Gatefather Read online

  “You’ll get a full account. Though I might have to tell it to you through a weejee board.”

  “Never,” said Veevee. “I hate those things. I think it’s Set’s buddies who run those things, and not the dead people that you think you’re talking to.”

  “I think it’s just some jerk in the group, deliberately guiding the pointer to some outrageous message.”

  “Well, you know your friends, and I know mine,” said Veevee. “Good luck, dear girl. I’d say God bless you, only then I’d have to specify which god, and I’m just not in the mood for metaphysics.”

  Veevee walked to the tree that held their emergency escape gate.

  “That leads to Stone’s house,” Pat warned her.

  “I know where all gates start and where they end,” said Veevee. “But Stone is my husband, and there’s a gate from his house leading to my place in Naples. Loki put them all back, right where Danny had them. So this is my fastest route home. Goodbye, Pat.”

  So at the last she rated a name rather than “darling” or “dear girl.”

  Pat sat there until the end of school, when it was likely that the others would use their amulets to gather there in the woods on the hill. Pat didn’t use the escape gate, because she didn’t want to go to DC. She just walked away along a secondary path, heading down to the parking lot in time to catch her school bus, since she was not riding with Laurette or Sin or any of them. Not today. Because she couldn’t help Danny if she was in jail for assault and battery. Or attempted murder.

  4

  No matter how Wad explained it to him, Ced seemed puzzled. “Isn’t Bexoi the great Firemaster you wanted me to help you fight?”

  “Yes,” said Wad.

  “And she’s in a coma.”

  “So it seems,” said Wad.

  “Seems or is?” asked Ced. “Is she faking?”

  “I think it’s real. She can raise an incredibly believable clant, but no, I think this is her, that she’s unconscious. Unresponsive.”

  “But not dead.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Pregnant.”

  “That’s why I haven’t killed her yet.”

  “You’re all heart,” answered Ced.

  “She killed my baby,” said Wad.

  “I remember that.”

  “I’m not killing hers. I’m a very nice man. Not a forgiving man, but nice.”

  “That’s exactly how I see you.” Ced smiled. “And while we’re at it, she also killed Anonoei. I liked Anonoei.”

  “Me too,” said Wad.

  “What I don’t understand is why we’re still preparing for war.”

  “Bexoi may turn out not to be a threat,” said Wad. “But I told you all along that we had to prepare for an onslaught of powerful mages from Mittlegard.”

  “Even though you now have control over all the gates in both worlds.”

  “That was true for fifteen hundred years. And then the universe popped a little surprise on us. Or, I should say, the world of Duat, which sent the soul of Danny North into a gatemage’s body.”

  “He’s a very nice boy,” Ced reminded Wad. “Even when he was burgling houses, he saved people’s lives.”

  “He’s a nice boy who built a Great Gate and put both worlds in enormous danger.”

  “Now he’s paying for that,” Ced pointed out. “Lost all his gates, and he’s possessed by this Belmage, probably for the rest of his life.”

  “Only because Set will probably kill him when he gets tired of living inside a gateless Gatefather.”

  “I’m not blaming you, Wad, but all your enemies seem to be … more or less neutralized at the moment. Danny North has no freedom and no gates. Set caught himself a gatemage but now he’s got no power to pass between worlds. Bexoi killed everybody until she got herself into a coma. It seems to me the universe is on your side, man.”

  “Yes, that’s how it seems,” said Wad. “But my guess is that nothing is as it seems. Or if it is, it won’t stay that way. Because mine is not the only will that’s working in these worlds. Danny North is already proving himself to be resourceful and oddly undefeated. What if Bexoi comes out of her coma? Set has infinite patience, when it suits his purpose, and no scruples at all. And who knows what the world of Duat will send us next? We still need to get Westil into shape to cope with that influx of mages. And why are you even resisting this? For the next few weeks, or days, or hours, you’re the most powerful mage on Westil.”

  “Or years. It’s also not true, because you’re here.”

  “Yes,” said Wad. “Ced, I can’t do anything. Not compared to you.”

