The Eyes of the Overworld Audiobook (Free)

The Eyes of the Overworld may be the to begin Vance’s picaresque novels about the scoundrel Cugel. Here he is delivered by a magician he offers wronged to a faraway unknown nation to retrieve magical lens that reveal the Overworld. Conniving to steal the lens, he escapes and, goaded with a homesick monster magically mounted on his liver, begins to find his way home to Almery. The journey will take him across trackless mountains, wastelands, and seas. Through cunning and dumb fortune, the relentless Cugel survives one catastrophe after another, overcoming bandits, ghosts, and ghouls-stealing, laying, and cheating without understanding or remorse leaving only wreckage behind. Betrayed and betraying, he joins a cult group on a pilgrimage, crosses the Silver Desert as his comrades die one at a time and, escaping the Rat People, obtains a spell that returns him home. There, thanks to incompetence and arrogance he misspeaks what of the purloined spell and transports himself back again to the same dismal place he began his journey.