The Gate Thief

8

It should have been easy for Wad to find the windmage from Mittlegard whom Danny North had called Ced. Not only was there a swath of destruction across a long stretch of Hetterwee, making it easy to narrow down his location, but even if he tried to blend into the local population, even if he had acquired local clothing, his foreignness had to be obvious from his language.

Hetterwee was a broad plain that got heavy snow in winter but scant rain in summer. The grass was fast-growing and the sod was thick, but the whole world turned brown by midsummer and the grazing herds now stayed close to the many streams that flowed down from the Mitherkame, the High Mountains.

Mitherkame was high and thickly forested, a place where mages of stone and water, tree and eagle prospered and grew strong. Wind could whistle and whine through canyons and narrow passes.

But Hetterwee was a wide-open land where the wind made waves in the high grass, rippling for miles. There the wind could dance.

Deep in the grass, insects abounded, eating fallen seeds; birds and rodents came to eat the seeds as well, and to eat the insects too; and great grazing animals came in vast herds to slice or tear off the grass well above the matted sod. The predators-wolves and great cats-came to cull the lame and old and unprotected young from the herds. Here a mage of herding beasts and a mage of predators could equally find a home.

It was a place where a traveler could walk for days without any certainty that he had come any closer to his destination, or escaped any distance from the place where he began.

Yet somehow in this dry grassy wilderness, small villages of drowthers found a way to make their homes of cut-up sod, scratch their tiny farms out of the clay that they exposed, and one way or another eke out a living and store up enough strength to spawn a next generation, and then another. They did not hunt the herding beasts, for fear that they were watched over by a beastmage; nor did they wander alone, for fear that a mageridden predator would hunt them down for sport. They kept to themselves; they watched the weather on which their precarious lives depended; wariness kept them alive.

Wad gated from village to village, coming in as a stranger, but one who knew the language-for Wad could speak all the variants of Westil spoken in this world, or at least he never found one he couldn’t pick up in a few minutes. He dressed himself in clothing that made him seem to be a journeyman in search of work. He should have been far more acceptable than Ced in these little villages, yet Wad could see that they were lying to protect the windmage from Mittlegard.

“My friend would have come soon before or soon after the storm that stripped your fields and blew down your houses,” Wad said in village after village. “I have to find him-his wife is ill, and I must get him home for the children’s sake.”

But they never answered him except with a shrug or, if he forced the issue, a defiant stance, brandishing a stout stick and daring him to ask another question.

Somehow, though gales had torn roofs from houses and hail had ravaged the already scanty fields, these people took Ced as one of them instead of seeing that he was the one who had caused their misery.

Despite the help of the drowthers, Ced could not hide from a Gatefather forever. If the people would not talk to Wad openly, he would open a tiny window in their houses and listen to their conversation. They told him all he wanted to know, and more: They knew that Ced was the windmage who had harmed them so; they knew he came from another world; Ced had told them all of this himself. He was the god of the wind, come in person to apologize for the harm his mighty gales had wrought, and to make amends as best he could.

At last a window revealed Ced himself, asleep in the place of honor near the fire, in a house with a chimney, marking it as the richest in the hamlet.

Wad gated him from the house so gently that he didn’t wake up. It was the cold that woke him, half an hour later; the wind itself, cold and thin at the top of a high crag in the Mitherkame.

Ced awoke shivering and knew at once that a gatemage had him, for how else could he have been taken out of the warm house and out into the cold? The wind told him he was in an open place, the lightness of the air that he was very high up. And when he opened his eyes, the starlight showed him that he lay on a patch of ground not more than ten strides in every direction before a drop-off that hid the rest of the world from view.

“Sorry to take you from the fire,” said the young man who sat watching him. Ced recognized him at once-the mage who had come to meet Danny North at the tail of the Great Gate. The Gate Thief. The enemy.

“I’m not the one you want,” Ced warned the man at once. “He went back to Earth.”

“I know where Danny North is,” said the Gate Thief. “He has most of my outself with him. Is the captive ever unaware of the boundaries of his prison?”

“Is that where I am now? A prison?” asked Ced.

