The Gate Thief

18

What no one knew about Wad, what he barely knew about himself, was how lost he was. You don’t live a thousand years inside a tree without losing something, and what Wad had lost was his own story.

Once he had been driven by a terrible purpose, something so important it was worth locking himself away from human life and devoting everything to the single task of taking away from any gatemage in Westil and Mittlegard the power to make a Great Gate. In doing this, he diminished all the mages, and consigned generations of human beings to suffering and death for lack of the power of healing that the gatemages had held.

But, waking from the tree, called from it by something he did not recognize or understand, Wad had wandered with no purpose at all. A girl had fed him and given him clothing, so he did not freeze to death or starve. A bakerwoman had taken him in and so he had dwelt in a castle and learned to care about the things that castle dwellers care about-kings and dynasties.

He had followed his body’s inclinations and fallen in love with a woman of beauty and ruthless power. Only gradually had he discovered that he had some moral principles, things he would not do. He would not murder King Prayard’s mistress and their children. He would not rip the baby from Bexoi’s womb in vengeance for her murder of the child they had made together.

It implied that once upon a time, Wad had been a man who thought deeply about right and wrong, and came to conclusions different from those that were common among the mages. That man had learned much about the workings of power, had acquired never-before-seen skills in gatemagery.

Above all, he had strength of will. When he set his mind to a purpose, he accomplished it.

Yet was there any sense in which Wad was still that man?

If he was, what purpose did he have now? Anonoei had her plans, and Wad helped her, as once he had accepted the purpose King Prayard assigned to him, and then had become the willing tool of Bexoi in her plotting.

When Wad came upon Danny North, he had acted according to what was left of the driving purpose of the man that Wad had once been. But when Danny North fought back and ate most of Wad’s own gates, Wad had backed away, beaten, and now even this feckless boy in a faraway place had more purpose in his life than Wad.

No, it was Wad who was feckless. Danny North had accomplished everything he set out to do. His mistakes had been mistakes of ignorance. Even Wad had not known what would happen to a Great Gate made of the captive outselves of other Gatefathers, for the very good reason that few mages had ever had captive gates to work with.

It was Wad who had no sense of responsibility.

No. He could not lie to himself, even in self-loathing. He had far too great a sense of responsibility. When he adopted someone, he took absolute responsibility for them-even when they were his captives, like Anonoei and her sons during their many months in prison; even when they were using him without conscience, like Bexoi and, for all he knew, Anonoei.

Wad especially took responsibility for his failures. Even when he had no idea what the right thing to do might have been, he blamed himself for not having done it.

As he watched Anonoei manipulate everyone whose life touched Bexoi’s, Wad understood quite clearly that Anonoei’s purpose was dark and destructive, and she showed him over and over again why manmagery had always been feared and banned, why manmages were destroyed whenever they were caught at their work. When her plotting came to terrible fruition, just as with Bexoi’s, Wad would bear the terrible guilt of having helped her accomplish it. And yet he had no will of his own to give him the strength to say, Enough, we will do no more.

Or was it that his will was every bit as dark and evil as Bexoi’s, as Anonoei’s, as anyone’s, but by letting them make the decisions, he left himself an excuse? Yes, I share responsibility, but it was not my plot to do this terrible thing.

These were the thoughts that he brooded over, whenever he was not actively doing something else, and sometimes even when he was. Watching Ced raise a tiny dust devil and whip it into such power that it became a blade that could cut through stone, Wad could not stop his mind from wandering back to his own troubles, his own mistakes.

Where is the teacher who can help me know when to use my power, and whom to trust, and whose plans are worth fulfilling?

I don’t even know if my own former plans are the ones I should support, or if I made a terrible mistake fifteen centuries ago.

At that moment, on another world, Danny North took the gates that Wad had given to him-and why not, since he already had them? — and used them to bring back a memory.

