The Lost Gate

by Orson Scott Card

  Once, fresh-hatched from the tree, Wad had shadowed the girl and her family along a mountain road. Wad had seen where they arrived. And now he was there, looking down a slope at the lonely house in shaggy fields nearly ready for the poor harvest of the short growing season in the mountains.

  He took the gate at the mouth of the cave where the dangling soldier braced his feet upon the sill, poised to jab with the pike into Eluik’s body, and pushed the gatemouth up the sloping floor to swallow the child inside. At that very moment he had already moved the tail of the gate to a spot in the dry grass just up the hill from the house of Roop and Levet, and their brave and kind-hearted daughter Eko, who once had succored him.

  Wad paused only long enough to see that Eluik was there and alive, then returned his attention to the face of the cliff. Another soldier now was poised at the mouth of the cave that held Anonoei, readying his pike to probe the woman who lay trapped and helpless before him.

  At that most inconvenient moment, Wad felt a familiar stirring that he did not understand. It was a burning somewhere deep inside him, in the well from which five hundred voices cried to him. He did not know what the burning meant, or why the voices cried out when the burning came, or who they even were, but he knew that every time he had felt this burning during all his years inside the tree, the only way to still the hunger was to eat.

  Not food, but the thing that burned.

  Now, though, he was not in the tree. Now he was a woken man, a Gatefather who understood his own magery. So what he had experienced during his long tree-sleep as a burning and an eating, as unconscious as that of a babe inside the womb, he now understood quite differently.

  It was the presence of another gatemage that had stirred him up. Or rather, it was the creation of a Great Gate that was not his own which caused him to burn inside. The new Great Gate led from a world that Wad had once known well, but now could not remember. He only knew that if that Gate were left in place, it would destroy everything that mattered in the world.

  So Wad reached out, by instinct now, after so many years of habitual response, and ate it. He felt the outself of the other mage, the maker of the gate, react with surprise and try to pull away. He knew that he had felt the selfsame thing at least two dozen times while he had lived inside the tree. But this time he understood that it was a person, and that what he ate was that other person’s heart, his outself, the part of him that made his gates. Wad swallowed that heart, and with it dragged inside himself the whole array of gates the other mage had made, sucked them in like noodles that dangled outside the mouth, only to be slurped inside. And in a moment he had them, all the gates.

  There were so many. This one had so many gates, and yet they had not begun to exhaust his hearthoard. Wad had never seen a Gatefather with so much potential. But, as usual, the gatemage was naive and did not understand what was happening with him. He had not learned enough to know how to resist Wad’s strength and skill and wiliness.

  But just as Wad was about to sever the connection between the gatemage and all the gates he would ever make, a strange thing happened. Out of the heart Wad held already in the jaws of his inner mouth, the other gatemage stretched open a mouth much larger than Wad’s own, and snapped it over him, over his entire hearthoard, over all the other mages’ hearthoards that Wad held inside him. The stranger snapped, he bit, the connection was severed. And Wad was helpless to resist.

  If the other mage had not been so naive, he would have sucked in all of Wad’s existing gates as well, but he did not. The gates that Wad had made remained. But he had no hearthoard now, nothing with which to form another gate.

  In that moment, Wad went from being the greatest Gatefather that the world of Westil ever knew to being one so frail he had no store of gates inside him, and only a handful of existing gates that he could manipulate.

  The soldier stabbed into the cave with his pike, and Wad could not do anything at first. It would take a tiny bit of his outself even to move her gate the way that he had moved Eluik’s, and he had no shred of outself left to do even this.

  So he sucked Anonoei’s gate into himself, to give himself some kind of hearthoard, however small.

  Her bleeding body tumbled from the cave mouth toward the lake.

  Now Wad had enough reserve that he could move the mouth of Eluik’s gate to a place just under the falling woman. It swallowed her; she disappeared in midair; but he felt her emerge in the snow near Eko’s house, fully healed by the passage through the gate.

