The Gate Thief (Mither Mages)

by Orson Scott Card

  “He’ll know who they are because they came through the gate, and they’ll know him because the gate has led them straight to him.”

  “What if they come back through the gate?” asked Anonoei.

  “The gate is gone. I took it back. I husband my gates carefully these days,” said Wad. “A few are all I have. You see, the Gate Thief got the rest.”

  She looked at him sharply. “You said that you—”

  “I was the Gate Thief for a thousand years or so,” said Wad. “I burgled one hearthoard too many. I am punished now, and the punishment is just.”

  Wad turned to Eluik, who was not looking at him. “Whatever you are or might become,” said Wad, “passing through a Great Gate will strengthen you.” But the older boy gave no sign of hearing.

  “He’s still singing to himself,” said Enopp.

  Wad and Anonoei waited for the younger boy to explain.

  “Alone in the cave, with all the falling,” said Enopp. “We sang to ourselves.”

  Wad wondered if Enopp had some connection with his brother that allowed him to know what he was doing during their many months of isolation.

  “That’s what you did, is it?” asked Anonoei.

  “Of course,” said Enopp. “I sang every song I knew. You should have taught me more of them, Mother.”

  “I’m glad you’re not still singing them now,” she said.

  “Oh, I am,” said Enopp. “I hear them all the time. I just don’t listen to them. Eluik does, though. He’s still trying to understand the words.”

  “But they’re all in plain language,” said Anonoei.

  “Not the words of the songs,” said Enopp impatiently. “The words beneath the songs.”

  “What words are those?” asked Wad.

  “I didn’t understand them either, not at first, but I was little. There were many words I didn’t understand, when I was little.”

  The words beneath the songs. Wad thought he might have some idea what words those were, and who spoke them. The gates that held the prisoner, that surrounded them—they were connected to Wad, to his hearthoard. To the place where the thousand gates of other mages were imprisoned. They had shouted all the time, Wad hardly heard them. But it was possible that these voices carried with the gates. That an isolated child, with nothing else to occupy him, might have heard something. Especially if there were gates in his own hearthoard, gates that he was yet too young to use. But the captive gates cried out to the captive boy, and if he was a gatemage himself, he would have heard them in the same way that Wad, at the height of his powers a millennium ago, could sense the location and the owner of every gate in two worlds.

  Wad took the boy by his hand. “Would you like to come with me and your mother now?”

  “And my brother,” said Enopp.

  “Him too,” said Wad.

  “Of course,” said Enopp. “It’s good to be out of the cave. Eluik is even happier than I am. He’s eager to go with you.”

  Again Wad looked from the younger boy to the silent elder one. If Eluik objected to his little brother’s speaking for him, he gave no sign.

  Enopp took his older brother’s hand, and Anonoei held him on the other side. Wad passed a gatemouth over them, and they were standing in the stone circle where the Wild Gate now shone plainly, obvious for anyone to see and use. It was good that the place was scarcely inhabited, that people shunned it. Stone circles were shrines no longer. Since the Great Gates were taken, they were regarded as dark places of ill fortune. They were avoided. All to the good. But that could not last forever. Someone would figure it out.

  “Don’t let go of hands,” said Wad. And then, after a breath, he stepped through.

  The Great Gate swallowed up the four of them, and they were standing in a barn, with cows around. A woman was attaching a machine to the udders of a cow.

  “Is someone expecting you?” she asked politely, in a heavily accented version of the ancient language of West Ylly Way. Wad understood her, because he had already spoken to Danny North and Ced. There was no hope that her words would mean a thing to Anonoei.

  “I wasn’t expecting you,” Enopp answered her, imitating her accent.

  Another sign the boy might grow into a gatemage, to have a knack for languages.

  “I’ve come to speak with Danny North,” said Wad.

  “He isn’t here,” said the woman, turning her back.

