Gatefather Page 12

  “Not with you subverting it,” said Pat.

  “But I wasn’t going to subvert it,” said Hermia. “I was going to let it fail under the pressure of all its inherent errors.”

  “I’m not here so you can critique Danny’s plan. It failed because of what you chose to do.”

  “And here’s why. My clever Family put together a list of Danny’s friends. You, the three stupid girls, and Hal and Wheeler.”

  “The other girls aren’t stupid.”

  “Compared to you they are,” said Hermia. “Compared to me, of course, you’re all stupid except maybe Hal. But the point is that Danny cared about all of you. And the Family was perfectly willing to spend you, all at once or one at a time, in order to get Danny to give them exclusive use of a Great Gate.”

  “So we were hostages even though your Family didn’t have any of us in custody.”

  “Silly child,” said Hermia. “Families don’t have to have you in custody. They only have to know where you are and how to get to you. Which of you would have been able to stand against a single dogsbody, let alone a mage with real power.”

  “Nobody had real power till the Great Gate.”

  “Compared to you and your friends, they all had power.”

  “But we could get away.”

  “Not quickly enough,” said Hermia. “They knew about your amulets.”

  “Because you told them.”

  “Because you all fingered them while delivering your messages. And I had one, too, remember. Do you think the Families can’t figure out obvious things? They may have had old-fashioned, out-of-date powers, but their brains are the latest model Homo sapiens, and when it comes to the use of coercive power against drowthers, you have no idea how skilled they are. The Iliad didn’t begin to plumb the depths of what they could and would do.”

  “So you moved the Wild Gate in order to save me and my friends.” Pat sounded skeptical.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass about you or your friends. But Danny’s friends, now—I knew they were his hobby and you were the momentary love of his life.”

  “Momentary. Cute.”

  “Oh, grow up, Patty. Everybody in the Families is notoriously fickle, but gatemages most of all. Most of the really good Eros stories are the escapades of Gatefathers. And even though Jupiter gets the credit for Leda and Ganymede and all the other kidnapped lovers, it was always a gatelord who did the carrying off. Danny may not know it yet, but he’ll lose interest. Maybe not as quickly as most of them, but ‘faithful gatemage’ is an oxymoron.”

  “So I’m Danny’s momentary conquest. You’ve hurt my feelings. Boo hoo. That’s your whole story?”

  “I knew that they probably couldn’t kill all of you, but they could hurt most of you, scare you all, and maybe kill a couple. Even if I warned Danny, it wouldn’t matter. He couldn’t be everywhere at once, but the Family could. And of course, anything we knew, other Families could figure out, what with all the spying we all do all the time. Ratmages have their role to play; there are mice in the walls and floors. As an example of ruthlessness, the Hittites found Danny and me and blasted him with a shotgun without asking questions. He lived, of course, because he could gate himself away before he died. But if it had been me they blasted, I couldn’t have used my amulet quickly enough. Ditto with you and your chums. So yes, I took the threat seriously. I knew Danny would rather revise his hopeless plan than lose any of you. So I moved the Wild Gate. But I pretended it was harder than it actually was, so Danny would have plenty of time to realize it was gone from the Silvermans’ barn so he could set up an alternative. Maine, wasn’t it? But I didn’t tell anyone where his Great Gate was. I was playing as nicely as I could, giving him every chance to keep the Families in balance.”

  “Brava,” said Pat. “You’re such a princess.”

  “My Family realized that I wasn’t really playing for their team. And once they discovered that my amulet wasn’t working anymore, then the same people who once plugged a bunch of tracking devices into my body decided that keeping me on a heavily guarded island was almost as good an idea as killing me.”

  “Yes, I imagine that Danny will believe all of this and agree that you made the right choice,” said Pat.

  “But you don’t think I did right, keeping you alive?”

  “I’m not the judge,” said Pat. “I’m just a novice Orphan windmage of as-yet-unmeasured powers.”

