The Lost Gate (49 page)

“Maybe enough to make a Great Gate of his own,” said Hermia, “and if passing through a Great Gate increases a Gatefather's outself, he might be able to come here and get us.”

“Maybe,” said Danny. “But if you could hear the hunger of his outself—he's all about eating Great Gates, not making them.”

“We need to bring together everything we know. I've had access to five Family books on gatemagery. Veevee's been studying what's available in the public record her whole life. Danny's actually faced the enemy. I think we can put it all together and try to make sense of it.”

“Not tonight,” said Leslie. She was stroking the head of the bird that Zog had tried to use to kill Danny.

“I don't know if I faced the enemy,” said Danny. “I mean, yes, it was the Gate Thief. But he was terrified of something. Of Bel, whoever that is. The god of Carthage, but … we need to find out more about that. Before we start undoing Loki's work, we need to understand it. How do we know we aren't going to unleash on the world the very disaster he tried so hard to prevent?”

“Another day,” said Leslie. “It's late, we're tired. Danny, are you coming home with us?”

“Or me?” said Veevee. “I don't care which, but Leslie's right. We all need to sleep.”

“It's Hermia who needs a place to stay,” said Danny. “You want to go annoy Veevee in her condo? Or get much better cooking with Marion and Leslie?”

Hermia looked from Veevee to the Silvermans and back.

“Or my house,” said Stone. “I take in refugees from the Families.”

“Stick with your fellow gatemage,” said Veevee. “Danny, would you be a dear and restore the gates between Yellow Springs and Naples and DC before you go to bed?”

“Yes,” said Danny. “And don't forget the gates from all of you to my place here in B.V.”

“No,” said Leslie. “You're not
staying
here!”

“Ridiculous,” said Veevee. “After what happened?”

“Do you really think the Norths will leave you alone?” asked Stone.

“Please let's not argue,” said Danny. “I'm trying to make a life for myself here. And tomorrow's a school day.”

Inside himself, however, Danny could feel the pull of a thousand different wills, some weak, some strong. And deeper and stronger than any of them, the outself of the Gate Thief, the ancient Loki. He had felt it surge with exultation when he thrust his own parents back to their home, dismissing them like a lord with a despised underling. He had liked his power far too much.

He needed to get back to school. And no more gates there, no more showing off. He needed roots in the drowther world. Because being a god was too seductive and too dangerous. How many people might he hurt, if he didn't keep this under control? He thought of his friends at school. Who would protect them from the gods, if not Danny? He thought of would-be tyrants like Lieder and weaklings like Massey. Just because Lieder misused his power, and Massey didn't protect anybody with his, didn't mean that in their weakness they didn't need to be treated with fairness and respect. I could dismiss
them,
too, because they have offended me. But there are rules of decency. Or if there aren't, then there should be.

For there was always the possibility that Loki was really a good man after all. That his reason for closing all the gates was real and compelling. That he wasn't just protecting Westil and the Westilians—that maybe he was trying to save the drowthers, too.

I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn't just survive, but deserves to.

AFTERWORD

I began this book as I have begun so many others—with a map. It was 1977. I doodled it and then began naming the places in it. I connected it with an idea I had been nursing along for more than a year, about a magic system in which you gain power over a type of creature or an element or force of nature by serving its interest, helping it become whatever it most wants to become. So as I worked on the map, I decided to take it seriously.

I traced the coastlines and rivers on a clean sheet of unlined paper (it was first doodled on a lined notebook sheet), then xeroxed it a couple of dozen times on the copier at the office of
The Ensign
magazine, where I was working as an assistant editor at the time. Then I drew in the borders of countries, showing the changes across time. When I named them, I let the names also change with the centuries.

When I was done, it felt to me as if I had a whole history there, with a sense of ancientness and power in it. The kind of feeling I always get from poring over historical atlases. (I once created a type-in program for the PC junior's BASIC language, showing the results of every presidential election in U.S. history as colors on a map. It was another way of containing the sweep of history in a two-dimensional space. The book it was supposed to appear in died with the PCjr, and the program can't run under any existing version of BASIC. So you'll have to take my word that it was great.)

With the maps complete, it was time to try out the magic system. The result was the dark story “Sandmagic.” Though the story was rejected with a rude letter by the quondam editor of
Fantastic
magazine, I refused to give up. It was published in an anthology of Andy Offutt's and then picked up for a best-fantasy-of-the-year anthology. That was all the validation that I needed.

The trouble was, I cared too much about the Mithermages world. I thought of it as my best world ever, and my best magic system. I wanted to tell only stories that were worthy of it. And besides, in those days fantasy didn't often sell as well as science fiction. I had a family to support. I stuck with the spaceships and held on to Mithermages for some later date, when I had found a story that could bring out all its possibilities.

Little did I know that I already had part of the story. Jay A. Parry, my closest friend at
The Ensign
(or anywhere, at that time), and I were working on a story idea together, about an orphan or bastard kid who lived in a medieval castle, prowling and spying as he crawled through beams and rafters, secret passageways, roof thatch, gullies, drains, and tunnels. He would know everything that was going on in the castle, yet everyone would ignore or despise him. Jay named him “Wad.”

Years later, we even tried to create a collaborative novel that we could sell together. Jay wrote an opening that was very good, but I somehow couldn't carry on with it. Now I realize that it was the magic system we were working with at the time that blocked me—it wasn't strong enough. Yet I couldn't think of a better one.

Skip forward a few decades. I had already published the Mithermages maps in a small collection entitled
Cardography.
(The maps don't appear in this book because they aren't needed yet; they'll show up in the next volume.) Still I had not written a story set in that world since “Sandmagic.” Yet the maps and the magic wouldn't leave me alone. I was brooding about it one day when it dawned on me that if Wad lived in the world of Mithermages,
his
might be the story worth writing.

