“Spacetime,” said Leslie.
“So I’m, like, the servant of physics?”
“That’s science, not magery,” said Leslie with only a little contempt. “Physics is measuring it; you change it.”
“Okay, so I love and serve spacetime. I can’t say it makes no sense, because how does it make sense to love and serve stone or lightning or water? But spacetime? That’s kind of … everything. How can I love and serve everything?”
“It’s the bed in which everything else exists, but it’s not, in itself, anything.”
“Now, see, that has to be offensive. To spacetime, you know? Which is why you can’t make gates.” Danny grinned.
“Danny, being flippant and making jokes isn’t going to help you.”
Danny felt abashed, but then his defiant streak made him think of a contrary argument. “How do you know it isn’t going to help me?” asked Danny. “How do you know jokes aren’t how spacetime is loved and served? I mean, spacetime is the causal universe, right? The set of relationships between everything that exists in space, which implies dimension, and in time, which implies causality.” Danny was rather proud of being able to toss out these terms, though he was pretty sure he barely understood them.
“You must be a whiz of a student,” said Leslie. “A real show-off in class. But I do understand you. Besides, I married a class show-off.”
“You know the saying ‘Shit happens’?” asked Danny.
“I saw Forrest Gump,” said Leslie.
“I have no idea what that is,” said Danny.
“Things happen, bad things, good things, seemingly at random. Yes, I get it.”
“That’s spacetime, right?” said Danny. “I mean, this is your theory, right?”
“It’s a theory. It is certainly not mine.”
“As far as I can see, spacetime is a prankster. Weird stuff just happens. Insane coincidences that mislead people into making false assumptions about how the universe works. You pray for somebody and they phone you. You keep bumping into the same stranger as if you were somehow meant to be together. Only there’s no meaning to it. It just happens. Spacetime is pranking us.”
“So you’re saying that by making flippant jokes, you’re loving and serving spacetime?”
“I’m saying that when I pranked people, I made shit happen,” said Danny, “and maybe that’s why spacetime gave me the power to make gates.”
“Well, it makes a perverse kind of sense,” said Leslie. “The tradition is that Loki and the other gatemages have all been tricksters and con men. It’s one of the signs.”
“Getting people to believe things that aren’t true, so we can cause them to do things they would never do in a rational universe.”
Leslie nodded. “So your brattiness is the source of your power?”
“Hey, I’m not the one who said that gatemages love and serve spacetime.”
“I’m intrigued. I think this bears looking into. Makes the theory stronger. So how about this one: Gatemages are also extremely good with languages. How would that tie in?”
Danny shrugged, though he was thrilled that she was asking him to come up with a guess. “Language is figuring out what other people mean by the noises they make, and then learning how to make the noises that will get them to do what you want. Right? Language gives us the illusion that we’re talking about reality, but in fact we can say false statements as easily as true ones, and get people to act on them as if we had changed reality.” Danny was liking this idea. “In fact, isn’t language just a system for coming up with false temporary realities? Isn’t it just our way of creating realities for each other?”
“That is a deeply perverse way of saying it, but I suppose it could explain the affinity.”
Marion was back in the doorway. “This boy is bullshitting you, Leslie. He’s making stuff up as he goes along.”
“Maybe that’s just what gatemages do,” she said with a shrug.
“How do you know it isn’t true?” asked Danny. “I come out of Wal-Mart wearing shoplifted clothes, and who do I run into but a kid who can get me to the very city where some magic pollen leads me to Stone who leads me to you, so I can get some training. How is that even believable, except that spacetime is grimly determined to make me a more effective prankster?”
“Why would spacetime care?” asked Marion.
“Why does stone care about getting shaped into … stone stuff? By stonemages? Why does water want to flow the way that watermages tell it to flow? These are inanimate objects that come to life under the ministrations of a mage that loves and serves them.”
“Maybe,” said Leslie, “spacetime hates the way that all its pranks have been so severely limited by the closing of the gates in 632 A.D.”
“That’s it,” said Danny. “And it’s been getting more and more frustrated because the Families have been killing gatemages all these years—and so spacetime has squeezed me out and somehow set things up so I didn’t get killed. Maybe spacetime brought me into being so I could make a Great Gate and get some real power back into the magery of the world.”
“A mission in life,” said Leslie. “Just don’t count on spacetime being reliable. As soon as you count on it, it’ll prank you.”
Danny got the implication—that if they trust him they might get that same result.
“Maybe spacetime wants the Great Gates restored, but it isn’t just the Families’ killing of gatemages that has kept us Gate-free for fourteen centuries,” said Marion.
“Far from it,” said Leslie, nodding.
“Killing all the gatemages isn’t enough?” asked Danny.
“The Families only kill the gatemages they know about,” said Marion. “We outsiders, we Orphans, we’ve had six gatemages that we knew about and the Families never found.”
“Well, why aren’t we going to Westil, then?”
“The Gate Thief,” said Marion.
“Gatemages don’t last long,” added Leslie.
Stone had said the same thing. “Why not? Who’s the Gate Thief?” asked Danny.
“As soon as somebody gets strong enough to attempt a Great Gate to Westil, the Gate Thief comes in and steals their gates,” said Marion.
