“Cool,” said Wheeler.
Danny turned to Wheeler. “This isn’t a comic book, Wheeler. It doesn’t go from panel to panel until the good guys win. In the real world, good guys lose all the time. What wins is power. I have a lot of it, but I don’t have enough to protect you all the time. I advise you to get the hell away from me and pretend you never met me. With any luck, none of the Families will notice you and you’ll be as safe as anyone.”
“How safe is that?” asked Pat.
“If I create a Great Gate and the Families send people through, so they become gods again instead of elves and wizards, the way they are now, then you won’t have a choice anymore. You’ll stay out of their way, and if they notice you, you’ll do what you’re told or you’ll die. Our Families aren’t nice people. They call you drowthers. They think of you the way you think of cars. Useful when you need them, but fun to crash into each other and watch them blow up and burn.”
They were looking sick and scared. So Danny was communicating.
“Do you see why I tried not to tell you?” said Danny.
“I think you’re just trying to scare us,” said Xena defiantly.
“Is it working?” asked Danny.
“Yes,” said Laurette.
“Good,” said Danny. “I came here in hopes of having a normal life. Two years of high school. But then I got stupid and did that thing with the rope climb and Hermia saw it and told me that it was a Great Gate. I finally got the knowledge to do some really powerful stuff.”
“But it sounds terrible,” said Sin. “Why would you let them through?”
“Here’s how it’ll work,” said Danny. “Either I’ll work out a way to give all the Families equal access to a Great Gate, or one of the Families will kidnap somebody I care about and kill them if I don’t give them exclusive use of a Great Gate.”
“Who would they kidnap?” asked Hal.
“Hermia. The woman who pretends to be my aunt. Or maybe you, Hal. It depends on how much they’ve observed already.”
“And if they kidnapped Hal,” said Laurette, “what would you do?”
“He’d let them kill Hal,” said Hermia. “He’d let them kill me. Because if he lets one Family have a Great Gate, and not the others, then that means that the most violent and evil Family will rule the world. But if they all have a share of the Gate, then maybe, just maybe, they’ll balance each other out. Maybe they’ll avoid a war. Maybe you drowthers won’t all end up as collateral damage.”
“Is she right?” Hal asked Danny.
“I hope so,” said Danny. “But if it came down to it, I don’t know if I could do it. Let them kill you or her or anybody. Up to now, the only life I was risking was my own. But once I made a Great Gate, everything changed. Now the whole world is at risk.”
“But you can do things,” said Hal. “Like, if you’d been around for 9/11, you could have made those planes-”
“No, I couldn’t have done a thing,” said Danny. “Because I would have found out about it when everybody else did, by watching television. I’ve got a couple of talents, but I’m not really a god. Not like you’re thinking-a god that knows everything and can do anything he wants. I can do a few specific things, and I don’t know very much at all.”
“Then what good is it?” asked Pat.
“Not much,” said Danny. “All I can do is try to keep the damage to a minimum.”
“So what’s your choice?” said Hermia. “My Family’s on the way here right now, you can count on that. If you’re going to choose not to stand with Danny, then he’s got to get you away from here before they come. Go get in your cars and drive away and forget you ever knew Danny. Don’t do anything to tip off the Families that you’re his friends, or you’ll end up as hostages. Get it?”
“Shit,” said Sin. “That’s just-that’s terrible.”
“Exactly,” said Hermia.
“Why did you make a Great Gate, man?” asked Hal.
“Because I’m a servant of spacetime,” said Danny. “Because it’s what I was born for. Because I faced a powerful enemy and beat him. Because I’m stupid.”
“There’s a feeble chance,” said Hermia, “that it will be better. For instance, Danny’s father and mother, if they went through a Great Gate, maybe they’d come back and use their power to destroy all the nuclear weapons in the world.”
“Could they do that?” asked Hal.
“The question is, would they,” said Hermia. “The Families don’t have a history of trying to make life better for the drowthers.”
“Drowthers-that’s us?” asked Xena.
“It sounds like the N word,” said Pat.
“It’s exactly like the N word, the way most people in the Families use it,” said Danny. “But some of us want to use our power to protect you.”
“Don’t let them through the Gate, man,” said Hal.
“I told you how they’ll make him do it,” said Hermia.
“Then kill yourself first,” said Hal. “That’s what I’d do.”
The words hung in the air.
“Maybe you would,” said Danny. “But I’m not that kind of hero. I’m not any kind of hero.”
“‘With great power comes great responsibility,’” intoned Wheeler.
“If only,” said Danny. “In the real world, with great power comes great suffering-by the people who don’t have the power.”
“I wasn’t kidding,” said Hal. “You shouldn’t exist. If you didn’t exist, things would keep on going the way they have been since 632 or whenever.”
“Spacetime would only create another like me,” said Danny. “And maybe the next guy would be even worse than me.”
“He did use his power to help us,” said Laurette.
“You were knocking Coach Bleeder on his ass,” said Hal.
“Yes,” said Danny. “And making him drop his watch.”
“To protect me?” asked Hal.
“And because it was funny,” said Danny.
“It was funny,” said Hal.
