The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (13 page)

“Tough guy,” said Veevee.

“He’s not so tough,” said Hermia. “He sounds like he’s apologizing. Real assholes don’t even pretend to be sorry.”

“True,” said Veevee. “It isn’t in his nature, so he’s not good at assholery yet.”

“Thanks,” said Danny. “I think.”

“Well,” said Hermia, “I’d better go, or the Family will track me here.”

“You’ve got to get those trackers out of her,” said Veevee.

She was right.

Danny studied Hermia, and then passed a gate over her, one that left her exactly where she was.

“What was
that
about?” asked Hermia.

“I didn’t know what I might have gained by going to Westil,” said Danny. “For all I know, I might always have had the ability to attach gates to portable objects. And maybe going through a Great Gate doesn’t affect the mage who made it. But I think there
is
a difference. When you went through the gate I just made, I could feel a difference in you—the places where the gate was trying to heal you and meeting with resistance. Maybe that’s what it was, anyway. I counted five places like that.”

“You should just send her through an airport scanner,” said Veevee. “They’ll show you exactly where the trackers are implanted.

Danny laughed. “Of course. Veevee, will you come along and make a distraction?”

He took them to the Roanoke airport. Veevee got to the end of the security line and then started wailing. “Where’s my ticket? I had my ticket right here!”

Her noise drew everyone’s attention, and in the moment, Danny put Hermia right in front of the security gate, ahead of the person at the front of the line. Then he opened a peephole over the shoulder of the TSA official working the screen.

Veevee, seeing Hermia in place, took off on an elaborate charade of searching for her lost boarding pass. The guard waved Hermia into the machine.

Danny had been right about the trackers. Five of them, exactly where he had felt the gate trying and failing to heal her. The trip to Westil
had
given him more power. A sharper focus, a greater awareness.

He moved the porthole to a spot an inch from Hermia’s ear. “Gate to my house in Buena Vista,” he said. Then he gave the same message to Veevee.

In a moment they were all there. “I spotted all five trackers,” said Danny. “I think I can gate them out.”

“‘Think’?” said Hermia. “This is my body we’re talking about.”

“I’ll have a nice big gate ready for you to pass through so when I get each one out, you can heal yourself instantly. What can go wrong?”

“Famous last words,” said Veevee.

But after another minute of dithering, Hermia said, “Oh, just do it.”

“Are you sure?” said Danny.

“Do it, gate boy,” said Veevee. “Can’t you tell when a woman’s saying ‘yes’? You really are young.”

In about ten seconds, Danny was done. There were five chips on the table, and Danny had passed the healing gate over Hermia after removing each one. It was very quick.

“It did hurt,” said Hermia. “Surgery is surgery.”

“Sorry,” said Danny.

“I was just reporting, so you’d know,” said Hermia. “I never thought it would be painless, so it wasn’t a complaint.” She picked up one of the chips. “So my parents thought it would be a good idea to put these things in their baby girl.”

“The question is, what do we do with them?” said Veevee. “I say gate them to an incinerator.”

“Or implant them in somebody else,” said Hermia.

“That wouldn’t be nice,” said Veevee.

“I was thinking, what about the President? Or Prince Charles?” said Hermia. “Or some dictator somewhere. Make my Family go chasing them.”

“Or five different people,” said Veevee. “Make them go crazy trying to figure out which one is you.”

In the end, Danny gated one tracker under the skin of each of the Hittite-Armenian assassins and sent the other trackers about a mile deep in the Atlantic. Then he gated the two assassins from the jail to the Greek Family’s offices in Athens. “Let my folks deal with them,” said Hermia.

“Are you going to tell them what the bastards tried to do to you?” asked Veevee.

“No,” said Hermia. “Let them try to talk to each other. They’ll know we picked these clowns to receive exactly two of the trackers for a reason. They’ll know it wasn’t random. But if I tell my family, they’ll just kill them. Even if they’re seriously angry at me, they won’t approve of assassins from another Family going after me.”

“So you think the assassins won’t talk?” asked Danny.

“My family won’t dangle them upside down over the ocean,” said Hermia. “Or maybe they will—but they won’t do it as cleverly and magically as you did.”

“We
are
gatemages, aren’t we?” said Veevee with some satisfaction. “It’s so much
fun
to prank everybody at once.”

They went to Veevee’s favorite gelato place—Angelato, on Arizona Avenue in Santa Monica—and ate their gelatos on the Third Street Promenade. Then all three of them gated away to wherever they were going to spend the night. Veevee laughed in delight as she prepared to stick a finger into one of her rings. “Oh, I feel so
powerful
. Like the first time I got the keys to the family car.” Then she was gone.

Alone in his little house in Buena Vista, Danny could hardly believe what he had done in a single day. Went to Westil and met the Gate Thief. Created portable gates for his friends. Removed the tracking chips from Hermia. Ate dessert in California and got back before bedtime.

Botched a Great Gate.

He really wanted to think about Xena as he went to sleep. But all he could think about was the angry gate that Marion and Leslie were tending now. How could he do something that stupid?

And then, inexplicably, he thought of Coach Lieder’s daughter, Nicki. How was she doing? Had they realized yet that she was healed of her cancer?

That
, at least, was something Danny hadn’t screwed up.

8

S
EARCH

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.

*   *   *

C
ED 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.”