Gatefather (10 page)

“It's only a small duchy.”

“An incredibly wealthy trading city,” corrected Ced. “I hated governing one crazy woman.”

“But I don't care what you
hate
doing,” said Wad. “I'm Loki. I'd rather be pulling practical jokes instead of doing whatever this is. Adult stuff. Business. Politics. I hate doing this even more than you imagine that you would hate it. It's completely contrary to my nature. I'm the brat in the back of the schoolroom, not the teacher. But when the survival of the world is at stake, then you do whatever you
can
, not whatever you
like
.”

“And now we've come full circle, because I can't do this. I keep telling you, and you keep answering me, but your answers don't change anything. I still can't do it.”

“Won't.”

“Won't try because I know I can't succeed. Give it up, Wad. I won't interfere with you. I'll even help with whatever wind can do. Except assassination. But you want to capsize some of Drabway's ships? I can do that. Bring some sand into the city from the desert? My gig, exactly. But nothing that might kill anybody.”

“Capsizing ships might kill people,” said Wad. “And people die in sandstorms all the time.”

“OK then,” said Ced. “I won't do those things either. You keep lightening my load. You're all heart.”

“Aren't you even curious?” asked Wad.

“Yes! I'm amazingly curious! But I'm not curious about the things you care about, Wad. I'm not from here. I'm not from the
time
you're from. You were inside that tree for fifteen hundred years, and you've been back to Mittlegard at least once. But you've never even asked me about cars, airplanes, the trips to the moon, nuclear energy, how stars form and collapse and explode—it's incredible to me how much you
aren't
interested in.”

“I can't do anything about those things,” said Wad. “And if you give it a moment's thought, you'll see that a gatemage has no reason to be curious about transportation.”

Ced laughed. “I suppose not. You claim to care about the drowthers, but did you ever think of setting up a public gate just to get people from downtown to the suburbs? Like a magic railroad, a subway that doesn't need any tunnels. You just go through the turnstile and you're in the parking lot forty miles or a thousand miles away, where you left your car.”

Wad could only shake his head. “There are billions of people. How many gates do you think I could make?”

“How many freeways and subways and airports have we built? There are fewer than two thousand commercial airports on Earth. You had way more gates than that. You could have established a handful of hubs, and people could just jostle their way through to their destinations. You don't have to load them into planes. No air traffic control. Clean. No fuel costs. No crashes. A farmer with a cart could get his produce to a market a thousand miles away without a middleman. And everybody who travels that way arrives completely healed! You could have been such a blessing to the world, and I bet it never crossed your mind.”

“Airplanes are good enough,” said Wad. “And I have other things on my mind.”

“Well, I grew up in the drowther world. More specifically, I grew up on Mittlegard, where they have amazing technologies that would really help people here. So many things haven't been invented, because all the power in the world was in the hands of
mages
, so nobody cared about the needs of the people. The things you haven't invented here. Paper! Without paper there's no point in inventing a printing press because with parchment, a whole sheep has to die for every sheet.”

“Paper? Papyrus?”

“Are you even literate?” asked Ced.

“Writing is language. I can write in any system I've read.”

“Mittlegard made
all
its scientific progress because writing allowed scientists to share what they'd learned. And when books could be printed cheaply on paper, using movable type, the sharing and therefore the progress exploded.”

“So you, a windmage, care about paper?”

“I can't do anything about paper. I don't know enough. But my mother made soap. Handmade artisanal soaps. A lot of the chemicals she used, I don't know how to get. But I read about soapmaking, I watched her, she talked about how it was done anciently, and I can make better soap than the vile stuff that they use here to strip the skin off children. No wonder nobody wants to bathe!”

“Personal hygiene, then? That's the magery you want to work with?”

“If midwives could approach every mother with
clean hands
, do you know how many lives that would save?”

“Then we'd soon have the same population problems as Mittlegard.”

“Earth doesn't have a population problem,” sighed Ced. “It has a distribution problem. And ultimately that's a political problem.”

“So I'm offering you a chance to work with politics,” said Wad.

“So that you can wage a war that you don't even know will happen!”

“Only the aggressor knows that a war will happen. But if his targets don't prepare in
case
there's a war, then the aggressor wins every time.”

“How do I know
you're
not the aggressor, Wad? I don't think you are, don't bother defending yourself. All I know is that soap is a war on bacteria and other filth, and it makes the world a better place.”

“So you've been up here working with a great treemage and what you come back with is soap?”

“I had to spend a lot of time making my windwork so habitual that it's like walking, or driving a car—I just do it, not thinking about it. But I couldn't think of
nothing
. So I thought about my childhood, and that brought me to the birds that fluttered around my mother, and it made me think of her at her cauldron—that's what she called it, ‘I'm a witch and this is my cauldron full of brew'—and the smells of her soaps, and then the cakes aging, sometimes in the sun, sometimes in shadow. I thought about my own life.”

Wad stopped himself from another retort. They had been through their arguments so often—but this was something new. Soap. Paper. Gates as a means of transportation. That's what Danny North had done, when he gave portable emergency gates to his friends. He created a hub for them, and amulets that would take them there, and allow them to transfer on to another point.

And those gates on tiny coins, that could be flung at an enemy to send him far away—that was brilliant. And it wasn't for Danny North or any of the Mithermages. It was for his drowther friends.

Instead of arguing with Ced, I should have been listening to him. He will never care about what I care about, unless I also care about what
he
thinks is important.

“So why aren't you making soap?” asked Wad.

“Here? Who would it be for? Treemages like to be covered with dirt. It makes them feel like they're rooting.”

