The Gate Thief

23

Wad listened as Keel told him how Queen Bexoi and two soldiers arrested him and brought him to his office and hung him from the rafter. There was no explanation, no threat. Keel had kept quiet, expecting her to ask him questions, to accuse him of something, but not a word was said until Anonoei arrived.

“It was hard for me to concentrate on what they were saying,” said Keel. “The Queen called Anonoei a manmage, which is true enough. I don’t think the Queen knew that the manmage who was interfering with people like me was Anonoei until she appeared here. Bexoi said she had studied manmagery because manmages and gatemages were the only ones who posed a threat to her. Bexoi kept waiting for you to come. I think she was using Anonoei as bait.”

“I was busy,” said Wad. “I didn’t realize that Anonoei was calling me until too late.”

“Bexoi is a firemage.”

“I know,” said Wad.

“The way she burned up Anonoei, it was…”

Apparently there was no word in his mind for what it was.

Keel broke into convulsive sobs. “I thought I was going to die.”

“Why was Bexoi burned as well? Her fires never harmed her before.”

“Anonoei threw herself on her at the last moment and held her close,” said Keel. “That’s how it looked to me, at least.”

“That shouldn’t have made any difference,” said Wad. “Bexoi could stand in a furnace that would melt granite and the heat would never reach her.”

“Then Bexoi must not have burned,” said Keel.

“Getting some sarcasm back, I see,” said Wad.

“You’re the kitchen boy. Hull’s errand runner.”

“I am,” said Wad.

“And you’ve been a gatemage the whole time.”

“It made me a better errand runner,” said Wad.

“Why hasn’t the Gate Thief eaten your gates?” asked Keel.

“Do you really want even more of the kind of information that will make me need to kill you?” asked Wad.

“If you didn’t kill Queen Bexoi when you had her in your power, you won’t kill me,” said Keel.

“You don’t know what I’ll do,” said Wad.

“I know that if you’re Queen Bexoi’s friend after all, I’ll kill you if I ever get the chance.”

“I’m not her friend,” said Wad.

“She told Anonoei that the gatemage was once her lover. Was that you?”

“I put a baby in that belly once,” said Wad. “The boy that she named ‘Oath’ was mine.”

Keel’s body shook again, but now with laughter. “Poor Prayard. Cuckolded by a kitchen boy.”

“By a spy that he often resorted to himself.”

“So he knows you,” said Keel.

“And trusted me, once upon a time. The question now is, what should I do with you?”

“I’m now the open enemy of the Queen, known to her. If she lives, my life is as good as gone. I don’t know why she isn’t killing us both right now, but even if she chooses to bide her time, I’m a dead man. I doubt there’s anywhere that I can flee where she won’t follow, or send an assassin after me. So I will do whatever I can to kill her. Does that make us allies or enemies?”

“Not until her baby is born,” said Wad.

Keel nodded. “Yes, you told her that. You spared her for the baby’s sake.”

“And so will you.”

Keel nodded. “Unless she comes after me. I will defend myself.”

“Whatever is keeping her silent,” said Wad, “does not make her deaf. I think she hears us and she understands, even if she can’t give us a sign of it. Maybe pride alone holds her tongue. But I tell her now, in front of you, that if she harms you in any way, or Anonoei’s children, I’ll overcome my scruples about not killing her unborn child.”

“Thank you,” said Keel. “I can’t understand why I don’t feel any pain. I hung there for hours.”

“Passing through a gate restores your body to perfect health, maintaining the age and shape that you’ve achieved.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Keel. “So gatemages are all healers. Yes, I think I had some vague knowledge of that. Old stories.”

“Keel, I need your help.”

“I doubt you want a ship, you who can travel anywhere in the blink of an eye.”

“I have the body of the Queen, apparently in some kind of trance. But she’s in your private office. Surely this is not where she should be discovered.”

Keel thought for a moment. “Can you take her back to her own rooms in Nassassa?”

