The Gate Thief (Mither Mages)

by Orson Scott Card

Then he remembered that he didn’t actually feel any attraction to Xena.

  That was before she was attracted to him. Now she was very attractive.

  I’m such a teenager myself, thought Danny. He remembered Lana, Ced’s wife back in DC. How she made him feel. Xena was much nicer than Lana, and a lot less crazy. What if Danny had a girlfriend for a while? Not somebody who would seduce him and mock him for succumbing. Not a succubus. An actual girlfriend.

  Then he remembered the stories of Zeus raping women all over the Aegean. And Hermes—how many women did the old myths have Hermes seducing? There was no lock on a bedroom door that could keep him out.

  Xena’s basically saying I can have her if I want. I could go into her bedroom tonight and sleep with her and her parents would never see me come in or go out. And she’d let me. She’d think it was cool.

  Until we’d done it. Then she’d think we were together. And we would be. What if she got pregnant? What if she thought it made her cooler than the other girls and it caused a rift in the group?

  Keep your pants zipped and your brain out of Xena’s bedroom, Danny told himself.

  She leaned her head on his shoulder.

  Danny turned his body to face Xena. She put a hand on his chest. He took the hand and held it between his. “We’re friends, Xena. And fellow soldiers in a war. Let’s see what happens when the war is over.”

  Xena tossed her hand and stepped to Pat. “I told you he was gay.” Then she laughed as if it had been a joke. Which it was. Mostly. Maybe.

  I have no business trying to lead a group of any kind. I should take back all these gates and leave right now and never come back. Everybody will be better off it I do that.

  Everybody but me.

  He’d been lonely his whole life. This was the first time he had friends. And he couldn’t give them up. He didn’t want to give them up, and he could do whatever he wanted, and so he was going to stay here with them. Because they thought he was cool. They liked that he was powerful. They weren’t trying to kill him. And they liked him before they knew he could do this thing with gates.

  And he was going to be thinking about Xena in spite of the fact that he wasn’t attracted to her. Or to any of the girls. He was sixteen now, so any offer was going to make him obsess for a while. Knowing that it was just his hormones making him feel this way didn’t make the feelings go away. Might as well enjoy the feeling. As long as he didn’t do anything about it.

  That night Danny went to DC and Stone agreed to let him put the tail of the emergency gate in his attic. “But no gun,” said Stone.

  “What if someone’s coming after them?” asked Danny.

  “Be creative,” said Stone.

  What Danny came up with was a stack of pennies with gates on both sides. As long as you handled them by the edge, you didn’t go anywhere. But if you touched heads or tails, you found yourself someplace interesting and public. Just inside the gate of the White House. The middle of the Capitol rotunda. Lincoln’s lap. On the nose of the giant in the Awakening statue. If one of his friends was getting chased through the gates, they come to Stone’s attic closet, grab a penny, and throw it at whoever comes through the gate after them.

  “Weaponized money,” said Stone. “But if one of your friends comes through just for fun, I get to throw a penny at them.”

  “They’re nice,” said Danny. “I don’t want them getting treated badly just because they’re drowthers.”

  “You know me better than that,” said Stone. “I’ll treat them badly because they’re teenagers.”

  When Veevee and Hermia heard about the portable gates, they both demanded some of their own. Veevee had a charm bracelet, which she loaded up with rings, each one a gate leading to a useful place—her condo, the Silvermans’ farm, Danny’s house, Danny’s school, Stone’s bedroom. “I’m his wife, I don’t have to use the attic,” she said.

  “What if somebody steals the bracelet?” said Danny. “I suppose if Hermia locks them for you and you only open them when you—”

  “While you were playing with your little friends,” said Hermia, “we were working.”

  “We can’t make gates,” said Veevee, “but now I can lock them and Hermia can unlock them. We both have lock and key now.”

  “We’re working on moving gates,” said Hermia. “I think I moved one. Just the tail.”

  “But she can’t do it again,” said Veevee.