“Are you going to destroy the world, Danny?” asked Sin.
“I hope not,” said Danny. “Here’s what I hope. I hope that the Families will unite to use their power to stop all wars, to stop all the terrorists, to put an end to all the shit.”
“Did they ever do that before, back before the gates were closed?” asked Hal.
“No,” said Danny.
“Why would it be any different now?” said Hal.
“Because Danny’s here,” said Hermia. “If one of the Family starts acting like Stalin or Pol Pot or Idi Amin, Danny has the power to gate him to the bottom of the Atlantic, and they know it. They’ve got no way to stop him. As long as Danny’s alive, he has a chance to keep it all under control.”
“So you’re going to be, like, the god of all gods,” said Hal.
Danny sat down. “Yeah,” he said.
“Plus graduate from high school on schedule,” said Hal.
“Maybe I’m not going to be able to pull that off,” said Danny.
“Why did you ever think you could?” asked Pat.
“Because I didn’t know I could make a Great Gate when I came here,” said Danny. “I didn’t know anything. I just wanted to be normal.”
Hal made a weighing motion with his hands. “Normal, or supreme god. Supreme god, or normal. So hard to decide.” Then Hal reached out his hand to Danny. Offering a handshake.
“I’m in,” said Hal.
“In what?”
“In the same shit soup as you,” said Hal. “I’m your messenger. Or servant. Or whatever you need. I think you’re a good guy. I think if anybody’s going to have this kind of power, I’d rather it be you than anybody else I can think of, except maybe Winston Churchill, and he’s dead.”
Danny solemnly took his hand.
“So Hal gets to be your right-hand man,” said Wheeler. “Just because he was willing to talk to you when you came to Parry McCluer High.”
“Because he’s my fr
iend,” said Danny, “and he volunteered.”
“Well I volunteer too,” said Wheeler.
And in a few moments, they had all agreed.
“So get in your cars,” said Danny, “and get away from here.”
“I thought that was what we’d do if we said no,” said Laurette.
“I don’t want Hermia’s people to know about you. Not yet. Go. You’re my friends. Your intervention worked. We’ve told you everything that we know. We didn’t pretty it up. And you chose to stand with me. So the first thing is, if I say get out of here, you get out. So they can’t use you as hostages to control me.”
They nodded.
“Don’t act like drowthers,” said Hermia impatiently. “He doesn’t want nodding. He wants going!”
And with that, Danny gated them all, one at a time, out to the cars.
After a moment of disorientation and confusion, they scrambled into the cars and drove away.
“That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” asked Hermia. “You wanted me to tell them, right?”
“I didn’t know that’s what I wanted until you did it,” said Danny. “But yes. They asked for the truth. They’re not children, they’re people. They deserve to have the knowledge to choose for themselves.”
“They made a stupid decision,” said Hermia.
“True,” said Danny. “But all the decisions are stupid. I’ve made nothing but stupid decisions. You too.”
Hermia grinned. “When there aren’t any smart decisions, I suppose you just have to pick the stupid decision you like best.”
“Your Family is coming, right?” asked Danny.
“I can’t imagine they’re not.”
“Then it’s time to move to a different location,” said Danny.
“It’s time for me to move to one place, and you to another,” said Hermia. “Until we’re ready to set up the meeting we want. Because they’ll always know where I am, and we don’t want them to know where you are.”
So Danny gated Hermia to a place she knew in Paris. Then he wrote a note to the Greeks and left it on the table in his own little house in Buena Vista.
“I will let you send two people through a Great Gate,” said the note. “Go home and wait for my messenger. After today, anybody from any Family who comes to this town will be sent to the Moon. Leave now.”
Danny opened the front door, so they wouldn’t have to break it down. No reason for the landlord to lose money.
Then Danny gated to Washington, DC, then on to Staunton, to Lexington, and then to Naples, Florida, gathering in his gates behind him so they couldn’t trace him if they happened to have a Gatesniffer that Hermia didn’t know about.
Veevee knew at once that he had come through a gate into her condo. She came up from the beach through the gate he had left there for her. “Just in time for the season finale of The Good Wife,” she said.
“Is that a TV show?” asked Danny.
“It’s pure fantasy,” she said. “There are no good wives.”
“What about good husbands?” asked Danny.
“We’ll see-when you grow up. Want a sandwich?”
“I’ll make my own,” he said. “We told all my friends about what I can do.”
“Well, that was selfish and stupid of you.”
“They insisted,” said Danny.
“That was stupid of them, but they didn’t know what they were asking. You have no excuse.”
“I know,” said Danny. “But other people are going to be involved whether we like it or not. Might as well have some of them on our team, on purpose, by their own choice.”
Veevee shrugged, then laughed. “It’s going to be so entertaining, to see how this all comes out. Right up to the moment when everything goes up in smoke.”
“We’re gods,” said Danny. “What could go wrong?”
4
CAPTIVE
Wad was so very old that even his own grief and rage could not hold him deeply, not for long. The being who had dwelt inside a tree for fourteen centuries, watching for only one thing, a gate between worlds, was not fully engaged in being a human being, not yet, perhaps not ever.
