The man groaned.
Danny let go of the roll. It hit the floor and rolled back under the divider into Danny’s stall.
“I missed it,” the man said. His voice sounded agonized. More noises.
Danny nudged it back under the divider with his foot. The room stank worse than ever.
“Thanks,” said the man. “For getting it dirty with your shoe.”
Danny almost laughed at the man’s stupidity. “Any time,” he said.
He walked back out of the stall and went straight for the trash receptacle. He made a gate in it by pushing his hand through to grab trash. He pulled out a handful of damp, wadded-up paper towels and dropped them on the floor. Now the gate existed. It was a simple matter to push the backpack through it and jam it into the space.
When he had withdrawn his hand, Danny wondered why the backpack didn’t just pop right back out through the gate. Then it occurred to him to wonder just how big the gate actually was. He pushed his finger against the metal surface just beside the spot where he could sense the gate was. Nothing. He touched a lot of other spots, and the metal was impermeable. He had to be reaching for the exact location of the gate—a place that no one else could possibly distinguish from any other—and then his whole hand went through as if the metal weren’t even there.
So that’s why it took magery even to find a gate. A Sniffer might not be able to make anything or open a closed gate, but he could tell where one existed. A Keyfriend could reach through a gate like this one, even though he couldn’t make one. So gates didn’t actually have to be hidden. They were unfindable to those without gatemagery.
Or maybe it was only lame, half-assed gates like the kind an untrained gatemage like Danny could make that were automatically hidden. Maybe if he were a really powerful mage, he could make gates that anyone could use.
Anyway, the backpack was hidden inside the dispenser, Danny could get it out any time, and judging from the condition of this restroom, the trash receptacle wasn’t going to be emptied anytime soon. Then again, the fact that the toilet paper dispensers were mostly empty might suggest that it was about time for the janitor to show up.
Well, if he finds my backpack, I’ll just shoplift another. I can live without my old raggedy begging clothes. Maybe I’ll stop begging anyway.
Danny gathered up the paper towel litter he had pulled out of the receptacle when he made the gate, and jammed it down into the trashbin from the top.
He heard the toilet flush. He heard the man stand up, the sound of pants being fastened. The man was sighing with relief when Danny reached the door and was gone. Only later did he realize that his encounter with this dump-taking jerk was precisely the kind of thing that the Family expected of drowthers. Danny remembered how sentimental and admiring he was about drowthers while looking at the Capitol dome, and he felt as if he had learned something. He wasn’t sure what. Maybe just that nobility and baseness could coexist in the same species. Maybe even in the same person. And that was just as true of the Westil Families as of drowthers. Great heroes, officious dump-taking morons—maybe they were even the same guys. For all he knew, this clown had won the Congressional Medal of Honor when he was younger.
Danny strode purposefully into a large open room—no, a vast room—filled with tables and counters and computer screens, and now there were shelves here and there with books on them, though it was obvious that these could not be a significant part of the vast collection of the Library of Congress. Probably you had to look up the title you wanted and then ask for it to be delivered to you.
Danny sat down at a computer and began to feel his way through the software. On a whim he tried “gate magic” as his search terms. He expected to get either thousands of hits or none at all, depending on whether the search engine scanned through the contents of books or insisted on finding only that exact combination in a title.
There were thousands of hits. Of course—the search engine had a notation: POWERED BY GOOGLE. Drowthers could do magic with data, as surely as treemages did magic with trees. Was it possible that this really was a power? That if he could bring one of the Google programmers through a great gate to Westil and back again, his power would be vastly increased? Then again, why would he need to? Computers were a kind of magery in themselves, or might as well be—to people who didn’t understand them, they were every bit as inscrutable. The programmers got to know them and love them and understand them in order to coax the right results out of them—just as beastmages did with their beasts, or stonemages with stone.
Danny smiled at the thought of all the great mages in the history of the Westil Families as if they were stereotypical computer geeks.
“Young man, can I help you with something?” asked a woman. Her i.d. made her an employee of the library.
“My dad’s in the bathroom,” said Danny.
She smiled. “I just wondered if I could help you find something.” She looked at the screen. “ ‘Gate’ and ‘magic,’ ” she said. “Is this a research project?”
“I wanted old legends,” said Danny. “About … magical travel. Getting from one place to another.”
“Seven-league boots,” said the woman.
“Maybe,” said Danny, who had never heard the term but guessed at its meaning. Boots that could take you miles with every step—maybe that’s how gatemagery would seem to drowthers. “Or, like, the winged feet of Hermes.”
“Oh, excellent,” she said. “You’ve already done some research before you came—you’d be surprised how many people come here without having done enough research to know how to recognize what they’re looking for even if they find it. Here, let me narrow your search a little.” She sat down in the next chair and typed in a list of search terms and various pluses, minuses, and parentheses. In moments she got a much smaller, more refined list of book titles, and then entered another command. “The list is printing out at my desk right now,” she said. “I’ll get you the top six books and you can pick them up over there in about fifteen minutes.”
“Wow,” said Danny. He really was impressed.