Wad had no idea what Danny North was seeing, hearing, experiencing. But to Wad it was all so clear and powerful that he could not escape from it. He lost all contact with the present moment. He could not see Ced or the ancient treemage who was teaching him. He could not feel the sun on his back or the grass in the meadow where he lay.

He could only see the old hermit Kawab, sitting in the mouth of his cave on the rocky plateau west of the Nile.

Wad knew him instantly, knew that he had sought this man for a year, once he discovered that he existed. Knew that he had come to him for guidance, for the answer to his question.

What was the question?

He heard himself in memory, explaining why he was there.

“She was possessed by a Belmage, and so I passed her through a gate, to drive the Belmage away,” Wad remembered explaining. “I knew enough to take her to a place far from him, so the Belmage didn’t dive right back into her and rule her again as if she were his clant. Only it didn’t work.”

Wad remembered now the terror of that realization. When he followed the Illyrian Clawsister he had just freed from possession, she laughed at him. “Fool,” she said. “Fool! You have no power over me.”

“What is this Belmage?” Wad remembered asking Kawab. “You are the last of the Enemies of Set; you are the only one who can tell me why my gate did not drive this one away.”

Kawab said nothing, did nothing. But a single tear streaked the thick dust on his face.

“What is it?” demanded Wad. “You know what this means, and it grieves you.”

“It was no Belmage,” said Kawab. “Not one of the Sutahites, the followers who were cast out of heaven with the Dragon. It was Set himself, the Dragon, the Enemy of all souls, and your story tells me that he has gained the power to hold onto a body beyond the power of any man to drive him out.”

“How do I fight him, then? How do I free this woman from him?”

“You can free her only by killing her,” said Kawab. “And yet it will not harm Set himself. He cannot be killed. He will simply find another man or woman to possess, to control. And none can heal her, none can drive him out. He is the devil of devils.”

“Don’t tell me the dogmas of Christians,” Wad insisted in that memory. “I came to you for the lore of the Enemies of Set.”

“They are the same, the same,” murmured Kawab. “What do you think John the Revelator was talking about in the Apocalypse? War in heaven-that was the battle in the world of Duat, which Michael won, which Osiris won, it was the same war. Set was cast down to the Earth, the great Dragon, Satan, the devil, Baal, Bel, the Enemy. Only fools think that truth disappears when the boundaries of belief are crossed. Set is the enemy, the slayer of Osiris, the possessor of souls. His followers are weak, pathetic creatures. You can drive them out with your gatemagery, you can trick them, frighten them. They have no power except what people give them. But Set and a very few of his disciples, they are the most terrible manmages ever to live-or not-live-here upon the Earth.”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Wad had answered him. “What is Duat? Who is Michael or Osiris or whatever you call him? What was the war? And who is this Set, this great Dragon, this Satan?”

Over and over this memory played through Wad’s mind, starting over whenever Danny North lost the thread of it back in the Egyptian desert on Mittlegard. Again and again Wad heard himself ask and ask and ask and yet for hours there was no answer. Danny North could never get him to the answer.

This much consciousness of the present moment Wad retained: He reached to his own gates, the ones he had put under Danny’s power, and he calmed them. Slowed them. Kept them tied to the memory. He tied them to his own inself, not taking back control of them, but giving them cleaner, clearer access to himself, to his memory. And through them, he was able to calm and soothe Danny North himself. Stop him from losing the thread of the memory. Help him hold to it, follow it, allow it to reach fruition.

Finally the voice of Kawab went on, the soft voice, the urgent voice. “We are all creatures from another world.”

Yes, from Westil, thought Wad-who-was, his old self there in the desert.

“Not from the world you call Westil or Mitherholm, and not from the world you call Mittlegard or Middle Earth. Where do you think that name comes from? Terra stands in the middle, between two worlds. The world of the mages who call themselves gods, and the world of all souls, Duat, where every human comes from.”

“How can I come from there, if I don’t remember it?” said Wad-who-was.

