by IGMS
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 --"
"Daylilies," said Veevee. "I do love daylilies."
"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.
But historical interest would have to wait. "If Hermia is dead," said Danny, "so are you."
"Alive!" the man cried. "We not touch her."
"No Great Gates!" shouted the other man, the weeping one. "Bel comes! Bel goes to Yllywee!"
So they were allies of the Gate Thief. Or shared his fear; Illywee was an ancient name of Westil. Danny remembered the runic inscription in the Library of Congress. "We have faced Bel and he has ruled the hearts of many." Manmages from another world -- a world not Earth and not Westil. "Loki found the dark gate of Bel through which their god poured fear into the world." Why would it matter whether Danny made a Great Gate if Bel already knew how to make gates of his own?
The Hittites knew something, and he had to find out what it was.
Danny moved the tail of the gate that suspended them to the barn. They plopped in a sodden mass amid the straw near a milking stall. At once Danny brought back the mouth of the gate, scooped them up, and hung them in the air ten feet above the barn floor.
"What's going on, Danny?" demanded Marion. "How can you bring strangers to --"
"Hittites," said Danny. "They shot me, and they know something about Bel."
There had been enough discussion of the runic passage that everyone immediately understood the significance.
"I need you to question them while I'm gone," said Danny to Marion.
"I'm not an interrogator," said Marion.
"I didn't say torture them," said Danny. "Ask them questions."
"You're torturing them," said Marion. "Look how afraid they are! They're falling and falling!"
"People pay money to go up in airplanes and freefall like this before they open their parachutes," said Danny. "It's not torture, it's just a way of keeping them where we want them."
"Not here," said Marion.
"Fine," said Danny. "I'll put them back out over the Atlantic till I find Hermia."
"No!" shouted Leslie from the door. "Let them go at once!"
"They killed me!" shouted Danny. "They're assassins."
"And Hittites," added Veevee. "So they're evil and interesting."
"This is not what a good man does," said Leslie coldly.
Danny knew at once that she was right. His fear and anger had made him act by reflex. Yet he had also shown restraint, and he wanted credit for it.
"I could have killed them," said Danny. "I didn't kill them."
"They're sopping wet," said Leslie.
"I didn't know they couldn't swim," said Danny. "But I pulled them out of the water, didn't I?"
"Get them out of my barn," said Leslie. "Now."
Back to the ocean, then. Again, Danny had to move the tail of the gate first, which put them back in the water, flailing and sputtering, and screaming whenever they could catch their breath. Then he got them back up in the air. By now they thought of that continuous freefall as a good thing, no doubt, compared to drowning.
Danny followed them this time, suspending himself in the air. No falling in the water -- when he was moving himself through space, he was much quicker, more deft about it.
"I'm going to go see where my friend is," said Danny. "If she's hurt or dead, I'll do the same thing to one of you while the other watches."
"We not to touch her, we not talk to her!" the less-panicked man insisted.
Danny gated himself back to Hermia's hotel room in Rio. It was empty this time, no shotguns waiting. They door was undamaged -- they must have bribed their way in. Danny went to the balcony and looked out over the broad beach. So many people lying there or milling around. But after a few minutes he spotted someone who might be Hermia. He made a gate near her. If it was Hermia, she'd see it and step into it; if it wasn't, she wouldn't.
It was. She did.
"Is it already time?" she asked as soon as she was in the hotel room.
"I came here for you," said Danny, "and I was met by a shotgun blast."
Hermia saw the pellet pattern on the wall, Danny's punctured clothes, and exclaimed softly. "My Family wouldn't --"
"Not your Family," said Danny.
"They just shot to kill? Without a warning?"
"No negotiations. Just ... bang."
"Who was it?"
"Hittites, I'm pretty sure." He grinned.
"Extinct gods with shotguns," said Hermia.
"Extinct for two thousand years, no less. They didn't actually admit to being Hittite, but it's the one they denied instead of being evasive. I have them hanging over the Atlantic."
"I want to talk to them."
"You want to lock the gate they're using so they drop into the water and drown," said Danny.