  Angry at this stranger for such treatment, Wad gated to the other side of her. But before he could speak to her, a cow kicked him hard in the leg. He cried out and fell, then passed a gate over himself.

  “The only way to punish a gatemage,” said the woman, “is to take him by surprise.”

  “Punish me for what!”

  “I know who you are, Gate Thief,” said the woman. “I told him never to bring you to Mittlegard, yet here you are. Do you think because you have these darling children with you, I won’t hurt you? Especially the damaged one—why did you bring him here, except to protect you from me?”

  “I didn’t know you were here,” said Wad, “and I don’t know who you are.”

  “She’s my wife,” said a man’s voice. And in that moment, Wad was falling into a crevice in the Earth. Not a wide one, but it was enough to swallow him.

  Wad gated to the loft of the barn. “I’ll never die by falling,” said Wad.

  “Didn’t my wife inform you that our stepson is away?”

  “He’ll be here,” said Wad.

  “How can you be sure of that?” asked the woman.

  “Because he’s been sensitized by passage through a Great Gate. He knows when someone passes through any gate in the world.”

  That was when Danny North strode through the open door into the barn.

  13

  TRUST

  Danny was getting dressed for another morning practice when he felt it: Something had happened at the Wild Gate.

  He stopped pulling on his running shorts, froze in position. The feeling didn’t come again. He tried to think what he had actually experienced. It came from that portion of his outself that was entwined in the Great Gate in the Silvermans’ barn.

  It felt like when Veevee or Hermia passed through his gates. Only far stronger.

  Why? Because it was a Great Gate?

  Because it was more than one person going through a gate at once.

  He had felt it before when his friends went through his first Great Gate, but had not been able to think about it then because he was immediately engaged with the Gate Thief.

  Now he even knew the direction they had passed. It was a group of four people, and they came from Westil to Earth.

  Whoever it was had arrived in Silvermans’ barn. It was milking time. Leslie would be there.

  Danny even knew who it was. Because lingering after the sensation of the Great Gate being used there was another feeling—a quickening in the gates that Danny held captive inside him. The strange gates were saying—not in words, but deeper than words—“He is coming, he is coming.” And the gates that belonged to Loki himself were brightening because their true owner was now in the same world with them. “Let us go home,” they were saying, straining ever so slightly against the restraint of Danny’s hearthoard.

  The Gate Thief had brought three people with him through the Wild Gate.

  Danny pulled off the shorts and put on pants and a shirt, socks and shoes and a jacket. He would not be running this morning after all.

  Once he was dressed, he stepped through the gate in his house that led to the Silvermans’ upstairs hall, then walked from house to barn through the biting cold of this autumn morning. The trees were dazzling with color. There was a trace of frost on the grass.

  Inside the barn, Leslie and Marion were standing side by side, looking up at the loft where Loki stood with a woman and two young boys.

  “Took you long enough,” said Marion.

  “I was mostly naked,” said Danny. “I stopped to dress.”

  “Thank you for t
hat,” said Leslie.

  “Danny North,” said Loki.

  “I don’t want you here,” said Danny in Westilian.

  “I need your help,” said Loki. “But it will be hard to converse with your friend prepared to make the ground swallow us up.”

  “Only swallow,” said Marion, in his heavily accented version of Westilian. “Not chew.”

  “His mercy is noted,” said Loki. “That’s why I didn’t gate him to the bottom of a convenient river. Or into a tree.”

  “You didn’t harm him,” said Danny, “because you are afraid of me.”

  “I didn’t harm him,” said Loki, “because I am an intruder, and he is protecting his home and his friend.”

  “And you didn’t leave, because you wanted to be here when I arrived.”

  “I promise not to do anything to anyone here,” said Loki. “I will not try to take back my own gates, or swallow any others’. In return I hope you will not try to take the few that remain to me.”

  Danny turned to Marion and Leslie. “May I invite them into the house?”

  “Guest law will apply then,” said Marion.

  “I know,” said Danny.

