The Lost Gate (47 page)

He could not think about this now, because from his vantage point he saw at once that a dozen men were being lowered over the castle walls on ropes, heading for each of a dozen caves that overlooked the lake below. In three of them, he knew, they would find Anonoei and her two sons. They had pikes. Their plan could not be clearer. And Wad remembered that he had told the Queen what the prison he had made consisted of, but had never told her that the three of them were separated, or which of the caves contained them.

Wad knew how to save Anonoei and her children, but he had no intention of bringing them back to King Prayard. That would only put their lives in danger, for the King was now besotted with Bexoi, who carried his child. If he had taken Wad's advice and watched at the viewport in Anonoei's old room, then he would know that Oath was not his child, that Bexoi had been faithless to him, that she knew who had captured Anonoei and her children, and that Queen Bexoi was a firemage. If he had not watched, he would not know. But either way, there was little hope for Wad's three prisoners if he brought them to a place inside Nassassa. Bexoi would kill them if the King did not.

So instead, Wad cast his inner gaze to a place high in the mountains, where once he had found clothing left by a young girl's hands. But where were the girl and her family, who had picnicked by the tree where Wad had dwelt in silent dreaming for so many centuries? He knew that poor as they were, the family would take in the children and their mother. And the prisoners, for their part, would be so grateful to be free that they would accept whatever meager fare was offered them.

Later, Wad would come to Anonoei and her sons and tell them a useful story about who imprisoned them and how they were set free. Later, he would bring them to the people who still mistrusted Bexoi and believed the kingdom would be better served if Anonoei's children were King Prayard's heirs.

Once, fresh-hatched from the tree, Wad had shadowed the girl and her family along a mountain road. Wad had seen where they arrived. And now he was there, looking down a slope at the lonely house in shaggy fields nearly ready for the poor harvest of the short growing season in the mountains.

He took the gate at the mouth of the cave where the dangling soldier braced his feet upon the sill, poised to jab with the pike into Eluik's body, and pushed the gatemouth up the sloping floor to swallow the child inside. At that very moment he had already moved the tail of the gate to a spot in the dry grass just up the hill from the house of Roop and Levet, and their brave and kind-hearted daughter Eko, who once had succored him.

Wad paused only long enough to see that Eluik was there and alive, then returned his attention to the face of the cliff. Another soldier now was poised at the mouth of the cave that held Anonoei, readying his pike to probe the woman who lay trapped and helpless before him.

At that most inconvenient moment, Wad felt a familiar stirring that he did not understand. It was a burning somewhere deep inside him, in the well from which five hundred voices cried to him. He did not know what the burning meant, or why the voices cried out when the burning came, or who they even were, but he knew that every time he had felt this burning during all his years inside the tree, the only way to still the hunger was to eat.

Not food, but the thing that burned.

Now, though, he was not in the tree. Now he was a woken man, a Gatefather who understood his own magery. So what he had experienced during his long tree-sleep as a burning and an eating, as unconscious as that of a babe inside the womb, he now understood quite differently.

It was the presence of another gatemage that had stirred him up. Or rather, it was the creation of a Great Gate that was not his own which caused him to burn inside. The new Great Gate led from a world that Wad had once known well, but now could not remember. He only knew that if that Gate were left in place, it would destroy everything that mattered in the world.

So Wad reached out, by instinct now, after so many years of habitual response, and ate it. He felt the outself of the other mage, the maker of the gate, react with surprise and try to pull away. He knew that he had felt the selfsame thing at least two dozen times while he had lived inside the tree. But this time he understood that it was a person, and that what he ate was that other person's heart, his outself, the part of him that made his gates. Wad swallowed that heart, and with it dragged inside himself the whole array of gates the other mage had made, sucked them in like noodles that dangled outside the mouth, only to be slurped inside. And in a moment he had them, all the gates.

