The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (32 page)

“We’re listening,” said Veevee.

“Sounds very gnostic,” said Hermia.

“No it doesn’t,” said Danny. “It doesn’t sound gnostic at all. Or Coptic. It sounds like the thing that made Loki close all the gates.”

“If the ka and ba aren’t part of our human body,” said Veevee, “then where do they come from?”

“From the world of the Belmages,” said Danny.

“In other words,” said Hermia, “from ‘heaven.’”

Danny clamped his hands over his ears. “Please, please don’t pollute this. Let me say it first. Let me say it before you start trying to bend it to fit whatever shit you Greeks think you already know. Did any of you go closing gates? No? Loki did. So shut up and let me
try
to remember why.”

“Sorry again,” said Hermia.

“From the world of the Belmages,” said Danny. “It was a gate from their world that first turned these hairless apes into humans. But it was also these bodies that gave them the powers we turn into magery.”

“No,” said Veevee. “I mean, I thought the powers came from the ka and ba.”

“That’s the thing. Everybody has a ka and ba. It comes into the body when we’re born or … whenever. It comes in. But in the process, the body has a … a … an
interface
with the ka and the ba. When mine came into me, when Loki’s came into him, that’s what I mean, that’s what I remember, when Loki’s ka and ba entered his body, it fragmented his ba into all his gates. That’s when he became a gatemage. Body plus ka and ba. You see? There’s no magery without the body.”

“So far this is so exciting I can see why you nearly died to learn it,” said Hermia.

“I haven’t gotten to the exciting part yet,” said Danny. “It’s in the book of Revelation. ‘And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceives the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.’”

“I thought you said this was ancient Egyptian lore,” said Hermia.

“Sounds like the King James version to me,” said Veevee.

“The devil. Satan. That’s the Belmage. He was cast down—that means he was sent through a gate to Mittlegard. But he wasn’t put into a human body. He and his angels were sent here as naked ka and ba.”

They pondered this. So did Danny. “I feel so much of what Loki understood slipping away from me. Now I don’t even know how much of this is what he concluded and how much of it I’m making up right now, trying to make sense of it.”

“Just go ahead,” said Veevee. “I’m finally beginning to see why this matters.”

“I’m not,” said Hermia.

“Belmage is
not
a manmage. There
are
manmages, and what he does is very similar to manmagery, but he isn’t in a human body. He’s bodiless. But think what the devil keeps doing all the way through the New Testament. He possesses people’s bodies. He and the other devils. His angels, you see? Jesus was always casting them out.”

“I thought that was just schizophrenia,” said Hermia.

“Or multiple personality disorder,” said Veevee.

“That’s the only thing today that
looks
like what the Bible describes. But there are all these bodiless kas and bas around. The Belmage is their boss. The big guy. The main enemy. That’s all ‘satan’ means—”

“Don’t bother telling gatemages what words mean,” said Hermia.

“So the Belmage hates us all, because our ka is joined to a body and it changed us. Gave us these powers. If we learn how to use them. The ability to use magery is hereditary. Tied to the body. But that’s why he wants to take possession of the bodies. Take over, get the power.”

“But they aren’t joined to our body the way
we
are, are they?” asked Veevee.

“No, they aren’t. They don’t get magery of their own. They get inside us and boss us around and get the use of
our
magery. That’s the danger of the Belmage. He’s not a guy who sends his ba into other people the way a manmage does. Persuading you, changing your perceptions. No,
his
whole ka and ba climb into you. He wears you like a puppet. He makes you use your powers to do his will. But when you die,
he
doesn’t die. In fact, he loves it when your ka gets separated from your body, because then he’s in sole control.”

“So why doesn’t he just kill you and take over?” asked Veevee.

“That’s the thing. The ancient Egyptians believed the Semitic gods could animate dead bodies. That’s why they emptied out the brains and internal organs of the people of great power, and put them in the canopic jars. So that the body wouldn’t work. So that the Belmage or his minions couldn’t animate your corpse and continue ruling in your place. Embalming wasn’t about living forever. It was about making damn sure you stayed dead.”

