The Gate Thief

10

Wad gated to the farming village in the high country of Iceway. He appeared near the public well, so that there was no chance that his manner of arrival would go unremarked. He came showing his power: A gatemage is in the world, and he came here, and he walked from this well directly to the house where the strange woman and her two damaged, terrified sons were brought only a few days ago.

It was the house of Roop and Levet where Wad walked. Inside, he found-as he expected-that the eldest daughter, Eko, was tending to Anonoei, the onetime concubine of King Prayard, and her two sons, eight-year-old Eluik and six-year-old Enopp.

The boys had spent the past two years in total isolation, living like tortured animals. For Enopp especially, the two-year imprisonment had been more than half his life, for who remembers anything before the age of three? Their imprisonment had ended in terror and violence, with soldiers stabbing at them; and then they had been magically gated to this high mountain place, to be cared for by strangers, and their wounds healed, and their mother restored to them, and her children restored to her, and all was …

Not well. Wad did not expect things to be well at all.

The boys did not speak, but they saw him come in. They did not fear him. If they thought of him in any way, it would come from the fact that they had seen him magically heal wounds, that he had arranged for them to be fed and kept warm. They would think of him as the great mage who had rescued them from hell. If they were capable of rational thought at all.

Wad was looking at the boys, who were looking at him. Anonoei was looking down at the table, where she was chopping an onion. Chopping it very, very fine.

It was Eko, the eldest daughter of the house, who spoke first. “The man in the tree,” she said. “Have I done well with them? Do they look strong to you?”

“Yes,” said Wad.

“The boys don’t speak to me or anyone but their mother and each other. The younger one doesn’t speak even to them. The mother speaks to me now and then. I haven’t pressed them. I think something terrible has happened to them.”

“It has,” said Wad.

“He saved us,” murmured Anonoei.

“Yes,” said Wad. “I did. But before we can proceed any further, I have to make sure you understand everything that I did, and why I did it. Only then is there a chance that we can work together to try to undo some portion of my crimes.”

Anonoei looked up then. “Your crimes?”

“I know you remember me,” said Wad. “I know you saw me spying on you from the rafters, back when you were King Prayard’s mistress and lay with him in the castle where another woman was the queen.”

“That was you,” she said.

“You winked at me,” said Wad.

“You saw us, and you said nothing, though I knew not and know not why. But I winked at you, to show you that I knew you were there, and that I, too, would say nothing. That’s why I recognized you when you snatched us out of our prison cells when the soldiers were trying to kill us. When you brought us to the snow, I thought I knew you, but I couldn’t think when or how we met. I thought you were a strange kitchen boy. But you were really a great mage, a gatemage, all along.”

“I was, though at the time I barely knew it myself,” said Wad.

“A gatemage,” whispered Eko. “But living in a tree.”

“That’s one story,” said Wad to Eko. “But I’m here to tell another. About how some men came to murder Queen Bexoi and I, appointing myself as her protector, warned her and saved her life. I showed her then the kind of mage I was, and she showed me the kind of mage she was.”

“Bexoi?” said Anonoei with contempt. “A Sparrowfriend!”

“That was her disguise. She’s a Firemaster at least, if not a Lightrider. And she has the power to make a self-clant so perfect that not only could it speak in her voice, but also when the assassin stabbed it, it bled, and the blood spilled onto the sheets.”

Anonoei touched her fingers to her lips.

“No one knew but me. I saw it with my own eyes. I was proud that she trusted me. I became her lover. She bore my son and pretended it was Prayard’s.”

“The baby was yours?” said Anonoei. “So Prayard didn’t lie when he told me that he never put his seed in her.” She looked away.

“He was faithful to you,” said Wad. “And you joined in plotting against him and against the Queen. I know you were guilty of that, and you know what the penalty would have been, had you been caught.”

“Never against him,” she said. “And I was part of no plot. They told me to pack for a journey, for myself and my sons.”

“You knew what it meant.”

She did not disagree.

“Bexoi wanted me to get you out of the way. I loved her and I did her bidding. But I also distrusted her even then, and so I didn’t kill you. What I did was worse. I took you and your two dangerous sons, and I put you in the mouths of old slag tunnels in the face of the cliff, and I made gates that caught you if you fell and put you back at the top of the cave, so you lived in constant torment, always about to fall, never able to end your captivity by leaping from the cell. That was my idea, my plan. That was how I saved you alive. How I punished you and your innocent sons, because you posed a threat to the woman I loved, and to my son that she was bearing.”

“That’s a poor excuse,” said Eko boldly.

“It’s no excuse at all,” said Wad, turning to the girl. “It was a monstrous crime against the three of them, and I did it. I thought of it and I carried it out and no one knew that they were there except for me. I stole food and gave it to them. As time went on the food grew better and I made their imprisonment more bearable. When the Queen learned that they were still alive and demanded that I kill them, I disobeyed her. There are a few things in my favor.”

