The Gate Thief

6

“What did you do with them?” demanded Leslie.

“They’re alive,” said Hermia. “And safe.”

Leslie looked at Danny suspiciously. “I want to hear it from him.”

“Because you think you can tell if I’m lying?” asked Danny.

“We assume you’re lying,” said Stone. “Because we’re all hoping you killed them and had done with it.”

“I’m hoping no such thing!” said Leslie.

“We can’t control a gatemage anyway,” said Marion to Leslie. “He did what he did, he’ll do what he does.”

“I can make him feel guilty about it,” said Leslie.

“That’s not very sporting,” said Veevee. “Danny feels guilty for being alive.”

“Make the Great Gate,” said Hermia. “If the Hittites are onto us, then everybody knows that there are gatemages in the world again, and they’ll be looking for a Great Gate.”

“That’s an argument against making one,” said Stone.

“It’s an argument for making one now,” said Hermia, “and all of us going through it except Marion and Leslie, because they’ve already gone and somebody has to keep watch.”

“You’re coming right back, aren’t you?” Leslie asked Danny.

“Unless the Gate Thief gets me this time,” said Danny.

“Do you think there’s any chance of that?” asked Veevee.

“He’s weaker than he was,” said Danny, “but he knows a lot more than I do.” Danny walked to the rope, took hold of it, pulled the noose wide open.

“I hate that noose,” said Veevee. “It looks so grim.”

Danny made no answer, just pulled the noose down over his head and shoulders, then tightened it under his armpits. Now he could put his weight on the rope while keeping his hands free.

His feet were still on the floor of the barn. He turned around and around until the rope was so twisted that it lifted him off the floor. Only the tips of his toes touched.

“Want us to wind you tighter?” asked Hermia.

“I’m pretty tightly wound already,” said Danny.

“Very funny,” said Veevee.

“I’m still not sure whether I should go through it,” said Stone.

“Do it,” said Veevee, “and keep me company.”

“It will give you the power to make plants grow and cover everything,” said Marion.

“That’s kudzu,” said Stone. “It doesn’t need any help from me.”

Veevee took hold of his hand. “‘Come and go with me to that land where I’m bound,’” she sang.

“Is that a real song?” asked Stone.

“A very old one,” said Veevee. She sang again: “‘I’m gonna walk the streets of glory on that great day in the mornin’.’”

“I need to concentrate,” said Danny. “And I need the two of you to be watching, so you know when to go through the gate.”

Veevee smiled. “‘They’ll be singin’ in that land, voices ringin’ in that land. There’ll be freedom in that land where I’m bound.’”

“Nobody’s ever heard of an obedient gatemage,” said Stone.

“Serves you right, Danny,” said Leslie.

Danny silently raised his feet, leaned back, closed his eyes. He began to spin. Twenty gates at once this time.

Only this time he wasn’t alone-there were all the other mages’ gates inside him, and many of them, most of them, were clamoring, demanding that he use them to make the gate.

One by one he drew them in, until now he was spinning a score of other mages’ gates along with his own. He couldn’t tell if they were making the Great Gate stronger, by adding more threads to the connection, or weaker, by adding new textures that didn’t fit well with his own. Danny knew nothing about what he was doing. Yet it seemed fair to him to include the outselves of these long-dead mages, which had been stolen from them because of their attempts to make Great Gates.

You lost your magery by doing this. Did I capture you to keep you imprisoned, or to set you free and let your power live again in the world?

Free free free, answered the gates inside him.

Me me me, demanded so many gates that he had not yet used.

Enough, thought Danny. Twenty of mine and twenty of you.

He was spinning rapidly now. Not as fast as he had been spinning in the gym, but it was enough. This time he could feel the power in it, this time he understood that what mattered was not the speed of the spinning, but the intertwining of the gates. It truly felt like a rope-four great strands, each consisting of ten gates. Because he had made a Great Gate before, and learned so much in the making of it, he could understand it better this time.