“Steals them. How?”
“If we knew how, maybe we could prevent it,” said Marion. “The gatemage lives through it, he just can’t make gates anymore. It’s as if his whole outself was stolen from him.”
“Who can do that?” asked Danny.
“The Gate Thief,” said Marion.
“But who’s the Gate Thief?”
“The person who steals the gates,” said Marion. “It’s very circular.”
“I’d rather believe it’s all a prank by spacetime,” said Leslie. “For one thing, the Gate Thief has been at work for centuries. Nobody lives that long. So why not figure spacetime causes all the gatemages to lose their outself?”
“Spacetime loves the gates,” said Marion. “If it didn’t, it wouldn’t have allowed them in the first place.”
“Then the Gate Thief is the enemy of spacetime,” said Danny.
“Exactly!” said Marion.
“That’s why we’re hoping,” added Leslie, “that spacetime—or fate, or raw random chance, or whatever—will create a Gatefather with the power to withstand the Gate Thief.”
They looked at Danny in silence.
“The pie crusts are almost certainly done,” said Marion, “if they aren’t burnt.” He went back into the kitchen.
“You hope I’m the one who can stand up to the Gate Thief,” said Danny.
“You hope you are, too,” said Leslie. “Because if you can’t stand up to him, then you won’t be a gatemage anymore. Not after your whole outself is ripped away from you.”
“What if the Gate Thief is a gatemage who loves and serves spacetime … by playing tricks on spacetime itself?”
“Tickling the tickler,” said Leslie.
“If I never try to make a Great Gate, will the Gate Thief leave me alon
e?”
“We don’t know who it is, if it’s a person at all, and either way, we can’t ask,” said Leslie. “As far as we know, the Gate Thief doesn’t steal any gates at all until somebody bridges the gap between Westil and Mittlegard.”
“So I’ll never make a Great Gate.”
“Then you’re an even bigger waste of time than I thought,” said Leslie. “We’re not training you so you can burglarize houses or steal state secrets or whatever course of action you decide to devote your life to. Nor even to get the healing power that comes from passing through a gate. You’re worth helping precisely and solely so that you can open a Great Gate so that mages can pass between the worlds and build up reverberations of their power.”
“And you want it to be a student of yours so that maybe you can control this new access to power, break down the Families, and rule both worlds.”
Leslie nodded. “Now you understand.”
Danny laughed. The heroes were unmasked. “You Orphans are no better than the Families.”
“But we are,” said Leslie. “Because we want the Great Gates open to everyone. Even drowthers, so they can wake up the potential affinities inside them.”
“How egalitarian,” said Danny.
“What an elitist thing to say,” said Leslie.
But Danny couldn’t help it—he despised the self-delusions of the Orphans as much as he despised those of the Families.
“I’m thirteen,” said Danny mockingly. “This is all over my head.”
“You’re a gatemage,” said Leslie. “You understand everything that anybody says.”
Did he? Was that why he was such a good student? “It’s not that easy.”
“Serve spacetime,” said Leslie, “and let’s work on learning how to close your own gates.”
“But you don’t even know how to do it,” said Danny. “How can you teach me?”
“I’ll keep describing to you how it feels to gather in your outself, and you keep trying to produce that feeling so you can see if a gate closes. Maybe someday, between us, or through dumb luck or getting older, you’ll hit on it.”
Danny thought about this. “It doesn’t sound like a complete waste of time.”
“How low our expectations have become,” said Leslie.
“So,” said Danny. “It’s a deal. Let’s get started.”
“I think we just did,” said Leslie. “And my brain is tired. I think you bruised it with your idea that pranking serves the whimsical nature of spacetime.”
“So when is our first real practice session?”
“Tomorrow after breakfast,” said Leslie. “No, I take that back. Tomorrow morning at milking time.”
“Why so early?”
“Because I’m going to teach you to milk cows.”
“I can’t tell a cow from a camera.”
Leslie smiled. “A cow with autofocus, you just point it at the scene and yank its tail.”
“You think I need vocational training? That if you get me to milk cows I can become a beastmage whose heartbeast is a grazing animal?”
“I want you working hard and concentrating on something besides your gatemaking.”
“How will that help?”
“It might not,” said Leslie. “But it’s worth a try. Danny, I think we have some good ideas here. But the only way to know if they’re workable is to try to make them fail. If we fail to fail, then maybe we’re on the right track.”
“Why don’t we try something else first?” asked Danny. “Why don’t you show me some of the gates those earlier gatemages made? Then maybe I can learn how to close their gates, the way Loki did.”
“I can’t,” said Leslie. “Loki closed all the old ones, and the Gate Thief takes all the new ones. There are no gates left. Right now, yours are the only gates in the world.”
“So why doesn’t he step in and stop me now? Why wait?” asked Danny.
“I’ll put that question on the agenda when I meet with him next week,” said Leslie.
That was how Danny’s education in the rudiments of magery began all over again. But he had some hope this time. Before, when the Aunts and Uncles were trying to teach him, everyone felt that he could do no magery at all. Now, the Silvermans and Danny knew that he could do some pretty good magery, so maybe they could get better results.
