The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (8 page)

Marion shook his head. “Stonemages like me believe in solid connections. Not sudden leaps through spacetime.”

“Where’s Mom?” asked Danny.

“Out scouting for anybody’s clant or heartbeast. You’re making a Great Gate again, which is exactly what all the Families want, not to mention rogue Orphans we might not even know about.”

“I can’t believe that passing through a Great Gate allowed her to sense anybody’s outself within a couple of miles,” said Danny.

“And I can feel all the disturbances in the rock, not to mention the flow patterns, for a hundred miles in every direction. There’s a reason why people had to go through Great Gates before the drowthers deigned to call them gods.”

“So that’s what you and Mom are now?” asked Danny. “Gods?”

“If I had already been a Stonefather, and then went through a Great Gate, then yes, I think I could put on a show that would make drowthers feel a strong desire to let me have my way. But as a Cobblefriend? Let’s just say that my affinity is much more useful. I have more to give the stone, and so the stone replies with greater strength. That’s all.”

Danny stood there, looking at the ground, thinking of how Marion had opened up the earth near Parry McCluer High School and swallowed a pickup truck. Thinking: What will I be able to do, after I go through a Great Gate? And Veevee and Hermia? What does it do to a gatemage?

Wasn’t that what they were making this Great Gate to find out? With no Gate Thief left to threaten him, and with Marion and Leslie primed to keep all danger at bay, Danny could experiment a little. He could stay a minute or two on Westil. Not very long—not long enough to be in danger. But long enough to see the place where Marion and Leslie had lingered for only a fraction of a second. “We blinked and then came back,” Marion explained at the time. “It was daylight and there were rocks and grass, that’s all I know.”

“And he only knows about the grass because I told him,” Leslie had said. “Stonemages don’t care about grass, but Cowsisters have a real eye for it.”

Danny put a little weight on the rope that Marion had suspended. He was so hungry to make a Great Gate that he almost couldn’t wait until the others arrived.

No, that wasn’t true.
Danny
wasn’t hungry for it. What he was feeling as a powerful yearning was coming from many of the outselves trapped inside him. The Gate Thief’s old prisoners, not the Gate Thief himself—
his
gates were all about blocking Great Gates, stealing them, not using them, and certainly not building them.

Could Danny use some of the captive outselves in making a Great Gate, as if they were his own? Hermia had told him that in the old days, mere Pathbrothers would sometimes contribute to a Gatefather their three or four or dozen gates to help reach the critical mass to make a Great Gate. Could he use these captive gates the same way?

Danny tried to use one on an ordinary gate. That is, he did the inward thing that felt like gatemaking, only tried to access one of the captives to do it. The result was almost a physical pain, the rebuff was so sharp and strong.

No!

It felt like a shout from somewhere deep inside him. Not the
word
no, but the meaning of it, the idea of utter rejection.

It made sense. Danny could not force another mage’s gate. In Hermia’s account, the Pathbrothers would donate their gates willingly. These gates had all been stolen, from gatemages who most assuredly would not want their captor using their long-lost outselves to make his gates.

It would have been interesting to see the result of a Great Gate made out of so many different mages’ gates at once. But if they wouldn’t let him, the question was moot.

It made sense. If Gatefathers could make use of stolen gates, then they’d have done it all the time. The Gate Thief wasn’t taking gates in order to use them, he was taking them in order to prevent their being used.

And again he wondered why. Something about the Semitic gods. Something about Bel, the ancient Carthaginian deity.

I won a battle when I beat the Gate Thief, but I didn’t even know what war I was fighting in. For all I know I just intervened in the American Revolution on the side of the British. I have no idea who the good guys are. There are so many enemies; but what if my enemies are right to want to destroy me? What if my defeating the Gate Thief was the worst thing that ever happened in history?

“Stop brooding, Danny, it makes your mouth turn sour,” said Veevee.

So she had taken the gate from Naples, Florida. She was almost quivering with excitement. This Great Gate was more for her than anyone. After all her years of not knowing whether she was a gatemage or not, her complete vindication upon finding Danny’s gates and realizing she could unlock them had been the greatest joy of her life. But then came the frustration of not being able to do anything
but
unlock gates—that and teach Danny all the gatelore she had learned in a lifetime of study.

