Gatefather (39 page)

“If,” said Xena.

“Move,” said Pat, giving Xena a little push.

Hermia was laughing, and not nicely, as Danny's friends walked briskly away.

“Glad to provide you with amusement,” said Danny.

“You should have let them stay. Remember, I'm the one who told them what you are and explained everything. I'm part of your group whether you like it or not.”

“Not,” said Pat softly.

“Maybe you'll like me better when we're done here,” said Hermia. “Because I'm here to relieve you of a burden you aren't really qualified to bear.”

“Me?” asked Pat.

“You?” asked Hermia, looking annoyed. “What, are you pregnant? If you are, then I'm not relieving anything. No, I'm talking about what Danny's got inside
him
.”

“No,” said Danny. “Don't do it. I don't think you
can
, but don't even try, because believe me,
you're
the one who isn't ready.”

“
I'm
qualified because I'm the only one who's got any perspective. You've picked up Loki's absolute horror of letting Set get to Westil, but—”

“Look at her Sutahites,” said Pat. “Not a cloud outside of her, they're riding inside, as if they were her gates.”

“I don't have gates,” said Hermia. “You took them.”

“Inside her hoard,” said Danny. “So many.”

“Do you think they've possessed her?” asked Pat. “Do you think she's making her own choices?”

“I know she is,” said Danny. “Her mind is made up. She has no idea of what she's doing, but she also doesn't care about the consequences, because all that matters to Hermia is that she's hungry to prove that she's greater than I am.”

“I don't have to
prove
that,” said Hermia. “The real question is, am I greater than Loki?”

“The one thing you don't understand,” said Danny, “is that you're not greater than Set.”

“Gate away, Danny,” said Pat.

“She can follow me anywhere,” said Danny. “I can't hide from her.”

“Exactly,” said Hermia.

“So do the insane thing you came here to do,” said Danny, “and
then
I'll decide how to respond.”

Hermia smiled. “I didn't come here for you, so I don't care how you respond, Danny North. Once you were the most important thing that ever happened in my life. But now that place has been taken by someone else.”

Danny said nothing.

“Set,” Hermia said, her voice turning oddly seductive. Who feels the need to seduce Satan? “I invite you into
me
. I can do anything Danny North can do. You can leave him behind and really accomplish something with me. Come into me, Set.”

What Hermia didn't realize was that Set made the jump the moment she first invited him. But Danny could see that it took Set awhile to find his way into Hermia's body. He had learned something from the new skills Danny had acquired in Duat. Set rooted more deeply in her than he ever had in Danny.

Hermia fell silent, her face looking a little surprised, then vacant, then exultant.

“Should I kill your little friend again?” asked Hermia—but Danny knew it was Set speaking now.

“You can't,” said Danny.

“Why can't I?” asked Hermia.

“Because I forbid it.”

Hermia's hand flashed out, holding a handgun that Danny had not realized she carried in her purse.

And then the handgun was gone. Pat must have moved it.

“Really,” said Pat. “Is that all you've got?”

Hermia looked at her savagely, then at Danny with complete loathing. “Do you want to know what hell is? Being trapped inside somebody as weak and stupid and …
nice
as you.”

“Thanks,” said Danny. “I won't say I'll miss you.”

“Oh, you will,” said Hermia. “Why haven't you tried to kill me yet? Gate me inside the sun? Loki tried that. An inconvenience, a delay.”

“It's all right for you to kill Hermia,” said Pat. “She asked for it.”

“I don't kill people just because they ask for it,” said Danny. “And it wouldn't work.”

“Do you know what else won't work?” asked Hermia. “Trying to keep me from going to Westil.”

“Nobody's keeping you from anything,” said Pat.

But Danny
was
doing something. It was what Pat said, about the Sutahites being inside Hermia like gates. Danny reached out, the way he had when the Gate Thief first tried to take his gates, and ate Hermia's Sutahites.

And just like that, he had them locked inside himself.

But the Sutahites were not Hermia's, never
hers
. They always belonged to Set. They had followed him out of Duat, the way that near-human prets followed the strongest prets, becoming their ba, giving them the powers that would turn into magery.

So when Danny ate Hermia's Sutahites, it was Set who reeled at the sensation. Nobody had ever done anything like that to him, Danny knew.

In his alarm, Set did something by reflex: He polled his ba. He enumerated his Sutahites, called to them, kindled them, woke them.

Even though they were scattered over the surface of the Earth, accompanying billions of people, every one of them became clear to Danny North, not by number, but by location.

And he ate them all.

It felt strangely familiar, to have tens of billions of Sutahites inside him, completely contained in his hearthoard. It took Danny a moment, but he realized: Ever since he had given all his gates to Wad, and then returned all the imprisoned gates to themselves, Danny had felt empty. And now he was full again.

Well, half full.

I had more gates in me than Set has Sutahites, thought Danny. How is that even possible?

Or his Sutahites are somehow smaller than my gates were, so they take up less space.

These were fleeting thoughts, and Danny had no time to pursue the answers because Hermia's face now wore a look of complete panic. “What have you done?” she asked.

“Played a little Hungry Hungry Hippos with you,” said Danny. “I win.”

“You won
nothing
!” shouted Hermia. “Nothing!” And then, very quietly: “Nothing.”

It seemed to Danny that the last “nothing” referred to what Set had left. Instead of possessing the body of a gatemage and using it to carry half his Sutahites to Westil, he had no Sutahites. They were gone.

They were his kingdom. His body, his
self
. He could reach out with them, influence people, and he did. They were his wings, his eyes, his ears, his voice whispering into the ears of everybody all at once, and now he's blind, deaf, mute, wing-broken. He has Hermia. And nothing else.