Two of the strands were made entirely of Danny’s gates, and the other two were made of the other mages’ gates. He wove all of his into the return gate, whose tail would be here in the barn to bring them home, and all of theirs into the gate of sending, whose mouth would be here. They spun themselves together like forty slender tornadoes, all of them spinning on their own, weaving their own patterns.

And then he cast them upward and outward, with all the strength of his inself, and felt rather than heard the song of rejoicing as the strangers’ gates leapt out into space, into time, carrying his own gates with them.

They connected in another world. The Great Gate was made.

“Now,” said Veevee.

“Untie me,” said Danny, still spinning.

Strong hands stopped his spin; other hands loosened the noose and pulled it over his arms. He still hadn’t opened his eyes. He didn’t need them. It was with another sense that he saw the Great Gate. It was very different this time, as if the earlier gate had been woven of one color of thread, while this one was of many bright colors that combined and recombined. Gate of many colors, thought Danny. What does it mean to have a gate of many colors?

He felt Veevee and Hermia take him by the hands. The mouth of the gate was wide. Danny stepped into it. Joined to him, they did not need to step; they were with him as the gate gathered him in and there they were, in bright sunlight on the other world.

Danny opened his eyes. The light was dazzling after the relative darkness of the barn. But he could see that they were surrounded by tall stones, rough-hewn, set on end into the grassy ground at the brow of a gently sloping hill.

“Stonehenge,” said Danny.

“A gatecatcher,” said Stone.

“Fool,” said another voice. A stranger’s voice. A man.

Danny turned to where the voice had come from. But it wasn’t the voice that told him who the man was. It was the inself. It was the few gates the man had inside him.

“Gate Thief,” said Danny. “Why are you here?”

“Fool,” said the Gate Thief. “To use those angry Wild Gates.”

“They wanted-”

“Centuries in prison have made them uncontrollable. Insane.” The Gate Thief spoke Westilian with a strange accent, but Danny understood him perfectly.

“They wanted to be part of the Great Gate,” said Danny. “Are you here to do battle with me again?”

“He wants to come through the gate,” said Veevee.

“He’s here to kill you,” said Hermia.

“You know nothing,” said the Gate Thief. “Someone has to teach you.”

“Lock the gate behind us, Hermia,” said Danny.

“Do we have to go so quickly?” asked Veevee. “This is Westil, and the sun is so bright I can hardly claim to have seen it.”

“I don’t want him to follow us,” said Danny.

“You’ll be back here soon enough,” said the Gate Thief. “Begging me to teach you how to undo this terrible thing you’ve done.”

“Why did you eat all the gates?” demanded Danny, his curiosity overpowering his good sense, making him stay long enough to ask.

“You know why,” said the Gate Thief. “My captive gates have told you.”

“They say the name of Bel.”

“Bel, the gatemage from the other world,” said the Gate Thief. “The world of soul stealers. The world of manmages. Fool.”

“Let’s go,” said Hermia. “Who knows what he’s plotting to do while he keeps us talking?”

Meanwhile, Stone knelt in the grass, his hands splayed out, digging into the soil. “It’s so alive,” he whispered.

“It’s you that’s alive,” said the Gate Thief. “Coming through the Great Gate has made you strong. All of you too strong. You have nothing to fear from me.”

“That’s what he wants us to believe,” said Hermia.

“Gatemages are such liars,” said Veevee-rather proudly, Danny thought.

“What do I call you?” asked Danny. “Loki?”

“Wad,” said the Gate Thief. “It’s my name since I came out of the tree.”

Danny had no idea what that meant. “I’m not giving you back your gates,” said Danny.

“I don’t need them,” said Wad.

“Do you know what happened to Ced?” asked Stone. “He came through the earlier gate and he stayed.”

“A windmage,” said Wad. “I know where he is.”

“Is he safe?” asked Stone.

Wad laughed. “Is Westil safe, with him here? The most powerful mage in the world now-the winds that he blows!”