  “Because I’m such a likable fellow.”

  “So you were listening. You’re the windmage who devastated fifty leagues of the Hetterwold and made them love you for it.”

  “It wasn’t a trick. I was really sorry, and I worked hard to try to help them rebuild. They treated me better than I deserved.”

  “I’m a good liar, Ced, but I don’t know how to make myself seem as sincerely miserable and repentant as you.”

  “Because I’m not lying.”

  “I know! That’s why I can’t do what you can do. If you make yourself master of Westil, they’ll love you for it.”

  “So what does that mean?” asked Ced. “That only fifty assassins will be trying to kill me, instead of the usual two hundred?”

  “Oh, it’ll still be all two hundred,” said Wad. “But you have me watching out for you.”

  Ced only shook his head.

  “Anonoei went on that little jaunt of hers against my advice, and while she was in the greatest danger, Danny North held my attention by using my gates to explore my memories.”

  “And nothing will ever come together just wrong so that you can’t protect me either.”

  “Ced, there are no guarantees in this world. Anonoei didn’t think anybody could kill her, because she could make people want not to have her dead. Except she came up against Bexoi, who had no human feelings, and so she had nothing to manipulate.”

  “Your hypothesis.”

  “No, it’s a fact that she has no human feelings,” said Wad. “The only part I’m guessing about is that that’s why Anonoei had no defense against her.”

  Ced shook his head and laughed. “Wad, you seem to filter out of your memory anything that doesn’t fit your preconceived notions! Anonoei apparently did have a defense, because Bexoi, the firemage, got burnt. It nearly killed her and she only survived because you passed her through a gate.”

  “I have no idea why that happened,” said Wad.

  “But it still happened, whether you have any idea of why or not,” replied Ced. “And even after you healed her, whatever Anonoei did to Bexoi, she hasn’t come out of it yet. Am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Take everything into account, Wad. I keep dreaming of Anonoei.”

  “Most men who met her have those dreams,” said Wad. “It’s part of her power.”

  “Not those dreams. I was once married to a succubus, please remember. I liked Anonoei but I didn’t faunch after her like most men apparently do. The dreams I have are truly weird. Anonoei is inside a coffin, knocking and knocking to get out. But when we open the lid of her coffin, all that’s inside is a moth. Or a dead … thing.”

  “A dead baby,” said Wad.

  “You’ve had the dream too?” asked Ced.

  “People don’t have each other’s dreams, Ced. I saw the way you glanced at me and then said ‘thing’ instead of what you were going to say. What dead thing would you not be able to say to me? Dead baby.”

  “Well, yes. A mummified baby. And sometimes the whole coffin is full of spiders as big as my hand. It’s not a pleasant dream. But I always know that it’s Anonoei inside the coffin, knocking to get out.”

  “That’s a strange dream indeed,” said Wad. “I’m trying to think why that has anything to do with whether we go help the Doge of Drabway.”

  “Because you don’t want to help him,”
Ced explained. “You want to use his fear in order to get control of him.”

  “He’s a very lazy old man who doesn’t do any of his own work anyway,” said Wad. “He’s already a puppet controlled by his Wazir, and he’s a puppet controlled by Drabway’s oligarchs and enemies in approximately equal proportions. Somebody’s going to kill the Wazir and probably the Doge as well. So we’ll be saving his life. And the Wazir’s life, even if from now on he’ll take his orders from us while we protect him from the people who will be discommoded by our takeover. They both get to keep their jobs, on a somewhat reduced income, and all their prestige and perquisites.”

  Ced shook his head. “You don’t really think they’ll regard this as a favor, do you?”

  “No, they’ll hate us. Or rather, they’ll hate me. But you’re so likable—”

  “That’s where we cross over into Bullshit Land. It’s one thing to apologize abjectly to peasants who are used to bowing to powerful mages. But these clowns are mages, right?”

  “Not in your league,” said Wad.

  “They’re used to ruling, not being ruled.”

  “They take orders from other people all the time.”