Now she had hope, however meager, that by passing through a Great Gate she might have her power augmented in some interesting way. It was all she had talked about, whenever there was nothing else to talk about, so that Danny knew that it was where her thoughts always turned in moments of idleness. She hadn’t nagged him, but he felt the pressure of her yearning all the same.

He felt some of the same curiosity himself, and Hermia was, if anything, even more in need of some kind of boost to her abilities, since as a Lockfriend she could only close gates that Danny wasn’t leaving open anyway. But Hermia’s presence here would be dangerous, since she would bring her Family soon after. So she and Danny, left to themselves, might have waited.

Danny, for his part, was afraid. Yes, he had beaten the Gate Thief before, but that might have been a fluke. What if the Gate Thief was waiting for him again, this time prepared for him, this time armed in some terrible way. It could be something as simple as a sword. Danny appears, the Gate Thief swings a mighty sword, plop goes Danny’s head, and even if somebody dragged him through a gate, even a Great Gate, and even if they set his head on his neck and held it there through the passage, Danny didn’t think the healing properties of gate travel would do the trick.

It wouldn’t happen. There was no way the Gate Thief could know where Danny’s new Great Gate would appear on Westil.
Danny
didn’t even know.

“It does look so unfortunately like a gallows,” said Veevee, looking up at the rope and then down to the dangling end. “Did Marion have to put a noose in it?”

“It’s not a noose, it’s a loop,” said Danny. “It’s so I don’t have to hold on so tightly while I spin. I want to have my mind clear.”

“You could just spin around on the ground, like a dervish,” said Veevee.

“I made the gate on the end of a rope last time,” said Danny, “so until I know more I’m doing it the same way this time. For all we know, the strength or endurance or power of the gate depends on the speed of my spin.”

“Or it has no effect at all.”

“Time to experiment with that is after we gatemages have passed through the gate ourselves.”

“And back again,” said Veevee.

Danny knew what she was thinking of. “We don’t know for sure if Ced decided to stay there or not. All it would have taken was a moment’s hesitation. The Gate Thief was on me almost instantly. It could easily have been Marion and Leslie trapped there as well.”

Stone appeared at the tail of the gate to his house in Washington, DC. “Hello, Veevee,” he said.

“‘Veevee’?” she said indignantly. “Not ‘My darling’ or ‘My love’ or—”

“O glorious Gatemage,” said Stone. “O most admirable of women. O thou wife.”

“There we go,” said Veevee, preening playfully. “It may take a little prompting, but you know how to make a girl feel all princessy.”

“It’ll be interesting to see what a Meadowfriend becomes after passing through the Great Gate. I have visions of being able to make every lawn in America grow so rapidly, with grass so tall, that people can’t find their houses.”

“And the buffalo herds return to roam all over North America, consuming lawn grass at a prodigious rate, and yet the grass leaps ever higher,” said Veevee.

“Grass growing from cracks in the sidewalks and asphalt tears it all into little chunks,” said Stone. “In this profuse jungle of life, no vehicle can move; even helicopters can’t land for longer than a minute or two before grass grows up so thick that the blades can’t turn again.”

“And three hundred million people die of starvation,” said Danny dryly.

“But the vast lawns make such a lovely cemetery,” said Veevee.

“Don’t worry, Danny. Even if I could do it, I wouldn’t,” said Stone. “Lawns are the least interesting plants in the world. Everything interesting has been bred out of them. A true meadow has at least a hundred different species of grass, clumping here and there, with a thousand wildflowers and bulbs and tubers and mosses and ferns and—”

“Day lilies,” said Veevee. “I do love day lilies.”

“The poodles of the plant world,” said Stone scornfully.

“So pretty,” said Veevee. “Alone or in great fields of them. Don’t leave them out of our meadow, darling.”

Stone looked at Danny and rolled his eyes.

“I saw that, Peter,” said Veevee. “Eyerolling is rude.”

“Rude but necessary,” said Stone. “For your own good. Make your gate, Danny. The longer I stay here talking with Veevee, the more extravagant the trouble I’ll get myself into.”

