The Gate Thief

by Orson Scott Card

  “That is such a manipulative thing to say,” said Wad.

  “If I were using magery to control you, I wouldn’t need to manipulate you with guilt.”

  “Unless my conscience is entirely of your creation.”

  “Alas, no,” said Anonoei. “There are times I wish I could put out your conscience like a sputtering candle.” She began turning around and around. “Please send me through a gate into Keel’s office. There’s no one there at this time of day.”

  Wad still had his misgivings, but she was right—she could take care of herself. It’s not as if she was going to face someone as strong-willed as Bexoi or, for that matter, Wad himself.

  He sent her, still spinning like a child dancing. If she tripped, it would be her own fault.

  Then he went at once to a place near the stone circle where the Wild Gate lay. Sure enough there were people milling around on the top of the hill. No one had left the circle yet—but too many of them were gazing around them instead of going back. And some of them were trying to use their powers. From inside a circle with an active gate! Didn’t they know anything?

  No, of course they didn’t. And apparently the Greek girl who stole the mouth of the Wild Gate didn’t think to come through herself and make sure everyone returned.

  So Wad retrieved the gate he had used to send Anonoei, made it into a large public gate, and placed it directly in front of the inbound gate, setting it so it would transfer people immediately to the outbound one. That used up four of his eight gates. He used another gate to pop each of the loiterers to the mouth of the outbound Great Gate.

  Just a matter of tidying things up.

  It was fortunate that no one on Mittlegard had the slightest experience with gates. They would no doubt think that any glitches were just a part of the process, and if they suspected someone caused them to return immediately with no chance to look around, they would doubtless blame the Greek girl, and if they were angry it would serve her right.

  If he still had even a serious fraction of his original gatehoard, he could have swallowed up the whole Wild Gate himself and had done with it. But he didn’t have the power, and Danny, who most definitely did, lacked the knowledge and skill to overmaster the formerly captive gates. Nor was Wad interested in teaching him—the last thing he needed was for the boy to acquire serious deftness. He was dangerous enough as it was.

  Through it all, he kept feeling a nagging worry about Anonoei. It got more and more intense. You’re just being a fool, he told himself. She really can take care of herself.

  Only when it was clear that there were no more mages coming through the Wild Gate did it finally dawn on Wad that it was not like him to worry overmuch about someone else’s safety. Not with the kind of nagging, pestering concern that had been bothering him.

  If Anonoei wanted to call for his help, and if she really did have a slice of her ba inside him, wouldn’t it feel just like that? What if that worry was actually Anonoei screaming for help?

  But the feeling was gone now. So apparently she had dealt with it.

  He gated back to the room they had shared, in a house whose owner was away for the season. It was only as he stoked the fire to warm the room for Anonoei’s return that he realized that there was another reason why her calls for help might have stopped.

  The sickening dread he felt now was nothing like the feeling that had nagged him while he supervised the transfers at the Great Gate. It was so obvious, when he had genuine personal dread to compare it with. She really had been nagging at him, shouting at him to get her out of there.

  Wad made a gate to Keel’s office and nearly went through it at once. Until he remembered that Anonoei, too, had been confident that she could deal with any problem that might arise.

  He shrank the ends of the gate until it became a mere viewport, and brought it to his eye to look through it.

  There was no one in the room.

  He looked around twice until he thought to lower his gaze to the floor.

  It was the gown Anonoei had been wearing when she left. It lay on the floor, discarded.

  No, not discarded. It was filthy.

  No, it wasn’t filthy. It was soaked in ash and bodily fluids, which also extended out from the gown where the head and hands and feet should be.

  She had been burned to death. But not by an external fire, for the dress wasn’t even singed. In his life on Mittlegard before he closed the gates, Wad had seen what murder looked like when a Firemaster heated someone’s body from the inside until it was utterly consumed. It was Anonoei’s dress, and what was left of her dead body was still wearing it.

