“Leslie, of course,” said Veevee.
“And Hermia,” said Stone.
“Oh, really?” asked Veevee. “I thought she was still busy locking gates.”
“I am,” said Hermia. “I’m not crying. Shut up.”
“We thought we lost you,” said Veevee. “So many gates, so many outselves. We couldn’t imagine how you could contain them. Keep them from taking you over. Especially with the Gate Thief’s outself in you—so thick with power, so … but the dust of your outself overwhelmed him. You’re really something, Danny.”
“My gates?” asked Danny.
“All inside you,” said Hermia.
“The Great Gate?”
“Especially that one.”
“Make it again,” said Danny.
“Not yet,” said Veevee. “You don’t know what would happen.”
“What about Ced?”
“He chose to stay,” said Marion. “He could have made it back. You can open another Great Gate in a day, a week. Let him do what he wants to do there. In a month you can go to him. Give him a chance to do what he can do as the most powerful windmage in Westil.”
“If he is the most powerful,” said Stone.
“If you try to make the Great Gate again,” said Hermia, “you don’t know what the Gate Thief will do. He’s not dead. If you open up a way for him to come through, he might know a way to take it all back again—his own outself, the captives, and you as well. He’s still dangerous.”
Danny nodded. His head hurt. “My head hurts.”
“You hit the floor kind of hard,” said Veevee. “I’m thinking we need to pass you through a gate. You might have a concussion.”
“He might have fractured his skull,” said Leslie.
“Can you put yourself through a gate?” asked Hermia.
Danny took the little gate that he had made and passed the mouth of it over his own head, then down his entire body.
He felt fine now. He sat up. Stood up.
“You beat him,” said Hermia, grinning. Then she threw her arms around him. “You beat the Gate Thief.”
“It’s Loki,” said Danny. “The Gate Thief is Loki. The very one.”
“After thirteen hundred years?” asked Stone, incredulous.
Hermia let go of him, stepped back. “I guess he really wanted to keep the worlds apart,” she said.
“Well, Ced is there now,” said Stone. “And Marion and Leslie went through to Westil and back again.”
“Powerful cows,” said Danny to Leslie.
She strode to him and hugged him tightly.
“What now?” Danny asked them all.
“We get the rental car away from here,” said Veevee. “Which means I have a drive ahead of me.”
“You’ve put enough miles on the car for them to believe you actually used it,” said Danny. “I’ll gate you back. The rest of you—Yellow Springs?”
“They certainly don’t want to stay in the miserable shack you’re living in here,” said Veevee.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Danny. And added, to Marion, “Now that we know how to do it, we can rig our own rope in the barn.”
They came to the crash doors, pushed them open.
A huge bird dropped on top of Danny and knocked him to the ground, started pecking at him savagely. Danny instantly gated about ten feet away and, completely uninjured now, jumped to his feet.
Thor was there, about two rods off, and Baba and Mama were with him. Thor was yelling at the bird. “Stop it, Zog! Stop!” The bird was beating with its great wings, moving angrily toward Danny.
Then the bird was calm.
“I can’t believe Uncle Zog would give up,” said Danny.
“He didn’t,” said Leslie. “I took the bird away from him.”
“You can do that?” asked Danny.
“Nobody can do that,” said Thor.
“I’ve been to Westil,” said Leslie. “I still can’t ride a beast that isn’t bound to me, but I can break anyone’s connection with their heartbound. Do you understand me?”
The ground trembled under them.
“Gyish!” cried Baba. “Don’t!”
Now Danny saw Gyish standing near the Family’s truck. Gyish was paying no attention to Baba. A crevice opened in the ground at Danny’s feet.
Danny simply gated to one side.
A new crevice opened.
“Oh, for pete’s sake,” said Marion.
A gash opened in the earth under Gyish and the old man dropped down into it. So did the truck.
Mama screamed.
“Marion, what have you done!” cried Leslie.
