention.
‘You weren’t always a cat, were you?’ he asked his companion once when the two of them were lying on the fur-covered bed after they’d eaten.
‘I thought I’d already told you that,’ she said.
‘What were you before?’
She gave him a long, steady look with her glowing green eyes. ‘You aren’t quite ready for that information yet, Althalus. You’re fairly well settled down now. I don’t want you to start bouncing off the walls the way you did when you first arrived.’
‘Did you have a name – before you became a cat, I mean?’
‘Yes. You probably wouldn’t be able to pronounce it, though. Why do you ask?’
‘It just doesn’t seem right for me to keep calling you “cat”. That’s like saying “donkey” or “chicken”. Would it upset you if I gave you a name?’
‘Not if it’s a nice name. I’ve heard some of the words you use when you think I’m asleep. I wouldn’t like one of those.’
‘I sort of like “Emerald”, because of your eyes.’
‘I could live with that, yes. I had a very nice emerald once – before I came here. I used to hold it up in the sunlight to watch it glow.’
‘Then you had arms before you became a cat, and hands as well,’ he said shrewdly.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. Now would you like to make some guesses about how many and where they were attached to me?’ She gave him an arch look. ‘Stop fishing, Althalus. Someday you’ll find out who I really am, and it might surprise you, but you don’t need to know that right now.’
‘Maybe I don’t,’ he said slyly, ‘but every now and then, you make a slip, and I keep track of those slips. It won’t be too long before I know pretty much what you used to be.’
‘Not until I’m ready for you to know, you won’t,’ she told him. ‘You need to concentrate right now, Althalus, and if I used my real form here in the House, you wouldn’t be able to do that.’
‘That bad?’
She snuggled up against him and started to purr. ‘You’ll see, pet,’ she said. ‘You’ll see.’
Despite her rather superior attitude – which Althalus strongly suspected had been a part of her original nature – Emerald was an affectionate creature who always wanted to be in close physical contact with him. He slept on the thickly furred bison robes on the stone bed, and she always snuggled up to him, purring contentedly. Right at first he didn’t care for that, so he made a practice of covering himself with his wool cloak and holding it tightly around his neck. Emerald would sit quite calmly at the foot of the bed watching him. Then, as he started to drift off to sleep and his grip relaxed, she would silently creep up the bed until she was just behind his head. Then she would skillfully touch her cold, wet nose to the back of his neck, and Althalus would automatically flinch away from that surprising touch. That was all she needed to burrow down under the cloak, and she would settle down against his back and purr. Her purring was really very soothing, so he didn’t mind having her there. She seemed to get a great deal of entertainment out of the game, though, so Althalus continued to clench his cloak up around his neck so that she could surprise him in the same way each time they slept. It didn’t really cost him anything, and as long as it amused her . . .