  He found the cave where Enopp had been held. The soldier there was drawing back his pike from the cave, and on the end of it Enopp hung, gripping it with both his hands, though it pierced him through the belly. If it had been his heart, no doubt it would have been too late to save him, but quickly Wad took back Enopp’s gate, gaining even more power and quickness. Then he swung the mouth of Eluik’s gate to swallow him. He disappeared.

  But because Enopp still gripped the pike, it came along with him, leaving the soldier standing there, balanced between cave sill and taut rope, with empty hands.

  Enopp emerged between his mother and his brother in the mountain grass. He was not healed by the gate because the spear still pierced his body and he still held on to it.

  Pull out the pike, Wad shouted in his mind. But Anonoei and Eluik just stood there, shivering and terrified. Two years of prison had made them helpless, broken, unresourceful. They could do nothing.

  Wad moved the mouth of the gate across the gorge until it swallowed Wad himself. He too emerged on the mountain slope. He pulled the pike from the writhing boy, then dragged the mouth of the gate from Nassassa to this place and passed it once more over the boy, depositing him only inches from where he started, but with no wound in his belly.

  Wad stood revealed now before Anonoei.

  “You,” she said. “The kitchen monkey. Wad.”

  He turned to her. “Get your sons down the hill and beg these gentle souls for help! Are you a fool? Walk!”

  But they could not walk. They could barely stand.

  Wad gathered in more of the gates that he still had to work with, a tiny fraction of the outself he was born with, and made a gate to take them down to a spot just outside the door of the humble shack. “Open up!” he shouted.

  No one came.

  The house was empty.

  Wad gated them inside the hovel. It would be warmer there than outside. It was all that he could do right now.

  Because he had a greater concern, now they were safe. What had Anonei and her boys ever been to him, except his enemies and then his prisoners and finally his terrible burden of responsibility? For them as human beings he cared nothing, because he knew them not at all.

  All he could think of now was: Where is Trick? He was not in the burning crib when I reached for him. Where did she put him?

  Wad used the gate at hand, reversed it, and took himself back to the hill overlooking the fjord and Nassassa’s steepest wall. Then he closed the gate entirely, and gathered up all the other gates, the ones that once had been his passageways to freedom in Nassassa, the gates that once had led him to the Queen. Now he wished that he had been like the mage who swallowed up his hearthoard, leaving hundreds of gates everywhere. If he had not been so tidy, he would have them now. Instead his entire hearthoard was no more than that of a common Pathbrother.

  How could I not have understood that I was the Gate Thief all along? What did I think those voices inside me were, that seething mass of rage and loss and fading memory? I did not think. I did not remember a time when they were not there. But there must have been such a time, because I stole them all. Somewhere among them was Hull’s grandfather. So many others. Why was I doing this? Why was it so important that no gates be made in this world, or leading from another world to here?

  Wad realized now that his old self, the self that still remembered things, must have hidden inside the tree so he would live for centuries, stealing gates and gatemages’ hearts. Why had he become the enemy of all gat
emagery? Why couldn’t he remember? Had his memories seeped into the tree, lost to him forever? Or did they remain somewhere inside him, waiting to be found?

  He gathered in his gates and then used these feeble resources to search Nassassa for his son.

  He found Trick’s body smothered under the gown of the last nurse who had been on duty. When Wad had been distracted, watching her replacement stumble and go to the kitchen to get her injury attended to, the woman had suffocated the child and carried the body out beneath her clothing. Trick was already dead before Wad went to the nursery to see the Queen.

  Wad had supposed that he and Trick were safe until the new baby was born. The Queen had counted on him to believe that, and so she acted in advance, carefully manipulating Wad’s attention. Only her failure to kill Wad himself had prevented all from going as she planned. This was the day, the hour she had chosen for all her rivals to die. And she had hidden it from him.

  Wad gated the dead toddler out from the nurse’s gown and brought the body to his own arms. The gate had no power to heal the child now. He was already cold.