“Don’t worry,” said Danny. “I gated the old man away and sent him home to the compound as soon as he fell in.”
“You didn’t have to,” said Marion. “I wasn’t going to kill him.”
Leslie strode toward Baba and Mama and Thor. “Yes, he made a Great Gate. Yes, the Gate Thief tried to take him. But Danny is the greatest Gatefather who ever lived. Get it? He fought the Gate Thief and he won!”
“Oh, Danny!” cried Mama. “It’s what we hoped for you!”
“This is why we kept you alive,” said Baba. “So you could make a Great Gate for us.”
“How kind of you,” said Danny.
“Now let us through,” said Baba. “Let us go through the gate.”
“It doesn’t exist right now,” said Hermia.
“But you can make it again,” said Mama. The greed in her eyes was more than a little scary.
“If I decide to,” said Danny. “But one thing is certain, Mama, Baba, Thor. No one from the North Family will ever use it.”
If he had stabbed a knife into his father’s heart, he could not have looked more stunned. “You’re my son!” Baba cried. “We made you for this!”
“How many gatemages before me did the Families murder?” said Danny. “Thank you for not killing me. Thank you for not murdering your own son. What a sacrifice. I have better parents now. If you come anywhere near us, I’ll gate you to the Moon. Do you understand me?”
Thor was about to say something, but before he could get any words out, Danny gated them all back to the Family compound.
“So how do you really feel?” asked Stone.
“Give me credit here,” said Danny. “I didn’t kill them.”
“Should I bring the truck back up to the surface?” asked Marion. “It isn’t damaged much.”
“Crush it,” said Danny. “They can buy another, and think of me whenever they use it.”
“Can we visit my Family next?” asked Hermia.
“All in good time,” said Stone. “What you just did was probably a mistake. It’s their worst fears realized—it gives them all the more incentive to kill you. You’ll be able to remake the Great Gate and send only your friends—their enemies—through it. It’ll be the destruction of their Family.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Danny.
“We can work it out,” said Marion. “Negotiate. No more killing of gatemages. They turn gatemages over to us as soon as they’re identified. And when we make a Great Gate again, each Family can send one member through and right back again. If we promise to share equally, maybe we can keep a war from breaking out.”
“And gates for everybody,” said Stone. “Leading from Family to Family. Public gates that can’t be closed, so everybody can check on everybody else without buying an airplane ticket.”
Danny laughed.
“What’s funny?” said Veevee. “I wet myself a little when he opened up that crack in the ground.”
“I just—we had no plan for this,” said Danny. “For complete, total success.”
“It isn’t total,” said Hermia. “The Gate Thief—Loki—he’s still there, and he knows a lot more than any of us. The Families can’t be trusted even if they make the most solemn promises. We’re safer than we were, but only barely.”
“You really are a pessimist, aren’t you?” said Stone.
“Danny won,” said
Hermia. “But only by taking Loki by surprise. Now it’s time for us all to knuckle down and study this. So when Danny faces him again, he’ll have a better idea of what he’s doing. Did Loki have anything left, Danny, or did you take it all?”
“He has six gates left,” said Danny. “Or at least that’s all I sensed before I cut him off.”
“Maybe enough to make a Great Gate of his own,” said Hermia, “and if passing through a Great Gate increases a Gatefather’s outself, he might be able to come here and get us.”
“Maybe,” said Danny. “But if you could hear the hunger of his outself—he’s all about eating Great Gates, not making them.”
“We need to bring together everything we know. I’ve had access to five Family books on gatemagery. Veevee’s been studying what’s available in the public record her whole life. Danny’s actually faced the enemy. I think we can put it all together and try to make sense of it.”
“Not tonight,” said Leslie. She was stroking the head of the bird that Zog had tried to use to kill Danny.
“I don’t know if I faced the enemy,” said Danny. “I mean, yes, it was the Gate Thief. But he was terrified of something. Of Bel, whoever that is. The god of Carthage, but … we need to find out more about that. Before we start undoing Loki’s work, we need to understand it. How do we know we aren’t going to unleash on the world the very disaster he tried so hard to prevent?”
