The Lost Gate (28 page)

“And yet I don't recall him leaving someone behind with a bloody stump of a thumb and a bullet in their brain.”

“That's because he eats his kills,” said Danny.

Leslie laughed. “Oh, you're funny.”

“I wouldn't put it past him,” said Danny.

“Well, when he's riding his heartbound, of course he experiences eating whatever the heartbound eats. I can tell you that I know the sweet pleasure of chewing cud, for instance. Yet grass, half-digested or fresh, has
never
passed
these
lips.”

Danny felt a little relieved, but also disappointed. “I thought the longer you rode your heartbound, the more like them you became.”

“In temperament, perhaps, not in diet. I'm very calm, though I'm also skittish and prone to stampede.”

“What are the basics you can teach me? Because I could never do any of the things they taught the other kids to do.”

“And what was that, exactly?”

“Finding your outself. Making clants. Love and serve the source of your strength. That sort of thing.”

“And why do you think you weren't doing those things?”

“Because nothing ever happened.”

“And mightn't that have been the fault of your teachers?”

“Maybe,” said Danny. “But what would a gatemage ‘love and serve'? Doors and windows? And if you don't
have
an outself, you can't very well do anything with it.”

“Everyone has an outself, Danny. Even the most commonplace drowther, whether he knows how to set it loose or rein it in.”

“I don't,” said Danny stubbornly.

“Well, then, we have a long way to take you, since you do have one. But let's start by telling you something that
is
known about gatemages. You could not make a gate without an outself. Gates are your clants, you see. Each of them is built around a small portion of your outself, and it opens and closes—or disappears completely—under your complete control. Call in your outself, and the gate doesn't just close, it dies. It's gone.”

“So when Loki closed the gates, he was just calling in his outself?”

“That would close only the gates that
he
had made. He closed
all
the gates, even those made by long-dead mages.”

“But if a gatemage dies, how can his gates continue, if they're clants?”

“What happens to any other mage if someone kills his body while his outself is controlling a clant or riding the heartbound beast?”

“The clant begins to fade,” said Danny, thinking back to lessons he'd been taught. “And it keeps going through the motions it was last assigned by the dying mage. They told us that was how legends of ghosts began—people seeing a fading clant from a dead mage.”

“And if you die while riding your heartbound?” asked Leslie.

“Then we have a beast that can talk, or at least understand human speech. Which is where the idea of talking animals and werewolves comes from. But the outself gradually fades and gets lost in the mind of the heartbound.”

And Danny made the extrapolation to his own magery. “So every gate I've made remains after I die, for a while at least.”

“Only the ones you haven't already closed and gathered in.”

Danny didn't like confessing a weakness, but how would he learn if he didn't? “I don't even know what that means.”

Leslie regarded him steadily for a long moment. “You mean you don't know how to close your own gates?”

“How would I know anything at all?”

“They're all still there? How many?”

Danny reviewed his mental map of his gates. “I'm not sure how to count them. What about the ones that I made twice, once in each direction?”

“I think those are two gates,” said Leslie. “They just go the same places.”

“I don't know,” said Danny. “They
feel
like one gate to me, only doubly strong.”

Leslie nodded, frowning in thought. “Perhaps that's how gatemages create gates that are strong enough to persist centuries after they die—they knit two or more gates together. I really can't say,” said Leslie. “You realize that without a serious gatemage in nearly fourteen centuries, we don't know much, and what we do know is mostly guesswork or logical deduction.”

Meanwhile, Danny had been enumerating each group of gates. The largest batch was all the nonce gates he had made inside the Family compound before he knew that he was making gates at all. “I might have overlooked some, but I think I've got about two hundred and fifty gates.”

“Mercy me,” said Leslie. “All at the same time?”

“Well, I can only go through one at a time. And some of them are just little stutters, getting me through a wall or up a tree. You've got to remember I didn't know I was making them. I didn't know I was going through them. I just thought I was a good runner and climber.”

“You do understand that this is extraordinary. Great mages can often maintain up to a dozen separate clants, or ride two heartbeasts at once, sometimes three. But each division of the outself diminishes what remains. You should have run out of outself after the first dozen gates or so. In ancient times, the great gatemages used to treasure their gates, take pride in them, yet always hold a bit of outself in reserve, so they could get out of emergencies.”

Danny heard the implication loud and clear: He was doing something even the “great mages” couldn't do.

“Of course, I don't know how much of your outself each gate requires,” said Leslie. “Maybe all gatemages can maintain as many as you seem to have, and pretended to have only a few. They can't be that hard to control. After all, the gates don't
do
anything, they just sit there, yes?”

“Unless I move them.”

“You can move them?”

“Either end. I can slide the gate over somebody and sort of make them go through it.”

“So you can move people through your gates against their will?”

“Do you want me to show you?”

“I want you to promise you will never move me like that.”

“Even if you're lying helpless in front of an oncoming train or semitruck and I can gate you out of the way?”

“I will try to avoid getting in the way of large oncoming vehicles,” said Leslie, “so it won't come up.”

Danny was already learning—but perhaps a little more than they had meant to tell him. And they were learning from him, too. Leslie meant him to know that he
had
an outself, that his gates were his clants. But she had had no idea that either end of a gate could be moved or that a single gatemage could maintain so many at once. This seemed to Danny to be useful information.

“Since I could never find my outself, I didn't pay much attention when they were teaching the other kids about calling it in. I know there was some kind of danger that the outself could get lost. Or that it could drag too much of your inself with it, and so you could lose track of where your body is. But I don't see how any of it applies to gates. I always know where they are, and where I am. I don't
feel
like there's any part of me
in
them. How can I call them?”

