Gatefather Read online

  Stone chuckled at that, but didn’t dispute the point. “I take it you can use your own amulets to get back home?”

  “To our meeting place, anyway,” said Hal.

  “Then you should get back there before your families miss you. And just in case it occurs to one of you to try to save Danny by inviting the Belmage to jump into you, don’t even try. Because he wouldn’t come into you himself, he’d just have one of his followers take you over.”

  “But we could resist one of those,” said Wheeler.

  “Danny could,” said Stone.

  “And you think we’re all weak?” asked Wheeler.

  “Please don’t take this as a challenge,” said Stone. “Being possessed by the devil isn’t a recreational drug. It’s losing everything.”

  “It’s like being murdered,” said Hal, “only you have to stay and watch.”

  “Exactly,” said Stone. “And yes, kid,” he said to Wheeler. “I think you’re weak. Because you are weak. Danny seems to be fighting this thing—and even he is barely holding on. There’s not a chance in hell that any of you are even close to being as strong as Danny is. Get it?”

  “Got it,” said Wheeler.

  “Go,” said Stone.

  “You’re supposed to say ‘Good,’” said Wheeler.

  “This isn’t The Court Jester,” said Stone. “Go.”

  They all took out their amulets and gated away. Except Pat.

  “Please tell me what you find out,” she said to Stone. “Please don’t cut us out of this just because we’re drowthers.”

  “Give me your phone number,” said Stone. “Danny can sense whenever you come here like this, but he can’t tell if I text you or call.”

  She wrote it down.

  “But you’re the only one I’m telling,” said Stone.

  “You can trust Hal to keep his mouth shut,” said Pat.

  “Think a little harder,” said Stone.

  She did.

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m not a drowther.”

  “Goodbye, windmage,” said Stone. “Thank you for telling me. I think you’ve done everything right.”

  “We don’t even know what ‘right’ is,” said Pat.

  “But you didn’t keep it to yourself in order to avoid being embarrassed if you were wrong,” said Stone. “You didn’t try to fix it or talk to Danny about it directly. A lot of really wrong things that you didn’t do.”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s comforting to know I could be even dumber.”

  Stone gave a short little bark of a laugh. “Nobody could ever call you dumb, kid. I saw you notice the other girls’ reaction when I said Danny might have blocked the Belmage from doing other things, too.”

  “But I don’t know what it means,” said Pat.

  “Maybe nothing,” said Stone. “But you noticed. Now you’ll hold that in the back of your mind, and maybe something will happen to explain it. Or maybe it won’t, because maybe it was nothing.”

  Pat didn’t think it was nothing, but he was right. Just wait and things will get clearer. Or they won’t.

  “Meanwhile, Pat, practice your magery,” said Stone. “Get it under very good control. Weaponize it.”

  “Why?” said Pat. “I don’t want to hurt anybody.”

  “When somebody’s trying to destroy a person you love, even pacifists find themselves wishing they had a gun.” Stone chuckled again. “Or a rocket launcher.”

  He seemed to be referring to something, but Pat didn’t know what. She’d Google “rocket launcher” later. But it probably didn’t matter—if it did, Stone would have explained it.

  She touched her amulet and found herself back in the clearing. The others were already gone, though she could hear Wheeler and Hal talking loudly, well down the slope.

  Pat sat down in her usual place. She hadn’t really thought about having a “usual place” before, but yes, they all did. Like first grade, everybody in an assigned seat. Only it wasn’t assigned.

  How did I choose this place? It isn’t particularly comfortable. But I wasn’t the last to sit down, this isn’t “last pick.”

  Danny sits there. So I wasn’t trying to get as close to him as possible. But I’m also not directly across from him.

  I sit where I can always see him, but he isn’t looking right at me all the time. Off to the side. Just the tiniest bit outside the circle.

  She heard footsteps.

