The Redemption of Althalus Read Online Free

interior was furnished with tattered, broken-down chairs and tables that would have shamed a pauper. The draperies were in rags, the carpets were threadbare, and the best candlestick in the entire house was made of tarnished brass. The furnishings cried louder than words that this was
not
the house of a rich man. Omeso had evidently already spent his inheritance.
    Althalus doggedly continued his search, and after he’d meticulously covered every room, he gave up. There wasn’t anything in the entire house that was worth stealing. He left in disgust.
    He still had money in his purse, so he lingered in Kanthon for a few more days, and then, quite by accident, he entered a tavern frequented by artisans. As was usually the case down in the lowlands, the tavern did not offer mead, so Althalus had to settle for sour wine again. He looked around the tavern. Artisans were the sort of people who had many opportunities to look inside the houses of rich people. He addressed the other patrons. “Maybe one of you gentlemen could clear something up for me. I happened to go into the house of a man named Omeso on business the other day. Everybody in town was telling me how rich he is, but once I got past his front door, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There were chairs in that man’s house that only had three legs, and the tables all looked so wobbly that a good sneeze would knock them over.”
    “That’s the latest fashion here in Kanthon, friend,” a mud-smeared potter told him. “I can’t sell a good pot or jug or bottle anymore, because everybody wants ones that are chipped and battered and have the handles broken off.”
    “If you think
that’s
odd,” a wood carver said, “you should see what goes on in
my
shop. I used to have a scrap heap where I threw broken furniture, but since the new tax law went into effect, I can’t
give
new furniture away, but our local gentry will pay almost anything for a brokendown old chair.”
    “I don’t understand,” Althalus confessed.
    “It’s not really too complicated, stranger,” a baker put in. “Our old Aryo used to run his government on the proceeds of the tax on bread. Anybody who ate helped support the government. But our old Aryo died last year, and his son, the man who sits on the throne now, is a very educated young man. His teachers were all philosophers with strange ideas. They persuaded him that a tax on profit had more justice than one on bread, since the poor people have to buy most of the bread, while the rich people make most of the profit.”
    “What has that got to do with shabby furniture?” Althalus asked with a puzzled frown.
    “The furniture’s all for show, friend,” a mortar-spattered stonemason told him. “Our rich men are all trying to convince the tax collectors that they haven’t got anything at all. The tax collectors don’t believe them, of course, so they conduct little surprise searches. If a rich man in Kanthon’s stupid enough to have even one piece of fine furniture in his home, the tax collectors immediately send in the wrecking crews to dismantle the floors of the house.”
    “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