“Because we are tied to the body. Ka and ba, both parts of the soul, what you call inself and outself-they are tied to the body, to this hairless ape, this featherless biped, this tribe-dwelling louse-picker, and in that moment all access to the ancient memory is lost. Yet you remain yourself, for all the decisions of the body are made in the ka, the bonded mind, the inself, and the body has no choice but to obey. New memories are made, by ape and ka and ba together, a new self, a whole soul. It is why we were sent to Mittlegard, to get this body, to learn to control it.”

Then Wad-who-was asked the question that immediately occurred to Wad-that-is, lying unconscious in the meadow on Westil: “In what part does the magery lie? Is it of the body or the inself-and-outself?”

“Both,” answered Kawab. “It is the body that gives shape to the powers inherent in the ka and ba. Because the ka is rooted in the body, the ba is free to roam and act out the will of the self. Because of the abilities inherited from your parents’ bodies, your ka and ba expressed their powers as gatemagery; your ba is divided into ten thousand parts, more than the ba of any other man I have seen, a ba like grains of sand. Because of this, you can make ten thousand gates, or a thousand Great Gates. Because of this, you have the power to eat the gates of any other living mage, for you can take their gates into yourself and overwhelm them. But without this body, you are a ka and ba like any other.”

“And without my ka and ba?” asked Wad-who-was.

“Then the body is only a tool-making monkey,” said Kawab. “The natural man. A beast with lips that make words, but no mind to understand the deep meaning of anything.”

It was clear to Wad-who-was, and so it became clear again to Wad-that-is.

Now Kawab could explain who it was that Wad-who-was had failed to drive from the body of the beastmage he had tried to save.

“In the world where every ka-and-ba was born, there was a war. Set was the evil one, and he persuaded many to follow him. But they lost the war and were cast out of Duat, down to Earth, through a gate that only worked in one direction.”

“But you say we are all cast down to Earth from Duat,” said Wad-who-was.

“We are not cast anywhere,” said Kawab. “We are born, one by one, created as body-and-ka, with a ba to do their bidding. The ka joined deeply to the ape. We are born. This did not happen to Set and his followers, the Sutahites, the ones you call Belmages. They cannot become part of the ape, as we have.”

“And yet they take possession anyway,” said Wad-who-was. “One or ten or a hundred Belmages or Sutahites, however many it takes to do it, they force their way into the body and rule it. We gatemages drive them out, until now, until this Set.”

“They only take possession as your manmages do-they persuade the ka-and-ba to see the world the way they see it, and then to act within the world according to their will.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“It is not the same thing,” said Kawab. “They feel nothing of the body-they only watch us feel it. They do not cause a single finger to curl, a single eyelid to close or open. They cannot taste the food we eat, or make the jaws chew. They have only the power that comes from our obedience.”

“Except for Set.”

“Not even him,” said Kawab. “Not even the great Set. He rides the ape-brain like a man on horseback, but he never becomes the horse.”

“Not even the way a beastmage becomes the heartbeast?” asked Wad-who-was.

“It is the ba that goes into the beast, but it is the ba of a mage who is attached to a living body of flesh and blood. The ba knows how to become a part of the body. The ba feels what the beast feels. Yet doesn’t it also persuade rather than rule?”

“The will of the mage is much stronger than most beastminds,” said Wad-who-was.

“But the strongest beasts can disobey the ba; is that not true?”

It was true, or so Wad had heard from the beastmages.

“Even Set?” asked Wad-who-was. “Even he cannot bind himself inside the human body?”

“Even when he rides the woman through your gate and laughs at you. He may have power to stay, even through the gate, but he has not become the woman. She is still there, a ka-and-ba inside the body, but completely subject to him. Feeling her limbs move in obedience to the will of Set, hearing her mouth speak his words, powerless to stop him. And yet she is the one who owns the body; Set is and always will be an interloper. That’s why he hates us all. That’s why he wants to destroy us.”

“Then he is all-powerful,” said Wad-who-was. “Because he can take possession of the most powerful mages, and they can never get free of him, and must always do what he says, and he cannot be killed, but they can be killed.”