  She knew it was Danny before she looked. Because he knew they were here, and he’d have to know why. He or the Belmage. And waiting to get one of them alone made sense. Especially her. If the Belmage knew what she was to Danny.

  If she was right and it was the Belmage. Maybe Danny just started acting like a jerk to make her fall out of love with him. Maybe he got Nicki pregnant because he liked her better.

  He came up behind her and started playing with her hair. She couldn’t help feeling a kind of thrill at his touch.

  Then he knelt beside her and put one hand on her shoulder and slid the other hand down into her blouse.

  She threw herself away from him, off to the side. “What are you doing!” she said.

  “You liked it well enough the other night,” said Danny.

  “The other night, you didn’t just grab me like you had a right,” said Pat. “Or have you forgotten everything we talked about?”

  “What I remember,” said Danny, “was that we finally stopped talking.” And he gave this little shit-eating grin that he only ever wore when he had just brought off a prank.

  Only it wasn’t Danny who was fooling somebody, it was the Belmage. He’s feeling smug and clever, and so Danny’s face shows it, but the Belmage doesn’t even realize that it’s a giveaway to somebody who really knows him, who has spent weeks and weeks studying everything he says and does.

  The Belmage wasn’t inside him that night, thought Pat. He doesn’t know what we talked about. Is that because Danny didn’t even remember it, the conversation was so unimportant? Or is it because the Belmage only has access to Danny’s physical memories? He can remember Danny and Pat going at it, but not the conversation leading up to it.

  “Danny,” said Pat—knowing that she was talking to the Belmage, but hoping to get a message through to the real Danny, who was surely listening very closely. “I love you. That’s not going to change. But like you said, we’re not married, and so we’re not going there. I didn’t like it at the time, but I agree with you now. And you should remember what I said about personal space and being touched without me inviting it.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  But he didn’t sound all that sorry. It was just words. The real Danny would really have been sorry. In fact, the real Danny would never have tried to cop a feel right out of the blue like that.

  “Until we’re in a position to make something real out of this,” said Pat, “out of whatever it is we feel for each other, then physically we’re just friends. That’s what you wanted, right?”

  “It’s what I wanted then,” said Danny’s mouth.

  “Oh, and just walking up behind me in the woods, suddenly you were overwhelmed with passion?” She laughed.

  After a moment—too long a moment—he laughed, too.

  The Belmage might have had a lot of practice, but he still wasn’t good at this—pretending to be the original person so other people didn’t notice the change.

  “If you knew we were up here,” said Pat, “why didn’t you come along?”

  “Because you didn’t stay here,” said Danny.

  Pat wanted to laugh at how dumb the Belmage was. Danny North wouldn’t need them to stay long enough for him to walk up the hill to join them. He would just gate to them—or gate to wherever they went from here.

  “Well,” she said, “it’s a good thing you didn’t, because that would have spoiled everything.”

  “Spoiled what?”

  “It’s hard thinking of a Christmas gift for somebody who can go anywhere and get anything he wants,” said
Pat. “And no, we’re not planning some big stupid group gift, we just wanted to share ideas and make sure we didn’t all get you the same thing.”

  “The same thing lots of times over can be very nice,” said Danny. His face didn’t really go well with the leer it was wearing as he said that.

  “But not very individual,” said Pat.

  “So do it as a group,” he said. “Or make me a video.” There was that grin again.

  “In your dreams,” said Pat. She got up and started walking down the hill. Despite their effort to come and go without making a path that other people could follow, the ground sort of forced them into a couple of routes, and paths were forming. Some random hiker might find this place and already be here when one of them showed up by gate. But if they used the amulets all the time in order not to make a path, somebody was going to see one of them disappear.

  He didn’t call after her. He didn’t follow her.

  Danny would have. But the Belmage, caring nothing for the relationship, and apparently believing that “no” meant “no,” didn’t bother.