Wad turned back to Anonoei. “But nothing makes up for the evil that I did. I tormented you and your sons. Whatever terrors and dark visions inhabit their minds, I caused.”

Wad looked at the boys, for his eye caught some motion. It was the younger one, Enopp. He had broken his gaze at Wad and was now looking at his brother and then his mother. His face showed some animation for the first time. But Eluik remained dead-eyed, his gaze still riveted on Wad.

“Whomever you blamed and whomever you hated there in your prison cells, and whomever you feared, I was your captor, your jailer, your torturer. What does it matter that I despised myself for what I had done to you? I continued to do it.

“So let me give you some consolation. Queen Bexoi got the King to sleep with her. You were gone, and so were your sons. He believed that my boy was his own, and now he came to love the Queen, and he wanted to give her a baby. So he begot a child upon her. And then she didn’t need my little bastard anymore.

“My son, whom she called Oath and I called Trick, was now a danger to Prayard’s true son. He was also the only person that I loved, once I understood that Bexoi had used me, had never loved me. So she murdered my boy and tried to murder me. On the day I released you from the cells where I had kept you, that was when she killed my son.

“If she had killed me as she meant to, I couldn’t have saved you, and you’d be dead as well. But I escaped from her, and I rescued you. But don’t imagine that I had repented of my crimes against you. I meant to let you out someday, and I tried to make your imprisonment more bearable, but I was not about to let you go. It was Bexoi’s monstrous murder of her own child, of our child, and her open try at killing me that finally made me let you go.

“You see that I don’t pretty up my actions. Bexoi is a monster, but so am I. If I’m better than her it’s only because I kept you alive and didn’t murder you right out. But is that really better? Weren’t you just the prey that the spider binds up and hides away to devour another day? I kept you as a tool to use against her, when the time came.”

Wad fell silent. Eko looked at him in a kind of fascinated horror. He doubted that the boys understood, though the younger one at least seemed interested. Anonoei, though … she understood all.

“This is that time,” she said. “The time to use us as tools against her.”

“No,” said Wad. “You’re far too weak, and so am I. I was once the greatest gatemage that the worlds had ever known, but now there is a greater one than I. He took all but a few of my gates. I am no match for Bexoi now, and you are most certainly no match for her. I came here to set you free of me, since I’m no use to anyone. I came here to tell you the truth so you would know your enemies. So you would hate the right people, when it was time to hate. Prayard had no hand in what happened to you. He searched for you and he grieved for you, but you were beyond his finding, and when he came to love Bexoi it was only in the firm belief that you were dead.”

Anonoei shook her head and laughed bitterly. “Foolish boy-or are you older than you look? Don’t you know that Bexoi was not the only one to hide her magery? Like you, I am a mage, but of a kind forbidden.”

Wad had to think for a moment, because if she had been a gatemage, she could have gotten herself and her sons out of prison any time she wanted.

“A manmage,” he said.

“Not a great mage by any means,” she said. “But yes, I realized my power when I came of age. When I could flatter people into doing anything I wanted. I began to realize that once I owned them, they were mine. I owned Prayard. Do you understand me? He didn’t fall in love with me. I decided to own him and I did.”

Wad thought for a moment and then he laughed. “Well, it doesn’t make any of my actions better than they were, but it’s nice to know that I’m a monster among monsters. These boys, then-the sons of two mages and not just one.”

“I imagine they’ll have some talent for this or that when they get older,” said Anonoei. “Maybe even the much-sought-after seamagery. Or maybe one of them will be a gatemage by and by.”

“It’ll be me,” said the younger one, Enopp. “I’ll be a gatemage!”

Eko clapped her hands together. “He spoke!”

Anonoei rushed to her younger son and embraced him. “Oh, my baby, no, you can’t just decide, the power chooses you, it’s already inside you and someday you’ll find out what it is.”

But Enopp kept looking at Wad. “A gatemage,” he said. “Because you can go wherever you want.”

It was in that moment, in those words, that Wad first realized what he had to do. He had come to this place with no plan other than to tell the truth and then take them wherever Anonoei decided they should go. But he heard Enopp’s innocent words as if they were a recipe for how he might possibly redeem himself. How he might really help Anonoei. How he might get the power to undo Bexoi and destroy her root and branch.

Go wherever I want, the boy said, but Wad knew that he could not. He did not have gates enough inside him now to make a Great Gate, so he could not go to Mittlegard. But then he realized that he could. That there was a Great Gate, a wild one, controlled by no mage now. Danny North could not lock it and so anyone who knew of its existence could make use of it. Wad could pass through that Wild Gate and go to Mittlegard and back again, restoring what power he had left to its full strength. It would not get him back his gates-Danny North still had those safely locked inside a place where Wad could never go against the young Gatefather’s will. But it would sharpen his faculties, bring him back to the state he had once been in, when he saw all the gates in the world, even the gates of the Semitic gods, and he ate them all.

