The Gate Thief

by Orson Scott Card

  The boy thought he was dreaming, but he was not dreaming. There was a woman in his bed, a woman that he did not love and did not want. He knew that he did not want her, and yet his body wanted her, and so he continued to believe it was a dream, or to pretend to himself that he believed it.

  But it was this very dreamstate that had alerted Wad’s outself to the danger. For Wad had seen possession many times and his ba remembered it. A dozen of the Sutahites were in and out of Danny North, possessing him only lightly, only enough to whisper reassurance to him. This is safe, they were saying wordlessly. What harm can it do. It’s a dream. Nothing is real.

  Wad joined with his given-away gates in shouting their panic to the boy. Someone as strong-willed as Danny North, the Sutahites would never bother with. They could never own him; he would drive them out. What could they possibly gain by encouraging him to be intimate with this girl? And why was she there, uninvited?

  Wad came quickly to the conclusion that there was something in the girl, something that wanted very, very much to have her body intimate with Danny North’s. Something that hungered for a clear pathway from one body to the other.

  It was Set, the Dragon, making his first assault upon the greatest Gatefather in the history of the world. And it was working, because the boy was an adolescent who was easy to arouse to passion, and he was deeply weary, and he was coming out of a sound sleep, and he knew the girl and did not fear her. All of it worked together so that even though Wad knew the boy felt the deep dread, the warning of Wad’s gates inside him, he went ahead.

  He not only coupled with the girl, he consented when her voice asked him for permission to enter him.

  Fool. Fool.

  Not Danny—in his confusion, he was only as foolish as any boy would be.

  The fool was Wad. When Danny’s exploration of Wad’s memories had brought everything back to Wad with such clarity, it had not been half so clear to Danny North. Wad should have dropped everything then, should have used the Great Gate again to go to Danny North and explain everything, not in the vague way Danny would have learned it, but with the clarity of Wad’s bright memory, and of all that he knew beyond the information that came from Kawab during that desert conversation.

  I should have prepared him for exactly this danger. But in my arrogance and solitude, I thought it was enough that I knew. Why would I think that? I’m in Westil. Danny’s the one who was in danger, the one who needed to be alert to the way this sort of thing is done, and I betrayed him by my silence, my delay.

  Now all is lost. Set has him, and can make as many Great Gates as he wants, a thousand of them. He can flood Westil, the world of Mitherholm, with his Sutahites, and find a people totally unready to resist them. All the powers of the Mithermages will be in their hands, compounded by as many passages between the worlds as they might need or want.

  Everything I tried to prevent has now taken place. So what if I delayed this day by fourteen centuries? All that happened in the meantime was that drowthers had created terrible weapons that now would be completely in the hands of the mages who had the power to take them and wield them, or induce the drowther armies to use them. How long before those terrible machines made their way to Mitherholm as well? How long before they were used, and Mitherholm destroyed, along with Mittlegard? Then Set would have his great triumph over Duat, having ruined both the other worlds.

  In that moment of despair, Wad was shocked to feel himself awash with a sense of power and connection.

  He had never felt this thing before, because he had never given his gates away before. It took a moment to realize that this was how it felt to have them given back.

  He didn’t have them; they were still in Danny’s hearthoard. But he owned them. They would obey him now, if they obeyed anybody. If Set, through Danny, tried to make them into gates, they would not become gates at all, they would simply return to Wad. Wad wasn’t sure if Danny understood that. It was likely that Danny knew only that they were no longer Danny’s to command, and therefore they were out of the reach of Set.

  The boy was braver than Wad had imagined. Danny must realize now that he had lost his battle with the enemy, but he was not giving up. Inside his own body, which Set must now control like a beastmage riding his heartbound, Danny North was still himself, and was still capable of doing things that Set had no idea how to prevent.

  But since Danny did not have the power to free the gates he held captive in his hearthoard, this gift would only be a small limitation on Set. A futile gesture, really.

  Then Wad realized that it was not as futile as it seemed. There were things that Wad knew how to do that required him to have a huge aggregate of gates—and his own store of them had seemed huge indeed, until he met Danny North, whose natural hearthoard made Wad’s seem small and shallow. Wad might not have his gates with him; he might not be able to make them into gates; but they were his gates all the same, and if he reached out to swallow up another mage’s gates, these captive gates of his would be part of his strength. If Wad was careful and clever, he might be able to find some way to resist Set after all. At least to slow him down.

  For one thing, Wad would have the power to swallow up the rebellious gates that were woven into the Wild Gate the Greek girl had moved out of Danny’s control. Unfortunately, half of the outbound Great Gate and all of the inbound one was made up of Danny’s own gates, and those would remain in place.

  Wad was still trying to think of possible uses for his newly restored power when he was overwhelmed by a force so strong his body could hardly cope with it. He fell to the ground, gasping for breath, whimpering with a feeling so strong that he could not tell if it was ecstasy or pain.

  In moments, though, he understood what had happened to him.

  Danny North had given Wad his gates. The seemingly infinite store of Danny North’s own natural endowment was now utterly placed in perfect obedience to Wad, and Wad alone.