  “Wad, I won’t be good at this. And if I am good at it, then I’ll hate myself for it.”

  “Neither one,” said Wad. “You’ll rule so benignly, so generously, that you’ll even like yourself, I promise.”

  “I only ever tried to rule one person. Not even rule her, just contain her so she didn’t destroy herself and hurt a lot of other people in the process. I couldn’t do it. And also, likable as I am, she hated me for it.”

  “These aren’t women,” said Wad.

  Ced shook his head. “Wad. You keep explaining this as if I didn’t understand. I understand completely, I just don’t agree.”

  “I know,” said Wad. “But I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Find a new plan,” offered Ced.

  “You’re all I’ve got, now that Anonoei is gone.”

  “You’ve got her boys. Didn’t you say they’re already some freaky kind of conjoined-twin mage?”

  “Ced, when I say you’re all I’ve got, I mean it. If I had anybody else, would I still be here after you’ve told me no so often?”

  “You still have you,” answered Ced. “Do it yourself, and call on me if you need a big wind. Or a little tiny one with a lot of tightly-focused force.”

  “What did you want power for?” asked Wad, genuinely curious.

  “I didn’t want power over people, Wad. I wanted wind. I’ve had more than I want of people.”

  “But the world consists of people,” said Wad. “We’re humans, we have responsibility to the society we—”

  “You sound like a politician.”

  “I was talking like a philosopher.”

  “A really boring one. Don’t you get it? I’m a windmage. To me the world consists of a million different airs wandering over the surface, and people are just occasional obstructions that are fun to swirl around and take the hats off of, but I can always sweep them away and it’s hard work to remember that it’s not nice to do that. Not killing people randomly—that’s the level of morality that I’m still working on. I’m not ready to take on whole kingdoms.”

  “It’s only a small duchy.”

  “An incredibly wealthy trading city,” corrected Ced. “I hated governing one crazy woman.”

  “But I don’t care what you hate doing,” said Wad. “I’m Loki. I’d rather be pulling practical jokes instead of doing whatever this is. Adult stuff. Business. Politics. I hate doing this even more than you imagine that you would hate it. It’s completely contrary to my nature. I’m the brat in the back of the schoolroom, not the teacher. But when the survival of the world is at stake, then you do whatever you can, not whatever you like.”

  “And now we’ve come full circle, because I can’t do this. I keep telling you, and you keep answering me, but your answers don’t change anything. I still can’t do it.”

  “Won’t.”

  “Won’t try because I know I can’t succeed. Give it up, Wad. I won’t interfere with you. I’ll even help with whatever wind can do. Except assassination. But you want to capsize some of Drabway’s ships? I can do that. Bring some sand into the city from the desert? My gig, exactly. But nothing that might kill anybody.”

  “Capsizing ships might kill people,” said Wad. “And people die in sandstorms all the time.”

  “OK then,” said Ced. “I won’t do those things either. You keep lightening my load. You’re all heart.”

  “Aren’t you even curious?” asked Wad.

  “Yes! I’m amazingly curious! But I’m not curious about the things you care about, Wad. I’m not from here. I’m not from the time you’re from. You were inside that tree for fifteen hundred years, and you’ve been back to Mittlegard at least once. But you’ve never even asked me about cars, airplanes, the trips to the moon, nuclear energy, how stars form and collapse and explode—it’s incredible to me how much you aren’t interested in.”

  “I can’t do anything about those things,” said Wad. “And if you give it a moment’s thought, you’ll see that a gatemage has no reason to be curious about transportation.”

  Ced laughed. “I suppose not. You claim to care about the drowthers, but did you ever think of setting up a public gate just to get people from downtown to the suburbs? Like a magic railroad, a subway that doesn’t need any tunnels. You just go through the turnstile and you’re in the parking lot forty miles or a thousand miles away, where you left your car.”

  Wad could only shake his head. “There are billions of people. How many gates do you think I could make?”