“I did not say that,” said Kawab, “because that is not known. What we do know is this: The ka-and-ba of the Sutahites, these wandering souls, cannot be divided. Even when they possess a body such as yours, which caused your own ba to divide ten thousand times, their ka-and-ba remains a single thing.”

“What does that mean?” demanded Wad-who-was, frustrated with the strangeness of Kawab’s teachings.

“It means that Set can only possess one person at a time. And most of the Sutahites are so weak that they cannot possess even one person-they have to join together, two or five or ten or more, in order to get control. They drive their victim mad with a chaos of voices, and even when his ka has retreated deep into the mind, and the wanderers have control, they can hardly agree among themselves. No one of them is master. We think the man is mad, because his behavior is not guided by a single will.”

Wad-who-was had seen this, and now he thought he understood. “Set himself, this great Dragon, can rule over a person by himself, needing no allies.”

“He and the mightiest of the Sutahites. We call these devils by many names, but we don’t know if any of them is the true name of the Master Sutahite. We only know that only a fool calls upon one of the great ones, for they can take possession far more easily when they are called. The fool who summons one believes that he is the master over the Sutahite, but he is deceived; it is the Sutahite who rules.”

“So the pentagons they draw-”

“Decorations only,” said Kawab. “They have no power, these fools who call themselves wizards and necromancers. The power that you Mithermages have, those are real. But when a Master Sutahite has power over a man, then the Master calls many lesser Sutahites. They obey him then, and gain great power from their obedience to a Master who rules a human body. They can easily influence the minds of many other people, so they think that the one possessed by the Master is a great wizard with mighty powers. All illusion.”

“So they are not as powerful as we think they are,” said Wad-who-was.

“I said ‘when a Master Sutahite has power over a man.’ But when he has power over a Mithermage, then the mage will do his bidding, and his powers belong to the Sutahite who rules him.”

“Until a gatemage comes and drives out the possessor,” said Wad-who-was.

“Which works with every Sutahite, but not with Set himself, or so your story tells me. For if he has the power to resist you, there is no gatemage among all your kind who can drive him out.”

“But as long as he rules a mage, he has that mage’s power,” said Wad-who-was.

“And when he takes possession of you,” said Kawab, “he will be master of all. Because only those who obey him will be permitted to use any Great Gates, and all others will therefore be weaker than he is. He will rule both worlds, passing back and forth between them. He will summon ten thousand, a hundred thousand Sutahites to Westil, and take possession of all the mages, there on that world where few have strength enough to resist them. For humans here on Mittlegard have developed strength in the ape-brain, to resist possession; those who have this strength are far more likely to have children than those who are easily possessed. On Mitherholm, there is no resistance. All the power of all the Mithermages will be in Set’s hands, through the Sutahites who will be unable to resist his will. Then they will return to Earth and conquer all. When that work is complete, they will challenge Duat. But even if that fails, they will still have this: possession of all the bodies that were reserved for the ka-and-ba who obeyed the law and fought against Set in the war in Duat. Is that not a victory? Is that not the triumph of the devil?”

Those words rang in the ears, in the mind of Wad-that-is. He would have leapt to his feet, finally understanding what he had forgotten during his centuries in the tree.

But Danny North had not seen with such clarity, because of course he had no personal memories of the interview with Kawab. And so he started it over, every word of it again and again. And Wad lay trapped on the meadow in Mitherkame while Danny sat dehydrating in the desert of Egypt, replaying the same memory over and over, struggling to understand it.

Then, at last, it ended. Hermia wakened Danny North in Egypt, and Wad’s eyes flew open and he cried out in relief to have his mind finally clear of the memory.

“Who held you?” demanded Anonoei.

“When did you come here?” asked Wad. “You weren’t here.”

“You lay here unmoving an entire night, and then a day. Ced came for me, through a gate you left for me to use, and we came back by another gate you left for me.”