  Danny was still connected to them; they were still part of his ba. But they were almost as deeply connected to Wad. They were part of his power.

  Having his own gates returned to him had given Wad the scope to swallow the gates of any mage but Danny North, for Danny’s strength was like the sun compared to Wad’s otherwise-impressive moon.

  But with Danny’s gates as part of his own strength, Wad had power to swallow anything.

  He still could only make the eight gates that Danny North had left to him in their original struggle. But anytime he wanted to, he could change that. Though he had no way to make the gates that Danny held within his hearthoard—Set could force Danny to hold on to those, to prevent their being made.

  But the gates that were outside of Danny’s body, the gates that he had made before Set took him, those were there for the taking. For with all of Danny’s strength under his control, Wad had the power to swallow all of Danny’s made gates.

  And so he did it.

  He swallowed first the Wild Gate that Hermia had moved, including all his former captives. They were in Wad’s hearthoard once again, under his discipline again. Their freedom had been shortlived, and they despaired and fell silent almost at once.

  Then Wad reached out, gate by gate, and swallowed the rest. But now, knowing that Danny North had made them all for a purpose, and Danny’s friends relied on them, Wad remade them immediately, only now as gates of his own making, though the gates were Danny’s.

  It was a subtle thing indeed, but with enormous consequences. If Set had understood his danger, he could have quickly gathered in all of Danny’s made gates. But Set had only a little practice at possessing a gatemage; he would know only what was known to previous gatemages he had possessed, and there could not be many of those. He could not possibly know what was possible to a Gatefather of such magnificence as Danny North.

  Now, though, the gates were not of Danny’s making, though they were his gates. Danny, under Set’s control, could not gather in these gates. They would not obey him. And because his hearthoard was reduced to ze
ro, Danny North couldn’t even do what Hermia had done—move another mage’s gate.

  Wad was astonished at the things that Danny North had done. Gates attached to amulets, which his friends could use for quick escapes. Gates that chained from place to place, which could be found only if you knew where the mouth was hidden. Wad understood now that Danny had provided highways for his drowther friends, to keep them safe if the Families went after them. The boy had more love for ordinary people than Wad had ever heard of in a mage—more than Wad had ever shown, though he considered himself a drowther-friend, compared to most.

  The Great Gates were harder. He could not unmake them and then remake them as a whole. Instead he spent hours carefully gathering each single strand, then remaking it by weaving it into the existing Great Gate, exactly where it had been before. It taxed all of Wad’s power of concentration to hold the shape of it in place, but finally it was done. Even the Great Gates were now outside of Danny North’s control, and therefore beyond the reach of Set to gather them back in.

  What irony, thought Wad. The outcome is almost identical to what it would have been if I had won our little battle when I first tried to eat the gates of Danny North. His hearthoard is full of gates, that’s true—most of his and most of mine. But he has no gate in either world that will respond to his commands. No gate that adds to his strength. He is as bereft of power as if I had stripped his gates away.

  Only the captive gates remain within him. He can’t give them to me. But if Set tries to spin a Great Gate, it will be completely wild.

  And then, as Wad observed Danny from inside, he saw something that he wasn’t sure he would have thought of, or, having thought, had the courage to act upon. The Dragon was torturing Danny to try to get him to do what Danny no longer had the power to do—allow the Dragon to control the making of Danny’s gates. The game was simple enough: The Dragon was threatening to kill Danny and move on if Danny didn’t give him what was no longer Danny’s to give.

  By the time the Dragon understood how Danny had deceived him, he had done so much damage to Danny’s body that Danny North would surely die unless he made a gate to pass himself through. At first, Set might have been content to let him die, as punishment for Danny’s clever, stubborn disobedience. But then it must have occurred to Set that he was nowhere near any other person. Cut off from a human body, Set was weak again, unable to jump right in and control a person who had any willpower at all.

  If Danny’s body died, it might take Set weeks or months to get control of a body that was worth controlling.

  Meanwhile, there was Danny’s hearthoard. So many gates—and so many captives, too, including Wad’s own gates. Even though Set hadn’t the power to use them, if Danny died then he would never have the power.

  As long as he remained in control of Danny’s body, and Danny’s body remained alive, then Set had a hope of persuading Danny to cooperate; and if that never happened, he could use Danny’s body to bring him close enough to another person to make the jump smoothly and easily.

  He could always kill Danny later, he doubtless thought.

  And so he made one of the only gates remaining under Danny North’s control—the captive gates. He made it and then moved it so that it passed over Danny’s body, healing him. Danny North would not die.

  And then Danny did something Wad had not known was possible. He gave the captive gate to itself. The ka that the gate had once been attached to was long dead, gone wherever the kas of dead gatemages went. But the ba was still part of that self, wherever it was, and even though Danny could not find that ka, he figured out that the ba could find it, could always find its ka, and so he gave the ba to itself, and through itself, to its original maker, even though he was dead.

  The result was that the ba was gone. Simply gone. Danny hadn’t unmade the gate—Set would have known what that felt like, would have prevented Danny from doing it. But Set did not know what Danny was even doing, when Danny performed the act of giving a gate. Because as far as Wad knew, he was the first mage ever to give a gate to another mage—if someone else had done it, Wad had never heard of it. And Danny had taken that new technique, had learned it, and then extended it to a use Wad would never have imagined.