  “Oh, that indoor wind thing was pretty impressive,” said Hermia. “You’ll hold up pretty well in the coming war.”

  “I’m not in that war.”

  “Oh, don’t kid yourself, kid,” said Hermia. “The Orphans will be brushed aside before the real mage-to-mage fighting begins.”

  “Fine,” said Pat. “Then I’ll be dead.”

  “Dead is pretty final,” said Hermia.

  “No doubt,” said Pat. “Except for one tiny thing.” And right in front of Hermia’s eyes, Pat shifted about a meter to the left. Without changing her posture or moving her hand or anything.

  What was the girl trying to show her? “You have an amulet to move you a meter? Do you get to choose the direction of this incredibly useful move?”

  Pat shifted rapidly from point to point around the room. Then disappeared completely, and returned about ten seconds later.

  “How many gates were created?” asked Pat.

  “None,” said Hermia. “None at all.”

  “Not surprising, since I’m not a gatemage.”

  “So Danny’s doing it.”

  “Danny is with Veevee, teaching her how to do what I just did. In fact, while I was out of the room I checked in and told Danny you were about ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “For him to decide whether you can be trusted with any of the things we’ve recently learned. Or whether he should just get you out of here. Me, I’m for leaving you right where you are, but he thinks he owes you something for past help. Danny’s even more loyal than I am. Though perhaps that will turn out to be momentary, too.”

  “For an American high-school girl, you certainly have mastered snottiness.”

  “For American teenage girls, snottiness is an Olympic event, and we’re all training to qualify for the national team. Starting in middle school.”

  Hermia laughed. “I can see why Danny likes you,” said Hermia. “I like you, even though all I really care about right now is how Danny was able to give gatemaking abilities to a windmage, when he could never give them to me.”

  Pat cocked her head a little. Thinking? Listening? “He didn’t give them to me,” said Pat. Apparently she had reached her decision, and she was going to tell Hermia something about what was going on with these gateless gates.

  “Oh, please,” said Hermia. Because challenging Pat with scorn seemed to work better than simple inquiry.

  “Everybody has the ability to move like that,” said Pat. “It’s not even a secret, if you just think about it. We all get from Duat to our newborn baby bodies, without any detectable gate, and when we die, back we go. Gateless again.”

  Hermia realized Pat was right—it was obvious enough. “But those aren’t gates.”

  “They’re not only gates, they’re Great Gates, since they go from one planet to another. And we all know the way. We just don’t leave a trace of our path behind us.”

  “Somebody from Duat manages all that,” said Hermia.

  Again, the cocked head. The decision. “No,” said Pat. “Not the way you think. The ability to move from anywhere to anywhere is inherent in all of us. What’s tricky is bringing along our baggage.” And she indicated her own body.

  “Danny told you to tell me this?” asked Hermia.

  “He left it up to me. Because simply telling you doesn’t help you at all,” said Pat. “You can only learn it by doing.”

  Hermia tried to make sense of this. “So you learned it, and you didn’t learn it from Danny. What did you do, die?”

  “Yes,” said Pat.

  Hermi
a had meant the question as a joke. But Pat’s response was honest enough. So Hermia thought through what that implied. “He followed you to the afterlife and brought you back?”

  “That’s the simplest version.”

  “You were actually completely dead,” said Hermia.

  “If you’re not dead, you can’t get to Duat. Except that Danny held on to me, mostly detached from his body, and let me pull him there.”

  “So you’ve been dead, and you came back.”

  “Which is how I know what it feels like to move—without leaving a gate behind me that somebody else might follow.”

  Hermia began to realize the implications of this. Danny had given away all his gates, and a few days ago he got rid of the last of the captive gates, too. But now he could go anywhere without needing to have any gates at all. His outself was in Loki’s tender keeping, and yet Danny’s movements were not restricted. “So that makes you a windmage and a gatemage,” said Hermia.

