The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (9 page)

But historical interest would have to wait. “If Hermia is dead,” said Danny, “so are you.”

“Alive!” the man cried. “We not touch her.”

“No Great Gates!” shouted the other man, the weeping one. “Bel comes! Bel goes to Yllywee!”

So they
were
allies of the Gate Thief. Or shared his fear; Yllywee was an ancient name of Westil. Danny remembered the runic inscription in the Library of Congress. “We have faced Bel and he has ruled the hearts of many.” Manmages from another world—a world not Earth and not Westil. “Loki found the dark gate of Bel through which their god poured fear into the world.” Why would it matter whether Danny made a Great Gate if Bel already knew how to make gates of his own?

The Hittites knew something, and he had to find out what it was.

Danny moved the tail of the gate that suspended them to the barn. They plopped in a sodden mass amid the straw near a milking stall. At once Danny brought back the mouth of the gate, scooped them up, and hung them in the air ten feet above the barn floor.

“What’s going on, Danny?” demanded Marion. “How can you bring strangers to—”

“Hittites,” said Danny. “They shot me, and they know something about Bel.”

There had been enough discussion of the runic passage that everyone immediately understood the significance.

“I need you to question them while I’m gone,” said Danny to Marion.

“I’m not an interrogator,” said Marion.

“I didn’t say
torture
them,” said Danny. “Ask them questions.”

“
You’re
torturing them,” said Marion. “Look how afraid they are! They’re falling and falling!”

“People pay money to go up in airplanes and freefall like this before they open their parachutes,” said Danny. “It’s not torture, it’s just a way of keeping them where we want them.”

“Not here,” said Marion.

“Fine,” said Danny. “I’ll put them back out over the Atlantic till I find Hermia.”

“No!” shouted Leslie from the door. “Let them go at once!”

“They killed me!” shouted Danny. “They’re assassins.”

“And Hittites,” added Veevee. “So they’re evil
and
interesting.”

“This is not what a good man does,” said Leslie coldly.

Danny knew at once that she was right. His fear and anger had made him act by reflex. Yet he had also shown restraint, and he wanted credit for it.

“I could have killed them,” said Danny. “I didn’t kill them.”

“They’re sopping wet,” said Leslie.

“I didn’t know they couldn’t swim,” said Danny. “But I pulled them out of the water, didn’t I?”

“Get them out of my barn,” said Leslie. “Now.”

Back to the ocean, then. Again, Danny had to move the tail of the gate first, which put them back in the water, flailing and sputtering, and screaming whenever they could catch their breath. Then he got them back up in the air. By now they thought of that continuous freefall as a good thing, no doubt, compared to drowning.

Danny followed them this time, suspending himself in the air. No falling in the water—when he was moving
himself
through space, he was much quicker, more deft about it.

“I’m going to go see where my friend is,” said Danny. “If she’s hurt or dead, I’ll do the same thing to one of you while the other watches.”

“We not to touch her, we not talk to her!” the less-panicked man insisted.

Danny gated himself back to Hermia’s hotel room in Rio. It was empty this time, no shotguns waiting. The door was undamaged—they must have bribed their way in. Danny went to the balcony and looked out over the broad beach. So many people lying there or milling around. But after a few minutes he spotted someone who might be Hermia. He made a gate near her. If it was Hermia, she’d see it and step into it; if it wasn’t, she wouldn’t.

It was. She did.

“Is it already time?” she asked as soon as she was in the hotel room.

“I came here for you,” said Danny, “and I was met by a shotgun blast.”

Hermia saw the pellet pattern on the wall, Danny’s punctured clothes, and exclaimed softly. “My Family wouldn’t—”

“Not your Family,” said Danny.

“They just shot to kill? Without a warning?”

“No negotiations. Just … bang.”

“Who was it?”

“Hittites, I’m pretty sure.” He grinned.

“Extinct gods with shotguns,” said Hermia.

“Extinct for two thousand years, no less. They didn’t actually admit to being Hittite, but it’s the one they denied instead of being evasive. I have them hanging over the Atlantic.”

“I want to talk to them.”

“You want to lock the gate they’re using so they drop into the water and drown,” said Danny.

“Eventually, yes,” said Hermia. “You’re too soft, Danny. People who shoot first can’t be left alive.”

“People who talk about Bel have some explaining to do,” said Danny. “And they didn’t actually kill me.”

“They killed your clothing,” said Hermia. “Walk around like this and you’ll start a new fashion. Perforated clothing. Shotgun Style by Calvin Klein.”

“I want to make the Great Gate before anything else happens,” said Danny. “Those clowns aren’t going anywhere. We’ll have plenty of time to question them after.”

“If we make it back,” said Hermia.

“If we don’t, then someday somebody will find a heap of bones and some empty clothing hanging in the air over some spot in the Atlantic. It’ll make the cover of the
Enquirer
.”

“You sound like you don’t care,” said Hermia, “but I know you do.”

Danny sighed. Leslie thought the worst of him, Hermia thought the best of him, and they were both right. Danny gated the two men into a single cell in the county jail in Lexington, Virginia. “They’re on dry ground now, all right?” he told her. “Now let’s get this gate made before somebody notices them and lets them out.”

“Where are they?” she demanded.

“In jail,” said Danny. He made a viewport into the cell and showed her.

Hermia spoke to them. “Don’t make a sound,” she said. “If you try to get out or if you talk to anybody at all, it’s back to the ocean for you.” Then she added a few words in a language Danny had never heard.

“Yes, they understood me,” she said to Danny. “The Hittite-Armenian theory seems to have some merit.”

“You speak Armenian?” asked Danny.

“It came up,” said Hermia. “I’m a gatemage, it’s a language.”

Danny reached out his hand, and the two of them gated to the barn.

6

A
NGRY
G
ATE

“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.”