They spent weeks and months at it. By the next summer, Danny had reached the conclusion that it would be easier to squirt snot out of his elbow than to figure out how to gather home the outself fragments that maintained each of the gates he made. But apart from farm chores, did he have anything better or more important to do than to try to get control of his gatemagery?
Life on a small dairy farm beat burglary. Living and working with the Silvermans was way better than hanging out with Eric and Ced and Lana. And maybe someday he’d have a breakthrough and get the hang of it all at once.
If spacetime wants me to close gates, it’ll happen, one way or another. And if it doesn’t, then I never will learn it no matter how much I study.
Meanwhile, Danny reminded himself, he was safely out of the reach of the North family and all the other Families that would regard him as a threat that needed killing or start a war over who got to use any Great Gate they could get him to make. So even if he never learned to do everything the Orphans wanted him to do, his life was still better in Yellow Springs than it had ever been in Virginia.
12
THE QUEEN’S HERO
Wad knew every path and passage of Nassassa Castle, for he had explored them all.
He knew the public spaces from climbing high in the beams and rafters, or burrowing into thatch. No one ever looked up to see him looking down, or if they did look up, his face was hidden in smoke or they were partially blinded by the dazzle of candles.
He knew the corridors that everyone walked, and the corridors that only the servants used, and the passages that allowed the soldiers to get to the arrowports and spyholes and oilspouts and secret sallyports that protected the castle.
He knew the abandoned rooms whose doors were heavily locked and into which no servant came; he knew the private rooms whose doors were hidden behind tapestries and furniture, or under rugs, or as furniture, and he knew who came and went. For it was in such private rooms that the secret government of Iceway met and tried to influence the decisions of the king, and it was in such private rooms that King Prayard met with Anonoei, his concubine, to conceive the sons that the whole kingdom hoped would inherit from him someday.
He knew the spaces that were not rooms at all, but rather architectural accidents, which had no passages that led to them, except in the attics, and only when sections of old roof were torn up to be replaced by new tiles or thatch. Then the workmen saw such places; but the others, in the foundations of the castle, in the airshafts that provided ventilation to deep places, in the spaces between rooms where stones had not come out even during construction and gaps had been left behind, no one but Wad ever saw those, for there was no way to reach them, unless you were a Pathbrother or Gatefather.
For Wad understood now that he was indeed what Hull had said he was on his first evening here, in the shade garden on the hill behind the kitchens. He had not known it until she said it, but then he realized that what he had thought of as “finding the door” was really making a gate.
He reached into himself, into the maelstrom of dream and memory and habit and reflex of his mind, and found out how to make gates exactly where he wanted them, and move them when that was necessary, and call them back into himself when they had served their purpose, so he never dissipated his outself by maintaining too many gates at once.
He kept only a dozen or so permanent gates, and otherwise used feet and hands to get from place to place. All his gates were in hidden places where no one could ever see him go or come. Instead, people who bothered to look at him would see him climbing, swinging, groping, balancing his way up walls and tapestries, out along beams and girders, and into narrow ducts and passages. Thus
he earned a reputation as a squirrel, seen only as he slipped out of sight; a rodent skittering through the castle.
Since people thought this of him, it was natural that if anything was stolen he would be suspected of it. Suspicion led to questions, and Wad hated questions. He didn’t like to talk to people. Talking led to argument, and he was tired of argument. He didn’t remember why he was so tired of it, for it was lost in his distant past, his time before the tree, which was still chaotic and unfathomable to him. He only knew that he had wearied of talking long ago, and then had simply acted. Had done something that made him both satisfied and ashamed, so he could hardly face anybody’s gaze without looking away, and yet always knew that he had done right.
He had stolen something, he knew that. Stolen many things. But he was done with stealing now, as far as he knew. So one of the things he watched for was to make a constant inventory of everything that anyone brought into the castle. Then he would track it, remembering whose it was, where it was kept, whom it had been given to and where they now kept it, and so on, in an intricate web of exchange.
If something was missing, he usually knew it before the owner, for he checked the inventory frequently during the night, making small nonce gates that let him probe the insides of trunks, drawers, cabinets, boxes, bowls, and under beds and behind tapestries and inside nooks and crannies.
Then, when he was questioned—usually by Hull—about whether he knew where some item or another had been left, he had an answer. “It’s in Rudder’s chart chest,” he said once, and two days later the man once named Rudder was hanged over the sea wall, and a new man was elevated to his place and given his name.
Another time he knew that a particular wanted item was exactly where it was always kept, and the accuser was lying. This he said to Hull, and the kitchen girl who had lied got a beating and then was sent back to her home in disgrace.
Over time, instead of suspecting Wad of stealing things, most people stopped stealing or lying about where things were, because they knew that he always knew. Some feared him because of this, and now and then there was an effort to have him expelled from the castle, but when it came to the King, he said, “And then I’d have to replace Hull as baker and night cook, and I won’t do it. Besides, I’ve found that most people who complain about Wad are the very ones he has caught stealing or lying about someone else stealing.” Then the King would look at them with innocent amusement and watch them retreat in confusion.
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