Wad laughed. “Maybe,” he said. Then he remembered being inside the tree, feeling the life of the thing, how it clung to the soil, reaching ever deeper, gripping more tightly, drinking the elixirs of the groundwater, the fresh draught of new rain, while the branches and leaves fell ever downward toward the sunlight. For that was how trees experienced the world, upside down, their heads in the soil, reaching upward into the earth, while the visible part of the tree dangled, wading in sunlight during the day, but hardening and drying out for nighttime, for winter. Yes, trees loved the feel and taste of soil. So of course a great treemage would feel the same way.

“What if I help you with the soap?” asked Wad. “Help you get ingredients. Take you to where you can make the soap.”

“I don't want to be a soapmaker, Wad. I want to
teach
soapmakers.”

“Can't teach them without making it yourself, Ced. Let me help you. But let's do it in Drabway. They're a trading city. If your soap catches on with them, merchants can take it far and wide.”

“I don't want to get
rich
from soap, I want to teach—”

“Teach soapmaking. But nobody will want to learn your methods unless they first learn to want your
soap
.”

“Lawsy me,” Ced intoned, clearly imitating a woman's voice. “You a capitalist, Wad.”

“What dialect is that?”

“The old black woman who took me in when my mother died,” Ced answered. “And that wasn't her real dialect. She was born and raised in Seattle, for pete's sake. That was the voice she put on when she was being sarcastically black.”

“Dialects interest me more than soap,” said Wad. “But that's natural for a gatemage. I'm just trying to think what soap has to do with wind.”

“Nothing at all. I'm human before I'm a mage, Wad. Unlike you and your kind, my life isn't about power.”

“Tell that to the—”

“This training you sent me to, it worked, Wad. I'm not the self-indulgent stormbeast I became when I first passed through a Great Gate. I'm myself again. But who will
you
be, when you get over being a gatemage? I think that's all you are. I think that without gates, there'd be nothing left.”

Ced's words stung, because they were so obviously true. But Wad couldn't blame himself for it—there were only a few times when windmagery was useful or even possible. Whereas gates were a part of every moment of Wad's life. Ced could do tricks with wind. Wad's magery was as much a part of his life as walking. As breathing.

But if he couldn't. If Danny North had completely stripped him instead of leaving him his last eight gates … what then? Who would he be?

The kitchen monkey in Prayard's house? He
had
learned how to make a dough that passed Hull's inspection. Would I bake bread for a living? Or learn how to make noodles or fine pastry or …

“Got you thinking, didn't I?” asked Ced.

“Yes,” said Wad. “I'm also a little hungry.”

“Suppose I go with you to Drabway, and I'm making soap, and you come to me and ask me for something. What would it be?”

“A little demonstration. Power of a kind they haven't seen in fifteen centuries.”

“You don't want me to kill somebody, I hope. Because I'm not really interested in doing that.”

“I've seen you drive a twig through a sheet of metal. If they see something like that, and then imagine what the same twig might do driven through a shirt or a shield, they might become more interested in preparing to unify against the threat from Mittlegard.”

“Why do you assume it's going to be a threat?” asked Ced.

“Because look what you did when you first came through the Great Gate.”

“So you're not expecting an invasion. More like a plague of locusts.”

“You're a decent guy, Ced. You didn't
want
to be some force of destruction. But you know that the Families are full of mages who are
dying
to be like that. The more drowthers weeping, the more powerful they'll feel.”

“I only knew my mother, Stone, and Danny North. None of them were like that.”

“But Stone must have told you about the Families,” said Wad.

“Not much. But
you
told me about Bexoi. And I saw you and Anonoei. You were both drunk on your own power—and you're the good guys. I know the danger. I'll help you. As long as you arrange it so they don't know I'm the windmage.”

“Seriously?”

“I can't gate away from assassins, Wad. My best armor is to be a soapmaker and nothing else, as far as anybody knows.”

“Then how can I arrange the demonstrations I need?”

“Bring them near where I'm making soap. I don't actually have to be watching when I whip up a tight little tornado. The kind that can drive a dart a thousand times faster and harder than an arrow. The wind shows me where it is, where everything is. I can feel it. Trust me, Wad. You can make gates when you're a thousand miles away, right?”

“More like a few billion miles,” said Wad. “I remade all of Danny North's gates after he gave them to me.”

“On Earth? From here?”

“I'm really good at what I do,” said Wad. “But so are you. So yes, I'll bring them into the city. Or maybe we go out in the woods at a time when I've arranged for you to be having a picnic or something. As long as you act as scared as everyone else—you don't even have to be good at acting. These aren't geniuses we'll be working with.”

“I know you're trying to do good things, Wad. I know you're trying to save the world. I don't know if it's true but I believe that you believe it. So yes, I'll help. After what happened to Anonoei, I know that mages can be evil. And if I had seen that bitch queen set Anonoei on fire, I'd have driven a splinter through her brain in a hot second.”

“I'm glad to know that you're not a complete pacifist,” said Wad.

“I'm not a pacifist at all. I'm just not an assassin. And besides, you know that Anonoei couldn't help but make me fall a little bit in love with her and feel real loyalty toward her. My teacher made fun of her as a habitual rapist of the souls of men. Even as I felt it, he made sure I realized it was just her magery. But that didn't make the feelings go away.”

“It never does,” said Wad.

“Which is the reason why I think my dreams matter. Did she leave something behind in me? Is that why I'm still thinking about her?”

“Could be,” said Wad. “She told me she left a little bit of her inside of everybody she needed to … influence.”

“Including you?” asked Ced.

“I assume so.”

“So are you still feeling drawn to her? Dreaming about her?”

“No,” said Wad.

“Too bad,” Ced replied. “I was kind of hoping that it meant she was still alive somehow. Trying to talk to me. But why would she talk to me? I was never anything to her.”