Read Online The Redemption of Althalus by David Eddings - Free Book Online

more brightly.
    “I’m the best,” Althalus said with a deprecating shrug.
    “He’s right about that, stranger,” Nabjor said, bringing Althalus a fresh cup of mead. “Althalus here can steal anything with two ends or with a top and a bottom.”
    “That might be a slight exaggeration,” Althalus said. “A river has two ends, and I’ve never stolen one of those; and a lake has a top and a bottom, but I’ve never stolen one of those either. What exactly is it that this man in Nekweros wants badly enough to offer gold for it—some jewel or something like that?”
    “No, it’s not a jewel,” Ghend replied with a hungry look. “What he wants—and will pay gold for—is a book.”
    “You just said the magic word ‘gold’ again, Ghend. I could sit here all day and listen to you talk about it, but now we come to the hard part. What in blazes is a book?”
    Ghend looked sharply at him, and the flickering firelight touched his eyes again, making them glow a burning red. “So
that’s
why you threw all of Druigor’s money on the floor. You didn’t know that it was money because you can’t read.”
    “Reading’s for the priests, Ghend, and I don’t have any dealings with priests if I can avoid it. Every priest I’ve ever come across promises me a seat at the table of his God—
if
I’ll just hand over everything I’ve got in my purse. I’m sure the dining halls of the Gods are very nice, but you have to die to get an invitation to have dinner with God, and I’m not really
that
hungry.”
    Ghend frowned. “This might complicate things just a bit,” he said. “A book is a collection of pages that people read.”
    “I don’t have to be able to read it, Ghend, to be able to steal it. All I have to know is what it looks like and where it is.”
    Ghend gave him a speculative look, his deep-sunk eyes glowing. “You may be right,” he said, almost as if to himself. “I just happen to have a book with me. If I show it to you, you’ll know what you’re looking for.”
    “Exactly,” Althalus said. “Why don’t you trot your book out, and I’ll have a look. I don’t have to know what it says to be able to steal it, do I?”
    “No,” Ghend agreed, “I guess you don’t at that.” He rose to his feet, went over to his horse, reached inside the leather bag tied to his saddle, and took something square and fairly large out of the bag. Then he brought it back to the fire.
    “It’s bigger than I thought,” Althalus noted. “It’s just a box, then, isn’t it?”
    “It’s what’s inside that’s important,” Ghend said, opening the lid. He took out a crackling sheet of something that looked like dried leather and handed it to Althalus. “That’s what writing looks like,” he said. “When you find a box like this one, you’d better open it to make sure it has sheets like that one inside instead of buttons or tools.”
    Althalus held up the sheet and looked at it. “What kind of animal has a hide this thin?” he asked.
    “They take a piece of cowhide and split it with a knife to get thin sheets,” Ghend explained. “Then they press them flat with weights and dry them so that they’re stiff. Then they write on them so that other people can read what they’ve put down.”
    “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