“I’ll tell Hermia we’re ready,” said Danny.

Because his gatesense already told him exactly where the gate he had made for her in Rio was—her latest hiding place, the theory being that if she had to keep moving around, at least she could go to warm and interesting places—he was able to make a new gate straight there.

She wasn’t in her hotel room. That was a surprise. She knew that it was nearly time for the making of the Great Gate. She was supposed to be waiting.

Danny immediately made a return gate and stepped toward it just as the shotgun blast went off. He felt the pellets tear through his body and then … no pain at all, because he had passed through the gate back to the barn. He still gasped from the pain he no longer felt, and the others turned toward him.

“They found Hermia,” said Danny. “She wasn’t there, and they weren’t waiting around to talk about it.”

“Are you hurt?” asked Veevee, fingering his tattered shirt.

“I was, for a moment,” said Danny. “I may still have all the pellets in me. I can work on that later. The gate healed the wounds, and I have to find Hermia.”

“It can’t be her own people,” said Stone. “The Greeks may do many terrible things, but they wouldn’t kill the world’s only living gatemage.”

“But they’re the only ones who could track her,” said Danny.

“They might be tracking the trackers,” said Marion.

“Or they might have a sniffer of their own, whoever they are,” said Stone. “The Greeks track Hermia, but a sniffer could simply have found your gate and then waited for you.”

“Some fanatic group that really thinks we shouldn’t go back to Westil?” asked Veevee.

“Or some minions of the Gate Thief,” said Marion.

“I’m going to look,” said Danny. He made a tiny gate, really just a viewport, that showed him the room where someone had shot him.

Two men were standing there, one carrying a shotgun. “I know I hit him before he disappeared,” said one.

Danny made a gate and pulled it over them.

They arrived twenty feet above some spot out in the Atlantic Ocean, far from the nearest land. Danny’s new viewport was in place before they hit the water. The shotgun sank at once; the men cried out for help as they tried to swim.

They weren’t good at it. In fact, one of them was panicking and clearly had no idea how to swim.

Not Greeks, then. Hermia’s Family were proud of their heritage among the thalassocracy, and they were all taught to swim as babies.

Danny needed a way to hold them in place, where they’d be helpless, unable to escape, but in no danger.

Gravity would have to do the police work for him. Danny made a gate that scooped them out of the water, then dumped them twenty yards over it; he moved the mouth just under them to catch them. They fell a half inch into the gate’s mouth, which tossed them back up that half-inch and dropped them again. It gave them a continuous sensation of falling, but they could breathe and they could hear.

Through the viewport, Danny spoke to them.

“I could have put you a thousand feet down and the ocean would already have crushed you.”

The man who had held the shotgun was weeping. But the other seemed capable of listening.

“Where is the woman who lived in that hotel room?” asked Danny.

“Woman?” asked the man.

Danny moved the mouth of the gate so now they fell twenty yards before rising again. He let that go on for a minute and then returned them to a half-inch fall.

“Try again,” said Danny.

“She go to the beach,” said the man. “Then we go in her room. She not come back yet.”

Now that Danny had a chance to study the men, he could start making guesses. “Persians?” he asked. “Hindi?”

The assassin managed to look scornful in the midst of his ongoing terror.

“Tell me what Family you’re from,” said Danny.

“Never,” said the man.

So it
was
a Family—an Orphan would have declared his non-Family status proudly. And it was a Family that regarded hiding its identity as more important than life itself. Any of the known Families might have wanted to do this assassination stealthily, but the secrecy wouldn’t be important enough to die for it. After all, killing gatemages was something they were all sworn to do.

A Family, then, that everyone thought was extinct?

Danny ran through a mental list. Middle Eastern, from the look of them. But all the Families were Indo-European, and in the Middle East that list wasn’t very long. “Hittites?” he asked.

“No!” shouted the man.

Hittites they were, then. Interesting. Exciting, even. How had the Hittite Family remained hidden all this time? They were supposed to have been wiped out before Pompey came to Syria, though some Family historians speculated that they might have adopted the Armenians and helped them surreptitiously.