  2

  It was hard for Wad to find a time to visit Bexoi’s inert body, for he did not want to let anyone else see him, and King Prayard made sure that she was almost never left unattended. Nor could he constantly watch through a viewport; he had other things to do. But now and then he thought of her, the Queen whose life he had saved, who had taken him as a lover, who had borne him a child, who then murdered that child and then burned to death his friend Anonoei.

  Bexoi, the woman whom he hated above all other human beings, yet whose life he was going to protect until she bore King Prayard’s baby.

  One night he saw that both the doctor and the young servant girl who attended her had fallen asleep, and King Prayard was gone. So he made a gate and came in person to sit on the floor beside the bed where she lay in a coma, responding to no word, never opening her eyes, but able to drink and swallow some of whatever was poured into her mouth. Her dress was stained with old spills, damp with new ones. Behind the liberally applied perfume she smelled of various kinds of putrescence, and Wad passed a gate over her, in case she needed healing.

  Did she feel it? Did she know that he was there? Was she afraid that he would kill her? No one in Iceway had more cause. But no, he had promised her that he would not harm the baby, and she knew that was a promise he would keep.

  He put his hand in hers. It was warm. Her chest rose and fell slightly with each shallow breath. But as he held her hand, it gave no motion, responded to him not at all; nor did her face change in any way.

  Wad had found her like this, though covered with burns. A firemage of Bexoi’s power should never have been burned. The man named Keel had witnessed the event, and even though he was hanging upside down, in terror for his own life, his account was clear and did not change. When Anonoei stepped through the gate Wad had made for her, she found Bexoi waiting, and soon Bexoi set Anonoei on fire. But to Keel’s surprise, Anonoei stepped to Bexoi and clung to her.

  At first Bexoi did not burn, and she laughed at Anonoei. But then she did burn after all, even as Anonoei’s body slumped into ashes on the floor. It was as if Anonoei were a firemage after all, as if she had stolen some of Bexoi’s magery, that’s what Keel said.

  But Wad knew that such a thing was not possible. Anonoei was a manmage. She had no way of acquiring someone else’s skill.

  She might, however, have taken over Bexoi’s body in that last moment of her life. And in a brief struggle, she might have kept Bexoi from protecting her own flesh from the fire. Then Anonoei died and Bexoi was so badly injured that she fell into a coma.

  But Wad had healed her the moment he saw her, for the baby’s sake. He and Keel had made sure that she was found, floating in the waters of the port; she had been kept warm and comfortable, and if anything went wrong with her body, Wad healed it again and again. Why was she still unconscious?

  Or was this an elaborate prank? A diversion? Wad knew well that Bexoi had the power to create a clant of herself that could talk and bleed and show all other signs of life. Was this only her clant? Keel swore that it could not be—he had been conscious the entire time, and he swore that the woman in the coma was Bexoi. There could have been no substitution.

  Besides, no clant could survive passage through a gate. It would crumble into its constituent parts.

  What are you hiding from, Bexoi? Why can’t you allow yourself to return to the world? King Prayard weeps and prays for you. The kingdom awaits your baby. All your plans are coming to fruition. How can it benefit you to pretend to be asleep like this?

  Or is this real? And if it is, what could possibly ail you that passage through my gates did not heal?

  The servant girl stirred, and with her small noise, the doctor awoke. Wad knew that he would go to the corner and urinate, then return to Bexoi’s bed and check her pulse to make sure she had not inconvenienced and endangered him by dying on his watch.

  With the trickle of urine into a jar to cover any noise he made, Wad leaned close to Bexoi’s ear and whispered, “When the baby is born, I will kill you. You cannot hide from me.”

  He gated away from Bexoi’s bedchamber before the doctor turned around.

  Wad found himself in a certain clearing in the woods at the southern end of the Mitherkame, where a nameless treemage was teaching the Earthborn windmage Ced how to control himself. It seemed to Wad that the lessons were going all too well. Whenever he came to visit, Ced was in some kind of meditative trance and the treemage would tell him almost nothing about Ced’s progress.