“And let her simply be discovered? The problem is that her clothes are half burnt away.”

“No woman in my house has clothing fit for a queen.”

“Then I think our purpose will be best served if she is found in some strange place, without clothing. She needs to be discovered quickly, because in this weather she would soon die of exposure.”

“You want me to discover her.”

“Tell me a place where you or a workman would find her, but where you would not be suspected of having put her.”

“In the water,” said Keel. “If she bobs to the surface where fishermen are passing on their way home, then she’ll be found. Found naked in the river, no one will know where she might have been thrown in.”

“Should we bind her hands and feet?” asked Wad.

“No,” said Keel. “No one would believe that she hadn’t drowned. Better to have it thought that she was struggling to swim and then fell victim to the cold.”

“And the cold would explain this coma. If it persists. There’s always the risk that the moment she’s not in my direct control, she’ll start to speak. I’ll keep a watch on her. If she starts to talk to anyone, I’ll warn you. I’ll gate you wherever you want, you and anyone you want to take with you.”

“So much simpler just to kill her,” said Keel.

“For a man who was almost the victim of assassination yourself, you’re awfully bloodthirsty.”

“You don’t understand,” said Keel. “She murdered Anonoei, a woman I honored and admired and obeyed. Even if Anonoei, as a manmage, put these feelings in my heart, that doesn’t make them any less real. The murder was terrible. I will not let this monster live. If I’m in exile, I won’t be in a place where I can kill her.”

“If she starts to talk,” said Wad, “I’ll bring you to her with a knife in your hand.”

“I wish I had realized, years ago, that you were something more than the palace monkey,” said Keel.

“But if you had realized it,” said Wad, “would I have let you live to reach this happy day?

“This happy day,” said Keel bitterly. He moved to the burned clothing, the ashy corpse of Anonoei, and knelt. “She used me, but in a way that I was happy to be used. If she was compelling me, it was to do what I would have done by choice, though with less boldness-work against the Queen. May I take these ashes and these clothes, and give them a proper deeping in the river?”

“As long as no one knows whom you’re deeping, then I would also like her to have such honor. I did her great harm once upon a time. Now I can never redress that wrong. But her sons are still in my keeping, and my own way to honor her will be to keep them safe and whole, and help them reach a happy life, if they choose it.”

“Are we friends, then?” asked Keel. “I don’t know what I can offer such a mage as you. My powers are not worth mentioning, compared to yours.”

“It’s not the magery that makes the man, but what he does with it, and with any other opportunity that he is given,” said Wad.

“You say that as if it were an old saying, but I’ve never heard it.”

“I learned it in my childhood, more than fourteen centuries ago, and in another language.”

Keel took in this information calmly. “There are tales in this that someday I’d like to hear. How a man can live so long. How you kept your gates when the Gate Thief took everybody else’s. What harm you did Anonoei, and how you came to be the lover of the Queen.”

“What parts I could tell you, you would not believe, and what you would believe, I dare not tell you,” said Wad. “But I know the service you have done for Iceway, and if it comes to war with Gray, I know that Iceway will have a mighty fleet, only because of your brilliant and devious mind. That’s what you bring to our alliance-your loyalty, your love of country, your intelligence, your resourcefulness, and a deep goodness that Anonoei admired.”

Again a sob caught at Keel’s throat, but then he mastered it. “Few will know, except for you and me, the greatness of Anonoei’s heart, and how faithfully she served King Prayard and the people of Iceway.”

“Everyone will know, if one of her sons someday inherits this kingdom,” said Wad. “But now it’s time for you to place yourself where the fishermen who find Queen Bexoi in the river will come directly to you. Tell me where you want to be, and I can put you there. Or you can go yourself, so that the ordinary witnesses will believe that you were there on business and it was only chance that made you the official into whose hands the fishermen delivered the half-drowned body of the Queen.”

Keel told him a place on the docks where he had a team of workmen refitting a ship for a long voyage. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. “And I have work enough to keep me there for another ten.”

