The Lost Gate (7 page)

“You're one of
us,
Danny. You might be one of the most powerful mages in the family—we're certainly hoping so, because all this will be wasted if you can't learn how to open a gate to a world you've never seen.”

Danny thought about that for a while. “I opened a gate to
this
place when I had never seen it.”

“Very impressive. Let's see … two miles, to a place you can see from Hammernip. Why, you'll be ready to go to a planet in another star system tomorrow!”

“I don't even know what's hard or what's easy!”

“Well, I can tell you this. The gates you're making aren't yet
open
gates. You have to learn how to make them and then leave them open for
other
people to follow. Then you'll be a Gatefather.”

“You've tried to go through my gates?”

“You should have seen me. Running starts, great leaps, I always just stayed in the same part of the compound. Your gates are real, but they only work for
you.
So far.”

“How do I open them?”

“Am I a gatemage?”

“Then I need books.”

“Gatemages never told, never wrote things down. Liars, tricksters, deceivers, that's what gatemages are. Along with being healers, guides, interpreters, ambassadors.”

“Healers?”

“Think about it, Danny. Have you ever passed through a gate and come through in any condition but perfectly healthy and uninjured?”

Danny shrugged.

“Something happens during the passage through a gate. It heals you. The body that emerges on the other side is perfect, exactly what it should be at the age you are. There are no blind or one-legged gatemages.”

Danny remembered now. Loki wasn't known as a healer, but Hermes and Mercury were.

“Go far from here,” said Thor. “Talk to people in their own language, but also say as little as possible. Let them teach you, by what
they
say, what you need to know to stay alive. Drowthers can be cruel, but they're not all alike, and many more of them are kind than otherwise. Stay alive until you can make a gate that stays open. Then come back here. Don't just walk in—gate yourself in to Lumtur's and Mook's bedroom. They'll be hoping for you. Waiting.”

“What will happen then?”

“Then we'll talk about whether and how you're going to get us all to Westil. The five of us first. We'll come back powerful enough to subdue anyone who tries to hurt you. When they see the result of the passage to Westil, they'll be clamoring to do the same. You'll be the hero of the Family.”

Danny thought again. “So that's the plan. I leave in order to keep the Family from killing me, and I live in hiding while you pretend to search for me, and when I learn the forbidden gatemagery without a speck of help from you, I'm going to come back and just
give
you all this power?”

Thor laughed. “Ah, Danny, it's good to hear you talk like one of the Family. Of course you won't give us anything. You'll demand power. You'll insist on being made Odin in place of your father. Do you think you'll be the first? Your father will usher you in and bow to you. Whatever you make us pay, it's worth the price.”

Thor hadn't understood at all. It hadn't crossed Danny's mind to become head of the Family, least of all while Baba still held the office. But let Thor think he knew what Danny would do. It would make it all the easier to deceive him.

“North, south, east, west. Make plenty of jumps. The longer, the better. Though don't try making gates that end over water, not until you figure out how to make a gate while drowning.”

“I made a gate while people were crumbling down a lath-and-plaster wall with a shovel and poker.”

“A promising step. Just don't tell me where you're going. Make it hard to spot you, so I can really look for you without accidentally finding you. And take care that this absurd little girl of the Greeks
not
find you first. You can be sure they'll have her looking for you.”

Danny nodded as he rose to his feet. “Do you have anything else useful to tell me?”

“You sound so bored. ‘And the voice of God was in the whirlwind after all,' ” said Thor. “We gods just aren't as impressive as we once…”

Danny wasn't there to hear him finish the sentence. He had learned all that Thor intended to tell him. Danny had reached several clear conclusions.

First, his parents and Lummy and Mook and Thor might have watched over him, but if he screwed up and got caught, they would have killed him and still
would
kill him just as quickly as anybody else. So they were no friends of his, especially because Danny had no idea what “screwing up” might consist of.

Second, if Thor's clant could watch him pass through gates for years, long before Danny even understood that they
were
gates, then who else might have a clant here, listening to the whole conversation? Thor's boys, Lem and Stem, were stupid, all right, but Danny didn't think they got their stupidity from their drowther mother.

Third, Danny really was getting the idea of what he did inside himself to make a gate. The one he made to get from the house to here was his first act of deliberate gate creation, and to make it with only one false start wasn't a bad thing. He believed he could make a gate whenever he wanted. He didn't even have to be walking, let alone running or leaping. And now was as good a time as any to see whether he could do it.

He could. He thought of where he wanted to go, and there he was, standing just outside the fence that marked the edge of the I-64 freeway right-of-way, watching the cars and semitrucks approach, then whiz by, then cruise on out of sight.

And then, without another thought, he was on the other side of the freeway, up on the hill. Another gate now existed behind him—and if Thor was telling the truth, no one could follow him through it. Why would he ever, ever want to make a gate that other people could pass through? They could follow him then! And the last thing he wanted was to be followed.

Another jump, and he was in the Wal-Mart parking lot. If there was one thing he knew, it was that he'd need better clothes than what he was wearing in order to pass for normal in the drowther world. And shoes—he had to have shoes. Running shoes. The kind he'd seen on television and internet ads. The kind that drowther kids his age all wore. The kind that the Aunts had absolutely refused to buy for him. “Bare feet are better, Danny. It toughens you up.” Well, screw you, all you cheap murdering bastards. If you think I'm ever coming back, think again.

3

T
HE
M
AN IN THE
T
REE

The kingdom of Iceway has no eastern border. It runs up against Icekame, the ridge of mountains that form the northern spine of the great continent of Westil. The peaks of Icekame are always deep in snow, and their glaciers creep downward year after year, plowing the poor soil and stony earth of the high valleys before them.