“Another day,” said Leslie. “It’s late, we’re tired. Danny, are you coming home with us?”
“Or me?” said Veevee. “I don’t care which, but Leslie’s right. We all need to sleep.”
“It’s Hermia who needs a place to stay,” said Danny. “You want to go annoy Veevee in her condo? Or get much better cooking with Marion and Leslie?”
Hermia looked from Veevee to the Silvermans and back.
“Or my house,” said Stone. “I take in refugees from the Families.”
“Stick with your fellow gatemage,” said Veevee. “Danny, would you be a dear and restore the gates between Yellow Springs and Naples and DC before you go to bed?”
“Yes,” said Danny. “And don’t forget the gates from all of you to my place here in B.V.”
“No,” said Leslie. “You’re not staying here!”
“Ridiculous,” said Veevee. “After what happened?”
“Do you really think the Norths will leave you alone?” asked Stone.
“Please let’s not argue,” said Danny. “I’m trying to make a life for myself here. And tomorrow’s a school day.”
Inside himself, however, Danny could feel the pull of a thousand different wills, some weak, some strong. And deeper and stronger than any of them, the outself of the Gate Thief, the ancient Loki. He had felt it surge with exultation when he thrust his own parents back to their home, dismissing them like a lord with a despised underling. He had liked his power far too much.
He needed to get back to school. And no more gates there, no more showing off. He needed roots in the drowther world. Because being a god was too seductive and too dangerous. How many people might he hurt, if he didn’t keep this under control? He thought of his friends at school. Who would protect them from the gods, if not Danny? He thought of would-be tyrants like Lieder and weaklings like Massey. Just because Lieder misused his power, and Massey didn’t protect anybody with his, didn’t mean that in their weakness they didn’t need to be treated with fairness and respect. I could dismiss them, too, because they have offended me. But there are rules of decency. Or if there aren’t, then there should be.
For there was always the possibility that Loki was really a good man after all. That his reason for closing all the gates was real and compelling. That he wasn’t just protecting Westil and the Westilians—that maybe he was trying to save the drowthers, too.
I was born with more power inside myself than I ever dreamed. But along with it there came no more sense than any other idiotic kid. Somewhere along in here I need to grow up into a man I can stand to live with. A man who doesn’t just survive, but deserves to.
AFTERWORD
I began this book as I have begun so many others—with a map. It was 1977. I doodled it and then began naming the places in it. I connected it with an idea I had been nursing along for more than a year, about a magic system in which you gain power over a type of creature or an element or force of nature by serving its interest, helping it become whatever it most wants to become. So as I worked on the map, I decided to take it seriously.
I traced the coastlines and rivers on a clean sheet of unlined paper (it was first doodled on a lined notebook sheet), then xeroxed it a couple of dozen times on the copier at the office of The Ensign magazine, where I was working as an assistant editor at the time. Then I drew in the borders of countries, showing the changes across time. When I named them, I let the names also change with the centuries.
When I was done, it felt to me as if I had a whole history there, with a sense of ancientness and power in it. The kind of feeling I always get from poring over historical atlases. (I once created a type-in program for the PC junior’s BASIC language, showing the results of every presidential election in U.S. history as colors on a map. It was another way of containing the sweep of history in a two-dimensional space. The book it was supposed to appear in died with the PCjr, and the program can’t run under any existing version of BASIC. So you’ll have to take my word that it was great.)
With the maps complete, it was time to try out the magic system. The result was the dark story “Sandmagic.” Though the story was rejected with a rude letter by the quondam editor of Fantastic magazine, I refused to give up. It was published in an anthology of Andy Offutt’s and then picked up for a best-fantasy-of-the-year anthology. That was all the validation that I needed.