"Eventually, yes," said Hermia. "You're too soft, Danny. People who shoot first can't be left alive."
"People who talk about Bel have some explaining to do," said Danny. "And they didn't actually kill me."
"They killed your clothing," said Hermia. "Walk around like this and you'll start a new fashion. Perforated clothing. Shotgun Style by Calvin Klein."
"I want to make the Great Gate before anything else happens," said Danny. "Those clowns aren't going anywhere. We'll have plenty of time to question them after."
"If we make it back," said Hermia.
"If we don't, then someday somebody will find a heap of bones and some empty clothing hanging in the air over some spot in the Atlantic. It'll make the cover of the Enquirer."
"You sound like you don't care," said Hermia, "but I know you do."
Danny sighed. Leslie thought the worst of him, Hermia thought the best of him, and they were both right. Danny gated the two men into a single cell in the county jail in Lexington, Virginia. "They're on dry ground now, all right?" he told her. "Now let's get this gate made before somebody notices them and lets them out."
"Where are they?" she demanded.
"In jail," said Danny. He made a viewport into the cell and showed her.
Hermia spoke to them. "Don't make a sound," she said. "If you try to get out or if you talk to anybody at all, it's back to the ocean for you." Then she added a few words in a language Danny had never heard.
"Yes, they understood me," she said to Danny. "The Hittite-Armenian theory seems to have some merit."
"You speak Armenian?" asked Danny.
"It came up," said Hermia. "I'm a gatemage, it's a language."
Danny reached out his hand, and the two of them gated to the barn.
5
"What did you do with them?" demanded Leslie.
"They're alive," said Hermia. "And safe."
Leslie looked at Danny suspiciously. "I want to hear it from him."
"Because you think you can tell if I'm lying?" asked Danny.
"We assume you're lying," said Stone. "Because we're all hoping you killed them and had done with it."
"I'm hoping no such thing!" said Leslie.
"We can't control a gatemage anyway," said Marion to Leslie. "He did what he did, he'll do what he does."
"I can make him feel guilty about it," said Leslie.
"That's not very sporting," said Veevee. "Danny feels guilty for being alive."
"Make the Great Gate," said Hermia. "If the Hittites are onto us, then everybody knows that there are gatemages in the world again, and they'll be looking for a Great Gate."
"That's an argument against making one," said Stone.
"It's an argument for making one now," said Hermia, "and all of us going through it except Marion and Leslie, because they've already gone and somebody has to keep watch."
"You're coming right back, aren't you?" Leslie asked Danny.
"Unless the Gate Thief gets me this time," said Danny.
"Do you think there's any chance of that?" asked Veevee.
"He's weaker than he was," said Danny, "but he knows a lot more than I do." Danny walked to the rope, took hold of it, pulled the noose wide open.
"I hate that noose," said Veevee. "It looks so grim."
Danny made no answer, just pulled the noose down over his head and shoulders, then tightened it under his armpits. Now he could put his weight on the rope while keeping his hands free.
His feet were still on the floor of the barn. He turned around and around until the rope was so twisted that it lifted him off the floor. Only the tips of his toes touched.
"Want us to wind you tighter?" asked Hermia.
"I'm pretty tightly wound already," said Danny.
"Very funny," said Veevee.
"I'm still not sure whether I should go through it," said Stone.
"Do it," said Veevee, "and keep me company."
"It will give you the power to make plants grow and cover everything," said Marion.
"That's kudzu," said Stone. "It doesn't need any help from me."
Veevee took hold of his hand. "'Come and go with me to that land where I'm bound,'" she sang.
"Is that a real song?" asked Stone.
"A very old one," said Veevee. She sang again: "'I'm gonna walk the streets of glory on that great day in the mornin'."
"I need to concentrate," said Danny. "And I need the two of you to be watching, so you know when to go through the gate."
Veevee smiled. "'They'll be singin' in that land, voices ringin' in that land. There'll be freedom in that land where I'm bound.'"
"Nobody's ever heard of an obedient gatemage," said Stone.
"Serves you right, Danny," said Leslie.
Danny silently raised his feet, leaned back, closed his eyes. He began to spin. Twenty gates at once this time.