  “I can only move myself,” said Pat. “But in the long run, that’s all anyone can do. Danny and Veevee have talked about it, about how gates usually work, and I suspect they want you to hear their ideas and see if you can come up with alternatives.”

  “Did they lock you out of the room, or do you know what they think?”

  “If explaining it could give you the ability to do it, Veevee would already have learned it.”

  So you think that if Veevee can’t learn it, neither can I? But Hermia did not say that. Instead, she said, “If I can’t learn it by hearing about it, you might as well tell me.”

  Pat gave one little derisive laugh—but then went ahead and told. Maybe not everything, but something. “The movement I can do now is the only kind of movement there is—a ka relocating itself in relation to other kas. Only in Duat they seem to think ‘ka’ should refer only to the human inself. The generic term for every entity capable of such movement is ‘pret.’ All of us are prets. And the ba—the outself, right? It acts like a part of us, but it isn’t. It consists of the handful or dozen or thousand or billion prets that chose to follow us into this life, into our bodies.”

  “So Danny’s not really a man with a billion gates, he’s just the chairman of the board?”

  “The prets that make up the ba seem to be as obedient to our will as our bodies are. That’s why you can make a gate and then die, and yet the gate stays there, guiding people back and forth between locations.”

  Hermia saw that Danny and Pat may well have had a glimpse behind the curtain, and it excited her. Even as a prisoner, trusted by nobody, she still loved to learn how things worked. To make sense of the world. “So you’re saying that every gate is somebody else’s ka, but it’s your slave, bound to obey you?”

  “Not a slave, not property. It follows you because it chooses to, because it’s bound to you by some kind of unbreakable oath. Or at least it can’t break the oath.”

  “What was the word?” asked Hermia. “Pret?”

  “Gatemages don’t forget words,” said Pat, “so you know it is.”

  Hermia summarized what she thought the girl had told her. “You and I and every other human is a pret that has an entourage. A body, maybe a ba, maybe a thousand gates. But all those parts in the entourage, they’re really independent beings that could have been people in their own right.”

  “I don’t think they could be people,” said Pat, “or they would be. In Duat it all seems to be about some kind of ranking. If you’re at a certain level, you can be born as a human, and take along whatever other prets choose to bind themselves to you.”

  “A patronage system. Our outselves are merely clients, along for the ride.”

  “Hardly,” said Pat. “They’re the source of our power. When I guide the wind, I do it by using the prets of my outself. Nothing like so many as you have, and not persistent enough to become gates. But they love to guide the air into becoming wind. That’s how I see it.”

  “This is all very interesting, but what is it you actually do now that you know about these ‘prets.’”

  “I can sense where things are,” said Pat, “and I can go there. My body comes with me when I do. No gate, I just go, and the others follow without my having to tell them to. But if you’re like Veevee, you can sense other mages’ gates, but you have only the vaguest idea of the outselves of other kinds of mages, and you can’t sense anybody’s ka or any of the nonmagical prets.”

  “Correct so far,” said Hermia, “though you can be sure I’ll try to find out whether this is true or you’re just playing with me.”

  Pat said nothing.

  “You can’t tell me it surprises you that I’m not taking you at your word.”

  “I expect nothing from you,” said Pat, “so you can’t very well surprise me.”

  “When did you do all this dying and journeying to Duat?” asked Hermia.

  “A few days ago. Danny got rid of the captive gates the moment after he healed my body. I had just died. That’s when he followed my instinctive journey to Duat.”

  “No coin for the ferryman at the river Styx?” asked Hermia.

  “There’s no river and we all know the way.”

  “And our outselves are prets that voluntarily bound themselves to us, when we were born,” said Hermia.

  “We don’t know how they sort themselves out,” said Pat, “but yes, that’s pretty much what we were told.”

  “So how could the Gate Thief take them away from other gatemages? How could Danny strip my outself away from me? Did they suddenly decide they liked him better?”