The trouble was, I cared too much about the Mithermages world. I thought of it as my best world ever, and my best magic system. I wanted to tell only stories that were worthy of it. And besides, in those days fantasy didn’t often sell as well as science fiction. I had a family to support. I stuck with the spaceships and held on to Mithermages for some later date, when I had found a story that could bring out all its possibilities.
Little did I know that I already had part of the story. Jay A. Parry, my closest friend at The Ensign (or anywhere, at that time), and I were working on a story idea together, about an orphan or bastard kid who lived in a medieval castle, prowling and spying as he crawled through beams and rafters, secret passageways, roof thatch, gullies, drains, and tunnels. He would know everything that was going on in the castle, yet everyone would ignore or despise him. Jay named him “Wad.”
Years later, we even tried to create a collaborative novel that we could sell together. Jay wrote an opening that was very good, but I somehow couldn’t carry on with it. Now I realize that it was the magic system we were working with at the time that blocked me—it wasn’t strong enough. Yet I couldn’t think of a better one.
Skip forward a few decades. I had already published the Mithermages maps in a small collection entitled Cardography. (The maps don’t appear in this book because they aren’t needed yet; they’ll show up in the next volume.) Still I had not written a story set in that world since “Sandmagic.” Yet the maps and the magic wouldn’t leave me alone. I was brooding about it one day when it dawned on me that if Wad lived in the world of Mithermages, his might be the story worth writing.
I asked Jay for permission to take Wad and put him in this world of mine. Jay graciously gave his consent, and so I have preserved the name Jay thought of for this lost and lonely boy. I knew at once the place where he would live in the novel—Iceway, a northern kingdom that thrived by trading and raiding on the sea.
For a time the Mithermages project was under the tutelage of editor Betsy Mitchell at Del Rey, with whom I had worked so happily on the book I thought of as the best in my career so far, Magic Street. She helped and advised me greatly in developing Mithermages, and it was at this time that I decided that I would stretch the
story between our present-day natural world and the magical one, rather the way I had done with Magic Street and its immediate predecessor, the contemporary/medieval fantasy romance Enchantment.
At once the magic system erupted: It would explain everything. Elves and fairies, ancient mythical gods of every Indo-European culture, ghosts and poltergeists, werewolves and trolls and golems, seven-league boots and mountains that move, talking trees and invisible people—all would be contained within it.
As I was fitting the magic of Mithermages into our world, past and present, I was invited by Gardner Dozois to submit a story to an anthology called Wizards. I came up with a new story set entirely in the Mithermages world, at an unspecified but early time period. I called it “Stonefather,” and I knew as soon as I finished it that it was one of the best stories I’d ever written. I later brought it out in collaboration with Subterranean Press as a slim stand-alone book with a gorgeous cover by Tom Kidd. I had tangible proof that the Mithermages world was still alive and could give rise to strong stories.
But it was slow going, building up the story of Wad and the simultaneous tale of Danny, the boy born into our world as a gatemage in a Westilian Family. The problem was that the magic system was too thick. There was so much to explain. For years I was stuck in one place: an opening I wrote in which a much younger Danny struggles just to figure out what was going on in his magical family.
By the time I solved the problem, the project had moved to my primary publisher, Tor, and I was working once again with longtime editor and friend Beth Meacham. I realized (finally!) that my whole approach was faulty. Instead of having Danny know almost nothing, and have the reader learn each point as Danny learned it, I started the book afresh with Danny as a twelve-year-old knowing as much as anyone in his family about the way magic worked and how the Westilians fit into the universe.
I was really following my own advice—I tell students in my writing classes that suspense comes, not from knowing almost nothing, but from knowing almost everything and caring very much about the small part still unknown. I had expected to spend quite a bit of time in the North Family compound, developing Danny’s relationships with the Aunts and Uncles, the Cousins, and his parents and siblings, but I quickly found the place too cramped and depressing—as Danny did. I had painted him into a corner; he could not thrive there. I had to get him out.
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