“But
can
they?” asked Veevee. “That would be—zombies.”

“No, no,” said Danny. “The hermit called that superstition. The Belmage can’t control a dead body unless he’s already in control when the ka leaves. People believe what they believe, right? But the Belmage needs to take control of a living body, and he wants powerful ones. He wants mages. Then he uses their magery.”

“So when he possesses somebody, you have to kill the person he possessed?” asked Veevee. “That seems really final.”

“It doesn’t even work,” said Danny. “The Belmage isn’t dead. You can’t kill the ka or the ba. They don’t die. I mean, the ones truly attached to human bodies die, but that only means they’re cut loose from the body. The ka and ba are still alive. That’s why we can still hold on to the gates of these mages who’ve been dead for a thousand years. They’re severed from a ka that’s still alive … somewhere. But the Belmage—he didn’t really
have
a body, so he’s not changed by the death of the body. He just goes on to another.”

“You’re saying that these Belmages are the only ones who reincarnate.”

“I don’t know, that’s not the way they discussed it. I don’t know what happens to regular people who die in the regular way. This is a memory so I couldn’t exactly ask questions,” said Danny. “And here’s the thing. The Belmages were really
bad
at this at first. They aren’t manmages. They aren’t any kind of mage. So they don’t have powers the way we do. What they have is a
lot
of practice. They’ve been diving into people, getting whatever control they can, for
ten thousand years
. Even Loki hasn’t lived that long. So the smartest, the best of them—
the
Belmage. The Enemy. The great Dragon.
That
one is the most powerful, the one that has acquired the greatest skill. He’s
learned
ways of getting inside people that are far more powerful than any of the other castoffs.”

“So what Loki realized,” said Hermia.

“What made him close the gates,” said Veevee.

“Was the realization that the Dragon had finally figured out how to attach himself so firmly to a person that he could ride him through a gate.”

“Oh my,” said Veevee.

“Think about it. The presence of a Belmage inside you, being possessed—that’s a disease. Isn’t it? Passing through a gate should cast him off.”

“But people holding hands with other people can take them through a gate,” said Hermia.

“Holding hands. Two people
with their own bodies
. But this extra, this rider, this possessor, he gets cast out. What do you think Jesus was? Healing people, casting out devils.”

“Oh, you’re saying he was a Gatefather?” asked Veevee.

“This isn’t from the hermit, we’re away from what Loki learned, the hermit wasn’t going to say anything that denied the divinity of Jesus. Let’s get back to what Loki knew. He realized that the Belmages were learning how to attach to people in such a way that they could go through gates. I think that’s what’s really going on with that passage from the Library of Congress. That Belmage had taken possession of a gatemage. The Loki of that time didn’t realize what was going on. He thought that the gatemage he saw in the body was his enemy. But it was the Belmage
inside
him. So when the Loki of that ancient time fought the Belmage, he actually killed the poor sap of a Gatefather that the Belmage had possessed. The Belmage himself never left this world. He couldn’t actually pass through a gate. He could use the power of the Gatefather he was controlling to
make
gates, but he couldn’t go through them. And sending him through one threw him out of the body.”

“This isn’t what you remember from Loki,” said Hermia.

“No, sorry, no, it just makes sense now, that’s all. And I don’t remember—I mean, I didn’t find out why Loki knew that the Belmage of his time was getting ready to go through gates. The Dragon was probably riding a Gatefather at the time, so Loki ate all that Gatefather’s gates—
not
killing him. That made the Gatefather useless to the Dragon. He’d leave him then, see? Because he was powerless. But he would just have found another gatemage. Or he would have gotten into
anybody
and then gone through a Great Gate and magnified his power and so—”

“So Loki ate all the gates, and kept eating them,” said Hermia. “Until we
brilliantly
came along and made a Great Gate after all.”

“And put a Wild Gate out in the world,” said Danny. “I have so totally screwed up.”

“No,
Loki
screwed up,” said Veevee. “He should have realized that someday there’d come along a Gatefather who was even more powerful than he is, and he’d eat
his
gates. He had to know it.”