  “So then it doesn’t have to be a ring,” said Danny. “I can attach a gate to anything, and it only works when you want it to.”

  Hermia handed him a euro. “Put a dozen or so gates on this,” she said. “I’ll only open the ones I need, when I need them.”

  Her list of destinations was longer than Veevee’s, but she had to stay a jump ahead of her Family. Danny attached two dozen gates to the coin. At first he tried to arrange them in some orderly way, but Hermia just laughed. “Danny, I can see them all, I can tell them apart, I know where they go, and I can keep them all locked except the one I want to use. Go ahead and pile them on in a jumble.”

  He gave her Paris, New York, Dubai, Singapore, Katmandu, Accra, Brisbane, São Paulo, a dozen other cities—not to mention the Greek Family’s office building in Athens, the North Family compound in Virginia, and the Library of Congress. “It’s practically the whole atlas,” said Veevee admiringly.

  “I’ll add as many gates as you want,” said Danny.

  “No, I’m not jealous, and I know you’ll open a gate to anywhere I want. What I’m worried about, Danny, is that there’s no gate that takes me to you.”

  Hermia nodded. “We have all these gate mouths with us. But we need a gate whose tail always leads to wherever you are.”

  “I can’t have you popping out of my pocket,” said Danny.

  “I know,” said Veevee. “Have us come out of an old-fashioned oil lamp. We can be your genies.”

  “Amusing as that sounds,” said Danny, “I don’t want you popping up when I’m on the john.”

  “What if you need our help?” asked Hermia.

  “I’ll always know where these gates are. If I need to, I can move the tail of one of your portable gates to a place near me.”

  “Unless you’re unconscious,” said Veevee.

  “I’ll think about this,” said Danny.

  “You can lock it,” said Hermia. “And then unlock it if you need us. We aren’t going to intrude on your privacy.”

  “We unlock it ourselves only if we think something is really wrong,” said Veevee.

  “We peek through ahead of time,” said Hermia.

  Danny hated the whole idea. It was one thing to give them the power to go anywhere by using their amulets. But to give someone constant access to him—that wasn’t going to happen. Even if they promised not to use it.

  “I don’t think he sees a difference between peeking through a gate and coming through it,” said Veevee. “He doesn’t want to be spied on.”

  “You have to trust us,” said Hermia.

  “I said I’d think about it,” said Danny.

  “Meaning the answer is no,” said Veevee.

  “It’s really unfair,” said Hermia. “You can make a gate anytime you want, no matter what we’re doing. We can’t hide from you, but you don’t think we can be trusted not to spy on you or intrude when you’re kissing some girl.”

  “We won’t take pictures,” said Veevee. “Or at least we won’t post them online.”

  “I said…” Danny began.

  “He’s getting testy now,” said Veevee.

  “I don’t spy on you,” said Danny, “and I know you won’t spy on me. But that’s how power is—just because you have a power doesn’t mean you want other people to use their power on you. Fairness only seems reasonable when the other person is more powerful than you.”

  “As it seems to us,” said Hermia.

  “I hate to sound like one of the Family,” said Danny, “but … you’re just going to have to live with it till I get used to the id
ea. Maybe someday I’ll wish I had made gates that follow me around like puppies, so you can always find me. But right now I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t think I even want to, and so … I won’t.”

  “Tough guy,” said Veevee.

  “He’s not so tough,” said Hermia. “He sounds like he’s apologizing. Real assholes don’t even pretend to be sorry.”

  “True,” said Veevee. “It isn’t in his nature, so he’s not good at assholery yet.”

  “Thanks,” said Danny. “I think.”

  “Well,” said Hermia, “I’d better go, or the Family will track me here.”

  “You’ve got to get those trackers out of her,” said Veevee.

  She was right.

  Danny studied Hermia, and then passed a gate over her, one that left her exactly where she was.

  “What was that about?” asked Hermia.