There were so many. This one had so many gates, and yet they had not begun to exhaust his hearthoard. Wad had never seen a Gatefather with so much potential. But, as usual, the gatemage was naive and did not understand what was happening with him. He had not learned enough to know how to resist Wad's strength and skill and wiliness.

But just as Wad was about to sever the connection between the gatemage and all the gates he would ever make, a strange thing happened. Out of the heart Wad held already in the jaws of his inner mouth, the other gatemage stretched open a mouth much larger than Wad's own, and snapped it over him, over his entire hearthoard, over all the other mages' hearthoards that Wad held inside him. The stranger snapped, he bit, the connection was severed. And Wad was helpless to resist.

If the other mage had not been so naive, he would have sucked in all of Wad's existing gates as well, but he did not. The gates that Wad had made remained. But he had no hearthoard now, nothing with which to form another gate.

In that moment, Wad went from being the greatest Gatefather that the world of Westil ever knew to being one so frail he had no store of gates inside him, and only a handful of existing gates that he could manipulate.

The soldier stabbed into the cave with his pike, and Wad could not do anything at first. It would take a tiny bit of his outself even to move her gate the way that he had moved Eluik's, and he had no shred of outself left to do even this.

So he sucked Anonoei's gate into himself, to give himself some kind of hearthoard, however small.

Her bleeding body tumbled from the cave mouth toward the lake.

Now Wad had enough reserve that he could move the mouth of Eluik's gate to a place just under the falling woman. It swallowed her; she disappeared in midair; but he felt her emerge in the snow near Eko's house, fully healed by the passage through the gate.

He found the cave where Enopp had been held. The soldier there was drawing back his pike from the cave, and on the end of it Enopp hung, gripping it with both his hands, though it pierced him through the belly. If it had been his heart, no doubt it would have been too late to save him, but quickly Wad took back Enopp's gate, gaining even more power and quickness. Then he swung the mouth of Eluik's gate to swallow him. He disappeared.

But because Enopp still gripped the pike, it came along with him, leaving the soldier standing there, balanced between cave sill and taut rope, with empty hands.

Enopp emerged between his mother and his brother in the mountain grass. He was not healed by the gate because the spear still pierced his body and he still held on to it.

Pull out the pike, Wad shouted in his mind. But Anonoei and Eluik just stood there, shivering and terrified. Two years of prison had made them helpless, broken, unresourceful. They could do nothing.

Wad moved the mouth of the gate across the gorge until it swallowed Wad himself. He too emerged on the mountain slope. He pulled the pike from the writhing boy, then dragged the mouth of the gate from Nassassa to this place and passed it once more over the boy, depositing him only inches from where he started, but with no wound in his belly.

Wad stood revealed now before Anonoei.

“You,” she said. “The kitchen monkey. Wad.”

He turned to her. “Get your sons down the hill and beg these gentle souls for help! Are you a fool? Walk!”

But they could not walk. They could barely stand.

Wad gathered in more of the gates that he still had to work with, a tiny fraction of the outself he was born with, and made a gate to take them down to a spot just outside the door of the humble shack. “Open up!” he shouted.

No one came.

The house was empty.

Wad gated them inside the hovel. It would be warmer there than outside. It was all that he could do right now.

Because he had a greater concern, now they were safe. What had Anonei and her boys ever been to him, except his enemies and then his prisoners and finally his terrible burden of responsibility? For them as human beings he cared nothing, because he knew them not at all.

All he could think of now was: Where is Trick? He was not in the burning crib when I reached for him. Where did she put him?

Wad used the gate at hand, reversed it, and took himself back to the hill overlooking the fjord and Nassassa's steepest wall. Then he closed the gate entirely, and gathered up all the other gates, the ones that once had been his passageways to freedom in Nassassa, the gates that once had led him to the Queen. Now he wished that he had been like the mage who swallowed up his hearthoard, leaving hundreds of gates everywhere. If he had not been so tidy, he would have them now. Instead his entire hearthoard was no more than that of a common Pathbrother.