  Keel had been partly right, when he thought he was spied on. When Anonoei went to talk to him, it wasn’t a spy who waited to intercept her. It was Queen Bexoi herself. Bexoi the Firemaster.

  21

  INTIMACY

  Danny knew that his parents expected him to come back to the compound after everyone got back from their instantaneous trip to Westil. There was a war about to start, using magery with a scope and intensity that had not been seen in Mittlegard since the seventh century.

  But Danny had no intention of taking part in the war—not the way they would expect him to. They would hold councils and plan strategies. They would be practicing to see what they could do with their newly enhanced magery.

  Danny also knew that he couldn’t just go back to high school and sit it out. He would have to be involved in this war, like it or not.

  But war or no war, he was not going to drop out of high school.

  He had not slept in thirty-four hours when he came back to Parry McCluer just as school was letting out. Nobody noticed him, in their rush to get to the buses or the parking lot or just plain out.

  That is, they noticed him enough to not bump into him, but few of them realized, as they passed him in the halls, that he had been absent all day. Whatever their normal response would be to seeing this normal kid on a normal day, they did. A wave, a nod, nothing.

  He didn’t see any of his friends. Had they all ditched? Had something happened to them?

  “Danny,” said a girl. Someone touched his back.

  Danny turned. It was Nicki Lieder.

  “Dad was so worried when you didn’t come to practice this morning and then you weren’t at school and nobody answered your phone.”

  “Sorry,” said Danny. “Family emergency.”

  “I was sure it was something like that.” Her hand was resting on his waist. He almost hadn’t noticed it, the move had been so subtle. But it was a girlfriend thing, he knew that—a possessive gesture that communicated to anybody passing by, “He’s mine, I have the right to do this.”

  He didn’t want to hurt her feelings by removing her hand. So he turned partly away, then back again; it broke the contact. “I should have called,” he said.

  “I understand completely. So will Dad. He’s so gruff, people don’t realize that he’s really very concerned for all his athletes.”

  Yeah, and he’s a complete asshole to anybody who isn’t one of “his athletes.” But Danny didn’t say it.

  The hand was back, except that because he wasn’t facing her, she was touching his waist right at the top of the zipper, her thumb hooked onto the waistband. It was a surprisingly intimate place to touch him. Maybe if he didn’t wear his jeans so low—but he had always worn hand-me-downs that were a little small on him, or way too big. The former had to ride low so there’d be room in the crotch; the latter rode low because they were on the verge of falling off. Now that was where pants felt comfortable to him. But it also put her hand very low on the front of his body and for a long moment that’s all he could think about.

  And in the silence between them, he knew that’s exactly what she intended.

  Innocent little Nicki wasn’t all that innocent. Whatever it was that had led her to kiss him that time, it was still there. She hadn’t given up. She was still offering.

  Or was she demanding?

  This didn’t seem like
the same girl he had talked to that day in the Lieders’ kitchen, when he had healed her and changed her life. By not letting it end, of course, but also by restoring her to strength and health, and by talking with her like a normal person instead of an invalid. Apparently he had made much too great an impression on an impressionable girl.

  He could just remove the hand, but the lingering presence of her hand so near his groin was obvious enough now that he felt the need to say something aloud. “There’s only one woman who has the right to touch me there,” he said, “and it isn’t you.”

  She didn’t remove the hand. What girl wouldn’t remove her hand when the guy said something like that?

  Instead she answered, “Who is it, then?”

  “My wife,” he said.

  “But you’re not married.”

  Now, at last, he took her by the wrist. He couldn’t understand why he felt so reluctant to move her hand away. Or why, in the moment that he took her wrist, what he really wanted to do, what he almost did, was move her hand lower, to a place that was already eager to welcome her touch.

  But he didn’t do it. He pushed her hand away, more roughly than he originally meant to, because it was so hard to do it at all. “I’m not married,” he said. “That’s the point.” And then he walked away. Which wasn’t all that easy. He needed to reach a hand inside his crotch to readjust himself, and couldn’t really do that in a crowded corridor.