“We’re here to serve the public,” she said. “And … we finally have decent software. You should have seen what a mess it was before. It was a miracle if you could find anything if you didn’t already know exactly what you were looking for.”
And then she was gone.
Ah, drowthers, thought Danny. Sometimes you love them, sometimes you hate them.
Then for the first time it dawned on him that classing all drowthers together made no more sense than having a word for all animals that can’t stand upright on two legs for more than a minute, or all animals with dry noses. What possible use could there be for such classifications? The word “drowther” didn’t say anything about people except that they were not born in a Westil Family. “Drowther” meant “not us,” and anything you said about drowthers beyond that was likely to be completely meaningless. They were not a “class” at all. They were just … people.
Danny didn’t want to loiter around doing nothing, so while he waited for the books he went into another room, a smaller one where people were sitting at tables reading or studying or taking notes. There was art on the walls and Danny walked around the room looking at it. Nobody did more than glance up at him—apparently being an unaccompanied child in this room was okay, as long as he didn’t make noise or touch anything.
I’m just six inches away from being a human being, thought Danny. Just a little taller, maybe a touch of moustache, and I won’t have to put up with all the suspicion.
Then again, dump-taking man would probably have treated me with disdain just for being younger than him and not wearing a suit.
I need a suit. Not right now, but eventually. I need to be able to look as if I come from more than one social class. I need clothes that look rich, and not just Wal-Mart clothes. What good does it do for me to gate my way into a place, if I immediately look out of place there, and everyone stares at me? Just getting from place to place is no
thing if I can’t appear normal in the new place.
I wonder what they wear in Westil? When I make a Great Gate and go there, will they dress like us? Or something as different from shoplifted Wal-Mart clothes as our modern clothes are from ancient Egyptian or Chinese costumes?
It had been fifteen minutes. He didn’t have to look at a clock, he just knew. He had always had that knack—waking up when he planned to, staying away from home until an exact time, even though he didn’t own a watch. When he returned late, having missed dinner, it was never because he lost track of time. It was because he got better food after his parents made the rule that if he was late, he’d get no food in their house. Then he’d stop by Aunt Lummie’s on the way home and get a great sandwich even as she scolded him for his irresponsibility. “But a growing boy can’t miss meals, it’s just wrong,” she’d say, and Uncle Mook would roll his eyes.
Danny stood up. The nice library woman must be back by now. That is, if her estimate of fifteen minutes meant anything.
There she was at the counter, and there were six books beside her, just as she had said.
“These are almost the best I could do,” she said as soon as he was close enough that she didn’t have to raise her voice.
“Almost?” asked Danny.
“Maybe you don’t care about oddities in the collection, but I’m afraid they’re my favorite thing,” she said.
“I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘oddities.’ ”
“Come with me and see,” she said. “Of course, you can’t touch it.”
“Touch what?”
“You’ll see.”
She led him through an employees-only door and up a flight of stairs. At the top, there was a door with a keypad, and when she entered the code and pulled open the door, there was a whoosh of air. “Climate controlled,” she said. “Try not to do any global warming while you’re in here.” She chuckled.
He followed her inside. It was a large room full of books in acrylic boxes. But she led him to another area, where books were shelved without separate cases. On a low table an oversized book was lying open.
“The book itself is only a couple of hundred years old,” she said, “and it isn’t in English, so I don’t know what use it would be to you.”
“It’s in Danish, isn’t it?” said Danny.
She looked at him a moment. “You recognize Danish?”
Danny shrugged. Of course he did, it was one of the languages descended from Old Norse, but he could hardly explain to her that he had grown up with Old Norse. Along with Fistalk, the ancient language of the Germans before their language was bent by the Phoenician colonies along the North Sea and Baltic coasts. It was one of the languages of the Family, one that some of the old books were written in. It wasn’t exactly taught, but the books were there, and some words and phrases of it were spoken when the Family was speaking Old Norse. Danny picked up languages as easily as breathing. He could read Fistalk in the runes that it used to be written in. Runes like the ones reproduced on the open page of the book.
“When this book was catalogued,” the woman told him, “it was placed in the American history section because it was supposed to be about the colonization of New Sweden. But then somebody who read Danish said that it was nothing of the kind, it was actually about Eric the Red and Lief Ericson and the colony in Vinland. So it was moved here. Then, when I was doing my graduate work here before I got this job, I found the book and realized that it was something else. It’s a book about a book about an ancient runic record.”
“You read Danish?” asked Danny.
“I am Danish,” said the woman. “I moved here with my parents when I was seven, which is why I don’t have a Danish accent. But I had already learned to read in Denmark and I haven’t forgotten because there were lots of Danish books in the house. You see, this book is describing an old manuscript that the author discovered in an old accounting house in Copenhagen, where some of the library of a monastery had been deposited when the monastery was closed. The book he described was written in a combination of Latin and Old Norse, and it was reproducing a supposedly ancient runic record in an unknown language. The Danish author of this book had tried to decode it—there are two chapters on his efforts to do that—and he did succeed in translating the Latin and Old Norse sections of the old manuscript, but he had no luck at all with the runes.”
