‘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.’
‘That stands to reason,’ another man said. ‘Druigor drives very hard bargains. He can always find some way to get the best of anybody he deals with.’
‘I hear tell that he’s thinking about standing for election to the Senate,’ a wispy looking fellow added.
‘He’s out of his mind,’ the first man snorted. ‘He doesn’t qualify. He doesn’t have a title.’
The wispy man shrugged. ‘He’ll buy one. There are always nobles running around with nothing in their purses but their titles.’
The conversation drifted on to other topics, so Althalus got up and quietly left the tavern. He went some distance down the narrow, cobblestoned street and stopped a fairly well-dressed passer-by. ‘Excuse me,’ he said politely, ‘but I’m looking for the counting house of a man named Druigor. Do you by any chance happen to know where it is?’
‘Everybody in Maghu knows where Druigor’s establishment’s located,’ the man replied.
‘I’m a stranger here,’ Althalus replied.
‘Ah, that explains it then. Druigor does business over by the west gate. Anybody over in that neighborhood can direct you to his establishment.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ Althalus said. Then he walked on.
The area near the west gate was largely given over to barn-like warehouses, and a helpful fellow pointed out the one which belonged to Druigor. It seemed to be fairly busy. People were going in and out through the front door and there were wagons filled with bulging sacks waiting near a loading-dock on one side. Althalus watched for a while. The steady stream of men going in and out through the front door indicated that Druigor was doing a lot of business. That was always promising.
He went on up the street and entered another, quieter warehouse. A sweating man was dragging heavy sacks across the floor and stacking them against a wall. ‘Excuse me, neighbor,’ Althalus said. ‘Who does this place belong to?’
‘This is Garwin’s warehouse,’ the sweating man replied. ‘He’s not here right now, though.’
‘Oh,’ Althalus said. ‘Sorry I missed him. I’ll come back later.’ Then he turned, went back out into the street, and walked on down to Druigor’s warehouse again. He went inside and joined the others who were waiting to speak with the owner of the place.
When his turn came he went into a cluttered room where a hard-eyed man sat at a table. ‘Yes?’ the hard-eyed man said.
‘You’re a very busy man, I see,’ Althalus said, his eyes covering everything in the room.
‘Yes, I am, so get to the point.’
Althalus had already seen what he’d come to see, however. In the comer of the room stood a bulky bronze box with an elaborate latch holding it shut.
‘I’ve been told that you’re a fair man, Master Garwin,’ Althalus said in his most ingratiating manner, his eyes still busy.
‘You’ve