The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (43 page)

The weeping stopped. Wad spoke again, whispered. “You knew that I couldn’t kill your baby, even though you killed mine. You knew there was a line I wouldn’t cross. But once the baby is born, anyone can nurse it. Do you understand?”

Anonoei understood, and so did Bexoi. If they did not manage to end their struggle and find a way to make this body speak aloud, then after the birth of the baby, she would die.
They
would die.

But there was still a little while before the baby was due.

Wad rolled the body over so it was lying on its back. He pried open an eyelid. The reflex for the eye to focus was under the control of the ape-brain, not the two kas that warred within it. So Anonoei saw and therefore remembered that Keel still hung, alive, from the rafter overhead.

Look up, she said to Wad. And then she filled him with the kinetic memory of looking up.

And so he looked.

“Keel,” he said.

In a moment he had gated himself to the rafter and the open eye watched as Danny untied the man, as he caught Keel in a gate so he landed on the floor after the fall of half an inch rather than ten feet.

I am not utterly helpless in this flesh, thought Anonoei. I am still a manmage, I can keep communicating with the portion of my ba that already dwells in him.

There were other splinters of her outself that connected her to Eluik and Enopp, and to the couple in Mittlegard who were looking after them. Her connection with the Gatefather Danny North, with Bexoi’s nephew Frostinch, with King Prayard—all these persisted, along with her links with the enemies of Bexoi. Bexoi would probably be able to block her from making new connections, but she could not interfere with the ones that still existed from before. They were part of Anononei’s self, her ka-and-ba, and Bexoi had no part in them.

So while Bexoi was fully trapped inside this stalemated, unmoving body, Anonoei could still influence the actions of dozens of people, could still reshape events, at least a little.

That’s a tiny bit of justice on my side.

23

R
ESOLUTION

Wad listened as Keel told him how Queen Bexoi and two soldiers arrested him and brought him to his office and hung him from the rafter. There was no explanation, no threat. Keel had kept quiet, expecting her to ask him questions, to accuse him of something, but not a word was said until Anonoei arrived.

“It was hard for me to concentrate on what they were saying,” said Keel. “The Queen called Anonoei a manmage, which is true enough. I don’t think the Queen knew that the manmage who was interfering with people like me was Anonoei until she appeared here. Bexoi said she had studied manmagery because manmages and gatemages were the only ones who posed a threat to her. Bexoi kept waiting for you to come. I think she was using Anonoei as bait.”

“I was busy,” said Wad. “I didn’t realize that Anonoei was calling me until too late.”

“Bexoi is a firemage.”

“I know,” said Wad.

“The way she burned up Anonoei, it was…”

Apparently there was no word in his mind for what it was.

Keel broke into convulsive sobs. “I thought I was going to die.”

“Why was Bexoi burned as well? Her fires never harmed her before.”

“Anonoei threw herself on her at the last moment and held her close,” said Keel. “That’s how it looked to me, at least.”

“That shouldn’t have made any difference,” said Wad. “Bexoi could stand in a furnace that would melt granite and the heat would never reach her.”

“Then Bexoi must not have burned,” said Keel.

“Getting some sarcasm back, I see,” said Wad.

“You’re the kitchen boy. Hull’s errand runner.”

“I am,” said Wad.

“And you’ve been a gatemage the whole time.”

“It made me a better errand runner,” said Wad.

“Why hasn’t the Gate Thief eaten your gates?” asked Keel.

“Do you really want even more of the kind of information that will make me need to kill you?” asked Wad.

“If you didn’t kill Queen Bexoi when you had her in your power, you won’t kill me,” said Keel.

“You don’t know what I’ll do,” said Wad.

“I know that if you’re Queen Bexoi’s friend after all, I’ll kill you if I ever get the chance.”

“I’m not her friend,” said Wad.

“She told Anonoei that the gatemage was once her lover. Was that you?”

“I put a baby in that belly once,” said Wad. “The boy that she named ‘Oath’ was mine.”

Keel’s body shook again, but now with laughter. “Poor Prayard. Cuckolded by a kitchen boy.”

