The Lost Gate (10 page)

He was warmer right from the start. And the Nike shoes were comfortable enough that they didn't bother him much—and it felt good not to have the stones and sticks on the ground be more than bumps under the soles of the shoes. These were a lot better than the “best dress” shoes that got passed from child to child. Danny had never been the first to wear a pair of shoes in his life.

He looked at the now-empty cart and it bothered him to leave it there in the woods. So he hitched the backpack up over one shoulder and then wrestled the cart through the woods and bushes until he reached the asphalt that ran along the back of the Wal-Mart property, where several trucks were getting offloaded. He left the cart behind as soon as it was on asphalt, and walked south, toward the small row of stores separated from Wal-Mart by more parking. He toyed with the idea of sauntering along in front of the stores just like a regular person, but decided to go behind them, after all.

And that decision shaped the next few years of his life.

There were a couple of guys smoking behind one of the stores, sitting on some steps with a handrail. They were teenagers, eighteen years old or so, Danny guessed. One of them was dressed in an employee uniform of some kind, and the other one was scruffier, with a sad-looking jacket and a beat-up backpack beside him. They looked at Danny as he walked by.

“Kid, you must be the dumbest shoplifter ever,” said the scruffy guy.

Danny stopped and turned to look at him. “Shoplifter?”

“Come here,” said the guy. “Look at him, Tony. Look! He didn't even take the store tags off.”

“Yes I did,” said Danny.

“Maybe you took off some of them, but look at that, what's that sticking out of your collar? Is that from the shirt or the jacket?” Scruffy Guy Who Wasn't Tony was standing up now, and Danny let him yank something out of the back of the jacket. He held out a tag as big as a brochure, touting the virtues of some kind of fabric and some designer's name that Danny never heard of.

“Thanks,” said Danny.

“Dumb as my thumb,” said Tony.

“Naw, he's not dumb,” said the guy who had called him the dumbest shoplifter ever. “He's just unobservant. That right kid? You
un
ob
ser
vant?”

“I guess,” said Danny.

“Take off the jacket and let me see if anything else is dangling. And let me guess what's in the backpack—more stuff with the tags on, right? So if somebody stops you they don't even have to
ask
if you stole it?”

Danny took off his jacket and the guy pulled something else off the back of his pants.

“How did he miss
that
one, Eric? You going to tell me he's blind?”

Danny now had his backpack open and was pulling tags and labels off the other clothes. “Where can I put these?” he asked, when he had a fistful of them.

“Just drop them in a trash can somewhere,” said Tony. “Or toss them in the woods. But
not
here. Manager would just make me come out and clean it up.”

Eric had his hands on his hips now and was looking Danny up and down. “So I wonder what you were wearing before.”

“Other clothes,” said Danny.

“But not anything you wanted to keep.”

“Old, lousy, ugly hand-me-down clothes,” said Danny. “Since you seem to want precision.”

“Oh, listen to him, Eric,” said Tony. “A real intellectual. Pre-
ci
-sion.”

Danny kept looking at Eric. “
You
said ‘unobservant.' ”

“Because I'm a high school graduate,” said Eric. “Not college material, mind you—my counselor was very clear about that. But I did attend enough days to graduate. Next day I was out of the house and on the road.”

Danny liked hearing that. “That's what I'm doing.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” said Eric. “In brand-new clothes that say, ‘Come rob me and beat me up too.' ”

“That what you're going to do?” asked Danny. He wondered if he should disappear right now.

“What are you, twelve?” asked Eric.

“Fourteen,” said Danny.

“Thirteen then, right?”

Danny nodded.

“See, here's how it is, kid. The road's a tough place. How you going to live? Me, I'm eighteen. If I felt like it I could get a job. Or join the army. But what are you going to do? Look for some nice man who'll give you a good place to live as long as you let him
do
a few little—?”