“Is he causing harm?” asked Veevee.

“He doesn’t know how not to cause harm,” said Wad. “Any more than you do. And there’s no one to balance him, no one to teach him. That’s what you’re doing here. Setting monsters loose in the world.”

“Becoming monsters ourselves, by that reckoning,” said Danny.

“We’re all monsters,” said Wad.

“Let’s go back,” said Hermia.

Danny could see him clearly now, standing between two stones, leaning on neither. A slight man-like Danny, he was neither tall nor short, neither strong-looking nor weak. And his face was neither young nor old, but ageless, with eyes like deep water, gray as the belly of a thundercloud, looking into Danny with such sadness, such anger, such understanding.

“Don’t look at him,” said Hermia. “He’s too strong for us.”

“I’m weak,” said Wad. “You have most of my outself inside you now. What do I call you?”

“You don’t,” said Danny. He gathered the mouth of the Great Gate around himself and they were in the barn again.

The sunlight was gone. The stones. The grass.

Stone knelt, his fingers pressed against the floor. He was weeping. “It’s a desert here, compared to there,” he said.

“We met the Gate Thief,” Veevee told Marion. “He was almost as pretty as Danny, and as old as the stars.”

“I can’t lock the other gate,” said Hermia. “The outbound gate, the one you made from the hearts of strangers.”

Danny could see that she had locked the return gate, and was trying to close the other. “You can’t control it because there are twenty mages in it,” said Danny. “You have to close them one at a time.” He began pinching off the gates.

But by the time he got to the third gate, the first was open again. “It won’t stay closed,” he said.

“I see now,” said Hermia, and instead of trying to close the whole Great Gate, she began to join him in closing the individual gates. “I can see everything more clearly. I’m so much stronger. You’d think I could close them.”

Danny could see that she was getting no better results than he was.

The inbound Great Gate, the one made entirely from Danny’s own gates, was closed and locked, but the gates of other mages were not so obedient. They willed themselves to be open, and though Danny and Hermia could close them, they would not stay closed.

“We have a wide-open public gate here,” said Veevee. “I can see what you’re doing, and they won’t stay closed. They don’t want to be closed.”

“Wild Gates,” said Danny. “‘Angry Wild Gates,’ he called them.”

“Angry at him, not us,” said Veevee.

“I held them prisoner, too,” said Danny. “And it doesn’t matter who they’re angry at. They aren’t people, just the wraiths of people, the lingering memory of them. But strong.”

“Going through a Great Gate strengthened us,” said Veevee. “But they are a Great Gate. How strong is that?”

“Let them stay open,” said Danny. “It isn’t going to work, no matter what we do.”

“Are you saying that you can’t close the Great Gate?” asked Marion.

“I closed the one coming back to Earth,” said Hermia. “But not the one leading to Westil from here.”

“So my barn is now a Great Gate, and you can’t close it?” demanded Leslie.

“Why did you use those gates?” said Hermia.

“They wanted it,” said Danny. “It seemed only fair, after so long in prison.”

“But you didn’t know them-what kind of men they were,” said Hermia. “A wraith preserves the character of its maker, and these might have been very bad mages.”

“Yes, that seems obvious now,” said Danny. “I chose the most insistent. The most selfish. But it never occurred to me that I couldn’t control these gates.”

“You’ve never faced a gate that wasn’t under your control,” said Marion. “You’ve never seen a gate that wasn’t of your making.”

“But he did make it,” said Veevee.

“I wound them together, I threw them into spacetime,” said Danny. “But Marion’s right-they aren’t my gates.”

“Then move them,” said Leslie. “Get it out of my barn.”

Danny tried. The gate wouldn’t budge. Only when he stopped trying to move it did it move-in the opposite direction. And it widened.

“It’s trying to eat us,” said Hermia, alarmed.

It was true. The mouth of the Great Gate was seeking them out.