  Danny’s body was healed, and Set was in check. His total supply of gates was limited to Wad’s old captives, and now he knew that each time he made such a gate, he could use it once, but then it would be gone. Danny North would set it free, would let it die and disappear. And though there were many hundreds of gates, that number would be exhausted very soon if Set made heavy use of them.

  If spacetime really had brought Danny North into the world as a giant prank, it was a good one. Because even though Danny North tried hard to be a decent man, he still had a prankster’s heart, and he had chosen his victim well. Set had thought he would be master, and he was; but Danny had taken the mastery out from under him, even though it meant that Danny would be left utterly empty when Set abandoned his body. If Set let him live, Danny would be an empty gatemage, just like all the mages Wad had emptied through the years.

  Wad knew well how rare it was for a mage to make such sacrifice. The usual thing, when a mage had been possessed, was for the mage to yield, to surrender quickly to the Sutahite’s will, and then become its partner, obeying it but receiving the rewards of power ruthlessly applied.

  Danny North could have taken that road. Set would have used Danny’s gates to become the most powerful mage in history, forcing all the other mages to bend to his will. Truly he would have been the Great Dragon then, master of two worlds, manipulator of humankind, mage and drowther alike. Mage of mages. God of gods, at least in the eyes of drowthers.

  Women, money, mastery of everyone. Anyone that Danny hated, he could have punished; Set would have had no scruples about the taking of a life, of many lives.

  But Danny had thrust all of that away, removed it from himself with no hope of getting any power back, so that Set would not have the use of that power. So that Westil was still safe. So that Wad’s work was not undone.

  Danny North, I admire you for your courage. I honor you for your cleverness. I pity you for your loss.

  Because even if Set moves on to someone else, even if he doesn’t kill you in revenge for having tricked him, do not think for a moment that I will ever give these gates back to you. I do not even want to be as noble as you. For a while you were a greater mage than me. I am now, again, the greatest Gatefather in the world, and you are nothing. I will never give that up. I am the Gate Thief, and because of your nobility, the victory is mine.

  AFTERWORD

  For those who wish for an afterword that is a continuation of the themes of the book, I must disappoint you. Instead, I want to talk a little about the practical difficulties that only the writers of fictional stories have any reason to care about.

  This book was six months late, but for good reason. If I were still the young writer of Songmaster and Treason, or even the not-so-young writer of Saints and Ender’s Game, I would have delivered the book on time. It would also have been a very different kind of fiction.

  In the years since then I’ve learned something about the structure of storytelling. I realized, just as I began writing the book in time to meet the original deadline, that I had the structure all wrong. I was going to use this book to tell the story of the wars of the Mithermages who had received the enhancement of their powers—thus melding the world of meddling gods shown in the Iliad and Odyssey with our modern kind of warfare.

  Then I realized that I couldn’t tell that story and only bring in the conflict with Set at the end. That had to be at the heart of the story all the way through, or it would feel tacked on, an extra element when the real story was over. As I tell my writing students, you have to promise the story you are going to end. The ending of this series is the climax of the struggle with Set. Just as the Mithermages will supercede the wars and geopolitics of the drowther world, so also the war with Set must supercede all other concerns in the minds of
those few who know that it’s going on.

  Once I faced that structural necessity, I realized that I was not ready to tell that story. All my thought and development had been in the world of the Mithermages, while the magery of gatemages and manmages remained nebulous and ill-formed in my mind. In order to tell this story, I needed to develop a complicated rule set. What is it, exactly, that a manmage does? Or, for that matter, a gatemage?

  So instead of delivering a book, I essentially started it over—always a depressing bit of news for an editor who trusted you to deliver when you said you would. But Beth Meacham, my editor for most of my career, also understands that it’s better to deliver the best book I’m capable of than whatever book happens to be ready on the due date. Her patience is extraordinary, because the patience of editors is not passive. She has to fend off and placate marketing staff who are wondering just when (or whether) the promised book will appear; she has to make decisions about whether to go through the expensive and disappointing process of changing the publishing schedule. Fortunately, her employer and my publisher, Tom Doherty, shares the same literary values—that getting it right is more important than getting it now. My responsibility, then, is to be sure that any delay is worth it.

  I happened to be listening, during this time, to a course on ancient Egypt from the Great Courses series. When I heard the description of Thoth as being very much like Hermes and Mercury, including healing, I realized that I could benefit greatly by adapting a version of Egyptian lore to my literalizing of Indo-european gods. Ka and ba corresponded—or could be made to correspond—with the way I was already using “inself” and “outself” in the Mithermages series. That allowed me to name the Belgod I had taken from Semitic and biblical tradition. Set made a lovely, dangerous enemy. And as I invented more and more of the lore surrounding him, tying him to the dragon in the book of Revelation, the workings of manmagic became something rich and fascinating, and very close to what I had already developed for gatemagic. In other words, they made a consistent whole, and one that I believe corresponds with the real world in significant metaphorical ways.