Hermia's hands lashed out, but whatever Set meant to do—jab his eyes out? slash his cheeks? throttle him?—Danny would never know, because he was suddenly thirty feet away. He hadn't done it—Pat had.

“Really, Danny,” she said, “letting her slash you was just
too
nice.”

Hermia knew where they were, of course, and a moment later she had gated in front of them. “I think I'll go to Westil,” she said.

“Go,” said Pat. “You'll be the only passenger.”

Danny waited until Hermia disappeared. “Please stay here and get the others home,” he said to Pat. Then he leapt directly to Loki. The Gate Thief needed to be warned what was happening.

He also needed to help Danny figure out what to do.

 

18

Wad was with Queen Bexoi when Danny came to tell him the news.

“So you didn't have him under control after all,” said Wad.

“I never claimed that I did,” said Danny mildly. “I invited him to stay, and he stayed. She invited him to go, and he went.”

“I already thought she was dangerous,” said Wad.

“My question is, how dangerous is Set?” asked Danny. “No matter how evil somebody is, how much damage can they do without a lot of followers doing what they command?”

“He'll have no trouble gathering followers,” said Wad, thinking about Queen Bexoi, who had managed to find minions to do her work. Including Wad himself, when he was besotted with love and admiration for her, when he had put his gatemaking abilities at her disposal.

Then Danny explained what he had done to the Sutahites.

Wad looked at Danny and shook his head. “You still don't have any gates.”

“I said it was
like
eating gates,” said Danny. “That doesn't turn them into gates.”

“I can't see anything like that,” said Wad.

“You couldn't see Set himself, either,” said Danny.

“And you can.”

“More easily and clearly now that he's inside Hermia,” said Danny.

“Not shaped like a man. More like a flyspeck.”

“Less than a flyspeck. A geometric point. No dimension to him. Just location, persistence across time, the ability to move.”

Wad watched as Danny got a momentary faraway look.

“He's never been human, so it's hard to evaluate his character. But he seems to be a creature of pure ambition. Fearless and strong, without a scrap of empathy.”

“Sounds like a gatemage,” said Wad ruefully.

“But we're funny,” said Danny.

“Not very,” said Wad. “Not lately.”

“I think Hermia poses less danger than she would have, before I took the Sutahites.”

“How long will you live?” asked Wad. The boy was still so young; he didn't think things through.

“Oh,” said Danny. “Of course. When I die, the Sutahites will be released. So even if Set doesn't have them now, he will.”

“And don't imagine that it will help if you climb inside a tree,” said Wad. “That only postpones the day.”

“A lot can happen in fifteen hundred years,” said Danny. “More to the point, a lot can
not
happen.”

“We need a permanent solution.”

“Set and the Sutahites have never been alive,” said Danny. “So they can't exactly die.”

“They don't have bodies that can die,” said Wad. “But that doesn't mean they can't be destroyed.”

“Prets can't be extinguished,” said Danny.

“And you know that because?”

“Because that's what I was told in Duat,” said Danny.

“And everything you learned there is absolute truth,” said Wad.

“If you had been there,” said Danny.

“I'd believe everything?” said Wad. “Quite probably. All that means is that liars can do a better job of deceiving people when they're physically present.”

“There was no lying in Duat,” said Danny. “There was no
language
.”

Wad didn't answer.

“All right,” said Danny, “I know you can deceive without language, but what I got there, it was pure knowledge. It wasn't
told
, it just
was
.”

There was no way for Wad to dispute the point. And it might even be true. “There's plenty of lying
here
,” said Wad.

“You have to pick something to believe or you could never
do
anything,” said Danny.

Wad could only agree, though he remembered how he had loved Bexoi and trusted her, doing her will in everything. Well, up to a point. When Bexoi commanded him to kill Anonoei and her sons, Wad had kept them alive and lied to her about it.
That
was when he stopped loving her. When she murdered Wad's son Trick, that was when he began to hate her.

“Maybe it's time for you to go back to Duat and find out how to solve this,” said Wad. “With all that pure knowledge lying about, maybe you could pick up something we can use to keep the Sutahites imprisoned even after you die. Or, you know, obliterate Set from the universe.”

“I've thought about this a lot,” said Danny. “How much of the evil in the world comes from Set, and how much comes from human nature. I mean, chimps are violent. Alpha males
own
the females. The other males kidnap females and carry them off and rape them repeatedly. They make war, they commit genocide. They can't hack into computer systems or build nuclear weapons, but they do a lot of really terrible things, without Set or the Sutahites goading them.”

Wad had to think hard to imagine what a “chimp” might be.

It was as if Danny were reading his mind. “Chimpanzees. A kind of ape. The one that's genetically closest to human beings. Next time you're in Mittlegard, visit a zoo.”

“Or I'll read a book,” said Wad. “Great invention, books. Paper—amazing stuff. Why couldn't Hermia have brought
papermaking
to Westil?”

“Maybe she will. Dangerous and terrible ideas spread better with widespread literacy,” said Danny. “Along with the good ones, of course.”

“I think your original point was that people are terrible whether Set's around or not.”

“They
can
be terrible,” said Danny. “They can also be good.”

“Does Set stop them from being good?”

“Only the person he's possessing.”

“When Set was first inside you, he completely controlled your body, right?” asked Wad.

“That's how it felt. I felt like I couldn't do anything.
Now
I know that I had the power to take back control at any time. But it took a level of self-awareness—
physical
self-awareness—that I had never had.”

“Is this part of your ability to sense prets and Sutahites?”

“Sort of,” said Danny. “I'm still finding out what I can actually sense, what I can do, what any of it means.”

“But you were able to regain control of your body with Set still inside you. Can Hermia?”

Danny shook his head. “She didn't try to learn anything from Pat and me except how to travel instantly without gates.”