  “It will bind you as well as us,” Leslie reminded him.

  “It will bind us all,” said Danny. “Aren’t you curious to know about the woman and the children?”

  “Anonoei, onetime mistress of King Prayard of Iceway,” said Loki. “And the unofficial but potentially useful sons of the King, Eluik and Enopp.”

  Danny nodded to them formally. It was a ritual greeting that all the children learned very young, to be used on important and solemn occasions. Only as a child, Danny’s bow had been deep, and from the waist; the nod he gave now was that of a ruler toward subordinates—the nod that Baba bestowed on those saluting him as Odin. No one could mistake what he was asserting, and indeed they did not. The return bow of the woman and her sons was deep, though not so deep as to imply worthlessness. And Loki also bowed slightly from the waist rather than merely nodding in return. The hierarchy had been asserted and agreed to.

  “May we enter your home?” Danny asked the Silvermans again.

  Leslie sighed. “Gate me to the kitchen, please, Danny.”

  He did.

  “I’d like to walk with our guests,” said Marion.

  Loki understood, and instead of gating down from the loft, he descended the ladder, Anonoei and the boys after him. Then Marion drew Loki with him, and walked beside the ancient yet youthful gatemage toward the house.

  Danny knew that Marion would make dire warnings about what would happen if Loki broke his word. Danny also knew that Loki would agree cheerfully, knowing that in a pinch, he could always gate away, so Marion’s threats were more symbolic than practicable.

  Meanwhile, Danny looked at the woman and smiled. “You’re a mother. I had one once.”

  “I hope a mother that you loved.”

  “Devotedly,” said Danny. “Why don’t you and your older son walk ahead, and let me talk to the young one. Enopp, is it?”

  Anonoei took Eluik by the hand and walked from the barn, whose smaller door was still standing open after Marion’s and Loki’s departure.

  “These are cows, aren’t they,” said the boy Enopp.

  “They are,” said Danny.

  “They’re huge,” said Enopp.

  “Cows may be bigger here than in the place you came from,” said Danny. “But these are particularly well-fed and healthy cows. Leslie takes good care of them. Though at this moment I believe they still want milking. Would you like to help me?”

  The boy nodded. “I’m only little,” he said. “And I’m not very strong. I’ve been in prison, you know.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Danny. “Did you do something very bad?”

  “No, but I’m dangerous, because there are people who think my brother or I should be king after my father, and not the child of Queen Bexoi. She’s from Gray, and her brother is our enemy.”

  “I’m glad you’re out of prison, since you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Enopp shrugged. “I’m glad to be out, too, but it’s dangerous for me even to exist. I don’t have to actually do anything.”

  “I know the feeling,” said Danny. “I was older than you, though, when people made the same judgment about me.”

  “Did they put you in jail?”

  “I’m a gatemage,” said Danny. “They couldn’t if they tried. All they can do is kill me or leave me alone.”

  “Or kill someone you love,” said Enopp.

  “Ah,” said Danny. “I see you understand how power works.”

  “I’m son of a king,” said Enopp. “I think I’m going to be a gatemage, too.”

  Meanwhile, Danny had attached the milker to a cow. “Do you see how I did that?”

  “Does it hurt the cow?”

  “It’s designed to fit her teat exactly right,” said Danny. “She likes it.”

  “What does it do?”

  Danny spent the next fifteen minutes explaining the milking machines and letting Enopp help in whatever way he was large enough and strong enough.

  “What do you think of Loki?” asked Danny.

  “Who?” asked Enopp.

  “The gatemage who brought you.”

  “Wad,” said Enopp.

  The word made no sense to Danny in this context. “You want bread?”

  “His name,” said Enopp. “That’s what Mother calls him.”

  “Wad,” said Danny. “Not a noble name.”

  “He used to be the castle spy. He would climb everywhere, watch everything. Hull named him. The chief baker. She’s dead, somebody murdered her because she refused to murder the Queen. It would have been better if she had done it. The Queen is an evil bitch.”