  Wad did not kill the nurse. She had only obeyed her Queen. Let the woman be tormented by the memory of the struggling boy, and by the fear of what would happen when the Queen demanded she produce the corpse. When she could not do it, Bexoi would assume that the nurse had given it to someone else. Bexoi would assume the baby was alive, that she had not had the heart to kill it, just as Wad had not killed Anonoei and Eluik and Enopp.

  If that had only been the truth, if Wad had found his son alive, he would have spared the nurse who refused to kill him. Even in his weakened state, he would have gated her away to safety. Now, with no corpse to prove her obedience, he would let her suffer the consequence of being thought innocent of murder by the one who ordered her to do it.

  For a moment he thought of a terrible justice: putting the body of his son back into Bexoi’s womb, to share the space with his half-brother, only a month away from birth. If Bexoi lived through the insertion—and Wad had lost none of his deftness, so she might—the body would decay and rot inside her, and soon wreak vengeance on his monstrous mother and his usurping wombmate.

  But Wad had no murder in him now. Grief and fear had overpowered his rage. A Gatefather in another world had proven he was stronger than Wad. Someday that mage would come here to this world, and Wad would have no power to resist him. Now was not the time for meaningless murders. Let Bexoi have her kingdom, if she could keep it, if Anonoei could not find a way to take it from her. Wad had other work to do. Other enemies to deal with.

  He sat upon the hill, a Gatefather who was now but a shadow of himself, and wept. For all his crimes he wept, for all who had died before he could save them, for the mages he had stripped of power even more utterly than he had been stripped today. I held their outselves in my hearthoard for a thousand years, some of them, or more. I made myself the thief of hearts, and now I am repaid.

  And yet I must stand watch against some enemy whose name I do not know, some danger that I can’t identify, some world-ending dread that now will find me nearly empty.

  I was the god who was supposed to protect this world. Was it my nemesis who took away my heart today? Or merely some innocent gatemage who happened to be stronger than I ever was, and unknowingly laid the world bare to the real enemy, whatever that might be?

  Wad gated himself away from Nassassa to the mountains. He found Eko working in another field beside another house—a larger one. The family had become more prosperous. They had abandoned their old house in the high and meager fields.

  Eko knew him when she saw him, and her face brightened. “Tree man,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said, “for what you did for me.”

  She knelt before him. “O Man of the Tree,” she said, “how can I serve you now?”

  “In your old house higher up the mountain, there is a woman and her sons. They are helpless and no one else knows where they are. If the King or Queen should find them, they’ll be killed. But they have friends who soon will seek them. Keep them alive until I can find and bring their friends.”

  “I will,” she said, and closed her eyes. Then she opened them, reached out and touched Wad, then drew back her hand as if she had burned herself.

  “If there is any blessing in me,” Wad replied, “then it is yours.”

  She arose and ran up the path that led to the abandoned hovel.

  Wad gated himself to the tree in the Forest of Mages, where he had lived so long. He gathered in the last of all his gates and pressed himself against the tree. “Take me back,” he murmured. “I have failed at everything.”

  But the tree did not obey. Perhaps without his power it did not know him. Perhaps his time for dwelling in a tree had passed. But Wad remained there, clinging to the rough bark, because he had no other place to go.

  “Trick,” he whispered. “My son, my son, if only I had died and you had lived. O Trick my son.”

  23

  GATEFATHER

  He heard them calling to him, as if from far away. Leslie, weeping over him, saying over and over, Danny, come back, Danny, we need you, please come back. Marion, his voice stern: Daniel North, you have work to do. Get your chores done before you play. Do you think a farm runs itself? Stone, speaking softly, We have to know what happened, Danny. You have to report to us. This is all wasted if we don’t understand. Danny, come back to me.

  Veevee and Hermia didn’t speak to him. Instead he felt them, felt a pinching and a caressing inside himself, probes that moved through him, not in his body, not even in his mind, but in that place where his gates all stayed.

