The Gate Thief (Mither Mages) (29 page)

Nice guy.

Danny turned to face south on 60. Stay on the left side. Don’t cross the street.

He didn’t run. He jogged. Shambled, really.

What was that about? he asked the voices. What had he been thinking about when he suddenly got so stupid?

He was asking the voices how he could prompt
them
to tell him about things that only Loki would remember.

And then he realized. They had demonstrated something. That had disconnected him from the moment. Or they had disconnected his own gates, or distracted him—something. They had done something so that his body
didn’t
just keep on doing what he told it to do, the way Loki’s gates had kept on following his instructions while he lived in a tree, the way Danny’s outself had kept on running his body while he thought about other things.

He thought about how he remembered what he had been thinking about during each stage of his run along McCorkle Drive. He had mentally gone back to the process. Going up this hill, making that turn, passing this driveway, going down the hill, looking at the highway onramp, seeing the McDonald’s sign.

He had mentally retraced all the steps.

But he couldn’t
re
trace steps that Loki had taken, and he had not.

But he could
trace
them.

Do you know where Loki learned the nature of the Belmage?

A sort of vague approval.

You can’t
tell
me where.

Yes yes yes.

But can you take me there?

Again, vague approval.

Danny jogged left into a driveway, past a building, to the back of the parking lot, behind a tree and some bushes, and made a gate.

He had no idea where the gate was leading. He left it up to Loki’s gates. Don’t tell me where I need to go, because you can’t, you don’t know. Just
take
me there because what you have is not word memory or even picture memory, it’s kinetic memory. You remember what you
did
, and then the other kinds of memories come popping back.

Yes yes yes.

There was the gate. He stepped through it.

And found himself in a bare stretch of desert, and it was nighttime, and it was cold. But there was a lot of moonlight, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, so he could see just fine.

His first thought was: Mohave Desert? Death Valley?

Then he realized: America hadn’t even been discovered when Loki lived in Mittlegard.

And this was
too
bone dry.

And—duh—in the Mohave Desert it would be three hours
earlier
than it was in Virginia, and so it would be even earlier in the day. Here it was night. He was on the dark side of Earth.

He looked at the position of the moon. The stars. He wasn’t a fanatic about it, but he knew how to locate himself, roughly, if he did a little thinking.

Plus, he also knew where all his gates were. They were far beyond the curvature of the Earth, but he was at just about the same latitude as the gates at Veevee’s place in Naples. That meant, going due east, and figuring from the time of day …

He was somewhere in the Sahara.

He remembered how he had made a gate that took him and his entire P.E. class a mile above the high school. Maybe he could get an aerial view of this desert and maybe guess why Loki’s gates had brought him here.

But instead of using a gate to go vertical, he climbed a rise to the east. When he reached the crest, he looked down and saw that the bone-dry desert went right to the edge of a river in a deep valley. Lots of lights—a city across the river, and some of it on his side, too.

The river ran north-south. He was on the west side. Upstream—to his right—there was a lake. And a huge dam.

Then it became obvious. He was in Egypt. Within sight of the Nile, just downstream from the Aswan Dam. Across from Kitchener’s Island. Thousands of people all around. A tourist with no visa—no passport—and not a word of Arabic.

But when Loki came here, if he came here, nobody spoke Arabic. That was the language of obscure barbarian tribesmen across the Red Sea. The language of the common people here was Coptic; the educated spoke Greek. The religion was Christian.

What now? he asked the voices silently. And then, out loud: “Are you remembering anything yet?” It was vaguely comforting to hear his own voice.

He knew as he asked the question that this isn’t how he would get the answer. He had to walk through the memory. He had to take his own body where Loki had gone, and then let the memories wash over him. Not his own memories, Loki’s. He had to become Loki, act out Loki’s part, and then he’d be able to remember what Loki had seen and heard, just as he had remembered, just a moment ago, his run along McCorkle Drive—and everything he had thought about and noticed as he ran.

So it was a kind of time travel.

There is no way this is going to work.

