The Gate Thief Read online

  The trouble was, they hated him. Even inside Danny North’s hearthoard, they stayed as far from Wad’s gates as they could. For even there, Wad’s power was great, his hoard of gates vast indeed compared to theirs—though all of them were puny before the billion gates that belonged to Danny North himself. The other gates—the remnants of so many dead mages—still feared and hated Wad.

  And loved Danny North.

  That was what astonished Wad, when he understood it. These gates were no less captive than they had been before. Danny North had not set them free. Yet they responded to their new master as if he had liberated them. As much as they had hated—still hated—Wad, they loved this boy.

  That was what Wad now struggled to understand. I was a good man, thought Wad. When I walked two worlds under the name of Loki, I saw the great danger that both worlds faced from the dark manmages from the world of Bel, the possessors of men’s bodies and souls. And I sacrificed everything to save the worlds from the dragons of Bel. Did that not make me the best of men?

  Yet they never came to understand the nobility and greatness of my cause. Centuries inside me, and their hatred never relented.

  Inside Danny North, though, they seemed to blossom, to come to new life. A pathetic, shadowy life, but life it was. They were still alert, still aware, but calm, not seething as they had done inside Wad.

  They liked Danny North. They liked living inside him. They liked seeing the world through his eyes. They were at peace with him.

  And they were not fading even now.

  Nor are my gates fading, though they are apart from me, thought Wad. In fact, my gates thrive there. I, too, am more at peace inside Danny North than I am inside myself.

  That was Wad’s great discovery: The reason he could bear the death of his son, the betrayal of Queen Bexoi, the agony of his own guilt for what he had done to Anonoei and her sons, and the terror of having lost almost all his power, was that Danny North held a huge part of Wad inside a heart that was astonishingly pure and at peace.

  Danny North was good.

  Undisciplined, untrained, raw, confused, afraid—young.

  Yet even so, his character was fully formed, as it is in all people by the time they reach the age of understanding—as it is, perhaps, from the moment they are conceived. And the person that Danny North revealed himself to be, by those who were held against their will inside his heart, was decent to the core.

  Am I not decent, too? Why was dwelling in my hearthoard such a torment, and dwelling in his is an experience of healing, rest, calm, comfort?

  Maybe the difference is this: The first thing I tried to do, when I realized I was still alert and aware inside of Danny North, was to exert some kind of control over him.

  My first instinct was to rule.

  But Danny North does not want to rule over anybody.

  The poor child. So much power, and no idea of what it’s for.

  He did not eat my gates because he saw me as a rival. He was merely trying to survive, to hold on to himself. He does not want to rule the worlds. He does not even want to be the hero who saves the worlds. What does he want? Who is this boy?

  And why, when he is so utterly different from me, do I find myself so glad of his company?

  Danny North was such a compelling presence in Wad’s mind that it took Wad days to realize that he knew something very important about events here on Westil.

  There was a new mage in the world. A mage who had passed through a Great Gate. The powers of the Great Gate still clung to him; it was as if his footfalls reverberated like temblors through the deepest rock of the world, and made the slightest of vibrations in Wad’s gatesense. Even though the Great Gate had not been of his making, the disturbance in spacetime could not be hidden from an old Gatefather like Wad.

  What was he? What magic was this interloper doing? Whatever it was, the world was waking up before this surge of magic. No one had exercised such bright power since the closing of the Great Gates fourteen centuries before. Whatever Danny North was doing in Mittlegard, Wad was here on Westil, and this new greatmage was Wad’s business.

  And because Wad was not as decent, as unambitious as Danny North, his first thought was this: How can I harness the great power of this new greatmage and use it to wreak vengeance on my enemy, Queen Bexoi, and make her suffer as I have suffered?

  5

  ASSASSINS

  By the time Danny got to the farm in Yellow Springs, Marion had already suspended a rope over the central beam of the cowbarn. “Ladder work?” asked Danny.