“A place for undistracted conversation,” said the Gate Thief. “No one will interrupt us. But a mage of your power-no, I could not keep you here, if you wanted to be gone.”

“A mage of my power,” Ced answered scornfully. “A monster power that harms everyone and helps no one.”

“And yet you keep using it,” said the Gate Thief.

“The air calls to me,” Ced whispered. “Day and night, I hear it singing. I feel it on the hairs of my arms, my legs. It wakens me and I can feel the motion of all the airs of the world. Faraway winds and gales, nearby breezes, the passing of a running deer, the wings of a butterfly. This place is too much for me.”

“It isn’t the place,” said the Gate Thief. “It’s you. Passing through the Great Gate was what woke you. The air has been calling to you all along, as much in Mittlegard as here in the shadow of the Mitherkame.”

“I don’t know those words, sir.”

“Mittlegard is the word for Earth, as you know quite well. And this is the Mitherkame,” said the Gate Thief. “These mountains are the spine of the world called Westil among the mages of Mittlegard-though Westil is only one of the languages here, and also the ancient half-forgotten name of a kingdom that once included all the Hetterwold and the forests of the north.”

“I’m a stranger here,” said Ced. “If the wind hadn’t called me with such strength, I wouldn’t have missed the passage back to Earth. Can you send me home?”

“You know I can’t,” said the Gate Thief. “You know that Danny North took my gates from me, all but a handful, too few for me to make a Great Gate even if I wanted to. And I don’t want to. Bad enough to have you here; worse for Mittlegard if I returned you there.”

Ced understood. “So here I am, alone and friendless.”

The Gate Thief looked at him quizzically. “Friendless? When they let you sleep in the place of honor near the fire?”

“They’re kind folk, and forgiving, but they don’t know who I am. They only know the power of the wind, and they’re afraid of me.”

“If they treat you well, and don’t seek to kill you or control you, then they’re your friends. Don’t set so high a standard for friendship, Ced, or you’ll have no friends.”

“So what are you?” asked Ced. “You took me here without my consent. I hear the winds that whine around this crag, far below me-if I stepped to the edge I’d fall and die. So I’m a prisoner.”

“Do you think the winds you’re hearing would let you fall? They’d bear you up if you asked them to, and land you gently anywhere.”

Ced felt a thrill of joy at what he said. “You mean that I can fly?”

“I mean that the wind you serve so well and rule so weakly has no desire to let you die.”

“I suppose if you wanted me dead, you could have plunged me into the middle of the sea.”

“There’s air in the sea, and it would find you instantly, gather around you, make a bubble for you, and bear you up to the surface, where the wind would dry you instantly and again, you would fly.”

“Then into the heart of a mountain-you could kill me if you wanted to.”

“You’ve figured out my secret,” said the Gate Thief. “I would like to be your friend.”

“What form would such a friendship take?” asked Ced. “I had a friend once who provided me a home and food, and let me make my own mistakes, and figure things out for myself.”

“I’m the kind of friend who would like to prevent your mistakes from killing people-either directly in the storms you raise, or afterward, when their ruined crops lead to famine and death this winter.”

Ced reached out and took the man’s hand and gripped it. “That’s what I want, too, with all my heart.”

“You seem to mean it,” said the Gate Thief. He looked relieved.

“I do,” Ced answered. “I’m not a violent man. I don’t like breaking things. But when the wind starts…”

“It takes on a will of its own,” said the Gate Thief. “It grows and grows, stronger and tighter, whirling and dancing. Do I have it right?”

“Yes!” cried Ced.

“And the ecstasy you feel-it’s overpowering. You want to scream with joy. Do I have that right as well?”

Ced nodded, ashamed now, because the Gate Thief had caught out the secret Ced had been keeping even from himself. “It’s a drug. It’s heroin and coke and ecstasy and methamphetamine all at once-it’s way more powerful than pot, which is the only drug I ever actually tried. Once it starts, I don’t even want it to stop. Even though I know the terrible things that are happening, I can feel the tearing and breaking at the edges of the wind, but I can’t stop.”

“Meaning that you choose not to stop,” said the Gate Thief.