Many miles below these valleys, in his castle of Nassassa by the city of Kamesham on the Graybourn, the King cared nothing for that edge of his kingdom. Beyond Icekame there were no marauding hordes eager to pour over the high passes. There was only the Forest Deep, where no one dwelt but thornmages, who sought no visitors and never left.

From a king's point of view, Icekame was better than a border. On that edge of his kingdom, there was no one who coveted his crown or his lands, and he need not spare thought or money to guard that border. And the higher one journeyed up the valleys, the poorer the people were, so there was no purpose in trying to tax them. A king could only do it once, and then, deprived of the slight margin of survival, the people would either die or become expensive refugees farther down the valley.

So the people in the high valleys were left alone. Poor and powerless, scrabbling in their poor soil for food enough to last out the winter, eking out a bit of meat by killing a bird or a squirrel now and then, they buried many a child, and a man was old at forty.

Between hunger and loss, however, they found time to live. The children had games and rhymes and contests and grand adventures between the labors that helped their families survive. They got older and felt the stirring of the hot sap of love rising through them like trees in spring. The women built their mud-daubed hovels and symbolically sang their lovers into husbands at the hearth, and then babies came and they delighted in them and taught them and raged at them and clung to them for however long they might survive.

The people in the King's city of Kamesham thought that these highvalley folk lived like animals. But in truth these villagers lived pure human life. They needed each other to survive, and knew it. They had no conspiracies and no secrets, no ambitions and no feuds. They couldn't afford the luxury of treating any man or woman or child as expendable.

The highvalley villagers knew one thing that the King in Kamesham did not even think about: They knew every passage over Icekame into the Forest Deep. In high summer, when the crops were doing well and could take care of themselves, families would pack up a bit of food and hike over a pass and then down the other side.

As they walked, the parents taught the children what they could and could not take in this place: Food enough for meals while they were there, but nothing to carry away. Water enough to drink, but nothing for the return journey.

“Will we see a thornmage?” a child would ask. Always they hoped to see one, and feared to see one.

“We will tread in their homes and their hearts,” the parents would always answer, “and you will never see one because they are the whole forest. Nothing here goes unseen or unfelt by them. They tend it all.”

“And they share with us?”

“They see that we take nothing from their land, but only live here for a day or two as honest as the animals. We live here like squirrels or birds, and they let us be.”

Since most children had licked the last scrap of meat and fat and marrow from the bones of squirrels and small birds in order to survive a hard winter, this gave them a bit of a shiver. No wonder they came only in summertime. Who knew how hungry the thornmages would be in wintertime?

Such was the family of Roop and Levet, a man and woman married long enough to have had seven children, and astonished that six of them were still alive. Their oldest was Eko, a girl of eleven, who had a bit of a knack with root vegetables; not enough that anyone would call her a mage, but she could find edible tubers even under the deepest snow, and that was part of the reason they survived. The other children looked up to her and endured her endless bossing, because they knew she loved them and looked out for them.

The family always went to the same place, the meadow of the Man in the Tree. Other families had come with them in years past, but the Man in the Tree unnerved them and they never came back. That was all right with Roop and Levet. It was a lovely meadow for children to romp in, and fruit trees and berries provided sweetness and tartness that could never be found in their high valley.

Why didn't the Man in the Tree frighten them?

The great oak stood alone in the middle of the meadow, as if all other trees had shied away from daring to grow too close. The massive trunk proved the tree to be of great age—the whole family could not join hands around it, or even get halfway around the trunk.

Ten feet above the ground, the bark was distended in the shape of a man, as if someone were imprisoned between the bark and the heartwood. This was not a vague impression of a man, a trick of the eyes. The man was in perfect proportion, with knees slightly bent, one more than the other, and hands splayed so that in a certain cast of light you could count all five fingers. But he had no nose or eyes, no mouth or belly, no toes sticking out, because his face was inward, toward the heartwood, his back turned to the meadow.

“I think,” Eko told the younger children, “that he is a treemage who defied the thornmages and came to the Forest Deep and tried to turn this great tree into his clant. And the thornmages punished him by trapping him inside the tree, not just his outself, but his inself too.”

“You don't know anything about magery,” said her next sister, Immo. “How could a man live inside a tree?”

“Then what do you think it is?”

“I think it's a fungus growing under the bark,” said Immo.

“That's silly. You don't really think that.”

Father heard them and came over. “I think the tree eats children who play too long around its roots, but it takes so long to digest the children that they have time to grow up into fullsized men.”

The children laughed, for it was always fun when Father told them a story. Mother even turned to face them, as she sat in the grass, in the sunlight, nursing the youngest.

“How long, Baba?” asked Eko. “How long has this child been inside the tree?”

“My parents brought us here,” said Father, “and the Man in the Tree was already there. But not as high as he is now. My father was as tall as me, and he could still touch the man's heel without standing on tiptoe.” Father stood up against the tree but could not touch the man at all, even when he jumped a little. “He's been there for hundreds of years. Our family always comes here to watch him. My father said that our family was the first to notice him, back when his head first rose up here.”

“There?” said Immo skeptically. “But that's not even on the same side of the tree.”

“He hasn't just been rising through the bark,” said Father, “he's been circling the tree. All the way around, the long way. They say that when he completes the circuit, he'll be set free.”

“Who says that?” asked Eko.

“My father's father. Or someone in the family. Or some stranger who visited this place with our family. Or me.”