Wad remembered now that Anonoei had been visiting one of her toadies who was working against Bexoi in the castle of Nassassa. He had sent her through a gate, and had already made the gate that would bring her back. He had made them overlap perfectly, so that it remained public for her to use for her return. That way he didn’t have to watch and bring her back herself. He was tired of watching her flirt with men and turn them into jelly.

But a public gate is public in both directions, unless Wad locked it, which he hadn’t. Ced must have noticed where Anonoei stepped through from this meadow. And when Wad fell into the trance of memory …

What had Danny North learned?

Would it be good or bad if he understood?

It was certainly good that Wad now understood completely what once he had guessed at. For now he remembered how he had gone at once to the beastmage he had failed to save. Only she fell to her knees before him this time, instead of mocking. “Thank you, Loki!” she cried out as soon as he appeared. “You saved me.”

“I did not save you,” Wad had said.

“But he’s gone,” she said.

Gone, but of his own free will. Not cast out by my power. He simply didn’t want me to find him.

That was a good sign. That meant that the Belmage-Set, to use Kawab’s name for him-still feared Wad enough to want to avoid him. Set had given the beastmage back to herself so that Wad would not know where to find him.

It was in that moment that Wad began to eat the gates. It took him a little while to figure out how to do it, but hadn’t Kawab told him it was possible?

And it worked. Wad ate all the gates. All the Great Gates but one. Then he passed through it, ate it behind him, then ate all the gates on Westil.

But it was not enough. The other gatemages saw what was happening, felt their own gates consumed, and immediately began to create new gates where the old ones had been.

It was not enough to eat the made gates. He had to reach into the other mages and eat the gates they had not yet made.

It took him days to learn how to do it, and during that time he could hardly sleep, because he knew that the other gatemages were searching for him. They could find him because he was holding their gates captive. He had to block them by eating every gate as soon as it was made.

That was when he trained his outself, his ba, to watch for any gate at all and cry out to him with strength enough to waken him from his exhausted sleep. Gate gate gate, they cried, and he awoke and ate whatever gates the mages searching for him had created.

Until at last he was able to reach inside them, find their gatehoard-their ba-and gather it all in. The more they resisted, the easier it was to snap off the connection. All the gates they would ever make, and he took them and held them, ruling over them, controlling them.

And then there were no gates left in the world, and no gatemages left to make new ones.

Only then did Wad go in search of the ancient treemage-now long dead, though this one who was training Ced was a disciple of a disciple of-who got a tree to let him inside its bark, to feed on its sap and keep both himself and the tree vibrant and alive forever.

Forever, that had been the plan.

But the tree expelled him. Or he unconsciously pulled himself out of the tree. Or both. And Wad had no idea why. The system had been working, and now it was broken.

It was broken because he-or the tree, or spacetime-knew that Wad had no power to resist or control Danny North, let alone steal from him.

It had to happen, Wad supposed. If there were two mages, one would be greater than the other; and, given time enough, you could find a third who was greater still. Powerful as Wad was, there was bound to come another, eventually, who was stronger than he was. One whose gates could not be eaten.

“Please talk to me,” Anonoei asked.

Whether it was because he was dying to talk to someone about all that he had just remembered, or whether she used her manmagery to cajole him or control him into telling, he told her all of it.

“You saved the world,” she said.

“And Danny North has it in his power to unsave it. Now there is an open gate, and if the Dragon-Set-can find someone, some mage, to ride through it, he’ll be here, along with as many wanderers as he can bring, and this world is lost.”

“I can see how you’d think that was a bad thing,” said Anonoei.

“You think it isn’t?” demanded Wad.

“I was being ironic,” said Anonoei. “It’s the worst thing that could happen. All the power of all the Mithermages, under the rule of a monster? I’m against that.”

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Ced and the treemage had listened to all of Wad’s account. But now the treemage said, “Time to return to work, Ced.”

“But after hearing all of this, how can I concentrate?” asked Ced.

“It is precisely at such times that you must have the power to concentrate. So now you’ll make a whirlwind small enough to use a single grain of sand to bore through a block of wood, a hole that is only one sandgrain in diameter.”