That, too, was true, and Ced felt the shame and guilt burst within him, and in front of this powerful stranger he broke down and cried. “You should have killed me in my sleep,” he said. “I have so much blood on my hands. Not soldiers’ blood from a war-the blood of children who died in the collapse of roofs or were swept away from their parents in the wind and dashed into trees or rocks or plunged into ravines. The blood of the parents who died reaching for them, or later, searching for their little bodies. I should be dead-I owe a hundred deaths already.”

“Twenty deaths, in fact,” said the Gate Thief. “Your shame makes you exaggerate.”

“Twenty,” Ced repeated, and he wept again.

The Gate Thief’s hand was on his shoulder. “I take it that you tried to stop.”

“The voices of the wind won’t leave me alone. How do I make them still, so I can think?”

“You don’t,” said the Gate Thief. “You sing with them, so the voice becomes your own, their movements a part of your own breath. What you feel, when you feel all the winds of the world, is your own outself, spread as thin as air, and because you’re the only windmage who has passed through a Great Gate in this age of the world, you meet no other there to challenge you. The winds are yours. If you love them, Ced, the winds are you.”

“How does a gatemage know so much about how windmagery works?”

“Because all the magics of the world are one,” said Wad. “And because I loved a windmage once.”

“Your wife? I had a wife.” Ced thought of poor broken Lana, and how grief and relief warred within him when she left.

“My mother,” said Wad.

He had a mother. He was once a child. He’s a human being, like me. And also a monster-like me.

“What are you going to do with me?” asked Ced.

“I want you to learn how to use your power to protect this world,” said the Gate Thief.

“Protect it from what?”

“From the monsters. From the gods.”

“Gods?”

“You called them the Families, there on Earth. They’ll be here soon, and they’ll be every bit as strong as you, and every bit as unprepared to control it. But unlike you, they’ll have no consciences. They won’t care what their magery costs the common people of this place.”

“My caring doesn’t bring them back to life,” said Ced.

“But if you learn to master your power, you’ll be far stronger than they are-at least for the first while-and perhaps you can protect the people. Prevent a little of the horror that would otherwise come. Would you like to do that?”

“I can’t even prevent my own damage.”

“You prevent it every day, every hour that you aren’t raising a wind. You prevent it when you go among them, not to threaten them with storms if they don’t obey you, but to help undo the damage that you’ve done. Why do you think they love you? Because you don’t think that you’re a god. Or maybe because you think that godlings should be kind.”

“They love me?”

“This is a world long ruled by gods. When I closed the Great Gates, I weakened them, and as the old mages died, the new ones had only a fraction of their power, and life got better here. Now what counts as a great mage is a person of relatively petty power. But the mages of Mittlegard will come here with power unseen in this place for fourteen centuries. They’ll bring their wars and rivalries with them, and then provoke more, as the mages here attempt to resist them, and fail. Only you can stand before them as an equal. As their master, if you prepare, if you’re readier for war than they are.”

Ced remembered an old line from a movie. “I’m a lover, not a warrior.” He thought it might have been Rodney Dangerfield who said it. The man who got no respect.

“If you love something, then there’s something to fight for,” said the Gate Thief. “I think you’ve come to love these people.”

Ced wasn’t so sure. Guilt was surely not identical with love. But maybe there was a little overlap.

“But this is a different kind of war,” the Gate Thief went on. “The lover has to stay alive inside the warrior. Because I don’t want you to destroy them, Ced. I want to master them, but then to win them over to our side.”

“Our side?” asked Ced. When had they become allies? Aloud, he said, “If the mages from the Great Families join us, who would we be fighting against then?”

“Someone worse,” said the Gate Thief.

“The Families are monsters,” said Ced. “They train their children to be monsters, and I can’t imagine anybody worse.”

“I can,” said the Gate Thief.

“Who?”

“Mitherkame and Mittlegard are not the only worlds with people on them, and not the only mages capable of becoming monsters.”

Ced felt tired. “I don’t want any part of it.”

“I know,” said the Gate Thief. “What you wanted was to pass through a Great Gate and find out what it would do to your power.”

“And it made me a monster.”