Danny wanted to be bored—this had nothing to do with his quest for knowledge about gates—but in fact he was fascinated. Because he could read the runes right off the page, the very ones that the author had failed to decode.
“ ‘Here Tiu dashed the ships of Carthage against the rocks, because they would not pay tribute to the valkyrie,’ ” said Danny.
“What?” asked the woman.
Danny kept reading. “ ‘Here Loki twisted a new gate to heaven and the valkyrie passed through it many times, because the Carthaginians had eaten the old gate. Here Odin raged with the sky and crushed the might of Carthage until the survivors wept in the blood of their children.’ ”
“What are you talking about?” asked the woman.
Danny nodded. “This is what I was looking for,” he said. “How did you know?”
“I remembered that his translation of the Old Norse sections was full of references to the old gods and the magic of doors and gates. And there you were, googling ‘magic’ and ‘gate,’ and I knew that this book would never pop up on your search so I thought you’d want to see it. But what you said before, what were you quoting?”
“I wasn’t quoting,” said Danny. “I was reading.”
The woman scanned the pages that were open. “Where did you read that? There’s nothing like that in the Danish.”
Danny pointed at the copied-out runes. “That’s what it says.”
“Talking about Carthaginians and Tiu and Loki and Odin?”
“What I can’t figure out is how the Carthaginians could have eaten a gate,” said Danny. “Is this the whole runic inscription?”
“There are three others,” said the woman. “On the next three pages. But … are you saying that you can read this?”
“Of course not,” said Danny. “I’m just imagining what it might say.” He couldn’t help lying. He was enjoying this game of telling her a truth he could not possibly know, and then pretending that it wasn’t true after all. He shouldn’t toy with her like this, it wasn’t nice, and she had been very kind and helpful to him, but Danny sometimes couldn’t resist doing such things. Showing off. The other kids had resented it, but the Aunts and Uncles had often seemed to enjoy it, back in the days before they began to think of Danny as drekka.
“How could the runes say anything about Carthage?” asked the woman.
Danny pointed to a few characters. “It’s written in the way Semites write their words and names—no vowels. K-R-T-G. Back when the Germans were just separating from the Norse, they were under the domination of a Carthaginian colony at the neck of the Jutland peninsula.” Danny had this much of the story from the version of Family history they taught the children.
“I’ve never heard of this. Was it discovered by archaeologists? Because it’s in none of the histories.”
“From the time when Carthage was at its peak, before they went to war with Rome for the first time. The German gods broke the power of the Carthaginians. This has to date from that time. But I’d never heard of any reference to Loki or a gate to heaven.”
“That doesn’t even sound Norse—they don’t talk about heaven.”
“But the Carthaginians did. It’s referring to another planet—so far away that the light of its star can’t be seen even on a clear night. High in the sky, see? Heaven. And Loki made a gate to take them there.”
“So that’s the kind of magical gate you were looking for?” asked the woman.
Danny didn’t answer her directly. “I never heard it said that Loki would twist a gate. See? That’s the same word you use for making rope. Wouldn’t you think that a gate would be ‘cu
t’ or ‘opened’ or ‘built’ or ‘carved’ or something like that? How can you twist a gate?” Danny knew she couldn’t understand what he was talking about. His questions were real enough, but they weren’t for her. What he was doing with her was breaking the Family’s taboo against telling Family business or Family history to strangers. And it felt good to do it.
The woman looked baffled. “Who are you? Where are you from? What school do you go to?”
“I was home-schooled,” said Danny. “May I see the other runes?”
“What language is it, then, if you can read them?”
“Widdensprak,” said Danny, using the term for “the way the people we know talk.” But it wasn’t true—nobody talked quite this way. But it was close to Fistalk.
“I’ve never heard of it,” she said.
“Am I allowed to turn the page, or is that something you need to do?”
She reached down and turned the page, carefully and slowly.
Danny scanned the runes. Just as before, the words were ones he knew or were like words he knew, and the grammar was easy. Where it differed from Fistalk, it was more like Westil, though Westil was normally written with yet another alphabet. Or, rather, syllabet, since there were separate characters for every consonant-vowel combination. There were also separate characters for each of the common noun and verb endings. It took up far less room on the page, but you had to learn 181 separate characters, and some of them were pretty hard to tell apart. On the whole, Danny preferred alphabets. Fistalk was written with the runes used as an alphabet, though some of them sometimes stood for syllables, too. It was confusing, and most of the cousins had simply refused to make any serious effort to learn to read or write Fistalk or Westil. Aunt Lummy had often said that she expected the knowledge of Westil to die, “so if a Great Gate were ever opened, we wouldn’t even know how to talk to our distant kinfolk from our home world.”
The message on the page was a continuation of the previous one. “ ‘Hear us in the land of Mitherkame, hear us among the great ships of Iceway, among the charging dunes of Dapnu Dap, among the silent mages of the Forest and the swift riders of the Wold: We have faced Bel and he has ruled the hearts of many. Bold men ran like deer from his face, but Loki did not run.’ ”
The Lost Gate Page 11