  Instead he ducked into an empty classroom and, not caring whether she followed him and found an empty room, gated himself to the spot on the hill where he and his friends regularly met.

  And there they were.

  “Well, hello,” said Laurette. “Where were you all day?”

  “And what’s her name?” asked Sin.

  “Whose name?” asked Xena.

  Sin just rolled her eyes, looking at his bulging jeans, and laughed. Xena looked, too, and laughed.

  Danny sat down at once. “You guys are twisted,” he said.

  “Name,” said Sin. “Say who, or we’ll cut it off.”

  “I was walking through the halls at school,” said Danny.

  “Always a dangerous place,” said Hal, who clearly had no idea what they were talking about.

  “When I ran into Nicki Lieder,” said Danny.

  “Apparently very slowly,” said Sin.

  “The coach’s daughter?” said Wheeler. “What about her?”

  “She’s kind of a nothing person,” said Hal. “She never seems connected to anything.”

  “She was at the point of death when she suddenly got better,” said Laurette. “Maybe it takes a while to rejoin the world.”

  “She’s all for joining Danny, apparently,” said Sin.

  He closed his eyes. “I didn’t sleep at all last night.” And, to forestall Sin’s inevitable lurid assumptions, he told them what had happened. And what it meant. War.

  Everyone in the Families understood that Danny had made all the gates that anyone had used; everyone knew that if they offended him, Danny could gate anyone to anywhere.

  That had always been true of any war that involved gatemages. “We’re like kickers in football,” Danny said to his friends. “We wear the uniform, but we’re not really part of the team. We play a completely different game.”

  “Just beware of roughing the kicker,” said Hal.

  “Do you even know what ‘roughing the kicker’ means?” asked Laurette.

  “Just because I look like a goal post doesn’t mean I don’t understand the game,” said Hal.

  Pat was the one who moved the discussion to a practical level. “How can you even think about high school when you know that the whole world is about to change?”

  “I can’t,” said Danny. “But it’s the only thing I can think of to do. If I go to the Family, they’ll be all about how I can move the enemy mages all over the place, which I’m not going to do.”

  “Why not?” asked Sin. “I mean, they’re your family.”

  “I kind of thought you guys were my family,” said Danny. “You didn’t spend my whole childhood despising me and threatening to kill me if I couldn’t raise a clant.”

  “The question isn’t whether you want to fight in a war,” said Wheeler. “It’s going to happen, and it’s going to involve you.”

  “Why?” asked Xena. “Why does he have to get involved? Why can’t he just study for the SAT like everybody else?”

  “First,” said Hal, “Danny doesn’t study for anything, ever.”

  They all nodded their agreement.

  “I study,” said Danny.

  “Like, never,” said Laurette.

  “I studied. When I was home schooled,” said Danny. “High school just hasn’t caught up to what I already learned.”

  “Second,” said Hal.

  “Thus proving that Hal can count all the way to two without losing his place,” said Sin.

  “Second, and this is the actual point: When people start getting hurt, Danny’s going to get involved. Because he’s the only combat medical officer in the whole war.”

  Danny remembered how carefully the family always avoided discussing why casualties had been so much higher in the wars since 632 A.D. Everyone’s powers were reduced, but there were no gatemages to heal people. Now there was Danny. And the North Family undoubtedly expected that Danny would use his healing gates only for the good-guy team.

  “That’s why I don’t want to talk to my family about anything,” said Danny. “Because sooner or later they’re going to catch on that I intend to use gates to heal everybody.”

  “On both sides,” said Pat, as if to make sure he really meant it.

  “On all three sides,” said Danny. “Because whenever there’s a war among the gods, they end up using drowthers as surrogates. Mage-to-mage combat is rare and potentially destructive. So they’re going to get the Danae to come attack the Trojans.”