“It made you a great mage,” said the Gate Thief. “Your inexperience and lack of self-control led to the monstrous things you did. You can learn to control them. You can help the Families learn to control their greater powers. Only then will we have a chance against the Eater of Souls.”

Ced thought of how Danny and Hermia had spoken of the Gate Thief-the legendary enemy, the Minotaur, the terrible monster that they would have to face.

“Why are you laughing?” asked the Gate Thief.

“You said ‘Eater of Souls’ exactly the way people say ‘Gate Thief.’”

The Gate Thief nodded. “I was the thing that Danny North feared most.”

“You destroyed every gatemage you found for a thousand years.”

“No I didn’t,” said the Gate Thief. “I never touched a gatemage until he tried to make a Great Gate. All they had to do to stay safe from me was to confine their gatemaking to their own world. Why wasn’t that enough? Why couldn’t they be content to gate from place to place, to heal anyone who passed through their gates? Why wasn’t such a wonderful power enough for them?”

Ced thought of his own experience with power. “Because if it’s there, you have to reach for it.”

“Monkeys in the trees,” said the Gate Thief. “Always hungry for the fruit that’s out of reach.”

“What’s your name?” asked Ced. “I think of you as the Gate Thief, but that’s only your job title.”

“They call me Wad, in the place I lived most recently.”

“And what did your mother call you?” asked Ced.

“She called me Loki-but that was a job title, too. It’s the name given to the most powerful gatemage of the North family. It was under the name of Wad that I last tasted hope. It’s the name that my friends call me.”

“Tell me about this monster worse than the mages of the Families,” said Ced. “Tell me about the Eater of Souls, so I can decide whether I’m qualified to call you Wad.”

“I don’t know if it’s one being, or one of many. It could be the same one, coming back again and again, because if I understand correctly what it is, then it never dies and is very hard to kill.”

“But what is it?”

“A manmage,” said Wad. “But not the kind we’re warned against. Not like the manmages of Dapnu Dap, who once ruled the world of Mitherkame by seducing and flattering and eventually riding men and women as their heartbeasts.”

“They sound bad enough.”

“You can still find their bodies, when a manmage’s outself is riding a heartbeast. You can kill them. But from what I learned before I closed the gates, the god Bel doesn’t do this. He takes over the man’s body, and it isn’t his outself that comes to control it, it’s his inself.”

Ced tried to understand it. “So he has nothing left in his own body?”

“I don’t know if the Belmages ever had bodies. I don’t know what life is like in the world they come from. But they passed through gates into our world, never in large numbers-and as I said, it’s possible that it only happened once, and there’s only one. Because when one body dies, it doesn’t kill his inself. He simply jumps into someone else, displacing their inself, becoming that person.”

Ced understood now what the threat was. “If he takes over the body of a great mage…”

“Then he has all that mage’s power. That’s what the Belmages did, before we understood and began to fight them. A great mage of our kind would suddenly change, become more powerful and yet more ruthless. Systematically evil, that’s how it looked. But when we fought against a mage who had become so terrible, we simply … won. Killed him sometimes. But sometimes we were able to imprison him, talk to him-and he wouldn’t remember a thing. Not a thing. He didn’t remember the way heartbeasts remember their jaunts together with their mage inside. He never felt controlled. He was simply-absent. Cut off from his own body. Asleep in some deep sense. One of them said that he was wandering, but he couldn’t say where, or anything that happened to him.”

“So the mage you had imprisoned-he really hadn’t done the terrible things that made you go to war with him.”

“There was a thing that took over his body, but when we got control of him, made him powerless, the thing was no longer interested in staying inside him. It left. The Egyptians discovered the danger first. That’s why they cut the organs out of the bodies of great mages and put them in separate jars. So there’d be no way for the Belmage to use their body for evil after their own inself was gone.”

“But how do you even fight something like that?” asked Ced.

“Another Loki faced him once, and won. He gated the body containing the Belmage into the Sun of Mittlegard. We always assumed that the Belmage died there, along with the body, because there was no other human close enough to jump into. But now I wonder if the Belmage didn’t simply wander for a long time, lost. If that’s the case, then there’s only the one. But he came back, and in my time he was too clever to be fooled again. I couldn’t use the trick that other Loki used. So I took all the Great Gates from the world, so that no matter what body he took, it would be a weaker one, and he could never get from there to here.”