Unlike Danny North, he had not been fool enough to try to use the captive gates, but he had found them and held them. He could make himself that strong a mage again. He could restore his own vision, the range of his seeing.

And if he could take himself to Mittlegard and back again, he could take Anonoei as well.

But perhaps not. Wad was a gatemage who knew how to rule over the lost and disobedient outselves that were woven into the Wild Gate. Anonoei could not resist them. Manmage that she was, she would know that they were there, but not the form they took. They might entice her out of herself. They might entwine her in the Great Gate. And because she was a manmage, they would only be fulfilling the law by taking away her power.

No, if Wad were really to strengthen her so she might be a match for Bexoi, he would have to get Danny North to help him hold the Great Gate open for her. He would have to teach him what to do, to train the man who bested him so that he could never be defeated and Wad could never get his lost gates back.

How could he give even more power and wisdom to the mage who had shattered him?

Because I deserved the shattering, thought Wad. He was an instrument in the hands of spacetime and so I got what I deserved. I misused my power and so I lost all but a tiny shred of it. And I will have to go as supplicant to Danny North, to get him to help me make amends for how I raised the monstrous Bexoi to be mistress of Iceway.

All of this came to him between Enopp’s words and Wad’s answer to him.

“I see that your outself may indeed be divisible,” said Wad. It was true enough-the outselves of all children might be divisible, and those that were going to be gatemages would be the most divisible of all. But there was no way to tell at such a young age. “But things like that take time. No one knows what you’ll become.”

Anonoei looked at Wad. “For you he speaks,” she said.

“He sees my power,” said Wad. “He’s too young to understand my wickedness.”

“The wickedness of all the mages,” said Anonoei. “What did I ever do but seek to advance myself?”

“And love your children.”

“Look at the danger I put them in,” said Anonoei.

“Their very conception was dangerous,” said Wad. “But all children are born into a world of danger, where they’re bound to die.”

“Listen to the two of you,” said Eko.

They looked at her, surprised that such a quiet, mousy person would speak to mages of their kind.

“Bragging about who is most monstrous,” said Eko.

Was I bragging? Wad asked himself.

“Monstrous or not,” said Anonoei, “I want revenge.”

“I came here so you could have it,” said Wad. “Against me, if you choose. I will not gate away.”

“And what then?” asked Anonoei. “Without your help, what vengeance can I have on her?”

“Promise me this,” said Wad. “That you will not harm her baby.”

“This from the man who-”

“I know what I did to your sons,” said Wad. “I’m telling you now that if you harm her baby, you will not be able to live with it. I know what I’m talking about. No matter how you rage against her, her baby has done nothing. Your children did not deserve to suffer, even though their existence posed a danger to my son. My son did not deserve to die, even though his existence posed a danger to this new child of Prayard’s and Bexoi’s. And their son does not deserve to die.”

“So this is the root you’ve found for your morality?” asked Anonoei. “Do what you want, just don’t hurt the children?”

“For lack of any deeper root, that will have to do for now,” he said. “Agree to that, or kill me now, because I’ll never help you get revenge against a child. I’ve gone down that road and it’s too terrible to travel on again.”

“There’s no way that we could hurt her more,” said Anonoei.

“But what good is it to hurt her, if we destroy ourselves in the process?” asked Wad.

“Listen to the two of you,” Eko said again. “All your power, and all it is to you is a means to get revenge.”

Wad looked at her sadly. “I tried to save the world, once upon a time, but what I was saving it for I still don’t know, and in the end I failed.”

“Then try again,” said Eko. “The world’s as much in need of saving as it ever was, and somebody ought to try.”

Anonoei put her arms around her sons. “This is all the world I care about now.”

“If that were true,” said Eko, “you wouldn’t be plotting vengeance on a queen, a firemage. You’d be looking for a place to take your sons where they’d be safe.”

“I thought I had that here,” said Anonoei.

“We’re in Iceway, and your enemy’s the queen,” said Eko. “And by the way, Man-in-the-Tree, thanks for bringing the king’s missing mistress to our house. That will help us prosper, you can be sure.”

“I didn’t know anywhere else to take them,” said Wad.

“Well, I’ve done what you wanted. And I’m not turning them away even now, though if it’s discovered who they are, her enemies will happily kill me and my whole family, don’t you think?”

Wad slumped down to sit on the floor of the tiny house. “I think that I’m the puppeteer, pulling strings, but then I trip on them and find that someone else has hold of my strings.”

“Who?” asked Enopp.

“Fate,” said Wad. “Unintended Consequence. That’s the only god that’s real.”

“Do you have an actual plan?” Eko asked Wad.

“Yes,” said Wad. “As of this moment, yes, I do.”