  “I didn’t know what I might have gained by going to Westil,” said Danny. “For all I know, I might always have had the ability to attach gates to portable objects. And maybe going through a Great Gate doesn’t affect the mage who made it. But I think there is a difference. When you went through the gate I just made, I could feel a difference in you—the places where the gate was trying to heal you and meeting with resistance. Maybe that’s what it was, anyway. I counted five places like that.”

  “You should just send her through an airport scanner,” said Veevee. “They’ll show you exactly where the trackers are implanted.

  Danny laughed. “Of course. Veevee, will you come along and make a distraction?”

  He took them to the Roanoke airport. Veevee got to the end of the security line and then started wailing. “Where’s my ticket? I had my ticket right here!”

  Her noise drew everyone’s attention, and in the moment, Danny put Hermia right in front of the security gate, ahead of the person at the front of the line. Then he opened a peephole over the shoulder of the TSA official working the screen.

  Veevee, seeing Hermia in place, took off on an elaborate charade of searching for her lost boarding pass. The guard waved Hermia into the machine.

  Danny had been right about the trackers. Five of them, exactly where he had felt the gate trying and failing to heal her. The trip to Westil had given him more power. A sharper focus, a greater awareness.

  He moved the porthole to a spot an inch from Hermia’s ear. “Gate to my house in Buena Vista,” he said. Then he gave the same message to Veevee.

  In a moment they were all there. “I spotted all five trackers,” said Danny. “I think I can gate them out.”

  “‘Think’?” said Hermia. “This is my body we’re talking about.”

  “I’ll have a nice big gate ready for you to pass through so when I get each one out, you can heal yourself instantly. What can go wrong?”

  “Famous last words,” said Veevee.

  But after another minute of dithering, Hermia said, “Oh, just do it.”

  “Are you sure?” said Danny.

  “Do it, gate boy,” said Veevee. “Can’t you tell when a woman’s saying ‘yes’? You really are young.”

  In about ten seconds, Danny was done. There were five chips on the table, and Danny had passed the healing gate over Hermia after removing each one. It was very quick.

  “It did hurt,” said Hermia. “Surgery is surgery.”

  “Sorry,” said Danny.

  “I was just reporting, so you’d know,” said Hermia. “I never thought it would be painless, so it wasn’t a complaint.” She picked up one of the chips. “So my parents thought it would be a good idea to put these things in their baby girl.”

  “The question is, what do we do with them?” said Veevee. “I say gate them to an incinerator.”

  “Or implant them in somebody else,” said Hermia.

  “That wouldn’t be nice,” said Veevee.

  “I was thinking, what about the President? Or Prince Charles?” said Hermia. “Or some dictator somewhere. Make my Family go chasing them.”

  “Or five different people,” said Veevee. “Make them go crazy trying to figure out which one is you.”

  In the end, Danny gated one tracker under the skin of each of the Hittite-Armenian assassins and sent the other trackers about a mile deep in the Atlantic. Then he gated the two assassins from the jail to the Greek Family’s offices in Athens. “Let my folks deal with them,” said Hermia.

  “Are you going to tell them what the bastards tried to do to you?” asked Veevee.

  “No,” said Hermia. “Let them try to talk to each other. They’ll know we picked these clowns to receive exactly two of the trackers for a reason. They’ll know it wasn’t random. But if I tell my family, they’ll just kill them. Even if they’re seriously angry at me, they won’t approve of assassins from another Family going after me.”

  “So you think the assassins won’t talk?” asked Danny.

  “My family won’t dangle them upside down over the ocean,” said Hermia. “Or maybe they will—but they won’t do it as cleverly and magically as you did.”

  “We are gatemages, aren’t we?” said Veevee with some satisfaction. “It’s so much fun to prank everybody at once.”

  They went to Veevee’s favorite gelato place—Angelato, on Arizona Avenue in Santa Monica—and ate their gelatos on the Third Street Promenade. Then all three of them gated away to wherever they were going to spend the night. Veevee laughed in delight as she prepared to stick a finger into one of her rings. “Oh, I feel so powerful. Like the first time I got the keys to the family car.” Then she was gone.