“Make sure there’s a likely fishing vessel coming in or going out,” said Wad. “The Queen will bump against the side of it.”

“There’s always at least one fishing boat, and usually a dozen, within hail of the docks.”

“Then gather up Anonoei’s remains,” said Wad, “while I undress the Queen.”

It took Keel very little time to gather the sad ashes of Anonoei, along with her half-charred clothing, and put them in a pot that previously held nuts, which now were strewn on his writing table. Wad did not remove the last of Bexoi’s undergarments until the man was gone. She was the Queen, after all, and once he had loved her. With his hands on her unresponsive body, with the warmth of her flesh under his fingers, old feelings came flooding back. He had loved her with the intensity of a boy’s first love, for she was his first love after the long amnesia of the tree, and when it began he was a boy again, though old memories came back quickly enough, along with his knowledge of how a woman might be pleased. By habit he found his fingers stroking her as if in lovemaking, but he caught himself and stopped. She was no longer the woman he had been besotted with. Now she was the murderer of their son, the boy whom she called Oath and he called Trick, and he did not love her. Yet those feelings were so strong within him that he could hardly drive them away. He had to stand up and pace the room until he judged that Keel had been gone for long enough that it was worth checking on his progress.

Yes, he was at the dock, and already heavily engaged in conversation with the foreman and a couple of workmen. Wad looked out across the water and chose the ship, an inbound vessel with a crew that seemed alert enough as with long sweeps of two oars on a side they rowed upstream.

“Don’t inhale,” he told Queen Bexoi, “and you’ll be fine. Or if you can’t control your body well enough to manage that, I’m sure the fishermen will be able to revive you. Trust me: After saving you from the ravages of fire, I will not let you drown or freeze to death. Whatever the sailors do to revive and warm you, I can promise it will work.”

Then he gated her into the water, just below the surface, so she would bob up between the portside oars. He watched them notice her, drag her into the boat. He was glad to see that she was capable of choking and sputtering and struggling to breathe-it meant she wasn’t paralyzed. But when the sailors peppered her with questions, she said nothing. And so they took her in to shore, where Keel performed his show of recognizing her, modestly covering her, and taking her to Nassassa, where King Prayard rewarded the sailors, and Keel as well, for bringing his wife and unborn baby home to him.

Then Wad watched as Danny North sent all the other mages of Mittlegard to Westil, making sure they immediately went back again. The boy learned well. He was careful. If Wad was fated to lose his gates to a greater Gatefather, then fate was kind to let it be a responsible, intelligent, persuasible lad like Danny North.

Throughout the day, Wad checked on Bexoi many times, but she never spoke or did anything that seemed volitional, though she breathed and took in food when it was given to her. If she was putting on an act, she was astonishingly consistent; someone less clever would have feigned a coma, and then it would have been easy to discover that she was really awake. By pretending this sort of catatonia, her eyes could be left open by someone else so she might see; her breathing could show responses to what went on around her without provoking suspicion that she was faking all of it.

There was also the possibility that it was real. Though with Bexoi, to have something really be exactly what it seemed was so unlikely.

At last, late in the day, Wad allowed himself the luxury of sleep.

He was wakened by an urgent stirring of his outself. It was the gates that he had given to Danny North. They no longer obeyed him, but they were still part of him, and their agitation, their panic, filled him with fear as well. Immediately he tried to make sense of what they were perceiving from Danny’s mind.

The boy thought he was dreaming, but he was not dreaming. There was a woman in his bed, a woman that he did not love and did not want. He knew that he did not want her, and yet his body wanted her, and so he continued to believe it was a dream, or to pretend to himself that he believed it.

But it was this very dreamstate that had alerted Wad’s outself to the danger. For Wad had seen possession many times and his ba remembered it. A dozen of the Sutahites were in and out of Danny North, possessing him only lightly, only enough to whisper reassurance to him. This is safe, they were saying wordlessly. What harm can it do. It’s a dream. Nothing is real.