  “I’m a Cobblefriend,” said Marion. “I can’t fly, nor can my clants, such as they are.”

  “Then why didn’t you wait for me to make a gate and carry the rope up there?” asked Danny.

  “Hard for you to believe, I know, Danny, but before you ever came to this farm, I was able to wipe my butt all by myself.”

  Danny grinned. “Are you suggesting that you want me to install a rectal gate? Outbound only, I promise.”

  Marion made as if to smack Danny, though he never had and never would. But then he stopped. “Could you?” he asked. “Not rectal, but a gate that’s attached to a person instead of to a place?”

  “When Hermia gets here,” said Danny.

  “Hermia. Veevee. They’ll only know what’s in books.”

  “And I only know what I’ve tried,” said Danny. “All those years I tried to figure out how to lock gates and how to take them back inside myself, and I couldn’t figure any of it out until I saw it done.”

  “Somebody had to be the first gatemage,” said Marion. “And from what Hermia says—if you can trust a Greek—”

  “It’s only a problem if they’re bearing gifts,” said Danny. “And she’s Pelasgian.”

  “From what she says you may be the most extravagantly gifted gatemage ever. So you’re going to have to break new ground to reach your potential.”

  “Parents always think their children have more potential than they actually have,” said Danny.

  “What about gatemage surgery?” asked Marion. “Those tracking devices inside Hermia—can’t you gate them out of her?”

  “I have a map in my head of all the gates I’ve made,” said Danny. “But I can’t map the inside of a person’s body. Going through a gate heals people of any injuries or dysfunctions, but if I start making gates to remove bits of Hermia, it would only be by chance if I found the tracking devices her family installed in her.”

  “At least now I understand why you want to gate up to the roofbeam to hang a rope—it’s something you know you can do.”

  “Don’t you mostly do things you know you can do?” asked Danny, a little resentful now.

  “Yes,” said Marion. “Tell me. If you took one end of the rope down here, then gated to the roofbeam, would the rope just follow you and string out from here to there, or would it get cut off where the gate began?”

  “It would look cut off,” said Danny. “But it would still be connected. It would go up to the mouth of the gate down here, and the very next inch of rope would then emerge from the gate up there.”

  Marion shook his head. “Stonemages like me believe in solid connections. Not sudden leaps through spacetime.”

  “Where’s Mom?” asked Danny.

  “Out scouting for anybody’s clant or heartbeast. You’re making a Great Gate again, which is exactly what all the Families want, not to mention rogue Orphans we might not even know about.”

  “I can’t believe that passing through a Great Gate allowed her to sense anybody’s outself within a couple of miles,” said Danny.

  “And I can feel all the disturbances in the rock, not to mention the flow patterns, for a hundred miles in every direction. There’s a reason why people had to go through Great Gates before the drowthers deigned to call them gods.”

  “So that’s what you and Mom are now?” asked Danny. “Gods?”

  “If I had already been a Stonefather, and then went through a Great Gate, then yes, I think I could
put on a show that would make drowthers feel a strong desire to let me have my way. But as a Cobblefriend? Let’s just say that my affinity is much more useful. I have more to give the stone, and so the stone replies with greater strength. That’s all.”

  Danny stood there, looking at the ground, thinking of how Marion had opened up the earth near Parry McCluer High School and swallowed a pickup truck. Thinking: What will I be able to do, after I go through a Great Gate? And Veevee and Hermia? What does it do to a gatemage?

  Wasn’t that what they were making this Great Gate to find out? With no Gate Thief left to threaten him, and with Marion and Leslie primed to keep all danger at bay, Danny could experiment a little. He could stay a minute or two on Westil. Not very long—not long enough to be in danger. But long enough to see the place where Marion and Leslie had lingered for only a fraction of a second. “We blinked and then came back,” Marion explained at the time. “It was daylight and there were rocks and grass, that’s all I know.”

  “And he only knows about the grass because I told him,” Leslie had said. “Stonemages don’t care about grass, but Cowsisters have a real eye for it.”