  Alone in his little house in Buena Vista, Danny could hardly believe what he had done in a single day. Went to Westil and met the Gate Thief. Created portable gates for his friends. Removed the tracking chips from Hermia. Ate dessert in California and got back before bedtime.

  Botched a Great Gate.

  He really wanted to think about Xena as he went to sleep. But all he could think about was the angry gate that Marion and Leslie were tending now. How could he do something that stupid?

  And then, inexplicably, he thought of Coach Lieder’s daughter, Nicki. How was she doing? Had they realized yet that she was healed of her cancer?

  That, at least, was something Danny hadn’t screwed up.

  8

  SEARCH

  It should have been easy for Wad to find the windmage from Mittlegard whom Danny North had called Ced. Not only was there a swath of destruction across a long stretch of Hetterwee, making it easy to narrow down his location, but even if he tried to blend into the local population, even if he had acquired local clothing, his foreignness had to be obvious from his language.

  Hetterwee was a broad plain that got heavy snow in winter but scant rain in summer. The grass was fast-growing and the sod was thick, but the whole world turned brown by midsummer and the grazing herds now stayed close to the many streams that flowed down from the Mitherkame, the High Mountains.

  Mitherkame was high and thickly forested, a place where mages of stone and water, tree and eagle prospered and grew strong. Wind could whistle and whine through canyons and narrow passes.

  But Hetterwee was a wide-open land where the wind made waves in the high grass, rippling for miles. There the wind could dance.

  Deep in the grass, insects abounded, eating fallen seeds; birds and rodents came to eat the seeds as well, and to eat the insects too; and great grazing animals came in vast herds to slice or tear off the grass well above the matted sod. The predators—wolves and great cats—came to cull the lame and old and unprotected young from the herds. Here a mage of herding beasts and a mage of predators could equally find a home.

  It was a place where a traveler could walk for days without any certainty that he had come any closer to his destination, or escaped any distance from the place where he began.

  Yet somehow in this dry grassy wilderness, small villages of drowthers found a way to make their homes of cut-up sod, scratch their tiny farms out of the clay that they exposed, and one
way or another eke out a living and store up enough strength to spawn a next generation, and then another. They did not hunt the herding beasts, for fear that they were watched over by a beastmage; nor did they wander alone, for fear that a mageridden predator would hunt them down for sport. They kept to themselves; they watched the weather on which their precarious lives depended; wariness kept them alive.

  Wad gated from village to village, coming in as a stranger, but one who knew the language—for Wad could speak all the variants of Westil spoken in this world, or at least he never found one he couldn’t pick up in a few minutes. He dressed himself in clothing that made him seem to be a journeyman in search of work. He should have been far more acceptable than Ced in these little villages, yet Wad could see that they were lying to protect the windmage from Mittlegard.

  “My friend would have come soon before or soon after the storm that stripped your fields and blew down your houses,” Wad said in village after village. “I have to find him—his wife is ill, and I must get him home for the children’s sake.”

  But they never answered him except with a shrug or, if he forced the issue, a defiant stance, brandishing a stout stick and daring him to ask another question.

  Somehow, though gales had torn roofs from houses and hail had ravaged the already scanty fields, these people took Ced as one of them instead of seeing that he was the one who had caused their misery.

  Despite the help of the drowthers, Ced could not hide from a Gatefather forever. If the people would not talk to Wad openly, he would open a tiny window in their houses and listen to their conversation. They told him all he wanted to know, and more: They knew that Ced was the windmage who had harmed them so; they knew he came from another world; Ced had told them all of this himself. He was the god of the wind, come in person to apologize for the harm his mighty gales had wrought, and to make amends as best he could.

  At last a window revealed Ced himself, asleep in the place of honor near the fire, in a house with a chimney, marking it as the richest in the hamlet.

  Wad gated him from the house so gently that he didn’t wake up. It was the cold that woke him, half an hour later; the wind itself, cold and thin at the top of a high crag in the Mitherkame.