Wad was a watcher above all. Yes, he had been taken as the lover of a queen. Yes, he had loved his son, had tried to protect him, and then had been outwitted by his lover, his enemy, Queen Bexoi, and his son was dead. Yes, he had imprisoned an innocent woman and her sons, then set them free. Surely this qualified as having been truly alive.
But Wad was still watching. Not only seeing what lay outside himself, as he had done creeping through the castle at Kamesham, but also what was happening inside himself, where his gatesense lay.
In his early life as Loki, and then for centuries as the Gate Thief, Wad had captured and held the gates of other mages, but never had a gate of his own been taken from him. So he had not understood what it was like to have his outself captive in another mage’s hearthoard.
Of course it was well known what happened to other mages when their outself was taken captive. How they lay inert, comatose, waiting for their wandering self to return.
But they were not gatemages. Their outselves were usually indivisible. Only the greatest of mages could control multiple clants or ride several heartbeasts at once-and even they suffered from the self-division.
Gatemages, though, were divisible by nature. They could leave bits of themselves here and there forever, as gates that others could use, always aware of where they were, but never putting their whole attention into any one gate.
Which is why, when Wad stole all the gates from mage after mage, he did not leave their bodies empty and helpless. They were able to continue their lives almost normally. Wad had therefore believed that he had done them no real harm. They were still themselves, still alive and aware, still able to control their own bodies.
He had not understood.
When the new Gatefather from Mittlegard stole most of Wad’s gates from his hearthoard, including all the gates that Wad had stolen from others over the years, at first Wad could only think about the handful of gates that he still had under his own control. He had used those gates to save Anonoei, King Prayard’s concubine, and her two sons, Eluik and Enopp. He still had some power. He was still a mage.
But now, without an urgent task, he realized what he had not understood before. More of the gatemage is in his gates than Wad had ever supposed. For he was still aware of his stolen gates. He still knew exactly where they were. He felt them all the time. He just couldn’t do anything with them.
Yet, like the outself of a beastmage, riding with the heartbeast, or like a clant raised from plants or stones or sand or water or fire, his stolen gates were aware, alert, sensing what the possessor of the gates was doing, seeing, hearing.
And the longer Wad concentrated on his stolen gates, the more he was able to get glimpses of what the other gatemage wanted, what he planned, what he needed, what he hungered for. It was not quite words; always the words remained just out of reach. Unless this thief, this Gatefather, this Danny North spoke his thoughts aloud, Wad could not gather them up and study them. But as surely as if he were a beastmage, Wad could feel the inner longings of this man-no, this boy.
He could not change anything, could not take control of him-Danny North was master, and there was not enough of Wad within his captured gates for him to hope to take control. The deepest self of a gatemage was not in his outselves, the way it was with other kinds of mages. This was why gatemages could raise no clants. But the gates were still a part of him, and so now he was a part of Danny North.
And all the gates that Wad had stolen over the centuries, they had felt the same. The mages were not as strong as Wad, and so perhaps they had not felt themselves inside him as clearly as Wad now felt himself inside Danny North. But they must have been aware.
And because Wad had lived on and on inside the tree, the captured gates had not faded and died after their mages died. They were all still alive.
Wad had suppressed them, kept them si
lent. But they had been watching. They knew him as no one could ever know another human being, from the heart out-unless manmages also had such deep understanding.
In only a few days inside Danny North, Wad knew him intimately, the feel of him, the kind of man he was, the loves and fears and hopes and hates of him. So in these fourteen centuries, how well did the other gatemages still shadowed in Wad’s hearthoard come to know him?
And now their knowledge was inside Danny North.
Wad could feel them, too, the gates that were fellow captives of this boyish Gatefather. He realized now that he knew them all, that even as he suppressed their cries, the tumult of their rage and despair, their surges of will, he had come to know them. They had been a part of him, and now that they were gone, he missed that intimate connection. At such great distance, in another man’s hearthoard on another world, he longed to listen to them now.
The trouble was, they hated him. Even inside Danny North’s hearthoard, they stayed as far from Wad’s gates as they could. For even there, Wad’s power was great, his hoard of gates vast indeed compared to theirs-though all of them were puny before the billion gates that belonged to Danny North himself. The other gates-the remnants of so many dead mages-still feared and hated Wad.
And loved Danny North.
That was what astonished Wad, when he understood it. These gates were no less captive than they had been before. Danny North had not set them free. Yet they responded to their new master as if he had liberated them. As much as they had hated-still hated-Wad, they loved this boy.
That was what Wad now struggled to understand. I was a good man, thought Wad. When I walked two worlds under the name of Loki, I saw the great danger that both worlds faced from the dark manmages from the world of Bel, the possessors of men’s bodies and souls. And I sacrificed everything to save the worlds from the dragons of Bel. Did that not make me the best of men?
Yet they never came to understand the nobility and greatness of my cause. Centuries inside me, and their hatred never relented.
Inside Danny North, though, they seemed to blossom, to come to new life. A pathetic, shadowy life, but life it was. They were still alert, still aware, but calm, not seething as they had done inside Wad.
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