He felt the need to make a gate, and, assuming that feeling came from the voices, he made the gate and stepped into it.

He was standing in a wadi. Sand had flowed like a river through here. Carried by wind, though, not water. And so it would have piled up, not washed down. Building up like snowdrifts, not fanning out like silt in a stream.

He walked where it felt right to walk, trying to let memory wash over him, and failing.

Because it was wrong. Something was wrong.

He needed to walk somewhere that didn’t exist.

Only it did exist. It was just buried in sand.

He needed a shovel.

He gated back to Lexington, where it was still afternoon, though starting to get a little darker. He popped out behind the Lowe’s on the far side of the Walmart. He walked in and bought a shovel and a pick. Then he thought of a better plan and went back and bought two more shovels.

A minute or two later, he interrupted Hal and Wheeler playing some game on the Xbox at Wheeler’s house. “This couldn’t wait?” asked Wheeler.

“Got to do it while it’s dark,” said Danny.

“So we’ve got a couple of
hours
,” said Hal.

“While it’s dark
in Egypt
,” said Danny.

They were smart guys. They got it.

They just didn’t like it.

“I don’t even like digging in the sand at the beach,” said Hal as he dubiously eyed the sand-filled wadi.

But Danny set to work without insisting they do anything. “Just help as much as you want to. And if you want to go home now, the gate’s right there.” Danny didn’t even look at them. Just started digging.

Pretty soon they were digging beside him.

If they had been archaeologists, they would have proceeded methodically, slowly. But they weren’t archaeologists, and this probably wasn’t even an excavatable site. Because as Danny and Hal and Wheeler dug into the sand, Danny began to remember the place. Not his own memories, of course. But he knew without knowing how he knew just who had lived here. A monk. A Christian ascetic, not one of the ones who collected disciples, but one of the few who avoided them. Only Loki had gone to him.

There was the cave. Or rather, the depression in the cliff. It’s not like he had to stay out of the rain—and since he had chosen a south-facing cave, he wasn’t even staying out of the sun.

No, he was staying out of the sight of people who came looking for him. He really didn’t want to be found.

Did he want to die?

Suicide would be a sin. This was a holy man. He didn’t want to die. He had a friend who brought him water, and he shielded his face, his whole bald head, from the sun. Under a little awning.

I came here—Loki came here—and brought his own water and then just sat here. Day after day. Saying nothing. Danny remembered it, the silence.

After a few days—on Sunday, actually—the hermit said, in Greek, “Go away.”

In that instant, Danny remembered gating away. Right in front of the man. Letting him see that he was a gatemage.

Of course, it was Loki who had done that. Whatever he wanted from this man, it depended on the man knowing just what Loki was, what he could do.

“You’ve stopped digging,” said Hal. “Are we done?”

Danny broke out of his reverie. Out of the memory. It had been so real. Even though it was dark here right now, and it had been broad daylight when the hermit told Loki to go away.

This was going to work.

“Yeah, we’re done. With the digging.”

“Cool,” said Wheeler. “Now I get to explain to my mom why I’m covered with sweat and sand.”

“Just go shower,” said Danny. “I’ll gate you right into the bathroom if you want.”

“Somebody will be in there,” said Wheeler. “Every hour of the day and night.”

“My house,” said Hal. “You can shower at my house.”

“My clothes?” asked Wheeler. “It’s not like any of yours will fit me.”

Without another word, Danny gated with them to Wheeler’s bedroom. “Pick out some clean clothes,” said Danny.

Wheeler did.

Danny gated with them to Hal’s house. “Shower here?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Wheeler.

“I don’t know why you were sweating,” said Hal. “It’s not like you actually did anything.”

“I worked my ass off,” said Wheeler.

Hal just looked at him.

“Compared to regular
me
I was digging my ass off,” said Wheeler.

“I’m going back now,” said Danny. “Thanks. You saved me a couple of hours of solo digging.”

“Not to mention how we got to see all the sights of Egypt,” said Hal.

“I’ll take you back there someday,” said Danny. “In daylight.”