“How can I explain it? When I'm riding my heartbound, I just … gather it in, when I want to return to myself.”

“I don't know what that would even mean.”

“At least now you know that each gate
is
a part of your outself.”

“That's like saying that gravity makes things fall. Naming it doesn't mean you understand it or can affect it in any way.”

“You know how it feels when you send
out
your outself.”

“I know how it feels when I make a gate,” said Danny. “You're telling me it's a sending of my outself, but it still feels like … making a gate.”

They sat and looked at each other.

“This isn't working,” said Danny. “Everybody
but
me knows what you mean by ‘gathering in your outself.' And you have no idea what it feels like to make a gate. Why are you so sure they're the same thing?”

“I'm not sure.”

This was discouraging. There was going to be too much of the blind leading the blind in this “education” he was launching into.

Yet it was also exhilarating to be discussing magery with someone who didn't regard him with pity or dread or contempt. To be spoken to as an equal, or at least as someone worthy of respect. Just the fact that these two, like Stone, took him seriously as a mage—maybe a great mage—changed his estimation of himself. Things like mooning the security guy at the library didn't feel so funny and clever anymore. Danny realized now that they were the actions of a defiant child, someone who feels small and weak and therefore has to show contempt for power—if he thinks he can get away with it.

I have this rare and frightening power, he thought, and all I could think of to do with it was bare my butt and say nanner-nanner, because I knew they couldn't punish me.

But how much of the behavior of Lokis and Mercuries in the legends and Family histories came out of precisely that same childish sense of being inferior and yet capable of escaping punishment?

So he wanted to keep this adult conversation with Leslie going. “I'm trying to think,” he said, “what it is that I love and serve to gain the power to make gates.
If
gatemagery really works according to the same principles as all the other magics.”

“No one knows,” said Leslie. “Some say that gatemages don't love or serve anything, which is why they're so dangerous and irresponsible and childish.”

That stung a little, but since Danny had just been thinking the same thing, he couldn't really take offense.

“But in recent years, in discussions among the Orphans, a theory
has
come up.”

“I'd love to hear it, because as far as I know, I tried with all my heart to love and serve trees, potato plants, mice, dogs, and rock, to no effect. They didn't notice I was there, except the plants, and they withered.”

“It takes time.”

“It takes time to get really good at it,” said Danny. “But for those with a real affinity, it takes no time at all for some
spark
to show up. Like me—whatever it is I have an affinity for, I never knew I was ‘loving and serving' it. I just had the power to make gates, and then it was a reflex. Automatic. I didn't even know I was gating.”

“So do you want to know the theory?” asked Leslie.

“All ears,” said Danny.

“Spacetime,” said Leslie.

“So I'm, like, the servant of physics?”

“That's science, not magery,” said Leslie with only a little contempt. “Physics is
measuring
it; you
change
it.”

“Okay, so I love and serve spacetime. I can't say it makes
no
sense, because how does it make sense to love and serve stone or lightning or water? But spacetime? That's kind of …
everything.
How can I love and serve
everything
?”

“It's the bed in which everything else exists, but it's not, in itself, anything.”

“Now, see, that has to be offensive. To spacetime, you know? Which is why you can't make gates.” Danny grinned.

“Danny, being flippant and making jokes isn't going to help you.”

Danny felt abashed, but then his defiant streak made him think of a contrary argument. “How do you know it
isn't
going to help me?” asked Danny. “How do you know jokes aren't how spacetime is loved and served? I mean, spacetime is the causal universe, right? The set of relationships between everything that exists in space, which implies dimension, and in time, which implies causality.” Danny was rather proud of being able to toss out these terms, though he was pretty sure he barely understood them.

“You must be a whiz of a student,” said Leslie. “A real show-off in class. But I do understand you. Besides, I married a class show-off.”

“You know the saying ‘Shit happens'?” asked Danny.

“I saw
Forrest Gump,
” said Leslie.

“I have no idea what that is,” said Danny.

“Things happen, bad things, good things, seemingly at random. Yes, I get it.”

“That's spacetime, right?” said Danny. “I mean, this is
your
theory, right?”

“It's
a
theory. It is certainly not mine.”

“As far as I can see, spacetime
is
a prankster. Weird stuff just happens. Insane coincidences that mislead people into making false assumptions about how the universe works. You pray for somebody and they phone you. You keep bumping into the same stranger as if you were somehow meant to be together. Only there's no meaning to it. It just happens. Spacetime is pranking us.”

“So you're saying that by making flippant jokes, you're loving and serving spacetime?”

“I'm saying that when I pranked people, I made shit happen,” said Danny, “and maybe that's why spacetime gave me the power to make gates.”

“Well, it makes a perverse kind of sense,” said Leslie. “The tradition is that Loki and the other gatemages have all been tricksters and con men. It's one of the signs.”

“Getting people to believe things that aren't true, so we can cause them to do things they would never do in a rational universe.”

Leslie nodded. “So your brattiness is the source of your power?”

“Hey, I'm not the one who said that gatemages love and serve spacetime.”

“I'm intrigued. I think this bears looking into. Makes the theory stronger. So how about this one: Gatemages are also extremely good with languages. How would that tie in?”

Danny shrugged, though he was thrilled that she was asking
him
to come up with a guess. “Language is figuring out what other people mean by the noises they make, and then learning how to make the noises that will get them to do what you want. Right? Language gives us the illusion that we're talking about reality, but in fact we can say false statements as easily as true ones, and get people to act on them as if we had changed reality.” Danny was liking this idea. “In fact, isn't language just a system for coming up with false temporary realities? Isn't it just our way of creating realities for each other?”