“Maybe that’s why he woke up from the tree he was living in, because he knew I existed.” Danny stopped himself. “More speculation, more guessing. What we know is this. Loki realized he had to close all the gates to keep the Dragon and his followers, these loose kas and bas, from taking over everything.”

“I’m still not getting it,” said Veevee. “So they can use gates.”

“I get it,” said Hermia. “As long as using a gate stripped them out of you, all you had to do to cast a devil out of somebody was to pass him through a gate. But if they can
stay
, then nothing casts them out except death itself. Whoever they take over is possessed till they die. And the Dragon or his devils, they don’t die when the human dies, they just find another powerful mage to possess. Human life is ruled by these guys
forever
.”

“Human life is over,” said Danny. “Only the Belmages have a life. Everybody else is forced to be their puppets. To be spectators in their own lives.”

“So all these years that Loki has prevented Great Gates,” said Veevee, “these Belmages have been possessing people, and because there were no gates, nobody could get rid of them.”

“True,” said Danny. “That’s why it’s all about the Great Gates. When Loki did it, Westil was still free of the Belmages. They had never been able to make the passage—till then. So Loki kept Westil completely free of the Belmages. And even here, he kept all the mages weak by preventing their passage between worlds. So the Belmages could never get control of any
real
power. For all we know, they’ve been leaving mages like us alone, and concentrating on the people who actually run this world.”

“Stalin, not Odin,” said Veevee.

“Hitler, not Jupiter,” said Hermia.

“But now imagine Hitler with the power of a Tempester or a Tidefather or a Stonefather—one who’s passed through a Great Gate. Because just supposing Hitler was really a Belmage possessing this Austrian painter dude, then Hitler didn’t really die in that bunker in Berlin in 1945. The poor sap he was riding died. But the Dragon just cut himself loose and went in search of somebody else.”

“So maybe we’re fighting all the monsters of history here,” said Veevee.

“No,
Loki
was fighting them,” said Danny. “And I just wrecked everything. I just lost him his war.”

“Nothing’s lost yet,” said Veevee.

“And there’s also this,” said Hermia. “I think it’s all merde.”

Danny looked at her blankly. “What are you talking about? You think I got the memories wrong?”

“I think you probably got them exactly right,” said Hermia. “But just because one ancient man said it to another ancient man—and let’s remember, one was a crazy Christian hermit living in a cave, and the other was
Loki
, for heaven’s sake—just because they believe it doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“But just because you
don’t
believe it doesn’t mean it’s
not
true.”

“Look at how you got all this information,” said Hermia. “You put yourself into a hallucinogenic trance. You were sitting there in the Egyptian sun, baking, not drinking, not eating, not moving, just locked in place, having hallucinations while conversing with—whom? Why, crazy Loki’s outself! Do you see how absolutely unreliable this is?”

“No, I don’t,” said Danny. “Loki’s a smart guy.”

“Being smart and being a loon aren’t mutually exclusive,” said Hermia. “
You’re
smart and
you’re
a complete loon.”

“No he’s not,” said Veevee.

“We just saved his life in the desert because he was catatonic in the hot sun. Please find me a definition of ‘lunatic’ that doesn’t include that!”

Danny had no answer to that. He knew she was wrong. He knew that what Loki learned was right. Or at least he
trusted
that it was right.

But maybe he only believed it because he had worked so hard to get at the memory.

“Don’t let her talk you out of this,” said Veevee. “She doesn’t know anything.”

“No, but I
am
attached to the rational universe,” said Hermia. “Not meaning to give offense, but Veevee, you spent your whole life convinced you were a gatemage without any evidence at all.”

“But it turned out that I was,” said Veevee.

“But you believed without evidence,” said Hermia. “It doesn’t make you a reliable judge of weird theories like this. Don’t you get it? Danny’s probably completely right about what Loki learned. Only he was a loon learning from a loon, and Danny’s a loon using a lunatic process to recover their lunacy, and we’d have to be loons to take it seriously.”