The Lost Gate (44 page)

“Are you going to tell them?”

“I can't go back,” she said. Her English was perfect, though it had a British tinge.

“Why not? They knew you were a gatemage.”

“They thought I was just a Finder. That justified letting me live, despite the treaties and laws, because I couldn't actually
do
anything with gates. I never dared to show them I could move through your gates.
I
didn't even know I could until I finally came across an open one. But then … I had to go. Don't you see? I've been hungry for this my whole life. I felt so much hope when I first found you three Christmases ago, there in the North fortress. But all your gates were locked, and I couldn't open them. I could lock them more tightly—but what good was that, with you as the only other person in the world who could find them!”

She looked right at him, wiping tears off her cheeks as she did. “Then I found the open gate you made for your Keyfriend, there in Florida. Yes, I was in her flat, and no, she never saw me. If she had, don't you think she would have followed? I couldn't have blocked her. Anything I can lock, she can open.”

“And anything she opens, you can lock.”

Danny made the viewport into a complete gate and passed through it to sit beside her on the grass. “Are you saying that you're in as much danger now as I am?”

“I'm a real gatemage, am I not?” she said. “Not just a Finder, but someone who can change the gates. Who could lock down any but a Great Gate, who can tell where gates lead as well as where they start. They were with me walking through the mall in Naples, Florida, shopping—my parents, an uncle, the cousin they think I should marry—and I saw the open gate in a corridor leading down to the mall restrooms. I went right up to it and stepped through. I didn't care that it would cut me off from my own Family. I didn't even care where it led. I just knew that at last, after all these years, I had found a gate that I could use. And I locked it behind me.”

“So you brought no one,” said Danny.

“I came to meet
you.
But then I realized that you didn't leave all your gates open because you wanted to, you didn't even realize you were doing it. And when I got to the high school and saw that you were trying to twist a Great Gate—”

“I was?” asked Danny.

“Didn't they teach you anything?” asked the Greek girl.

“ ‘Twist a Great Gate,' ” he echoed. Then he began quoting the runes. “ ‘Here Loki twisted a new gate to heaven.' I thought ‘twist' was just the Fistalk term for making a gate. But it was about making a gate that spirals, making it while the gatemage is spinning.”

“What do you think whirling dervishes were imitating?” asked the Greek girl. “They had seen a gatemage spinning while he made a gate to heaven. The Tower of Babel—Nimrod was one of the earliest gatemages to reach Mesopotamia, a mighty hunter who built a tower from which he suspended a rope, so he could wind himself up and then create a gate while spinning a long, long time. Doesn't your Family have these stories?”

“Nothing about gatemages,” said Danny. “You can understand why.”

“Of course they didn't tell you. Even in my family, they gave me access to the records of the gatemages only because they wanted me to be able to recognize whatever gates I might see. Not that it helped—there were no gates in all of Europe and Africa and Asia! Your Last Loki was thorough. All the gates in the world were gone. Until we drove into the North fortress and I saw gates everywhere. It took me a while to realize that's what I was sensing, and to realize that the ones located behind buildings and inside trees were as plain to me as the ones out in the open.”

“So when you walked up to the wall where I was hiding…”

“I just wanted to see you. The only other gatemage I'd known of in my life. I could see the gates burning inside you—”

“What?”

“Your hearthoard,” she said. “Gatemages don't have the normal outself, because it's already fragmented, ready to be made into gates. In your case, it's divided into bits so fine they almost seem like dust to me. That's what I was looking at. A million possible gates, all contained in a single vivid point inside your body.”

“I've never felt that.”

“What
did
you feel then, when you reached into me just a moment ago?” she said.

“No,” Danny said. “It was you who reached out to
me.
”

“I had to persuade you somehow that you could trust me. So I touched you to lay myself bare to you. Not in body, but my hearthoard. You could have stripped it away from me and added it to your own hearthoard. Sometimes lesser gatemages do that, so that a Pathbrother or Gatefather can have enough in his hearthoard to make a Great Gate. The lesser mage is left with nothing, but if the Great Gate is made, then it is deemed to be a worthy sacrifice.”

“I don't know anything,” said Danny. “Nobody I knew could teach me.”

“I had books,” said the Greek girl. “Nobody in
my
Family actually knows anything, either.”

“Thank you for trusting me,” said Danny. “I had no idea what was happening between us, when you reached into my viewport and I felt you.”

“You understood enough to trust me and come out and join me here.”

“I'm still afraid that it's all a lie,” said Danny. “That some Grassbrother will make the lawn here swallow me up or something.”

She took his hand. “Whatever happens to you will happen to me, I promise it. I will do whatever I can to protect you, when the time comes to make a Great Gate.”

“I don't want to use up your … heart…”

“Hearthoard. Heart magazine, heart arsenal…”

“I don't want to take it away from you.”

She laughed. “Don't you understand? I have never heard of a gatemage with a hearthoard like yours.”

“You said it was only dust.”

“No, no,” she said. “The hearthoard is the same
size
in everyone. The potential gates expand to fill the size, or shrink to fit within it. Mine has only a few coarse granules. According to the books—well,
book,
the only one that discussed the hearthoard—the most powerful Gatefathers have so many gates inside that they are like grains of sand. But yours … yours are—”

“Dust,” said Danny.

“That's what I saw when you were hiding there in the wall. A gatemage with so much power…”

Danny sat there digesting this.

“And then you were twisting a Great Gate there in the school, all by yourself.”

“I had no idea what I was doing. I thought I was making a series of tiny gates to help my friend get to the top of a climbing rope in gym class.”

She looked puzzled for a moment.

“Physical education.”