“By a spy that he often resorted to himself.”

“So he knows you,” said Keel.

“And trusted me, once upon a time. The question now is, what should I do with you?”

“I’m now the open enemy of the Queen, known to her. If she lives, my life is as good as gone. I don’t know why she isn’t killing us both right now, but even if she chooses to bide her time, I’m a dead man. I doubt there’s anywhere that I can flee where she won’t follow, or send an assassin after me. So I will do whatever I can to kill her. Does that make us allies or enemies?”

“Not until her baby is born,” said Wad.

Keel nodded. “Yes, you told her that. You spared her for the baby’s sake.”

“And so will you.”

Keel nodded. “Unless she comes after me. I
will
defend myself.”

“Whatever is keeping her silent,” said Wad, “does not make her deaf. I think she hears us and she understands, even if she can’t give us a sign of it. Maybe pride alone holds her tongue. But I tell her now, in front of you, that if she harms you in any way, or Anonoei’s children, I’ll overcome my scruples about not killing her unborn child.”

“Thank you,” said Keel. “I can’t understand why I don’t feel any pain. I hung there for hours.”

“Passing through a gate restores your body to perfect health, maintaining the age and shape that you’ve achieved.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Keel. “So gatemages are all healers. Yes, I think I had some vague knowledge of that. Old stories.”

“Keel, I need your help.”

“I doubt you want a ship, you who can travel anywhere in the blink of an eye.”

“I have the body of the Queen, apparently in some kind of trance. But she’s in your private office. Surely this is not where she should be discovered.”

Keel thought for a moment. “Can you take her back to her own rooms in Nassassa?”

“And let her simply be discovered? The problem is that her clothes are half burnt away.”

“No woman in my house has clothing fit for a queen.”

“Then I think our purpose will be best served if she is found in some strange place, without clothing. She needs to be discovered quickly, because in this weather she would soon die of exposure.”

“You want me to discover her.”

“Tell me a place where you or a workman would find her, but where you would not be suspected of having put her.”

“In the water,” said Keel. “If she bobs to the surface where fishermen are passing on their way home, then she’ll be found. Found naked in the river, no one will know where she might have been thrown in.”

“Should we bind her hands and feet?” asked Wad.

“No,” said Keel. “No one would believe that she hadn’t drowned. Better to have it thought that she was struggling to swim and then fell victim to the cold.”

“And the cold would explain this coma.
If
it persists. There’s always the risk that the moment she’s not in my direct control, she’ll start to speak. I’ll keep a watch on her. If she starts to talk to anyone, I’ll warn you. I’ll gate you wherever you want, you and anyone you want to take with you.”

“So much simpler just to kill her,” said Keel.

“For a man who was almost the victim of assassination yourself, you’re awfully bloodthirsty.”

“You don’t understand,” said Keel. “She murdered Anonoei, a woman I honored and admired and obeyed. Even if Anonoei, as a manmage, put these feelings in my heart, that doesn’t make them any less real. The murder was terrible. I will not let this monster live. If I’m in exile, I won’t be in a place where I can kill her.”

“If she starts to talk,” said Wad, “I’ll bring you to her with a knife in your hand.”

“I wish I had realized, years ago, that you were something more than the palace monkey,” said Keel.

“But if you had realized it,” said Wad, “would I have let you live to reach this happy day?

“This happy day,” said Keel bitterly. He moved to the burned clothing, the ashy corpse of Anonoei, and knelt. “She used me, but in a way that I was happy to be used. If she was compelling me, it was to do what I would have done by choice, though with less boldness—work against the Queen. May I take these ashes and these clothes, and give them a proper deeping in the river?”

“As long as no one knows whom you’re deeping, then I would also like her to have such honor. I did her great harm once upon a time. Now I can never redress that wrong. But her sons are still in my keeping, and my own way to honor her will be to keep them safe and whole, and help them reach a happy life, if they choose it.”

“Are we friends, then?” asked Keel. “I don’t know what I can offer such a mage as you. My powers are not worth mentioning, compared to yours.”

“It’s not the magery that makes the man, but what he does with it, and with any other opportunity that he is given,” said Wad.