Wad joined with his given-away gates in shouting their panic to the boy. Someone as strong-willed as Danny North, the Sutahites would never bother with. They could never own him; he would drive them out. What could they possibly gain by encouraging him to be intimate with this girl? And why was she there, uninvited?

Wad came quickly to the conclusion that there was something in the girl, something that wanted very, very much to have her body intimate with Danny North’s. Something that hungered for a clear pathway from one body to the other.

It was Set, the Dragon, making his first assault upon the greatest Gatefather in the history of the world. And it was working, because the boy was an adolescent who was easy to arouse to passion, and he was deeply weary, and he was coming out of a sound sleep, and he knew the girl and did not fear her. All of it worked together so that even though Wad knew the boy felt the deep dread, the warning of Wad’s gates inside him, he went ahead.

He not only coupled with the girl, he consented when her voice asked him for permission to enter him.

Fool. Fool.

Not Danny-in his confusion, he was only as foolish as any boy would be.

The fool was Wad. When Danny’s exploration of Wad’s memories had brought everything back to Wad with such clarity, it had not been half so clear to Danny North. Wad should have dropped everything then, should have used the Great Gate again to go to Danny North and explain everything, not in the vague way Danny would have learned it, but with the clarity of Wad’s bright memory, and of all that he knew beyond the information that came from Kawab during that desert conversation.

I should have prepared him for exactly this danger. But in my arrogance and solitude, I thought it was enough that I knew. Why would I think that? I’m in Westil. Danny’s the one who was in danger, the one who needed to be alert to the way this sort of thing is done, and I betrayed him by my silence, my delay.

Now all is lost. Set has him, and can make as many Great Gates as he wants, a thousand of them. He can flood Westil, the world of Mitherholm, with his Sutahites, and find a people totally unready to resist them. All the powers of the Mithermages will be in their hands, compounded by as many passages between the worlds as they might need or want.

Everything I tried to prevent has now taken place. So what if I delayed this day by fourteen centuries? All that happened in the meantime was that drowthers had created terrible weapons that now would be completely in the hands of the mages who had the power to take them and wield them, or induce the drowther armies to use them. How long before those terrible machines made their way to Mitherholm as well? How long before they were used, and Mitherholm destroyed, along with Mittlegard? Then Set would have his great triumph over Duat, having ruined both the other worlds.

In that moment of despair, Wad was shocked to feel himself awash with a sense of power and connection.

He had never felt this thing before, because he had never given his gates away before. It took a moment to realize that this was how it felt to have them given back.

He didn’t have them; they were still in Danny’s hearthoard. But he owned them. They would obey him now, if they obeyed anybody. If Set, through Danny, tried to make them into gates, they would not become gates at all, they would simply return to Wad. Wad wasn’t sure if Danny understood that. It was likely that Danny knew only that they were no longer Danny’s to command, and therefore they were out of the reach of Set.

The boy was braver than Wad had imagined. Danny must realize now that he had lost his battle with the enemy, but he was not giving up. Inside his own body, which Set must now control like a beastmage riding his heartbound, Danny North was still himself, and was still capable of doing things that Set had no idea how to prevent.

But since Danny did not have the power to free the gates he held captive in his hearthoard, this gift would only be a small limitation on Set. A futile gesture, really.

Then Wad realized that it was not as futile as it seemed. There were things that Wad knew how to do that required him to have a huge aggregate of gates-and his own store of them had seemed huge indeed, until he met Danny North, whose natural hearthoard made Wad’s seem small and shallow. Wad might not have his gates with him; he might not be able to make them into gates; but they were his gates all the same, and if he reached out to swallow up another mage’s gates, these captive gates of his would be part of his strength. If Wad was careful and clever, he might be able to find some way to resist Set after all. At least to slow him down.