  Danny put a little weight on the rope that Marion had suspended. He was so hungry to make a Great Gate that he almost couldn’t wait until the others arrived.

  No, that wasn’t true. Danny wasn’t hungry for it. What he was feeling as a powerful yearning was coming from many of the outselves trapped inside him. The Gate Thief’s old prisoners, not the Gate Thief himself—his gates were all about blocking Great Gates, stealing them, not using them, and certainly not building them.

  Could Danny use some of the captive outselves in making a Great Gate, as if they were his own? Hermia had told him that in the old days, mere Pathbrothers would sometimes contribute to a Gatefather their three or four or dozen gates to help reach the critical mass to make a Great Gate. Could he use these captive gates the same way?

  Danny tried to use one on an ordinary gate. That is, he did the inward thing that felt like gatemaking, only tried to access one of the captives to do it. The result was almost a physical pain, the rebuff was so sharp and strong.

  No!

  It felt like a shout from somewhere deep inside him. Not the word no, but the meaning of it, the idea of utter rejection.

  It made sense. Danny could not force another mage’s gate. In Hermia’s account, the Pathbrothers would donate their gates willingly. These gates had all been stolen, from gatemages who most assuredly would not want their captor using their long-lost outselves to make his gates.

  It would have been interesting to see the result of a Great Gate made out of so many different mages’ gates at once. But if they wouldn’t let him, the question was moot.

  It made sense. If Gatefathers could make use of stolen gates, then they’d have done it all the time. The Gate Thief wasn’t taking gates in order to use them, he was taking them in order to prevent their being used.

  And again he wondered why. Something about the Semitic gods. Something about Bel, the ancient Carthaginian deity.

  I won a battle when I beat the Gate Thief, but I didn’t even know what war I was fighting in. For all I know I just intervened in the American Revolution on the side of the British. I have no idea who the good guys are. There are so many enemies; but what if my enemies are right to want to destroy me? What if my defeating the Gate Thief was the worst thing that ever happened in history?

  “Stop brooding, Danny, it makes your mouth turn sour,” said Veevee.

  So she had taken the gate from Naples, Florida. She was almost quivering with excitement. This Great Gate was more for her than anyone. After all her years of not knowing whether she was a gatemage or not, her complete vindication upon finding Danny’s gates and realizing she could unlock them had been the greatest joy of her life. But then came the frustration of not being able to do anything but unlock gates—that and teach Danny all the gatelore she had learned in a lifetime of study.

  Now she had hope, however meager, that by passing through a Great Gate she might have her power augmented in some interesting way. It was all she had talked about, whenever there was nothing else to talk about, so that Danny knew that it was where her thoughts always turned in moments of idleness. She hadn’t nagged him, but he felt the pressure of her yearning all the same.

  He felt some of the same curiosity himself, and Hermia was, if anything, even more in need of some kind of boost to her abilities, since as a Lockfriend she could only close gates that Danny wasn’t leaving open anyway. But Hermia’s presence here would be dangerous, since she would bring her Family soon after. So she and Danny, left to themselves, might have waited.

  Danny, for his part, was afraid. Yes, he had beaten the Gate Thief before, but that might have been a fluke. What if the Gate Thief was waiting for him again, this time prepared for him, this time armed in some terrible way. It could be something as simple as a sword. Danny appears, the Gate Thief swings a mighty sword, plop goes Danny’s head, and even if somebody dragged him through a gate, even a Great Gate, and even if they set his head on his neck and held it there through the passage, Danny didn’t think the healing properties of gate travel would do the trick.

  It wouldn’t happen. There was no way the Gate Thief could know where Danny’s new Great Gate would appear on Westil. Danny didn’t even know.

  “It does look so unfortunately like a gallows,” said Veevee, looking up at the rope and then down to the dangling end. “Did Marion have to put a noose in it?”