  “No, they’re still yours,” said Pat. “Only captive. You can’t use them, but the Gate Thief can’t use them either, or not safely, anyway. Which is how that Wild Gate was created in the first place. The prets wanted to be part of a Great Gate, and once they weren’t locked inside Danny’s hoard, they weren’t bound to obey him.”

  “But how could they be stolen?” asked Hermia.

  “I’m not a gatemage,” said Pat. “But from what Danny and Veevee were saying, I think their current guess is that your gates, your outself, your … entourage?… was invited to leave you for a time, and they accepted.”

  “Just like that?”

  “They were asked by somebody far more powerful than you. Far more attractive to a pret. But they still belong to you because that oath seems to be unbreakable.”

  “You sound so sure,” said Hermia.

  “I’m sure that that’s what Danny and Veevee said. I’m sure that they’re completely unsure about whether they’re right. I’m sure that I can’t do any of those things because even though I can move wherever I want, I’m not a gatemage, so I will never experience any of what you experience.”

  “And apparently I will never experience it again,” said Hermia. “Because even if Danny were inclined to return my gates to me, they’re now in the possession of the Gate Thief, and he doesn’t give anything back.”

  “Whatever,” said Pat. “Danny’s heard all he needs to. So I have only one question now.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you want to get out of this place?”

  “I’m like the Wild Gate,” said Hermia. “If Danny sets me free, what makes him think he can control me?”

  “He doesn’t,” said Pat. “Because he doesn’t think he can control anybody.”

  “He controls you,” said Hermia, knowing that it wasn’t true, knowing that these words were designed to cause pain to someone who had done her no harm. But it was in her nature to say it. It was her pleasure to say it.

  In that moment, without any awareness of a gate, Hermia found herself sitting in a chair on the balcony of Veevee’s condo in Naples, Florida. Veevee was lying on a chaise, taking the sun. Danny was sitting on the floor in a corner, looking for all the world like a frightened child.

  “So I’m worthy to enter the august presence,” said Hermia.

  “Don’t be a bitch, dear,” said Veevee. “You know that by all the rules of the Westilian Families,
you should be getting thrown from this balcony—perhaps after having most of your skin removed.”

  “I know that,” said Hermia. “But I also know that Danny isn’t like that, and neither are you. And neither is my Family, for that matter, because here I am, alive and as spunky as ever.”

  Pat appeared in a chair beside Veevee. “I think she believed everything I explained, and she thinks she can try to learn it by watching what we do.”

  “Maybe she can,” said Veevee. “Can’t stop her from trying.”

  “I don’t think any of this can be learned just by clicking your heels and saying, ‘No place like home,’” said Danny quietly.

  “He’s saying that because this old dog couldn’t learn any of the tricks,” Veevee explained to Hermia.

  “Maybe it just takes time,” said Hermia. “It took time for you and Danny to figure out anything, before you had me to show you what I could do.”

  “But Danny has shown me his new powers. It blows me away, Hermia, darling, but I have no idea what he’s actually doing.”

  “Pat knows how to do it because she was with me in Duat,” said Danny. “I didn’t have to teach her anything except how to move. She already saw what she needed to see.”

  “Prets?” asked Hermia. “Pret—is it really the French word? As in prêt-à-porter?”

  “I don’t know,” said Danny. “The word was put in my mind. Our minds. By somebody who doesn’t actually use language to communicate. So who knows the origin of the word?”

  “You’re such gatemages,” said Pat. “Worrying about etymology when you’re talking about the fundamental power of the universe.”

  “I know I can’t teach you, Hermia, because I can’t teach Veevee,” said Danny. “And I actually trust her.”

  “I assume you listened to what I told Pat?” asked Hermia. “I was not betraying you.”

  “Oh, I assumed all along that they did something to manipulate you,” said Danny. “But I think that just gave you the window-dressing to do what you really wanted—to have control of a Great Gate and pass your Family through.”

  “Probably true,” said Hermia. “In fact, I’ll say you nailed it. I wanted them to make me do it. But it doesn’t change the fact that they really would have messed up your friends.”