“Impossible,” said Ced.

“Two sandgrains, then,” said the treemage. “The single-grain tunnel will be tomorrow.”

They went back to work.

Anonoei had only one question for Wad. “These Sutahites, these Belmages. Are they manmages, then?”

“No,” said Wad.

“But they work in the same way. What my outself does, reaching into a person, persuading him-that’s what they do, only using their whole ka?”

“They can’t separate ka from ba, or so Kawab said.”

“Why can’t you just say yes or no?”

“Because I don’t understand all the ramifications of the things Kawab told me. He isn’t-wasn’t-a mage himself, so he doesn’t even know the ramifications. It’s lore that he learned and memorized and then intended to pass on. To other disciples of the order, but they were being persecuted at the time, so there were no others. They had been killed or had fled or had obeyed when Kawab commanded them to go into hiding. There was no one left to teach.”

“Only you,” said Anonoei. “But you were enough.”

“For sixteen hundred years or so,” said Wad. “Until now.”

“And now?”

“Set is surely still alive somewhere. Waiting for a chance to get control of Danny North.”

“If he can,” said Anonoei.

“Danny is a strong-willed boy,” said Wad. “Stronger than me. So maybe he can resist. As long as he doesn’t do something stupid, like inviting Set in.”

“What form could such an invitation take?” asked Anonoei.

Now that his memory had been awakened, Wad could think back to the lore of possession that, as a gatemage, he had been required to learn. “Words, of course. Calling the Belmage by name, if they have names-maybe the name didn’t matter, just the fact of calling.”

“And no other way?”

“A Belmage could jump from one person to another if they had some kind of physical intercourse.”

“Sex.”

“Or a deep kiss. Or a common flow of blood-two wounds pressed together. There were some people so weak-willed that a Belmage could jump between them with only a steady gaze connecting them. But few Mithermages are so weak as that.”

“That’s how it is with me,” said Anonoei. “A weak person, my voice alone is enough. A little stronger, and I have to have them in gaze before I can send my outself into them and turn them to my will. If I’m going to ride them like a heartbeast-well, before passing through the Great Gate, I didn’t have the power to do that. And even now, I can’t do it without consent. Without … the kiss.”

Wad understood the hesitation. It wasn’t kissing she had used. She had doubtless slept with several of her toadies in order to be able to ride them as heartbeasts.

“So you’re saying that they are like manmages,” said Wad.

“Or manmages are like … Sutahites?”

“Like Set. Like the devil and his angels. Yes. Like that.”

“No wonder everybody fears and hates us,” said Anonoei.

“Including me,” said Wad. “Not hate, but fear. I always wonder if you’ve used your magery on me.”

“Not deliberately,” said Anonoei. “I’ve never sent anything into you. But I do this by reflex. I’m sure that I’ve probably had some influence I wasn’t even aware of. But never enough to control you. Your choices have been your own.”

“So the powerful desire I have to sleep with you,” said Wad. “That’s not of your making?”

“I think it has more to do with-what did Kawab say? — the apewoman that I’m riding in.”

“In other words, I just think you’re pretty,” said Wad.

“You’re male and I’m female,” said Anonoei. “You think any willing female is pretty.”

“You’re willing?”

In answer, she kissed him.

“But is it safe for me to sleep with you?” he asked her, when the kiss was over.

“Doesn’t that depend on how strong your own will is?” she asked.

“It’s a foolish thing to do right now,” said Wad.

“You’re right,” she said. “But what if we gate somewhere that Ced and his teacher can’t see us.”

That sounded good to Wad, and so he moved the end of the gate she had just used so now it led to a room in Nassassa, a locked room. With a bed.

After all, I’ve slept with a queen, thought Wad. Why not with a king’s ex-concubine?

Vaguely he thought: Shouldn’t I have the strength of will to resist this desire?

Clearly he answered himself: It is my will to have this woman, right now. And she’s willing. So shut up.