  Danny was amused at the way Enopp echoed what he must have heard. “What about Wad? Is he evil or good?”

  “He kept us in prison,” said Enopp. “But when Queen Bexoi said to kill us, he didn’t. After a while he gave us better food. And he got us out just when soldiers were trying to kill us in our caves.”

  “That sounds frightening.”

  “It was,” said Enopp. “They were my father’s soldiers.”

  “Did they know who you were?”

  Enopp thought a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “But they knew I was little.”

  “You have a point,” said Danny. “Enopp, why did your mother and Wad bring you here?”

  Enopp shrugged. “It isn’t safe for us in Iceway. I think they want us to be safe here.”

  “This world isn’t safer. People die on both worlds, just as easily.”

  “When I’m a gatemage, I’ll hide where they can’t find me.”

  “Are you sure that’s what you’ll be?”

  “I’m already good with languages,” said Enopp. “That’s a sign.”

  “It is,” said Danny. “Are you also a devilish little brat?”

  Enopp gave that more thought than Danny had expected. “I don’t know. I have only been free of my prison for a few weeks.”

  “We’d better watch carefully then,” said Danny, “so we don’t get taken by surprise when the pranks start.”

  They kept milking till the job was done. Only then did Danny take Enopp by the hand and walk with him across the yard to the house.

  In the kitchen, Leslie had the table spread with small plates and a big platter of warmed-up sliced bread and an array of butter, jams, and honey. Everyone was eating. Enopp ran right to the table beside his brother and started jabbering to him. Danny saw that Eluik did not answer him, or even show a sign of listening. But Enopp was undiscouraged by this; and it wasn’t as if Eluik were inert, for he was eating steadily, though without any visible pleasure in the food, which Danny knew from experience was extraordinarily good.

  “Did my son bore you?” asked Anonoei. “He chatters as if he thought himself a great philosopher or statesman, with the world eager to hear his words.”

  “I
could not have been more eager,” said Danny, adopting the arch-formal tones he had only overheard when spying on the adults meeting in the library of the old house in the North Family compound. “Your son is surprisingly happy for one so recently a prisoner.”

  “He is resilient,” said Anonoei.

  Danny could not help glancing at Eluik, but then looked at Loki, as if he had only chanced to look at Eluik as his gaze passed from Anonoei to the Gate Thief.

  “You have achieved your first purpose,” Danny said to Loki. “You have passed through a Great Gate.”

  “My first purpose was to see that no such gate existed,” said Loki. “But having failed in that, it is true that I thought it wise to refresh such small powers as are left to me.”

  “You know more than I about how these powers work,” said Danny, “but it seems to me that while our brute force depends on the number of our gates, our dexterity depends on knowledge and experience. I have the brute force, it’s true, but you have the deftness of long practice.”

  “Long practice followed by far longer disuse,” said Loki. “I have spent fourteen centuries and more drifting upward through a tree, aware of little but occasional flashes of gatemaking, which I quickly extinguished.”

  “Yet you did come out of the tree,” said Danny, “and apparently some time before I attempted a Great Gate.”

  “But not before you made your first few dozen gates,” said Loki. “Your first few hundred, I should say.”

  It was the Gate Thief’s admission that he had been aware of Danny for some time. That he had sensed, however dimly, that Danny was alive, a great mage in potential if not in accomplishment.

  “I didn’t even know I was making the gates,” Danny admitted.

  “Be careful what you say,” said Marion.

  “He knows,” said Danny. “He has been watching me even before he knew that it was I whom he watched.”

  “Aren’t we the lofty speakers now,” said Leslie. “I feel as if I’m in a school, studying Westilian style.”

  “These gatemages and their linguistic show-offery,” said Marion in English.

  “I am learning your English a little,” said Loki, and while his words were slow and stilted, his Ohio accent was nearly perfect.