I asked Jay for permission to take Wad and put him in this world of mine. Jay graciously gave his consent, and so I have preserved the name Jay thought of for this lost and lonely boy. I knew at once the place where he would live in the novel—Iceway, a northern kingdom that thrived by trading and raiding on the sea.

For a time the Mithermages project was under the tutelage of editor Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey, with whom I had worked so happily on the book I thought of as the best in my career so far,
Magic Street.
She helped and advised me greatly in developing Mithermages, and it was at this time that I decided that I would stretch the story between our present-day natural world and the magical one, rather the way I had done with
Magic Street
and its immediate predecessor, the contemporary/medieval fantasy romance
Enchantment.

At once the magic system erupted: It would explain everything. Elves and fairies, ancient mythical gods of every Indo-European culture, ghosts and poltergeists, werewolves and trolls and golems, seven-league boots and mountains that move, talking trees and invisible people—all would be contained within it.

As I was fitting the magic of Mithermages into our world, past and present, I was invited by Gardner Dozois to submit a story to an anthology called
Wizards.
I came up with a new story set entirely in the Mithermages world, at an unspecified but early time period. I called it “Stonefather,” and I knew as soon as I finished it that it was one of the best stories I'd ever written. I later brought it out in collaboration with Subterranean Press as a slim stand-alone book with a gorgeous cover by Tom Kidd. I had tangible proof that the Mithermages world was still alive and could give rise to strong stories.

But it was slow going, building up the story of Wad and the simultaneous tale of Danny, the boy born into our world as a gatemage in a Westilian Family. The problem was that the magic system was too thick. There was so much to explain. For years I was stuck in one place: an opening I wrote in which a much younger Danny struggles just to figure out what was going on in his magical family.

By the time I solved the problem, the project had moved to my primary publisher, Tor, and I was working once again with longtime editor and friend Beth Meacham. I realized (finally!) that my whole approach was faulty. Instead of having Danny know almost nothing, and have the reader learn each point as Danny learned it, I started the book afresh with Danny as a twelve-year-old knowing as much as anyone in his family about the way magic worked and how the Westilians fit into the universe.

I was really following my own advice—I tell students in my writing classes that suspense comes, not from knowing almost nothing, but from knowing almost everything and caring very much about the small part still unknown. I had expected to spend quite a bit of time in the North Family compound, developing Danny's relationships with the Aunts and Uncles, the Cousins, and his parents and siblings, but I quickly found the place too cramped and depressing—as Danny did. I had painted him into a corner; he could not thrive there. I had to get him out.

From the moment he left the Family compound and started shoplifting at the Lexington Wal-Mart, the book hummed along right to the end. The scene that I had originally envisioned as the beginning of the novel—a gate that would allow Danny and other kids to shoot right to the top of a climbing rope in a high school gym in Buena Vista, Virginia—now became the climactic scene. Meanwhile, Wad's story, which had stayed stubbornly vague for years, suddenly took on clarity as I wrote the story “The Man in the Tree,” always intended as a chapter of this book, and then created the character of Queen Bexoi as Wad's ally, lover, and nemesis.

Only one ingredient was missing, and it came by purest chance. Years ago, Victoria Von Roth, a wonderful actress whom I directed in
Posing As People
in a production in Los Angeles, almost demanded that I name a character in one of my books after her. Since then she had reminded me from time to time, and it happened that one of those reminders came at exactly the moment when I had Danny in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and had no idea how to push him forward on his journey of discovery. “Use my name in this book,” Veevee suggested, so I did. I thought of the real Victoria's exuberant personality and genuine kindness, and the character who bears her name in this novel came forth. I ran the chapters past Victoria for her approval; if she hadn't liked the character, I would simply have changed the name. But she did approve, and the name stayed.

Beth Meacham was reading the chapters as they came out of my computer, the first time I have ever let an editor read my chapters at the same time as my wife, Kristine, read them, instead of waiting till after. Beth was helpful at every stage, either with suggestions or needed encouragement; Kristine was also my reliable first reader, helping me walk the narrow line between the earthiness I wanted and some level of decorum that the general readership might enjoy.

Other primary readers—Erin and Phillip Absher and Kathryn H. Kidd—got the chapters in their rawest form as well. They all contributed greatly as I moved the story forward.

With the ironclad deadline for publication looming during the summer of 2010, more than thirty-three years after I first drew the maps of the world I now call Westil (after one of the more important nations in its history), I was compelled to finish the novel despite all other distractions, including teaching two weeklong writing workshops. I wrote a chapter nearly every day as Kristine and I flew to Poland for the launch of the translation of
Ender in Exile.
Chapters were written in jets on the way to and from Poland, in Warsaw, and in Czeszin, where I took part in a sci-fi and fantasy convention that combined the annual EuroCon with the national conventions of Poland, Czechland, and Slovakia. I met or reacquainted myself with many wonderful people, and came home with all but four of the chapters done.

On the first of September I finished the last chapter, and put the book into the hands of the wonderful staff at Tor, who went the extra mile in making up for my late completion to bring the book out on time. My thanks to all.

Above all, though, I must thank my family—Kristine, of course, and our youngest, Zina—for their patience during the stress it always causes when I have a book under construction. Erin Absher helped many times to make our lives possible during episodes of travel, while my assistant (and the managing editor of my magazine,
Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show
at www.oscigms.com), Kathleen Bellamy, and our webwright and IT manager, Scott Allen, kept the world running smoothly around us.