“I'm not looking for anybody like that,” said Danny. He remembered what he had accused the Wal-Mart detective of, and now he had a sick feeling that all by himself, he might run into somebody who really was like that. Not that he couldn't get away easily enough. But what if somebody drugged him? Or knocked him out? He couldn't make a gate and get away in his sleep.

“Yeah, but, see,
they
're looking for
you,
and a kid your age—a little bit pretty, too—new clothes, looking like you ain't got a brain in your head and ain't scared of nothing … tell him, Tony.”

“As long as he stays away from my stepdad, he's got nothing to worry about,” said Tony.

“Your stepdad isn't the only asshole on planet Earth,” said Eric.

“I know that,” said Danny. “Got my share of them back home.”

Eric slapped him on the shoulder. “See, Tony? This is a man of the world!”

“I'm not,” said Danny. “Never been out of the … homeplace. Farm.” He had almost said “compound” but he decided that would have conveyed a wrong impression. Like he was from some religious group somewhere. Though come to think of it, the Family
were
gods, or at least descended from them, and that was kind of like being from a religious group, wasn't it?

“Country boy!” cried Eric. “Yee-haw!”

“Nobody in my Family ever said ‘yee-haw' in their lives,” said Danny. Though he wouldn't put it past Lem and Stem, if they ever thought of it.

“I'm just thinking something, kid. You got a name?”

“Danny,” said Danny, since there was no particular reason to lie.

“I tell you, Danny,” said Eric. “This is a hard world and you're just too damn young to do the road by yourself. You need somebody looking out for you.”

“What he means,” said Tony, “is that he's thought of a use for you.”

“Well duh,” said Eric. “Pitiful kid, and I can say, ‘Got nothing to feed my kid brother, you spare us a couple of bucks, ma'am?' Bet we do okay with that.”

“Not with his clothes looking all new like that,” said Tony.

“Well, he's going to have to dirty himself up anyway,” said Eric. “He's not going to make it far with all his clothes looking new like that.”

Danny looked down at himself. “They won't look brand new for very long. And I'm not going to dirty them up. I could have kept the clothes I came here in if I wanted to look dirty.”

“Any chance you can still lay hands on those clothes?” asked Eric. “I mean, not for wearing now or anything, but so you can change into them when you need to beg.”

“Are you kidding? I don't want to beg.”

“Oh, you got a junior executive job in a Fortune 500 company waiting for you in Philadelphia? Atlanta maybe?”

“No,” said Danny.

“You don't look big enough to be worth anything at digging ditches,” said Eric. “You box flyweight? What about tag team wrestling? Or maybe you're a mechanic for a NASCAR team. Begging's how you stay alive on the road, Danny. You too good to beg? You better go home to mommy and daddy.”

“I've just never done it,” said Danny.

“You go get those clothes. They far away?”

“Back in the woods.”

“You go get them,” said Eric. “I'll be here waiting for you. You can keep all this stuff you stole, that's good, you must be one hell of a lucky thief to get away with all this on your first try.”

“How do you know it was my first try?” asked Danny.

Tony hooted. “The tags? The labels?”

“So I was lucky,” said Danny. “I'm good at getaways.”

“A useful skill,” said Eric. “But this is my home town. Don't steal anything more from my home town, get it?”

“Got it,” said Danny.

“I still got a lot of friends here, like Tony. You planning to steal anything from his store?”

“No,” said Danny.

“Good thing, because then we'd have to beat the crap out of you.”

“If this is your home town, what do
you
know about the road?” asked Danny.

“Because I've been on the road since June. Came back for Christmas. Say hi to my mom, tell my dad to eat shit and die.”

“You already do that?” asked Tony. “Cause I don't see any bruises.”

“I left him a note,” said Eric. “And besides, he's not as big as your stepdad. I don't think he could lay a hand on me now. I'm taller.”

So neither one of these guys felt safe living with their families. Danny wondered how they'd feel if their family had a Hammernip Hill.