“No, no, I understood you very quickly. I
am
a gatemage, you know, even if only a lesser one.”

“Without you, I don't know if I would ever have learned locking and unlocking. Or even eating gates.”

“You didn't eat any gates,” she said, laughing a little.

“The gates that were out here—I took them back.”

“Yes, you gathered in your own gates, but that's not
eating
them. Eating is when you take someone else's. It's a bit of their outself, so you're connected to them, then. That's eating. You can't eat your
own
gates.”

“I don't know anything,” said Danny. “Sixteen years old and I'm like a baby.”

“Because they gave me five books to read,” said the Greek girl. “Only five that talk about gatemages, out of our whole library—but it was five more books than anyone gave you.”

She was still holding his hand.

“Do I know your name?” said Danny.

“Yllka,” she said. “That's my public name. But the secret name my mother and father gave me, when they realized I must be some kind of gatemage, was Hermia.”

Danny understood at once the classical reference to Hermes—the generic name for Greek Family gatemages. “So they thought you would be a gatemage like me? Despite the law?”

“Why do you think they brought me the books to read? I had all the signs—good with languages, a bratty trickster, no outself, no clant-raising ability, no affinities at all, yet very smart. I might have been drekka, but my parents hoped for more.”

Danny shook his head. “All these years, everyone pretending that they hate the thought of having a gatemage, promising to kill the first one to show up—”

“My Family have been trying for years to persuade the others—not yours, of course—that the drowthers have become so powerful that the weak mageries that are within our reach are not enough to protect us. Where is the stonemage who can take apart an atomic bomb without touching it? Where is the Tempester who can blow a missile off its course? Where is the Sandfather or Claymaster who can swallow up a tank? And as for stopping a bullet or bending its course—there is no magery to deal with that. Not unless we can pass through a Great Gate once again and make ourselves strong. Instead of fighting each other, we must be preparing to protect ourselves against the drowthers.”

“It sounds almost noble,” said Danny.

“It isn't,” said Hermia. “They miss being gods. They know that nobody will worship any of us in our present condition, let alone pay us tribute or obey us or regard us as anything but psychics or magicians—charlatans, yes?”

“And you thought I was making a Great Gate?”

“For your Orphan friends. That's who my Family fears most in this world—the Orphans. They've tried, you know. Gatemages have been born to them before this.”

“They told me,” said Danny. “The Gate Thief gets them. Which is why I would
not
have made a Great Gate today if I'd had the slightest clue that that was what I was doing.”

“Well, it was pretty feeble, anyway,” said Hermia. “It only went up a mile. You don't actually think there are any planets that close to the surface of the Earth, do you?” She smiled.

Danny laughed a little, but a new question came to mind. “How would I create a Great Gate anyway? I don't know where Westil is.”

She shrugged. “We've never had to,” said Hermia. “Make a gate that's large enough, and twist it so it shoots out beyond your conscious control, and … it ends up on Westil. Then twist it all the way back, and you have created a Great Gate. Public, powerful. Not only healing but enhancing. Strong men and women made stronger—like Herakles and Goliath. We couldn't make such drowthers into mages, but we could take them through the Great Gate—”

“Take them to Olympus,” murmured Danny.

“And then bring them back many times stronger than they were.”

“I should make one just for Hal,” said Danny, thinking aloud.

“But that's why you need me there,” said Hermia. “To lock the other end of it the moment it reaches Westil. Otherwise, who knows what kind of person or beast would come down from Westil?”

Danny remembered something he had read in Leslie's King James Bible. “ ‘And the great dragon was cast out,' ” Danny recited from memory. “ ‘That old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.' ”

“Is that the Bible?” asked Hermia.

“It just seemed appropriate,” said Danny.

“Only that's not referring to Westilians,” said Hermia.

“Who else, then? And why not us?”

“There were plenty of wars on Westil over the millennia that the Great Gates were open. But nobody in their right mind would cast their enemies out of Westil and send them to Mittlegard through a Great Gate. That would be like healing all their wounds and replacing their spears with artillery and their chariots with jet fighters. You lock them
out
of the Great Gates that you control and go back and forth yourself.”

“So if I had opened a Great Gate before I knew how to lock it…”

“Great Gates are made up of hundreds of small gates woven together,” said Hermia. “Like rope. But all the gates lead to Westil. You make them here but then as you twist them you're almost throwing the ends of them out into the universe, like casting a rope up to someone waiting on a cliff. There's no way you can do that while thinking of whether the gates are locked or not. So it doesn't really matter if you know how to lock them, as long as you have someone with you who does.”

“And you're offering your services,” said Danny.

“It's not really an offer,” said Hermia. “It's more like … a desperate plea. I have no safe place in the world now. When you make the Great Gate, I need you to take me through it. Where in Mittlegard can I hide from the Family of Zeus?”

“I've done okay hiding from the Family of Odin.”

“Zeus isn't one-eyed,” said Hermia with a grin. “And I'm not a true Hermes who can always stay one step ahead of him. When I'm caught, there's no escape for me, unless
you've
made gates for me.”

“So we're allies,” said Danny.

“You don't need me as much as I need you,” said Hermia. “But I really can help you. Please don't shut me out of your gates, Danny North.”

21

G
REAT
G
ATE

They gathered at the high school gym, because the rope was already there. It was night, and the building was dark, but for this work they needed no more light than the green of the glowing exit signs over the crash doors.

It made Danny sad to come back here, for he knew there would be no returning here to this school. Nobody but Hal Sargent actually knew that Danny had anything to do with the weird behavior of the rope; Danny might have gotten away with it and stayed in school, especially now that he knew how to lock a gate or return it to his own satchel.