  Only gradually did he realize what they were doing. All the screaming outselves that had been drowning out his own thoughts, threatening to swallow him up in their agonized, frustrated wishes and demands, one by one they were closing, closing, closing, as Hermia worked to shut them all. Meanwhile Veevee was touching the ones that Hermia had not yet reached, as if to assure them that they were being heard, they did not have to scream, they would be heard if they only spoke one at a time, each in turn, not all at once like this, patience, patience.

  Only one voice inside him was not touched or closed or changed. It was the outself of the Gate Thief, and he was not screaming. Not shouting, not doing anything.

  Pulled out of his stupor and terror and solitude by the voices of his friends, freed from more and more of the burden of all the stolen gates by Hermia and Veevee, it was to the outself of the Gate Thief that Danny turned.

  Who are you? Danny asked, not in words, but as a kind of exploration. Why did you try to steal my heart? What did you want? What did you fear?

  Bel Bel Bel Bel, came the answer. Only it wasn’t an answer. It was simply a kind of watchfulness, a continuous probe. Let Bel not come into the world again, he will eat us all this time, he will ride the drowthers, all of them, ride them through the gates to Westil, he will devour us all. Close the gates, all the gates, keep the worlds apart. Is that a gate? Is there a gate? Gate? Gate?

  Gradually Danny came to understand that the Gate Thief’s outself was simply continuing to do the task that had been set for it, waking and sleeping, for centuries. Watch for a Great Gate, for any gate, wake me when a gate appears, all gates must be stopped, must be eaten, must be owned. No gates anywhere, or the enemy will make it through.

  It was still the war with Bel. Carthage was long since broken, plowed and salted, but still the Gate Thief watched out for the dangerous and implacable foe.

  Gate Thief? Danny knew him now. It was Loki. It had always been Loki, the Last Loki, the one who closed the gates between the worlds. Somehow he was still alive, still watching, and until Danny ate his outself, he had still been laboring to keep the worlds apart.

  Why? Danny asked, again and again. But Loki’s outself did not hear him. Instead it continued its vigil, intensely watching, scanning.

  Lying where he was, still hearing the other captive outselves, still feeling Hermia and Veevee in
side him, still hearing the voices of Leslie, Marion, and Stone, Danny made a gate, a single gate, going only an inch or two.

  Immediately Loki’s outself outshouted everything. Gate gate gate gate gate! And Danny felt what Loki’s outself made him feel: Must consume the gate, must eat all the gates this mage will ever make. Danny was hungry. And yet it was his own gate that he would have to eat, if he was to satisfy Loki’s need.

  The Gate Thief had carried this hunger around inside himself for more than thirteen centuries.

  “He made a gate,” said Hermia aloud.

  “A locked one,” said Veevee. “Very small.”

  “Was it Danny who made it?” Hermia asked. “Or has the Gate Thief taken him over from the inside?”

  Danny opened his mouth and tried to speak.

  Leslie cried out, “He’s trying to talk! Hush!”

  “You’re the only one being loud, my love,” said Marion.

  Danny searched for his own voice, the one the outside world could hear. “It’s me.”

  He opened his eyes. “Still in the gym?” he asked.

  “We didn’t know if we could move you,” said Veevee.

  “And Ced didn’t make it back through the gate,” said Marion.

  “He didn’t want to come,” said Leslie.

  “But we came back,” said Marion. “We touched the earth of Westil and then we came right back. While you fought, we made the passage.” The awe in his voice was almost palpable.

  “So move us some mountains, tough guy,” said Danny, his voice feebler than he expected. “What about Stone?”

  “I didn’t go,” said Stone. “I stayed with Veevee. What would I do with more power? Grow giant tomatoes and get my picture in the paper?”

  “Florist shop?” asked Danny. “How long?”

  “Half an hour, maybe,” said Veevee.

  “Who’s crying?” asked Danny.