  “‘Danae’ is what the Greeks in the Iliad called each other,” Wheeler explained to Xena.

  “And where did you learn that?” asked Xena.

  “From a role-playing game in fourth grade,” said Wheeler.

  “I’m so tired I could die,” said Danny. “That’s one thing that passing through a gate doesn’t fix. I’m fit, I could run for miles right now and hardly feel it, but my brain needs to sleep. I think if I did run I’d fall asleep doing it.”

  “What do you think these guys will do now that they’re, like, really powerful?” asked Wheeler.

  “Is this going to be like NASCAR, Wheels?” asked Hal. “Are you going to pick your favorite Family and root for them in the wizard war finals?”

  “My whole life, when I wanted a taste of something magical, I had to play a videogame or roll a bunch of dice in an RPG,” said Wheeler. “But Danny’s given us rides around the world. Or at least to places around here, but instantly. And that was cool, don’t get me wrong. But that’s, like, a transportation spell. Very convenient, but I want to see some really major combat spells.”

  “There are no ‘spells,’” said Danny. “Just persuasion.”

  “Yeah, well, I want to see a windmage persuade him a tornado,” said Wheeler. “And clants. I want to see a stonemage turn stone into a walking monster, like the Incredible Hulk.”

  “A tornado’s a terrible thing no matter how it comes into existence,” said Danny. “And your stone clant isn’t going to care who it tramples.”

  “I know that,” said Wheeler. “And I deplore it, abhor it, I roar it—”

  “As you bore us,” said Hal.

  “And we ignore you,” added Laurette.

  “I didn’t make the magic come back into the world,” said Wheeler. “Can I help it if it’s exciting? All those extras in the movies who run screaming from Godzilla or wave like idiots when the aliens come to blow them up in Independence Day—sure, they get squished, they get barbecued, but they were there.”

  “You’d buy tickets to anything,” said Sin.

  “I would,” said Wheeler
. “Once.”

  Danny sighed. “I just wanted to go to high school.”

  “Why?” said Laurette. “I mean, we’re glad you’re here, but why would anybody in his right mind choose to spend your days like this?”

  “Sitting in the woods?” asked Pat.

  “Down there in Parry McCluer,” said Laurette.

  “Come on, Rette, you’ve got the system sussed,” said Xena. “You’ve got the teachers and the principal eating out of your hand, the office staff loves you, your grades are good, and you’ve got a great body. There is just no reason why you should be allowed to hate high school.”

  “Because it’s not how I’d spend my days,” said Laurette. “If I had a choice.”

  “But Danny does have a choice,” said Pat.

  Danny was thinking that if Laurette came from one of the Families, her ability to make people from every group like her might be considered a sign of manmagery. Then Pat turned the conversation back to him, and he could barely remember what they’d been talking about. He was that sleepy.

  “High school is boring,” said Danny, “and if anybody cared, you could finish the whole curriculum in a year. It’s mostly just a tool for keeping kids out of the work force and out of criminal activities for at least half the day. But I swear it looked like the coolest thing in the world when I was reading about it in young adult novels.”

  “Young adult novels,” said Pat, “are no closer to reality than Wheeler’s videogames.”

  Wheeler laughed. “Reality is so overrated. In between catastrophes it settles down to the most-boring-possible-explanation-for-everything. ‘That can’t happen,’ until it does. ‘Things don’t work that way,’ until they do.”

  “Girls can never find a god to fall in love with,” said Xena, “until they do.”

  “Girls find gods to fall in love with all the time,” said Pat. “Then they wake up pregnant and the god is gone. All that’s left is an asshole.”

  Everybody laughed at that, even Danny, tired as he was.

  “‘Who’s the father of your baby?’ ‘Oh, Daddy, it was a god,’” said Pat. “‘What does he look like?’ ‘Oh, Mother, he forbade me to turn on the light and see his face.’ Nobody ever wants to admit they fell for a lying moron. Every bastard ever conceived is the love child of a god.”