“Take them!” cried Veevee. “They were captive before, capture them again!”

Danny tried to unmake the gate as he had done with his previous Great Gate, but these were not his own gates, and they dodged him. He could work on one at a time, but they all resisted him. They refused to be captive again.

“I thought passing through the gate was supposed to make me irresistibly strong,” said Danny.

“They’re stronger, too,” said Veevee. “Dead as they are, it made them more powerful, to be part of a Great Gate.”

“Wad took them, though. Loki, I mean,” said Danny.

“They weren’t all woven together like this,” said Hermia. “And he knows more than you.”

Now Danny understood what Wad had meant: “You’ll be back here soon enough, begging me to teach you how to undo this terrible thing you’ve done.” Danny wanted to go back right now, to demand answers from Wad.

“No!” shouted Hermia.

“No what?” asked Danny.

“Don’t step into that gate!” she cried. “Don’t you see? It’s not yours. What’s to stop it from moving itself into the depths of the sea?”

“What have we done?” asked Veevee miserably.

“You don’t control it at all,” said Leslie. She wasn’t just angry now. She was afraid.

“It could go out and look for the Families that are hunting for it?” asked Marion.

“I don’t know what it can do,” said Danny. “Wad was right, I am a fool.”

“At least the return gate is closed,” said Hermia. “If the Families go to Westil, they can’t get back.”

“But that’s terrible,” said Danny. “What right do we have to set them loose in that world? I have to reopen the other gate. I have to make it so there’s no space between them, so that if you go through the gate you come back here immediately. No pause, no chance to see the sights.”

Danny acted even as he spoke. But no sooner did he move the mouth of the return gate directly in front of the outbound gate than the Wild Gate moved its tail away. Not far-the two Great Gates were so woven together, so inseparable, that it was only a few yards between the tail of the Wild Gate and the mouth of Danny’s return gate.

“It can’t get away from my gate either,” said Danny in relief. “As long as I keep mine anchored, it can’t go far.” Danny tethered the mouth of his own part of the Great Gate to the walls of the barn. It was like hobbling a horse. The Wild Gates could move the mouth of the combined gate, but only a few yards.

“This is our worst nightmare,” said Leslie. “A gate you can’t control, here in our barn. Do you understand what the Families will do now?”

“Whatever it takes to get to this gate,” said Hermia.

“They don’t know it’s gone wild,” said Veevee. “I don’t plan to tell them. Do you?”

“The gate is hungry,” said Danny. “It wants to be used. It’ll find a way.”

“Then let’s feed it,” said Hermia. “Negotiate with the Families, let them each send a couple of mages through, exactly as we planned all along. They don’t have to know that we can’t close the gate or move it or … anything. You gate them here, two at a time, and send them through-how will they know that you aren’t as much in control of the Great Gate as you are of the gates you make here on Mittlegard?”

“Or make another Great Gate, one you control completely,” said Veevee, “and starve this one to death.”

“I don’t know what to do,” said Danny. “Wad was right. I have to go talk to him. I have to ask him.”

“Terrible idea,” said Stone.

“If you do go back, make another Great Gate,” said Hermia. “Don’t ever step into this one again.”

“She’s right,” said Veevee. “This is an angry gate, isn’t that what Wad said?”

“Who’s Wad?” asked Marion.

“Loki,” said Danny.

“The Gate Thief,” said Hermia.

“He’s dangerous,” said Stone. “He makes me believe in the devil.”

“I’m screwing everything up,” said Danny.

Stone was sitting on the floor now. “What else did you expect?” he asked. “Nobody’s done this in fourteen centuries. And it’s not your fault that the Gate Thief had all these captives. It’s his fault, not yours. The only thing you did was not let him capture you.”

“That was my first mistake,” said Danny.

“No,” said Leslie. “Not a mistake.”

“We’ll figure this out,” said Marion. “We’ll find a way to get it all under control.”

“But first,” said Leslie, “we’re getting all my cows out of this barn.”