For one thing, Wad would have the power to swallow up the rebellious gates that were woven into the Wild Gate the Greek girl had moved out of Danny’s control. Unfortunately, half of the outbound Great Gate and all of the inbound one was made up of Danny’s own gates, and those would remain in place.

Wad was still trying to think of possible uses for his newly restored power when he was overwhelmed by a force so strong his body could hardly cope with it. He fell to the ground, gasping for breath, whimpering with a feeling so strong that he could not tell if it was ecstasy or pain.

In moments, though, he understood what had happened to him.

Danny North had given Wad his gates. The seemingly infinite store of Danny North’s own natural endowment was now utterly placed in perfect obedience to Wad, and Wad alone.

Danny was still connected to them; they were still part of his ba. But they were almost as deeply connected to Wad. They were part of his power.

Having his own gates returned to him had given Wad the scope to swallow the gates of any mage but Danny North, for Danny’s strength was like the sun compared to Wad’s otherwise-impressive moon.

But with Danny’s gates as part of his own strength, Wad had power to swallow anything.

He still could only make the eight gates that Danny North had left to him in their original struggle. But anytime he wanted to, he could change that. Though he had no way to make the gates that Danny held within his hearthoard-Set could force Danny to hold on to those, to prevent their being made.

But the gates that were outside of Danny’s body, the gates that he had made before Set took him, those were there for the taking. For with all of Danny’s strength under his control, Wad had the power to swallow all of Danny’s made gates.

And so he did it.

He swallowed first the Wild Gate that Hermia had moved, including all his former captives. They were in Wad’s hearthoard once again, under his discipline again. Their freedom had been shortlived, and they despaired and fell silent almost at once.

Then Wad reached out, gate by gate, and swallowed the rest. But now, knowing that Danny North had made them all for a purpose, and Danny’s friends relied on them, Wad remade them immediately, only now as gates of his own making, though the gates were Danny’s.

It was a subtle thing indeed, but with enormous consequences. If Set had understood his danger, he could have quickly gathered in all of Danny’s made gates. But Set had only a little practice at possessing a gatemage; he would know only what was known to previous gatemages he had possessed, and there could not be many of those. He could not possibly know what was possible to a Gatefather of such magnificence as Danny North.

Now, though, the gates were not of Danny’s making, though they were his gates. Danny, under Set’s control, could not gather in these gates. They would not obey him. And because his hearthoard was reduced to zero, Danny North couldn’t even do what Hermia had done-move another mage’s gate.

Wad was astonished at the things that Danny North had done. Gates attached to amulets, which his friends could use for quick escapes. Gates that chained from place to place, which could be found only if you knew where the mouth was hidden. Wad understood now that Danny had provided highways for his drowther friends, to keep them safe if the Families went after them. The boy had more love for ordinary people than Wad had ever heard of in a mage-more than Wad had ever shown, though he considered himself a drowther-friend, compared to most.

The Great Gates were harder. He could not unmake them and then remake them as a whole. Instead he spent hours carefully gathering each single strand, then remaking it by weaving it into the existing Great Gate, exactly where it had been before. It taxed all of Wad’s power of concentration to hold the shape of it in place, but finally it was done. Even the Great Gates were now outside of Danny North’s control, and therefore beyond the reach of Set to gather them back in.

What irony, thought Wad. The outcome is almost identical to what it would have been if I had won our little battle when I first tried to eat the gates of Danny North. His hearthoard is full of gates, that’s true-most of his and most of mine. But he has no gate in either world that will respond to his commands. No gate that adds to his strength. He is as bereft of power as if I had stripped his gates away.

Only the captive gates remain within him. He can’t give them to me. But if Set tries to spin a Great Gate, it will be completely wild.

And then, as Wad observed Danny from inside, he saw something that he wasn’t sure he would have thought of, or, having thought, had the courage to act upon. The Dragon was torturing Danny to try to get him to do what Danny no longer had the power to do-allow the Dragon to control the making of Danny’s gates. The game was simple enough: The Dragon was threatening to kill Danny and move on if Danny didn’t give him what was no longer Danny’s to give.