  This time was no different. Ced was sitting in absolute stillness, and there was not a breath of wind in the clearing, though breezes blew through the trees only a dozen yards away. The treemage stood with his back against an old beech, only his eyes moving to follow Wad’s movement through the grass.

  “He does well,” said the treemage.

  “I didn’t ask,” said Wad.

  “You asked before, and now I have an answer,” said the treemage.

  “I find that I’ve sworn to kill an evil mage, but because she’s lying in a coma I don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Do men refuse to cut down a tree because it doesn’t speak or walk?”

  “Cut down a tree and you can build something. A house or furniture or a fire. Cut down a sleeping mage, and all you have is a mass of flesh and bone and bodily fluids, rotting as quickly as it can.”

  “And then it becomes part of the soil, or part of the bodies of crows and maggots,” said the treemage. “What form does her evil take, when she’s awake?”

  “She deceives everyone, kills whomever she wants, and seeks to rule two kingdoms. To start with; I think her ambition will never end.”

  “If she can’t wake up, then her ambition will only be fulfilled in dreams, where it harms no one,” said the treemage.

  “But I don’t know that she can’t wake up,” said Wad. “I only know that she seems to be asleep, and has not seemed to wake up yet.”

  “So if you knew that she could not wake, you’d leave her alive,” said the treemage, “because being alive would be useless to her. But if she might wake up, and thus make use of her life, you need to kill her.”

  “She murdered my son,” said Wad. “And Anonoei, the woman who used to come here with me.”

  “The manmage.”

  Wad had not realized that the treemage knew what she was. “A good woman,” said Wad.

  “A mother, as I recall,” said the treemage. “I believe you left her sons on Mittlegard.”

  “I did,” said Wad. “Because we thought they were in danger.”

  “They are, I’m sure,” said the treemage. “What did they say about their mother’s death?”

  “I haven’t told them,” said Wad.

  “What makes you think that they don’t know?” asked the treemage.

  “Because they’re on one world, and their mother died on another.”

  “These are not ordinary bo
ys,” said the treemage.

  That was true enough.

  “You imprisoned them with their mother for more than a year,” said the treemage. “Then separated them so she could help you seek vengeance on Queen Bexoi. You owe them a conversation. You owe them the truth, that they are orphans no matter which world they’re on.”

  It was true that Wad owed a debt to them—their imprisonment had been terrifying and wrong, and it was all Wad’s doing. Now their mother was dead because he hadn’t realized that she was calling to him until it was too late.

  And now that he thought of her, it was as if he could hear her voice in his mind. Why haven’t you told my boys yet how I died?

  “I can’t tell them how she died,” said Wad. “It’s too terrible.”

  “Not telling them is terrible,” said the treemage. “Children heal better than adults. Tell them now, while they’re still children.”

  “They’re on Mittlegard,” said Wad.

  “Then you’re the only person on Westil who can get to them,” said the treemage.

  “I’m not going to make a Great Gate, and I’m not going to use any of Danny North’s Great Gates either, because then the Belmage will know that I’m on Mittlegard.”

  “Then make a Great Gate after all. Use it and eat it so it’s gone.”

  Hearing it spoken aloud made it seem so obvious. He didn’t dare to make a permanent Great Gate, and the two that Danny made posed a serious danger to both worlds. But to make a temporary gate and then close it permanently—the Belmage couldn’t use that to get to Westil.

  Unless he struck while Wad was still on Mittlegard. Danny North would sense Wad’s arrival—indeed, he would know that a Great Gate had been made. But would that knowledge be available to the Belmage? Would he understand it if he felt it himself? Danny was still able to make gates, using the captive outselves of long-dead gatemages; if the Belmage understood what was happening, he could force Danny to bring him directly to the Great Gate; Wad would have no choice then but to eat the gate before the Belmage could use it to go to Westil.

  It would require alertness. But since Wad held all of Danny’s gates inside him, Wad would be aware of whatever Danny did. There would be warning.