“You say that as if it were an old saying, but I’ve never heard it.”

“I learned it in my childhood, more than fourteen centuries ago, and in another language.”

Keel took in this information calmly. “There are tales in this that someday I’d like to hear. How a man can live so long. How you kept your gates when the Gate Thief took everybody else’s. What harm you did Anonoei, and how you came to be the lover of the Queen.”

“What parts I could tell you, you would not believe, and what you would believe, I dare not tell you,” said Wad. “But I know the service you have done for Iceway, and if it comes to war with Gray, I know that Iceway will have a mighty fleet, only because of your brilliant and devious mind. That’s what you bring to our alliance—your loyalty, your love of country, your intelligence, your resourcefulness, and a deep goodness that Anonoei admired.”

Again a sob caught at Keel’s throat, but then he mastered it. “Few will know, except for you and me, the greatness of Anonoei’s heart, and how faithfully she served King Prayard and the people of Iceway.”

“Everyone will know, if one of her sons someday inherits this kingdom,” said Wad. “But now it’s time for you to place yourself where the fishermen who find Queen Bexoi in the river will come directly to you. Tell me where you want to be, and I can put you there. Or you can go yourself, so that the ordinary witnesses will believe that you were there on business and it was only chance that made you the official into whose hands the fishermen delivered the half-drowned body of the Queen.”

Keel told him a place on the docks where he had a team of workmen refitting a ship for a long voyage. “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” he said. “And I have work enough to keep me there for another ten.”

“Make sure there’s a likely fishing vessel coming in or going out,” said Wad. “The Queen will bump against the side of it.”

“There’s always at least one fishing boat, and usually a dozen, within hail of the docks.”

“Then gather up Anonoei’s remains,” said Wad, “while I undress the Queen.”

It took Keel very little time to gather the sad ashes of Anonoei, along with her half-charred clothing, and put them in a pot that previously held nuts, which now were strewn on his writing table. Wad did not remove the last of Bexoi’s undergarments until the man was gone. She
was
the Queen, after all, and once he had loved her. With his hands on her unresponsive body, with the warmth of her flesh under his fingers, old feelings came flooding back. He had loved her with the intensity of a boy’s first love, for she
was
his first love after the long amnesia of the tree, and when it began he
was
a boy again, though old memories came back quickly enough, along with his knowledge of how a woman might be pleased. By habit he found his fingers stroking her as if in lovemaking, but he caught himself and stopped. She was no longer the woman he had been besotted with. Now she was the murderer of their son, the boy whom she called Oath and he called Trick, and he did not love her. Yet those feelings were so strong within him that he could hardly drive them away. He had to stand up and pace the room until he judged that Keel had been gone for long enough that it was worth checking on his progress.

Yes, he was at the dock, and already heavily engaged in conversation with the foreman and a couple of workmen. Wad looked out across the water and chose the ship, an inbound vessel with a crew that seemed alert enough as with long sweeps of two oars on a side they rowed upstream.

“Don’t inhale,” he told Queen Bexoi, “and you’ll be fine. Or if you can’t control your body well enough to manage that, I’m sure the fishermen will be able to revive you. Trust me: After saving you from the ravages of fire, I will not let you drown or freeze to death. Whatever the sailors do to revive and warm you, I can promise it will work.”

Then he gated her into the water, just below the surface, so she would bob up between the portside oars. He watched them notice her, drag her into the boat. He was glad to see that she was capable of choking and sputtering and struggling to breathe—it meant she wasn’t paralyzed. But when the sailors peppered her with questions, she said nothing. And so they took her in to shore, where Keel performed his show of recognizing her, modestly covering her, and taking her to Nassassa, where King Prayard rewarded the sailors, and Keel as well, for bringing his wife and unborn baby home to him.

*   *   *

T
HEN
W
AD WATCHED
as Danny North sent all the other mages of Mittlegard to Westil, making sure they immediately went back again. The boy learned well. He was careful. If Wad was fated to lose his gates to a greater Gatefather, then fate was kind to let it be a responsible, intelligent, persuasible lad like Danny North.