“Go get your clothes,” said Eric. “I'll wait here, and then we'll get us a ride up north. No money for begging around here. But in DC now, there's plenty of people with a few bucks for a guy and his kid brother. You'll see.”

“Who's going to give us a ride?”

“Somebody,” said Eric. “You getting those clothes, little brother, or do I kick the crap out of you?”

“Think you can?” asked Danny, getting into the spirit of the game.

“Think I can't?” said Eric. “Move your butt, little bro. Don't make me wait any longer than the next cigarette.”

So Danny jogged and then ran back around behind Wal-Mart, put back on his discarded shirt and pants, stuffed the new ones into the backpack, and ran barefoot back to where Eric and Tony were still waiting.

“Man, the kid wasn't kidding,” said Tony.

“His name's Danny,” said Eric.

“I don't have to remember that,” said Tony. “I'm not going with you. I'm a working man.”

“BFD,” said Eric. “Those clothes are great, Danny. You're a natural.”

“Come on, he's a complete hick, that's what those clothes mean,” said Tony.

“But he doesn't talk like a hick,” said Eric. “He talks like he's read a book in his life. He'll be good company. I'll teach him to beg and he'll teach me how to make clean getaways. We'll be such great brothers we'll start thinking we really grew up together.”

Eric and Tony said their good-byes and a half hour later, Eric and Danny were in the back of a pickup truck that was going as far as Staunton. Danny figured it was the luckiest thing in his life, that he walked behind those stores and not in front of them.

5

T
HE
G
ATE
T
HIEF

King Prayard of Iceway was a Wavebrother—a seamage with the power to make currents flow where he needed them to.

This was no surprise. The inhabitants of Iceway, lacking in good agricultural land, and so far north that the growing season seemed to pass in a few weeks, had long found that trade or pillage were essential to survival; and, rimmed with mountains as their lands were, the ocean provided the only means of accomplishing either.

In such a land as Iceway, seamages were essential to making long voyages even when winds were contrary. A ship with a good stillsea mage aboard would never sink in a storm; a fleet led by a ship with a Wavebrother could always follow currents that led precisely where he wanted them to go. And if they had a Tidefather, the strongest of seamages, he could invest a portion of his outself in a particular current so that it would continue to flow exactly as he shaped it, for decades or centuries, no matter how long he himself remained alive. So long had Iceway depended on detailed maps of all the ancient currents made by the Tidefathers of the past two thousand years, and on the work of present-day Wavebrothers, that they had long since ceased to build their great trading and raiding ships with sails, or with any means of propulsion except the sea itself.

In such a land, it was inevitable that great seamages would rise to political power, and just as inevitable that seamagery was the power most sought after. Thus most children were tested for seamagery, and if they showed even the slightest talent for it, they were trained to the extent of their abilities, however meager they might be.

It was not that other mages were without value, for a Siltbrother could help improve the soil, a Galebreath could turn aside an unseasonable, crop-wrecking storm, a Cobblefriend could lead miners to productive veins of a desired ore, and a Meadowfriend could bring reliable harvests, and sometimes even spectacular ones. The people of Iceway were grateful for any such mages.

But seamagery had become something of a religion with them. To have a child with such abilities was to be raised into a different rank of society; no social barriers stood in the way of a child who could flatten the sea or kindle a current in the desired direction.

Kings of Iceway almost always married the daughters of seamages, or women who were skilled in seamagery themselves, for there was a strong belief in Iceway, and some evidence, that a predisposition toward seamagery could be inherited by children.

There is a subtle distinction here: It was absolutely known and repeatedly proven that if both of a child's parents were powerful mages in any discipline, their children were likely to have great power in whatever magery they found an affinity for. But in most of the world called Westil or Mitherkame it was considered just as certain that the
kind
of magery a child excelled in had only a chance relationship with the particular talents of either parent.

In Iceway, however, the importance of seamages was so great that a seamage king, in order to produce seamage heirs, would mate only with women who were proven seamages.