By the time the Dragon understood how Danny had deceived him, he had done so much damage to Danny’s body that Danny North would surely die unless he made a gate to pass himself through. At first, Set might have been content to let him die, as punishment for Danny’s clever, stubborn disobedience. But then it must have occurred to Set that he was nowhere near any other person. Cut off from a human body, Set was weak again, unable to jump right in and control a person who had any willpower at all.

If Danny’s body died, it might take Set weeks or months to get control of a body that was worth controlling.

Meanwhile, there was Danny’s hearthoard. So many gates-and so many captives, too, including Wad’s own gates. Even though Set hadn’t the power to use them, if Danny died then he would never have the power.

As long as he remained in control of Danny’s body, and Danny’s body remained alive, then Set had a hope of persuading Danny to cooperate; and if that never happened, he could use Danny’s body to bring him close enough to another person to make the jump smoothly and easily.

He could always kill Danny later, he doubtless thought.

And so he made one of the only gates remaining under Danny North’s control-the captive gates. He made it and then moved it so that it passed over Danny’s body, healing him. Danny North would not die.

And then Danny did something Wad had not known was possible. He gave the captive gate to itself. The ka that the gate had once been attached to was long dead, gone wherever the kas of dead gatemages went. But the ba was still part of that self, wherever it was, and even though Danny could not find that ka, he figured out that the ba could find it, could always find its ka, and so he gave the ba to itself, and through itself, to its original maker, even though he was dead.

The result was that the ba was gone. Simply gone. Danny hadn’t unmade the gate-Set would have known what that felt like, would have prevented Danny from doing it. But Set did not know what Danny was even doing, when Danny performed the act of giving a gate. Because as far as Wad knew, he was the first mage ever to give a gate to another mage-if someone else had done it, Wad had never heard of it. And Danny had taken that new technique, had learned it, and then extended it to a use Wad would never have imagined.

Danny’s body was healed, and Set was in check. His total supply of gates was limited to Wad’s old captives, and now he knew that each time he made such a gate, he could use it once, but then it would be gone. Danny North would set it free, would let it die and disappear. And though there were many hundreds of gates, that number would be exhausted very soon if Set made heavy use of them.

If spacetime really had brought Danny North into the world as a giant prank, it was a good one. Because even though Danny North tried hard to be a decent man, he still had a prankster’s heart, and he had chosen his victim well. Set had thought he would be master, and he was; but Danny had taken the mastery out from under him, even though it meant that Danny would be left utterly empty when Set abandoned his body. If Set let him live, Danny would be an empty gatemage, just like all the mages Wad had emptied through the years.

Wad knew well how rare it was for a mage to make such sacrifice. The usual thing, when a mage had been possessed, was for the mage to yield, to surrender quickly to the Sutahite’s will, and then become its partner, obeying it but receiving the rewards of power ruthlessly applied.

Danny North could have taken that road. Set would have used Danny’s gates to become the most powerful mage in history, forcing all the other mages to bend to his will. Truly he would have been the Great Dragon then, master of two worlds, manipulator of humankind, mage and drowther alike. Mage of mages. God of gods, at least in the eyes of drowthers.

Women, money, mastery of everyone. Anyone that Danny hated, he could have punished; Set would have had no scruples about the taking of a life, of many lives.

But Danny had thrust all of that away, removed it from himself with no hope of getting any power back, so that Set would not have the use of that power. So that Westil was still safe. So that Wad’s work was not undone.

Danny North, I admire you for your courage. I honor you for your cleverness. I pity you for your loss.

Because even if Set moves on to someone else, even if he doesn’t kill you in revenge for having tricked him, do not think for a moment that I will ever give these gates back to you. I do not even want to be as noble as you. For a while you were a greater mage than me. I am now, again, the greatest Gatefather in the world, and you are nothing. I will never give that up. I am the Gate Thief, and because of your nobility, the victory is mine.