How could I not have understood that I was the Gate Thief all along? What did I think those voices inside me were, that seething mass of rage and loss and fading memory? I did not think. I did not remember a time when they were not there. But there must have been such a time, because I stole them all. Somewhere among them was Hull's grandfather. So many others. Why was I doing this? Why was it so important that no gates be made in this world, or leading from another world to here?

Wad realized now that his old self, the self that still remembered things, must have hidden inside the tree so he would live for centuries, stealing gates and gatemages' hearts. Why had he become the enemy of all gatemagery? Why couldn't he remember? Had his memories seeped into the tree, lost to him forever? Or did they remain somewhere inside him, waiting to be found?

He gathered in his gates and then used these feeble resources to search Nassassa for his son.

He found Trick's body smothered under the gown of the last nurse who had been on duty. When Wad had been distracted, watching her replacement stumble and go to the kitchen to get her injury attended to, the woman had suffocated the child and carried the body out beneath her clothing. Trick was already dead before Wad went to the nursery to see the Queen.

Wad had supposed that he and Trick were safe until the new baby was born. The Queen had counted on him to believe that, and so she acted in advance, carefully manipulating Wad's attention. Only her failure to kill Wad himself had prevented all from going as she planned. This was the day, the hour she had chosen for all her rivals to die. And she had hidden it from him.

Wad gated the dead toddler out from the nurse's gown and brought the body to his own arms. The gate had no power to heal the child now. He was already cold.

Wad did not kill the nurse. She had only obeyed her Queen. Let the woman be tormented by the memory of the struggling boy, and by the fear of what would happen when the Queen demanded she produce the corpse. When she could not do it, Bexoi would assume that the nurse had given it to someone else. Bexoi would assume the baby was alive, that she had not had the heart to kill it, just as Wad had not killed Anonoei and Eluik and Enopp.

If that had only been the truth, if Wad had found his son alive, he would have spared the nurse who refused to kill him. Even in his weakened state, he would have gated her away to safety. Now, with no corpse to prove her obedience, he would let her suffer the consequence of being thought innocent of murder by the one who ordered her to do it.

For a moment he thought of a terrible justice: putting the body of his son back into Bexoi's womb, to share the space with his half-brother, only a month away from birth. If Bexoi lived through the insertion—and Wad had lost none of his deftness, so she might—the body would decay and rot inside her, and soon wreak vengeance on his monstrous mother and his usurping wombmate.

But Wad had no murder in him now. Grief and fear had overpowered his rage. A Gatefather in another world had proven he was stronger than Wad. Someday that mage would come here to this world, and Wad would have no power to resist him. Now was not the time for meaningless murders. Let Bexoi have her kingdom, if she could keep it, if Anonoei could not find a way to take it from her. Wad had other work to do. Other enemies to deal with.

He sat upon the hill, a Gatefather who was now but a shadow of himself, and wept. For all his crimes he wept, for all who had died before he could save them, for the mages he had stripped of power even more utterly than he had been stripped today. I held their outselves in my hearthoard for a thousand years, some of them, or more. I made myself the thief of hearts, and now I am repaid.

And yet I must stand watch against some enemy whose name I do not know, some danger that I can't identify, some world-ending dread that now will find me nearly empty.

I was the god who was supposed to protect this world. Was it my nemesis who took away my heart today? Or merely some innocent gatemage who happened to be stronger than I ever was, and unknowingly laid the world bare to the real enemy, whatever that might be?

Wad gated himself away from Nassassa to the mountains. He found Eko working in another field beside another house—a larger one. The family had become more prosperous. They had abandoned their old house in the high and meager fields.

Eko knew him when she saw him, and her face brightened. “Tree man,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, “for what you did for me.”

She knelt before him. “O Man of the Tree,” she said, “how can I serve you now?”

“In your old house higher up the mountain, there is a woman and her sons. They are helpless and no one else knows where they are. If the King or Queen should find them, they'll be killed. But they have friends who soon will seek them. Keep them alive until I can find and bring their friends.”