“So if I went back…”

“Everyone that Danny North brought here to Mitherwee-to this world, to Westil-is now more powerful than any other mage in Mittlegard. The Belmage will know. It will crave that power. They’re all in terrible danger, and none so much as Danny North himself. Because if the Belmage takes him, he can make all the Great Gates he wants. And if there are many of them, and not just one, they’ll all be able to come here, to the heart of magery, and make their bid to rule the universe.”

Ced nodded. “Displacing all the gods. Becoming the permanent, immortal, unkillable gods.”

“If they really are unkillable. If we don’t stop them.”

“What if this Belmage really did take over Danny North? What could we do?”

“Kill Danny,” said the Gate Thief. “What choice would we have?”

“Why didn’t you kill him already? You were there with him at the Great Gate.”

“Because Danny North hasn’t done anything that makes him deserve to die.”

“He made a Great Gate.”

“When people made Great Gates, I took the power to do it away from them,” said Wad. “But I didn’t kill them. I’m not the Belmage. I refuse to be a monster.”

“I refuse to be a monster, too. But it doesn’t mean that I’m not one.”

Wad smiled. “I know. But I can help you get control of your power. To become master of the wind, instead of the wind ruling you, as it’s doing now.”

“It feels as though I’m controlling it. And yet I can’t stop, because I want whatever it wants.”

“That’s right,” said Wad. “You’re like the wick of a candle. The flame could not survive without the wick to concentrate it-but the wick is not the master of the flame. The flame consumes it, bit by bit.”

Ced knew at once that this was true. He nodded. “I wouldn’t have said it that way, but it’s the truth.”

“I’m glad that you’re aware of it-it’s the beginning of wisdom. It’s the hardest thing for a mage to learn.”

“And you’ll teach me, Wad? How to control my power?”

“Me?” Wad laughed. “How, when I never learned the lesson all that well myself? I’m the tool of spacetime in just the way that you’re the tool of the wind. No, I’ll take you to the best teachers. The ones who can help mages of every kind, because they have almost infinite patience and understanding, or they could never become masters of their own magery.”

“Who?”

“Treemages. Not all of them. Just a few. The best of them, the master teachers. The ones who understand that the tree is in the root. It was a treemage of fourteen centuries ago who saved me alive to do the work I’m doing now. He persuaded a great tree to open itself to me. Inside its living wood, I made a tiny gate that drew me upward through the tree, a tiny fraction of an inch every day, so little movement that I almost wasn’t moving at all. But I passed through the gate each day, healing all the ills of my body. And it also healed the tree, so that limbs never broke off without regrowing. The tree lived those fourteen centuries in perfect health, as I did. Until I felt a shuddering in the All. I felt Danny North coming into the universe-coming into his power. I didn’t understand it at the time. I only knew it was time to come out of the tree. I hardly knew who I was. I couldn’t speak. I had to learn to be human again, instead of being a part of the tree. But I learned. All too well. I’m human now. And Danny North is in the world. He bested me and has my gates. I’m nearly helpless to fight the Belmage, or even the Families of Mittlegard. That’s why I need you to become master of yourself, so you can stand beside me.”

“I’m not a brave man,” said Ced. “I don’t know what I’ll be like in war.”

“No one ever does,” said Wad. “And the answer is never the same on two different days. Will you come with me to the treemages of Gos in the Forest Deep, and see if one of them will take you on?”

“I think you’ve already asked one, and he’s said yes, or you wouldn’t have come to me,” Ced answered.

“I’ve asked,” said Wad, “but he won’t say yes until he meets you, and you have to come of your own free will.”

“I’ll go with you and learn what I can learn. And if I find that everything you said is true, I’ll stand with you as best I can.”

“If it isn’t true,” said Wad, “it won’t be because I lied. It will be because I’m only guessing at half the things I know about the Belmage, and I might be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. I hope we can defeat him in the end.”