“No way,” said Hal. “It’s just a desert. I’ll look at pictures on Google Images. Give me a break.”

Danny gated back to Egypt and sat down in front of the hermit’s cave and let Loki’s memories flow back through Loki’s gates.

16

F
ROSTINCH

Anonoei had never been in Gray, though the shadow of that kingdom had darkened her entire life. Or perhaps brightened it. If Gray had not defeated her homeland of Iceway and imposed harsh terms upon it, including the loveless marriage of Bexoi, the sister of the Jarl of Gray, to Prayard, the heir to the throne of Iceway, would she ever have become Prayard’s mistress and mother of his sons?

No. She would have become his wife.

Once she understood that her power over men was far greater than the ordinary allure of women, she knew she could pick any man in the world to be her husband and win his undying devotion. Prayard—handsome, kind, intelligent, powerful in magery, and heir to the throne of the only kingdom she knew—would have been her choice.

But he was already tied to Bexoi when Anonoei came to understand her power. So yes, it was due to Gray that she became Prayard’s mistress instead of his wife.

Prayard’s former love for her might have been achieved through her illegal, immoral, indecent manmagery; but her love for him was genuine, and still was. Anonoei wanted her vengeance on Bexoi, of course—enough that she would use the power of her cruel captor Wad to achieve it. But she also truly wanted what was best for Prayard, despite the fact that once he was torn away from her influence, he fell in love with the Gray bitch.

And Anonoei had learned enough about men in general and Prayard in particular to understand that his true happiness did not depend on which women inhabited his bed and bore his children. For him, happiness would be the liberation of Iceway from Gray.

And since that would also happily coincide with Anonoei’s vengeance on Bexoi, she was content.

That was why she had watched through the tiny windows Wad made for her, spying on the Jarl of Gray and on his son and heir, the beautiful, conniving Frostinch. With him, no sexual allure would be believable—he seemed to have no interest in sex of any kind. If Anonoei knew anything about manmagery, it was that whatever she got other people to do had to be the kind of thing they already tended toward, or other people would suspect some kind of ensorcelment.

It was power Frostinch hungered for, and so she would use his lust for domination as the tool to bring Bexoi down.

She was ready now. She knew enough about Frostinch to speak the language of his heart. And now that her magery had been so vastly magnified by passages through a Great Gate, he would be unable to doubt her.

So it was that as he sat on his chamberpot—one of the few times he was ever alone—she appeared in his closeroom. She wore nothing magnificent or revealing. She had dressed herself carefully in undyed homespun, with her hair drawn back in a severe bun. It was the garb of what passed for holy women in Gray.

As she expected, Frostinch took her presence in stride. The only sign of his surprise was that his bowels loosened in that instant, filling the small room with the fetor of his troubled digestive system.

“So there is a gatemage in Westil,” said Frostinch softly.

“There is,” said Anonoei, “but I am not that mage.”

“What are you, then? My assassin?”

“If I were here to kill you, I would have come in behind you, or simply pushed a knife through the gate,” said Anonoei. “I am the enemy of your most dangerous enemy.”

“Yet you speak with the accent of Iceway,” said Frostinch. “And Iceway is my most dangerous enemy.”

“Neither of us is fool enough to believe that your most dangerous enemy is a land your father subdued years ago, a land that lies under his heel,” said Anonoei. “Your greatest enemies are Grayish by birth, and of the royal house.”

“My father is not my foe,” said Frostinch, “and there is no one else in Gray powerful enough to aspire to be my enemy.”

“Pay attention,” said Anonoei in her most contemptuous voice. Instead of letting him be angry at her, she turned his immediate resentment into a grudging respect. If this woman spoke to him with contempt, then perhaps he deserved it. Perhaps she was wise. Perhaps she could be used. And if she regarded him with contempt, then perhaps he could turn that against her.

Let him think he was superior to her, and simultaneously wonder if she might be superior to him. That would keep him listening, weighing all she said.

“Born of Gray, I said, not
in
Gray.”