  “How many freeways and subways and airports have we built? There are fewer than two thousand commercial airports on Earth. You had way more gates than that. You could have established a handful of hubs, and people could just jostle their way through to their destinations. You don’t have to load them into planes. No air traffic control. Clean. No fuel costs. No crashes. A farmer with a cart could get his produce to a market a thousand miles away without a middleman. And everybody who travels that way arrives completely healed! You could have been such a blessing to the world, and I bet it never crossed your mind.”

  “Airplanes are good enough,” said Wad. “And I have other things on my mind.”

  “Well, I grew up in the drowther world. More specifically, I grew up on Mittlegard, where they have amazing technologies that would really help people here. So many things haven’t been invented, because all the power in the world was in the hands of mages, so nobody cared about the needs of the people. The things you haven’t invented here. Paper! Without paper there’s no point in inventing a printing press because with parchment, a whole sheep has to die for every sheet.”

  “Paper? Papyrus?”

  “Are you even literate?” asked Ced.

  “Writing is language. I can write in any system I’ve read.”

  “Mittlegard made all its scientific progress because writing allowed scientists to share what they’d learned. And when books could be printed cheaply on paper, using movable type, the sharing and therefore the progress exploded.”

  “So you, a windmage, care about paper?”

  “I can’t do anything about paper. I don’t know enough. But my mother made soap. Handmade artisanal soaps. A lot of the chemicals she used, I don’t know how to get. But I read about soapmaking, I watched her, she talked about how it was done anciently, and I can make better soap than the vile stuff that they use here to strip the skin off children. No wonder nobody wants to bathe!”

  “Personal hygiene, then? That’s the magery you want to work with?”

  “If midwives could approach every mother with clean hands, do you know how many lives that would save?”

  “Then we’d soon have the same population problems as Mittlegard.”

  “Earth doesn’t have a population problem,” sighed Ced. “It has a distribution problem. And ultimately tha
t’s a political problem.”

  “So I’m offering you a chance to work with politics,” said Wad.

  “So that you can wage a war that you don’t even know will happen!”

  “Only the aggressor knows that a war will happen. But if his targets don’t prepare in case there’s a war, then the aggressor wins every time.”

  “How do I know you’re not the aggressor, Wad? I don’t think you are, don’t bother defending yourself. All I know is that soap is a war on bacteria and other filth, and it makes the world a better place.”

  “So you’ve been up here working with a great treemage and what you come back with is soap?”

  “I had to spend a lot of time making my windwork so habitual that it’s like walking, or driving a car—I just do it, not thinking about it. But I couldn’t think of nothing. So I thought about my childhood, and that brought me to the birds that fluttered around my mother, and it made me think of her at her cauldron—that’s what she called it, ‘I’m a witch and this is my cauldron full of brew’—and the smells of her soaps, and then the cakes aging, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in shadow. I thought about my own life.”

  Wad stopped himself from another retort. They had been through their arguments so often—but this was something new. Soap. Paper. Gates as a means of transportation. That’s what Danny North had done, when he gave portable emergency gates to his friends. He created a hub for them, and amulets that would take them there, and allow them to transfer on to another point.

  And those gates on tiny coins, that could be flung at an enemy to send him far away—that was brilliant. And it wasn’t for Danny North or any of the Mithermages. It was for his drowther friends.

  Instead of arguing with Ced, I should have been listening to him. He will never care about what I care about, unless I also care about what he thinks is important.

  “So why aren’t you making soap?” asked Wad.

  “Here? Who would it be for? Treemages like to be covered with dirt. It makes them feel like they’re rooting.”

  Wad laughed. “Maybe,” he said. Then he remembered being inside the tree, feeling the life of the thing, how it clung to the soil, reaching ever deeper, gripping more tightly, drinking the elixirs of the groundwater, the fresh draught of new rain, while the branches and leaves fell ever downward toward the sunlight. For that was how trees experienced the world, upside down, their heads in the soil, reaching upward into the earth, while the visible part of the tree dangled, wading in sunlight during the day, but hardening and drying out for nighttime, for winter. Yes, trees loved the feel and taste of soil. So of course a great treemage would feel the same way.