Free The Redemption of Althalus by David Eddings

carpet of needles was very thick, smothering obstructing undergrowth.
    Althalus always moved cautiously when traveling through Hule, but this time he went through the forest even more carefully. A man whose luck has gone bad needs to take extra precautions. There were other men moving through the forest, and even though they were kindred outlaws, Althalus avoided them. There weren’t any laws in Hule, but there
were
rules about behavior, and it was very unhealthy to ignore those rules. If an armed man doesn’t want company, it’s best not to intrude upon him.
    When Althalus was not too far from the western edge of the land of the Kagwhers, he encountered another of the creatures who lived in the forest of Hule, and things were a little tense for a while. A pack of the hulking forest wolves caught his scent. Althalus didn’t really understand wolves. Most animals don’t bother to waste time on things that aren’t easy to catch and eat. Wolves, however, seem to enjoy challenges, and they’ll chase something for days on end just for the fun of the chase. Althalus could laugh at a good joke with the best of them, but he felt that the wolves of Hule tended to run a joke all the way into the ground.
    And so it was with some relief that he moved up into the highlands of Kagwher, where the trees thinned out enough to make the forest wolves howl one final salute and turn back.
    There was, as all the world knows, gold in Kagwher, and that made the Kagwhers a little hard to get along with. Gold, Althalus had noticed, does peculiar things to people. A man with nothing in his purse but a few copper coins can be the most good-natured and fun-loving fellow in the world, but give him a little bit of gold and he immediately turns suspicious and unfriendly and spends almost every waking moment worrying about thieves and bandits.
    The Kagwhers had devised a charmingly direct means of warning passersby away from their mines and those streams where smooth, round lumps of gold lay scattered among the brown pebbles just under the surface of the water. Any time a traveler in Kagwher happened across a stake driven into the ground with a skull adorning its top, he knew that he was approaching forbidden ground. Some of the skulls were those of animals; most of them, however, were the skulls of men. The message was fairly clear.
    So far as Althalus was concerned, the mines of Kagwher were perfectly safe. There was a lot of backbreaking labor involved in wrenching gold out of the mountains, and other men were far better suited for that than he was. Althalus
was
a thief, after all, and he devoutly believed that actually working for a living was unethical.
    Ghend’s directions hadn’t really been too precise, but Althalus knew that his first chore was going to be finding the edge of the world. The problem with that was that he wasn’t entirely sure what the edge of the world was going to look like. It might be a sort of vague, misty area where an unwary traveler could just walk off and fall forever through the realm of stars that wouldn’t even notice him as he hurtled past. The word “edge,” however, suggested a brink of some kind—possibly a line with ground on one side and stars on the other. It was even possible that it might just be a solid wall of stars, or even a stairway of stars stretching all the way up to the throne of whatever God held sway here in Kagwher.
    Althalus didn’t really have a very well-defined system of belief. He knew that he was fortune’s child, and even though he and fortune were currently a bit on the outs, he hoped that he’d be able to cuddle up to her again before too long. The ruler of the universe was a little distant, and Althalus had long since decided to let God—whatever his name was—concentrate on managing the sunrises and sunsets, the turning of the seasons, and the phases of the moon without the distraction of suggestions. All in all, Althalus and God got along fairly well, since they didn’t