  “It’s not a noose, it’s a loop,” said Danny. “It’s so I don’t have to hold on so tightly while I spin. I want to have my mind clear.”

  “You could just spin around on the ground, like a dervish,” said Veevee.

  “I made the gate on the end of a rope last time,” said Danny, “so until I know more I’m doing it the same way this time. For all we know, the strength or endurance or power of the gate depends on the speed of my spin.”

  “Or it has no effect at all.”

  “Time to experiment with that is after we gatemages have passed through the gate ourselves.”

  “And back again,” said Veevee.

  Danny knew what she was thinking of. “We don’t know for sure if Ced decided to stay there or not. All it would have taken was a moment’s hesitation. The Gate Thief was on me almost instantly. It could easily have been Marion and Leslie trapped there as well.”

  Stone appeared at the tail of the gate to his house in Washington, DC. “Hello, Veevee,” he said.

  “‘Veevee’?” she said indignantly. “Not ‘My darling’ or ‘My love’ or—”

  “O glorious Gatemage,” said Stone. “O most admirable of women. O thou wife.”

  “There we go,” said Veevee, preening playfully. “It may take a little prompting, but you know how to make a girl feel all princessy.”

  “It’ll be interesting to see what a Meadowfriend becomes after passing through the Great Gate. I have visions of being able to make every lawn in America grow so rapidly, with grass so tall, that people can’t find their houses.”

  “And the buffalo herds return to roam all over North America, consuming lawn grass at a prodigious rate, and yet the grass leaps ever higher,” said Veevee.

  “Grass growing from cracks in the sidewalks and asphalt tears it all into little chunks,” said Stone. “In this profuse jungle of life, no vehicle can move; even helicopters can’t land for longer than a minute or two before grass grows up so thick that the blades can’t turn again.”

  “And three hundred million people die of starvation,” said Danny dryly.

  “But the vast lawns make such a lovely cemetery,” said Veevee.

  “Don’t worry, Danny. Even if I could do it, I wouldn’t,” said Stone. “Lawns are the least interesting plants in the world. Everything interesting has been bred out of them. A true meadow has at least a hundred different species of grass, clumping here and there, with a thousand wildflowers and bulbs and tubers and mosses and fer
ns and—”

  “Day lilies,” said Veevee. “I do love day lilies.”

  “The poodles of the plant world,” said Stone scornfully.

  “So pretty,” said Veevee. “Alone or in great fields of them. Don’t leave them out of our meadow, darling.”

  Stone looked at Danny and rolled his eyes.

  “I saw that, Peter,” said Veevee. “Eyerolling is rude.”

  “Rude but necessary,” said Stone. “For your own good. Make your gate, Danny. The longer I stay here talking with Veevee, the more extravagant the trouble I’ll get myself into.”

  “I’ll tell Hermia we’re ready,” said Danny.

  Because his gatesense already told him exactly where the gate he had made for her in Rio was—her latest hiding place, the theory being that if she had to keep moving around, at least she could go to warm and interesting places—he was able to make a new gate straight there.

  She wasn’t in her hotel room. That was a surprise. She knew that it was nearly time for the making of the Great Gate. She was supposed to be waiting.

  Danny immediately made a return gate and stepped toward it just as the shotgun blast went off. He felt the pellets tear through his body and then … no pain at all, because he had passed through the gate back to the barn. He still gasped from the pain he no longer felt, and the others turned toward him.

  “They found Hermia,” said Danny. “She wasn’t there, and they weren’t waiting around to talk about it.”

  “Are you hurt?” asked Veevee, fingering his tattered shirt.

  “I was, for a moment,” said Danny. “I may still have all the pellets in me. I can work on that later. The gate healed the wounds, and I have to find Hermia.”

  “It can’t be her own people,” said Stone. “The Greeks may do many terrible things, but they wouldn’t kill the world’s only living gatemage.”

  “But they’re the only ones who could track her,” said Danny.

  “They might be tracking the trackers,” said Marion.